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30 March, 2121: Western Chinese cities of Urumqi, Kashgar, Turpan, Hotan and Aksu in Xinjiang province were leveled yesterday by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake, the most destructive in recent history. Thanks to mass evacuations organized by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Urumqi, the industrial center of Xinjiang, miraculously re-corded fewer than two dozen casualties. Officials believe a “Futures” narrowcast predicting a geomagnetic pole reversal inadvertently saved millions of lives. Directorate scientists have yet to explain a twenty-two second loss in Coordinated Universal Time (CUT) during the quake, or why atomic clocks controlling Harmonious Recycling in Western China suddenly failed at the quake’s epicenter in Tashkent.
1
JANUARY 2110
THE MANDARIN
高
官
My lover Marco Hsu Yang luxuriates in our sleeping pod. He leans over, kisses me twice staccato on my cheeks, my lips, exclaiming, “Your country is China’s whore.”
My country, as he describes it, is “a spread-eagled bender over gifted with auburn hair and rouged lips. She’s covered coast to coast in white, her wedding dress antiqued with yellow snow and sprigs of spruce and gossamer.”
“Repeat that, please?”
“A spread-eagled bender over—”
“This is your country, too, Hsu Yang.”
“No, never. My parents dragged me here.”
Marco is literary, all right. Dark and puerile when he wants to be. His voice silky, then razor sharp, cutting into my bones, my throat, making me bleed with wanting.
For years I’ve craved his perfection, or at least my teenage notion of it: a doctor-to-be, cynic, exotically Chinese, someone drawn to my prosthetic, half-human allure.
My parents call me “prescient” (I foresee my father’s death). As though a shadow has fallen (Marco’s hand reaching for my shoulder, and then a blinding light), I foresee my lover’s rise to fame. His propensity for solving puzzles and beating every AI opponent in 3D chess games will propel him to algorithmic leadership in China’s Harmonious Revolution.
As for me, my future is unknown, blurry. I’ve had transplants, a nanofiber-ceramic hand, portals installed in throat and brain, my medical aspirations rendered gloomy. When The Laws of Ice came down from China’s Directorate in the form of tablets written in skywriting, my parents recognized my life would end on a surgical table where machines alter my insides or replace me entirely. I’ll work in underground cubicles, chatbots directing my every move. Marco, on the other hand, lives in the afterglow of Mother Country’s victory. He recognizes a new form of global shock therapy, both economic and psychological, imposed on us by talking heads, nightly ear drones we can never turn off and messages absorbed subliminally in movies, advertisements and holo-screens on our roads. All these inputs play to our fears of another war, another Ameriguan insurrection, convincing us that Mother Country has the better way.
*
I’m looking back on Marco now. Backward and forward. Time jerks forward, then stands still. Sometimes I resent his superior attitudes. Makes me feel worried, this resentment, maybe hate, recognizing he’s untouchable, hua qiao (华侨) overseas Chinese, superior by birth.
Marco says all the time he loves me, that I’m “exceptional” in my harlot country. But I think part of it is sexual passion, and maybe the red and gold highlights of my hair. Opposites attract. I’m taken by him, at least his gambler and alien Chinese parts. When he calls my name, Naomi, I just want to sink my bones inside of his, there’s such an ache.
Six months ago we married secretly inside a pauper’s chapel beneath the crimson and white sandstone cliffs of Zion Guojia (国家) Refuge. The roof above was caved in. My retinal screens captured clouds at sunset moving fast into night—violet swirls, grays and sparks of orange, yellows and whites, a Starry Night knock-off, then a clear blue shaft dropping down from the sky right in front of us. A sword, maybe. A carpet to Elysium. God knows I didn’t understand what it meant.
Shivering at the altar since the snow was icy against my feet and no one was there to marry us, not even a drone, I wondered why my wedding scene seemed like a stage set, hardly real. I guess he wanted to keep any serious thoughts of me from his parents. We exchanged jade rings purchased in Hualien, the Taiwanese marble city. Our vows consisted of silent, furtive looks, eyes toggling back and forth worriedly between the clouds and each other.
“This country has become Ameriguo, a pretty nation, a guo (国),” he wrote in his economics thesis just before our wedding date. “Ameriguo is a little winter paradise, primitive and greedy. Securitized now as a Chinese trading protectorate, addicted to pleasure. Mother Country floods our continent with cast-off consumer goods, contaminated food and transportation materials that disintegrate on contact. Ameriguans are grateful for the crumbs.”
Etcetera.
He likes to lecture me. “Evidence of Ameriguan weakness is in the teeth, Naomi,” he says, examining a batch of X-rays I’ve kept of my extra tooth pulled when I was a child. He squeezes my upper lip, then takes a pen light to my pallet, pretending he’s already a doctor, as though to see a hole left by the extraction. “A white supernumerary tooth grows abnormally long in 2.5 per cent of Ameriguans’ soft palettes,” he says. “This represents the cast-off wisdom of her ancestors.”
I nod, recognizing bullshit. When he speaks like this, he slinks up against me like a cat.
Marco likes to mix stupid messages with nuggets of Chinese wisdom. His accent is perfect and I archive and emulate every tone: “Wuyuan jianmian bu xiang shi, you yuan qianli lai xiang huì” (无缘 见面 不 相识， 有缘千里来相会.) This nugget basically means “If Fate isn’t choosing you, you can bump into someone and never connect. But if Fate rules, a thousand li cannot keep you apart.” So romantic, I reflect back to him. Except he adds, “I doubt we’re really yuanfen (缘分)”—i.e., fated to be partners. “More like airships passing in the night, perhaps we meet only at this point, and then go separate ways.”
*
Friends knew us as Naomi and Marco when we lived together in a walk-up flat on Thompson Street in the Arbors, though we maintained separate quarters on campus to satisfy our parents. On occasion I called him Marco, when we were close; Marco Hsu Yang or just Hsu Yang when we were not. Periodically we’d fly to Zion Refuge in the Ameriguan West, and sometimes to Taiwan and, once, to Mother Country’s Lijiang old city in Yunnan province, a golden land of tigers and pagoda-shaped mountains of snow. Vacations were the good times. But recently he’s been in a dark, woe-is-me mood; I try to remind him that the Chinese paramilitary supports his elite education.
“Why are you so pissed off? You’ll come out of medical school as a doctor without debt,” I say, smoothing his sweaty brow. “Isn’t that good?”
“Yeah, no!” he says, ever contrary, covering his mouth with his delicate Mandarin hand.
We both know he’ll have to give four years of medical service in the military, just what his father wanted him to do, but his real desire is to play Blackjack in Las Vegas or even Macao to beat the system. Any system. It’s pointless to argue about it because his heart is set.
On Sunday winter nights, after long hours cramming for lectures and exams, he leads me out the door. Taking our cross-country skis, leaving the dorms and slipsliding down the hills to backcountry, we look for steep bowls and globes of snow.
“We’re a snowflake globe that China shakes,” he laughs, guiding me through the dark pines he calls Songshu (松树), a lovely seductive sound, “Song,” as though the pines actually sing a song. We head toward the lights of North Campus. Passing a sign saying Climax Molybdenum Corporation posted on a laboratory no longer in use, we stop a moment, shivering, making clouds with our breath.
“The Mandarins drink mojitos through a fire hose,” Marco opines, pouting as usual, his habit of appearing distant, regal. “Then they toss our globes in the fireplace, fucking us up the ass.”
“Stop talking shit!” I slap him. At least I do it with words, realizing I can’t stop his mouth no matter how hard I try. I push off, skiing away downhill. It’s impossible not to hear what he says.
Marco is the anomaly. I can’t figure out which country he hates or loves the most, or whether he confuses “nation” with my body. He’s fond of conquering my “nation” every chance he gets. He has slightly crooked teeth and a disarming way of rubbing his cheeks against mine, making fun of brightness and dullards alike, anyone aspiring to a tangible goal, even mine, ambiguous as it is. His resentments are barely disguised, but I sense they come from being surrounded by medical superiors who not so secretly resent China’s recalibration of our liberties. Do I feel sorry for him? A little. He’s a foreigner, neither here nor there. I can see he feels uncomfortable with all the Mandarins on the ski slopes, even though he’s one himself. His way of “talking story, jiang gushi”（讲故事）in Chinese is embarrassed, his lips pursed or screwed forward, as though sucking on a sour candy, his voice pitched low and humble.
“Time was,” he said, “China and Japan were slaves to the concessions of Europe and America. Now it’s the other way around. Even though China ‘owns’ us, the Directorate in Beijing doesn’t care about our local shenanigans. China just wants our markets—raw materials, cheap labor, technical expertise.”
“They don’t need our expertise,” I tell him.
“How would you know that?”
“I just do.”
He recognizes I suck up information with anything I read, but I also have these Aeolian vibes telling a story, too. It’s just as though my ears extend like antennae to his secret thoughts. I seem to hear harmonies in wind, waves, rotating cloud banks, street vendors arguing with customers in multiple languages 10 miles away. It’s music to my ears (literally), this extra sensory hearing born into me. Marco says I’m absorbing too much Greek tragedy from my parents (formerly actors) since I project their tragic thoughts. He says these thoughts still control me. Yet I detect his thoughts, feel his grief and joy as my own. Perhaps it’s my father who drives me toward Hsu Yang. A dying father envisioning immortality: his daughter, a brain surgeon. But every day I go to the university language labs and read and listen to everything I can about Mother China, too. I want to go there, maybe permanently, to be embraced in a Harmonious Society and warm bosom. This is something Marco and my parents might understand. Or not.
*
In our childhood, Mother Country began saturating us with patriotic messages about loyalty and personal sacrifice. There were arrests of dissidents in Detroit and Washington, D.C., on the intranets, but no one had an accurate count. Our cities transformed quickly into military fortresses de facto, most of them subjected to helicopters patrolling above and perimeters of razor wire to keep out gangs. Most skyscrapers had turned into blackened spires from arson or careless wiring, I’m not sure which, and smaller enclaves and even our water reservoirs turned muddy black from coal ash and leaks from molten salt reactors.
Our architects were clever, though. Designing breathing domes covering the cities—at least the big ones left—they created membranes which were practically invisible and gooey in texture. Membranes floated above the cities like egg whites before beating. Blocking ultraviolet and cosmic rays from above, the membranes absorbed and channeled spew from factories worldwide, so that the worst particulates escaped to the outer atmosphere. Before the domes, black spew from Asia traveled in the westerlies, and white ash clouds from the fires of Northern Laurentia, painting the sky in sulfur dioxide, arsenic, carbon monoxide and coal dust.
We called this exchange the “Air Trade.” China gave us new-style coal scrubbers, thorium reactors and high-throughput skymills whipping the upper atmosphere currents to produce our energy. Laurentia to the North gave us lumber and oil from tar sands. Ameriguo gave everybody movie stars, molten salt reactors breeding fissile uranium-233 and snow, the latter a highly valued commodity.
*
The night I met Marco Hsu Yang was a rare display of polar vortex in our Lake Erie community. Residents joked about the weather: “Ten months of winter. Two months of rough sledding,” although mostly we had rain and black ice. But that particular night, it was frigid. His brother Tommy invited me to a birthday party. I heard footsteps above his basement ceiling and suddenly a boy/man came bouncing down the stairs, blowing his nose with a handkerchief, his mop of straight black hair so long that he kept throwing his head back to tame it.
Immediately I noticed his buoyancy. He bounced as though his hips were spring loaded. He had inviting brown eyes, one round like a chestnut, the other almond shaped, more “Chinese.” He seemed drawn to my cascade of gold hair held back by a white silk bandanna I wore wrapped around my head, much like a 1960s hippie. He focused on my blue and emerald irises flecked with shards of red rust depending on the light, a retinal display embedded behind the cornea to provide “cloud vision,” a sharper 4D focus for storm events and fast-moving predators. Marco talked to me about his acceptance at medical school, describing a certain gynecology professor who labeled vaginas “beavers” in a preparatory class.
“Personally, I find this label disgusting, sexist, incredible, given how far we’re supposed to have advanced,” I retorted. His neck snapped back, mouth quivering a little, as though no blonde teen had ever talked to him that way.
“Chinese girls aren’t that blunt,” he went on, cocking his head, as though trying to weigh his confusion. “If they don’t like something, they snivel or toss their heads back and walk away.”
I shrugged. Surmising he was trying to account for failed hookups, mostly girls turned off by his dirty talk, I switched conversation to our life chances. I told him about wanting to be a physician or researcher or linguist. At one point when brother Tommy and the others piled into coats and rolled outside to throw snowballs, I excused myself and joined them. The boys tackled the girls in heaps and the girls took revenge by throwing icy hard pellets at the boys’ cackling mouths. We were red-faced, giggling and panting like dogs. Hsu Yang had a bad cold; he choked, excusing himself, but said he’d wait for me because Tommy mentioned that I had had a heart transplant and he had never met one.
“Half a transplant,” I corrected, returning inside to him within 15 minutes. I rubbed my hands and blew on them. “Just some valves and a leaky septum between ventricles, nothing that exciting. I’ll be full of replacement parts by the time I reach maturity.”
His mouth curled down.
“That’s too bad,” he said. He took my real hand. “But everyone gets replacement parts these days.” I wondered if Marco had any himself. “No,” he said, “of course not.” But someday, thanks to his reading of a familial genetic map citing his Dad’s intractable glaucoma, Marco believed he too would become blind.
*
At the time (and I didn’t reveal it), I had a port at the base of my brain, and another in my throat, the two housing all the wiring and firmware for the eventual installation of a Logos-harp (shortened to Logoharp for branding purposes). The harp’s workings are known only to a few medical elites and the Chinese and Ameriguan Singing Directorate masters (The Singing Directorate is the name of our highest government body in charge of harmonizing communication to the masses, both in China and Ameriguo).
Think of the harp as an instrument amplifying Aeolian music. On the earthly, practical level, the Logoharp conveys explicit, reasoned messages that the Directorate wishes to convey to the public. At the same time, the harp is believed to receive higher-order harmonies conveying both wisdom and warning from unidentified sources in Nature and the Divine. What these signals mean or how they’re identified I’m not sure. But I do know the harp enables universal translation of all human languages and, presumably, the extraterrestrial ones that will crop up, enabling the harp’s recipient to act as an Intermediary, a public communicator, also known as a Reverse Journalist (RJ), meaning a “journalist of future prospects.” As such, anyone who receives the Logoharp is blessed with great responsibilities on behalf of the State. Once installed, the Logoharp can’t be removed or shut down. You belong to the State.