His father shrieks with rage. As An fights his uncles, whirling and ducking and holding his own, one well-trained 10-year-old against four grown men, his father takes up the branding iron from its home by the fireplace. He slashes it through the air and strikes An solidly across the chest, knocking him to the floor. His head smacks hard against the concrete. Thunder and lightning explode at once, and he is consumed by the noise and the light and the pain.
Then all is still.
An Liu is somewhere else.
Far away, in the black.
Untouchable. Untouched.
He feels nothing, sees nothing, cannot know that even after his eyes close and he goes limp, his father continues to beat him, teaching him a lesson he will never learn, because he is gone.
His uncles are tasked with curing him of his fears.
When he is five years old, the uncle who was once his favorite nails him into a coffin and buries him in the ground.
An screams in the dark. He kicks at the pine walls closing him in, tries to catch his breath, feels like he will lose his mind if he doesn’t get space get air get free get out get out get out.
He does not get out.
His voice goes hoarse; his mind goes blank.
He lies still, in the dark, whimpers, waits.
Somewhere above, up in the light, he hears his uncles’ voices raised in argument. He clings to the sound, evidence that a world still exists.
“This is not right, Hua. You know that. He’s only a boy.”
“A boy who will be the Player someday, and you know that makes all the difference.”
“The things we’re teaching him . . . what kind of Player will he be?”
“To harden a Player’s spirit, to teach him the shape of pain, you know this is the Shang way. He learns pain now, or he learns death later. This is how we help him survive.”
“No, Hua. Not like this. Pain tempered with love, with mercy, with wisdom. That is the Shang way. This is . . . I don’t know what this is.”
“This is how our brother sees fit to train his son, Chen. It’s a father’s right to train his Player. This is also the Shang way. And if things go too far, at least we will be here.”
“Too far? He’s got the boy in a coffin—”
“Keep talking like this, it might be you in a coffin. You know that best of all.”
The argument ends there.
Endless time passes. An Liu cries.
“Peace, Little Liu.” His uncle Chen, from above, pain in his voice. “Patience.”
He cries out for Uncle Chen, who once fed him sweets when his mother wasn’t looking and told him stories about dragon slayers and princesses when he had trouble falling asleep. He says, “Uncle, don’t you love me anymore?”
There is a silence, and then a low voice. “This is love.”
And so An Liu learns: Pain is love. Fear is love. Violence is love.
Life is love, so An Liu learns to hate it.
He learns other things too: how to shoot all manner of guns, how to speak the languages of the modern world and those long dead, how to use a computer to explore and dominate, how to manipulate code and circuitry to make machines do exactly as he wishes, and this is his favorite language to speak, because the machines are the only things that obey him. Inside the computer, he has ultimate control; inside the computer, he is God, and his father doesn’t exist.
Xi’an, China, is filled with wonders. It was an imperial capital for 1,000 years, the seat of 13 dynasties, ruled over by 73 emperors. It is surrounded by the world’s largest city wall and home to remnants of glorious civilizations past: the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, the army of terra-cotta warriors, the sacred mountain Huàshān—An Liu sees none of it, knows none of it.
He is not allowed out of the house. He is rarely, and only with supervision, allowed out of the basement.
An Liu’s world is dark and small, peopled only by his father and his uncles.
His time is structured and scheduled. Like everything else in his life, it is not his own.
It belongs to the Shang, his father tells him. His life belongs to the Shang.
“You will Play and you will win,” his father often shouts, when whipping An for minor failures. It becomes a mantra, drilled into An’s subconscious, something he knows about himself as surely as he knows his name.
He will Play.
He will win.
He will be the savior of the Shang people, rescue them from extinction when Endgame comes. He knows this; he simply doesn’t know why he should have to do such a thing, why the Shang would ask it of him.
He doesn’t understand how he can be the only one who dreams of escape from this life. Who are these fools, that they would choose to survive?
For fifteen days, An Liu is unconscious, drowning in the black.
His body lies in a hospital bed, strung with wires and tubes. Monitors beep irregularly as his pulse bounces, his heart soldiers on. One tube delivers fluids; another carries them away. A machine breathes for him. His head is shaved, wrapped in bandages. Skull fragments have been carefully extracted from his brain. Gray matter has been pared away, damaged bits sliced off and dropped into a metal bin. Pieces of An Liu, of who he used to be, now medical waste, put out with the trash. A steel plate replaces the chunk of skull that was lost. The brain swells against its casing, the coma persists, and the doctors have little left to do but wait.
He will wake, or he will not.
He will be the same, or he will not.
Time will tell.
These are hard truths the doctors are prepared to tell his loved ones—but An Liu is alone in the secure private facility, abandoned to expert care. The doctors receive their payment, and know who to contact when the time comes, when there is an answer, one way or another.
In the meantime, no one sits by An’s side. No one holds his limp hand. The nurses gossip over his still head, about their bosses and their love lives, and sometimes one will put a soft hand on his forehead and wish him well.
He is just a child, they say to each other. Broken, probably beyond repair. He shouldn’t be alone.
His eyes twitch behind his lids, and they wonder if, in his state, he can dream.
He dreams of a different life.
He dreams of a different An Liu, one who has a mother, not a father. He dreams of a 10th birthday full of cake and presents and love, a mother’s radiant face and gentle kiss. He dreams that he goes to school, has friends, sleeps in a room with a window and posters on the wall.
He dreams of warmth and joy and human touch.
He dreams himself into a fantasy world, and when the images dissolve in a shower of blinding light, when he blinks himself back to reality, a stranger aiming a flashlight at his pupils, a voice asking if he knows who he is or where, a stabbing pain in his head unlike anything he’s ever known, he wishes only to return to the dream or, even better, to the mercy of death that lay just beyond it.
After, things are blinkblink different.
An Liu is shiver-SHIVER different.
The world jumps and jitters, will not blink-shiver-blink sit still. His tongue is clumsy in his mouth; his limbs are numb blocks of wood. And when he blink tries shiver to blink focus, to shivershiver stand, to BLINKblink read, his mind jitters, his body rebels; he tics and shudders and eventually blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkBLINK loses himself to frustrated rage.
Anger makes it worse.
Everything makes it worse.
An has spent six years learning to control his body and mind—the only two things in his life he has any control over at all—and just like that, it’s all gone. He’s been a prisoner in his father’s house, but now he will be a prisoner in SHIVER his own body.
His doctors tell hi
m to be patient.
His father, who visits only once, tells him to be a man.
The blinkblinkSHIVER tics are blink much SHIVERshivershiverBLINK worse when his father is there.
“D-d-d-d-d-d-id y-y-ou you you dooooooo this-s-s-s-s t-t-t-to m-m-me? ME ME ME?” An asks, cursing his halting and stuttering tongue.
Losing patience, his father walks out before An manages to finish the sentence. Maybe this is for the best, but An blinkblink doesn’t care. He’s not afraid of SHIVER his father anymore.
He’s not afraid of anything. Except living blinkblink like this.
For three blinkblink months he lives in a secure private rehab facility. He SHIVER learns to walk again, one jerking step at a time. He practices with a speech pathologist until blink-shiver-blink he can force his tongue to make the right letters again. He retrains SHIVERblink his brain to retrieve the words he needs to express his anger.
It’s blink-blink-blink slow.
Thoughts flutter away from him; words escape him.
An Liu could once shiverBLINK multiply matrices and solve quantum wave functions in his head. Now his blink studies blink are blink simpler.
He looks at pictures, tries to remember the words that go with them.
This is a clock.
This is a dog.
This is a . . .
“A-a-a-a-a-a-apple!” he finally screams, and throws the fruit across the room in frustration. It goes only a couple feet.
His body is as weak as his mind.
What they did to him, what they took from him: it is irreplaceable.
What is left behind: a steel plate, a Swiss-cheese brain. A fragmented memory of his father’s angry shouts and a rod slamming down, again and again. Pain, in his body, in his head, throbbing pains, stabbing pains, aching pains—and the perpetual fog in his brain from the medicines intended to take it away. And, shiver forever blink with shiver him, tics and stutters, stutters and tics.
“K-k-k-k-ill memememe,” he asks his physical therapists. “P-p-p-l-l-l-ease.”
He hates them for refusing, as he hates his body for rebelling, as he hates his uncles and his father for leaving him in this state.
Hate. That’s another thing he’s been left with.
His hate is the purest thing he’s ever felt, untempered by fear or hope.
Someday, maybe, he will be blinkblinkblinkblink strong enough to use it.
An’s mind heals faster than his body, but he begins to return to himself. He is slower and weaker than before, but he gets stronger every day. The tics and stutters shiver remain.
They will, the doctors say, likely always BLINK remain.
He shiverSHIVERshiver will never be what he was. Never as strong, never as coordinated. Nothing will ever be blinkblinkblink so easy for him again.
An Liu laughs bitterly when the doctors tell him that.
As if blinkBLINKshiver his life has ever been easy.
He goes home.
If he were of another line, if he were not blinkblinkblink Shang, then perhaps his people would SHIVER choose a different champion. They would deem him BLINK unworthy. Choose someone new to be their Player. Someone SHIVERblinkSHIVERblink whole. They would BLINK set BLINK An BLINK free.
Not the Shang.
The Shang believe in the oracle bones. The oracle bones were cast years ago, and they name An Liu as BLINK the next Player.
There is no question.
There is no escape.
If An Liu is blinkBLINK damaged, then it was meant to be. If An Liu’s father deemed it blinkblink necessary to damage him, then it was SHIVERblink meant to be.
He will Play however he is able to Play.
He will Play no matter what.
He will not be given a choice.
He’s not ready yet to resume his physical training. So his father and his uncles leave him alone to his basement and his computers. Maybe they think he’s shiverBLINK no use to them in this state.
Maybe they blink-blink-shiver see something new in him, and they are afraid.
An doesn’t care, as long as they leave him alone.
Hour after hour, he sits in the dark, in front of his computer, fingers shiverBLINK flying across the keyboard. On screen, in the bits and bytes, there are no tics. No stuttering. He calls himself LaMort377. La mort, French for “death”—he likes it because, out loud, it sounds the same as the French word for “love.” There’s nothing to tie the username to him except the number: the Shang people are the 377th bloodline. But no one would be able to piece that together, trace it back to him. This is a secret he shares only with himself.
Online, An can be whoever he wants to be. Do whatever he wants to do.
He wants to destroy, and when the impulse seizes him, he does.
He hacks electricity grids. Banks. Air-traffic-control systems. He makes mischief of any kind that suits him. Some days he crashes stocks, other days blinkBLINK planes.
Every day, he searches for his mother.
Government databases. Social networks. Corporate mailing lists. Media archives. Anywhere and everywhere, he looks for evidence of his mother, something to lead him to her. Something, even, to prove she ever existed.
There is nothing.
There are no walls in An Liu’s cyberspace. No locks he can’t blinkSHIVERblink crack at will. No shred of information hidden from him—but his mother is a ghost.
He learns plenty about this father, answers to questions he never before thought to ask. An Bai grew up in Beijing, child of wealthy banker parents. His name, Bai, means “person of purity,” and An Liu thinks this is well chosen. His father is impossibly pure, untainted by mercy, doubt, or love. When he was 16 years old, his parents died in a fire, leaving him everything: their penthouse in Beijing, the family estate in Xi’an, and four brothers who depended on him for everything. He controlled the money, and so he controlled them.
As he blinkblink continues to control them.
The more An Liu learns about humans, the more he comes to despise the human race.
Machines are better. Machines are rational, trustworthy, easily controlled. Everything in cyberspace is smooth and comprehensible—everything except for the fact that An Liu’s mother is invisible, unfindable, even by someone with An Liu’s unlimited powers.
This, An Liu cannot comprehend.
And there’s something else: someone is blinkSHIVERblink watching him. There’s no concrete evidence at first, just a sense he has, that someone is tracking his digital footprint. It should be impossible; he moves untraceably through the cyber world. He’s a ghost in the machine, and yet . . .
And yet there are traces of another. Tiny bread crumbs left behind, almost as if this shadow wants An to notice him, as if the predator yearns to become the prey.
Then, one day, the impossible happens: despite the security protocols on An Liu’s system, despite layers and layers of unbreakable firewalls, despite some of the best encryption in the world, the stranger breaks through, and a message in English pops up on An’s screen, uninvited, unwelcome.
It blinks red, waiting for a response.
12GOLDENGATE12: GREETINGS AND SALUTATIONS, FRIEND. WANT TO PLAY?
An doesn’t want to blinkSHIVER “play,” whatever that means. He doesn’t blinkblink want to be noticed, or watched, or tracked. He certainly shiverBLINK doesn’t want a friend.
But 12goldengate12 is persistent.
12GOLDENGATE12: I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY.
An ignores him that day and the next.
12GOLDENGATE12: I CAN BE YOUR ENEMY, IF YOU’D RATHER.
He tries to trace his IP, find this annoying bug and squash it, but 12goldengate12 is the best he’s ever seen, as good, almost, as An himself. The signal is bounced across 12 satellites, ping-ponging back and forth across the world—An is, finally, able trace its origin to the west coast of North America, but that tells him nothing he couldn’t have guessed from the username itself.
It doesn’t tell him how to find and eliminate this
pest.
Or what the pest might want from him.
And blinkblinkblink as the days pass, An finds himself getting curious. His uncles and his father haven’t spoken to him in weeks. They deliver his food to him in silence. It’s a relief, this temporary respite from pain and torture—but it’s a strange silence to live in. Sometimes An wonders if he’s gone invisible. If he blink died blink after all, and is shiver doomed BLINK to haunt his father for all his days.
It’s easy to imagine he doesn’t exist—except that 12goldengate12 knows An Liu is there, and wants an answer.
After one week, An finally gives it to him.
LAMORT377: WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT?
12GOLDENGATE12: A FRIEND
12GOLDENGATE12: I COULD BE A FRIEND, AT LEAST
12GOLDENGATE12: DO YOU WANT A FRIEND?
This is a question An Liu has never asked himself.
LAMORT377: WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO BE MY FRIEND?
12GOLDENGATE12: DUDE I’VE BEEN WATCHING YOUR WORK. IT’S SOME NEXT LEVEL SHIT. NOT MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE CAN KEEP UP WITH ME. BUT YOU’RE ALMOST THERE. I CAN TELL YOU’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE, THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT SOME HELP.
It disconcerts An to think that the stranger has traced his steps well enough to figure out that he’s searching for someone. What else does this interloper know? And how dangerous is it to have him out there, knowing it?
On the other hand, he appreciates that the stranger is impressed with him. Even if he’s clearly not impressed enough.
LAMORT377: YOU’RE SUGGESTING YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME? THAT I COULD LEARN FROM YOU?
12GOLDENGATE12: FOR A GENIUS YOU’RE KIND OF SLOW. YEAH, DUDE, I’M SUGGESTING THAT. I’M THE BEST. SO I MUST BE BETTER THAN YOU. THAT’S JUST LOGIC
LAMORT377: PROVE IT
With that, An Liu shuts down his system. The stranger is galling, enraging—but blinkblinkSHIVER this is the first shiver tic-blink-free conversation he’s had with someone since he woke up from the coma.
The stranger has shivershiver no idea who An Liu is or that he is blinkblinkblinkblinkblink damaged. An Liu’s father would certainly disapprove of An making contact with anyone, much less continuing it. He would shiver likely forbid it, if he shiverBLINK could—but An Liu surpassed his father’s computing skills years ago. In this digital space, An Liu is free to do as he pleases. And perhaps the stranger simply wants to play. So An will give him a game.