And herein lay the problem of bot agents. Without genuine intelligence and capacity for abstraction, they were hardly capable of unmasking the behaviour and appearance of virtual people as codes. Small wonder, then, that Yoyo and her Guardians had focused their attention on Second Life: since the decentralised structure of the peer-to-peer network was ideally suited to the creation of hidden spaces, it was extremely hard to identify senders and receivers of data, and the number of worlds tended towards infinity. In fact, only the itineraries of the data between the servers could be reconstructed.
Servers themselves worked with many electronic doorkeepers. Anyone who visited a server and was allowed in was subject to the control of the webmaster in question, while visitors to the server couldn’t check one another if they didn’t have the requisite authorisation.
The webmaster of Cyber-Shanghai was Beijing. If Jericho had had an investigation centre in the virtual metropolis, he would have been a tenant of the Chinese government, which meant that the authorities would be able to knock at his door and turn his electronic office on its head with a search warrant (although to do that they would have needed judicial permission, which the Chinese were reluctant to grant). That was the only reason Jericho had never considered moving his office there.
He looked out at the bluish-green expanse.
Was it possible that this world had actually been created by a bot network? If computers developed something like aesthetic aspirations, they were copied from those of human beings, while at the same time being unsettlingly alien.
‘And is the island safe?’
Yoyo nodded. ‘We’ve drilled into cyberspace at every available point to build our own planets, in such a way that not everyone can get there. Jia Wei’ – she hesitated – ‘has calculated millions of simultaneous possibilities. That included modifying the protocol. Not significantly, just in such a way that the uninitiated end up in a jumble of data if they don’t have the right key. No idea how many variations we tried out, we generated them at random because we thought it was a new idea. Instead we ended up here.’
‘And the protocol is—’
‘A little green lizard.’
Yoyo smiled. It was the same sad smile that he knew from Chen Hongbing’s photograph.
‘Of course Cyber-Shanghai’s server records the intervention, but it doesn’t raise the alarm. It doesn’t register the momentary opening of an electronic wormhole, through which you escape into a kind of parallel universe. As far as it’s concerned, all that happens is that someone opens a door and closes it again.’
‘I figured it was something like that.’ Jericho nodded. ‘So who’s Irma la Douce?’
‘Hey!’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows. ‘You know Irma la Douce?’
‘Of course.’
‘Heavens! I hadn’t the slightest idea who she was when Daxiong turned up with her.’
‘A film. A lovely film.’
‘A film about a French poule.’
‘Perhaps it doesn’t necessarily represent the glorious Chinese culture,’ said Jericho mildly. ‘But there’s something else, think about it. The avatar is, incidentally, a perfect copy of Shirley MacLaine.’
‘She – erm – was an actress, right? A French one.’
‘American.’
Yoyo seemed to think for a second. Then she suddenly laughed out loud.
‘Oh, that’s going to nettle Daxiong. He thinks he knows everything there is to know.’
‘About films?’
‘Not at all. Daxiong has this thing about France. As if we didn’t have enough culture of our own. He could bang on at you all day about— Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
She turned away and ran her hand over her eyes. Jericho left her in peace. When she turned back to face him he saw the smeared remains of a tear on her cheek.
‘You’ve got my computer,’ she said. ‘So, what do you want? What do you want from me?’
‘Nothing,’ said Jericho.
‘But?’
‘Your father sent me. He’s terribly worried about you.’
‘Don’t think I don’t care,’ she said belligerently.
‘I don’t.’ He shook his head. ‘I know you don’t want to worry him. You thought your communications were being monitored, and that if you sent him an email they’d pounce on him and give him a going-over. Am I right?’
She stared gloomily ahead.
‘Hongbing doesn’t know about blogs and virtual worlds,’ Jericho went on. ‘He’s happy to be able to use an antediluvian mobile phone. And he’s consoling himself with the idea that his daughter has learned her lesson. He doesn’t know what you’re doing. Or let’s say, he guesses what you’re up to and doesn’t know. I’m sure he hasn’t the faintest idea that Tu Tian is protecting you.’
‘Tian!’ cried Yoyo. ‘He commissioned you, right?’
‘He referred your father to me.’
‘Sure, because Hongbing never— But why didn’t he—?’
‘Why didn’t he send a message for you to the Andromeda? Even though he knew where you’d fetched up? I mean, you never told him anything about the blast furnace, so in the end he got nervous—’
‘How do you know Tian?’
‘He’s a friend of mine. And, I should think, a kind of unofficial member of the Guardians. At least he supported you as best he could. The stuff in the control centre came from him, didn’t it? Tian was just as much of a dissident as you are now.’
‘As we were.’
Oh, right, thought Jericho. What a miserable subject. Whatever they were talking about, that was where they would always end up.
‘Tian didn’t need to send me a message,’ said Yoyo. ‘He knew it wouldn’t change a thing.’
‘Exactly. But it changed something when Hongbing hit on the idea of having a search made for you. A risky enterprise. Your father might prefer to act ignorant, but he knew he couldn’t get the police involved. I guess he secretly knew that you were going through the Party’s rubbish bins out the back. So he asked Tu Tian, the way you ask somebody with connections like that, and also because he accepted through gritted teeth that Tian might have been closer to you than your own—’
‘That’s not true,’ Yoyo rounded on him. ‘You’re talking nonsense!’
‘But that’s how it looks to—’
‘That has nothing to do with you! Nothing at all, okay? Keep out of my private life.’
Jericho tilted his head.
‘Okay, princess. As far as I can. So what was Tian supposed to do? Slap Hongbing on the shoulder and say, no need to worry? I know something you don’t know. But all right, your private life is sacred to me, even if it’s cost me my car and possibly my flat, which could go up in flames at any moment. You’re causing a lot of stress, Yoyo.’
A wrinkle of fury appeared between her eyebrows. She opened her mouth, but Jericho interrupted: ‘Save it for later.’
‘But—’
‘We can’t go on wasting time on your island for ever. Let’s see how we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess.’
‘We?’
‘You’re not listening, are you?’ Jericho showed his teeth. ‘I’m in this too, so take a good hard look, young lady! You’ve lost your friends. Why do you think all this happened? Because you stirred up a bit of dust? The Party is used to stepping in dissident shit. They might send you to jail for it, but they’re never going to send someone like Kenny.’
Her eyes filled with tears.
‘I couldn’t—’
Jericho bit his lip. He was making a mistake. Blaming Yoyo for the deaths of the others was as unfair as it was stupid.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said hastily.
She sniffed, took a step in one direction, then another, and then sliced the air with her trembling hands.
‘Maybe I should have – I should have—’
‘No, it’s okay. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘If only I hadn’t come up with that stupid idea!’
‘
Tell me about it. What did you do?’
‘Nothing would have happened. It’s my fault, I—’
‘It isn’t.’
‘It is!’
‘No, Yoyo, there’s nothing you can do about it. Tell me what you’ve done. What happened during the night?’
‘I didn’t want any of that.’ Her lips trembled. ‘It’s my fault they’re dead. They’re all dead.’
‘Yoyo—’
She threw her hands to her face. Jericho walked over, gently took her wrists and tried to draw them down. She pulled back and staggered away from him.
He heard a deep, throaty growl behind him.
What was it this time? He slowly turned round and looked into the golden eyes of an enormous bear.
Very impressive, he thought.
‘Daxiong.’
The bear showed its teeth. Jericho didn’t move. The beast was pretty much as big as a middle-sized pony. Of course the simulation didn’t put him in any danger, but he didn’t know what impulses were emitted by the gloves. They produced haptic sensations, meaning that they stimulated the nerves. Would they also emit pain if the monster decided to start chewing his fingers?
‘It’s okay.’ Yoyo had joined him. She stroked the huge animal’s fur, then looked at Jericho. Her voice was calm again, almost expressionless.
‘We tried something out that night,’ she said. ‘A way of sending messages.’
‘Via email?’
‘Yes. The whole thing was my idea. Jia Wei supplied the method.’
She tapped the bear on the nose. It lowered its head and a moment later it was gone.
‘We’re in touch with a lot of activists,’ she went on. ‘We wouldn’t be able to get hold of the relevant information without them. Of course we can’t openly ask Washington what dirty tricks China’s up to, and I’m registered as a dissident, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘So, Second Life is one way of tricking Cypol. It always involves a lot of effort. Good for a meeting like ours, but I wanted something quick and uncomplicated, just to send through a photograph or a few lines.’ Yoyo stared at the spot where the bear had stood. ‘And there’s a constant traffic of mails. Boring, unsuspicious mails containing nothing that would scare the Politburo. So we’ve tried to hop other people’s freight-trains.’
‘Parasite mails?’
‘Piggybacks, parasites, stowaways – whatever you want to call it. Jia Wei and I wrote a protocol that lets you encode messages in white noise and decode them again; we used it between Daxiong and me and decided to do a test.’
Jericho was gradually working out what had happened that night. The basic idea was designed to trick even the cleverest surveillance experts. It was based on the fundamental principle of email traffic, which was that mails were primarily a collection of data, little travellers that wanted to be helped on their way. So they were crammed into packets of data like passengers into railway carriages, and like those carriages the packets had a standard length. If one carriage was full, the next one turned up, until there was room for the whole message and it could be sent, with the receiver’s web address up at the front as the locomotive.
But the difference in the quantities of data usually meant that the last compartment was only partly occupied. The phrase end of message defined where the message ended, but because a packet could only be sent as a whole, there was usually some data-free space left over, what was known as white noise. As it arrived, the receiving computer selected the official data of the message, cut the rest off and threw it away. It didn’t occur to anyone to look through the white noise for further content, because there was nothing to be found there.
That was where the idea began. Whoever had it first, it was and remained brilliant. A secret message was coded in such a way that it looked like white noise, was immediately switched for the real white noise and sent on its way like a stowaway. There was only one problem that needed to be solved. You had to send the message yourself, or have access to the sender’s computer. There was no reason not to let stowaways travel on their own trains. But once you’d attracted attention, your email traffic would be under constant surveillance. Organisations like Cypol might be overstretched, but they weren’t stupid, so it was to be feared that they would also check up on white noise.
But there was a solution, which was to use other people’s email traffic. Two dissidents who wanted to pass a conspiratorial message one to the other each needed a router or illegal railway station for passing data-trains, and of course they had to agree on the same train. It might be birthday greetings from Mr Huang in Shenzen to his nephew Yi living in Beijing, both reputable citizens with nothing bad to be said about them as far as the State was concerned. So Mr Huang sent off his birthday greetings without guessing for a moment that his train was about to make an unscheduled stop with Dissident One, who took charge of the white noise, swapped it for the disguised message and sent the train on its way again. But before it reached Yi, it was stopped again, this time by Dissident Two, who received the message, decoded it, replaced it with real white noise, and now at last it went on to the nephew in Beijing, who was assured of Mr Huang’s esteem, while neither of them knew what purpose they had served. The whole thing suggested innocent tourists who had drugs secretly smuggled into their luggage at the airport and then taken out again at the other end, with the significant difference that the drugs didn’t assume the appearance and consistency of their underwear.
‘Of course we weren’t so naïve as to assume that we’d invented the trick,’ said Yoyo. ‘But it’s really not that likely that you’re going to come across an email that already has a stowaway.’
‘And whose official mail did you intercept?’
‘It came from some government authority or other.’ Yoyo shrugged. ‘The Ministry of Energy or something.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘Wait, it was – it was—’ She frowned and looked defiant. ‘Okay, don’t know.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Jericho looked at her in disbelief. ‘You don’t know who—?’
‘For the love of heaven! It was only a test! Just to see if I could get into it!’
‘And what did you write?’
‘Just something.’
‘Come on! What was it?’
‘I—’ She seemed to chew the sentence a number of times before spitting it out at Jericho’s feet: ‘Catch me if you can.’
‘Catch me if you can?’
‘Am I talking Mongolian? Yesss!’
‘Why that?’
‘Why that?’ she said, copying him. ‘Doesn’t matter. Because I thought it was cool, that’s why.’
‘Very cool. In a test—’
‘Oh, son-of-a-turtle!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘No – one – was – supposed – to – read – it!’
Jericho sighed and shook his head.
‘All right. Go on?’
‘The protocol was set to real time. Stop mail, take out noise, put in own message, encode, pass on, all at the same time. So, I write, and at the same time I notice there’s something in it already! That I haven’t taken out any white noise at all, but some kind of mysterious stuff.’
‘Because someone else was trying to do the same thing as you were.’
‘Yes.’
Jericho nodded. In fairness, he had to admit that Yoyo couldn’t have anticipated this development.
‘But by then the email was already on its way again,’ he said. ‘To the person that the mysterious stuff was meant for. Except that it never got there, because you’d taken it out and swapped it.’
‘Unwittingly.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Imagine this. They’re waiting for some complex, secret information. Instead they read: Catch me if you can.’ Jericho couldn’t help it. He raised his hands in the air and applauded. ‘Bravo, Yoyo. Lovely little provocation. My congratulations.’
‘Oh, fuck you! Of course they immediately worked out that someone had broken in.’
‘And they were prepared.??
?
‘Yes, unlike me.’ She pulled a sour face. ‘I mean, I don’t know if they’d expected something like that exactly, but their defences work, you have to give them that. Some kind of watchdog program immediately started barking: woof! An extra hub has appeared in the predetermined route, it shouldn’t be there. Grrr, where are our data?’
‘And traced you back?’
‘Traced me back?’ Yoyo gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘They attacked me! They attacked my computer, I don’t know how, it was absolutely terrifying! While I’m still gawping at what I’ve pulled out of the water, I see them starting to download my data. I couldn’t get online quickly enough as they went through my stuff. They knew exactly who I was – and where I was!’
‘Does that mean you don’t have an anonymiser—’
‘I’m not stupid,’ she hissed. ‘Of course I use an anonymiser. But if you’re implementing something completely new and playing around with it, you’re forced to open up your system for a moment. Otherwise the protection tools downstairs would get in your way, that’s what they’re there for.’
‘So you turned various things off.’
‘I had to take that risk.’ Her eyes flashed with fury. ‘I had to be sure we could work like that.’
‘Well, now you know.’
‘Lovely, Mister Brain Box.’ She folded her arms. ‘What would you have done?’
‘One bit at a time,’ said Jericho. ‘First take out the attachment and check it for land mines. Then put my own thing in there. Leave myself the option of cancelling everything before I send it off. And most importantly, don’t put any smug little phrases in there, even if you’ve encoded it as noise a thousand times over.’
‘What’s the point of data transfer that doesn’t make sense?’
‘We’re talking about a test. As long as you don’t know for sure whether your data transfer is safe or not, you’ve got to sound like a communication error. They might have wondered where their message ended up, but it wouldn’t immediately have occurred to them that someone was tapping off their communication.’
She looked at him as if she was thinking of tearing his throat out. Then she spread her arms and let them fall back helplessly by her side.