The HYDRA aircraft touched down at Hong Kong International Airport just after noon. Caldwell stared out one of the windows as the plane skidded to a halt. He’d never seen so many aircraft in one place before. There were hundreds of them with many landing and taking off simultaneously. There were planes that landed and stopped abruptly, planes that took off from a stationary position. They just shuddered and shot up vertically into the sky. There were hybrid planes that took off like a helicopter, then they’d sprout wings, the rotors would fold down, and they’d shoot off like a jet fighter. Amazingly, most of the airline logos were familiar to him. In his previous life he had probably been a frequent flier.
“Thank you for flying HYDRA Air,” the two Eurasian stewardesses said in stereo over the intercom. Caldwell wondered where they had sequestered themselves for much of the flight and considered the remote possibility that they had actually flown the plane, if in fact it had been piloted by humans.
Caldwell couldn’t put his finger on it but something in him had changed dramatically. He’d come out of the operating room a bit groggy and badly in need of some shut-eye, the dull throb of a migraine lingering in there somewhere, but otherwise feeling that he was still the same person, except for the constant barrage of images flashing in his head. He’d taken a nap and found himself the protagonist in a string of vivid nightmares. He’d awoken to an empty lounge and headed to the shower. He felt much better after his shower, shave and a change of clothing. The suit the two Siu Jes had brought on board for him fitted well and when Caldwell had looked at himself in the mirror he had seen a face that he didn’t completely recognize.
While still in the operation room, for that’s what it was even though the procedure was non-invasive, he had solved three programming algorithms that had been bothering him for a while. These were algorithms that would have made his bots much smarter and less prone to reboots or system failures. He was happy with that aspect of things. He would need his brain cells firing on all cylinders to extricate himself unscathed from his current predicament. He felt the urge to hold a gun in his hand and fire it. He had no idea why he had those thoughts, he just felt them. It was as though that act would fill some deep hole in his psyche. What surprised him most was that he could think in what he figured was Cantonese. He had heard the language before in the numerous Chinatowns scattered across the Union. And now in his somewhat refurbished mind, the sounds of the Chinese language were coalescing into a recognizable pattern of sorts.
The Siu Jes emerged to open the aircraft doors.
“Nei dei sik gong chungman ma?” Caldwell asked the twins in Cantonese, surprising even myself. Did they speak Cantonese?
“Gan hai la!” they exclaimed, like he was asking an idiotic question. That was good enough for him. He could speak at least some Cantonese. Caldwell wondered what else was going on in the uncharted depths his mind. Ms. Levin had explained to him that she had implanted two tiny chips non-invasively. One was a miniscule GPS chip that plotted his whereabouts on a digital map accessible somewhere in London. It probably had Fouler’s fingerprints all over it. The other was a Hong Kong ID chip.
While he was knocked out she had taken the liberty of running the ID chip he carried in his pocket against the Union identification database. She had told him he had a list of minor offences as long as her arm and that the authorities had been trying to track him down without success. Caldwell had observed that her arms were not that long and that her legs would be a better analogy. She’d blushed visibly and busied herself packing up her contraptions. Fouler had instructed her to wipe the slate clean on his new Hong Kong chip. Anything else that went on there was not their problem. Fair deal, he thought. Caldwell felt like he was betraying his anti-system ideals but Seven Levin had assured him that if he made it back alive, having the chips removed would be the least of his problems. From the way she said it, Caldwell reckoned Seven did not rate his chances.
He was escorted through the immigration counters by Agent Jones and Agent Jackman. Ms. Levin and the Siu Jes had stayed on board with the pilot who Caldwell hadn’t seen throughout the flight.
“Hello Mr. Caldwell, welcome back to Hong Kong. I see you’ve been away for a while,” a freckled young Chinese immigration officer observed, as his computer automatically picked up Caldwell’s details. Caldwell was taken aback and started feeling around in his pockets. Were they reading the passport chip that Ms. Levin had given him from his pocket?
“No need for a passport chip, sir,” the officer said, correctly reading his action.
At the luggage carousel, he kept his eyes open for the two Yakuza who had killed Glyph in London. His heightened sense of awareness felt weird and familiar all at once. Even the two HYDRA agents looked at him with a newfound respect. Caldwell wondered whether it was something in his eyes that was making the agents respond differently to what was essentially the same person. They seemed to be saying: “You are no longer a punk. You are now one of us, at least for the time being.”
They picked up the suitcase HYDRA had prepared for him, a graphite gray Brix heavy on technology, from the luggage carousel. Agent Jones ordered Caldwell to stand still. He placed the Brix on the floor and played around on a little touch screen display on the front of the suitcase. A small camera popped out from the top, swiveled round and a laser beam shot out and proceeded to rapidly scan Caldwell’s body. The whole thing could not have lasted more than a second. Then the suitcase beeped and a green light flashed and Agent Jones gestured for them to keep walking. As they walked out into the arrival area, Caldwell turned round to see the Brix faithfully following them, the suitcase’s owner-recognition sensors perpetually trained on him like the cross hairs of a sniper.
The arrivals lounge was chock full of people. People of all races but the vast majority were Chinese, the citizens of New China. It was immediately apparent that New China was the technology center of the world, at least in terms of massive adoption. Nearly all the teenagers packed jukebox implants, head mounted displays and had hair that changed color depending on how the light struck them. Their clothes were invariably astronaut silver or a translucent material that changed hue with the flick of a button. Aerodynamic computer-controlled trainers that morphed in real time depending on the amount of friction on the floor and the dynamics of the wearer’s legs were in abundance. The older generation were less flamboyant in many ways but made up for it with more gold and jade jewelry than you’d find in a typical Union high street jewelry store.
The entire Union was a giant lie. A lie designed to prevent an exodus of people to New China. From what Caldwell had seen so far, the Union was light years behind New China in terms of technology and related fashions. It showed on the faces of the tourists who made their way into the arrivals area, eyes wide open. New China had one-upped the world by causing a massive brain drain, sucking massive talent pools from the knowledge economies of the West.
In the Union corporate ads were ubiquitous. At Hong Kong International Airport, they were omnipresent. There were screens in the glass railings displaying stock prices and other data. Holographic projectors embedded in the escalators projected life-size movie stars flogging their latest Sim Flicks among the passengers. The entire ceiling of the arrivals hall was an advertisement for some new theme park. It was a live high-resolution real-time view of the park’s major attractions. Some foreign tourists were already gesturing with excitement at the ceiling. Get them before they even leave the airport, Caldwell thought.
There was something about coming out into the arrivals area of an airport, an odd feeling of displacement, which spooked him. It was probably the faces of the people meeting arriving passengers, the way they looked at you mentally figuring out which part of the planet you were from, whether you were there to contribute to the economy or be a drain on it. There was a recurring pattern in the depths of all those eyes that Caldwell found disturbing. In Hong Kong, take that arrivals hall feeling and multiply it by ten and you’d still have no idea what it was like.
Caldwell noticed that a significant number of Hong Kong’s young women were dressed in see-through trousers, skirts and tops. The most daring of them were standing there giving Caldwell, and everyone else who cared to look, a glimpse of their fluorescent G-strings and their Wonder Bras. If they didn’t like the way you were looking at them, they’d press a button on their hips and the trousers would cloud up like water does when you add milk. Hong Kong was an orchestra of colors, attitude and pure drive and the airport was its showroom.
Amid this sea of excitement, Caldwell’s mind came to focus on two events on different sides of the hall. One was the two Japanese from The Puzzle in London looking up and down the arrivals hall. Caldwell figured they were seconds away from spotting him. He turned away from them even though he knew that with the two HYDRA heavies walking next to him, his entourage would be easy to spot. The other thing that caught Caldwell’s eyes, for no reason he could fathom, was a woman in a tight black leather motorcycle rider’s body suit. She probably stood out because her helmet was on and there was data scrolling past on the dark visor.
The woman in black turned and looked in Caldwell’s direction. One of the Yakuza had also spotted him and as Caldwell acknowledged that fact, the Japanese looked him straight in the eyes. The Yakuza seemed unsure of whether it was him or not. Must be the suit, Caldwell thought. Then as the Japanese started moving forward gesturing to his associate, his eyes registered on the two HYDRA agents. The disfigured Yakuza had also seen them and he stood there giving Caldwell his most menacing look. Like I am going to go over and give you the console just because you are ugly, Caldwell thought. He was about to tap Agent Jackman on the shoulder to point out the Japanese men when they stopped suddenly. The woman in the biker’s outfit was standing in front of them.
“Agent Jackman, Agent Jones, I am Agent Hsu. Hope you had a good trip,” said a hoarse voice in perfect English, with some variation of an Asian accent.
“Code phrase?” the two agents asked simultaneously, eschewing small talk as was their habit.
“PERFECT VISION 2020”
“OK. He’s all yours Agent Hsu,” said Agent Jackman. The man seemed to be in a hurry to rid himself of Caldwell.
“Thanks Agent Jackman, I’ll take it from here. You boys have yourself a good trip back.” The girl’s accent was difficult to place. It was definitely Oriental. Caldwell’s eyes remained trained on the Japanese.
“I think you better distract those Japanese before you go. Use that sound gun thing if you must,” Caldwell said, nodding in the direction of the two Yakuza.
“Leave it to us. Later,” Agent Jones said as the two men retreated through the crowds towards where the Japanese were standing. Caldwell wondered why they hadn’t made their move.
“Tell Fouler I’ll be seeing him soon,” Caldwell said to no one in particular. The suitcase was idling behind him. He watched the two agents move decidedly towards the Yakuza. They were a sufficient distance away from the Yakuza not to freak him out although he looked nervous. The two Yakuza started to move away from the approaching agents.
“Come with me,” the woman said. Her visor was still down and something in Caldwell wondered why the agents hadn’t identified her visually. They probably never met her before so visual identification was unnecessary, the secure code phrase being enough. PERFECT VISION 2020. What the hell did that mean any way? Caldwell was too tightly coiled to make small talk. Something didn’t seem right. He kept turning around to check the movements of the two Japanese but a crowd of mainland tourists had emerged waving brightly colored flags and obstructing his view. Caldwell followed the girl through the crowds with the Brix tailing them obediently. A group of children raced past on electric-powered sneakers. One minute they were there, the next they were a blur weaving between the crowds.
Caldwell and the woman in biker gear arrived at a bank of elevators. A sign indicated that the elevators led to the underground car parks. He wondered whether the woman was also some kind of clone. She didn’t seem like the talkative type either. The elevator doors opened and they walked in followed by a Chinese family that seemed to have just flown in. They were chattering away in Cantonese and Caldwell was once again amazed that he could understand what they were saying. They were happy to be back in Hong Kong after a long trip visiting relatives in the United States.
The woman pressed the CLOSE button. The doors began to close shut but there was an elderly Chinese couple with a heavy luggage trolley at the door. Caldwell pushed the OPEN button to let them in, his fingers brushing the girl’s gloved hands in the process. He could feel the girl tense up slightly. Clone? The old couple sauntered in. The woman pressed the CLOSE button again. She seemed in a rush to get out of the airport. Caldwell didn’t blame her. With the Yakuza hanging around, a quick exit made sense.
As the doors closed, he sneaked one last look to see whether the HYDRA agents had intercepted the Yakuza. Agent Jones had disappeared as had the younger Japanese and the disfigured one. Caldwell could only make out the broad expanse of Agent Jackman’s back and he seemed to be talking animatedly with a girl in black leather. She was holding something round under her arm. It looked like a motorcycle helmet. She was gesticulating wildly. Then both of them turned round and looked towards the elevator. The elevator doors closed. Caldwell turned to his right to look at the woman in the biker’s gear. She had moved in close and had something hard and cold sticking against his ribs. He didn’t need a degree in rocket science to know that it was a gun.