Empire of Liberty

1. You are distressed

Peking, 1972.

A crowd of software engineers gathered around the Wall of 360-Degree Feedbacks, all of us straining to read the spreadsheet taped to the wall. The green-and-white printer paper promised to answer our one burning question: Who’d been denounced, and for what?

I was nearly close enough to make out the line-printed characters, but a co-worker suddenly elbowed me at an uncomfortable height and surged past. I tried to squeeze back in, but others were stronger and equally eager, and they pushed me back to the periphery. From there I surveyed the entire Wall of 360-Degree Feedbacks, an expanse of white drywall filled with accusatory big-character posters aimed at fulfilling the primary directive of our Chairman and CEO: “Bombard the HQ!”

Finally near enough again, I read the first line of the spreadsheet, which concerned a Level-D2 engineer named Robert Lin, who was accused of “dragging his legs” throughout Q4. I couldn’t help but feel bad for the teammates Robert Lin had let down, even though I knew it was hearsay.

As I scanned the next few lines, my cheeks flushed hot, because there in black and white (and green) was the name I least expected to see, my name.

Name: Vivian Wu

National ID #: 0001688816681

Gender: Female

Age: 19

Weight: 59kg

Notes: Uncontrolled workplace violence

I felt the judgment of my co-workers crush in on me even as they physically edged away. Something started to boil inside me, and I froze. Take a breath, I told myself. Check your mood ring. The ring was dark orange, meaning “you are distressed, you feel overwhelmed.”

Looking back up, I saw my name still there, and ... my weight? What crazy accuser had spuriously estimated my weight at 59kg?

Breathe.

Along the edges of the printer paper, there were two sets of perforated feed-holes. I decided to count them. Twenty-seven holes on the left side. Twenty-seven holes on the right side. Then I lost my shit, as the English expression goes. I ripped the spreadsheet down with both hands, leaving only scraps of cellophane tape behind.

Brenda says I should control my rage.

2. That’s the whole joke

The name of my company is Alicent Technologies.

How I came to work at Alicent is a story that began nineteen years earlier, when I was born as the elder child of a fighter pilot and a professional worrier. At birth, I was assigned National ID #0001688816681. It turns out to be a prime number, with no multiplicative factors. You may notice the auspicious sequence “888” in the middle. A statistical improbability, to be sure. But everything taped to the Wall of 360-Degree Feedbacks is full of statistical improbabilities.

Brenda says I should make small talk and tell jokes.

Like a normal person.

Here’s a joke. One mathematician says to another, “My ID number is 000137439855.” The other mathematician says, “Crazy! What are the odds?”

That’s the whole joke.

You may also notice that my ID number 0001688816681 contains three leading zeroes. Those zeroes reserve space for a trillion future Chinese citizens who will populate our space colonies.

3. The ring was a gift

Oslo, Norway, two years later.

I am an instructor at the Kolmogorov Institute of Mathematics at the University of Oslo.

The name on my office door is fake, because I’m in hiding, although I can’t remember my real name or even the reason I’m hiding. Since I have an Asian face, I lie to my colleagues and say that I come from the Soviet East. Fortunately, few Norwegians ask questions, especially in winter.

My memories may be gone, but my mathematical faculties are intact. I have just completed a private proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, a classic problem in prime number theory, unsolved since 1859. The more I work on the proof, the simpler it gets, which is always a good sign.

I check my mood ring. Bluish-green: I am relaxed and aware of my surroundings. This ring was a gift, I suddenly realize, so I open my math notebook and write this new fact down.

Given by: Unknown.

Date: Unknown.

Place: Unknown.

4. Spreading false corporate gossip

Peking, 1972.

Cherry Xu, my HR representative at Alicent Technologies, scheduled a struggle session for two o’clock, prompted, no doubt, by my recent outburst at the Wall of 360-Degree Feedbacks. I’d had two such “incidents” before, and as she put it, one more will make three, an obvious mathematical fact.

Brenda says I take things too literally.

Simultaneous beeps chirped from two computer terminals, mine and Sunny Li’s. We pushed our chairs back and walked down the row of engineers to Cherry Xu’s office.

Sunny Li and I had been friends since the day we arrived at Alicent. We ate dinner together pretty regularly, and she always looked out for me. Sunny Li was a project manager at the company. Or a product manager. I could never remember the difference.

Division head Krystal Zhang was already there, standing and talking with Cherry Xu. Also present were two other classmates, introduced as Carrie Hu and Edsger Wang. At Alicent, we were supposed to say “classmate” instead of “co-worker,” because of the nice, casual feeling it gives.

Only important people like Cherry Xu had offices at Alicent; the rest of us sat shoulder-to-shoulder at our rows of terminals. Cherry Xu’s austere office gave the impression that what little decorating time she might have had was consistently sucked up by dealing with problems we created. Her desk terminal had a fancy detached keyboard, instead of the usual built-in one, and its screen was covered by some kind of polarized film that prevented viewing at an angle. The office walls were bare except for a framed color photograph of our company’s Chairman and CEO.

After we assembled, Cherry Xu asked us to push the conference table to one wall and roll six office chairs into a circle. I looked at the faces around the room. No one was older than twenty-one, with the possible exception of Cherry Xu.

“Let’s start with the fact that we’re all lucky to be here,” she began, “given the ongoing disruptions in the labor market, and so forth.”

She pressed the red button on her Strollman cassette player to start recording the meeting. The empty audiocassette box on her desk advertised “60 minutes recording time,” which I optimistically took as an upper bound on how long the struggle session would last, after which the audiotape would be uploaded to the mainframe computer for speech recognition and persistent storage.

I looked past Cherry Xu at the Chairman’s framed photo on the wall. Studying it, I thought I detected a faint smirk on his face. Had that smirk been secretly added by some low-level artist in Alicent’s Office of Corporate Identity? I imagined the hapless illustrator attending her own struggle session right now.

“Krystal Zhang is the senior manager in this meeting,” continued Cherry Xu, “so I will consult with her about the outcome. I mean, she’ll make the decision.” Cherry Xu hesitated then, as if trying to remember something but ultimately failing.

Krystal Zhang arrived at Alicent Technologies the same day as me and Sunny Li. The three of us were assigned to the same lunch table, and since we were all strangers to each other in our cohort, we three decided to stick together. During the first weeks of orientation, Krystal Zhang struggled a lot, unable to master the basic technical materials. I covered for her and answered her questions, but Sunny Li wasn’t as patient, finally decreeing that we couldn’t be friends with Krystal anymore. Later, Krystal became a manager, which made sense, because everyone knows that managers don’t need to know all the technical details.

“What’s this about?” Sunny Li demanded. She was shifting in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position. As she searched under her chair for the height adjustment knob, Cherry Xu answered, in a pretty serious tone, that Sunny Li had been accused of spreading false corporate gossip. We were to address the matter with innovation, agility, passion, and so forth, following the Chairman’s procedure. With a nervous laugh, Cherry Xu corrected herself, saying that “procedure” was probably not the right word, given the Chairman’s famous opposition. Corporate procedures are the dead hand of the past, he wrote in the employee handbook, trying to maintain its grip on the living!

“This is bullshit,” Sunny Li declared.

5. I move to postpone or whatever

Suddenly, I realized this wasn’t my struggle session.

It was Sunny Li’s.

By now, everybody knew somebody who’d been kicked out of the company. Such people were inevitably unable to get another job in tech. The companies shared a surprising amount of data with each other: onboarding dates, graduation notices, performance evaluations, personal identifying information. Rumor had it that one classmate did get a job at another tech company, but it turned out the job was to water their indoor plants, which didn’t cover his rent, so he had to move.

Cherry Xu didn’t reply to Sunny Li’s outburst.

Instead, she took out a stack of pre-filled index cards and handed them to the boy on her right.

“Should I take the card on top?” Edsger Wang asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cherry Xu said.

“Or from the middle?”

As this was happening, Sunny Li pulled out her orange, pocket-sized Alicent employee handbook and started desperately waving it around while tapping the cover illustration with her finger. On the cover of the latest edition, a cartoon cricket stood surveying the ocean from the top of a cliff.

“The Director of Corporate Identity approved this drawing!” said Sunny Li. “It’s saying, you know, implying, that the Chairman is leading our company over the edge of a cliff. I’m not spreading corporate gossip. You can see how it’s drawn for yourself, right here!”

Then Sunny Li started frantically flipping the pages of the booklet. “The handbook has a section about how corporate logos get approved—”

Struggling to find the right page, she suddenly lost momentum.

I couldn’t follow exactly what Sunny Li was saying, and I thought the others might feel the same. I wanted to help her—in meetings like these, it was important to say the right thing in the right way.

“Sunny Li,” I said, “I think I get it, but could you put it in a different—”

Carrie Hu cut me off, asking, “Are we talking about employee handbook section 9.16?”

Sunny Li looked up from her handbook, stricken.

“Because section 9.16 isn’t really relevant to this situation,” Carrie Hu continued.

“What?” said Sunny Li.

Krystal Zhang asked Carrie Hu to quote a more relevant section, which Carrie Hu did, from memory. During the re-organization, people who could quote passages from memory earned high status, so everyone tried to do it.

“I suggest,” said Krystal Zhang, “that we evaluate Carrie Hu’s passage in an agile, innovative way.”

Cherry Xu cleared her throat. “And let me clarify, at this point, that either Sunny Li or the Director of Corporate Identity will be graduating today, depending on the outcome of this struggle session.”

“The guy’s not even here!” wailed Sunny Li, looking around wildly. “I move to postpone, or whatever!”

6. Consorts with

Sunny Li swept her gaze around the room before fixing it on me.

“I move to postpone,” she shouted, “because first we need to deal with the case of Vivian Wu!”

“I’m sorry?” said Krystal Zhang.

“Vivian Wu,” Sunny Li said, struggling to quiet her voice. “Vivian Wu slept with a Level-D2 Contractor from the Ministry of Defense.”

My hands squeezed the armrests of my chair. As everyone turned to look at me, I counted the seconds of silence. One, two, three, four. I averted my eyes by checking my mood ring: it was red.

“That’s right,” Sunny Li continued. “Vivian Wu slept with Level-D2 contractor Gerald Yang in exchange for military secrets. Then she passed those secrets to a female foreign agent that she frequently consorts with.”

“What do you mean, consorts with?” Krystal asked.

“Consorts with!” Sunny Li shouted.

She was starting to lose her grip again.

“Sleeps with!”

An awkward silence followed.

Cherry Xu finally suggested that this might be a matter for the police.

“Correct,” said Carrie Hu, flipping through the pages of her orange handbook. “Although fraternization with third-party clients is definitely prohibited in cases of conflict of interest. And it’s a separate violation if an intimate relationship hasn’t been disclosed within one week of ... you know, any potential infraction.”

Edsger Wang raised his hand.

“What?” snapped Cherry Xu.

“What do you call a person who’s attracted to both men and women?”

He was thumbing through the index of his orange booklet, failing to find the term he was looking for. Anyone not already holding their own copy of the handbook immediately dove for it ...

Except for me.

Instead, I rocked back and forth in my chair, again not knowing what to do. I leaned back and started to count the ceiling tiles, left-to-right, then right-to-left.

Sunny Li’s accusations weren’t true, but they were true enough. Once HR started digging, things would come to light and I’d be fired.

One hundred sixty-eight ceiling tiles in all.

7. A cesspool of drugs, explosions, and anarchy

I had two problems.

One was how to get out of the current mess, right there in Cherry Xu’s office. For that, I had the Projector. But it wasn’t good to use the Projector, and besides, it didn’t always work. And I’d vowed not to use it on friends and classmates. And also: the side effects.

The other problem was that, while my job at Alicent was terrible, I had no plan for life outside of it. I had a pipe dream, to move to California and live with my boyfriend, a mathematician named Carson Hawke. Maybe not boyfriend, exactly, but we’d exchanged lots of audio messages on the Strollnet. I won’t tell you that Carson Hawke invented the Strollnet, because then you wouldn’t believe any of this. You’d say Carson Hawke was imaginary, like the square root of negative one.

But he’s not imaginary. He sent me a mixtape, and I sent him the software that people called revolutionary.

The reason it was a pipe dream was that California was a cesspool of drugs, explosions, and anarchy, where the people’s chosen Governor was a woman who made the kinds of films I don’t know the English word for. The lawless breakaway region no longer required a passport to get into, but I still needed a passport to get out of China, and the Ministry of Defense rarely issued one.

Brenda could get me out, or so she’d claimed that one night, high on white stimulant powder. But these days, Brenda was nowhere to be found.

8. You’re not feeling well

Well, as I saw it, Sunny Li was no longer a friend. And Cherry Xu was certainly no friend either ... so I held my breath and projected a simple thought into Cherry Xu’s head: This meeting is over.

“This meeting is over,” she said.

“What?” said Krystal Zhang.

You have another meeting, I projected. You’re not feeling well.

“I’m not feeling well,” Cherry Xu said.

Around the circle of swivel chairs, everyone’s mouth dropped open, and in the silence that followed, I eased myself out of my seat and departed.

9. Side effects

Back when I thought Brenda believed in me, and wanted the best for me, she showed me how to control my extra-sensory action ability, what I came to call my “Projector.” I’d been accidentally projecting my whole life—accidentally manipulating people—instead of developing normal social skills.

At least by now I’d learned to turn it on and off.

It was bad to turn it on, according to the classified literature Brenda gave me, because it created “cognitive dissonance” in the “target person,” which meant they struggled to fit the new, projected belief into the network of their other beliefs. I created an untraceable “elevated mental load,” but the brain of the “target person” would eventually associate me with some vague form of unpleasantness, and they would start to avoid me. I guess you could say that stunted social skills and a lack of friends are side effects of the Projector. According to Brenda’s material, though, the chemical side effects were much more serious.

Anyway, it’s better not to use the Projector, especially on friends and classmates.

But sometimes you’re in a jam.

10. Thank you for the opportunity

I walked from Cherry Xu’s office to the Wall of 360-Degree Feedbacks and pinned my last note.

Dear all,

This is my resignation letter.

It has not been a pleasure working here, but I have learned a lot.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Sunny Li can go fuck herself.

Vivian Wu

My hand shook a little as I wrote the last line, but I wasn’t sorry. Sunny Li had turned on me, and it was only a matter of time before Alicent got rid of me. Then I’d be on the street with all the other graduates, unemployed and unemployable.

My next stop was the mainframe computer room, my late-night haven all these months. It was daytime now, so the room’s only occupant was a systems programmer wearing Strollman headphones.

I walked to the peripherals area, where an oversized color photo of a naked woman was pinned to the corkboard; the twice-creased page had been tacked up since long before I joined the company.

Miss April 1967, Satomi Nakamura.

The photograph was an unlikely yet incriminating piece of evidence against me, one that could tie me to the anonymous software I’d written during my late-night sessions. I unpinned the photo and folded it into the back pocket of my jeans.

At the door of the mainframe room, I turned and said, “Goodbye.” The systems programmer didn’t look up—maybe he didn’t hear me, or maybe he correctly guessed that I was saying goodbye to the room, not him.

I took the elevator down to Alicent’s vast front lobby. On the wall behind the security counter, a huge video screen projected a canned, year-by-year history of the company. I knew the story by heart, having pieced it together from slides I encountered, out of order, during my morning face-scans. The current image was the last one in the sequence:

1972. A year of reflection and rebirth in which Alicent, with the teams’ full backing of the business, accelerated the development of our products, increased operational efficiency, and created greater business value.

As I walked past, the giant screen looped back to the year of our Chairman’s birth, showing the dirt streets of a Peking from not long ago. No gleaming skyscrapers, no tech campuses, just a picture of how you’d imagine the poorest city in the poorest country on Earth.

I wondered what I would do if I could turn back time. Would I, like the Alicent slide show, admit no mistakes and forge the same path over and over? It was natural, I guessed, to feel philosophical after the day’s events, and wonder if I’d done things correctly. I wondered if I was living in the best of all the alternative worlds.

But I wasn’t.

The moment the face-scanner allowed me to leave the building, a plainclothes policeman grabbed my upper arm.

No more cat-and-mouse game.

Somewhere deep in the Ministry of Defense complex, Level-D2 contractor Gerald Yang was smiling.

He’d found his man.

Only his “man” was me.

Inside my head, I heard the voice of my dead mother: “No matter how hard you work, someone else is working harder.” That was my mother all right, always encouraging me to do better.