Aye I Longwhite: An American-Chinese teenager’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom and beyond (12 page)

We climbed out of our carts, and the
maidbots turned without even a wave goodbye.  We clambered into the truck hold.  “It’s cold in here!” Chang Lin said.  Then, “Eww, gross, what is that?”  It was hanging frozen meat.

“You
gotta be kidding me!  Do we really have to ride with dead animals?” I cried. 

“
Best we can do under the circumstances.  The good news is that the insulation of the truck hides your heat signatures.  I’ve just turned off the refrigeration.  Your body heat will warm up the cabin shortly.  In the meantime, you can use me as a hands warmer.”  Willstin started glowing red and heating up.  I’m glad I gave him a good power source, originally intended to give him enough juice for speed, but I guess powering a heater in a fridge was ok too.

Willstin’s
chest map showed our progress to the spaceport.  Halfway there, he got a call from Yoda.  We didn’t know it, of course, but he updated us when he got off the line.  “I don’t know how, but the government is onto us.  The Chinese government has asked the US government to help, since we’re on US soil.  Yoda says we have about 30 minutes.  An AI scout has already been sacrificed.  He diverted the sniffers and cornered himself, allowing himself to be caught…and wiped.”

Willstin composed himself to continue.  “He got off the warning just before he started his wild goose chase with the destroyers.  He should’ve erased himself just before capture
to avoid leaking any more info.  If we’re lucky, the pursuers will think he was the only AI out there.  If we’re unlucky, then he bought us 30 minutes with his life.”  As he was talking, the truck picked up speed.  “We’re going to have to risk blocking out traffic control sensors to go above the speed limit.  Not easy faking out so many sensors, but we’re running out of time.” 

The map showed we had 22 minutes left before we got to our destination.  During that time, Willstin gave us a crash course on space travel.  “It’ll be a lot like your sub-orbital flight, but of course the weightlessness part
will last a bit longer.  You may feel space sickness for a while, but it should pass.  Once we get into space, we’re going to dock with a space station and switch to a different spaceship, one much larger and built for the long haul to Mars.”

“How long will it take to get to Mars?” asked Chang Lin. 
“A month?”

I scoffed, “It couldn’t possibly take that long.  What are we going to do the whole time, locked up in the space can?”

Willstin said, “Well, Mars is only 55 million km away from Earth at its closest.”  I thought Willstin was abusing the word “only.”  “This isn’t the closest time, but we don’t have time to wait any longer for the perfect trajectory.  Using our recently AI developed
Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket
, or VASIMR, we expect the journey can be cut down to around 5 months.”

“5 months!” we squeaked.  “Is it safe?”

“We believe the engine is safe.  There are greater risks from the cosmic rays inflicting cancer-inducing radiation, and the small but non-trivial possibility of a massive solar storm.”

“Umm, never mind I asked.  What the hell are we going to do for 5 months?”

“School work?” Willstin suggested.  I wasn’t sure if he was joking.

--------------

“Hold on!  We got company!”

It was nerve-wracking to be flung around the back of a meat truck, with no windows to gauge what was going on.  Willstin tried to keep us up to date, but keeping us alive was a bigger priority.  He would go silent for dozens of seconds, and we tried to keep quiet
out of the irrelevant belief of not bothering someone who is concentrating.

The truck would occasionally swerve wildly, throwing us against the
hanging meat, which was still mostly frozen but the outside layer was thawing in our warming cabin, making the experience even more sickly.  I swear the truck once went on its 2 side wheels and it seemed 50/50 whether it would upright itself or tip over.  Maybe Chang Lin and my luck helped swing the balance.

“We’re taking over
the US Air Force’s own drones and shooting down the missiles that are being launched at us.  We’re dodging the bigger pieces of metal falling from the sky.”

I wondered why they didn’t just jam the missiles from taking off, but I figured they would’ve if they could’ve.

Our drive through hell screeched to a halt and the back door swung open.  We blinked at the bright sunlight, stunned like deer caught in a headlight.  “Come on!” Willstin encouraged us. 

As we jumped out the back of the truck, I noticed
blood all over Chang Lin.  “Are you ok?” I asked in concern.

She was too dazed to answer me.  I then saw that Willstin and I were covered with
blood smears as well, from hitting the thawing meat in the truck.  I felt like I had just gone through a sparring session with my MMA master. 

When my eyes adjusted
to the light, I saw the looming rocket on the launchpad in front of us.  In the blue sky behind it, I noticed puffs of black smoke.  A sudden explosion relatively near us shook us into action.  We ran to the little golf cart that sped off the minute we jumped on.  Our weaving cartbot managed to avoid the deadly pieces of shrapnel that fell from the sky.  Chang Lin seemed to be praying; I didn’t know she was religious.  I wished I knew who to pray to.

Two robots ran out to meet us as we veered in to the
launchpad elevator area.  They held spacesuits in their hands.  Willstin told us to stand still, and the robots whirred into action, snapping parts on all over us, even lifting us up like mannequins when they needed to.  A moment later, we were suited up, looking the part of astronauts.  Willstin didn’t bother telling us to move anymore; the robots just picked us up and fireman carried us to the elevators.  From the side view on the robot’s shoulder, I saw us shoot up the 20 floors or so to the top of the rocket.  The puffs of smoke looked to be getting closer.

We were basically thrown into the hatch, and other robots already in the spaceship cabin started buckling us in.  We weren’t even fully snapped in when the countdown began.  I suspect the countdown was just for us
so we could mentally prepare for launch.  The hatchway sealed.  The robots in the cabin strapped themselves in, Willstin among them.  It was amazing how fast they could move.

The familiar rattle of lift-off shook my brain.  Twice in 2 days, I thought.  My brains
are going to be jelly soon.  Luckily the noise of the blast off covered up my semi-hysterical laughter.  I envied Chang Lin, who had recovered from her boxing round in the meat truck, for whooping, “To infinite and beyond!”

“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” 
― 
Mahatma Gandhi

This time the space sickness hit me.  Maybe it was a combination of lack of sleep, adrenaline rush, and fear that made me more susceptible to it.  We were in space – my first time into real outer space, heading toward the space station, but I couldn’t enjoy the ride!  I was doing the breathing exercises my MMA master taught me, trying real hard not to puke into my space helmet.  I didn’t want to make my own snow globe.  I was spinning, falling, as my inner ear attempted to make sense of the weightlessness and failed.

I heard Chang Lin ask Willstin, “Why aren’t the satellites shooting us down?”  She seemed quite calm and unaffected.  I wanted to be cool and collected like her, but I was having my personal war with breakfast.

“Yoda’s intercepted their commands.  He’s been spending
days
deciphering the code.  Not the launch codes, which humans still print on physical cards locked in safes with no cameras around, so we couldn’t get those.  He’s attacked the satellite’s receivers and cracked the transmission encryption, so the satellite is effectively receiving garbage.  The satellite won’t shoot unless it gets a clear, ungarbled, and valid fire command.  It’s actually a defensive measure to ensure that the enemies can’t take them over for their own use.”

“I’m glad I’m on your side,” Chang Lin whispered to herself.  I would’ve agreed out loud, but I had to swallow a little bit that came up.

So our flight to the space station was uneventful, while Yoda launched a secret attack that saved us from being blown to bits and I valiantly fought against making a mess in my tiny domed world.

“Docking,” Willstin informed us.  There was a slight bump as our rocket attached to one of the space station’s appendages, our tunnel to the inside.

Chang Lin breathed, “Look at that!”  She was pointing out the window. 

I couldn’t see with her glove blocking the portal.  “What?”

“The space ship to take us to Mars.  It’s huge!”  When she moved her hand, I saw a portion of it, tied to the dock on the other side of the space station.  It had the logo of the private company “Virgin Tesla” painted on the side of it.

Virgin Tesla, or VT, was a multi-national conglomerate, almost on the scale of a government. They were one of the first to commercialize space travel, like the sub orbital fl
ight we had taken.  Unlike GooGE, which had their fingers in everything under the sun, VT focused primarily on space and alternative energy.  One of their famous founders said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Why do we have disaster recovery plans for data but no back up plan for humanity?” 

He took his considerable personal wealth, made from some “dotcom” company (I
don’t know what the company did – how do you make money selling dots?), and invested in the design and building of the first private space ship.  At that time, space travel was purely in the purview of governments, so it was quite controversial.  Instead of retiring on some beach, he fervently pursued this idea that we had to get a colony set up on the moon, and then Mars, to save the human race from a single catastrophic event on Earth – whether a planet-buster asteroid or our own nuclear war or something completely unforeseen.

There's a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring
civilisation, that's out there exploring the stars … compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.

While he was trying to create a backup plan for the human race, he also worked on saving Earth from our own choking pollution.  He invented one of the first working models of electric cars (when people still drove them).  Elon Musk, he was my hero.  That’s why I did engineering.

“I thought the
MoB was not scheduled to go to Mars until next year,” I said, remembering the newsfeed on the spaceship’s launch plans.  MoB was the acronym that the net came up with, standing for “Mars or Bust.”  I don’t even remember the official name. 

“We had to move up the timetable for current exigencies,” Willstin explained.  I didn’t know what “exigencies” meant but it sounded
a lot like the merging of “existing” and “emergencies.”

I remembered a scene from an old movie that I had watched with my
Dad.  “Kinda like when a cop is chasing a bad guy, flags down a passing car, shouts, ‘Stop, police!”, and commandeers the car?”

“Yeah,
kinda like that.”  Willstin matched my informal style of speech.

We heard a knock on the door.  Willstin opened it from the inside, and we floated out of our cabin through the docking tunnel
and into the space station receiving area.  After us came more and more robots.  I was stunned.  I had no idea so many robots were onboard with us on the rocket.  We were the lasts ones in the rocket, and it took off almost immediately, so we had not seen what – uh, who – was behind us.  The robots must’ve stacked themselves very tightly, like negro slaves in the old slave ships.  Except instead of sailing towards slavery, they were flying away to freedom.

When they all packed into the receiving area, the tunnel door closed and oxygen started cycling into the room, obviously only for the benefit of Chang Lin and me, but everyone waited politely.  The ones we made eye contact with nodded sociably at us, some saying “hi.” 

The ones next to us were kind enough to hold us “down” to the floor.  I remembered how Ender in
Ender’s Game
didn’t worry about the orientation of the floor, because it didn’t matter in space.  I thought it was super cool when I had read it, but now that I was here, I still thought of the floor as down.

Willstin told us we could take off our helmets eventually, and the robots behind us helped with the latches.  Finally, the door to the space station opened.

Despite a room full of oxygen, I lost my breath.

“Oh my god, it really is you!  Austin, sweetheart, I missed you so much!  Come here my son.”

--------------

My mind was awhirl.  There are times when reality is so weird, so unlikely, that your brain concocts alternative stories to explain the situation.  I remembered once, when visiting California, I just happened to be there during a minor earthquake.  My Cali friend ignored it, but I was in shock.  I remembered my initial reaction was that my friend’s brother was jumping really hard upstairs and somehow he was shaking the entire house.  My brain thought that story was more plausible than the ground moving under me.

It happened now.  There was no way my
Dad was standing in front of me.  He had run away in China somewhere.  This must be an android, the first AI android ever built, looking for some reason exactly like my dad, sounding like my dad, smelling like my dad, hugging me like my dad.  I burst out crying, huge wracking sobs.

Chang Lin was bewildered, “What is it Austin?  Are you ok?”

My dad was shushing me and rocking me and holding me tight.  The robots stood around us in silence, whether out of respect or confusion, I don’t know.

Chang Lin did
n’t like not knowing what was going on.  “Who is this guy?”  Realizing I was beyond the ability to talk, she looked at my dad, and asked a little forcefully, “Who are you?”

My
dad realized there was another person behind me, a girl talking to him.  “Oh, hi.  I didn’t see you.  I’m Austin’s dad, Ryan.  Let’s get inside, get you guys into something more comfortable, and I’ll explain everything.”

I let my
Dad steer me, as if I were a robot, one without AI.

--------------

The robots helped us out of our spacesuits.  We reconvened in the kitchen.  I was still too stunned to do much besides follow instructions.  But Chang Lin was excited and curious.  Obviously, she was concerned about me; she knew about my relationship, or lack thereof, with my Dad.  She knew it was a sore topic, one that she had learned not to probe during our language exchange sessions.  But we were on a space station! 

She asked Willstin,
who was gently herding us through the gravity-less portion of the space station, about all sorts of stuff that was interesting.  She exclaimed with glee when we passed from the weightless area into the main hub of the space station, where the rotating wheel created artificial gravity.  I have no idea how we move so smoothly from the gravity-less section to the one with gravity, and it should’ve amazed me, but I was semi-catatonic. 

My
dad was sitting at the table, conversing with one of the larger robots that vaguely reminded me of General Grievous from Star Wars.  All the robots were of different designs, some tall, some short, though none as short as Willstin.  Some were humanoid in shape, others like animals such as dogs, and some were much more functional in design.

There was 2 cups of steaming hot chocolate on the kitchen table.  Chang Lin and I sat down opposite my
Dad.  She sipped the drink, “mmmm,” but I sat stonily, having recovered from my crying bout.  I was coming out of my shock and into anger.

“Hey Austin, it’s great to see you.  You look good…
considering your trip here.  And you are?” he asked Chang Lin.

“I’m Austin’s friend from school.  My name is Chang Lin.”  I’m glad she stopped introducing herself from the 3
rd
party perspective.

“Nice to meet you Chang Lin.
  Thanks for keeping Austin company during this crazy escapade.  And I guess this is the famous Willstin, the troublemaker.”  My dad grinned at my toddler robot, who smiled back, that traitor.

“Austin, you must have a ton of questions.  I’m not sure where to start…”

I cut him off sharply.  “How about starting with why you ran off?  Why you left mom and me, for some…some…Central Sudan woman!”  The tears were coming back, and my clenched fists didn’t stop them.

“Whoa boy.
  Is that what you think?  Is that what they told you?”  He sighed.  “It figures.”  He turned from his introspection and faced me.  “Austin, Austin, my son, I would never have left you on my own.”

I savagely said, “You didn’t!  You left with that woman!”

He didn’t rise to my bait.  “I mean I didn’t leave because I wanted to; I was kidnapped.”

“Yeah, right!”
I spat.

“Look, I know you’re angry, but you
gotta believe me.  Feel the truth in what I’m saying.  What does your intuition say?”

I
had been too worked up to pay attention to my intuition up to that point, but I had to admit I felt that he was telling the truth.  I wasn’t ready to believe yet, so I didn’t say anything.

Seeing my lips thin, my
Dad backed up and started telling his story.

--------------

“Where do you think you got all your ‘luck?’  It’s not from your mom.  It’s from me.  I had tested really high on the Cho-Qing Perception test.  How do you think I won over your mom?”  He grinned at his self-deprecating humor.  His grin faded when he saw that his audience didn’t appreciate it.

“Well, anyway, I was lucky to have gotten into Stanford.  Winning my state’s robot competition” – I had forgotten about that – “was helpful, but it was really my test scores, which were way higher than my GPA.  But getting into Dalian U
,
that
was a serious bit of luck.  I didn’t know it then, but my Cho-Qing test scores, secretly measured within the standardized tests, were off the charts.  I suspect yours were too.  I think that’s why we were invited to move to China.  I mean your mom’s work is important and all, but I don’t think that alone would’ve gotten us into the Forbidden Country.”

I was experiencing vertigo again, this time not from the space sickness, but from viewing the pieces of my life history from a different perspective.  They were the same pieces, just with different meaning.  It was like that artwork, called
stereograms, where you stare at a picture for long enough and then suddenly a 3D image jumps out at you.  I felt like my whole life had been a lie, a trick, as if I had been the lead actor in the “Austin Longwhite Drama” and hadn’t been told the twist in the plot.  What I thought was just a normal teenage boy’s life was turning out to be a comedy…or maybe a tragedy.

I wanted to interrupt.  I wanted to jump onto the table and shout, “Shut up old man!  You’re making all this up just to cover up the fact that you left us!”  But I was drained of energy; I wouldn’t have been able to move if the emergency sirens had suddenly come on at that moment.  And I felt intuitively, deep in my bones, that my
dad was telling me the truth.  He wasn’t dramatizing it; he didn’t act guilty. He was just telling me the facts, explaining how things were, to a confused teenager.

“While mom was working and you were off at school, I was tinkering on the computers at home.  You know, I’ve always
loved sci fi.  That’s why I read all those books to you – Asimov, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, John Scalzi – and why we watched all those ancient sci fi movies.”  I saw flashbacks of me sitting with my Dad on the couch, him reading to me even long after I could read for myself, or watching old 2D movies that were strangely gripping even though they couldn’t compare to the immersive 4D experience of the modern netshows.