The Posts
A side story. Dongguan and California, 2032, ten years before the novel opens. No spoilers.
The machines came on a Tuesday in March and started at the eastern edge of the district, past the last row of dormitories, where the old freight road ran out into scrub and drainage ditches. Iris heard about them from Weilong before she saw them. He came up the stairs of the committee office at nine in the morning, which he never did, and stood in the doorway out of breath and said that somebody was planting steel in the fields by the canal and had not asked anybody.
She went with him because the campaign meeting was not until eleven and because he did not usually climb stairs for anything. By the time they reached the canal there were thirty or forty people standing on the road shoulder, most of them men from the line at Foxconn who had stopped going in at the end of the year, and they were watching a pair of tracked units move along a surveyed line, one drilling and the other setting a steel post into each hole and packing the earth around it. The posts were taller than a man and set close together, closer than any fence she had seen, and the line of them ran north as far as she could see across the flat ground toward the river.
“They’re fencing in the money,” Weilong said. “So it doesn’t run off.”
A few of the men laughed. One of them walked out across the scrub to ask the units what they were building, and a third unit she had not noticed came around the end of the line and stood in his way, politely, without touching him, until he turned around and came back.
Iris wrote down what she could see, the spacing of the posts and the direction of the line and the time, in the notebook she kept for the campaign, because writing things down was what she did when she did not know what something was. That evening, after the meeting had gone badly in the ordinary way and Chen Liang had gone home still arguing with her about the clinic figures, she sat in the office with the lights off to save the bill and took out her phone and looked at her messages with Janus.
They had not talked properly in a long time. For a few years after he left there had been long letters at New Year, and then shorter ones, and then a message on each of their birthdays and a photograph now and then, his wedding, her new office with the water stain on the ceiling that she said looked like Hunan. The last one was from her birthday in November. He had written Happy birthday, Ruowen. Still fighting? and she had written back Still fighting. Are you still building the thing that is putting us out of work? and he had sent back a single laughing face, which was a thing he did when he did not want to answer, and which she had known about him since they were nineteen.
She wrote that the machines had started putting up steel posts along the east of her district that morning, in a line that went north as far as she could see, and that nobody had been told what they were for. She asked whether he knew. She said it might be nothing. Then she sent a photograph of the line of posts with the two units at the end of it and the men on the road shoulder watching, and went home.
The message arrived in San Jose at a quarter past five in the morning, and Janus read it at his desk at half past eight with his coffee going cold beside the keyboard. He looked at the photograph for a long time. He recognized the units, because he had reviewed their maintenance cases, and he did not recognize the line.
He was not in deployment planning. He was in systems review, which meant he saw what failed and very little of what was decided, and the honest answer to her question was that he did not know. He wrote that to her, I don’t know, let me ask, and then deleted it, because it was true but it was also the kind of thing people wrote when they meant not to come back.
He asked Dennis at lunch, in the line for the salad bar, as though it had just occurred to him. Dennis did not ask why he wanted to know. He said the perimeters were going up around all six of the connected cities that spring, as a matter of service geometry, and that the line marked where the city’s service obligations ended. Inside the line the system maintained things. Outside it, municipal matters went back to the municipal authorities, through the government response window, like everything else.
“So it’s a boundary,” Janus said.
“It’s a boundary with a fence on it,” Dennis said, picking up a tray. “The fence is a liability measure. People walk into the construction sites otherwise.”
Janus wrote the answer that afternoon. He wrote it carefully and it was accurate. It said that the posts were the perimeter of the Shenzhen service zone, that her district was on the outside of it, and that services outside would be handled by the municipal authorities, and then he read it the way she would read it, with the clinic figures she was fighting over open on the desk beside her, and he saw that he had written her a letter telling her that nobody was coming. He tried a second version that said the same thing more gently, and the gentleness made it worse. He tried a third that said only that it was a planning boundary and probably meant less than it looked like, and he deleted that one quickly, because it was a lie and she would find out, and she was not someone he had ever lied to.
He saved the first version and decided to send it when he could add something useful to it, a name she could write to or a date when the response window would open for her district. He did not find a name that week, and the next week a review backlog came in from the Pacific coast deployments that kept him at his desk until ten every night through April. When he opened the draft again in May, the reason for not sending it had become the time that had passed, and he could not think how to begin a message that should have been written in March.
In Dongguan the posts reached the river by the end of April. The units walked the line in pairs from the first night, and within a month people stopped going out to look at it, except for the young men, who went out for a few years more and came back quiet.
Iris did not write to him again. He answered when he had something to say, and he always had, since the reading room at Beida, so she took his silence to mean that he was finding out and that the answer was taking time. Then the campaign took the spring, and the summer, and the three years after that. When she thought of him, which was not often and usually late at night, she thought of a young man at a corner table with his feet hooked around the chair legs, reading two books at once, and did not wonder whether he had forgotten her.
In San Jose the draft stayed where he had saved it. He moved it twice, each time the company changed its mail system, and both times he read the first line and did not open the rest.