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“You never did keep your promise,” Mei Lin said suddenly. Caldwell almost choked on his food.It was definitely one way to break the id she was beginning to get unfortable with the iy of Caldwell’s stare. As much as Caldwell didn’t want to admin it, Mei Lin had turned out to be even more attractive than when she was a teenager. Her features were a lot stronger, more intense. Her body was lithe like a ballet dancer with well-toned muscles. Her face was a lot more assured. Tonight, she was wearing a strapless top which told anyone who cared to look that she spent a lot of time in the gym and the dojo. She had wide elegant shoulders and a pact midriff tapering off to a slim waist. Her eyes hadn’t ged much. They were slightly darker in the subdued light of the Vietnamese restaurant located a stohrow from Shek O Beach.
Caldwell khat deep inside he hoped that his memories of her were not manufactured by HYDRA. He found it difficult to keep his eyes away from her face, willio bee transparent so that he could see through her. Whatever he had felt for her in those memories of all those years ago was still flowing below the surface like precipitation in a water table.
“It’s a long story. One I only found out myself less than forty-eight ho.”
“So you keep saying. I’m listening,” Mei Lin said simply. There was a look of inteional pain on her face, the kind that had been painstakingly buried only to have it relutly dug up agaihin pink lips were pursed. Her eyes had turned into pools of squid ink, opaque and totally unreadable. Was she ag, bolstering the perceived authenticity of his retly acquired memories of her?
“The truth is I don’t know what happeo me after the day I met you. You see I had my memory erased by HYDRA six years ago.” Caldwell paused for dramatic effed to study her rea.
“You don’t expect me to believe that do you? HYDRA doesn’t do those kinds of t>..</a>hings. At any rate, there is no data of this in your file.” Was she keeping up the preteoeing the official line?
“And that means it didn’t happen, right? You will be surprised. I think you will believe me by the time I am finished,” Caldwell said with thinly-veiled sarcasm.
“OK, go on.” There ecter of incredulity in her eyes but it didn’t look like it had any staying power. Caldwell felt that the ice had been somewhat broken and he would be able to make some progress in making her believe him. Yet, he was anything but plat. He could not trust her.
“As far as I was aware I knew nothing about Fouler or HYDRA until yesterday m when I went to the Dods to meet a hacker friend I knew only as Glyph. Until then, Glyph had been an online associate only. We had never met in the flesh. If it wasn’t flyph, and the work that he passed on to me, I would still be sleeping rough under Waterle.”
“You were sleeping rough?”
“Yeah, a homeless une below Waterle. The authorities turned a blind eye. We lived off the streets. Terrible times but made some lifelong friends.”
“How did you end up there?” There was something Caldwell reized as empathy in her eyes.
“Truth is, I woke up one day and there I was. The area below Waterle has a reputation as a place to abandon unwanted infants and I guess folks who have had their memories erased. Basically, unwanted members of the human race who the system itself to murder in cold blood.”
“No wonder.”
“No wonder what?”
“No wonder I’ve been so miserable most of these years.”
“How do you mean?”
“Found it impossible to be happy. Felt like a <cite></cite>huge part of me was missing. I don’t know why, but I had a feeling you were suffering. Before he passed away, I told my grandfather about meeting you soon after that day. He asked me to tell him as much as I knew about you. I told him everything I knew, which was a lot since I’d been in love with you for years before we met that day outside the school. I even got a friend to get me a printout of your school records. My grandfather is a trained fortueller and feng shui master. He said you would find much suffering in London but will only find pead happiness when you return home to New a. When you never tacted me I guessed you were still in London.”
Wasn’t she laying it on a bit thick, all this stuff about being unhappy? She looked perfectly OK to him.
“I wish now I had tacted you. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle by just quitting the agend ing back here.”
“I wao find you but by the time I got your family’s phone number from the school records, you were gone and your parent’s house on e Road was already up for sale, acc to the property agent who picked up the phone.”
“Ah right. The house. Fouler didn’t say a word about that? What do you know about Fouler?”
“HYDRA. Global Head of Operations. In his youth he was one of the most infamous phreakers to ever walk the face of the earth. His forte, apparently, was t dowire teleunicatioworks, until the authorities caught up with him and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Did some time in a re-education f<cite></cite>acility and joined HYDRA soon afterwards in S&D. Quite a resume. In fact, HYDRA is now probably his own personal operation. He keeps the name for the iional reition factor and the fact that it opeain high-level doors. I suspect that the umbrella agency cut HYDRA loose a long time ago and now it is funded with Fouler’s own money.”
“Iing. A lot of things are beginning to make sense. Anyway, where was I? Right, I was meeting with Glyph in a pub wheanese Yakuza thugs started taking shots at us. Glyph got hit. I mao break out the window on to the street. The Japanese were just about to kill me or kidnap me, who knows, when this black electric limo pulls up and I am bundled in. Inside is Fouler. He tells me this story about how I used to be some hot shot in S&D but somehow grew a sd threateo out the agency, to publish its darkest secrets in cyberspace. He said the agency had no choice but to wipe my memory and dump me oreet. I ended up under Waterle about six years ago with little or no memory of my past.”
“I see.”
“In the limo Fouler tells me what I had suspected earlier, that the Japanese were after this sole, which was sent to me by one Kenzo Yamamoto, a dealer in information. Some say he was into data blackmail.”
“Why did this Yamamoto send this sole to you?”
“At The HUB, essentially a hacker bulletin board I was a member of, he was one of gest ts.”
“And how did you go from sleeping rough under Waterle to The HUB?” Mei Lin was still not buying the story pletely.
“There were a few low-level hackers in Waterloo who used to retrieve old puter parts from corporate garbage dumps and re-build w maes. They did this to make a living, resold the puters at flea markets and the like. Occasionally someone found some valuable data residing iors on those discarded hard drives. Anyway, one of those guys gave me this base address while we were going through the junk, said I could find hag jobs there if I could teach myself how to do it. At the time, I was trying to put together a puter I could actually use. I had no idea why I had this insatiable o build o in the end I did and it turned out I had a propensity for the things. I had no idea at the time. Now, I know why. So eventually got to messaging this guy obase and we kind <bdo>..</bdo>of started an online friendship. Around that time I started hag the Union systems in a bid to find out about my past but I always came up blank. A few months later, I got accepted into The HUB and disc this new world persuaded me to try and break out of the vicious cycle of Waterle after close to four years there and make some kind of a life for myself. I set up an official base as C/line Iigations. My forte was to find missing people but I also did other jobs that went into grayer territories. After almost a year of borrowing power and ectivity from publifrastructure belonging to both Uniorid Union Tele, I made enough moo leave Waterle. I started going wherever the work was in the Union, Antwerp, Maastricht, Vladivostok. Then Glyph picked up a t who had enough work to go around and soon we were doing quite well for ourselves even though Glyph as the owner of The HUB took the lion’s share. That t was Kenzo Yamamoto. As it happened Kenzo needed some jobs that Glyph couldn’t deliver on and he referred him to me. After a lot marole establishing that I was trustworthy, I started doing the odd job for him with some success. Until about nine weeks ago, his projects kept me in enough Euro credit to be regularly holed up in capsule hotels around the Union.”
“So, what happened nine weeks ago?”
“I got an anonymous job through the HUB to steal the private banking t list of the Sumitomo Bank in Tokyo, plete with at numbers, passwords, credit history and so on. This is low level work, stuff I usually do with my eyes closed. Yet, the run was a plete failure. I had intrusioion bots following me all the way back to the Union. I mao avoid dete, but inexplicably news of the failed run ropagated all over the Union hacker bulletin boards. The general gist was that I had promised the security of the HUB and the livelihoods of the hackers. I became persona non grata. Work dried up,”
“And Kenzo was behind the whole thing?”
“God, you are sharp. I didn’t realize at the time but I found out from the sole, from the avatar Kenzo recorded before he died, that he had been behind it all.”
“And the sole? How did it e into your possession?”
“Yesterday it shows up in the post with Kenzo’s calling card. He says I’ll for an uping mission. You imagihis sounded like the big deal. It portunity to stop living in foam-padded plastic lockers that ted your life down by the minute. And I am running out of credit waiting for Kenzo to surface again when Glyph messages me. We meet aells me Kenzo is dead. And the Yakuza show up trying to retrieve the sole and probably dispatch me to my maker. Then Fouler shows up saying he has the key to my past. He is a clever man. He unlocks enough with these triggers he has in his pocket to make me remember that day when he unofficially hired me, the same day I met you and every cliché of Hong Kong you ever think of. If I help them on this mission to discover the fun of the sole I have my past back, a job at HYDRA.”
“He made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”
“Basically. And on the plane I get a bunch of old memories re-activated. Just what I need for this mission.”
“That’s like mnemonic blackmail.”
“cise way of putting it. Yeah!”
“So you still ’t remember why you never messaged me?”
“That part of my memory is locked up. Although I suspect it was an earlier procedure at HYDRA that wiped certain memories. I think Fouler may have erased some of my previous memories of Hong Kong when I joined HYDRA. If we don’t find this ese work it will probably be locked up forever.”
“I think you do it. You always had talent, even at school.”
“So how did you end up at HYDRA? ce?” Caldwell asked her. It was his turn to deliver the Spanish Inquisition.
“I guess. Left Hong Kong Iional School and read AI Studies at Tsinghua Uy in Beijing. It was the dohing then, to study in a. After all, Hong Kong was but a shadow of its former self and young people looked northwards for their careers, culture fix, inspiration and everything else. Don’t know why I chose puters. Subliminally, I am sure it had something to do with you. It was a way of making up for the fact that I had probably lost tact with you forever. Anyway, I found out I retty OK at it once I got over my initial prejudice that puters were b. And AI kind of puts a human spin on puting so that was iing. One day, towards the end of my final year, I was sitting in a coffee shop he Sanlitun diplomatic area in Beijing’s Chaoyang District reading some b book on neural works when a large man with straw-colored blonde hair strikes up a versation.”
“De Witte.”
“Yes. He said neural works were very iing. Asked me what I was doing. I told him I was about to graduate with a degree in Artificial Intelligend didn’t know what I was going to do with it. He asked if I would like the opportunity to work on some of the world’s leading systems. He asked a lot of questions about my family background and leased when I told him there was only me and my granddad, relatively ret mainland migrants to Hong Kong. Parents were dead, three grandparents dead and me an only child. A lot of tests followed in Hong Kong but basically within six months of the coffee shop enter granddad and I were Union citizens and I was w for HYDRA. First there was intense physical training in Tokyo and then at The Seminary. Then it was back to Hong Kong. Started off pushing a lot of paper, then became an analyst writis on emerging teology trends in New a, mostly military-related.”
“That is iing,” Caldwell said.
“Not nearly as amazing as your story. I am sorry you had to suffer so much. You must really hate Fouler. And here I was being angry with you. I had nht. I was asking too much of you from a single enter.”
“A single special enter,” Caldwell added, not knowing where he was going with this.
“Yes. But that was many years ago.”
“True.”
“And things ge.”
“The ohing we all be certain of is ge.”
“So true.”
“So are you married? Boyfriend?” Caldwell ventured, emboldened by the dire of their versation.
“If that ts, you were my first and only.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“That’s OK. It was my choitirely and I am still young. I figured career first. Many young girls in Asia do adopt this approach, preferring to deal with affairs of the heart after they have sorted out their careers. So what about you?”
“I have a friend ier London called Kat who I am very close to but not like a girlfriend. We are more like brother and sister. She kind of saved my life once. I guess these days, relationships are almost impossible. People are too plex, the repercussions too many.”
“True. Well, it’s getting late should we get the bill? We start bright and early tomorrow.”
Caldwell had no credit so he let Mei Lile the bill and they walked ba silence along Shek O Road to the sound of waves crashing on the beach below.
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