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Authors: Peter Buwalda
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Joni.
There was no opportunity to verify his suspicions. Tineke brought him to the train station early the next morning; the first computers he saw were being hogged by a group of backpackers at the airport Internet café. He waited indecisively for one, but walked off before it was his turn. He didn’t dare. The newly opened Shanghai Pudong Airport, he discovered eleven hours later, did not even have an Internet café.
After a taxi had jostled him through the driving rain, through rundown concrete suburbs into the heart of the metropolis, more or less catapulting him into the lobby of the Okura Garden Hotel, and even before unpacking his bags, he unplugged the telephone cable in his hotel room and tried to connect his laptop to the Internet. When that didn’t work, he shaved, put on a clean but wrinkly shirt and took the elevator down to the lobby. He crossed the mausoleum of gold-veined marble, slid his key across the reception desk, and requested a quarter of an hour online. A uniformed girl led him to an area with colorful table lamps and outfitted with three communist Pentiums, the cubicles separated by frosted-glass partitions in walnut frames. He seated himself in front of the farthermost computer. The girl gestured for him to wait, leaned acrosshim (sweat and something sweet), and set a digital egg timer. Next to the keyboard—nerve-rackingly non-QWERTY—was a ballpoint pen on a chain and a cube-shaped memo holder. He found, with some difficulty, a working search engine but subsequently ran into what is gradually gaining worldwide notoriety as the Great Firewall of China. He cursed out loud. The pen stayed put when he gave the table an irritated shove, but the plastic cube tipped over with a smack. He couldn’t even get onto the site, and although the irony wasn’t lost on him (he had been summoned to this backward dictatorship to instruct his repressive yellow friends in how to reinforce their nefarious firewall; they wanted to know about everything—broadband Internet, the future of video graphics—only to nip new technology in the bud, that’s what it came down to), he was vexed by being stymied for the umpteenth time as he scooped up the little square memo sheets from the marble floor.
“I don’t need money, Hiro,” he says, “I’ve already got money.” Maybe he is taking out his frustration on Obayashi because now, two days after the reception, he has still made no headway. Taking his tone down a notch, with a forced smile: “And, to be honest, I don’t think your puzzles will be much of a success in the Netherlands. Do you remember Go? We don’t. The ever-thrilling board game Go. Now only available at the flea market.” He has no idea if it’s true, but if he doesn’t make himself clear now he’ll be spending this summer as a traveling game salesman. His colleague appears, momentarily, to doubt his understanding of the English language, and then says: “Nippon Fun has a computer version of Go. I can send it to you. Two CD-ROMs.”
At a neighboring table, a waitress is going around with a teapot with the beak of a tropical bird, a slender, curved spout at least ameter long, from which the woman refills teacups from a distance. John Tyronne, the young Stanford professor, beckons her with a flourish of his arm. Tyronne, talented but naïve, was brought aboard the task force with a certain amount of fanfare, primarily because of his early and technically well-argued papers on the millennium bug, but he’d gone overboard and had done himself more harm than good with his increasingly apocalyptic Y2K articles that had sprung up in American newspapers the previous year and where he had more or less predicted the end of the world. As Tyronne refused to set foot in an airplane after December 31st, 1999, the first meeting of 2000 had been postponed. “Ah, there’s our doomsday prophet,” smiled task force chairman Gao Jian at their first reunion in the unravaged world. “Still eating canned
There was no opportunity to verify his suspicions. Tineke brought him to the train station early the next morning; the first computers he saw were being hogged by a group of backpackers at the airport Internet café. He waited indecisively for one, but walked off before it was his turn. He didn’t dare. The newly opened Shanghai Pudong Airport, he discovered eleven hours later, did not even have an Internet café.
After a taxi had jostled him through the driving rain, through rundown concrete suburbs into the heart of the metropolis, more or less catapulting him into the lobby of the Okura Garden Hotel, and even before unpacking his bags, he unplugged the telephone cable in his hotel room and tried to connect his laptop to the Internet. When that didn’t work, he shaved, put on a clean but wrinkly shirt and took the elevator down to the lobby. He crossed the mausoleum of gold-veined marble, slid his key across the reception desk, and requested a quarter of an hour online. A uniformed girl led him to an area with colorful table lamps and outfitted with three communist Pentiums, the cubicles separated by frosted-glass partitions in walnut frames. He seated himself in front of the farthermost computer. The girl gestured for him to wait, leaned acrosshim (sweat and something sweet), and set a digital egg timer. Next to the keyboard—nerve-rackingly non-QWERTY—was a ballpoint pen on a chain and a cube-shaped memo holder. He found, with some difficulty, a working search engine but subsequently ran into what is gradually gaining worldwide notoriety as the Great Firewall of China. He cursed out loud. The pen stayed put when he gave the table an irritated shove, but the plastic cube tipped over with a smack. He couldn’t even get onto the site, and although the irony wasn’t lost on him (he had been summoned to this backward dictatorship to instruct his repressive yellow friends in how to reinforce their nefarious firewall; they wanted to know about everything—broadband Internet, the future of video graphics—only to nip new technology in the bud, that’s what it came down to), he was vexed by being stymied for the umpteenth time as he scooped up the little square memo sheets from the marble floor.
“I don’t need money, Hiro,” he says, “I’ve already got money.” Maybe he is taking out his frustration on Obayashi because now, two days after the reception, he has still made no headway. Taking his tone down a notch, with a forced smile: “And, to be honest, I don’t think your puzzles will be much of a success in the Netherlands. Do you remember Go? We don’t. The ever-thrilling board game Go. Now only available at the flea market.” He has no idea if it’s true, but if he doesn’t make himself clear now he’ll be spending this summer as a traveling game salesman. His colleague appears, momentarily, to doubt his understanding of the English language, and then says: “Nippon Fun has a computer version of Go. I can send it to you. Two CD-ROMs.”
At a neighboring table, a waitress is going around with a teapot with the beak of a tropical bird, a slender, curved spout at least ameter long, from which the woman refills teacups from a distance. John Tyronne, the young Stanford professor, beckons her with a flourish of his arm. Tyronne, talented but naïve, was brought aboard the task force with a certain amount of fanfare, primarily because of his early and technically well-argued papers on the millennium bug, but he’d gone overboard and had done himself more harm than good with his increasingly apocalyptic Y2K articles that had sprung up in American newspapers the previous year and where he had more or less predicted the end of the world. As Tyronne refused to set foot in an airplane after December 31st, 1999, the first meeting of 2000 had been postponed. “Ah, there’s our doomsday prophet,” smiled task force chairman Gao Jian at their first reunion in the unravaged world. “Still eating canned
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