Read Online The Second Wave by Leska Beikircher - Free Book Online

it at least been
hacked already?”
    “Why would it need to be hacked?”
    “You are stupid, then.”
    “Tell me I’m stupid one more time, Celem, and
I’ll shoot you. Don’t strain my patience.”
    Celem, knowing John never made empty threats,
immediately got a grip. He stopped laughing and sat up straight, or
at least what he thought was straight. Every ticket was
personalized, issued to a certain individual who was rendered
useful to the colony. If one wanted to use another person’s ticket,
it had to be hacked by someone with advanced technical skills and a
good personal computerHa, to alter the information it contained. It
was like faking an ID, only in reverse.
    “Basically, you have to convince the computer
that the person the ticket was originally issued to is now someone
else, and I know of no one skilled enough to do that.”
    Ah, at least that was familiar territory.
John poured them another glass of tea. “And how much bling will it
take for you to remember that you do know someone?”
    “Yahya, you insult me in my own house. Me, a
poor, blind man! Shame on you and on your offspring; may they be
numerous and carry on your shame for many generations. I don’t
trade in bling anymore. Nobody does now.”
    “Then what do you trade in, poor, blind
man?”
    “Stories are the new bling. They have high
market value these days. Can’t get arrested for possessing too many
stories.” He leaned forwards, voice lowered conspiratorially. “Tell
me a tale I haven’t heard before, and I may remember the name of a
very skilled computer genius, who happens to live in this wonderful
city.”
    It was an odd request, but one John could, as
it happened, fulfill. And so, to get the name of a computer hacker,
he told Celem a story he had heard many years ago in Tianjin, about
Meng Jiang Nu, the woman whose tears brought down the Great Wall of
China.
    * * * *
    Embolimon: The Legend of Meng Jiang Nu
    Once upon a time in China, there lived two
married couples next to each other: The couple Meng and the couple
Jiang. They were all four of them very old and had never been
blessed with the gift of children, so all they had was each
other.
    In the Mengs' garden grew beautiful gourd
vines. One summer, one of the plants spread its vines right over
into the garden of the Jiangs, where it bore one large gourd. The
rest of the vines stayed barren, so the two families decided to
split the gourd in half, as it was big enough for all of them to
eat from its meat.
    They gathered around the table, but when old
man Meng cut the rind, they were surprised to find a baby girl
inside the vegetable. And since both couples wanted nothing more
than a child, they decided to raise her together.
    The baby girl grew up to be a beautiful,
mild-mannered woman, who was known as Meng Jiang Nu, or Lady Meng
Jiang. So beautiful was she, that many men wanted to marry her. But
Meng Jiang didn’t even look at them twice, for every night she fell
asleep and had the same dream: in it, she saw a stranger, the man
she would love, she knew, although the dream never revealed his
face. One time the Gods spoke to her and told her that she must
only love the one man who would catch a glimpse of her uncovered
skin in the sunlight before he saw her face.
    At that time, the emperor Quin Shihuang
started erecting the Great Wall. Many men died building it, so the
emperor was always on the lookout for young, strong men who could
work for him. He continually sent out his armies to go even to the
remotest villages to get every man strong enough to join the work
forces.
    It so happened that one of the men the
emperor’s soldiers intended to catch was a young scholar named Fan
Xiliang. He ran away from the soldiers, out of the city, over
fields, and through smaller and smaller villages, until he came to
the village where the families Meng and Jiang resided. It was the
last village before the mountains. There was nowhere else to
run.
    Fan Xiliang darted into the garden of