The boy – young man perhaps – lived in a sub-village of Qakilik, western China. He used to spend his summers in the deepest parts of Lop Lake, imagining a time when it was full of water.
White cranes swoop down, skimming the surface with tailed wingtips, releasing crystallized droplets into the hot air. The mist spreads outwards until his face becomes awash with it. An orange fish swims to the surface. It says, “this is no longer my country”, in his dead Grandfather’s voice.
The Kunlun range sways to the South. When he turned 13, he spent 9 days and nights in a tiny cave atop Ulugh Muztagh. His family’s ancient religion, nearly extinct by the time he was born, only deemed followers official members once the isolation cycle was complete. The prehistoric founders of the tribe – the Muztagh – excavated the cave themselves. The walls are covered with petroglyph’s detailing the consumption of the Muztagh culture millions of years before it happened. They were slaughtered not unlike the Neanderthals. Few survived. He was one of the few remaining descendants. Thinking back to the cold dampness of that cave, creatures squirming in the darkness, he felt shame. Not of that experience… of the now.
In the middle of the night he snuck out of his folks’ modest home. The wind gracefully rushed between the neighboring houses at his back as he checked his watch. The night sky sparkled with points of light, majority man-made and moving. He made his way to the Qakilik courtyard, where SmartSoft had installed the town’s only ultra high speed T-17 terminal for public use some years ago. A simple 3rd generation cable connection had been installed in the majority of the homes; “Not fast enough, I’m afraid”. Each connection trickled into the Earth to the main line which ran through western China like an electronic version of the Great Wall. The PRC government kept it very close to the chest; the expansion of Internet to the badlands of the State proved financially valuable but culturally volatile.
