Kidu, a city where once you arrive, you can never get away from the local-news pages.
If you happened to be standing in Beckoning-Stop Square at this moment, you would find social-news reporters from every major Kidu media outlet guarding every possible angle. Normally these people might be interviewing Dong Xiaohua of the Taobote household, who has climbed a tree and cannot come down, or filming the splatter on the wall at the scene of a husband-and-wife brawl, or recording a driver trapped in his cab after a traffic accident, or, failing that, disguising themselves as clients to investigate some girl selling her first time for money to pay medical bills. In short, in this city without superheroes, they are forever playing superheroes. Yet at this very moment they had all abandoned their usual strengths and converged on Beckoning-Stop Square to cover hard news instead, for one reason alone:
Obama had come.
News of Obama’s visit to Kidu had already been leaked by the press several months earlier. Ordinarily the itinerary of a U.S. president is among the highest levels of state secrecy on the planet, so very few people took the report seriously. Even the major terrorist organizations could hardly be bothered to issue a response. The media interpreted it as a gesture of goodwill from Obama in the face of the economic crisis. So when word really did arrive that Air Force One was flying into Kidu, the terrorists could no longer save face. One after another they appeared masked on YouTube, Tudou, Youku, and 6.cn to declare that Kidu would be a city Obama might enter, but leave alive no longer. While stressing the importance of security, the Kidu municipal government ordered all motor vehicles with plate numbers ending in 0 through 9 to stop operating on the day of the visit, and further barred citizens from coming within a three-kilometer radius of Beckoning-Stop Square. Only licensed journalists, after clearing security, were to be allowed inside. As a result, on that day the square received forty thousand fully accredited reporters, sixty thousand temporary reporters, and another hundred thousand fake-badge reporters. An American officer coordinating security inspection remarked that the prosperity of the local media put the United States ahead by a mere hundred light-years.
As a radio sound engineer, Balack seemed far too ordinary. His work was nothing more than trailing behind radiant female anchors, holding a microphone aloft on a telescoping boom and hurrying from place to place. Hardly anyone at the station gave him a second glance. But two weeks earlier, his colleagues’ attitude toward him had suddenly changed. The NB producers had begun to favor the tapes Balack brought back, because the audio was astonishingly clear. To take an ordinary dispute at a farmers’ market over short weights as an example: recordings brought back by ordinary reporters contained nothing but a chaos of shouting and curses, and even the interviewees’ voices were hard to make out. Yet if one opened one of Balack’s recent tapes in a processing program like Audition, the contents would be found cleanly divided into ten or twenty channels: the host’s voice, the subject cursing, the bargaining, the chopping of vegetables, the grinding of meat, the scrape of a blade cutting a handbag, the murmuring of onlookers. The producers could simply take whichever layer they needed. At first everyone assumed Balack had begun using some cutting-edge device, but after secretly examining it they found he was still using the same oldest-standard machine issued by the station, a relic none of the senior reporters would touch. Within days, the name “Master Recorder” had spread everywhere. Even upper management had heard it.
Today, management had specially arranged for Balack to sit in the very first row of the media section at the central reception area in Beckoning-Stop Square, recording Obama’s voice one on one in hopes of getting some choice gossip. Better yet, if he could pick up anything from the low-voiced conversations of those American officials behind Obama, so much the better.
Balack wore an orange vest, and the palm gripping the boom was slick with sweat. In truth, he was terrified. He knew very well that whether he ruined everything today depended entirely on how a few little fellows inside the microphone chose to perform.
When Balack was in school, his favorite books had been Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques. He had wanted to become an insect scientist. But one cannot do as one likes inside the ivory tower, and in the end he landed in a line of work eight poles removed from that ambition. Still, reporting in Kidu was relatively free, and Balack often used work as a pretext to attend events hosted by the Entomological Society, enough at least to become a familiar face there. A middle-aged man named Hussein had grown especially friendly with him and often gladly gave Balack precious insect specimens. Naturally Balack was deeply grateful, and in return he often shared bits of newsroom gossip with Hussein, the sort of stories that could never be published. A month earlier the station had secretly announced that Obama would soon be visiting and told its reporters to prepare professionally. No one took it seriously. Balack told Hussein the story as a joke.
Hussein, however, took it very seriously. He asked Balack, “Do you still want to make something of yourself in radio? If you do, interviewing a major figure is a perfect chance to turn your fortunes.” Balack answered with a bitter smile that with his meager abilities, he was hardly fit even to interview bureau-level officials. Hussein laughed and said, “I’ll help you with that. My laboratory keeps many insects, does it not? I’ll lend you a few. They’ll get you promoted in no time.”
Two weeks ago, Hussein handed several insects over to Balack. They were tiny beetles, smaller than a fingernail, with black elytra covering membranous hind wings. Balack’s field microphone was a long-handled dynamic mic. Hussein placed the beetles inside the coil beneath the metal diaphragm, then connected the ultrafine wires wrapped around their bodies to the microphone circuit. Balack went off to work carrying this “biological microphone” in utter disbelief, only to find his colleagues suddenly crowding around him with fawning intimacy. Two weeks later, management entrusted him with the great mission of going up against Obama.
The day before Obama’s visit, Hussein called to congratulate Balack on getting the opportunity. Balack thanked him profusely, but still worried whether the little beetles would perform properly tomorrow. Hussein laughed and said, “Since you’re uneasy, I’ll swap in some new ones for you. These are the latest strain, guaranteed to be more than ten times as sensitive as the previous set, and able to capture more than fifty channels at once.” Balack was delighted before he had even finished hearing it. Why would he refuse?
Obama appeared at last on the high platform beneath the flagpole in Beckoning-Stop Square, accompanied by the mayor of Kidu and more than a dozen bodyguards in black suits. The military band played. The flag was raised. Cannons fired. Obama slowly approached the media section and began his important speech.
The straight-line distance between Balack and Obama was only ten meters. Balack could even make out the white hairs at Obama’s temples. “Thank you to the warm and hospitable people of Kidu, thank you to this great city with its long history…” Obama’s voice rose and fell with the same infectious power it had carried eight years earlier during his campaign.
Balack stretched the boom forward with all his strength, aiming the microphone directly at Obama’s face. He could feel the beating of those tiny wings within the microphone’s little metal shell. It had to be captured. It had to…
Suddenly the boom began to shake violently, no longer under Balack’s control, as though something inside it were gathering force and preparing to burst out. Balack gripped it in both hands, but the microphone only trembled harder and harder.
A wave of infrasound below 11 kHz passed from the microphone head down the boom and into Balack’s body. His ears could not register such sound, yet he heard, with perfect clarity, the sound of his own heart rupturing and of blood jetting from the ventricle into his chest cavity.
The earth shuddered. Amid screams as people clutched their ears and fell, amid the grating din of all things breaking apart, the entire square collapsed into indescribable chaos. A ring of invisible shockwaves spread outward in ripples, and everything fragile and soft shattered to pieces.
Citizens one kilometer away from Beckoning-Stop Square fainted after four seconds, their stomach contents and intestinal waste liquefied, their bowels and bladders let loose. After twelve seconds, citizens three kilometers away suffered vibrations through their internal organs and fell unconscious. After forty seconds, citizens ten kilometers away complained of nausea. After one minute and twenty seconds, citizens twenty kilometers away reported severe palpitations.
Several hours later, dozens of international terrorist organizations claimed responsibility for the biological-weapons attack.
[Nine Stories, Season Five] Rules / Prologue: Mo Mo / “One Fragrant Herb, One Stinking Weed”