The Voting Machine

The Hunger

Chen walked over the window and opened it. He removed a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and started to smoke. "You can't just return home and forget all this. You know that Shiro is trying to kill you and you don't want to know the truth?"

He took his time to answer, inhaling deeply, then pursing his lips and blowing carefully through the crack in the window.

"The truth takes a very long time, Temo. And when it comes it is never what you expected it to be. You think you will be satisfied when you know what is hidden. You think your heart will sing with vindication. But maybe you will be horrified."

"You don't really mean that," I said.

"Oh yes I do," he replied after exhaling. "My father taught me that lesson. He and his brothers were part of the generation of idealists who founded modern China. They fought in the Glorious Revolution when they were the same age as you, risking everything to create a new society where humble peasants and urban elites would live together in equality and harmony. When the Communists won the war, my father was given a top administrative position in the Shanghai city government. The Revolution had succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. It seemed like the vision of my father's generation could truly come to fruition.

"Then a famine swept across China. It started out with a government project to make better use of the peasants' land. Mao called it 'The Great Leap Forward'. But good intentions had the opposite effect, as they often do, and the harvests were ruined. Crops became scarce and when winter arrived millions of people countryside began to starve to death. In every village it was the same story. First they stopped feeding those who were already weak and sick. Then families stopped giving food to their daughters, since they would be a financial burden in the future anyways. Finally, the respected elders had to be denied food as well. Pretty soon the mud streets of a hundred thousand villages were crowded with corpses. The living survivors who remained were too weak to bury them. They would spend their days slowly crawling through barren fields, searching desperately for a handful of wild grass or a piece of tree bark, anything to fill their empty stomachs. Hunger that strong creates a kind of madness, forcing its subjects to become truly capable of anything. And so the survivors began to turn inward on each other. Parents ate their children. Husbands ate their wives.

"Most of us in the city had no notion that this was happening in the countryside. But my father knew every detail because it was his role to secure food rations for the city. It was his job to send People's Liberation Army officers into the hinterlands and take the surviving crops, so that the Party elites in the city would survive the famine even if every single peasant died. And after all the remaining food supplies had been safely transported into the city, my father commanded the forces that would guard the city gates. Everyone who tried to enter was forced to show their hukou, an internal passport that marks whether a person is born in the city or born in the country. During the famine, the mark on your hukou was the difference between life and death.

"Even with guards at the gates, there were millions of desperate peasants and some slipped in anyway to roam the streets in search of food. I remember so clearly, I must have been five years old, and my father took our family to a dinner at a fancy restaurant near the Bund. I wondered why the restaurant manager locked the door behind us after we were seated. And then I saw them on the streets, their bony bodies dressed in rags, their swollen faces pressed against the window, fingers scratching at the glass as they stared at our meals. I asked my father who they were. He told me they were ghosts and I should look away or they might snatch my spirit.

"Thirty million peasants died and most people never learned what happened. But my father knew because he was part of it. It was only in the end, on his deathbed, that he told me the whole truth. His life had been driven by the dreams of equality and harmony. But the reality is that there will always come a time when you are forced to snatch food from another man's mouth. And his family will starve so that yours can eat. Hunger has no sense of right and wrong. It has no obligation to create a world that is fair and equal and harmonious. In the end, hunger makes one simple, non-negotiable demand: you feed it or you die. That's not the truth my father wanted, but it was the truth he got in the end. Whoever is behind the mask of Shiro, they understand this. And so do I."

Chen's phone cell hummed. He picked it up and listened, his eyes widening with surprise. He responded quickly in Chinese. A minute later, the security men who had picked me up stood at the entrance to our room.

"It seems that Chet Castle is preparing to give a press conference about the acquisition, some last attempt to save himself. I need to prepare," Chen said. He texted something into his phone and the two men with buzzcuts entered the room a few minutes later. Then he left the room without saying goodbye.

Chen's men drove me to the consulate general and we entered through a rear door, passing through a set of security doors they activated via fingerprint and retinal scans. Once we were able to pass, they led me directly down a staircase to an underground level. In a dimly lit conference room Brenda was sitting together with a dozen Chinese programmers, all working on laptops. The walls were covered with video screens of aerial footage and security views of the property. Teresa was also sitting in the back corner with her son.