“How many of you want to use computer?”
“One,” said Zula, “unless—?” She looked at Sokolov, who had been staring at more decorative swag posted on the wall. It was one of a series of promotional posters that Corporation 9592’s marketing department had produced shortly after the launch of the game, when they were making a ferocious effort to steal customers away from World of Warcraft. They were fake travel posters, rendered in photorealistic detail. This particular one showed a Dwinn perched on a boulder at the edge of a pristine mountain lake, fishing rod in hand, battling it out with a toothy, prehistoric-looking beast that could be seen breaching from the surface in the middle distance with a lure hooked through its lip. The real purpose of the poster had been to show off the incredible realism of Pluto’s landform-generating software, which was on spectacular display in the mountain slopes on the far side of the lake. But the riggers and animators, not to be outdone, had lavished a lot of time and energy on getting the Dwinn’s posture exactly right: leaning back against the tension on the line, one foot planted, the other just coming up off the ground. It was as good, for Zula, as seeing a snapshot of home and hit her hard; she’d not been ready for it here.
Conveniently, Sokolov chose this of all moments to wax talkative. He slowly turned his head to gaze at Zula, then Yuxia. “Maybe I google fishing equipment store.”
Zula was still contending with a sizable knot in her throat, and Yuxia had no idea what to make of Sokolov.
“Fishing,” Sokolov repeated, nodding at the poster and pantomiming a cast and a reel-in. “My boss wants to go fishing. But we did not bring matériel.”
“When?” Yuxia asked.
Sokolov shrugged. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next day. Depends. But today I could be getting equipment. Need to google store.”
“That’s not going to work,” Yuxia said, “if you can’t read Chinese.”
“Need help then. Need to buy special hats. Little iceboxes. Case for rod.” He shrugged. “Usual.”
Yuxia turned away and approached the front counter of the wangba, which was a pretty sizable installation in its own right, spanning about twenty feet and sporting two tills. The wall behind it was filled with a couple of glass-fronted refrigerator cases, jammed with beverages, and some shelves stocked with instant dried noodle bowls, sealed with disks of foil and printed all over in eye-grabbing colors. Behind the counter were three people: two employees, both men in their twenties, and one Public Security Bureau officer in his light blue shirt, necktie, and dark slacks. The latter was seated with his back to them and was paying attention to a pair of flat-panel screens subdivided into four panes each. Zula assumed that these were showing security camera footage, but on a second look she saw that each one of them was showing a half-size image of a computer screen. Some of those were displaying windowed user interfaces, such as a person might use to surf the web or check Facebook, but most were running video games. Each pane changed every few seconds.
She looked at Csongor, who had become fixated on the same thing. He turned to look at her. Their eyes met and they both laughed.
“What is funny?” Sokolov asked.
Csongor turned to him. “This guy is looking over everyone’s shoulder,” he said. “Making sure they don’t look at porn, or whatever.”
Sokolov got it but didn’t see the humor.
Qian Yuxia had in the meantime stomped up to the counter and addressed one of the employees in the style of a drill sergeant greeting a trainee who had showed up drunk and disheveled. The employee, for his part, began and ended the conversation by looking her carefully up and down, which confirmed in Zula’s mind that Yuxia was a bit of an unusual customer, and yet not wholly unprecedented. The PSB officer turned away from his screens long enough to examine the three Westerners, then glanced at Yuxia, then turned back to the screens. Apparently being a Westerner wasn’t such a big deal if you had a Chinese minder to lead you around; it was the unaccompanied and clueless Westerners who drew all the attention.
Some kind of transaction took place. Yuxia summoned Sokolov forward with a snap of the fingers and compelled him to produce money, which disappeared into the till. The employee handed over two strips of paper with alphanumeric strings printed on them: user IDs and passwords.