Chapter Eight: Taipei

Subject: Taipei
From: Randall Clay
Date: 03/21/15 19:21
To: Douglas Clay

When they scratched the reindeer-bone,
Someone made the sketch his own,
Filched it from the artist-then,
Even in those early days,
Won a simply Viceroy's praise
Through the toil of other men.
Rudyard Kipling, A General Summary

To look at the city today, you would hardly know that it had been bombed almost to rubble five years ago. But that's one thing that modern China, old or New, has always been good at, clearing away old and useless concrete and putting up fresh and new slabs. Taipei didn't always look like Shanghai, after all.
When Dad went here, it was the capital of an independent nation. One that wasn't actually recognized as such by, well, anyone, but independent nonetheless. And definately a place for the 'cutting edge manufacturing techniques' side of his work rather than an inroad to cheap labour. I knew going in that this city might be the most difficult and least useful of my stops, but something compelled me to follow Dad's footsteps exactly, and not skip ahead and westward.
It turns out that Dad got what turned out to be some extremely good deals here, licensing exclusive use of patents in a manner that allowed MP NeoTech to continue using them more or less for free after China's US assets were frozen, and then further allowed the payments to be made at pennies on the dollar after the collapse of the Mao Dynasty and the takeover of the Xuesheng government. That much is public knowledge, and I was at a loss go to much deeper. The buildings Dad had signed the contracts in were gone, replaced with ugly new ones of completely orthogonal purposes, and the people he dealt with weren't availible either. Some had died in the bombardment and invasion, the rest had been relocated to re-education camps in the aftermath. Of those, some survived and the rest have, for the most part, taken positions supporting the new government somewhere back on the mainland. I, of course, blame the Olympics.
Every times that the Games of the Olympiad are held in a totalitarian or authoritarian dictatorship, that government is doomed to collapse and be replaced with something better inside of a decade. The Berlin games took down the Nazi's, the Moscow games the Soviet Union. South Korea stopped being a military dictatorship because of the Seoul games, for that matter, and China's Beijing games are clearly what doomed it to adventurism, collapse, and revolution. If only we could arrange for the next Olympiad to be held in Terhan...
So, I spent about a week in Taipei, walking the streets, attempting research-I had two names in the notebook here to look up, but with no success. Then I returned to my hotel room and found inside it, smoking a large and particularly pungent cigar, Martin Panzer.
"Funny," I said. "I could have sworn I'd asked for a non-smoking room." I had, Asia being pretty much the last region of the world in which one is still presented with the option.
"I was out this way on business and thought I'd stop by, see how you were doing." he said, ignoring my remark completely.
"Not so well. This entire island might as well have sunk beneath the ocean and been replaced with a new one since Aaron was here.
"You'd almost think that, wouldn't you? There's a couple of places that held up, and a lot of people who weren't worth the trouble to relocate after the invasion, but sure, I was just noticing myself that there's not a single person I'm working with here today that was on board back then."
"So what are you doing here now, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Not at all, not at all. The new governmnet's been around long enough that I'm willing to believe that it's going to be stable, while the rest of the world is still waitin' and seein' on the sidelines."
"Governments naming themselves after words meaning 'students' still make a lot of people nervous after the experiences in Afghanistan and Arabia, I imagine."
"Well, there's that, sure. 'Course, pro-democracy students are a different kettle of cod than militant Wahibis, any day."
"In which case the suspicious lack of actual elections beyond the local and provincial level are a cause for the concern."
"Ayup, and that's the nub of the thing. But I'm going to let you in on a little secret. And that is that the students aren't actually, completely in control. It's more of a provisional kind of thing."
"Really? Then who is?"
"The military. A group of about a dozen of the top generals. They were left holding the reins of power when the economy collapsed after we decided that invading Taiwan turned all of those US bonds they held into toilet paper, but they didn't actually want to rule. So they rounded up the current leaders of the student democracy movement and put them in charge of the country. Except that they kept a silent veto, which so far they've only used to stop them from doing anything that risked the Xuesheng going out of power."
"And you think this keep the Centurion's sword raised system is stable?"
"Well, near enough to it to work in. And there's a lot of idle hands on the mainland that ought to be doin' my work instead of the devil's."
"Well, good luck, then."
"Same to you," said Panzer, readying to leave the room. "Oh, one more thing. I think you might be interested in this." He tossed a small pouch to me, which I caught as he vanished out the door.
The pouch contained a small memory card. I decided that using the Hotel's terminal was the lesser risk than my own system, and checked what was on it. It was, I must say, more than a little disturbing to find that it contained the scans of the letters from Lili Valo's box, along with translations. Good ones, probably done by human professionals. Those scans were on my phone for only a few minutes before I offloaded them, and then only connected to any network again when I printed them out. So either one of those things is completely and utterly compromised, or else Panzer found, scanned, and had translated the documents while I was out of the room. I'm not sure which alternative is less frightening. Thankfully, I carry the small notebook of Dad's on my person at all times, and haven't committed any of its contents beyond what I've mentioned in these letters to any digital form.
As I suspected, the letters are written in an oblique and cryptic manner. The one accompanying my photograph claims that I am a relative of a family friend, and suggests showing me the sights of the city, while the one mentioning Dad and Min suggests that he had care of a package for Lili from her mother, and also asks Lili to get fashion advice from Min before attending any more school dances. So obviously the parties in question are using codes more sophisticated than the obscurity of the language itself. The addresses on the envelopes were interesting, at least, including matches to some of the notebook names, including a Sean Buzzi, who not only still resides in the next stop along the trip, but in fact has an current address findible on the net and a connection to Dad's actual business suffificent to create a sufficient pretext for a meeting.
Thus, I believe that I will cut the Asian leg of this journey short and move toward the periphery of Europe.
Next Stop: Istambul (Not Constantinople, of course, but nearly certainly Byzantine.)