上海梦想 精彩片段：
Chapter 55
It took Caldwell and Mei Lin almost ten minutes to reach the entrance to the university. A couple of sleek oblong taxis were queued up at the taxi stand, their electrics idling. Wang Lin had disappeared. Mei Lin handed Caldwell a roll of New China Yuan and a credit chip and jumped into the first taxi. The automatic doors swished shut and the vehicle slid sideways into traffic. Caldwell got into the second taxi. The driver, an old weather-beaten man with short spiky gray hair and a mole at the back of his neck with a single strand of hair growing out of it, turned round and gave him the once over. Caldwell had a feeling he was going to need all the Mandarin he could muster.
“Ni qu nar li a?” the driver asked, rolling his “r”s like his teeth were made of Malaysian rubber. His voice was a deep guttural drawl. If you ran it through a voice analysis construct, you’d find traces of some obscure northern dialect.
“Follow those two 4x4s,” Caldwell urged in his best Mandarin.
“The ones that just sped off several minutes ago?”
“Exactly.”
“They’ve been gone for minutes. Many PLA 4x4s in Beijing at this time of the day my friend,” the old man observed slyly, looking at Caldwell in the rear view mirror.”
“Five thousand New Yuan if you can sprout an extra pair of eyes and catch up with vehicles in question.”
“Now we are talking,” the old driver said with a salacious twinkle in his eyes as they eased out into traffic.
“Whatever,” Caldwell muttered, settling back into the leather seats of the taxi. He flicked through the roll of bills Mei Lin had handed him to see if he had enough money to pay the driver. He had more than enough.
Things were definitely heating up. And Caldwell was not sure he liked the growing feeling of impending danger. He was on the trail of the PLA, on a journey whose destination he could not predict. What if there was an aspect to this AI, a purpose more sinister than appeared to the unsuspecting eye? What would Fouler make of the current turn of events? What if he never made it out of this alive?
“Can you go any faster,” Caldwell asked the old driver. A distinct note of impatience had crept into his voice. He did not like the sound of it. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he was scared.
“I can, but it is impossible with the traffic and everything on autopilot for the next two kilometers. Anyway, the traffic is good because it means we can catch up with those cars,” the driver growled without turning around. The old man cleared his throat, spat a thick globule of yellow phlegm out of the window and took a sip out of a transparent flask of strong-looking tea. The back of his neck was the texture of burnt leather, wrinkles etched into the mocha-colored fabric of his skin with the cruel passage of unrelenting time. Taut silver hairs at the base of his round head formed the beginnings of an impressive crew cut.
“Just find those two cars ok?”
“Sure. And stop looking back of head. Make my skin crawl,” the driver said matter-of-factly, leaning back in his seat. Caldwell couldn’t help but laugh. The driver was a bit cranky but he had a sense of humor, a virtue to be appreciated at times like this. The taxi was on autopilot guided along by its sensors and the markers on the road. There was something surreal about all the cars moving along at the same speed. It was like the various technologies, engines, fuel injection systems and carburetors that made some vehicles superior to others had been stripped away leaving only uniformity. This was exactly what society would like to impose upon its citizens, Caldwell thought, stripping them of all semblance of individuality, leaving only pale shadows of themselves matching in time to a common beat.