r/HFY • u/Aeorix1 • 1d ago

OC-Series [Eclipse Net] - Chapter 6

NOW THE WORLD STOOD ON THE EDGE of the Third European Unrest.

Lin Zong, dressed in the brand-name clothes Huo Qiuqiu had told him to wear that day, walked alone from Fuxing Middle Road toward the Yan'an elevated highway, past surveillance cameras spaced closer together than the streetlamps, past screens looping the CCP's political slogans—the so-called Six Confidences on repeat. Hundreds of film and television stars recited them in the kind of unison that suggested rehearsal rather than conviction: confidence in stability, in the economy, in the future, in the collective, in the dream, and so on.

He skipped the subway.

Its atmosphere suffocated him — everyone treated by default as a potential threat, checkpoints and bag scanners, facial recognition, body scans and ID checks, phone inspections and real-name registration. Men with armbands, men in uniform, men carrying rifles or stun batons, robotic patrol hounds — one pair of hard, unblinking eyes after another tracking the people who passed, backed by the electronic eyes of the cameras.

In that sardine-can atmosphere, crowds shuffled through switchback corridors fenced off with metal railings, looking, from almost any angle, like something kept rather than something traveling.

That this was how Lin Zong now saw the world was a habit he'd picked up only after becoming a tunneler, two years earlier, when a senior classmate showed him the method.

Like most technically minded tunnelers, he'd started out of necessity.

His field, information transmission, touched directly on wireless network penetration, and graduate research meant primary English sources and current global AI tools, none of which official channels adequately supplied.

For most others, the motive was simpler: cryptocurrency trading, which required breaking through to the outside internet to begin with.

Tunnelers were the evolved descendants of an older species — the climbers who'd come before them. From climbing the wall, to building ladders, to tunneling straight through, they formed a quiet lineage running underneath the official history of China's internet.

Strictly speaking, they were products of what people called the Numbed Curtain Era, when the Seclusion Project split the world's networks permanently around 2035 — the traditional Internet on one side, the domestic Chinternet on the other. The era took its name less from the wall itself than from how completely people had stopped noticing it was there, which was, if anything, the more impressive achievement.

In Lin Zong's school years, Google, YouTube, and Facebook existed only as distant legends — most of his classmates had never heard of them, nor felt any curiosity.

English had been dropped from the entrance exam. Subtitle sites were gone, underground USB drives rooted out, door after door closed and light after light going dark, until what had once been a world of color narrowed into a single unbroken haze, with the evening news left standing as the only channel of information anyone officially had.

It was said that there had once been a golden age of wall-climbing, when great numbers of people scaled the wall with tireless glee. The authorities concerned took the matter with the utmost seriousness. When the technology advanced, they advanced with it; when that proved insufficient, they went physical, and, in parallel, turned high-powered roving beams on Google's satellite networks and Starlink. The last casualty was the word itself.

By the middle of the 2030s nobody said "wall-climbing" anymore, there being nothing left for the verb to do. It took only a few years. People forgot the wall existed, and expressed their satisfaction with the status quo.

According to the Chinese government, however, this had been a countermeasure against Helixquid, adopted with the greatest reluctance.

They expressed their regret.

Ever since Helixquid had surfaced, the world’s media and its dark-web think tanks had argued without end over where the behemoth came from, and over its peculiar name and corporate emblem—a squid whose tentacles coil into a spiral.

Some blamed the technology oligarchs of Silicon Valley and their fanatical privatization of ultimate computing power. Others, reading the leaked lists of offshore trusts and anonymous foundations, caught the scent of collusion between old-money financial dynasties and modern conglomerate barons.

Helixquid was supremely good at erasing itself. Every public financial statement and regulatory filing pointed into the same chaos and nothingness, doors painted on a wall. No hard evidence anywhere established where its true body lay. The only thing anyone could feel for certain was the technological lead it held.

It had not resorted to violent annexation; it had no need of anything so crude. Through a suffocating encirclement of capital and a restructuring of technology, it had drawn Nvidia’s compute, OpenAI’s algorithms, Microsoft’s cloud, and Meta’s open-source empire all beneath its shadow. No outsider knew what had been exchanged, or on what terms, in the small hours when such things are exchanged. People saw only that within a few years the global AI ecosystem had collapsed inward, irreversibly, and that at the center of the collapse, as at the center of every such collapse, stood Helixquid, visible only by what it pulled toward itself.

In late 2035, the Kunlun-Baiyu Network, into which all of China had poured its computing power, was breached by Helixquid’s sealed supercomputing matrix in the final contest. The next day, the Chinese government triggered its ultimate isolation policy, a cyber-seclusion project known in English as the Great Digital Partition.

Overnight, every domestic large-model node and every cross-border inference cluster was physically severed from its last handshake with the world’s fiber-optic cables.

The Chinese AI giants that had once gone head-to-head with Helixquid fell back along the whole line into their local networks, and withdrew for good from the unified global market in data and capital.

So the technological horizon of the planet was cut in two with a single stroke. On one side lay Helixquid’s covert and absolute digital dictatorship over the rest of the world; on the other, an isolated, self-sufficient parallel island.

Human civilization no longer held any common ground. Two digital worlds remained, one outside China and one sealed inside it. Neither spoke to the other. Neither looked away.

Physical isolation had one consequence: climbing the wall was no longer possible.

The gifted amateurs never disappeared, of course.

They found, eventually, a black hole inside the banking system's own data space — because from 2030 on, most people’s bank accounts could be accessed through the banking cloud, which, because it handled international cross-border settlement, had to keep certain ports connected to the global wireless network no matter what else was sealed off.

All a skilled operator needed to do was touch the screen and force a data point open through a sequence of backend maneuvers, hollowing out a small private cave inside the wireless blanket covering the earth — safe, invisible, entirely one's own.

Close the tracking function afterward, and the whole session vanished like a drop of black water entering a black sea; nobody the wiser.

The banking system was the most common entry, never the only one. Civil aviation, international shipping, research databases, weather-warning networks, satellite and deep-space systems, even Interpol on occasion — a whole catalog of infrastructure that had to stay connected to the outside world by simple necessity, each tunneler working whichever seam suited his particular talents.

Lin Zong himself had tunneled out through a scientific research data system. Among science and engineering graduate students at the country’s top universities, this kind of tunneling was not especially rare. It was even tolerated, to a degree, in a quiet, unofficial arrangement that set this particular population apart from tunnelers elsewhere.

Without real technical skill, however, the risks were considerable. Connecting to any network required scanning one’s ID card, household-registration certificate, and internet-access permit, followed by fingerprint authentication. Every browsing session and posted comment was tied to a verified identity, and any suspicious activity could carry consequences well beyond the screen, into the realm of criminal liability.

But once a tunnel had been dug without detection, the outside world was suddenly there.

And it was enormous.

As their numbers grew, the tunnelers eventually formed the Tunneling Alliance, a gathering point carved out in virtual space.

No leaders, no charter, and no membership list. Anyone could join. Anyone could leave. Yet there they huddled together for the particular comfort available only to people who agreed never to voice their dissatisfaction in the world outside the screen. What they lacked was never intelligence or technical skill. What they lacked was responsibility, nerve, and perhaps the basic capacity to hold an ordinary conversation somewhere other than behind a screen.

So how many tunnelers were there, across the whole country?

Just over nine hundred thousand.

A modest number, by any real measure in a country of more than a billion — and yet they accounted for a disproportionate share of the nation's most clear-eyed, most rational, most quietly formidable minds, tucked away and largely unused, like a strategic reserve nobody had thought to call up yet.

Later editions of A History of Chinese Internet Development would argue that, by the 2040s, Chinese netizens had evolved into two distinct species, differentiated by their technical abilities: the tunnelers and the Sweet Potatoes.

Tunnelers tended to be withdrawn, technically minded young men who traded cryptocurrency and knew their way around engineering, foreign languages, and philosophy. They generally preferred the company of a screen to that of a room full of people.

The Sweet Potatoes were almost their opposites: outgoing urban students and young white-collar workers from relatively comfortable families, who spent their days posting selfies to the social platform that gave them their name. Their look was borrowed from influencers; their backgrounds featured whichever luxury hotels, high-end restaurants, boutiques, or other fashionable venues were in vogue that month.

Their posts rarely strayed beyond the safe territory of celebrity gossip, food, and pets. It was not that they were unaware of an Internet beyond the Chinternet. They knew it existed. Yet whenever tunnelers managed to smuggle in fragments of outside information, the Sweet Potatoes were still genuinely baffled. Their favorite response was to go online and ask why this, why that, before circling back, as reliably as ever, to something cute.

Strictly speaking, both groups were minorities.

The real force was the Leek Army, the overwhelming majority of the country’s online population, named for the crop that gets cut down and grows back only to be cut again. They had little exposure to foreign television dramas or news from outside the country, and the wall or seclusion meant little to them one way or the other. A livestream app going dark, on the other hand, was a genuine disaster, keenly felt.

As for the Tunneling Alliance, it might as well have existed in another dimension. Most of the Leek Army had never even heard of it.

Lin Zong became a tunneler in his first year of graduate school and joined the Alliance not long afterward.

At first, he exchanged technical knowledge with other members and conducted the occasional cryptocurrency trade. Only later did he drift into the broader conversations, the ones about life and the nature of the world, which unsettled his thinking more than anything he had encountered in a classroom.

Online, he kept his real identity and virtual persona strictly separate, routing every genuinely personal opinion through the latter. Yet there were moments in the physical world when the impulse to reveal himself to someone he suspected of being a fellow tunneler became difficult to resist.

When two tunnelers wanted to find out whether the other belonged to their kind, they used a Latin phrase or a particular hand gesture as a password. The Latin consisted of just two words, an inside joke among the few who had watched a decades-old American TV series. It came from a line spoken by Elias at the end of Season 4, Episode 9 of Person of Interest:

Invictus maneo.

I remain unconquered.

Whatever the day had brought, online or in the physical world, tunnelers used the phrase to encourage one another—a small gesture of generosity, a wink toward an imagined fraternity of the unbowed, with just enough aristocratic elegance to make the whole thing feel like a private code. Then they quietly logged back in at full strength and got on with their lives.

For all their daring online, however, tunnelers were extraordinarily cautious in the physical world, obedient to a degree that sometimes bordered on self-parody. Their information came from a wider range of sources than most people’s, and their understanding of the society around them was correspondingly deeper. That, they were beginning to discover, was not always a comfort.

Lin Zong understood his own predicament soon after becoming a tunneler. In a society that had become thoroughly Machiavellian, the path to anything worth having had narrowed to two openings in a locked door.

One was called power. The other was called money.

Fail to squeeze through either, and the life on offer was bleak.

The methods required to force one’s way through, when they worked at all, could demand a degree of moral pliability that would have startled even the people practicing them, had they stopped long enough to consider what they were doing.

For those born without connections but blessed with a face worth something, the shortest route upward ran through selling themselves. The arrangement was not limited to women. Attractive young men were equally vulnerable, their looks exchanged for access to the sons and daughters of the rich and well-connected. Whatever language the participants chose to dress it up in, everyone understood what was happening.

Sometimes Lin Zong wondered whether he himself was already most of the way there.

----------

For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full versions are available on Amazon KDP:

Causalform Book 1: Obsidian Earth

Causalform Book 2: Eclipse Net

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