We The Believers (Pt. 2)

Every belief begins with a story, from a simple plan to make a sandwich to faith in the afterlife. A story needed to be made for the new way my parents had to live after the incarceration. Reunited while I was at school, they did the sense-making for me, putting the life of our family, with its hurried mornings and afternoon teas and weekend walks to the park, into the story of China spanning millennia and billions of souls, but they should have known I was too young to support a fiction I didn't like.

The story was that everything was back in its place, like the teacups handle-out in the cupboard, the three of us just fitting on the small patio, on two wicker seats and a stool, the rock of the mountain in front and the tall high-rise behind enclosing all but an angled view down to the city; Dad's art nook inside, Mom's bedroom desk, the oval window in my little room letting in the river energy of the Jialing; the water's clarity reviving year by year in anticipation of the clean modern world of my future, but I knew how my own heart exploded seeing my father on the patio, smoking, like during the lone meditations from before but different since my mom was there, having come home early, the swellings and markings of her tears still apparent. I forgive myself for how I pestered my parents that first evening, asking again and again about the people who had taken my dad, the cell that had been his home, the bald scar curving from his forehead down the side of his head and past his ear—knowing I wasn't getting complete answers. However, I don't forgive the base craftiness, the child's pure greed, that let me exploit the grief my parents were trying so hard to hide. I saw right through their assurances. All "misunderstandings" had been cleared up, my dad insisted. The next morning he was back in his nook at the computer, sketching on the now officially cleared video blog, called "Fox Games" for how he liked to portray tricksters in business and government. I knew, though, that the long absence, for all of us, had been like a death, a show of power over life and death, and that my dad's return was the start of something new. I could sense it, in his careful speech, without even knowing about the CCTV "confession," shot in a movie-studio living room, which had earned him his release. I knew, therefore, that my father would do anything for me—that to him we had been dead, too. On that first normal full day of being a family, when it was time for extra calligraphy practice, I labored over the most beautiful characters for a mobile phone, making three attempts to get them right because the phone was a particular model I had coveted for weeks, in a particular color, used by a Douyin star I couldn't watch at home but had seen on friends' phones. Twice before, my ghost-hunting great-grandfather had refused similar requests, once leaving a note that calligraphy magic was for smaller wishes, but I knew. With a child's clarity I knew that my dad was Knowing Grandfather and that he would grant any wish I made, so the following morning I sent the characters for a mobile phone up in flames, and after school I found on the ship's deck, folded in silk, a gleaming white-gold Oppo phone, ready to use.

My dad played his part as before, remarking, once I had the gift in my hands, "Look at that. Very generous for Great-grandpa. He must have missed your offerings. Don't expect him to be so generous every time, though."

As my dad said this, coming towards me, I noticed something I had missed the previous day. He had a limp. It was subtle, barely there, but his stride was different, cautious. I had been right. My dad had been lonely, powerless, afraid. He had been hurt. Yes, I had been right, and I had used that hard little truth for its power, putting it on paper in six potent ideograms: the perfect spell, making an emanata of desire into a real thing. I hugged my dad and got in his lap so he could help me with the phone. When I thanked him, he adhered to the game's rules strictly, reaching for the device and saying, "Let's see if Great-grandpa configured it for you."

I had been right, and I had won, but that beautiful treasure in my hand was too extravagant for Knowing Grandfather, who cared only for the ghost stories of the mountain villagers, the customs of border people, writing, teaching. That morning I had believed in my words traveling as smoke-essence to heaven, believed in a spirit reading them, considering, making a judgment, sending a reply. From that day on, though, I could not bring myself to place a paper on the fire pit, because I knew it would be a lie.

Which meant that, because of me, life did not continue on as normal. I lost interest in the intrigues about potted plants and insects sneaking onto the patio, and somehow we never got them going again. Gone was the giddy playmate who had greeted me with wound-up energy after school. Now, after getting me settled with a snack and a look at my homework, my dad would sit in his nook, by his books and computer, his expression changed only by the tint of what he was drawing on the touchscreen, or he would lie on his back on the couch, thinking hard about the day's video, or alone on the patio seated sideways he would have a cigarette.

Despite seeing him struggling every day, I didn't watch his videos. They were from the noisy, changeless, and irrelevant adult world. The people in the videos were nobody I knew, so even if I heard a video playing at the computer or on my mom's phone I barely glanced at it. It was just my dad's job.

Not surprising for a preteen going into junior middle school, but I learned to hate that dumb spoiled little girl, in an instant, the day the Ministry of State Security visited the apartment, because there's nothing we hate in ourselves more than ignorance.

I thought my dad was getting a visit from two important businessmen. Dressed in beige slacks and white button-down shirts, they were crowded into my father's nook, one looking over his shoulder, the other sitting on the back of the couch.

The men couldn't resist the chance to teach him a new kind of lesson. I had surprised them, perhaps, my theory today being that daytime one-on-one visits had been happening regularly, but they adapted quickly.

"Ah, the honorable daughter," the one standing announced genially.

The other beckoned for me to come in.

Uncertainly, I obeyed. I dropped my book bag on the coffee table as usual. My father told me to get myself a snack and to make tea for everyone, but the second man overruled him. 

"You're a very good student, I hear," he said.

I thought I should say thank-you but the man's voice made me doubt the complement.

Pained by my silence, my father said, gently, "You can answer them." I was stunned to see him so meek. My clever father, quick to discourse upon any topic, even gods and ancestors, was suddenly boyish in an old T-shirt and shorts worn at home and with his hair slightly messed up from the scar. The look on his face was attentive, anxious.

"I think so," I said.

"Come here," the one standing said. "Like to tell stories?"

I looked to my father for permission but he was preoccupied. He turned all the way around to the man, who was watching me smugly with a foot on one of the chair's casters. "Let her do her homework," my dad said. "I'll add the scene."

"No, come, come," the other man said to me, following the first official's lead. "Help your respected father. These things are easy for a child."

So clean, the men were, hair clipped short and combed straight, both of their faces shaved smooth as peeled melons, mouths grinning instead of smiling. One of them wore glasses, the one who had just spoken, maybe the slightly brainy one, but the one behind the chair seemed to be in charge.

"Here," the senior official said. "Your respected father has a question for you. Officer Xiao is right. Sometimes what we need is a pure heart. You'll know what's right."

Gan Junjie, future voice of the Oyster Revolution, didn't meet his only daughter's gaze, my anxious gaze, and I obeyed. I came as close as I could, blocked from entering the nook itself by the bespeckled agent's outstretched legs.

"We have a problem here," the lead official said. "Tell me this. What would you do? A rich landowner, he builds himself a great house, using up all of the trees on his land, and using all of the smooth rocks in the river he builds a garden, a patio, a pool. Many years later his daughter lives in the house. She reads by the pool, plays a violin in the garden, sleeps in a royal bed with a canopy. Now a new neighbor arrives. He starts work on a house, cutting down the trees on his land and gathering the rocks of the river. These are some of the last trees and last river rocks in the area, so she protests. She gathers signatures and presents them to the village administrator, saying that these rocks and trees are too important to use for another big house. Now, honorable daughter. This administrator is known for his wisdom. With his many years and great wisdom he keeps peace in the village. What should he say to this woman?"

In this apartment that just months before had been my magic kingdom, where by asking question after question I had drawn these wonderful stories out of my dad, like colored handkerchiefs, I stood stiffly between two strangers, entirely alone because my father was limply waiting for the lesson to be over.

The officials savored the silence, showing their teeth finally, knowing I had to answer.

I thought hard, took a deep breath, and told them my idea.

"Maybe, um—maybe the woman could have the man move in with her. They could share the house and trees and river—all of it."

The idea took a moment to come across, then an explosion of laughter from the officials hit me like cold water. "See!" The man in the glasses had to shout in between convulsions. "I told you! . . . A child knows."

The leader couldn't reply, busy with his own derogatory laughter. "Brilliant!" he said finally, his face shiny with exertion. "Top three percent in your class in Chinese—I believe it! Cartoonist, consult your honorable daughter next time. She has what you need. Imagination!"

By addressing us with titles and honorifics the officials were being polite, at least in a perfunctory way, but today this traditional social distance strikes me as just another tool that allowed us to be treated like objects.

A reprimand was what I'd expected, though. This let me go numb to the ordeal, a punishment like any other, then I saw my dad look up. On his face was the sideways smile that always came when we were telling mischievous untruths.

He had liked my idea.

If not for that one brief taste of authority, I might have been taken out of China without once watching one of the videos that were my father's fame and income, and his sole ambition, too, even during those later, corrupted years. Enough of the old videos had been left by the censors for me to see the change, from bright irreverent caricatures of Chinese men and women to mostly international satires of leaders from Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, America. There was humor still, enough to make a pre-teen girl laugh. I could see that he was concentrating all of his skill to do a good job, achieving a new level of polish. Today I understand that his mission was to build up his audience (his only source of power), but in order to make things both good and orthodox he had to work very hard, often late into the night. Even as a child I saw that he didn't believe the stories anymore.

~

My rise as an associate at Civic was swift, not in official title or duties but in stature. I found myself pulled into strategy meetings or tapped by directors for their pet projects. Once the firm's leadership saw that I could flex between the office and the field, that I was in fact quite vocal and driven, the opposite of the small timid Asian girl I resembled, that my presence gave every team the frisson of working with a no-shit revolutionary, or at least the child of one, they began having me direct new-media projects, where I served as a mark of a team's resolve.

The men tried to date me, of course, especially as I began to float between projects. About one man per team would pursue an instant-message chat, working up from company business to snarky comments about co-workers and finally—the obvious route for them all—an invitation to coffee to hear about my "experiences." I knew better, and by the end of that election year I'd have my system for meeting people of substance (local conferences, symposiums; etc.), but I let one of these friendships get away from me. Intrigued myself by the mental life of a "Principal Game Designer," and by an overtly Latin machismo that involved gold chains and unbuttoned Polos, I went along with a happy hour, then a second happy hour. Arturo Gomez—still my one good friend from my time at Civic—sealed the deal one evening after a company party for donors, walking me back to his downtown condo. Afterward, trying to be smart, we stayed officially unofficial—in other words, a constant question, like an open bottle of bourbon disappearing day by day. He made me realize just how good I had it at Civic, since I was invited—again, often due to my value as a narrative device for donors or partners—into high-level initiatives, while he mostly went heads-down to crank out little gameplay "possibility spaces" within boundaries handed to him by the content leads.

Later that year I was put on the team going to the Democratic National Convention. There to (discretely) coordinate strategy, we were special guests of the Party, able to come and go from a private box high above the convention floor perpetually supplied with snacks and drinks. As expected—and as depicted in movies—the higher up the corporate and political ladders I went, the stronger was the party vibe. What better than a nice buzz to form the foundation of a partnership? That comment might sound facetious but it accurately conveys the comfort, the almost physical comfort needed for people to take risks together—whether an exchange of money or, in our case, quasi-legal collusion on a political campaign. Thus I was completely lit during what would be the biggest political meeting of my career.

Once again the revolutionary-in-tow, I accompanied our news director to a room in a hotel suite miles away from the convention, where we met the Yin campaign's deputy director: President Yin's own brother, Bret.

We were getting a news tip so sensitive that we needed a full hour sitting around the room's cocktail machine, first tapping out the gin reservoir at $35 per martini, then betraying our personalities as we explored the bourbon, vodka, and rum . . . waiting for Bret to reach the right level of comfort. When he finally showed us the tip, a video file, he did so with a VR headset, so that our news director, Marc, was the only one who could see.

"Is that—"

"The speaker, yes," Bret said.

Transfixed, Marc lifted his free hand, protectively, like he was moving past obstacles.

"Newsworthy?" Bret asked.

"This is real?"

"I was thinking we do the beats, like you said. Release just a fragment first. Inconclusive. Everyone fixates on 'What is he hiding? How bad could it be?'"

"Give your sister my congratulations on her reelection. Where did this come from?"

"Not from us."

Starting then we programmed our own drinks, or not, taking charge of our own bonhomie without comment, warmed not just by liquor now but the thrill of power. We joked carelessly, and cruelly, about Speaker Kelsey's love life, already embellishing. 

A great crusader against homosexuality, he had been caught on camera with another man. Beats that could captivate a mass audience? Our interns could write them.

I was nowhere near senior enough to become the series showrunner, or even the director of a channel within it, but wow. A hairline fracture in one policy position was about to bring down the entire Republican platform, just three months before the election. Cruel, yes. I knew it. The Republican traditional-marriage policy had even become semi-palatable, thanks to the success of gene therapies in "curing" less common sexual inclinations. "Pro-health" was its name, a rare Republican endorsement of gene therapy. I saw Kelsey's predicament: "come out" by undergoing the gene therapy, alienating his conservative constituents, or continue wrestling with his feelings in secret. No crime either way. These were life choices fully backed by our party. Yet—back in our San Francisco studio I set about with the ardor of a poet to ignite the scandal. This time we had him. Magnifying Jay Kelsey's hypocrisy became my mission day and night. By intercutting the love affair with clips of former supporters condemning him, I became an instrument of history, moving hearts and minds with truth, in a country that had enshrined my right to do so.

Not until the full video came out—the staging of which surely exceeded the Yin campaign's wildest dreams thanks to three "beats" posted anonymously from far-flung internet cafes (Indonesia, Bolivia, Madagascar)—did I begin to have misgivings about our role in the scandal. At first we were the keepers of all of the secrets, but once the contents of the video were public we were as ignorant as anyone about anything other than the 87.32 megabytes of video content. Why did one grainy video require an hour of cajolery with the president's own brother?

Couldn't we have been sent directly to the people who shot it? Or had the Yin campaign bought it from some unsavory group? A tabloid? A foreigner?

My instincts as a journalist, though at the time I didn't recognize them as such, were overpowering my instincts as an activist. I rewatched the video a dozen times. A persistent hum and POV drift were the marks of drone footage, but those were the only clues. No logos or faces other than Speaker Kelsey and his 25-year-old lover.

To question the video at Civic would have been a sign of disloyalty, I thought, so I hid my curiosity. I was still close to Arturo, though, and finally couldn't resist getting his opinion over coffee.

He said I was sane to have suspicions and crazy to pursue them.

"Well, for sure don't do it at work," he said, when I persisted. "IT logs everything. Maybe you're right. Maybe something's there, but . . . you do the wrong web search, even that looks like espionage."

"Espionage?"

"Well. Digging up negative info, using company research—and then if you give it to someone . . ."

"It's not dirt I'm looking for. That's not the point at all."

"Babe, nothing you find is gonna help Yin."

Since he had one foot in technology, I thought he might have an idea how to trace the video, but either he didn't have the skills or just didn't want to get involved. He said the file was generic compressed video and that the best I could do was some AI voodoo on the engine noise to find the drone model, adding, "But what then? You still don't know who, and you've tipped off an AI nerd, and it becomes a story, like 'Civic Whistle-blower Suspects Foul Play.' It's suicide, Naijin."

He did a great job of scaring me about the consequences, but the only result was that two days later I couldn't stop thinking about the drone model. Could AI really identify it from engine noise—maybe when combined with video cues like field-of-view, blur, dynamic range? A quick internet search, at home, started me on a new obsession and research spiral. I learned how to build a neural-net "classifier" from common components available online, and I already knew from grade school in China how to code well enough to scrape videos and metadata from drone-enthusiast groups. The hard part was building the training data: it took tens of thousands of videos, each of which I had to spot-check to make sure a drone model had been specified reliably. That took a couple of months. Training a neural net on video data on a personal laptop was slow in the 2030s, but doable. After another week, I had a classifier that was 83% accurate. Not being an AI specialist, I had needed to use a simple "opaque" technology that couldn't explain its reasoning, so all I had was the model number of a U.S. spy drone and that 83% chance that it was correct.

Online research revealed that the biggest customer for these drones was the FBI, followed by police departments. Civilians were barred from owning these Panther-4 Spotters due to the model's size and 45-caliber turret. Had Kelsey been under investigation? Even if the surveillance had been legal, though, sharing the video to a private political group had to be . . . I wasn't even sure, immediately, what the right term would be in America, only that I was reminded of old Party politics in China.

I carried this conjecture—namely my classifier and its source data—on a memory stick in my front pocket into Civic's cozy idea factory, searching for a hint about what to do with it as I passed stylish young professionals on couches, at coffee bars, in digital conference rooms, under track lights, all of them cracking with ideas, and yet . . . what I had in my pocket was something different. I think I knew that, despite being wholly absorbed in the advocacy world, but I didn't have words for it. 

I just wanted to get the information out and thought there must be a way to accomplish that in my role at Civic.

In my office I stood paralyzed behind my desk. Looking again through a maze of glass walls at the Civic machine running like a dream on smart-paint walls and wheeled panels, I wondered how these accomplished students, writers, and artists would feel if they knew that they had been conscripted, that the government had fed them a party line based on surveillance of its political opponent. There they were, sketching and chatting and dictating away, a giddy wing of PR warriors air-dropping propaganda on an electorate already cowed into re-electing Amy Yin. They had done this by ridiculing a gay man on behalf of a party that backed gay rights. They had put Speaker Kelsey in a confinement box, pacing the interrogation just right to make him lie and then backtrack and then—surely wanting only to crawl away to a cabin in the woods—admit on TV to being gay while pledging to stay in the race and then, at last, dropping in the polls, deciding just a couple weeks before Election Day, with ballots printed and voting underway, to make history by leaving the race, declaring, "A false face. I'll call it that. I wore a false face before all America askin' you to vote for a false man. I do not deserve to be your president."

A stunning career meltdown, nicely capping the three-act tragedy we had constructed for him.

He was ruined, beyond my help. Why, then, would I risk the election? With only ten minutes to think before the Content Steering meeting, I panicked. I couldn't even pitch the idea to myself, so I prepped a list of talking points on the active surface of my desk:

• Frame as news item?
  • Great scoop
  • Solid impartial journalism
• Risks
  • Yin presidency
  • down-ballot etc.
• Rewards
  • Civic news channel credibility. Renown? Pulitzer?
  • Corruption exposure
  • Reform

This was the pitch I brought into the room. I straightened my clothes, checked my hair, took several deep breaths, and was the first one to speak.

Linus, my immediate manager, cut me off right away, moving to head off an unproductive topic before our news director, Marc from the hotel meeting, could even comment. "Where exactly did you hear this rumor?"

"Just some conspiracy nuts in a café. But I might be able to track it down. I don't know—it almost makes sense."

"Makes sense how?"

"All the secrecy around—"

"No, I mean how does it make sense for a liberal advocacy like Civic to spread conspiracy theories about a Democratic president's high crimes and misdemeanors?"

"Well, we don't have to amp the drama, but for the news channels—"

"Miss Gan." Linus, an otherwise diffident former student of literature, who had drawn me toward the center of this leadership team, seemed to feel responsible for dressing me down, and he did, with rhetorical thrusts like "You have better instincts than that." His thinning hair, stirred more than combed over the top of his head, reminded me how long he had been here, in this same firm, and how much questioning its mission was like questioning the master narrative of his life.

I still had the proof on the memory stick in my pocket, but I lost my nerve. I sat there without saying a word for the rest of the meeting, my face hot, preoccupied with the looks I was getting: the pity for an intern who has said something stupid. 

On the way back to my office and the new-media "products" I was managing, I could see the screens of my team through a glass wall as I passed "The Pit." The face of Speaker Kelsey's wife wrecked by sorrow, scrubbed forward then back, forward then back, as she marched past the cameras into her church; a deep fake of the speaker dancing with a male stripper; the Kelsey adult children entering the church with bowed heads; a skit of the speaker flipping through gay porn at the lectern while he was denying his homosexuality.

Years later, in books, Kelsey and his biographers would reveal a complex sexuality, supported by medical diagnoses, that included love—and passion—for his former wife, but even during the scandal I could feel in my gut what we were doing. It wasn't fiction or reality but a god-like retribution. We were feeding lives back on themselves in a vicious spiral. In that moment, trying to get back into the Civic headspace, I felt terribly petty and cruel. The prospect of bending my mind to make these fabrications as vivid and "impactful" as possible, merely to keep tearing down the Kelseys and precipitating malaise into the public's feeling toward the Republican Party . . . made my stomach clench like a fist.

~

The lying is what hurt my father, laying him out flat on the couch for hours while his brain tried to wring out the next idea. I understood the poison, finally, and didn't blame him, but I felt abandoned. What had happened to the stir-crazy bard who had waited for me after school?

Grandpa Biao returned to our living-room potted garden one more time, but it was all wrong. I hadn't burned any writing, and this time there were several objects instead of one: a handheld game system, a kit for making sky lanterns, and an antique ivory figurine of Cao Guojiu, the god of theater, the Immortal my father had always said used the river mist to mark the acts of our lives. I was already upset that my mom and I, without my dad, were taking a train that day to see family during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and now my dad had broken all of the rules of the ceremony. I complained that I hadn't written any of the words for the presents.

"It's okay. They're for you."

"How do you know?" I knew he was the heavenly scholar, but I still wanted everything to make sense.

"Knowing Grandfather wishes you a good trip."

I still hesitated, then my dad pressed me forward with a hand on my back.

I picked up the game system. "Thank you very much [Fēicháng gǎnxiè nǐ]," I said to my great-grandfather.

I could see that my father was upset. He double-checked everything my mom was packing, even her ID and rail pass. He rushed us through breakfast, worried about the train schedule, then once we were ready and he had nothing more to do his eyes filled with tears. I knew something was very wrong when he clutched me to him at the door, not even accompanying us out of the building, and it was that gaping unknown that overwhelmed me. I was crying too as the doors opened to the lobby. My mom saw and hissed instantly, "Shhh. Mm. Don't cry, Naijin. You must be strong. You must. Mm."

With her tough words and that sound from her clenched diaphragm, she made it so.

I would need those objects from Grandpa Biao. In Quanzhou we didn't meet our family but rather a man in a teahouse who took us walking, told my mom the journey would be hard, dangerous, and final, and then snuck us into the utility entrance of a modern hotel. Somehow my father's network included a few wealthy businessmen. By then private jet was one of very few ways out of China, and still we had to be packed into small trunks for about six hours. Since we had abandoned our phones in a city park, I later used the game system as a refuge from the alien new life my mom was giving me, while we waited in a hotel and then a Japanese airport. A year later, going to the Lantern Festival in Seattle with other Chinese-American families, I would assemble and send up the paper lantern my father had given me, knowing the wish he had intended, and today I still have the Cao Guojiu figurine sitting on my desk, giving me courage against the unknown. It is a symbol of integrity, too, of living by heavenly rather than earthly laws.

I had seen my father as sick and weak, but now I know that he was strong. By the time we had landed in Seattle seeking asylum, he had published the Oyster Revolution open letter, first with subtle riddles and encrypted images, then direct links, then with the best satirical shorts of his life, a feature film's worth, stored up for months, and all targeting Party leaders. Though he published the manifesto on behalf of a group of fellow dissidents, he named it and made it a movement. Ten years later, nearly ineradicable thanks to this universal broadcast, the movement would bring freedom of speech to China, but that wasn't the magic of his act. The real magic was that by the time my mother was declaring us political refugees on the U.S. Application for Asylum form, he had made it true.

He had made us a new life, a life unimaginable then but seemingly inevitable now. I hate that I knew him only as a child, blind to so many cues, because that means I didn't really know him, and can't, though he is my hero, China's hero. I never saw him strong again, not even on TV. I can only infer that he had to be. After the reforms, my mom was able to get government records showing that he was found "dead from suicide" in his cell at Yuzhou Prison. Whether or not my dad really hung himself in a prone position from a shirt sleeve wedged into the button of the toilet (the only anchor in his solitary cell) I know he had to be strong. He never appeared again on CCTV confessing his crimes in a TV-studio living room. I picture him spitting in the faces of his interrogators. I picture him lunging for a door on the way to being interrogated, twisting free, forcing the guards to tackle him, vexing them into breaking procedure and just pummeling him in the face—like the way he had gotten the scar on his head?—then coming up glowering. I picture him lecturing his captors about how they agreed with him and knew they were cowards and were waiting for those with courage to win them their freedom.

He is a fiction, too.

~

We tell ourselves the stories that make us feel whole. 

Organizations, too, hold together only as long as their master narratives. Because I sabotaged the liberals' master narrative I will always be remembered as a destroyer, as an agent of chaos.

The drama was brief. I shared the files with a few key people, then I watched developments on TV like everyone else.

I watched President Amy Yin, entrepreneur and CEO, a relaxed talker who had bested Bill Clinton at slouching into a podium, come down in a limp mass like a shot bird, defiantly challenging an impeachment inquiry up to Election Day, only to lose the election to Kelsey's VP pick. In the spring a clever drone caught the image most of us remember: Yin crying behind the glass of her civilian SUV, the final proof that she had been too weak to be president. What sort of commander in chief has the guts to break the law and then cries about it? She had been a weak little woman who had cheated her way to the top, or so the new narrative ran. We may never know if the crying videos are fakes because the Yins have refused to comment.

I took credit for the AI model because I wasn't going to make a stand for the truth and then lie about it. The Bradford Group, one of the first to receive the drone materials from me, saw heroism in that. Employing a Civic-sized budget and media team, they made a true villain of Amy Yin, an overproduced villain, and of me an overproduced hero. I could condemn them for that, and America for believing them, but few can resist a well-told story, made with the best technologies.

They wrote me onto the public stage just when I had decided to disappear into the Associated Press. The reputation was hard to escape. I had made that analytical model, which had focused an investigation on two drone units in the FBI's Pittsburgh field office, and on from there. I had shown conviction. The new Congress invited me to testify. I became a subject-matter expert for the agency I now run. For someone who studied language and history, I have been responsible for a staggering amount of software development. Ten years later our media annotations reach almost everyone on the planet.

Many of you call me the "Chief Censor¹"{[1] colloquial appellation}, which I can't deny. Whether via lawsuit or fine or annotation, we tell people what not to say. I managed to disappear for a few years "making things" in a computer lab, but now I'm the face of the system, once again a political player, I suppose, though no longer trying to spin any particular story.

The reason Civic Sense shut down was because they never adapted. Though Bradford fought us with virtuoso lawyers, they complied with the letter of the law and survived. They still protest, but even now they can write, "Just look back at her career. Step by step, Naijin Gan has imposed¹ on this country old-school Chinese censorship²." {[1] Policy is created by the legislature. [2] Questionable analogy.}

I still believe in fiction. And satire. Sometimes we need a master storyteller, like my father, to captivate a whole population with an alternate reality. I wanted to be that kind of storyteller. Stories are what move humanity, not systems. But maybe that's what my era needed: a system, nurtured with policy papers and PR copy, which ruthlessly separates truth from fiction. Personally, I'm glad Bradford can no longer slap a label like "spy" on me. Politics may still be driven by charisma, or "character," but at least now we can see the person behind the pitch.

When I'm writing, maybe because the system is my own work, I feel gratitude, comfort, even curiosity, when it tells me I'm wrong. Most of you, if the polls are right, feel differently. Let's not confuse the right to say anything with the right to deceive, however. Do you really believe we could ever go back to a time when we never knew, never really knew, who was telling the truth?