Chapter 19: The Common Tongue

I stepped out of the capsule groggy and disoriented. It was mid-afternoon in Beijing, bright sun falling through the station entrance, and my body had no idea what to do with that information. It was three in the morning according to my internal clock, or maybe six in the evening, or possibly it had been Tuesday for about forty hours now and the concept of time had simply stopped applying.

Edward looked annoyingly fresh. He had slept on the tube too, or maybe he was just better at this than I was.

The station was inside the mega-structure, as it had been in Lagos and Sao Paulo, the tube rising directly into the city's lower levels. New Beijing was another mega-structure, and by now I had the language for it: the biostock walls, the light columns, the continuous-motion elevators, the floating platforms. It was larger than Lagos, more geometric, the surfaces less organic and more crystalline, but the principle was the same. A hundred levels, tens of millions of people, the whole thing designed so that no point inside felt enclosed. I was less stunned than I'd been in Lagos, which was itself remarkable. Six hours ago I'd seen a mega-city for the first time in my life and now I was walking through another one and noticing the differences in architectural style the way a tourist might compare one cathedral to another.

Edward had arranged the talk for me. A group of university students had invited me to speak about 2027, and the event was at six. We had two hours.

We spent them walking. The interior of New Beijing had a quality I hadn't felt in Lagos or Sao Paulo, a precision, an orderliness that wasn't cold but was distinctly different from the exuberant warmth of the other cities. The gardens were beautiful but more composed, the public spaces wider and more formal, the people moving through them with an ease that was familiar by now but expressed differently here, more contained, more measured.

I noticed something. Edward met a woman he knew on one of the upper terraces, and they greeted each other with the same gesture I'd now seen in Lagos and Sao Paulo: the interlocking hand clasp, the pull-in shoulder-to-shoulder, the back slap, the handshake. The woman was Chinese, or at least she was speaking Mandarin to the people around her, and the greeting looked exactly the same as Rafael's in Sao Paulo and the woman's in Lagos.

"Wait," I said, after she'd left. "I've been watching you do that all day. That greeting. The same one. In Lagos, in Sao Paulo, now here. I assumed it was an African thing in Lagos. I assumed it was a Latin American thing in Sao Paulo. But this is Beijing. People definitely did not greet each other this way in Beijing in my time."

Edward looked at me with genuine curiosity. "How did they greet each other in Beijing in your time?"

"A handshake if they were being international. A slight nod if they were being formal. Sometimes a slight bow. Nothing like what you just did."

Edward's info spoke. "In your time, the international jet set in Beijing, the American and European jet sets, and the elites in the rest of the world were all on very different pages. Different customs, different manners, different expectations. The closest thing to a global standard was American customs, which other cultures tolerated rather than embraced. Over the past several decades, as billions of people from every culture became active travelers and active shapers of global interaction, a genuine global set of customs emerged. Not American. Not Chinese. Not European. A real blend from everywhere. The greeting you've been seeing is rooted in Latin American warmth, but it's been adopted universally because when people from every culture started meeting on equal terms, the warmer, more physical way of connecting won out."

"And table manners," Edward's info continued. "And conversational customs. And a hundred other small things that people do when they interact. Edward doesn't even think about it. He just does what feels normal."

"I really don't think about it," Edward confirmed.

"That's because I spent quite a lot of time reminding you to mind your manners when you were very small," his info said. "Particularly when we were traveling."

"I definitely don't remember that," Edward said.

The student event was in a large open space on the sixtieth floor, one side open to the evening air with a view across the mega-structure's interior that still took my breath away even on my third mega-city of the day. About three hundred students were gathered, sitting on the floor in loose clusters, and the informality of it surprised me. I'd been picturing something more like a lecture hall.

A young woman introduced me in Mandarin, and I listened to the words I couldn't understand flowing over me, and then she switched to English and said, "Juliana West. From 2027."

I spoke for about thirty minutes. I talked about San Francisco, about Lumen, about the feed, about AI in its early days when it was still called AI. I talked about what it was like to wake up seventy-three years later and discover that the world had changed in ways I couldn't have imagined. I talked about the things I'd seen in the past day alone, in Lagos and Sao Paulo. And I found, to my own surprise, that I could articulate what had been wrong with my era in a way I couldn't have when I first arrived. The words came more easily now. The blindness I'd lived inside had a shape I could describe.

The students listened with the quality of attention I'd come to expect in 2100, complete and unperformative. Nobody glanced at a phone, because there were no phones, but it was more than that. They were genuinely interested. And they were terrifyingly well-educated. The questions they asked were precise, informed, and occasionally devastating.

I noticed, with a jolt, that every student who spoke to me in English spoke it without an accent. Not the stilted BBC English I'd heard from Chinese exchange students in my time, and not the slightly stiff textbook English of educated non-native speakers. This English was perfectly idiomatic, perfectly natural, as though they'd all grown up in California.

I mentioned this to Edward during a pause.

He looked at me. "But we're speaking Mandarin with no accent too."

"Oh," I said. "Of course."

Because of course they were. Everyone learned every language the same way, from infancy, through the info. There was no "native accent" anymore, because everyone was a native speaker of everything. The whole concept of accent as marker of origin had dissolved.

After the talk, a small group of students gathered around me. The conversation was easy, curious, and I found myself asking the question that had been on my mind since we arrived.

"Can I ask you something? In my time, China was authoritarian. No democracy, no free press, no free elections. People were afraid of the government. How did you get out from under that?"

Several of them laughed. Not unkindly, but genuinely amused, the way you'd laugh if someone asked you a question based on a premise you found charmingly wrong.

"Why are you laughing?" I asked.

The young man with the open face looked at the others, then back at me. "From our perspective," he said, "America in your time was the authoritarian state."

I must have looked confused, because he continued.

"You had over two million people in prison. Three percent under some form of state supervision. Hundreds of thousands of people in solitary confinement, which we now recognize as a form of torture. You had millions of people living in shelters where they had no rights or freedoms, conditions barely distinguishable from incarceration. Your corporations, with the full blessing of your government, addicted a huge percentage of your population to opioids for profit. And your country was bombing other nations, destroying their infrastructure, their access to water and medicine and electricity, on a regular basis."

I opened my mouth and closed it.

"Meanwhile," he said, and he wasn't angry, just matter-of-fact, "what was actually so authoritarian about China? We couldn't elect our leaders through your system of voting? You had a democracy that elected television celebrities and manifestly unqualified people to the most powerful office in the world. Is that really the model you'd hold up?"

I didn't have an answer. I sat with the discomfort of it.

Another student, a woman who'd been listening quietly, said, "We learn about this. It's part of how we understand the transition period. The American century. The things your country did in the name of freedom while being profoundly unfree in ways your media never told you about."

Edward had been sitting beside me, and he spoke now, quietly. "I know we haven't talked much about this, Juliana. And I want you to know that we don't carry this as personal guilt. It wasn't us. It wasn't even our parents. Most of our grandparents were children during the worst of it. And we know that most people in the United States in your time were just doing what they thought was right, what was good for their families, what was good for their country." He paused. "But with the perspective of decades, it's come to be generally accepted that the US in your era was an out-of-control state. A rogue state. Your government destroyed countries, whole countries, and killed millions of people, not just through direct bombing but by destroying infrastructure, water systems, hospitals, power grids. The excess deaths, the children who died because their hospitals had been bombed, because their water treatment plants had been destroyed. In your time, everyone knew the figure of the six million killed in the Nazi Holocaust. In our time, everyone knows the tally of the millions killed by the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chaos your country sowed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, in Iran. Six million people in eastern Congo alone, in a conflict funded and shaped by your government, and almost nobody in your country even heard about it."

The students were quiet. Edward was quiet. I was quiet.

"These are events that every schoolchild learns about now," Edward continued. "They're part of the history of what's called the American century, the way the Holocaust is part of European history. And I suppose, in the same way that Germans walked around for generations with an extra weight of historical responsibility, Americans carry something similar. We don't bear the guilt personally. But we carry the weight of knowing."

I sat on the sixtieth floor of a mega-structure in Beijing, exhausted, half a world and a full day from home, and I heard what Edward was saying and I knew he was right. Not because I'd known it in 2027, but because I hadn't. Because the entire apparatus of my world, the news I consumed, the education I received, the conversations I had at Harvard and Stanford and in the offices of San Francisco, had been designed to make it possible for me to live a comfortable, intelligent, well-informed life without ever confronting the reality of what my country was doing in my name.

The weird thing was that I knew about all of those destructive things that my country had done in my lifetime. I even read a New York Times story that told of the six million dead in eastern Congo and explained that the U.S. had driven that conflict and funded it. But somehow I put all that in a different category in my brain than whatever human rights abuses that China was committing. And come to think of it I didn't even know what those human rights abuses were. But something about being amongst all of these people from many different places, who all saw so clearly things that I could not see when I was living in the middle of them, made it all perfectly clear in an instant.

The young man with the open face spoke again. "I don't want you to think we're saying China was innocent. It wasn't. There were real human rights abuses. The surveillance state, the repression of dissent, the treatment of ethnic minorities, the labor conditions that built our infrastructure. These were real, and they caused real suffering." He looked at his friends, who nodded. "But at that stage of development, human rights abuses were everywhere. Every industrializing nation committed them. Every powerful state used its power badly. The difference is that your country told itself a story about being the exception, the beacon of freedom, while doing many of the same things and worse. We don't tell ourselves that story. We try to hold the complexity."

The students were kind. They didn't push. One of them offered me tea, and another told me about a project she was working on, restoring a section of old Beijing's hutong neighborhoods, and the conversation moved on to gentler ground. But I carried what they'd said with me as we rode the platform down to the station level, and I was quiet, and Edward let me be quiet, and on the ride down his hand found mine again and held it.

In the capsule home, I slept again. Properly this time, a deep forty-two-minute sleep that wasn't enough and was everything. I dreamed of water and buildings and music and Marco's face when I said "traffic" and the transparent floor in Lagos with the old city drowned beneath my feet and the students in Beijing who knew more about my country than I had ever known.

I woke to fog and Helen's house and food on the table and the particular quiet of a San Francisco morning that I was beginning to think of, against all reason and evidence, as home.

I ate standing up because I was too tired to sit down. Edward walked me to my room and said good night, though it was morning. I lay in Adaeze's bed and thought about what the students had said, and what Edward had said, and the weight of history that I hadn't known I was carrying, and I fell asleep, and I dreamed of nothing, and when I woke it was evening and the house smelled of something cooking and I could hear Helen and James talking in the garden and the world, this impossible world, was still there.