Ichthys

Shanghai, September 2120

I

Nahum pushed the decrepit door leading into a colorless hall dubiously decorated by a scabrous, dimly black statue of Qin Zhiguo, the celebrated Chairman of the last century who had heralded the then-new political current of the Great Heavenly Isolation. Nahum cast a weary glance at the statue. Chairman Qin did not react to that.

"Room 714, please," Nahum told the receptionist, a middle-aged local woman covered by fake golden retriever curls, who was proudly donning a T-shirt with the English phrase Kiss Me Hard engraved in Gothic script.

The receptionist flashed several nicotine-stained teeth at him.

"Last time, eh?" she said, handing him the key and trying hard to suppress the pitying notes in her voice.

"Something like that," Nahum mumbled, fumbling with his pockets to make some room for the key amidst a few hundred-renminbi coins and an illegal outdated iDevice he'd stubbornly refused to stick onto his temple like everyone else.

The receptionist nodded with the slightly malicious compassion peculiar to the female Shanghainese.

"Back to Laowaiguo it is, then," she said, then added with genuine understanding, using the local language: "Nong ve zi ngagonin, nong zi zangheinin... eeeehh!"

Nahum smiled and replied in Mandarin with good-natured bitterness: "Tell this to the government."

He took the elevator to the seventh floor and walked through a circular corridor, relentlessly pursued by the sticky odor of urine emanating from both toilets. He unlocked the door to Room 714 and entered. Inside, between a heap of broken iDevices and a pile of conspicuous synthetic Party-approved condoms to be distributed among the students in the next semester, he found what he was looking for: a small piece of wood with a strange symbol painted on it – a crude drawing of a fish.

II

"You aren't a foreigner, you are Shanghainese."

Those were the words of the receptionist with the tacky hair. And Nahum once again felt the familiar pangs in his chest. He had spent twenty years in Shanghai, watching the magical city gradually succumb to the merciless, icy tidal wave of the Great Heavenly Isolation. The Middle Land had been treating laowais benevolently, with mildly condescending magnanimity, up until the threat had become impossible to ignore any longer, undermining the pillars of Asian rigid social philosophy with its dynamic, wild growth: Christianity. Outlawed in the United States of Democratic West due to its conflicts with the state-sanctioned agnosticism, the old faith had risen from the ashes, thriven in the most energetic and vital of the world's three superpowers. By the year 2090, Christians had constituted forty percent of China's population – about a third of it consisting of Westerners unable to practice their religion openly in their progressive, modernized homeland.

Then the inevitable happened. The Caliphate had its own faith, harmoniously interwoven with politics - as it had always been the case with that religion ever since its founder had killed and conquered and spread the word of a god who would never sacrifice himself. The USDW reveled in the decadence of global acceptance - undoubtedly bizarre, yet of its own invention, born long ago in sunlit cities where the search for truth had resulted in seeking oneself and living in barrels, orgies and self-mutilation, and eventually complete indifference equally cold in its Epicurean or Stoic outfits. The rulers of the Middle Land, on the other hand, knew that the source of its incredible success was something alien, something weird, something that ran contrary to anything they'd ever deem healthy or even appropriate.