The soles of Li Jin’s pumps hit the floor much earlier than he’d anticipated and he felt the muscles in his sinewy legs absorb the impact with room to spare. He paused for a few seconds allowing his heartbeat to slow. Then he switched on the small flashlight and let the tiny beam dance around the room. It was a small enclosure, not much bigger than his dormitory room at Tsinghua. He sighed. He would probably never ever see that dormitory again. Then the beam danced over something that had his heart racing all over again.

There was a gurney in the center of the room. On closer inspection, Li Jin realized that it was more like an elaborate dental chair with the backrest pushed way back to allow the occupant to assume a reclining position. Next to the dentist chair was what looked like some sort of lamp/heater hybrid. They were common in Beijing, inexpensive lamps that provided a modest amount of heating at the same time by redirecting the heat from the filament outwards into the room. He felt along its stem and switched it on. The room was illuminated in a harsh yellow glow and a blanket of dry heat started to crawl outwards, slowly warming the room. Li Jin switched off his flashlight and looked around the room. The walls were made of gray brick, dripping with humidity. The floor was covered with some kind of laminate designed to approximate a wooden floor.

Li Jin studied the contraption in the center of the room. The dentist chair was rigged with a couple of plasma monitors sitting on metal arms that curved over the chair like the tail of an agitated scorpion. A pair of cyberspace gloves and goggles hung to one side next to a metal arm with several hooks. The chair itself was covered in a silver mesh fabric stretched tight over high-density compound memory foam and sat on an hourglass-shaped metal base. Next to the chair was a silver trolley stacked with medical equipment. There were intravenous catheters and tubes, some kind of pump and multiple packs containing various forms of medical hydration and nutrition, the kind hospitals fed to patients in a coma.

Li Jin scanned the packs quickly, his heart racing in anticipation. It was painfully obvious. These were medical nutrition packs designed to keep you under while jacked into cyberspace. This was the professor’s backdoor rig. The UPS below the rig and the heating panels confirmed his suspicions. The professor had been spending extended periods of time on the new network and had set up this elaborate rig for the purpose of staying jacked in for very long periods of time.

Li Jin knew the dangers of this kind of setup very well. At one end of one of the intravenous catheters was a needle, which you placed in a prominent vein under your skin. The catheter was used to administer fluids to prevent dehydration. The professor was also using nasogastric tubes which were fed down the nose and throat into the stomach. The g-tube, which was inserted just below the collar bone, allowed for much more extended periods of intravenous feeding. The computer-controllable pump ensured that nutrition from the packs could be regularly administered directly into the digestive system. The risks the professor had been taking were substantial. Liquid could enter the lungs, tubes could become clogged and a dislodged needle, while you were in the throes of some cyberspace episode, could result in serious tissue contamination. This stuff should only be done with someone, preferably a qualified medical professional, periodically watching over the subject. Yet, the professor had found it necessary to take these risks. Why?

Li Jin noticed that cables from the monitors, the goggles, the gloves and the intravenous pump, all led to the back of the chair where they disappeared into a tiny box made of cheap plastic. Another cable from the box disappeared into a small enclosure at the base of the chair. The backdoor device? Li Jin opened the door to the enclosure and exhaled deeply. In the small space was a small green plastic box no larger than a pack of cigarettes. It had no label except the following notice in simple white Chinese characters: Property of the People’s Liberation Army. Unauthorized Use Strictly Prohibited. There was a tiny flick switch at the back of the device. Li Jin switched the device on and the monitors above came out of hibernation. A flash of light from the goggles and the blinking LEDs on the gloves suggested those devices were also hooked up to the green box.

Li Jin stared at the monitor and couldn’t believe his eyes. On the monitor was a spinning 3D map of Shanghai with blinking icons indicating various locations on the network. Tiny dots moved around the map at random, their colors intermittently changing. In a small picture-in-picture was a readout of vital signs with the word ‘offline’ flashing for all of them. At the bottom of that tiny screen was a countdown timer frozen at zero. It all made sense to Li Jin. The professor had written a rudimentary program that monitored important aspects of his health when he was jacked in. The program in turn controlled the intravenous pump, the heating and the other environmental variables required to stay under. The countdown timer ensured that he was jacked out of the network at a specific point of time.

Li Jin fought his instinct to don the goggles and the gloves and enter the system. Here at his fingertips was probably the most amazing network in the world, a system he had helped build but had never seen up and running in the real world. The system had been top-level classified. Nobody on the project, except the professor and a selected few of the top brass of the PLA’s Third Department, had had any access to the finished product.

Yet, Li Jin knew about the seductive nature of cyberspace, especially this version of it. He could not afford to waste any more time. He had a train to catch to Hong Kong. He switched off the box and quickly disconnected the cables. He placed the rig, the gloves and the goggles in his backpack and ripping the labels off the health nutrition and hydration products, he placed them in his pockets. He would have to make some purchases in Xian once the Russian’s credit was sitting securely in his accounts. Then it would be off to a location he still hadn’t completely decided on.

With some effort, Li Jin moved the dentist chair so that it was directly below the trapdoor. Using the pneumatic pump below the seat he raised the chair to its highest position. The chances of him being heard were minimal. He stood on the chair and was relieved to find that his fingers could just about curl around the lips of the open trapdoor. With all his strength he raised his body up through the trapdoor like a gymnast mounting parallel bars. He thanked God for his skinny frame as his torso and backpack emerged on the other side.

Stealthily he crept out of the study to the back of the professor’s compound were he suspected there might be a side gate. Again, the gods were on his side. There was a side gate locked from the inside, probably by the man with the cigarette. Li Jin was again gratified to see that there was no padlock. He slid the bolt open and slipped out into cold Beijing night.