B ud had spent the last several days living in the open, in a prison 
on the low, smelly delta of the Chang Jiang (as most of his thousands of fellow 
inmates called it) or, as Bud called it, the Yangtze. The walls of the prison 
were lines of bamboo stakes, spaced at intervals of a few meters, with strips 
of orange plastic fluttering gaily from their tops. Yet another device had been 
mounted on Bud's bones, and it knew where those boundaries were. From place to 
place one could see a corpse just on the other side of the line, body striped 
with the lurid marks of cookie-cutters. Bud had mistaken these for suicides 
until he'd seen a lynching in progress: a prisoner who was thought to have 
stolen some other fellow's shoes was picked up bodily by the mob, passed from 
hand to hand overhead like a crowd-surfing rock singer, all the time flailing 
frantically trying to grab something. When he reached the line of bamboo poles, 
he
was given one last shove and ejected, his body virtually exploding as he flew 
through the invisible plane of the perimeter.