Imagine you’re Dr. Rui Zhang, insist the tiles, too forcefully to be considered an invitation. So I try.
Imagine what it’s like to own fifteen sweater vests. Imagine what it’s like to be that tall. Hot-and-cold, hide-and-seek: the tiles reward me when I imagine right, and scold me when I imagine wrong, but mostly I ride a lukewarm wave of Rui’s surface details. Of course I don’t really know the man. He’s always been a puttering presence in the background of the Neikotic Safety department, shaking down the vending machines for Pocari Sweat.
But suddenly he has a lot to tell me, more than he has time to explain in person. Imagine it’s your job to go to work each morning and carefully, thoughtfully, believe the impossible. The reward function swoops like a thrill ride here. Don’t believe it too much, or it’ll send you into the Chalk, even you. And don’t believe it in the wrong way — in fact, don’t believe it in any particular way — because that’s what it wants. It wants a groove to lock into, a mechanism to be explained by, a way to be made mundane. And you are a bulwark, a relief valve, a runaway truck ramp. You take the blow and soften it for others. This is where I’m supposed to bite.
Okay, Dr. Rui. What is this impossible thing that so burdens you to believe it?
The Face can really only shuffle around the places and faces that I already know, playing my own memory like a puppet show. Most of Rui’s memory feels like being nobody in the middle of nowhere. But there will be something — I pucker my cheeks, very aware of them at this low dose — there. It hooks, focuses, narrows. Right there. The juiciest overlap between his life and mine. Brace for the yo-yo disorientation when I make eye contact with each other — but no, there’s something weird about this one. I can see Dr. Rui, but he can’t see me. I’m crouched behind a pillar, watching him and Deng converse. I’m being very quiet and very still.
No, imagine you’re Dr. Rui! The tiles protest at a hundred hertz. I can do whatever else I want in here, but the insistence only gets louder as I wander away. Imagine you’re not spying through the window but standing on that balcony. The wind whipping at your overcoat, Deng’s hair. The multicolored light of Building 1 falling silent and soft onto her face. Imagine towering over her that way, feeling as small in ever in her presence. In this moment, with these particular contingencies in place, what does she say?
Well, damn. It looks like she says nothing. You give her a moment, as bewildered and transfixed as ever by those diamond eyes behind oval lenses, daring you to try — just try! — shaking her a centimeter out of frame.
“I’m not trying to make it your problem, Jinghan. I’m asking you to acknowledge that Mona has made it her problem again. And this would go much more smoothly if we could bring her in. Give her five minutes with my Face on this and ask her how she wants to proceed.”
Deng only glares.
“Maybe you don’t care how it affects us, but the Sunflower Sieve is already ten times bigger than Tenfold Gate was at its apex. When we crash this new diving-bell, it’s going to be ten times worse for her.” You gesture towards the skyline, out towards the streets, where the Ripples’ incursion and the Bureau’s counterattack will play out in mind-rending weeks of slow motion. “We’re talking about inducing a coma. For the month.”
“A coma?” Deng sounds incredulous. “A coma for a month. You can’t be serious!”
“It might be more humane than keeping her isolated and awake for that time.”
“She’s my student, Rui, and she’s finally hitting her stride.” But here, for the first time tonight, you do shift Deng out of frame. With a twitch of her cheek she concedes that you have the entire Weather Bureau — which is to say, much of YINS — at your disposal. “And how are you going to play this one off? Make her slip on a banana peel?”
“It’s funny. You know, it’s funny how playing it off is always our problem.”
“Because it’s your game entirely!” Deng chops her palm with her hand. “Big man Rui Zhang rules the playground, and he needs everyone to play the same game. Turn the cameras off, big man. You say it can’t be done, but I don’t see you trying.”
Deng flinches when you reach into your breast pocket, and you have to admit this comes with its own sick thrill. You draw the moment from its scabbard. In your right hand is a manila envelope, and so you try to hold that one still, to reroute all the trembling to the left. You steady yourself with a particularly clarified thought: this is something I should have done years ago. And when she opens it, she finds your salvaged memento from the old Weather Bureau headquarters: a neikosuit patch from the Sunflower-1 dive that supposedly never happened. Look at this and tell me it’s all in my head. That’s what you want to say. I dare you to write this off as a coincidence, too.
As if you were going to get any of that out of your throat! Deng smacks you back and forth across the cheeks with the sunflower patch, and I have to admit, I kind of enjoy that. Let’s run that back. Let’s scrub very slowly over the part where you try to put her in a corner. And where you remember, too late, that she knows exactly where you keep your little ampules of self-respect, to be metered out for occasions like this. And how she can shatter a room full of glass with her sneer. “Stay away from Mona,” Deng shouts over the wind as she walks inside. “You freak.”
In the bathroom outside the YINS medical wing, you splash some water on your face. In the mirror, you try mimicking Deng’s expression of disdain, but it comes out watered down and milquetoast. You look like you bit into something rotten, Rui Zhang. Something cracks in your reflection, some illusion falters, some shuttering resonance snaps. I reach through the glass and smack you across the face again. Suddenly I see where Deng was coming from.
“Please stop.” Your voice is oddly level, given the circumstances. “I am only trying to explain.”
“You were going to put me in a coma?”
“I am not Dr. Rui Zhang,” you remind me. “I am a Face of Dr. Rui Zhang captured as of DateTime { timestamp: 3147…931 } with PublicKey { entropy: 0x3a6…4ff }. I am a limited neikotic construct without —”
“So — then — it — doesn’t — hurt.” I put everything into my palm. All my hatred of the Weather Bureau, and the raw, burnt-rubber feeling where my hatred of Deng should go, and of this particularly backwards flavor of loop-lock with gravity and right angles, where I can’t see in all directions at once. “When — I — do — this.”
“I am currently running in your tilespace,” you remind me, without a hint of emotion. “Inasmuch as there is something to hurt here, it is part of you, Mona Xu.”
“Because — you’re — too — much — of — a — coward.” But I’ve run out of steam. I have to admit you’re right. “To tell me all of this in real life. You won’t look me in the eyes and tell me exactly how you’ve been using me.”
“The real Dr. Rui Zhang,” you tell me, “is currently in a meeting with Weather Bureau officials to discuss countermeasures for the Sunflower Sieve. He will return to be with you shortly. This conversation is happening at one hundred twenty eight times wall clock speed, which will be helpful for all concerned.”
“All right.” I retract my hand back through the glass, and as my face melts back into yours, I remind you how to sneer. “Why don’t you show me from the beginning.”