She — she had been here! But the lapse is momentary. Who, Mona?
The heat must be getting to me. How many hours have I been chasing the sun through these wildflowers?
It’s absurd enough that this was my plan, more absurd still that for a long time, it appeared to work. What kind of stars, what kind of moon, will be here to light my path when my legs finally falter and the sun sets? It’s a risk I can’t afford to take, so I’ve been trudging steadily west, jogging in bursts, and keeping that sun above me. If that’s what it really is. I hear it throwing off low rumbles and wind chime harmonics, and I find I can stare at it without pain, even strain my eyes to unpack its bright white into fine swirls of gold. But whenever I look back up, it seems to have moved much further west, so for now I keep it in the corner of my mind.
Instead I focus on the sunflowers and, in their own way, they focus on me. Each has at its center a thousand tiny onyx eyelets which form a large compound eye, with such hazy perception that you may stand in front of one for the span of ten breaths and make no more than the slightest smudge on its world. But plant them together and their roots tangle and intersect, sharing and elaborating on the same great image until they not only see you, but seem to anticipate you. I crane my neck backwards now: in the uncountable miles of them, rising and falling on shallow hills, I can make out the gentlest trace of my presence. They have turned, too subtly to notice in the moment, to face me as I pass. Spend all day in the sunflowers and you begin to exist solely on their terms, your soul knit from grass and dew coursing through your veins, no trouble swifter than a hungry caterpillar even in the spectrum of your attention.
And spend too long away from the flowers, well, I shudder to think. I might buy a few minutes on the glance of a blackbird hanging off a reed, or by grinding my feet into the dirt to cave in an anthill, but the fabric of causality is ever-mending and ever-spooling into unseen depths. To be stitched out takes far less than I once thought: a few minutes in unobserved stillness will do it. I could rise from my reverie and find that the universe has simply moved on without me, along a simpler course through time that carries no trace of my past and leaves me no way back into the future. That such a thing has never been observed in missing socks, in hibernating raccoons, in elderly neighbors, is less than cold comfort — it is precisely the point. The truest terror is just out of our peripheral vision, on the lip of a maw too wide to see through our telescopes. Death is a smokescreen. We are right to fear it, but as the proximate cause of this.
And the sun is lower in the sky now, and the sunflowers can’t see in the dark.
There are others here — mere rustling disturbances in distance stalks, hints of bipedal motion. So when I finally admit that I need a break, even under this reddening sky, I come to a stream and hope against hope that someone just as thirsty as I am will be there too. Time passes so strangely here that my exhausted stumbling towards the water, collapsing on the ground, and drinking my fill, are stretched into the same rubber-band present, finally snapping loose as I dunk my head underwater for the third or fourth time. You’re going to die here, Mona. You’re going to go unseen and slip away. Already I feel the creep of other possibilities that neatly fill my little vacuum in spacetime. I see it now in the widening bell curve of faces shimmering back on the surface of the stream, my close bob lengthening and my narrow face filling out. {{Mona Xu,}} I say out loud, trying to remember what it’s worth. No one is around to care.
Only...there is someone.
{{You’re not her,}} comes a high, crisp voice behind me. A whirlwind reorientation, a twanging oscillation that sets my back foot in the stream. When I find myself again in the space between self and other, I’m butt down in the mud, and there’s a face looking up — wait, no, focus, Mona — down at me. A face shimmering between features, but all centered on — am I doing this, or is she? — centered around something familiar. She offers no hand up. If she offers any reaction at all to my fall, it’s in the upper harmonics of her sneer. I scramble to my feet, and find something that passes for a voice.
{{Dr. Deng?}}
{{You’re not her,}} the Deng-thing repeats. {{Maybe she doesn’t work here anymore.}} Its tone level and assessing, stony gaze cutting clear through. And I say Deng-thing because it can’t be her, it just can’t, not even with that signature sigh of disappointment. Not even because she looks unstuck in time, betraying no particular age between ten years my senior or forty centuries old. She — it — steps forward and takes me by the chin with a cool, indifferent left hand. Inspects me at what feels like a molecular level. {{Ah — but you know her, don’t you? After all this time, under the circumstances, I did very well indeed...}}
Frozen, remembering to move, so the sunflowers will see me. They turn to face the Deng-thing — but no, that’s not quite right. The seconds drip viscously by, and I glimpse inverted causality. It follows the flowers. They project it. And it has my attention with a finger-snap of tiles — tiles, Mona, but the thought is too fleeting — and it’s tearing me apart with its gaze. There’s something utterly feral about the way it rifles through me for memory after memory of the Deng I know: now a half-smile in the dim light of her office, now a hurry-along gesture on the sloping hills behind Stanford, now a vexed frown under the low ceiling of the clinic...
{{You were never one for action. Too passive.}} It spear-fishes with its eyes, probing me for one more, just one more glance of the Deng I know — it looks disgusted and insatiable in equal measure — just one more. It half-drowns me in its caustic haze, but I’m nothing but a looking-glass, dripping with the molar vitriol it reserves for itself alone. {{Unwilling to do what it takes. Too comfortable in stillness.}}
{{I’m here,}} I hear myself shout. {{Talk to me!}}
{{Show her what I show you,}} the thing hisses. Then it slinks away, on foot or not, into the stalks.
Night crashes down in a blink. I try to follow, cursing precious minutes lost, any hydration gained now quickly sweat out. The sun falls over the horizon and disappears, revealing a swirl of stars-that-are-not. I follow a surefire gradient, a path only I would take, ripping the indifferent flowers from their stalks, reveling sickly in the idea that wanton destruction might mark me as human until sunrise. {{Mona Xu, Mona Xu,}} I keep muttering, but it’s a lie, a waste of breath. {{I am human I am here and what would a human being do, what could I do now that a scarecrow or the wind couldn’t.}} It’s no use. As the last light disappears over the horizon, the sunflowers begin to close. Unobserved, I feel myself slipping away into the breeze. My existence rests on the tensile strength of quantum foam.
I am nowhere, I am everywhere, in this infinite, idealized night. I am wind over the heads of the flowers and the dirt that feeds their roots. A null assertion of self, free of identity or desire, the color of nothing. Even that nullity competes with others, other non-faces stalking the flowers unseen — dozens of them, maybe...
{{She’s just trying to help,}} comes a swirl around me. Not with recognition, but with a sweet, ambient puff of acknowledgement. Another face briefly seen from down in the dirt, inviting me to conjure a name. Min? Is that Min? But the Min-thing floats away, only ever a thin smile and a whisper: {{The next time you see her, be kind.}}
Utter absence forever. I am formless. And yet still, impossibly, I am here.
And then the sun begins to rise in the east.
The sunflowers are all wrong. I only ever notice myself through their lazy gaze. And that is a shattered thing now, their network of roots torn to shards. I see myself peeled off the ground, throat parched, back throbbing. But the unity of the image cannot hold. I move as a multitude, a scattered stumbling in all directions, as though between shards broken and tarnished glass. I feel pushed back by the boundaries of the root systems, struggling to push myself between them, trapped in isolated little knots, lurching forward in what is revealed as an endless loop. I reach for other-Monas and they reach out in reflected turn, but nothing can bridge the gaps between the patches of sunflowers, all seeing me from disconcerted, disconnected angles. I am a shattered thing...
{{Do you see what we deal with?}} The Deng-thing is all around me, its cruel features smeared across sun-kissed islands of sight. Even the breeze through the crosseyed flowers is all wrong, discontinuous eddies and swirls. {{Do you see what her cowardice did? Do you see what she left me to fix?}}
It tilts its many chins back towards the sun — which is not a sun. No sun would have such staggering, paralyzing patters running across its surface. No sun could compel the flowers to reach for me now with their clawing, beady, gnarled sightlines, isolating me, gagging me, pinning my tilespace — and the concept comes with a churning shift in perspective. I can’t move my limbs because I have no limbs. I have no eyes, no head in here. I am everywhere, the sand and the sunflowers and the sky. Realization, elation: I reach for the hard circuitry at the edge of my awareness, grasping for the emergency shutdown. But at my periphery I find only more sand, more sunflowers, tessellating far beyond my grasp. I am a neikonaut, I am in loop-lock, but I don’t think I’m in a UTMS scanner. Something is wrong.
Then: another nearly formless figure, reaching a hand through the bulge in the tiles. The Deng-thing reacts, but this convexity reacts faster — it’s all familiar, the sweat on its palm, the chokingly ill-advised lavender of its cologne, the infrasonic pulse of the dance floor under my feet — and now Tethi jerks on my shoulder with conjured loops of radiant violet, a familiar and selfsame wave of pure relief —
{{You’re holding on,}} he shouts, and yanks me out of loop-lock. {{Let go.}}
The mantra comes as a dazzling, purple-and-white flash of inversion, a tunnel of concentric rings, a release back to the dance floor, and if that wasn’t loop-lock — and in the strictest sense, it wasn’t — it leaves me with the same dusting of technicolor grit on my soul. I catch myself in a two-step stagger cut diagonally through the confused and concerned, just as my hands hit the filthy, sticky floor. Nearby, Tethi is faring only a little better. But if we’re making a scene, so is every other neikonaut nearby. They’re going down like bowling pins, at least those that were clipped by — just what was it? It was the sparkle of moonlight on those ribbons of debris.
I pick out three kinds of crowd noise punching holes in the whump-whump of the trance floor. The first is a roller-coaster oooh and ahhh: the full moon is still rising from petaled whirlpools in the Sea, still infusing the brine with unbearably beautiful veins of gold. The second is from inebriated neikonauts pulled in by the primer tiles, limbs locking and seizing up, screaming as though pushed off a bridge. The third is a fleeing, chatter-scatter retreat from bright beams of xenon-white light, bobbing through the crowd. It’s all just below boiling point.
Tethi offers me an arm up, and from his wanji I learn that barely fifteen seconds have passed.
“Was that really you? In there with me?” And if so, was that really Deng?
“We need to go.” Tethi looks eagled-eyed, scouting for a route. “Now.”
It looks equally fucked in every direction, so we begin pushing away from the nearest beam of light, which is attached to the hand of a Weather Bureau agent. They’re picking their way through the crowd in pairs shouting the things you’d expect, like make way, give ground and please remain calm! The one nearest us seems unsure whether to shine the light into the neikonauts’ eyes or the Mirror Sea cameras. And overhead, a flock of their camballs whirs around, each round little drone staking out its turf, hovering blue LEDs joining the fixed constellations of red. I look back to see Tethi ducking beneath his rollscroll, keeping the contours of his face out of the drones’ view. They’re not doing anything yet, but if they see him they’ll be on him in a second. Red lights near, you’re in the clear. Lights of blue, we’re watching you…
He shouts a warning into my ear: “This is about to get weird.”
“Oh, come on. What could you possibly mean?”
He means this: all around us Chalkers descend from the rafters on winches and wire, spider-silent, gargoyle-posed, invisible against the velvet walls until suddenly, they’re not. Just to our left one of them grabs a Weather Bureau woman by the shoulders. She makes an unearthly whoop, a scream through synthvox that dopplers back up through the quasigrams to the ceiling at spine-whipping speeds. Her lantern drops into the crowd, spreading eerie shadows across the filthy floor. And even as confusion turns to panic turns to a lopsided brawl between the Bureau and the Chalk, the trance floor is still trying to make sense of our footfall as halting, skeltering licks and snatches of synth and bass.
“Please proceed in an orderly manner to the nearest marked ex —”
And as this next Weather Bureau agent goes leg-up to the rafters, Wu Ke Nai He teeters on the knifepoint of a deadly chaos that makes you wish this place had marked exits. Tethi and I are thirty meters away from anything that might be a wall, our motion random at best. Grimly I consider the value of human life through Chalker eyes: there must be house lights, there must be more ways out. But for them, this is a laboratory. This is a training ground for the wild Ripples, who need to learn to behave, to interact without destructive interference.
Can they? Can we?
It comes from within the crowd: don’t push, go slow. Not a broadcast, but a whisper: don’t push, go slow. It comes in on locked eyes from nearest neighbors, individual strangers, I won’t if you won’t: don’t push, go slow. It sheds fear and desperation and becomes a rallying cry echoing through the warehouse, picked up by foot-stomp and ratified by the bassline: don’t push, go slow. And — unbelievably, we’ve done it — no one is pushing. We’re all moving slowly, calmly, to the exits. The Weather Bureau is still pouring in, but they’ve lost the xenon lanterns now, these are uniformed medics looking for the injured and tile-shocked…
Don’t push, go slow.
People are saying it, yes. But I wouldn’t put it in quotes. The more I look — and the more I look, the more I see it — it’s as through the message is being transmitted through the crowd. Don’t push, go slow. Human agency is here, but encoded, amplified, transmitted, and abstracted by something artificially sleek and brand new. It is here for us, but only indirectly, incidentally. It resonates with lower energies in me but not of me, merely learned, merely borrowed for the duration. Don’t push, go slow. And the more I look — something convex goes flat, some certainty drops out, and for a moment I have perfect leeway to choose. Is it us or them? At the end of the day, is it us or them? Don’t push, go slow.
Tethi shakes this off like a drizzle. Something buzzes behind his shoulder.
“Mona, I hate to say this, but I think we have to push.”
It’s terrifying, the idea that we could break the equilibrium and turn this back into a massacre. And it’s curious, the way the crowd seems to part for us and us alone. But to be fair, we alone do have a drone swarm at our backs. It calls out in a fragmented chorus, a butchered transliteration of Tethi’s name, stand down, stand down. In a volley of whirs and clicks it unleashes pea-sized tranq pellets in our general direction, which sting and stick and squish. Mbetethi Okeme, you have committed a tantamount crime against human self-determination, stand down, stand down. And one of them hits my hair, and one of them hits the zipper of my dress, and one of them hits Tethi in the forearm...No! You are not taking him, not after all this! But he bites it off and spits it to the floor. And all around us people are going down indiscriminately, the whole scene backlit with a strange grace, its brushstrokes lingering in my eyes.
“In here.” All of a sudden I’m beneath a waterfall of black velvet and now Tethi grabs my wrist. “Hit that again.”
“What? Teth, where —”
He brandishes fresh chalk. “Just trust me.”
And I flex, and it hits my bloodstream immediately, the darkness around me a concentricity made of vibrating molecules of cool damp ocean of the beach just before it begins to rain. And Tethi (he is ahead of me, somehow) whips all that away and accelerates into a tunnel innervated with gemstone sconces, studded with architectural sapphire-moss outcrops that you might call balconies. At one of these he skids to a stop and gestures outward, to the great center of their lusciously chromatic city of pinnacles that ever-consume themselves with a languidly mechanical gleam, of wormways burning at their core with high summer’s hottest noon. And in the center, its quick arc-whips already powering it all, is the bulbous core of the Sunflower Sieve. Its sheer brightness puts swarms of Ripples into ecstatic silhouette. To look directly into it is to see all brought down on low heat to viscous essence, to (with ((forever, new) eyes) (always (see (that which is necessary, no more)))).
When it finally passes, when my eyes are at last my own, I’m in a bafflingly comfortable part of the sewers. A little underground one-room safehouse beside a Chalked-up halfpipe creek of this morning’s stormwater. There are shelves of clean pajamas and neat hampers of dirty ones. There is a Cup-Noodle vending machine and a water dispenser in the corner. There are two full bathrooms. Wordlessly, for there is absolutely nothing to say, we shower off the filth of Wu Ke Nai He and take kitty-corner bunks. I try, but don’t know if sleep is possible in my state.
“Mona?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that really what she’s like?”
It takes me a minute to unwind this. He means Deng, which means he had seen her, which means — I’m too tired to follow the implications just now — the Ripples managed to put us into loop-lock together...
“She’s not all that bad.” This, muffled, through my pillow. “I bet she’ll like you.”
“...”
“...Tethi?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this place real? Is this really happening to us right now?”
He peers down from the upper bunk, his face in bright orange relief, too bright. He laughs softly, sleepily. “I don’t honestly know.”
“...”
“...”
“Tethi?”
“Yeah.”
“Can we turn off the Cup-Noodle vending machine?”
He turns away to snuggle up with the rollscroll. “You’re down there. Do you want to try?”