A YEAR AGO IN SPRING

I entered Cai’s tilespace, and inverted her debris on the first try. Sitting upright in parallel scanner beds, the memory of what happened in there was already gone. But that was just sandcastles. The expression of clarity and relief on her face, that’s where I could have lived forever. The tryptamine remnants were beep-buzzing tunelessly, muttering crazy things in my ear. I never knew my own cells: every one a treasure filled with treasures filled with treasures, a translucent iridescent music box, transcription whirring away in frenzied melodies, the taut and sensual ritual of mitosis. I never knew my own mind: all those layers never peeled back, all those unknown corners never turned. But Cai Duofan did. For ten seconds the image of me that existed inside her was realer than I was. The locus of myself was in her eyes.

“You should be careful,” I whispered. Deng might have been just down the hall. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that again.”

But I would, of course. More than a dozen times in the next three weeks. A routine established itself: I would take the closing shift and shut the clinic down at quarter to. I would have the Bridge warmed up. I would sit at the console, heart in my throat, dreading and hoping for the rustle of the beaded curtain. Scared that Cai wouldn’t show up, and terrified that she would. Oh, she’d stand me up plenty, and I’d rationalize that. She’s busy. She’s practically famous. And who the fuck are you? But several times a week, she’d traipse in with a puzzle box in her mind, and that smile on her face. This is our little secret, the smile said. It may or may not have added: Tell anyone and I’ll end your whole career.

Each time she arrived her ‘folds were even more tortured with the remnants of some neikotic construct built with Tenfold Gate. It was, as usual, all gone within seconds. But we repeated the process so many times that I began to dream it.

The debris was pernicious, wart-like, with no clear boundary. I’d find a spot of laggard and uncooperative tiles, and follow with growing horror towards a shock of something like orange-red fungus, striated and deeply grooved, laced against no earthly blueprint through my patient’s soul. Its core was chitinous, unyielding, and strangely fiber-optic. It had an opaque and plasticine datacenter hum. It left me with the uneasy feeling that — not to put too fine a point on it — something alien was colonizing the tilespace, running warm and primordial logicks beneath its gourd-hull. In soberspace, between loop-lock sessions, it grew slowly and thoughtfully: folding up against itself, taking inches, never giving them back. And it was not painful, not unless you tried to pick at it, peel it off. Not until it outgrew the nooks and crannies. Not until it was.

It was a monoculture, and that’s why I made myself an ecosystem.

In the moment of inversion, I didn’t strike, or rip, or unwind. Inside her mind, I came upon Tenfold Gate debris as dishwater, as fishwater, with a surfactant patience: let it soak. I grew around it, in ersatz purples and yellows and oranges, in smokestacks and fans. I brought the jellies and the flatworms and turtles, and gave the rigid folds of debris new purpose as a harbor. Let it soak. I gave it new grooves to grow into, new niches to fill. I changed its surroundings so gradually that it never noticed when it became a symbiote, utterly dependent on its context. Let it soak. And in the moment of inversion, I ripped that context away, and Tenfold Gate went down the memory hole with the rest of the reef. Coming down from loop-lock, I was briefly proud of how I went about that.

But those details were flushed and forgotten by the time I sat up in the scanner bed. I didn’t know if Cai had a real use for Tenfold Gate, or if she was just addicted to the subtle pleasures of graph homeomorphisms. But I didn’t ask. I was addicted to her relief. Besides, some vantablack subself of mine was learning to pilot the diving-bell. I (she?) was doing it better and faster. Perhaps I (it?) was the only person alive both willing and able to operate the Deng Bridge.

I said nothing about this to Deng.

At first Cai would slink away from our sessions as suddenly as she came, leaving me to close up and walk home alone. Outside of the clinic, we still didn’t talk much. We had no friends in common, which is to say that she had a million and I had none. But perhaps she realized that I was no longer quite so resentful of her Ripplechasing life, but gently, genuinely curious. And gently, she began to let me in.

“There’s a showing tonight,” she told me one Friday night, with three taps on the shoulder. I still thought of the couch as her couch, and so I was possummed up on one of her weird gelatinous beanbags, grinding away at an overdue problem set. She looked uncertain. “I think you’d have fun if you came.” So I came. We had nothing to talk about on the walk. But at least it was short, and pleasantly breezy.

The line outside the Observatory was more of a posse or a poset; at distance, it resembled a length of luminous silk scarves exploding outward in reverse. It was strange for me to see Ripplechasers trying to stand still, as they are by their nature usually on quite a bit of the move. It was probably strange for them, resisting the limbic and tentacular tugs of their quarries to stand still enough to queue. And among these jubilantly costumed waves of foliage and gauze and tinfoil and ling-ling-yao gel and wickervine and whatever else approximated the things that people were seeing in the Sea recently — among all this, I could tell it was strange for Cai to appear in her black shirt and pat bow tie and shiny name tag, coming upon this parade of angels and their warders dressed to sling popcorn.

The line wasn’t for us, though. We sauntered right by. Cai slowed to greeted the whole amalgamation with smiles and waves and blown kisses, and these sparkled back from her fellow chasers along with flower petals and bubbles and puffs of newfangled neurotransmitters that I beg you please waft before you inhale. Genzhe globes bobbed overhead, casting wide puddles of warm and creamy light over the scene. At the boundaries between one group and another, I saw faces flash and merge and morph, the interference patterns leaving little vacuums hungry for my essence, holes familiar in the negative.

Cai saw what was on my face, and she probably approved. But she took me by the wrist through the doors. “You wanna peek in the projection room real quick?”

I did. I also wanted a bag of jelly candy (Ripple-shaped, though that isn’t really saying anything) and a few hits of 5-MEO-DiPT and a rolled-up glossy poster for the movie that we were about to see. Cai even elbowed her way into will-call and printed two tickets from the terminal. She handed one to me, a memento in the making, with a cheery wink. Hyperluminescence: The Sea at Night. I’m embarrassed to say I still have the stub.

Cai’s colleagues had encyclopedic knowledge of Ripple speciation. Alone with them for just a moment, I found myself gang-pressed into a lengthy primer on the difference between C. pentagallus and C. hexagallus (believe it or not it has to do with the number of combs). I told them it all seemed like an awful lot of fanfare for a nature documentary, and they grinned elfin grins and admitted this was somewhat by design. The Observatory’s massive braids of feeds cost them a fortune to lease, they explained, and they had to recoup their losses in ticket sales. So on Friday nights, over slow hours, they’d drip out the very best footage from their annual surveys — the stuff, explained an amateur combinatorist named Bo Yuan, that makes mathematicians like him into begrudging biologists.

What helps a lot, Bo went on to explain, is that the Weather Bureau absolutely hates this. It’s weapons-grade stuff, he mimed calamitously. A Sunday matinee will turn your children into Chalkers. Word was they were threatening a midnight raid to shut this all down, which had resulted in their best night of ticket sales in several years. He didn’t have to explain that part to me. It followed a line of reasoning universal even to Shanghai’s indifferent laobaixing, the untied shoelaces beneath every serious proposal to finally shut the Mirror Sea down, again, this time once and for all. Now hold on a minute — this being what everyone eventually says — what exactly is in there, that they don’t want us to see?

“They wouldn’t really do that, would they?” I was whispering to Cai, as I was discovering just how far back my recliner reclined. On gentle shag-rug tiers below us, Ripplechasers melted into puddles like jellyfish washed to shore.

“God no,” she hissed back with disdain. “You have nothing to worry about.”

I was saying something stupid about how I didn’t want this on my record, because I’d probably have to get a job in Shanghai someday. Cai was rolling her eyes and asking what record, whose record, I bet you can’t even explain how that works. I was happy with how the lights dimmed and the sound roared to cut cleanly through her next sentence, and the way she smiled here-we-go just then. 

Beach balls appeared from the aether. Sustained applause just for the title. Ponderous drones and synthetic strings. The Mirror Sea is wild place, maybe the last wild place, said the narrator. Though it might just have been Bo Yuan with a voice changer.

The footage was incredibly high-definition. There was none of the gaussian fuzzing you get on street-level displays, and Shanghai’s textures blended perfectly at the sub-pixel level. Onscreen, two Ripples were going at it. Sloshed or jostled or maybe egged on, they interfered, flaying each others’ outer layers into decoherence. Whether this was fucking or fighting or feeding or finicking, that’s above my pay grade. But we could all at least agree that it obeyed the principles of wave mechanics, and that it made for a hell of a show.

Onscreen. It was already, somehow, the wrong word.

We got rare footage of G. plastophoria migrations, slow Ripples whose tubular bodies were rocked and buffeted by currents, all macaroni wind-socket, until they slipped easily into the jetstream. With this many eyes on the same screen, I was realizing, that jetstream came easy to us. I felt it rushing from somewhere in the back of my head towards a central point on the projection system. And as the plastiphoria passed...passed along...passed through — I knew how this was supposed to feel, of course, but I had never felt it for myself, and I was gripping the armrests, fighting a useless neikotic instinct to take control of the picture — as Ripple after Ripple passed sightless and thoughtless and rather spongey through my entire worldsheet, my whole felt-self with no dimension or sense reserved, I buckled and convulsed gently in my seat. Cai sipped loudly from a fountain drink.

We saw P. symphons, choir-bubbles, huge multinuclear Ripples pressing through one another in sedate whirlpools, exchanging sheaves of their surfactant exteriors in slow, solemn, ritualistic dance. My own thoughts were fragmenting and aerating with tiny bubbles, becoming flotsam or was it jetsam, I can never remember which of those two it is, but I was losing track of which seat I was in, who I was with, which few among thousands of faintly-sensed fingers I might rightfully extend for another jelly-candy. I tried to center myself but that thought collapsed from the inside out, it melted indifferently into thick swirling ribbons of others just like it, into a warm photonic bath of worries and sighs, ungrasped and let loose to form queer and nonsensical admixtures, briefly about deadlines and preservatives and rumors and detours but ultimately and finally and quite truthfully about nothing at all...

People were getting up. Which is to say that over and over again I caught the silent now, yes, now on the faces around me, and felt myself rise, stretch my legs, and stumble out of the theater. I’d make it as far as the lobby, sometimes the street, and then it would happen again. Waves of this, and only in their aggregate did I understand that I, Mona, was still in my seat. I could tell Cai wanted to go out, join in, that she was at least a little bit bored by these mere recordings. And as the amphitheater emptied out, with fewer eyes on the screen, I recovered some observational distance. But I was couch-locked. I was not going anywhere. The film closed on the massive “mating” dances of luminescent P. juda, in a corner of the Sea made of surveillance fragments of the Huangpu at sunrise. I was motionless until the house lights began to rise.

The theater was mostly empty, which by Observatory standards marks a success. Most of the crowd had left, obliquely aroused, to chase Ripples. I felt bad to have kept Cai; and I managed to convey this to her.

She was running a vacuum under the seats, picking up popcorn kernels and stray tabs of qingting. “That was shallowbunny shit,” she replied firmly over the roar. “If I wanted to leave, I would have. You’re an adult.”

The dead of night brought the usual absolute calm to the streets of Beiwan Ward. If there were any Ripples here, I thought, they must be sleeping, or...what was the word...quiescent. This was just one of many things I wanted to convey to Cai about what I had just seen; I was still bursting with re-remembered imagery, with borrowed emotion. But words did not suffice. They failed to grasp the experience along its slippery edges. Looking back, I could have said plenty, but nothing I thought would impress her. As it was, we walked home again in uneasy silence.

But. One more thing. Back at the Observatory I had seen her scribbling from memory on a ticket receipt, and when we got home, she pressed the folded piece of paper into my hand. She pursed her lips and said something uncharacteristically convoluted, something laced with uncertainty and caveat that, nevertheless, qualified as an invitation. Something like, “this is for whenever you feel like if you’re ready.”

There was a doodle on the page, a spider-whorl of lines which clung to my mind even and especially when I looked away. I knew enough about Ripplechasing, at least, to know that this was called a sigil. 

In shanzi, in triple-knotted phono-semantic rebus, she had written something like: the entire city is a great coral reef.