A YEAR AGO IN SPRING

Anemone Pop — my hyperfriend and my ethos and my only remaining belief — it grew hot from my center on outward. It could not contain the energy and god knows I couldn’t either my knees buckled and my neikotic channels crackled as I yielded control to the gravity of inversion, and where I where we where it made contact with the reef there was effortless immolation, a self-sustaining chain reaction of my own distant invention, that I once imagined clever and now tried desperately to stop. But this was all I was, this was all there was, as I saw the entire city the entire coral reef from a cool and clinical angle. There was {{no wait stop}} — I grasped and I tugged — but from further inside me there was {{no, bad, go}}. The Sea snapped with tiny cavitations.

And the fabric of Shanghai’s reality contorted slightly to fill the Mirror Sea’s eyes of hungry quartz with white and purple light, just for an instant. And there were places where cameras faced displays, where feedback loops grew hot and deadly to Ripples, where this flash incubated and bloomed and lodged then-unnoticed in the minds of hundreds of thousands in their scattering and convergence. It happened slowly, languidly, miles away, hours ago. It happened so it could happen here, right here, bursting backwards through the oscillations and boundary conditions which join our world to theirs, with a great anticausal lash.

The tight loops of light and sight and belief which held it all together loosened and dissipated in the monstrous heat, and out of its grand, towering, rigid formations, the coral reef began to collapse onto its inhabitants.

I was hyperventilating or screaming or groaning, or at the very least air was leaving my lungs. I tried to hold on to the failing illusion, but Anemone Pop was unwinding itself with a mighty and satisfied death rattle, and giving itself over to the noise. I felt the Ripple spasm as it began to evacuate from my soul, leaving behind only the space I had made for it, a terrible and lonely place that I — the first person singular was encroaching with deadly clarity — that I had no wish to inhabit. Light swam senselessly in my eyes. Voices rang in my ears. Nothing was anything. 

Cai snapped her eyes from the crumbling reef. She wore a look of fascinated, seasick revulsion as she looked at me — or maybe it was unmodulated awe. She swallowed two little gulps of air and took me by the arm and — what was she wearing? What were any of us wearing? — her costume shimmered and shook and shed scales into onto the floor of the Haojie Tower, onto the neikosuits and gauzy cocktail gowns of the awestruck partygoers, eyes still glazed, that we were already pushing our way through. By dint of training or tint of their visors, only the Weather Bureau maintained any bodily awareness, and they were still picking off Ripplechasers, doubled over and vomiting on their costumes. One of them reached for Cai and she elbowed him in the clavicle. There was the whir of a vialgun, the cracking of broken champagne flutes underfoot.

We broke for the hallway, though a heavy set of double doors, and towards the elevator bank. Cai had a slim wallet with a large selection of Haojie badges and she flicked through them with growing frustration until one of them made light go green. There was a Ripple dying in my gut, and I was doubled over with physical pain, but standing still only made the hurt worse. I clutched at my stomach as it tried to find something to expel, and I pounded on the elevator doors until they parted, and I collapsed onto the mirrored wall, barely recognizable behind the sequins and face paint and frazzled hair — only by that familiar flicker of self-disgust.

Cai ran her fingers over the panel, looking for some controls, but the building was in lockdown. She was muttering to herself, “come on, come on, come on”. She waved frantically at the camera, a regular one, in the corner.

Fifty-fifth floor, said the voice in the elevator. I thought halfway down was not so bad, but Cai burst into quiet tears as we lurched and descended, ninety-two, seventy-five, sixty-eight. She was doubled over too, way out of poise. She still would not look at me, and I tried not to look at her, who knows what could happen with the inversion still smoldering in my gut. But wordlessly she offered me her shaking, clammy right hand.

Fifty-fifth floor! The elevator sounded pleased with its performance under difficult circumstances. The doors rolled open, and I imagined Haojie security flicking their laser sights with extreme prejudice. I could not even put my hands up — please, just let this be the end. But on the other side of the door were more Ripplechasers, dressed like Cai. I saw her eyes flick between them, counting one two three. “Where?” she insisted.

“In loop-lock,” one said. Something passed between them, wideband and narrowbeam, that I was not privy to.

“The building automation,” another clarified. “Coming down now.”

We were on a nothing floor of the Haojie Tower, more teak and golden sconces, more purple carpet to muffle our footsteps. They led and I followed, four women and one more woman, but I could not make us make five. Lights popped on as we rounded a corner, passed through a kitchen. Electrolyte bars and well-tended succulents. One door leaked dim light, and that was the one Cai opened. Yet another Ripplechaser was supine in a scanner bed, visor up, rubbing her eyes. I ignored the things a neikonaut should notice — the meticulous cable management and the custom twelve-point headgear and the bank of reusable autovials — and watched her watch us. She grazed the others one-two-three-four with a little sigh of relief, and then settled on me with curious, secondhand recognition.

“There is a path,” she offered. She was a balm, somehow, fresh out of loop-lock and trying airily to make sense of the physical world. She reminded me — well, they all reminded me of Cai. “North stairs unlocked. Eight floors down.” Then she caught the expressions on the others’ faces. “Bad?”

“Devastated. Maybe fatal.”

“Big. The whole quarter is collapsing.”

“Survivors?”

“Salvageable prototypic diversity. Terrible pain.”

“Time to leave now.”

It was all one thought. I could no longer participate. I was the devastation, the rend in the Mirror Sea, and I begged to be let in but I was fraying at the edges, trapped by encroaching degree within the confines of my own mind. I hated it in there. One of the other chasers seemed to see this and take pity.

“Mona?”

“Yeah.”

We were moving at breakneck speed, echoing thunderously down a stairwell that was basically endless in either direction. The green exit signs had gone red, but there was otherwise no sign of crisis. In cold cardiovascular terms I was probably in the best shape of my life, after weeks of chasing suggestive pixels miles into the middle-ring wards, but I was exhausted and malnourished and oh yeah I was covered in broken glass. My breath was ragged.

Hers was not. “First time, right?”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“You probably think you killed it, right?”

I would have liked to stop for this, or at least take the stairs one at a time. “Yeah.”

“Survivor’s guilt. Very common.”

“I feel it too. But this is where you need to let go.”

“There will be other Ripples. The Sea is too big.”

I would have liked to pause and explain that, no, the Ripple had let me into its very core and I looked the wrong way and ripped the reef to bits, that it was a neikotic technique I was supposed to be an expert in but had carelessly unleashed on a happenstance coincidence, on reckless thermonuclear whim. I wanted to ask her to push me down the next flight of stairs, to leave me broken and alone. But this was our stop.

“Forty-seventh floor,” one of them pointed out. Carpet became concrete. Stale air became roaring wind. Gunfire rang out behind me, sent lightning-cracks through my blackening vision, as Cai and her companions led me across the helipad —

“On the ground!” roared a voice, a terrified human voice, drowning out the synthvox. Dozens of Weather Bureau agents streamed out one veetle on each side, firearms trained on us. “On the ground, all of you, now!”

“No!” Cai’s voice cracked. I was already on my knees but she was not, standing in front of me, shielding me. “You can’t take her!”

“On the ground!” the voice repeated. They were a dull rubber hailstorm of boots.

“I have a clear shot.”

“Take it.”

I do not remember the prick of the dart. Only the way my eyelids went heavy. Only the way Cai screamed and screamed and screamed as I slouched into her arms. And then there was a dart in her, too, or so I always imagined. As the world slid away, I felt only that the locus of myself was in her eyes.