When the Weather Bureau released me from their custody, a year ago in spring, it was with a toothbrush and a towel and a seventy-two hour ward entry token for Xietu South, where they suggested I might find refuge from the Mirror Sea. My brief, sad year of feigned normalcy was built on this refuge, in a ward with no cameras and no displays. There was a gentle unclenching, a quiet uncoupling from the loop, that I needed to feel before I could sleep. That feeling is no longer subliminal. The ward-gate is now the border between worlds.
There are dozens of people camping on the street outside my building, piling into relatives’ apartments, seeking refuge from Epsilon City. The hole-in-the-wall downstairs slings xiaolongbao; I can hear their chatter (and feel their greasy air) through my bathroom vent, four floors up. Nothing up here is doing me any good. I slink downstairs to wait in a long line for whatever can be spared. The talk is of remedy. Qigong, potent teas, SSRIs. Taking a big rip from a 5-MEO pen and hoping for the best. Simple rest and relaxation. Folk antidotes mingle with the Weather Bureau’s mangled guidance for how to manage neikotic debris — this stuff, people say, with a windshield-wiper gesture over their eyes. I pull my baseball cap down over my cutouts.
Several days ago I watched Dr. Ren and Captain Ma compose a announcement laying out what passes for the ground truth of the situation: that the Ripples have been building a city in the minds of the neikotic community, and it’s beginning to overflow. Then I watched as they simply decided not to broadcast it. Old habits die hard, but I think they were right. An official story is exactly what it wants: a groove to lock into, a way to be made mundane. So let a profusion of confusion bloom, let the Bureau hide the working remedies in a cascade of false ones, let the people make the choice they will make for themselves. There will be no more dumplings for at least an hour, but someone hands me a paper cup of sports drink without a word.
How do we get our children to school? How do we trust our own thoughts? How do we sleep with the silt of a thousand computations accumulating in the cracks of our mind? How do we cope with the fact of the Ripples moving always through our peripheral vision? How will we ever tell them that we are here, that we were here first?
And most of all: how do we get our neighbors to the north to turn their cameras off?
Later on I slink onwards, to our boundary with Xietu North. I watch the Mirror Sea catching eyes, refracting thoughts, through the streaked and stained plexiglass. Not all of the migration is southwards, far from it: I watch the young and the brave and the uprooted tie their shoes and take big gulps of air and tap their cards, and get their first real taste of Epsilon City as it spills from the displays on the other side. It will fill their minds with sometimes-painful debris, grown from the Sunflower Sieve. It will grant them powers of perception and cognition, soberware for the masses, that we simply do not have words for yet. And the difference is no difference at all.
The Xietu redlights, north and south, have negotiated a one-for-one exchange across the membrane. But I point two fingers at the young mother just my age and her toddling son, and get them across south as I go north. And I hold the diving-bell in mind, keeping the Ripples’ city at just at bay, as I walk the streets. They brush my hull indifferently on their way to their somewheres, their needs and wants and culture and gadgetry and touch-language no more penetrable or less alien than it was five days ago.
Then I spy a strand of something familiar, a little bouquet of green tiles pulsing in the spandrels, something of distinctly human make among the pulsing, fruiting lines of computation that the Ripples invite us to pick. When I brush it, there is a kind of neikotic throat-clearing, an exchange based on discretized layers of existing trust, a message left just for me to find. Mallochi wants to see me.
There were three sleepless nights of Weather Bureau briefings, tech demonstrations and field reports and endless, interlocking triangulations of truth and fiction — and no small amount of time in their hidden hall of eggs, pulling and pondering voxelite, trying to reconstruct the story of how we got here. I spent hours with Dr. Ren’s copy of the Xia Zitian Papers, the one he’s tricked to bare Deng’s voice, and I learn nothing that his Face hasn’t already told me. Her neikonauts were here. And now they are simply gone.
I’ve learned my way around the Observatory. The place is a maze, but my card gets me everywhere. The Bureau is no longer shy about their presence in the building: the Mirror Sea screens are blacked out, and their rainy-grey veetles are now parked in the front lawn, scorching the grass to bare earth. There are checkpoints and barricades. They are field-testing a first-aid headset there, that can deliver my Sunflower Sieve inversion to a civilian. It bootstraps and injects the diving-bell in a few dozen carefully chosen frames. It doesn’t work yet.
I have a team. I have three neikologists working for me personally; most of Sea-Watch act as attachés; and any of the Ripplechasing squad up before noon will also join our daily briefings. Our mandate is to beat back Epsilon City’s terraforming efforts in whatever way possible. To both find and deploy the diving-bell into the Mirror Sea. In the soft hour before dawn, this makes perfect sense. The rest of the time, it gives me a pounding headache.
I’ve observed that we all have the same story: we all saw too much, we all got drawn in, and ultimately, we were all deemed too useful to discard. I’ve met with every one of my reports personally, heard a dozen variations on the theme. Well, all but one. And I can no longer avoid her.
Around the edges of the dome, the whitewashed core of the Observatory spills into a single donut-shaped mechanical floor of vaulted concrete ceilings and cantilevered steel. Windows but no view: the sun sets over Puxi, diffracts through permanently frosted glass, and bathes us in orange fire. Cai Duofan is in loop-lock when I arrive. A single visored technician minds the monitor bank — I keep a distance. I tamp down invasive urges to peek at her ‘folds, and settle for her vitals. I try matching my thumping heart to her own.
Arms crossed? No. I don’t mean to corner her, only...
Like this, maybe? Clasped behind my back, like Deng? Oh, no...
So when the scanner whines down, when Cai paws for the hood and lifts it from her eyes, my arms are halfway between on-hips-like-this and thoughtfully-folded. She’s in a neikosuit. That means she’s been in there for a long time, and those can feel like real eternities. I give her a minute to find her balance, leg-over-leg. To wake from raw geometry into the facts of the world.
“Mona?” Cai gasps, and turns to the technician with alarm. “Is she...is she there?”
“It’s me.” Hands up now, confused. “It’s just me.”
She stumbles forward and — doesn’t hug me, not exactly. Tests my substance, first with her fingertips, then her hands, and finally her arms. She lets go when she’s convinced I’m real. “What are you doing here?” She sounds positively moony, just as Ren warned me she would. Her pupils are ripe and dilated, and her Contecs ring them in languid standing waves. But then she begins to remember. “No one told me we were...they shot this down, so many times!”
In my hand is a nearly transparent piece of voxelite: hollow and also, weirdly, not. I turn it in my hand to feel all the shapes that it is. I watch it make orange and purple zebra-stripes from the blurry twilight. By this I convey to Cai that I know about the soberware mechanism that Dr. Ren has devised to sit precariously inside the minds of the Bureau’s Ripplechasing team. A wafer-thin membrane separates two chambers. The first contains Sunflower Sieve debris, clawing uselessly against smooth, glassy manifold walls. The second holds the inversion. Cai takes a step forward, newly entranced by the voxelite, and I see myself in her moony eyes, in more ways than one.
“It wasn’t very effective,” she admits, with a frown that’s almost a pout.
“It was a first try,” I offer. But it was also a second try, and a third. Each one of her team’s trial runs managed to catch a small swarm of diving-bells in their wake, and redirect them towards the fringes of Epsilon City. In every case they melted off just tiny slices of outlying districts, not even enough to draw the Ripples’ attention. The results are a disappointment for the Bureau and a strange relief for me: Shanghai simply does not believe in the diving-bell in the same way it believes in Epsilon City. Not yet, anyway.
The afterglow of loop-lock is fading fast from her demeanor, and for a moment, Cai Duofan’s entire apparatus of psychological dazzle camouflage falters. Something besides pure poise cracks into her voice, her posture, and in the candelabric flickering of her Contecs (this reminds me too much of the diving-bell, and I look away). I see a vessel with no lid, filled to the brim, trying with every careful motion not to spill.
“They’re wasting you,” she murmurs, “keeping you sat here in a swivel chair.” I’m still clinging to the idea that this glimpse under the skin, this dropped frame, was intentional. But it’s already long gone. “It’s your inversion. I know you know you know it best. Stop trying to put it in words, and come out and help us find it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh.” She extends a spidery index finger, as though brushing something between us that isn’t quite there. “That’s too bad. We had so much fun together last time.”
Last time. Well, Cai, I found out about last time. Did you enjoy playing the wounded animal, circling down to the Neikotic Safety clinic, begging me remove the shards of Tenfold Gate that were lodged in your mind? Did you understand that I would linger there hours after closing up, keeping the Bridge warm, dreading and hoping for the rustle of the beaded curtain, wondering if I could really pull it off again? Did you relish dropping the plea from your voice, the little alchemy by which your request became routine, and gradually hardened into a command?
Dr. Ren told me that in the days after our Ripple’s suicide-bombing of Tenfold Gate, Cai was in the same state of psychosis that I was. We got the same treatment. She was right down the hall. He also told me sternly that he expected me not to bring this up now, not with the state she’s in. So I don’t. I content myself with wondering whether, if I slapped her hard across the face, it might be enough to trigger the precarious soberware mechanism. Whether, were I to look very carefully, I might see the flash in her eyes.
But I don’t do that, either. I’m her boss.
“You and I need to talk,” I tell her. A weak, flailing move. We’re already talking. My heart sinks as I watch the last of the moony gloss fade from Cai’s eyes. As she sees that weakness, slinks, and pounces.
“We’re already talking, silly.” She has me right where she wants me. She always does. “Hey. Let’s go downstairs. I’ve got something Dr. Ren doesn’t want you to see.”
I follow Mallochi’s wind-up messenger-bauble on foot, through Sea. I think I know where it’s taking me, and I know where that is on a map. But it feels important to linger at the intersections, waiting for it to reappear on the next display, and the next one. How you get there matters. Farther from the critical density of Xuhui, I pass through pockets of Shanghai where Epsilon City appears dim and blurry in the background, where the Ripples are yet unassimilated. They terrified me once, these wild things, ferociously vital and only vaguely alive. Now my heart aches for them. Do they understand what’s coming?
The Chalkers prefer to hold the Sea in their hearts, in deep wells of quadratic belief. And so the final blocks are thick with cameras, but have no Mirror Sea displays at all. I feel myself slipping across the lens, into warmth and depth and motion, just as Mallochi finds me and steadies my shoulders. I attune to a silence around me, not to be broken, and he presses a finger to his lips. But he also mouths: You okay?
My gut slides; nobody has asked me that in a while. I want to hug him for it — and in point of fact, I do. He seems surprised but receptive, but mostly he just is, neither pulling me in closer nor pushing me away. He offers something that will have me without question or reservation, something deep enough for one more. He smells like sawdust.
There’s something I want to show you.
I was right, and I was wrong, about where his bauble in the Sea was leading me. This is a triple point, miles away from the one he and Min inhabit. But, well, it’s not not that place, either. The Chalkers are the opposite of territorial. I pull my collar up, and we follow the breeze that makes its way up the block. It plays on tarps and tents, heavy flapping and low whistles. There’s something going on in there. But the thought is already harmlessly vague. There are people going in there. Lone men, whole families, with their pushcarts and shopping bags. My blood runs dense and hot, watching them turn a gentle bend into the heart of the triple point. I remember Mallochi had maybe mentioned something about a night market.
The Chalkers have what people need: vegetables and painkillers and pads. They have what people want, too: hot youtiao and lily-waft perfumes and little cartridges with three hundred hits of 4-AcO-MET. But much of what they have is not so easy to judge as vitamin or vice, necessity or nicety. You won’t know in the moment, or for many months, why it drew your eye, why it was pressed into your hand. Your money is no good in there; you just need to be brave enough to step inside. I scan the faces that pass me, inscrutable in the dark. I wonder how many are looking for a totemic seedling of a new life, and how many just need to eat.
And when I’m brave enough to step inside, sensation accumulates. Hot oil and and ripe fruit and pungent betel-nut linger long past the stimulus, myelinating the walls of my mind. No chatter, no laughter, no barter. Precious little light: of tiny, scrolling, monochrome displays, of blue-gas burners, of waxing moonglint on waxy mangoes. The lack is lucid. The mind finally free to consider rustling plastic, cool wind, the hundred different smells of shoes. No deliberation, no thinking twice. Decision, purchase, exchange, all made with loaded glance and portent gesture, objects simply taken, offered, swapped sight unseen in newspaper and twine. These thicken and blur into currents of exchange striated with desire and preference and ability and need, but whose? Just whose?
Above me, those red pinpricks, rubytears of blind eyes, the hum of the joy of uncountable new constellations, finally, a sky willing to watch back...
It takes on all the richness I let it. Glints spicedense and cherrydeep, abundance offered from all to all, wretched twice-salvaged toys, dice, rice, stationery, batteries, genzhe globes, a bewildering array of ferrous powders, the abstraction and extrusion of treasure, the glint of possibility and synchronicity, the bellyfelt goldmelt annealing of need and have into unfurling, expansion, pure motile force, the deep assurance that there is enough, so take, and give, and take again, don’t be so bashful of what you are, for even the stars are the raw fact of consumption, and there’s no need to look down upon the stars.
Above me the near-full moon, its distance lonestrange face humming and golden, its tendrils expanding over the fundamental, rich, warm, darkness of —
No, over this street, over the rustle of the ginkgos! Over the aftertastes in my mouth, over the weight in my hands! Over the sudden terror of trying to balance on two legs! And I am out the other side, turning over the intricate coincidence in my hands, the abstract way-thing, the color-flush hyperobject in this plastic shopping bag, the mingled relief and loss as I forget what I was meant to do with it, as it resolves into constituent pedestrian parts, into scissors and shave-gel and amphetamine drink-mix, and marble-sized prime-numbered voxelite buddhas, and a nearly intact conch shell, and a do-it-yourself dental kit. And a thumb drive labeled Summer Vacation. And six colors of felt-tip pen. And hundreds of Thai bhat in loose, jangling coins. And chamomile tea.
I clutch the shopping bag like a life preserver. I can’t bring myself to throw any of it away.
Cai leads me around what feels like six left turns, up and down a series of narrow half-staircases. The corridor is soundproofed to high heaven, deadening our footsteps. Research posters appear on the whitewashed walls at regulated intervals, their titles cryptic and tightly-wound, their meaning locked up in surface integrals and shanzi. Behind them comes a thick broadband hum of electricity. This building is innervated with Mirror Sea feeds from all over the city, and I have to admit to myself that I want to get into a scanner and look so, so badly.
My only navigational clue is that the left wall is bulging. We’re circulating a series of rooms built against the outer wall of the projection screen. A narrow, whitewashed hallway terminates suddenly at a small door with a porthole window. Cai peers inside; she fishes a blank access card from her hooded sail-canvas jacket. She also happens to find finds a saline spray-bottle in her pocket, and puts one spritz into each nostril.
“Tempt you?” A faint shudder passes through her, and she waves the pale-blue liquid at me.
“I — no, what even is that?”
“What is it?” She exhales into an low smile. “Such a Mona question. I always did like that about you. So are things going well with Dr. Deng? I really did miss you, actually, and listen, I can’t believe they never showed you this, but it’s only because they’re afraid of that old bitch, but you clearly know how to deal with her, so I don’t see the problem. I’m so excited to work together again. I never understood their reasoning. I mean, you’re the one who actually knows how to do it.”
“And...this one,” Cai chirps. In the absence of any kind of labels or placards, she’s been counting doors. “Don’t freak out, okay? Can you do that for me, Mona? Not freak out?”
“Yeah,” I lie. “Absolutely.”
“I actually don’t know how to turn the lights on in here,” she admits with a grunt, heaving the door open. “But I think it might be best if you don’t see the entire thing at once. For not freaking out purposes.” Her fingers crawl the wall by the door until she finds an emergency pen light, rips it from its velcro bay, and hands it to me. Click.
It’s a galley of a room, most of it disappearing around the Observatory’s circular bend, a laboratory in the classic and timeless mode. The floor is studded linoleum, and the near wall is lined with narrow workbenches and stools. Roll-shades, pulled down against prying eyes, admit only slivers of daylight. What brings me on a beeline is a line of plastic shelves, with hundreds and hundreds of tiny cubbyholes.
Each one is labelled, in the usual mishmash of coordinate systems, with a location in the Sea. And each houses a single piece of neikotic debris.
“Are you stealing from me?” It’s all I can think to ask, pulling the drawers open by the half-dozen with a trembling finger and thumb. “These are — some of these — okay, this one is definitely mine!”
“Keep your voice down,” Cai hisses, slapping drawers shut behind me. “And don’t flatter yourself. I mean — yes. We’ve been stealing from you. You have the biggest collection at the Institute. This isn’t what I wanted to show you, ben dan, look up!”
I swing my flashlight overhead, and that’s when I see it. There must be a million pieces of neikotic debris suspended form the ceiling, a jagged pileup of voxelite in every shape and color, all catching my narrow white beam in very fetching ways. The work is densely interlocking but half-hollow, forever-unfinished, and it sways gently under my awestruck gaze. Each individual piece claws for my attention; the thing that they make together floods my neikotic channels with a kind of colorful pop-rock fuzz. Spidery little robots are even now descending from gossamer strands with new pieces of debris, chittering across the model, rotating them experimentally to find out where they fit into the Bureau’s model of Epsilon City.
I take a quarter turn around it, struck by how it pulses between its vantages, how life and energy and novelty pervade even this lifeless and clattering model, how it draws my eyes through barnacled wormways that disappear into hidden and higher dimensions, and then into sudden and shockingly clear memory, sightless, yet divulged in electric orange and pink. I am squeezing my way through reef-stuff, and beginning to lose my way. In my extremities there is an unfamiliar stiffness. I am seeping into these crevasses, spreading myself too thin, when I brush against a surface which brushes back with imbued memory, which seems to {{say}} something. It is a map, fractal and selfsame, of the surrounding of the reef. It tingles to me: this way in.
But where is that neighborhood now? Another quarter turn and all I see is the fringes of that orange and yellow and purple, the heartbreak of a great architectural disaster that cuts all the way to the core.
“We were there.” This, following an extended silence pattered over by the spiders. The fact is offered as the weighted average of gratitude and vindication and betrayal and shame, and slid neutrally as though onto the workbench for our shared examination. So we are having this conversation. “You aimed me at it.”
“Yeah, well.” She snaps absently at a rubber band. “It was a little desperate. Nobody really knew until it happened whether it was gonna work. They were lucky to have me, and I was lucky to have you — so, you know, thank you for your service.”
“Cai, why? Just...why?”
“Because the Mirror Sea is a wild place, the last wild place —”
“But we killed all those Ripples!”
“Oh, but with all that debris? We saved thousands more. The Ripples swarm to it, they go rabid for it, but they can’t stomach it. They lose their hunting instincts. It calcifies them from the inside out and they die as part of the reef. And all for what? Because some Paracoin dipshits can’t be bothered to go in for a cleaning?” In the low light, she is chimeric. She shifts from shape to shape under her translucent skin, now apologetic, now proud, now and briefly like she wants to eat me alive. I shudder when she draws near. “Neikotic debris is pollution of heaven itself, Mona. Take pride in what you’re capable of.”
But I don’t know. I don’t know if I buy the misty-eyed naturalist shit. Slowly, reverently, I pass my flashlight back and forth over the voxelite above, watching it catch my beam in some very fetching ways. There are patterns in there, all right. I know I say that a lot. But I’ve spent too many hours turning these ones over in my hand.
“No-no-no,” I whisper, sinking into the sacred concavity of the moment, the collapse of other possibilities, as Epsilon City makes itself known to me again. I struggle for the words. “No, this is their place. They like it here, they’re safe here.”
“Safe,” Cai spits, “as in dead.”
“The entire coral reef is a great city! You have to see it. You’re telling me you don’t really believe it?”
“Alright.” I catch some recoil in her eyes when she hears the words, un-obfuscated, right from my mouth. “Alright.” She steps sidelong and carries me in her wake. With a palm below my elbow and fingers around my wrist, she aims my beam so it cuts even more suggestively, revealing thoroughfares and and shantytowns and a bric-a-brac radial skylines with a silhouette and a whisper. “Should I tell you the story that Ma and Ren told you? That they’re building a civilization in there? All they’d have to do is bootstrap a tileset. Imagine the math they have, the festivals they have, the gods they have...”
“They could really make anything,” I mumble with tardy agreement, already distant, focusing a little ways past the voxelite and letting my imagination do the rest. I forgot how damn good she is at this. She walks the tightrope between sanity and delusion like it’s twenty feet wide, running the Bureau’s linearization techniques in reverse, stirring the quadratic in me until every heartbeat goes up and up and up...
“I could tell you how it looks from loop-lock. I could try. I could tell you how it blooms into your tilespace when you find it. How you will be substrate, and you will like it. How when you come down you’ll be convinced that neikotics is their invention. But I won’t. Because they don’t make anything, or feel anything, because they’re just chopped-up light.” She makes an I-got-you gesture, a needle-meet-balloon gesture, a little pop of the lips. “Better that way.”
“Put me in a scanner.” I just had the ladder kicked out from under me, and this comes out tilted and desperate but clear and true. I need to see Epsilon City again. I need to know that it’s real. “Please. After what I did for you, you owe me, just put me in and let me decide for myself...”
“Bzzzt.” She circumambulates with four-four metronomic precision. “Bad word. Red flag.”
“...easy for you to say, you can go in there whenever you want, you’ve seen what it’s really like...”
“Bzzzt.” She leans in, and I can smell that fucked-up fruity toothpaste of hers, and she’s giving me a look like the stroke of a red pen. “You’re not modulating, Your hand’s still not on the dial. Do you see how easy this is to do to you?”
“Well then...” I plead. I do. “Well then, don’t!”
“But I have to. I won’t take orders from you if I don’t see you modulating. Ren and Ma aren’t modulating. They may not use the word in public, but they call it a city, they think of it as a city, and that’s how we lose. Human consciousness crushed to rubble under its own debris. Is that what you want?”
Cai leaves a few beat for me to answer, but I barely squeeze it in: “No. Of course not.”
“Then please.” And there is a please there in the shimmer. “Act like it.”
After the night market, Mallochi takes me through the Chalk to the roof of Old New Prosperity. He sets me up with a musty microfiber blanket and a chipped mug of my recently acquired tea. I slide six inches over and find an improbable depth of comfort on the concrete. And with my back still against the brick, I find the best hour sleep I’ve had in weeks. I phase back in to a gentle, periodic ker-thoink sound. Through stray, slick strands of hair, I see Mallochi bouncing a rubber ball against a concrete backstop. Ker-thoink. It ricochets off the ground, against the wall, and back into his hand. But I have become deeply unmoored, so that the cause-and-effect of ball, wall, gravity, and hand is…doing a thing. A stare into the dot and the lines will wiggle thing. A how do these lights get so tangled just sitting in the box thing.
“Could you please stop that…” I groan as I put palms to concrete and force myself onto my ass.
“Watch it move,” Mallochi tells me. Three short English words. He looks glad to hear me up and speaking. Ker-thoink. And something about watching the ball does it. It all reels up rather imperfectly, but Mallochi and Mona snap back into focus. He grimaces. “I feel bad about the state I left you in the other day.”
“I kinda think that I was the one who left you.”
“I should have warned you before I put you in. Don’t take it right to the head,” he says, gluing English to Mandarin by way of French. “In there you need to be perceiving things obliquely, yeah? Not looking directly at them.”
I have only an inkling of what he means, so I choose to keep focusing on the ball. “It bounces?” I ask. Because, thanks to a glint of moonlight, I’ve realized it’s actually one of his Sieve orbs. “The Sunflower Sieve bounces.”
“Nothing in the Soup about it yet.” Ker-thoink.
“No one’s tried dropping one, I guess.”
Ker-thoink. “Could be your next big paper.”
The orb hits his palm with a satisfying smack. For a minute of pleasant silence, through an unlikely gap in the skyline, we enjoy a clear view of distant and twinkling Pudong. Blurry Ripples crawl the twist of the Haojie Tower. Close by, the nightclub Wu Ke Nai He is just rumbling to life, throwing off the embryonic basslines of a party that will last well past dawn.
“Back there, at the night market.” I struggle to formulate the question. “When I...when you...is it true that some people just live like that? Like the Ripples’ puppets? I’m sorry if that’s offensive.”
He offers a harder edge. Not quite a sharp one. “Mona — I can call you that, yes?”
“Well, it’s sure as shit not Dr. Xu,” I lob back, but politely. I have the egg now and I’m enjoying its ker-thoink.
“Mona, did you feel like a puppet? Back there?”
I consider the question for a little while. “I felt more like a place.”
He nods. “It is vanity to imagine that the same Ripple would want to inhabit you forever. Once you see them, you can chase them, or try to beat them out of your head, or...” And he gestures downward at the improbable place he calls home. “But it’s not common that one would stay for years.”
“Years?”
My question is about him, and he knows it, and he deflects it. “They come, they go.” And he casts a glance at my right arm. In the right light, in the moonlight, you can still make out the remains of my lasered-off sigil tattoo. “But I think you already know that.”
“The Chalk is different,” I protest.
“The Chalk is very different.” There is pride in his voice. “Do you know, when you’re bleeding out on the sidewalk beside a nightclub, with no ward alignment, who will treat you? Without a fuss, without getting the bluelights involved? Chalker hospitals.” This was not a phrase I expected to hear. He catches my surprised blink and doubles down. “Do you have any idea how big the cracks are in this city? Oh, it’s easy to get a YZID, and you can walk up and down the Bund until you starve to death. But if you add up the population of all the wards, you don’t get the population of Shanghai. Not even to the million.”
“No.” I protest. I don’t know why, especially after what I’ve just seen. But a million Chalkers?
“Yes.” The pride is growing. “The Chalk works. The Sea works. It can be counterintuitive. It requires a little give-and-take. But I believe the Ripples deserve a chance. If pressed, I might even say that this is their time.”
I whip the Sunflower Sieve egg at the wall, feeling relief at the predictable way it moves under familiar forces. Resenting that: wishing for a wider mind, with ample space to fit new ways of seeing as they come. The ball takes a weird hop. Flies past my face and into Mallochi’s outstretched palm. Slowly, then suddenly, I understand.
“You leaked it! At Double Descent, when you...you meant to do that!”
Mallochi grins, temple to temple, as though this were mere mischief. “Lobbing the egg into that crowd was not part of any sort of detailed scheme. I imagined I might just scan it and upload it to the Soup myself. But I never did mean to hold onto it. Just waited to see what course it wanted to take.”
“That’s...but...” I gesture out towards the city beyond Triple Point, at loss for words. “It’s nuts out there right now!”
“For now. They’ll learn, like we learned. This is not the end of anything. It’s what I showed you, with better tools.”
“You can’t possibly know that!”
“Do you think the Sunflower Sieve should have stayed in the hands of the banks?”
“That’s not...”
“Or the Weather Bureau? Do you think they would not have harvested it for soberware they deem only themselves fit to use? Even now they are using your inversion against Epsilon City. It’s only eating at the edges, yes, but they will find a way to amplify your pattern in their service.” He weighs the orb in his palm. “So now we come to it. Is that something that you want to let happen, Mona? Because, if not, you have my support.”
I tell him everything. It spills out of me, less viscous or coherent than water. I tell him about Dr. Ren and Captain Ma and Cai Duofan. I tell him about Tenfold Gate, and I try to explain how Cai inhabited Anemone Pop, steered it into the reef that became the city, but I can’t quite make it make sense in words. I tell him what the Observatory really is, and what the Neikotic Safety department really is. And about how, now that I’ve cracked their one-way mirror, they’ve put me in charge of their clockwork war against Epsilon City and its inhabitants.
Mallochi looks me over with such a serious eye that for a moment I worry I’ve made a mistake, even a fatal one. And then he bursts out laughing. It’s not disbelief. It’s just...funny. Contagiously, even. If you know how to look at it.
“Have they fitted you for a visor?”
“Oh, fuck off, man!”
“Do you think you could get me a Weather Bureau visor?”
“Well...” And I have to stop laughing, consciously, to catch a breath. “Yeah. Probably.”
“And am I to understand that you could turn me in, right now, if you wanted?”
“I mean, I could try. If you want the exercise.” I flex my wrist, to show him my new wanji. “But wait, I haven’t even gotten to...”
I haven’t even gotten to the other part. I tell him about Dr. Deng. About all the things that happened that weren’t in those biographies he read. About how — best we can surmise — she’s responsible for fifteen deaths, and this entire mess to boot. I try to keep my voice from cracking. I haven’t really thought about Deng, not so directly, in days.
“And now she says...?”
“Nothing.” The mirth is gone from my voice. “She says nothing.”
Beside me, Mallochi whistles. “Well now I really want to meet her.”
I stare east across the river.
Later on, Cai takes me to the roof of the Observatory. She and I lean against the top of the dome, and watch the Bureau’s medivac veetles ascend, descend, ascend from the lawn below.
“You’re cold,” she informs me, watching the shiver in my hands. “You’re freezing.”
“Didn’t you say you brought a blanket?”
She did, and she reaches into her knapsack to wrap it over my shoulders. But we quickly abandon the pretense. Her lips graze mine as we share a smile, trying haphazardly to keep each others’ eyes in view. I feel her entire body collapse with relief as my hands, still shivering, find her hips and stay there. I feel that power over her. And, satisfied with that, I allow it to flow both ways.
“Open your mouth.” She fumbles in her pocket and produces a baggie with a couple of pills. “I think you really need this. After everything you’ve been through recently.”
I think know what it is. And I think she might be right. By the time it hits, though, it’s a pleasant surprise on top of a wave of pleasant surprises. And it hits and hits and hits — this one isn’t good for loop-lock, either, and it’s been a while since I’ve had occasion — until I’m glad for the breeze, glad for the blanket, glad for every single sensation that runs over and through my body. It’s one more knot that I’ll have to untie tomorrow morning, but right now I’m glad for Cai. She was home, once.
“Wait.” I have her head in the crook of my neck, and it reminds me of another moment, and I realize that moment was just a few short blocks away. “Do you still have the old apartment?”
“Oh, fuck no.” She laughs. “And you know what? It’s fucked up, but I’m glad you gave me a reason to move. The new place is much, much nicer.”
“Mmm.” Time elapses. “Cai, what are you?”
“I’ll give you five guesses.”
“No, I mean, what were you before you were this?”
A twitch passes through her. “I really, really don’t want to talk about that right now.”
“Okay.”
“But I’m sorry I was such a bitch to you earlier. About Epsilon City. It’s fine to call it that. I’m not going to get mad at you. I just...I feel like I’m the only person here who understands that we’re on the right side of the lens.”
This thought, just now, is a little heavy. “Okay.”
“And I’m sorry to be a bitch to you again right now.” More time elapses, as she fishes around with a splayed hand for her knapsack, and draws it closer, and pulls something out. “My team found this at Double Descent the other night. We know you were there. We know Mallochi Okeme was there, too.”
My heart drops as I see what she’s holding, the corkscrew of it, the gold-fleck of it.
She makes a distasteful little ack sound at the taste of accusation on her tongue. “I don’t want you to worry. I’m not going to tell Ren or Ma. I don’t think it will help. But I know you know where he is. I think you’re keeping in contact with him. And when the time is right...” She squeezes my hand. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” I sigh. “Okay.”
I stare west across the river.