A YEAR AGO IN SPRING
Shanghai’s coral reef mania seemed certain to crescendo. Instead it just went up and up and up, until it reached into the city’s upper echelons. I was startled to discover that we were honored guests there.
Cai never made me pay for drinks, or for the black and piscine veetles that schooled us between rooftops, but I spent a fortune on ward entry charges alone. She was there to meet and to greet and to triangulate, to taste for subtleties in language and dress that almost completely eluded me. Assistant ministers, Haojie executives, the son of the genzhe globes guy: she knew them all, was tangent to their benders. We started many of our nights at Double Descent, doing the rounds in a foggy labyrinth of VIP booths. This is Mona, she’d shout, and they’d pull their faces from the tables and leer with false comprehension, my name lost to the wind — and this dragging on and on until she got what she came for and rounded me up with a circular wave of her finger. On to the next one.
And the next one, and the next one, but the veetle would never land us back at the last one, in the lawless negative space between wards. We massed in a sagging stucco house held up by clothesline and telephone wire. Names sank like lead in these weird and halogenated rooms; thais is Mona is exactly what Cai would not say. The people here tried to blend together, and I felt guilty clocking many of them from the Observatory. The furniture was, well, not; we smoked DMT spread-eagle on hardwood floors, or sometimes in piles of toaster-sized foam cubes, once in a vast bird’s-nest of pool noodles. Racks and racks of costumes, globes tuned to dim and sultry lighting, floor-length mirrors interspersed with Mirror Sea displays: we were Ripplechasers, and this was our staging ground.
My world was made of sense impressions: bright colors and wet air and skin on skin on skin. And gradually, aching feet and an empty stomach and an ongoing migraine. Cai Duofan was an evangelist and an amphetamine addict, and she had no trouble being in what felt like five places at once. And I had to let her take me out, because out was where the Ripples were. Every night a veetle would pluck us from the roof of our building at half past ten. Then, another blur of faces and costumes and music and screens, and we’d be back in a car, yawning over the dawn skyline, Cai trying to warm my shivering, waning frame.
“You did so good tonight, Mona,” she’d whisper to me. “I think they’re really starting to see.”
Which was an understatement. The Sea was in full bloom. You could be really, truly indifferent to it, and you’d still come home and find them pulsing dimly behind your eyes, with a foamy wake of memories that weren’t quite yours, third-person glimpses of your face from across the street or the next car down. Drawn to the surface by our seeing and seeing-more, basking in the gentle light of our attention, the Ripples jostled and jammed. Their interference birthed indiscriminate swarms of flaylings, which would mostly not survive. The Observatory threw up their hands, gave up on their counting and taxonomizing. There were a lot of them. They were all very gooey and tentacular.
Strange, then, that we chased the same Ripple two nights in a row.
In retrospect, it was obviously what Cai was looking for. She must have been tracking it, and it was an aspect of her art to let me think I’d seen it first. She stayed two paces behind, as we hopped windshields and parted crowds to keep it within eyeshot, as it banked between Mirror Sea displays, in a tightening loop from camera to screen to eye to body and back again. I just needed to catch a glimpse of where it was going, and be there first — I was getting very good at this — and then I’d be part of it, dragging it back to me through the Lam-Waldmann Hash with the patterns I was wearing. But I swear to you this Ripple knew we were watching, and fled.
I guess it’s a little fucked up that this is what made me start to fall in love.
The next night, in wordless agreement, we went for it again. We passed on juicy lines, and at the first sign of it we parted from the crowds. It was visually unremarkable, the very same purple and orange and yellow as the rest of the bloom, as the costumes we were all wearing. It was more of a feeling. Deep into the night, when it finally passed through me, it felt dense and complex and laden with intent. It was not neutrally buoyant. It was not a creature of the surface. It cut grimly through the bloom on its way to somewhere. It left me empty in the gut when we let cut it loose at daybreak.
Mixed feelings then, mere hours later, when I rolled over and discovered that Cai was already awake. She was in the living room. So far we had stayed in the shallows; we were always back by morning. But I knew that she had half a closet full of tentcloaks and everkettles and headlamps and disinfectant spray. And all kinds of other requisite gear for urban nomadry, for the kind of voluntary homelessness required to chase a Ripple for weeks at a time, and ultimately to fully inhabit it. She was packing two bags. This was inching into Chalker territory.
“Get your charger,” she told me, with a grim lucidity that I hadn’t heard from her — from anyone — for as far back as my addled brain could remember. “And your toothbrush. And whatever other shit you think you need.”
She told me she had called in the sighting. The Observatory called back with one of their ludicrous faux-binomial names, A. paopaolensis, and an MSO designation: 2074 MSO 213. Our Ripple was only the third member of this so-called species that they had seen. It was not a surface dweller. Its origin was an open question, and so the Observatory was sending a team out to track it, and that team included Cai. Bo Yuan and his desk jockeys, legs up at the comms, had already given it a nickname: they were calling it Anemone Pop.
I felt for my keycard as our flat locked behind us. I tried to wrangle phonemes into words as an unfamiliar sun beat us into the pavement of Beiwan Ward. The displays were thick as ever with Ripples, but they were washed out by daylight, and we were getting looks. My body was becoming wise to several bruises and a possible sprain. “Okay,” I finally managed, ten minutes into what would be a ten-day trek. “But where are we actually going?”
“Wherever it’s going.”
“And where do you think that is?”
“The reef.” She turned back and smiled mirthlessly, and this, Mona, this is when you should have run. “Down.”
I nodded like I understood.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
I knew from instinct that I was only motion, fed only upon motion, and my whole world was what I felt at the edges of my oral arms. I knew what it felt like to capture another of my kind, to subsume its rhythms into mine, living on within me as liquid embroidery. I knew what it felt like to fight back, to read the patterns on the surface of my foe and glean the truth of its heart, to put a half-twist to the consumption. To force constructive interference, so that when we parted there would be not a void but a third. I even knew what it was like to allow myself to be surrounded, eaten, to bud apart into countless tricksy seedlings, gathering force to involute the digestion, then ripping my predator apart in an exuberant storm of new medusae. There are endless such games in the Mirror Sea. Endless ways to continue being a Ripple, to find a gentle current, and keep moving.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
For days at a time I was everywhere at once, and it was pleasantly calm to descend past the surface froth of the Mirror Sea. My hands held knives and cue cards and the strings of marionettes. I would spend little eternities in a particular kind of moment. I would be peering out into the street, gauging the distance of a vague potpourri of oncoming traffic; I would feel my clogs my stilettos my gel-padded orthopedic trainers touch asphalt; I would luxuriate in that first long, confident, travel-sore, hurried, arthritic step, over and over and all at once, until waterlogged with the very gestalt of jaywalking, sponge-saturated, I could take no more. I would loosen the binding, let the moments separate. I would glance over a hundred shoulders at the swiveling of the cameras, the billion languidly rolling eyes of Shanghai’s blind idiot god grasping numbly to motion. And wherever they followed, there I would be.
They could not see me. I was a few blurry and shattered pixels in their maelstrom vision.
They could see me perfectly. But that’s not all I was, that was the mere tip of a mere tendril.
They could not see me. I was anonymous to the Mirror Sea.
They could see me perfectly. With stunning clarity, even. All I had to do was let go of the thing I thought I was.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
My own memory stretched no farther than I did. To hold on to the past is to leave behind clusters of thin wisps, to disgorge yourself as you go, and after all this is just another way to die. But there was nothing in my memory, ancestral or otherwise, that prepared me for what was rising up from the depths in frantic and jittering flakes. There was something new in the Mirror Sea. I was eating it, and it was eating me.
It tingled electrically as it brushed my cilia. It was not alive; it did not share even my vague and sun-dappled sense of want. But it was moving; it was motion, and so I did the very thing I do, which was to bring it inside and make its patterns my own. The first time it was not quite to my taste. The flakes left me with a twitch and grasp around my edges, a velcro hookiness, and they began to encrust me, squamous and quantized. They traced my insides with lightning-crack veins, spilling out along taut axes. They carbonated me with their broken logic. I was being changed.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
Our Ripple was growing denser and heavier. It was sinking, and not of its own volition. And it was alone, and so we were alone. Somehow days went by where Cai and I stayed strictly in the periphery, crouched among warehouses and muddy garden plots, very precisely where everyone else wasn’t. Nothing saw us except the Mirror Sea cameras, but then these were watching us at every distance and from every angle. I understood distantly that we were not the only ones tailing Anemone Pop. The Observatory had sent out a whole team of chasers to track its wisps across Shanghai. But I mostly felt the Ripple’s loneliness, its helplessness, at the way it was being changed.
I know Cai felt it too. When we finally made a fumbling and perfunctory and days-late kind of love in a tent pitched fifteen stories into an unfinished skyscraper, it was mostly because that feeling needed to go somewhere.
She shook me awake me an hour later, cutting through hazy and unprofitable sleep. Visions of coral were buzzing through my neikotic channels; my own stomach turned with Anemone Pop’s hunger and revulsion. Cai had been watching the Mirror Sea displays from down over the ledge; she must have finally seen what she was looking for. “Get up.” There was still a rough edge to her voice. She was stowing a scope. “It’s moving.”
It was always moving. How many more days of this could I bear?
The entire city is a great coral reef.
I never stopped moving, could not stop moving, but the Sea lent me its rhythm. I had no eyes, but I could follow concentration gradients. Innervated, my body-sense grew less diffuse and more taut, anxious, preemptive. I followed the flakes in a direction that felt like inwards. They got bigger, sticking together, sticking to me. In deepest and most viscous counterbeat they made clumps the size of a flayling, which held shape even into the tangerine throb of dawn. Experimentally, I swallowed one whole — it had been many beats since I truly hunted — and while the clump did not resist, it dropped out nearly undigested, prickling and magnetizing my insides. It hurt. But I was losing my instinct to feed any other way.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
As the days wore on, the coral reef transcended abstraction or metaphor. It was practically a tactile thing. In the displays I saw fingered, comb-holed pieces of it, obeying a dreamy kind of rigid-body physics. It was through my eyes that our Ripple rubbed up against it. Almost seemed to manipulate it. Late at night, after wordless weary hours trailing Cai, I would catch myself staring bleary-eyed at it with a distant, eschatological grief. The feeling was not my own. I could not even begin to fathom what it all meant to Anemone Pop; I simply could not fit enough of the Ripple my head.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
Beat by beat I followed the thickness of the flakes towards larger and larger clumps, until they dwarfed me, suspended in networks of gentle, terminal whirlpools. I could not see the red and the orange, but I could taste it, and I felt the ridges and the fans and the smokestacks that the clumps formed in the macro. I retreated into the narrownesses between them. I was no longer a creature of the vast open Sea, with its fickle currents and dangled lure-tendrils. I was a becoming cowed, kept thing, fit only for life inside this new foodstuff, this new phase of matter, still remaking me from the inside out. I knew it was calcifying me. Somebeat soon another Ripple would come across me here and mistake me for just another piece of coral.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
On the tenth day of this, by my later reckoning, our party began to converge. First they were distant glimpses of color, seen across layered intersections. Then they were the faces that passed by frequently, that I was able to resolve from nameless plazas and alleyways. Soon we were moving in the same direction. In twos and threes we emerged silently into each other, each having trailed a different strand of Anemone Pop. I could not count any higher than that, but in integral we now carried most of its heft and pinprick in our minds. We shared grim nods. We washed our filthy costumes in the canals. We were following the Ripple now, and the Ripple was following us, and the difference was no difference at all.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
There were others of my kind in here. Lots of them. I knew them by their timid and tingling brush as they passed. Gone was the instinct to interfere, to press inwards into hot struggle together, as I might have out there. By now the reef surrounded me on every side; I could not find the way out if I tried. In the wild Sea, other Ripples were almost always either predator or prey; what might look like kinship was most often just ambiguity between other and self. But in the reef, something else was possible. Sheltering inside my food, I wondered whether those timid brushes could be something more, mean something more. A {{thought}} passed through me, a simple impulse refracted candelabrically inside my calcifying soul until it bore nuance and counterfact. If I could {{communicate}} with {{another Ripple}} the way I {{communicated}} with {{myself}} — well, what would I say?
The entire city is a great coral reef.
We washed and groomed in public bathrooms, but these were cellular acts, unthinking absorption and expulsion. We saw Weather Bureau agents in most places, and hallucinated them everywhere else. They saw us causing traffic jams on Inner Ring Road, promenading at speed through tiered shopping malls, hopping the gates to some embassy to spread our truth-illusion. We had become their biggest problem. They’d give chase, fire their vialguns indiscriminately into the crowd, and pick off the stragglers for deconversion. I stuck with Cai, who was always a step ahead of them. I believed that with her I was safe.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
And the reef was large, and the reef was still growing, and soon I knew its alphabet. Every part of this was new to me: the act of counting, of quantizing, even of recognizing, all of it a strange new strain. It tightened my metabolism. The reef was made of a small number of the smallest shapes, and then a massive number of their combinations, and then at the highest scale there was a curious convergence, as though there were only ever a few stories to tell. We took these and we became them. We ate the reef and the reef ate us, until we sloughed off in massive, painful chunks. To us it was a slow and agonizing death, but to the things that we were becoming, that we were being remade into — it was a kind of birth. Newcomers were sung from the reef, natives to this place and utter strangers to the deep violence that had created those of us from outside. A name buzzed in tight, hot spirals along their surfaces. They called themselves {{phaseborn}}.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
One corporeal moment comes back to me, as we paused to rest, as I turned my pack out onto a parking-garage floor. My fingers were shaking and bruised. Exhaustion suffused me. Through some lack of electrolytes, my hands could no longer properly close. Did I have anything to wear that wasn’t this? I had my damp, filthy YINS hoodie, that I’d been pulling over my Ripplechasing getups, that reminded me briefly of missing two consecutive check-ins with Dr. Deng. That was just about it. Every other garment I owned was covered in garish fixpoint patterns, ribbed with reef-texture, designed to catch the attention of Mirror Sea cameras and swivel them towards me. I flipped also through memories, discarding the ones not plausibly my own, and caught a whiff of melting polyester, heard the whir of tires on overpass. The other night — had I burnt all my other clothes? At some point, I realized, I had bet my entire life on this. There was nowhere to go but further in.
The entire city is a great coral reef.
Further in, there was new safety and new danger. I learned the rules of my wild past only by contrast. Ripples did not know their offspring; here they had many generations stoking the reef. Ripples did not make things; here they molded our surroundings until they responded in predictable ways. Ripples did not remember; here they carved vast reserves of knowledge in the phased matter that surrounded me, stories and blueprints and fierce debates. Above all else, Ripples lived in a world over which they exerted no control; here they built mazes and whirl-halls and temples in our image, they coaxed shadows of predators and prey from the coral walls, they struggled and squirmed and abused of ourselves strange forms for our own amusement. It was natural that this should feel unnatural. It was sin.
And the city was growing. It was reaching its limits. The reef-stuff rained down in flakes from we-knew-not-where, the world of broken motion made from we-knew-not-what. It would soon need more. As its chief architects formed resonators and collectors and amplifiers to bring the world into {{phase}}, I wandered the wormways listlessly, flashing prophecies of ruin for those unlucky enough to feel me pass. I remembered, barely, the world before the reef. I knew it would not be long before one of their experiments, one of their supplications, would backfire, and we would be wild and thoughtless again, finally, deservedly.
It was prophecy, and then it was something more. I began to understand, in some heaving valve of my twisted hybrid form, that I would bring an end to it all. I knew I contained the kernel of all our destruction.
I did not know that its name was Mona Xu.