A YEAR AGO IN SPRING

Even Cai was shaking, sweating, spent, on what was to be our last night.

I remember four hours of sleep in the basement of a hotel. Anemone Pop drifted uncomfortably through our dreams, occupying all but the very recesses of our minds. Its restless discomfort was perhaps too alien to fathom, but then again it bound exactly to the contours of our own: the sting of soap on scraped knees, the the shirk of a surplus cot after days and days on pavement, the incessant beat of laughter from the lobby bar just above us. It was brooding in the recesses of the reef. It was using these senescent hours to gather its resolve.

I remember boarding a veetle. Too many of us in there, a collage of fixpoint textures and heavy packs and grinding teeth. The craft was Blue Delta surplus, or probably salvage. Even emptied of seats, it beeped in protest at our collective weight as it heaved us into the air. We grabbed for the ceiling straps, caught each other by chance velcro collisions, laughed nervously as our addled minds struggled to hold the rudiments of a plan. I remember my body screaming in fear, demanding an end to this. My mind trying to soothe it, pulling on the tangled strings by which the two were still tenuously joined. I remember catching Cai’s eye, seeing on her face alone some tight lucidity, and watching her promise me without words: I still see you. You, of all these people, I will not let come to harm.

What I remember next is a long weightlessness in which the coral reef spread out around me.

Up close or far away? It was the wrong question, with how the reef was the same at every scale. It was every color all the time, but it was resolving into a vibrato red-orange. Ripples squeezed through its crevices and schooled over its plasticine crenelations with an easy, clockwork calm. But for Anemone Pop, this came with a sick sense of mutual rejection, an outsider’s haunted gaze. It had been drawn downwards, transformed against its will, and could not assimilate. I tried to soothe what little of the Ripple I could. 

I tried to show it the beauty of those weightless and bumping fragments, sprouting stacks and spires. How it gave them common purpose, how it mollified the tides that foamed and lashed at their edges. This was how things were to be now, I understood, just barely feeling the cold in my fingers, the wind in my face. There would be a quiet surrender like an exhalation, and then would be no more bodies, no more hurt, no more cruel vagaries of chance. They had solved it in there. With a little push, the rest of Shanghai would see it too.

Shanghai.

I blinked. I saw that we were thousands of meters above the city in utter free fall. I was strapped to Cai’s front and oh fuck, we had jumped, when had we jumped? The other Ripplechasers were scattered in pairs around us, an anti-constellation of tiny, tumbling silhouettes against the foggy wall of light pollution below. Sparse veetles beaded the skylanes, and one would hit us, I was sure of it. I managed briefly to crane my neck backwards, saw blinking red dots in Cai’s goggled eyes — was she streaming this? — but the maneuver almost sent us spinning. She forcefully reset my limbs. I think she spoke to me through something in my ear. Something like, stay with me Mona, we’re almost there.

Almost where?

She pulled our chute. We angled diagonally into the fog at a stinging speed. Twice, a veetle shot just in front of our descent, a terror only in retrospect. A bluelight cruiser even put its flashers on, but to alter course and chase us would have been reckless madness. We punctured a layer of delivery drones, honest-to-god near misses. Then another of stationary surveillance quad-rotors — some of these were watching clearly, but just as many, even up here, were eyes of the Mirror Sea. I tried to follow their lead, to blur my vision and shave away the sharp edges of what was happening in this body, this moment, until the reef swam back into focus. Cai locked her arms around me in reassurance. The reef, Mona, your only job is to believe...

The fog thinned. We were already below the skyline, visible as brief stuttering flashes in garishly reflective windows. Cai pulled hard, steering us, guiding us, bringing us into alignment with the other Ripplechasers. We were third or fourth in a loose line. Balls of flailing limbs leading gaudy coral chutes. We were, I realized, about to strike the conch-edged upper spire of a very famous building, its terrarium interior gently awash with light.

Two hundred feet in front of me, one of our number came within range of the building’s apex, a crested interrobang of glass gargoyles, zodiacal spirits and guardian sprites. They fired. A gaseous thwoosh; a large projectile; a silent shower of glass. Cai yanked hard, then too hard, then pushed my legs up and dangled hers in preparation to catch the floor. There was a tumble and a tangle. We fell three stories through a tiered, verdant atrium, smacked this way and that by ancient ferns, our chutes lost in the canopies of rare trees. A blur of shock and terror. An osseous thump but no crunch, and I was face down screaming into a field of purple carpet. In other words, alive. 

The dome we had punched a hole in was a thirty meters above us. The tiers of greenery below, joined by waterfall staircases, were overhung with pleasantly dim floodlights and dense red candelabras of Mirror Sea cameras. That many, arranged like great compound eyes overlooking a private indoor space — it was downright dangerous, it was the kind of decadence the Weather Bureau only tolerated when paid to look the other way. But money was no object anywhere here; it dripped from the teak paneling and polished brass and golden-purple silk streamers. The scent of lavender and honey met my canal-and-disinfectant stench. My desperate panting became a laugh, which probably turned very quickly into a hacking cough. I rolled over and very briefly came to understand where, in the usual sense, we had landed. We had found our way into the top floors of the Haojie Tower.

Then I looked into the eyes of two hundred terrified neikonauts and saw only the coral reef.

For weeks we had trailed Anemone Pop as it dove the Mirror Sea deep, offering in its passing vistas more than a single mind could hold, as wound through deeper through the reef’s every crack and fissure. It had taken untold hundreds of us on its journey, swelling in size until it had been spotted on displays in every ward. Sometimes we could imagine we were steering it; mostly we were gripping for dear life to its fringes. But tonight, Cai and I were its beating heart. With the Ripple’s grim agency, with its very mass, we reached out and touched the seed that the reef was grown from. We had reached its very center.

And what were we here to do? A story briefly cohered. We were the leading edge of a psychic tidal wave, here at last to crash down on the people who ran the city. Not the cowering, two-faced Blue Delta magistrates who pulled broken levers of power from the safety of City Hall, but the neikotic elite whose very minds were interlaced with trade flow, who could make and break Shanghai’s fortune sixteen times in the span of a ragged and unfeeling breath. We carried our message in the lithe and slinking way our bodies moved as one: there was no longer a reason to play these human games at human scale, when we had it all figured out on the other side of the lens. Perhaps, I reasoned, we were here to help them anneal, let go, and relax into the current. The entire city is a great coral reef.

At this weightless apex, for one last beautiful moment, it all made perfect sense. 

Now if you’re interested in what everyone else was seeing just then, there was plenty of clearside footage of that night. There were two hundred people at that little soirée, and most of them were wearing Contecs. So, for instance, you can watch the first impact through the eyes of a cellist who hits one last slanderous note as the string quartet tumbles from its nest of suspended aerial silks.

Ten seconds later, into the other side of the atrium, you can watch a second stream of Ripplechasers make landfall through the eyes of an ex-PLA embedded funds manager. As a wall of glass explodes behind him, right behind him, he instinctually executes a duck-and-roll away from the new six-meter hole in the tower. Perfect reflexes, except that he forgets he’s wearing a cloak of astrological embroidery, and he trips sideways into a precarious cairn of off-gassing dried ice. He reaches for a weapon he hasn’t carried in twenty years.

The third impact was us. And, for better or worse, the best footage of our arrival came to light in the investigation that followed. As the ceiling shatters, a member of Haojie private security draws his pistol and fires three rounds into the chasers who made landfall just behind me. He kills one instantly and sends two more to the ground clutching their buttocks and thighs. If you zoom way in, look past the rubber fins and the face stuck with sequins, you can see blurry old me. Turning my head in glassy-eyed confusion. I had spent weeks with the Ripplechasers bleeding out on the floor behind me, and I didn’t even know their names. I did not resolve them as individuals.

Cai Duofan didn’t spare a glance. She took me by the arms and hoisted me like a payload. I had not seen her eat in six or seven days, and I don’t know where she found the strength. The chaos, the violence, the screams, it was cutting into the edges of my perception, but I was still resolving the world around me as coral. At most I felt her as a distant and tactile presence, cutting our lines, unbuckling our chute. We were still connected by a bungee cord, and I almost ate carpet as she led me into the panicking crowd, artfully dodging the bead of another sidearm...

Dodging the Weather Bureau, too. They might as well have materialized from the wallpaper. They raised needle-tipped vialguns, and their first act was to send the trigger-happiest of the Haojie armsmen foaming and convulsing to the ground. You idiots, we need them alive. Then they fired on sluggish Ripplechasers still on the outskirts, putting darts in three with their faceless precision, and knocking down more with well-placed knees to groins and stomachs.

But Cai was outrunning them; I was her wake. One, two, three calculated sidesteps was all she needed to draw the gossamer web of glances into her fingers, working them like a cat’s cradle. There were no more explosions of glass, no more shots fired; the screams were losing to the damp howl of the wind. Abject panic was giving way to curiosity. This was a tough crowd to shock, and it was not totally out of the question that someone here had arranged this as a ten-million-ping practical joke. A strange thought rippled through the crowd, and with a sweeping glance, Cai tied it into a beguiling bow that hung in the air around us: were we tonight’s entertainment?

I don’t think she ever stopped moving. But she did something with her costume, sending a shimmering cascade of scales down its sides, and she had the room in rapture. We were turning back-to-back in tight circles, deepening her vortex of attention, and I was near the center but not quite, so I was spinning fastest of all. I reached for purchase in the minds of our captive audience, and scraped terribly along that porous and calcified roughness, beautiful from a distance, rough and deadly up close.

“Mona,” Cai rasped. “What are you looking at?”

I answered same as always. Never these exact words, always their silhouette. But I caught myself off guard, sent myself spinning, with the order in which they came out: “The entire coral reef is a great city.”

It never felt as physically real to me as it did just then. This crowd was seeing it too, I was sure. Of course Anemone Pop was not the only Ripple here; they peeked from the coral with exactly the same sly curiosity of Haojie’s trade-engine architects. But for us to inhabit a single Ripple like this, so purely, with such coterminal finesse — it was suggestive. Seductive. Haojie knows what it is to channel unbridled power, longs constantly for a soberspace spectacle to rival loop-lock, and so a fat numerator of them broke into callous applause. Cai and I glowed and heaved in their nearsighted blessing, their eyes tracking the peripheral flickering of this great delusion. We had them in our grasp. 

But our Ripple was here of its own grim volition. It buckled and fluxed with obscure and igneous triumph. The Bureau’s risky potshots towards the chasers only focused more of its thrust through Cai and I, where each and every eye was further drawn. Anemone Pop began to push itself into the solid body of the reef.

Something familiar and terrible began to grow inside me.

The feeling was permeation, and the permeation was negation, and the negation was inversion.

I tried to beat it back. I tried to tamp it down. But the mental motions were automatic now, cued on a matched pattern and triggered by a part of my brain — the part that could operate the Deng Bridge — over which I exerted no conscious control. I closed my eyes and saw red and orange coral and at a distance of zero, zero feet, zero meters, zero pixels, zero tiles. Maybe the similarities were incidental and mild, but they gained speed down quadratic sluiceways, the Sea’s tidal surjections by which many become one, by which nuance is made simple and numbingly sweet. The more I looked, the more I saw.

The reef looked too much like Tenfold Gate debris.