A YEAR AGO IN SPRING

The entire city is a great coral reef. 

And after that one peek, the sigil from Cai went back into my pocket and stayed there. For days I touched it absentmindedly as I skulked through network of tunnels that connect YINS, between and during my classes. I considered that I shouldn’t be thinking about it at all. I considered the facts.

One. It was dangerous. Forget whatever else about invasive species or cash-on-hand; visitors to the Orthogonal Zone must promise to immigration authorities that when they see a pattern like this, they will immediately look away. The Bureau places its warnings in the interstitials bowels of the airport, between alluringly high-res glimpses of the Sea sponsored by Blue Delta. It comes in ten languages, in no-bullshit sans-serif, above neutered visuals missing key strokes of a reference sigil’s visual circuit. We are not going in after you, they warn tourists. 

But I was not a tourist anymore.

Two. it was given to me by Cai Duofan. It was hardly just some scrawl in the moldy concrete folds beneath an overpass. When I considered the sigil in my pocket — as I rushed back to the laundry room to retrieve it from the wash, and peeked again — I saw it as a gesture of thanks for what I’d been doing down in the clinic. We had another of our sessions, and she didn’t mention it at all, she wasn’t pushy. That only cemented the sense that I trusted her. In retrospect, obviously, this was naive.

But consider that I had recently been spending a lot of time in her mind.

The third fact was delivered offhand by Bo Yuan, back at the Observatory. It was early April, and the moon was waxing towards the first truly warm weekend of the year. If the skies stayed clear, the extra light and the extra motion would stir the Mirror Sea into a froth, and the resulting Ripple superbloom would be just about impossible to miss. Several days later the weather report confirmed all of this. Stay sober, the Bureau warned, after they’d wrapped up with the barometric pressure. Mix up your routes through the city, they suggested. And whatever you do, don’t make eye contact with strangers. 

But I never made eye contact with strangers — and where had that ever gotten me?

The entire city is a great coral reef. 

It was not exactly actionable information. But nor was Cai the only one saying it. I began to hear it, muffled, in the voices of newscasters and flower-sellers, trying to break free. And I saw it, that sigil of it. I saw that everywhere: in Sharpie on ward-gates. In ink on skin. Most of all: in chalk on everything else. It welled up like a dull wet pressure on my forebrain. Days and days later, tiling out of a long loop-lock session, I felt the mental logjam break. I took a long walk around campus, soaking in the blue hour. Wondering: how did I fail to understand her meaning then?

On Beiwan Ward’s main street, I stopped in front of one of the Mirror Sea displays. Usually I could just barely make out the Ripples; that night, I finally saw them clearly. Their motion was sensible and predictable. Their boundaries were crisp. They were fringed with the color and texture of coral that night, and unusually visible against their surroundings. I watched for a long time; others lingered in the twilight, watching with me. Home was just blocks away but the walk took an age, unpeeling myself over and over from the screens. Upstairs I grabbed Cai and repeated her meaning back to her. Not these words, never directly, but their silhouette:

The entire city is a great coral reef.

She grinned, and fetched me an oversized parka, violently fluorescent, with the texture of brain coral, only chopped-up and fragmented. I ran my fingers over the deep, stuttering fixpoint grooves. “I extruded this for you,” she said, with a touch of apology. “because I didn’t know your size.”

We set out on foot. Cai was wearing a kind of trypophilic purple jumpsuit made of wavy coral sprouts and smokestacks. She pointed to her eyes as her Contecs blinked red. “Everyone say hi to my flatmate Mona,” she bubbled into the mic. “She’s going to help us track some Ripples tonight.” I waved, sheepishly, to fifteen thousand viewers.

Cai knew all the best lines through Shanghai: she knew which cameras lead to which displays on what kind of time delay. She knew which rooftops were shortcuts across which ward boundaries. She and I and her Ripplechaser friends could traipse slowly across a block in East Xuhui and then sprint through narrow alleyways to catch Ripples bearing fragments of our texture and color on displays in Tianzifang. The delays got shorter and shorter. The Ripples got more vibrant, and the crowds of chasers got thicker. But Cai liked the slow build. She herded cats, leading our orange-purple-yellow stochastic parade from behind. By the time we got our first realtime glimpse of ourselves, of the Ripple we’d become, we were properly warmed up. We felt like we’d earned it.

The Scrambler is an all-ways all-walk crosswalk in Xintiandi. Its surrounding walls and rooftops are packed to the gills with Mirror Sea displays and quasigrams that are famously, despite the Weather Bureau’s grumbling, not on any kind of delay. We arrived panting and sweating from all directions at once. There was no saying how many of us there were, how many paths we arrived by. I had stuck by Cai’s side — but that’s not really how it felt. I felt very loose, very expansive. I was starting to get clear glimpses of myself through strangers’ eyes. Starting to feel like I was on both sides of the camera at once.

“Say it,” one of us whispered into the other’s ear, a hand on a shoulder, another pointing up towards a dripping neon quasigram. Mouth movements in response, distant, abstract. And then Mona Xu was gone. At least for the night.

The entire city is a great coral reef.

The daytime was still clinical drudgework and long, relentless meetings with Dr. Deng. But — the order that our minds make of blurs of light and sound in the streets? That simple statement unlocked more of it. The movement of the octopus explained the cut of the skyline. The contours of low-slung coral explained the gait of grannies, the timing of trains. I fell deeper into fascinated satisfaction, and the more I invited the thought into my daydreams, the more I was rewarded by what I saw. The things my professors said made more sense, sparked when rubbed together, when seen through this lens. Of course they had no idea, but other people did — I could tell they were tuning their words to resonate with this idea, and I began to seek them out, to reward their attention with my own.

The entire city is a great coral reef.

For a while I had to scour the Internet to find it, but soon there was nothing else in my feeds. I gorged myself on the aesthetics of it, making oblique references to it in my Advanced Techniques in Loop-Lock seminar. I knew distantly that I had become involved in something strange. That buying a scaly backpack and stickering my tablet with angelfish marked me with something not taboo, but deeply curious and reflectively impregnable to outsiders. But I didn't care about them. After two lonely years in the city, I felt like I had a hundred thousand friends whispering just out of sight. I could step onto the street, flash my jellyfish earrings or my new tattoo — where had that come from? — and run with a pack of strangers like I had known them all my life.

It became too bright to look at directly. Thousands of Doujiang posts and Veeku tracks churned around its gravity well, drawing us into closer, headier orbit. There was art about it, music about it, crime about it. The aesthetic had become an ethos, even a movement, but if it stood for anything at all, it was impossible to put into words. If asked, we would deny it outright — of course the entire city is not really a coral reef. It wasn't true, it was something more than that. It was a key that unlocked a thousand doors, an abstraction so powerful that it subsumed all other thought and rewarded us with shoals of correlations, hidden variables gleaming in the sand.

And that was just the daytime.

At night we burst out onto the street, in a dozen different places, in a dozen different moments. It’s not that I didn’t know where I was — quite the opposite. A footbridge across the trickling Zhangjiang, a wide and windy Century Avenue, a shed near a burbling fountain outside a great metro station. I recognized all these places, but they were mere floaters in my eyes as I unfurled myself into the city to see and be seen, to decorate a hundred walls. A second sun erupted diode by diode to soak Shanghai’s streets in soap-bubble suchness for anyone who cared to simply stop and see. The rain the Bureau had hoped for had not come, and the dead of night was not dead at all.

Instead I was a sea-moss maelstrom of flatworms and tendrils and jaws and cilia, in which nothing persisted for longer than a moment before decaying elegantly into something new. Snail palm shells fronds. Periwinkle is not a color it's my whole circulatory system inhaling blooming exhaling decaying into the barnacular the tentacular, a recurring negative space in creation. Briefly, of all things, I might even be people. In my selfishness, in my insistence of primacy, I might see a hand in front of a face, but I would simply let go of that miserly fool, who ever dared think a single atom or joule could ever belong to her. Velveteen cycles of creation and destruction, fin and bone, lit gently and obliquely from nowhere at all. A sea-hawk, a minnow, and a bloom of algae are eating each other, and this strange loop amounted to my shoulder? No, someone was shaking my shoulder...

“It’s you,” Cai would say, with honeyed delight: to me, to anonymous new friends, to everyone. I’d tear my eyes from the displays and wonder, were we strangers? Had we known each other all our lives? In these dips, these moments in-between, my heart sank back into my body with sad absurd little thoughts: it never lasts, the way it seems to last. But then I’d see her beaming at me with a joy that says I know you, that says let’s go ’til morning, and maybe it wasn’t so bad, suddenly, to be a detail in such eyes, dark velvet wrapped in orange-red reassurance. Maybe there were hours to go.

“We think we know where it’s headed.” Her hand would wrap, soft and clammy, around my wrist. “Let’s move.” The last of our quarry’s tendrils would disappear into the scan-lines. And it was fair to say that the next thing I knew, I was somewhere else entirely.

The entire city is a great coral reef.

“How do you think they reproduce?” I asked around dawn one morning. For hours Cai and I had been walking outside to re-up, letting the streetscape dissolve into waves of viscous glass. Now we were sitting in our flat.

“Mona!” she said, scandalized, but her eyes were laughing.

“How do you think the Ripples reproduce?” I asked. It was so freeing to hear the word leave my mouth, so right, and Cai’s breath caught when she heard it. Our eyes locked: the apartment melted away and we were back on the street, but with the clarity of conviction we saw the bulge of the world behind the world, our rectilinear reality ripe to burst. We saw the Ripples even where there were no displays.

“I think they…they go like this.”

Then we were back in the flat again, our fingers interlocked across the duvet.

“I think…” I began, already losing my train of thought. Making a face, because I was seeing my own expression through Cai’s eyes, and hers through mine. I looked so — so right when she saw me.

“You think?” Cai said, and I could feel her tongue curl in her mouth.

“I think they lay eggs.”