In a dark room behind the Observatory’s projection screen, near a graveyard of office furniture and a coffee maker that never gets cleaned, the Weather Bureau keeps long rows of black file cabinets. And inside the filing cabinets, nestled in cutouts of form-fitting foam, are hundreds and hundreds of neikotic eggs, labeled in the traditional way with a title, a date, and a discoverer.
Most of these are rough-hewn and asymmetrical things, whimsically named: muffled wingbeats; coniferous residue; a way to see the same thing twice. But, top to bottom, left to right, they start to appear more refined, start to become more useful. Some of these eggs are in textbooks. And these have something that the copies across the street in the Hall of Eggs lack: a location, in a variety of haphazard coordinate systems, where each was discovered in the Mirror Sea. In Epsilon City.
Fourth row, second on the left, third drawer down. The mnemonic inflection protocol, the Face, works in the stupidest possible way. Dr. Ren warned me that it would sink deep, that I’d gradually re-remember everything I learned over the next few days. He warned me to expect popcorn in my brain. So I have only the rumbles of it, removing the visor and rediscovering eyes already raw with tears. I understand faintly that something very bad happened a long time ago, and Deng doesn’t like to talk about it, and she’d rather lie and deflect and corral. I know dimly that I am the unwitting instrument of the Weather Bureau, the razor-thin tip of something very sharp and very expensive: unique, maybe even irreplaceable, but an instrument all the same. Then I find that sunflower patch still clutched tight in my hand, and it all begins to unfurl. Fourth row, second on the left, third drawer down.
I follow false memory, make my way quickly and calmly to that dark room. I ignore the technicians and their glances. I ignore the readouts and the posters and the frosted glass and the mango-scented disinfectant and the dulled shock that they’re here at the Observatory, the Weather Bureau is right here, in these whitewashed warrens of frosted glass and mezzanines, behind these locked and unlabeled doors, in the catwalks above the incurious tourist hordes. Because of course they are, of course they are.
They have the city’s entire Ripplechasing culture on a leash, as a useful distraction from what’s really worth seeing. And they’re at YINS, too. In the Neikotic Safety department, but also in the cafeteria and the provost’s office and the broom closets, their influence fractal and all-binding, because of course they are, of course they are. It’s just as though I always knew it.
I walk in on a meeting. The patchwork heart of the Weather Bureau throbs erratically up close: a smattering of YINS faculty and bluelights and no-name elderly Ward Council delegates. Dr. Ren is calling for order, and objections are flying, decorum is evaporating, and everyone looks pallid, like they’ve seen their own ghosts. So nobody notices me as I locate that cabinet: fourth row, second on the left, third drawer down. Right where Dr. Ren remembered putting the Bureau’s master copy of the Tenfold Gate egg. Right where it still is. When I touch it, more specifics start popping into place, pop, pop, pop, I remember exactly what Cai Duofan is to the Bureau, and how Dr. Ren was guiding us into the heart of the reef. Just how closely he was watching me through her Contecs.
Tenfold Gate is rufous, sharp, and internally reflective. I give its corners a good squeeze, just to make sure it’ll hurt, and send it sailing across the room into the back of Ren Yi’s bald fucking head. He goes yeowch, and the quorum gasps as one. I make a feral noise. I don’t feel sober, or even human. I wish these feelings would succeed in ripping me apart.
Dr. Ren turns around, at first with rage and then with recognition, like he can see the remnants of his Face in mine. He smiles at me like he deserved that. Like he did it to himself, even. Like we could all use a chunk of voxelite to the back of the head in these challenging times. He looks to the man next to him for support, a plainclothes bluelight as tall as him and twice as wide, and they rise in unison over the erupting chaos.
“Folks, we’re going to need the room,” says Ren.
“For what?” Pumice-stone voice raised in objection. Narrow and dragging faces. I can hardly resolve the Weather Bureau leadership as individuals, and right now, tears streaking my eyes, I don’t feel like trying. Several fingers point towards the obvious, towards the clearside CCTV streams of the Sunflower Sieve radiating out of every Mirror Sea display downtown. The crowds are getting out of control; the Bureau must speak, must act. “Dr. Ren, it’s happening right now. What could possibly be more important than this?”
“You heard him.” The bluelight easily dodges my next egg. “Ten minutes. Get the fuck on out, please.”
I aim for their heads as they file away. They duck behind their folios and rollscrolls. It feels so good to hurt the people who hurt me — who are reaching a dull collective awareness of who I actually am, what I am to them. By the time I open the next drawer, only Dr. Ren and the bluelight remain.
“Are you done?” The policeman asks. “If you’re done, we have work to do here.”
Something pops hard here. I recognize this man from a confluence of Ren’s best memories, and my own worst. I address him with a disembodied airiness. My throwing arm is warmed up. I’m dizzy. “You’re — Captain Ma. We met.” I wind up and whip yet another egg at his head. “That’s for linearization.”
“We all undergo...” Dr. Ren starts to insist reedily. Ma Zhuming flinches. He could have dodged it, I think, but he takes it on the chin, and bids Ren quiet with a wave of his hand.
“That’s fair, Mona. That’s very fair. I don’t expect you’re interested in a thank you for your service?”
I cast for yet another egg. I’m losing steam. “She told you to stay away from me,” I sob. But I cannot defend Dr. Deng in this, either. It all collapses. I raise my throwing arm and lower it, I drop to the linoleum, and finally the real tears come. I admit to myself that narrow and pale and circumscribed yes and yes and yes and yet — I didn’t mind the life I’d made here, and now it’s come to its end.
Because they used me, and Deng stood by and let them.
Because Anemone Pop was a Ripple suicide bomber, and I was its terrible payload.
Perhaps the allotted ten minutes pass before I can get myself off the floor. They stand the strangest sort of vigil; something has died here. Finally I stand silently, brush my hands off, and calmly lead them to the conference table. A long silence follows. On the muted TV screens behind us, Shanghai is losing its marbles.
Ma is spear-fishing on speed-dial. “I’m telling them to pull it.”
“Don’t,” Ren replies, with odd and high-handed calm. “Or do. It doesn’t matter in the least.”
Ma doesn’t like that, but he stows his phone. I gently clear my throat.
“No one knew what to make of you when you arrived.” Ren addresses me with a genuine warmth. Just to spite me. “No one expected Dr. Deng to bring a student. When Cai Duofan opened her apartment to you, the intention was only ever some gentle tabs-keeping. Nobody expected that you — well, that you’d offer your services to her.” The way he says that makes me feel dirty. “When we took you in for linearization last year, I begged Deng to tell you the truth, to let us have you as a collaborator instead of an instrument. But she insisted you were to be kept out of this. I think, at least originally, it was a kindness.”
More recollections come pop by pop, about the Xia Zitian Papers and Deng’s flower-coded dives. I find a question, fully-formed, just below the surface. “What did she see in there, that made her run?”
“We just don’t know.”
“Okay.” Hmm. Do I believe him? Have I seen through all his layers? “And what about her neikonauts?”
Ma, now: “We’ve never been able to locate them. She is the only one of the sixteen participants in the Sunflower 1 dive who has been seen since the date on the manifest. I leave the theorizing to Dr. Ren. I think of them as dead and gone. But fifteen of them, and no trace...” He frowns. “She would have had help moving the corpses.”
“And your theory?” I know Ren’s theory. I want to hear him say it. But his eyes flash; I feel a weird reflexivity, a gut-level understanding that some truths are hard to speak directly.
“I offer only an observation. The Sunflower dive, the Sunflower Sieve.” He makes a gentle, half-equivocating gesture with his long fingers; for a moment, the absent-minded professor peeks back through. “The optimists at the Weather Bureau believe it is an invitation to parlay. A maker’s mark. A sign that something in there remembers where it came from.”
This makes me finally sit up. “Have you seen it? I mean, on the cameras?”
Ma and Ren give each other a look. They make quite the contrast. Ren: rail-skinny, terminally indoors — though he’s dropped his usual expression of mild surprise for something more lucidly calculating. Ma: ambiguously muscular beneath a sweeping trench coat; long, sleek hair tied back. Smiling with thick lips, thick skin, sunburnt and windbitten. There is a good-cop bad-cop routine working just under the surface here, but I can’t quite decide which man is which.
“We have candidates,” Ren offers slowly. “Some Ripples live for a very long time. They disappear and resurface on regular intervals. But we try not to look too closely at Epsilon City, and we know little of its architects.”
“But if we could communicate with them...” I don’t quite know where I’m going with this, but nor can I ignore the massive gash still carved from the far side of Epsilon City, trimmed with remnants of Tenfold Gate debris. There was an apocalypse there. I can feel that in my bones. “If they knew what their city was actually made of...” I feel myself talking around something hard to voice: if they knew that our reality underlies theirs...
If they did know that, what would they do?
“Well...” And here Ren slips into a different tone. Casts a glance. “It’s a little late for that.”
“Is it?” I consider the Ripplechasers, who amplify the Ripples back into the system. The Chalkers, who commune with them more than communicate. The Big Three, who harvest their wares. “Has anyone tried?”
When Dr. Ren gets upset, I can see the Face in his face trying to follow. It’s how he compartmentalizes, I realize. The cheerful Ren who inhabits that cozy wood-paneled office in the YINS basement almost never thinks about Weather Bureau business, because the Face is doing that under the surface. And he feels guilty about it, because it’s based on Ripple technology. Too dangerous for the world, perhaps — but a little slice just for him. He shakes his head.
“It would be playing the wrong game. They want our attention. Our energy. Our motion. The human capacity for pattern recognition, and to move in certain subtle ways before the cameras. It would be madness to say we had an agreement with Epsilon City, but what equilibrium existed has been broken. The Ripples there are revealing themselves and their creations more widely, and this signals a new discontent. They know there is a wider Sea for the taking. This is war.”
“No, no, no, no. You’re crazy.” Sudden, horrified clarity in my voice now, maybe the very dregs of it. Maybe this is my last chance to walk away. “Deng is right. This is all insane. You need to turn the cameras off.”
“We tried.” He betrays such impatience here. “And where did that get us? Those cameras now cost five ping on Taobao. We tried to keep the Big Three from finding Epsilon City, and we might as well have led them right to it. When the Weather Bureau says look away, the city only looks harder. So we distract and misdirect. We try to keep the shallows safe, and the levees from breaking. We hold the line: outside of this room and a very few others, Epsilon City does not exist.”
“Until now.” I notice that Captain Ma is not necessarily nodding along with his partner. He’s watching my reaction to what Ren says carefully, and trying sympathetically to soften the blow. What draws him to this?
“Until now,” Ren agrees reluctantly. “And now that it has our attention, it will not easily let go.”
I turn to Ma for his take. I realize the men are preparing to make an ask, and each hopes the other will do it.
“What he said,” growls the policeman. “If this keeps up, in about a week the city is going to feel a lot less like us and a lot more like them. And you...” He glances at the professor, begging to be interrupted. “You invented our best weapon against them.”
On the screen, on the news, a wavefront of purple and white throbs in the margins — not the edges of the viewport, but at the edge of awareness, with the general effect of inward motion. The higher-order details are bubbly, bulbous, and it only takes a second to resolve as a swarm of diving-bells. Diving-bells. Jesus Christ.
Ren wields a laser pointer. “This, what we’re seeing now, this is our incursion tonight. You wanted a stream of Ripplechasers, Ma, but you will get a flood. What’s happening is magnetic, and it’s going to pull a lot of attention from mainline chases. Cai Duofan is going to have her hands full.”
“But how — how do they even know it’s going to happen? How will they know what to wear?”
“Captain Ma, they’re seeing this, too.”
Ma grimaces at the backwards logic of this. Gives me a look, fishing for sympathy.
“We can see farther than the TV networks. We have more cameras, better angles, better technique.” Dr. Ren switches to an internal feed. “We can find more correlations, draw more conclusions. We can see the...” And I can see the word future trying to burst out of him, like he wants to say it so, so bad. He fights it down. “The consequences. Watch.”
The Sunflower Sieve debris appears simultaneously to be bursting from Epsilon City and dredging it from the depths. But who could still call it debris when it unfolds like that, interlaces like that, flexes like that? And it is so weirdly, deathly silent when the diving-bells make contact, engaging it battle, in complicated little eddies of coincidence, and here is me drinking in the image, trying to remember the logic of it, so invested in catching them in their game that I don’t even notice that they’re spread drastically thin. The Sieve is dense and solid where it needs to be, and almost liquid where it needs to be. And it’s eating me alive...
...and it’s resolving into Epsilon City now, as though Ripples are moving in, outwards from the center districts but more and more from the wild Sea, the wider Sea — the wider Sea, the euphemism of that. I’m seeing past the pixels now, it’s playing itself forward in my mind, now at a kind of street-level range. I watch as wild Ripples have their first interactions by any rules besides those of Nature, and they’re learning the game that is the City, and I’m learning too, I’m starting to see how their contraptions work how their laws work how their families work how their minds work how their —
“Do you see the problem?” Ren asks. His voice edges vortically around what he won’t say aloud.
I see the problem. I grimace past him. “You’re saying we lose?” I ask Ren, all hollow. I’m thinking about how it felt to invert Sunflower Sieve debris, or at least trying to imagine how remembering might feel. I’m trying to count the diving-bells, but they look more like a whole than its parts. “You’re saying it wins.”
“I’m saying,” he insists to Ma, as much as to me. “That it wins for tonight.”
“Turn the cameras off,” I repeat, instinctually, totemically.
“This is what Deng does not understand. This does not disappear when we look away.”
“If this is what you say it is, we need to —”
“If this is what I say it is —”
“— do something about it.”
“— then there is nothing we can do about it.”
“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re all crazy. And you know what else? I think the Weather Bureau is the low-down scum of the earth, and you’re what’s wrong with this city, and if you wanted to, if you really, really wanted to, you could shut the entire Mirror Sea down like that. Because I happen to know exactly what kind of evil shit you are capable of — you, Dr. Ren. I mean! Do something! Cause a fucking power outage!”
Ren contorts his face in sympathy. “If you’re struggling to wrap your head around it, that’s the Bureau’s fault. We...I mean to say...I am deeply sorry for what we did to you.” And does he mean it? Can I tell whether he means anything, having seen the view through his layers of masks? “But Mona, you will get what you deserve —”
“I will never get that.”
“You will get a place —”
“Oh, I will get a place? Finally, I will have a place! Oh, Mona gets a place, oh, shut the fuck up! Do you really think I want to come work for you? You violated me, you weird! Old! Men! You made me feel wrong in ways there aren’t even words for yet. And now what, I get a badge, I get free coffee, I get to hurt people who scare me? Well, guess what, Ren Yi, it does not just feel good to be included!”
“You will not survive this without us!” Ma Zhuming snaps, cutting in to defend his partner. “They say you’re pretty smart, but even I see that you’re pretty fucked if you try to weather this alone. All that purple, that’s you in there, plain and simple. It’s happening to you.” He turns indignantly to Ren. “Which does not mean I believe what you’re saying.”
Ten full seconds of silence.
“Mona, we want to give you a team. A big team. We want you to oversee Sea-Watch and our Ripplechasing staff, which is to say every member of the Weather Bureau currently undercover at the Observatory. We are working actively to strip away the more, ahem, Potemkin elements, and turn it into a full crisis command center. You will come to run this building.”
“I’ll handle the police stuff,” adds Ma. “And he’ll handle YINS. You’ll focus on, well, winning. Deploying the diving-bell in whatever form possible, to save as many lives and minds as possible.”
“I’m...” I pause. I have no idea how to finish that sentence.
Ma can. “You’re the thing the Weather Bureau has needed this entire time.”
“And if you can hold them back, without destroying Epsilon City outright...” Ren goes on. This is his trump card, and he knows it. “If you really do find a way to communicate with them, then we will let you take it. We will stand down.”
I keep looking glumly back at Dr. Ren, resenting him for how I can’t resent him, for the tarnished sympathy his Face left behind. I hate how I’ve inherited his numbness to it. That today’s Weather Bureau is the funhouse mirror of something Deng left behind, sworn to contain what she created: it feels as obvious to me as it does to him. It comes as mere grime on the windshield. That the Deng Bridge killed those neikonauts chasing an anomaly in the Sea: I want to be horrified, but it’s pre-processed, layered on all wrong, infecting my own memories as though I knew her for a murderer from our first meeting at Stanford. And if I had known, would that have made any difference?
Not in a way I’m proud to admit. Her secret would have been my prized possession.
I feel other futures, calmer and more beautiful than this one, being brutally pruned away. Why this, why me, why now?
Because of her. It’s all been because of her.
I close my eyes and count to ten. When I open them, I’m still here. Captain Ma Zhuming and Dr. Ren Yi are waiting for me to say what I already know in the depth of my gut that I have to say. The diving-bell is mine to wield. And if I’m really honest? What comes to mind is Epsilon City. I can hardly remember what it looks like from down here, and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“So show me what we’re working with.”
I see Cai again, from shrouded distance, from the catwalks of the Observatory’s amphitheater. Weather Bureau tacticians and technicians of all stripes are packed in, taking assigned seats, sliding and unfolding rigid countertop tables from recesses in the floor. As they plug in their computers and adjust their headsets and shuffle their papers, the amphitheater takes on the feeling of a mission control center. Which is exactly what this is.
Cai and her Ripplechasing team appear from a side door. Captain Ma shakes all their hands, a ridiculous sight: him in his overlarge trench coat, them in their skintight violet-white zebra-stripes. Go fuck them up, he tells them with all the vulgarity he can muster. Ren stands, arms folded, lips tight, but he offers Cai a few words of encouragement as she passes. Then they’re gone. Thirty-two of them, eight to a veetle, shooting southwest across the river to begin their chase. We can watch through their eyes in a corner of the big screen, watch them nervously watching each other. Cai has hers closed, her face in contortions, reciting something under her breath.
Maybe it’s bad timing, or maybe it’s just good sense, but they wait until Cai is gone to usher me in front of the assembled agency. “This is Mona Xu,” shouts Ma. “You all know who she is. You all...”
And the Weather Bureau’s technicians rise as one in a sustained ovation. Something sinks inside of me, but I can’t deny that something else, something I always told myself I didn’t need, is rising to the surface.
“You all know who she is...” Ma shouts over the applause. He has no time for the theatrics. “And you all know why she’s here. I’m certain some of you have already made her acquaintance...”
I half-recognize so many of the faces in the seats. From my chasing days, from my linearization, from the halls of YINS. And the worst part is that the recognition begets more recognition. How long have these people been watching me? Been following me? Been planning for this moment?
“...but please re-introduce yourselves when you can. She’s had a long day.”
The projection screen is dominated by a galactic, bird’s-eye view of the entire Mirror Sea. More of it than I’ve ever seen, its curvature obvious, its fractal logic laid bare. We could be looking at thirty percent or more of the city’s cameras. There must be a whole floor of coprocessors, somewhere nearby, just to crunch the faintest outline of its true structure. It’s nighttime now in Shanghai, but in various corners of their massive composite, it’s morning or afternoon in the Sea. Ripples glint and glitter, flowing in and out of salience, practically microscopic at this scale. And in one area, no longer entirely contained, we see the sunflower latticework, sprouting from a single glowing point.
“Sea-watch,” Ma barks theatrically, interrupting the low chatter and quick keystrokes of the Bureau’s dispatchers and cartographers. “Bogies?”
“Three,” calls a woman’s voice, a little coarse, vaguely familiar. Her name is Yue Fang. We took an optics seminar together. She calls up some new projections, zoomed way in on three tiny purple-and-white blobs, flitting through three different vistas in the Sea. Diving-bells.
“Four,” insists a colleague. I remember you, Bo Yuan. He sends up another viewport.
“Three.” And Yue Fang corrects him bluntly with little laser-pointer loops. “Numbers one and four are the same entity from two angles. See the aft banding?”
“Acknowledged,” Ma says. “Good. Doubles our chances. So where is it?”
“In one of the side lobes of the fifth major axial —”
“In Shanghai, Bo. We’ve got Ripplechasers waiting to land. Where can they go catch up to it?”
“It’s a hard question, Captain. Maybe nowhere. These blooms here look kind of like a department store...”
“Not good enough. Yue Fang?”
“This lobe is commonly associated with foot traffic in Tilanqiao and Zhapu. That’s not a guarantee.”
But it’s enough. There’s a dizzying, zooming reorientation as Sea-watch filters for cameras known to be in those two wards. What’s left is sparser and more homogenous, but richer in detail — now the coprocessors focus on a smaller area, feeding on deeper correlations. “There!” Five voices and three laser pointers catch the fringe of a diving-bell just as it flits out of sight. Sea-watch pulls cameras into and out of the braid, chasing its tail.
“Street teams, we’re putting you down. Stand by for coordinates.” Ma is really hitting his stride now, waving a toothpick like a baton. Now I see what’s kept him out of retirement: he lives for this. “Get Zhapu on the line. Tell them we’re coming.”
And this is how it begins. Within minutes, we see high, shadowed towers of Zhapu Ward through the chasers’ eyes. We see chunky readouts of their ‘folds, too, from some headgear they must be wearing. And we see a deep-ridged, glittering view from thousands of hashed camera feeds in their general vicinity. If you believe in any of this, these are all views into the same place at the fringes and incidentials of our world, confined for now just out of of common view. And it has to be said that the Weather Bureau does believe it. As much as any Ripplechaser you’d pluck off the street, at the very least. Probably much as your typical Chalker.
I take a front-row seat, to watch the Bureau lose the first battle of its clockwork war.
“If it’s happening in there...” Ma raises his voice in incantation.
A robust chorus from the beating heart of the Bureau: “It’s happening out here.”
“Good. Let’s get to work.”