We have seconds to get out of here before the ringing in everyone’s ears subsides. The three militarily-clad Weather Bureau operatives are in the fray, picking through a nearly-dark maze of cardboard boxes and plywood crates, trying to keep the Sieve egg out of dozens of the wrong hands. Their two Ripplechasers are in bad shape. Perhaps the thing that they just did — impossible, but throw it on the pile — is new to them. Or maybe they didn’t count on me being here, on my inner expanse acting as a cavity resonator for the Sunflower Sieve inversion, tuned just to my frequency.
Mallochi’s in bad shape, too, freshly struck by a Bureau dart. It’ll be a seventy-thirty mix of a light tranquilizer and antipattern serum. Not enough to knock a person out, Cai once told me. The Bureau doesn’t have the medivac capacity for all that. Just enough to make your limbs heavy and your sight blurry, to render you docile and indifferent, to knock you out of the chase. That she knew all that, that we carried an antidote — it looks different now, in cold and retrospective light.
But I don’t have the antidote now. I have Mallochi putting too much weight on my shoulder, losing his footing every three or four steps. He’s leading us away from the storeroom’s only entrance, or so I thought. He pushes aside a tall stack of those styrolite cartons, sloshing with fluids, and slumps to the ground like he’s been waiting to sit all day. His index finger finds a notch in the floor.
“Mallochi, Mallochi, Mal,” I snap uselessly. And then try to shut up and give him a hand with the hatch. “They’re...”
“They won’t follow,” he grunts. He drops his good leg experimentally into the hole in the floor, seems to find a foothold, and then inches down left-right-pause-grunt into the dark. “Not if they have any sense.”
“They’re right here,” I shout back. I can make out the actual shape of the Ripplechasers’ garments, can almost see the pixels. I get a sense for the tricks of light and shadow that make them look so formless, moving like a pair of purple-fringed ribbons of bright white light, but none of that matters because they’re right here, and I really do remember these two, a man and a woman with the same fringy bangs and deep-set haunted eyes.
Shouldn’t I be able to pull their same trick?
I reach for the diving-bell, send all of my thoughts circling radially around the same drain, going crosseyed trying to keep them both in sight as one goes left and the other goes right. I feel within me for that stranger kind of fire, for that simple and clarified thought, wishing to will the inversion into existence...
Nah. I snatch the left chaser’s right leg and she goes down hard. There’s probably an arm she might have thrown to break their fall — if she were fully present in her body, on this side of the lens. The magnitude of the thump makes me nervous, draws her partner wheeling around back into frame. And the thump hasn’t subsided, not really, as we sail past one another in a dangling moment of mutual recognition, almost but not quite symmetrical: you know my name, I don’t know yours. I’m on the ladder, two rungs above Mallochi, willing him to move his ass, telling him in frantic English to move his ass. The hatch is still open: up top I see four Contec-ringed eyes, and feel one bloody fucking nose dripping malevolently onto my face. I hear the egg hunt devolve into deadly violence as two shots ring out against the cellar’s sloped ceiling. Footsteps, coming our way.
“Down,” Mallochi insists, tongue heavy. He’s moving at half speed and change, no longer lopsided so much as equilaterally sluggish. And there is a down. Behind and below me I sense an even pitcher and blacker space, the air taking on cooler and breezier qualities. There is, in fact, a stairwell. The scramble above is working to our advantage: everybody wants through that hatch, and so nobody is getting in, and so we have a thirty-second head start before I hear any feet on the rungs above....
“Mallochi?” I have no sense of how far my voice will travel in here, so I keep it very low. “Are you with me?”
There’s a grin in his voice. “Not really. This stuff is...”
Kinda nice. I know. God knows I’ve wished for another hit of the Bureau’s sedative cocktail on many sleepless nights. And the antipattern agents — well, there aren’t any patterns to see down here, right?
There’s no change to the utter darkness, but there’s a tactile shift after I dash (and Mallochi all but tumbles) down three flights. The stairwell is no longer concrete and standpipe, but a rough-hewn, narrow, mineral-damp, railing-free. I keep my hands in front of my face, warding off conduit, imagining spiderweb and live wires. Of course I have a light on me, but I’m terrified of drawing any attention. I let the guangpan draw subtle constellations of purple across my darkness, as I try to outpace the footsteps. But they’re already dampening and fanning out. The tunnels level out and are already branching, and we’ve made how many unknowing choices? Three? Four? I hold one hand out against the darkness, and the other traces the wall. The slimy, chalky texture accumulating on my fingers confirms what I already know.
“Mallochi? Hey! Mallochi!”
He mumbles something sleepy and French. The silence becomes the darkness, and finally, inevitably, I am all but alone.
But, God, isn’t this what I always wanted?
It’s called Ripplechasing, not Chalker-chasing. But back in that brief and brilliant period of my life, we all understood tacitly that finding one involved seeking the other. The Chalkers were where the Ripples were. They moved with them at night, or they moved them at night — the language of causality fails here, and that’s just how they like it. Cai Duofan chased for a firebug, scattershot kind of fame, a knack for finding and being found, for showing up one minute before the Ripple with legions watching through her eyes. I wanted the opposite. I wanted to feel the adoring gaze of the city and not refract it one bit. I wanted to be made of glass. We orbited it, on a high ecliptic, all for our own reasons, for oneness, for bounties, for cardio. But the Chalkers operated inside of it, and we watched their operations from a safe distance, warped and distorted and lensed, always feeling nervously for an event horizon.
Of course we knew about the tunnels.
We knew that they were everywhere, and that they were no one’s idea. We knew that, in Xia’s day, they had been the first whispered sign in the halls of power that something was askance in the daily, rolling five-year plans produced by the language models that were to interpret the Mirror Sea. We’re building how many new subway lines? someone finally thought to ask. How many sewer mains? But by the time they found the Ripples lurking in the system’s hidden layers, legions of tunnel-boring machines were in the ground. By the time Xia Zitian took to that podium to confess, some of those tunnels had tracks, and some of them periodically flooded. And now they’re all covered in chalk.
I’m afraid to look, and I’m afraid not to.
Lining the ceiling at luxuriously close intervals are bulbous teardrop cameras, clustered in fours, infrared sensors trained on the walls. They see — they see, Mona — chalk dripping imperceptibly slowly down the wet walls. And yet I know this, and I see it too. Flashes, jet-gnostic, more blindsight: hallucinatory scribbles in knots and hooks and whorls, for what feels like infinity in both directions. It’s the color of nothing, the same one I so faintly perceive from the LEDs ringing the cameras, infrared leaking into the visible spectrum. But is the chalk really that reflective? Or...or something else?
It only grows clearer in my mind’s eye. My stumbling becomes something more confident. With a lurch I realize that I’ve stopped feeling the wall: I’ve been relying on this unsight, this delusion, that I can see the contours of the tunnel. But I can. The chalk picks up definite form. You’re just imagining it. But it’s losing its wobbly stochast. It radiates with a brightness that is simply not here, in subtle and prismatic separations. I see it, and navigate by it, with hundred-watt surety that only makes it clearer. A familiar loop tightens.
I’m afraid not to look: You need to turn your camera flash on. Just see that you’re just hallucinating this. This is the parabola, Mona, you don’t want this, not now, not here...
I’m afraid to look: Mona, do you or do you not still believe that the Chalker tunnels are a sacred space, a quiet place, where the Ripples go at night to dream?
A wedge in my throat. Just a peek. I ignite the flash.
And I just barely suppress a scream (of horror? of loosening delight?) when I see that the chalk on the walls matches my unsight precisely. That down here I do not need light to see. A flaring realization of what bright light trained on such sensitive cameras is to the Ripples — you’re blinding them! But no. Not blinding them. Burning them, more like, with an LED-singed hole in their foundational rhythms.
“Turn that off.” Mallochi, suddenly alert, sounds both distant and deadly serious. “Turn that off now.”
I kill the flash. I still see the chalk.
An afterimage, sure, but an afterimage that moves as my head does, that doesn’t care if my eyes are open or closed. Here I float, at the Lagrange point between reason and madness. Here I strike the bedrock of Shanghai’s garden of delusion, that indifference to the difference between correlation and causation, between light and sight. And as I take my first steps forward — what else am I supposed to do? — the chalk begins to wiggle, to accumulate, to integrate into a dull red glow. It’s, it’s...it’s not too late to turn your flash back on. There’s got to be a manhole, a ladder, a quick way out...
“You’re fine.” Mallochi should be a silhouette against the glowing red, but he’s not, that’s not how any of this works. He’s melting into the sigils already wrapping themselves past my peripheral vision, even as I can feel his hand around my wrist, his two fingers placed as though to read my racing pulse. “You’re fine, just...” He laughs, goddammit. “Just...”
It’s not funny to me. “Just what?” The walls are clearly in sight, now positively crawling with texture, meaning thrumming in harp-struck primary colors behind my eyes. “I don’t know how to read this!”
The red is starting to peel apart into other colors, unflattening into browns and greens. The color is peeling off the wall, into the tunnel itself, becoming the tunnel itself. It blooms out of linearity back into a dappled and recursive maze of lotus-tipped archways, all directions available, every step a choice. The chalk is still on the walls, but these are the wrong walls, these are all the walls, and these aren’t even my eyes, my percepts, my memories. Tens of thousands of blinks and saccades, all jittering just out of sync. Hundreds of breaths, millions of heartbeats. I am going everywhere at once, I am climbing ward-gates and boarding trains and even hanging hooting and hollering off the side of a veetle, spread a little too thin for my liking.
“You’re here.” Mallochi sounds calm — more than that, he sounds home. “I’m right here with you.”
I am the blurry fact of motion, a disturbance along an axis, an implementation detail, but I am somewhere. I’m practically dragging Mallochi — but no, as soon as this realization hits me, it’s superseded by another, and another, and another, as my mind chokes on several delayed hours of my own experience. Mallochi is limping, carrying his own weight. He’s walking. At times, he’s even pulling me through some sewer-way or over some damp and slimy ledge. Only he can’t see the way I’m seeing, with the antipattern agent still working through his system.
“New Prosperity,” I hear him whisper. Or heard him? Just how long has the thought been bouncing around in the striations of my mind, not quite fully known? “New Prosperity Shopping Center. Don’t focus on the words, just picture the characters.”
Shopping Center, I have completely discarded. New Prosperity is hard enough to pin down, with how the strokes both are and aren’t the tunnels, resemble and do not the slashes of chalk on the wall. Sometimes I catch myself spooling on this, trying to reason it out, and our smooth unfurling motion grinds to gridlock. Sometimes a Ripple wafts by, quiescent and dusty-sweet, footsteps and hot breath and wordless brushes of black fabric, blowing us a little off course. But then, what can you do about that?
The illusion is faltering, flickering into layered frames, but when I look at the chalk I still get flashes of matching patterns along all the other walls in Shanghai, and creeping-charlie little clippings of borrowed memory. Under the circumstances, I think I’m doing a pretty good job navigating. “New Prosperity,” I confirm with a sudden confidence, finally responding to what Mallochi said, hours ago, miles behind us. “Okay, yeah. This way.”
And we burst out of a nondescript electrical substation, a halfhearted stack of leftover breezeblocks that looks especially matte compared to New Prosperity itself, the shopping center looming fifteen yards away. It has such a glossy bathtub shine that I half-expect a massive and dangling arm. The plaque on the substation gives me the name of a ward in Puxi. We’ve crossed the river. Dawn is mustering to break — I see its first blooms in the Mirror Sea dot-matrix draped dangling from the porcelain. You could intuit a lot about how the Lam-Waldmann Hash works by watching these. Or someone could. Personally, I’m focused on remembering how to use my hands.
Mallochi pulls out a nub of chalk and puts it to the wall. “Yes and no,” he mutters, answering my unspoken question. “It’s complicated. There are layers to it.” He pulls a long, left-handed stroke across the brick, slowly at first, like a thief picking for tumblers. It hooks suddenly, and there’s a received quality to the slashes and arcs he draws next. He glances up at the incandescent bubble-glyphs behind us and snorts. “I guess I should have been more specific.”
“More specific?” This, a little irate, between gulps of fresh surface air. “I got us right here!”
He doesn’t explain. He tries putting a few more yard between us to see how I react. “I owe you one, Mona Xu.”
“You owe me one right now.” I close those yards handily. There’s still something off about his stride.
“It was you, after all, wasn’t it?” Another one of those oscillations passes between us, grazes, and does not lock. He grins, low on mirth and heavy on teeth, obliquely collegial. Game recognize game; see you never. “Either you’re with the Bureau, in which case you’re extraordinarily bad at your job, or they followed you there.” He glances up at the Mirror Sea cameras around us, watching and not. “And they will follow you here.”
I open my mouth and close it. I cannot deny that the Weather Bureau came with the diving-bell to Double Descent, both leading it and following it. Is that — the question is making me queasy — is that the same thing? But after hours in the Chalk, or at least its more navigable underways, I’m losing the willpower to write any of it off.
“She wasn’t a neikonaut.” The parabola realigns, settles in my stomach. I know what I saw. All of it. I know what I saw. “We had a patient at the clinic with debris from that egg. She wasn’t a neikonaut, she was a bartender right upstairs, at Double Descent. That’s part of how I found you. I guess. I’m not with the Bureau, I’m...listen, I can promise you that much. I’m not with the Bureau. But I need to know where you found that thing.”
Mallochi just blinks back at me. Guilty. But perhaps not repentant, perhaps instead a firm resignation, even a relief-of-knowing. He slows and stops, hands-on-knees, eyelids falling closed. Every muscle in his body insisting on rest.
“You lost the egg,” I continue. This falls out of me not as an accusation or a taunt, but to simply mark the truth of it. Vague pastel-strands of other melodramas, lost bracelets and keycards and parakeets, are still sloughing away.
“I know I lost the damned egg,” he pants. “I owe you a hot meal and a place to sleep it off.” And he must sense my exhausted skepticism, because he hurries to add, with a spot of embarrassment: “I live with my aunt.”
At the edge of the mall directory is an arrow pointing a kilometer west: New Prosperity Shopping Center (old). We follow that arrow, and I am surprised to find that it takes us by Fudan University, Deng’s alma mater and her previous roost. We skirt the edge of campus proper, passing dorms that could each house the entire, walking upstream through several soccer squads out their morning jogs. I mean, I guess I’m not that surprised. I’ve been here for a poster session or two — maybe this is why the Chalk spit me out here.
Two blocks late, we hit wardgates, in a dim concrete checkpoint beneath an overpass. I tap reflexively. The card reader grinds, samples my ward-trail, and buzzes unhappily.
DENIED (0x1E) PATH LENGTH EXCEEDED — SEE ATTENDANT
There’s no attendant. The booth is empty; the wardboard screens are shattered. If I had to guess, this ward and Xietu South are in a standoff over some Ward Council edict, caught in a hairball of wards refusing their tokens to each others’ residents. So if I want some FZN, I can trade for it on the open market. Or...
Three figures in billowing black tentcloaks appear at speed on the other side of the checkpoint, faces painted: delicate black lines on a stark white field. Without slowing down, they each pick a gate. Taking the card reader as a suggestion — no, wait, as a foothold — they grab the plexiglass gates’ top edges and sail over in silent unison. If they look like Chalkers, they’re probably not. This is my rule, and that, just now, looked like cosplay. Only there was something entirely too uniform about their motion. It was so quiet, so fluid, that it was barely a disturbance; I almost missed it, hunched over my wanji.
Mallochi is already halfway over. He sees me trying to buy ward entry tokens and offers me a pitying look.
With no experience and no gecko gloves, the climb takes me longer. Awkwardly straddling the top, I consider what might happen if I were spotted; downtown is one thing, but if you’re sneaking into a mid-ring residential ward, you’d better have friends there. But the blind-eye winks encouragingly from the cameras above: go on, do your thing. I’m not really watching. I land, all wrong, in Fengzhen Ward. Pretty sure no one saw us come through. Beginning to suspect that nobody’s really in charge here.
Making conversation one night, I asked Cai Duofan — Shanghai born and raised — to explain the city’s ward system. So she fetched a ceramic bowl from the cabinet, raised it head-height, and dropped it to the floor. Against the guarantees of the Japanese omni-mart that sold it to me, it shattered into dozens of pieces. She held one pastel-toned shard up to the kitchen’s track lighting. “This piece, was it created just now? Or maybe it always existed in the bowl? Maybe I just released it?” She raised an eyebrow ever so meaningfully and I stared back, dumbfounded. I only had three bowls now. “That’s the thing no one can agree on.”
I think about that a lot. I’m thinking about it now, pinch-zooming a ward map. Back in the day, after Xia resigned but before Blue Delta got a handle on things, the most contentious blocks of Shanghai were at the boundaries of three rival wards. Nobody wanted to goad two neighbors into alliance against them, and so these triple points went unclaimed for most of a decade. But not totally, not quite. Today most are occupied by Chalkers, and many have consumed their surrounding wards, spreading tendrils of crosshatched grey across the map. And sure enough, there’s a triple point near Old New Prosperity, at the sharp bend of a stinking canal, just blocks away.
It’s ten to six in the morning. The towers are squat, peeling, off-white, redeemed by balconies overflowing with laundry and starlinks and greenery. The magnolias, half-blighted but too precious to spare, are ringed with cytogenic spray-foam, sprouting synthetic limbs. Sunlight begins to peek through dense power-line thickets. Quiet, overly so, save for an occasional meow and my own breath, our own footfall.
Five to. Old New Prosperity Shopping Center is a three-story concrete maze of indoor stalls ringing a square courtyard. Pigeons hoard daylight atop the dusty, angular skylights, and chickens strut around in old skincare boutiques. Fenced sneakers line the walls of a former moped showroom. The public safety checkpoint is a converted cell kiosk. The word that comes to mind is carapace. But an inflatable, visor-wearing pig still advertises a children’s tiyan-guan, and the laoban of a cerulean-tiled fishmart gives me a look like I will defend you with this broom.
I listen as grates go up. Shadowed figures lope by, weary with the night’s business. I was hoping sunlight would make this place feel safer, but instead it reveals a plasticine falseness — as though whatever really goes on here, it happens forever just out of sight, always around the next bend, and never mind that the angles don’t add up. I should just go home. I definitely shouldn’t follow Mallochi through this final archway, into this darkened concrete nook. If I was going to kill me, this is exactly where I would do it.
“This is me.” And yet, when Mallochi breaks our silence, he does it with a nervous whisper. “I believe it will be best if I check first whether...”
There’s a buzz and a sudden haze of mottled red-and-white light as the sign for Min’s Miscellaneous Electronics lights up, one crooked character at a time. There’s a series of gentle clicks as the LED tickers in the window all boot up and begin frantically advertising themselves. But what makes us both jump — what makes me almost eat dirt, frankly — is the clunk-clunk-clunk of the narrow little store’s grate catching its chain, sliding back and away. Standing in the now-illuminated doorway, there is a short woman with shorter hair, buzzed in the old style, wearing navy coveralls and an expression of unmitigated counter-filial ire.
“And this,” Mallochi says with a resigned sigh, “is my aunt.”
“Mal!” The door chimes bee-doo-boo as the woman storms outside. She brandishes, well, nothing. And she seems discontent with that fact as she takes Mallochi, eleven and a half inches taller than she, by his T-shirt scruff and drags him inside (bee-doo-boo) without a glance at me. But the door barely muffles her voice, and I make no effort to pretend I’m not listening. “Out again, oh, don’t think I don’t know! Don’t think I don’t hear you creeping up and down those stairs, but usually you have the decency to be in bed when I put on the kettle!”
“Min ayi,” Mallochi begins. She could not except in the vaguest and most kumbaya sense be his biological relative, but he addresses her as Auntie Min, with consternation but not the slightest hint of disrespect. If he thought he was getting a word in edgewise here, though, then he forgot whose name is on the sign.
“Let’s see your hands,” she snips. And Mallochi does something I consider rather smooth, dragging his hands slowly out of his back pockets as though to deposit all the chalk residue on cheek one and cheek two. But Min snatches one of them and sees what she sees. Drops his wrist with clear disappointment. There’s heartache in her voice. “If you want me to cut you loose again, I swear I will.”
“Min ayi, it’s not what you think.”
“It doesn’t care what I think, Mal. I know you think you’re out, and good for you, that’s half the battle. I know you have things you want to, you know I see you working away, and good, good! But if you’re going skulking around the edges, it’s going to pull you right back in.” She folds her arms, gripping at her distressed denim. “And I am not going in after you.”
My wanji goes off, confirming to me that I have been awake, if not fully lucid, for twenty-four hours.
“And with a girl?” Min looks me square in the eyes and mouths those last few syllables through the glass with an expression I’m too tired to parse. “That’s something else. That’s endangering a life to get your —”
“She’s a customer, auntie Min.”
Min takes a dustrag and, I dunno, kinda dusts him on the forehead for that. “A customer. You think I am so stupid to believe that you brought this poor girl, back to my store, at the crack of dawn. Because she needs parts? What does the sweet thing need, Mal, does she need a new beamformer?”
“A customer of mine.”
The very last thing I expected was for this to make Min stop talking. But she blinks pompously, backs away from Mallochi, and makes a lukewarm appraisal of me that begins at my dusty knockoff Docs and ends at my hair, at my cutouts. Her irritation melts into auntliness. The door chimes bee-doo-boo one more time as she heaves it open for me. “You should come in,” she chirps. “You must be rather cold. Can I offer you some tea?”
And she leads us past floor-to-ceiling pegboard shelving, warped by blenders and water heaters and factory-reject TPU arrays and stadium-grade quasigram projectors, past plastic tubs brimming with voxelite pilfered from the city’s trading floors, three eggs for twenty ping, past a display case in the back that catches my eye with a familiar iridescence, though perhaps now is not the time. But in back, through dangling curtains of grimy plastic, is where it really gets miscellaneous.
We pick our way through boxes crammed with feather boas, lewd and dusty DVDs, and all kinds of electronic refuse: Optical-Rubidium Adapters (broken); Phased array drivers (fixable); USB cables (2.0). Mallochi leads me past storeroom after storeroom. One amounts to a kitchen, full of tabletop induction burners and cube fridges, fed by daisy-chained power strips, and Min stops there to pour us two paper cups of red tea. The back hallway bespeaks a guest house. One door bleeds bass-heavy Ulanbataar prog-shag, another silent blue light.
“So I’m your customer,” I venture, blowing on my tea, when Min is out of earshot.
Mallochi leans on a door, and something flutters dully when I see my umpteenth descending staircase of the day. “You’re my customer.”
“And what am I buying?”
Quasigraphic candles flicker down into the cellar, their false angles revealed in the shatterglass and motorbike mirrors lining the the walls. Thick cables dangle parabolically from the ceiling, emerging from grey PVC pipe stamped regularly with the blind-eye. I have my answer.
“So you tapped into the Mirror Sea,” I state the obvious, starting too loud and falling quiet halfway, startled by the echo of my own voice.
“A Mirror Sea,” he corrects. And, sure, he seems one to make such a chiding distinction. The Mirror Sea fell with Xia Zitian; what we have now are fragmented subnets, tidepools and shards. He runs his finger along a cable as it reaches a splice-box, and I find myself imagining all the places the cables could lead: anywhere in the city, all the way to Suzhou. And any given slice of cameras will point to a unique slice of Mirror Sea. I saw the view through a single camera at the Observatory: not quite nothing. Perhaps only Secretary Xia Zitian knows what you’d see with all of them.
“It’s getting harder for regular people to access.” The lack of light helps me pick these qualities from his whisper: defensive, prideful, Francophone, and vaguely hungover. “They get what the Weather Bureau will let them see. Which is time-delayed flats and the odd quasigram. But the raw stuff…you need to be someone, or know someone.”
“Or just go Chalking,” I venture. There’s another way to see the Sea, of course, which is to promise yourself that it’s already there, that it’s always been there. To follow your intermingled hopes and fears down their steepest quadratic valleys, surrendering your agency in whole.
Mallochi ignores this, but his eyes flash as he fumbles with a final lock. “So, I figured, set this up, charge by the hour, don’t ask too many questions. There’s a nightclub nearby, Wu Ke Nai He. They’ve been gathering Mirror Sea feeds for years, we sell them cable by the kilometer. All that I had to do was to tap in.” He grins, then leans on the door until it gives way to a makeshift scanner room. The UTMS rig, the monitor bank, the bare tank of liquid helium — you can see his gear as charmingly classic or terrifyingly obsolete, but it gets an appreciative whistle from me anyway.
“Does Min know you’re doing this?”
“She knows I have a rig. She suspects what she suspects. But this is all for her. She has no one else, and that shop will be the death of her.”
“Do they know you’re doing this?” I know about Wu Ke Nai He. Everybody in Shanghai knows about it. And I’m asking about the Chalkers who
Mallochi laughs humorlessly. “I’m not afraid of them, you know.” He’s flicking more switches now, kicking the EASL array to free it from a boot loop. “Let me ask you. You ever consider why the market rate of a Mirror Sea feed is so high these days? Why the Big Three snatch them up?”
Haojie buys feeds because that’s what Haojie does: amasses a dragon’s-lair treasury of assets, homogenizing them into silken threads from which the parallel yuan is spun. Haojie has teams of astrologers operating lasers in space, vaporizing asteroids it deems inauspicious. Haojie’s reality-distortion field bulges across the globe, and it’s only here in the dead center that anything they do seems remotely sane, remotely sober. Chaoyue, Paracoin — they just follow Haojie’s lead, trying to keep the triumvirate less isosceles.
Mallochi considers my answer with a thoughtful frown. “That’s part of it, maybe.”
The scanner is purring under my hand now. I’m trying to find comfort in the familiar noises it’s making, but my head is throbbing, my mouth is dry. “Min’s Mix,” he tells me once I’m sitting inside it. “Some 5-subs in here, probably spicier than the YINS breakfast blend. I’d spread out my zeroes to compensate.” He flicks an autovial and slots it into the machine. “I don’t want to bias you, so I’m just going to put you in. Let you see what I saw. Afterward, we can talk about it.” He clicks through dialog boxes complaining that his free trial of Kanwei Pharos is months expired. “Afterwards, I’m going to ask again my favor of you.”
I don’t like that knowing look. He seems to see how badly I want this, and how badly I need to keep that longing under control. I try to imagine I’m Cai, who does this all day, who keeps the queasy quadratic madness always at arm’s length. I channel her airy detachment as I pull the scanner hood over my eyes.
“So put me in.”