What happens when we look away?
Take as your focus a cloud in the distance, unknowably large and far away, and try to understand that you contain it. Know that large as the sky is, you are larger still; revel in the distance to your own horizon. Now take as your focus your hand, and try to understand it as a construct of sense and memory, a projection of mind on mind. Know the claustrophobic brush of reality, always indirect, always through this world-sheet. Now close your eyes and feel how these perturbations disappear. Ask: where does it all go? What happens to those wind-whips on the surface of our ponds? Are they simply gone as soon as we avert our gaze?
Maybe, I decide, if we’re lucky. Maybe sometimes, and sometimes not.
Sometimes it’s a mirror.
Sometimes it’s a pane of glass.
And sometimes, it’s an open door.
Dr. Zhang Peifeng is not an easy man to find.
His office is, at least. My YINS ID got me onto Fudan’s campus, and the first person I asked in the neikotics building told me where to find him: second floor, east wing. I consider his darkened window, the collection of yellowing manhua cutouts on the door, the JPEG portrait of the elderly professor. No one’s there.
“He won’t be here,” says a woman vacuuming the carpet inches from my feet. “He’ll be walking his laps.”
“Walking where?” I shout over the vacuum, and whatever’s on her earbuds.
“The mall.” Pointedly, obviously, still jabbing at the square foot of carpet under my feet.
And that might have been it, only I happen to notice one more thing pinned to his corkboard, a red-and-white flyer for an end-of-summer sale at Min’s Miscellaneous Electronics at New Prosperity Shopping Center. Ten to thirty percent off a baffling variety of heat sinks and security quads and hot-swappable VRAM. Never mind that the sale ended last week. Find Me Here, he’s sharpied across the back.
So I head for the mall. I hustle upstream through soccer teams and mopeds, past dorms big enough for an entire YINS undergraduate class. I case the outside, watching bubbles cascading ivy-like down the translucent walls, half-expecting an enormous dangling arm. I do two laps of my own, expecting to quickly outpace a man who did his doctoral work on primitive fMRI scanners. But I don’t see him in the crowd. And, examining the mall directory...this isn’t the place either.
At the edge of the map is an arrow pointing towards New Prosperity Shopping Center (Old). And out around back now, peering over the high and unwelcoming wall of neighboring Fengzhen Ward, I can see about half the strokes of its neon sign buzzing cheerfully to life against the twilight. Fengzhen’s wardgates are in a dim concrete checkpoint beneath an overpass. I tap; the card reader grinds, samples my ward-trail, and buzzes unhappily.
DENIED (0x1E) PATH LENGTH EXCEEDED — SEE ATTENDANT
The attendant’s booth is empty; the wardboard screens are shattered. My app for this tells me that Fengzhen hasn’t issued entry tokens to residents of Xietu South for some years, still in a stale standoff over some long-forgotten Ward Council edict. 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 Fengzhen side, 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 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.
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 me come through. Beginning to suspect that no one’s really in charge here.
Making conversation one night, I asked Cai Yuhui — 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.
Quarter past the hour. 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. Dusk falls behind dense power-line thickets. Quiet, overly so, save for the cicadas and my own breath, my own footfall.
Twenty past. 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 down. I count on one hand the stars in the courtyard’s rectangle of washed-out sky. A passing raincloud sends me under an arcade of rounded concrete. Shadowed figures lope by, weary with the day’s business, a world away from the Fudan Applied Neikotics department. Nobody here could possibly be Dr. Zhang. I’m thirty minutes late, but I’m meeting with an old-time academic — those are rookie numbers. Likelier I’m not, I have to admit. Maybe I’m walking into a trap that Deng herself would never be stupid enough to fall into, towards Chalkers whacking me with buzz batons as I insist pathetically that I don’t know, I have no idea how to build a Bridge...
I should just go home.
I definitely shouldn’t turn this final corner, into a breezeblock nook illuminated by nothing but the mottled red-and-white sign of Min’s Miscellaneous Electronics, and LED tickers in the window all advertising themselves. But a familiar glint draws me inside: 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, all the way to the display case in the back.
The shopkeeper reserved all their care for these smoothly metallic teardrops, two dozen total, each in its own foam-lined case. I never noticed from ground level how much they vary in shape. But they’re all the size of a hand fruit, with the same basic structure. The tapered side has an inlet for CAT-5. The bulbous end hides the lens behind mirrored coating. It’s stamped with the blind-eye that has become synonymous with Shanghai.
“Get a load of the serial numbers.” A quiet voice startles me, emerging from the back through thick plastic drapes. The laoban is a woman just past the crest of middle age, with a sharp chin, weathered features, a pleasant crinkle around the eye. Her hair is in short curls, and now she plucks lilac-rimmed spectacles from a chain around her neck. “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-five-seven-nine,” she reads fondly off the leftmost Mirror Sea camera. She speaks so softly that I have to lean in to make this out. “This is a prototype from the the Century Park pilot. But, count the digits — they had ambitions.”
Her name tag says Min, but...this woman is Zhang Peifeng. She must be. Or rather she has the man’s N-1 license, and is using it to log into the Soup and contact Deng. The cameras, the weirdly stilted messages, the misdirection, it all adds up to something like this. I consider whether to make the accusation, or come clean myself. And then — despite my purpose here, despite everything, I ask: “Can I hold it?”
I expect her to laugh me off, but she nods solemnly and fetches a pair of microfiber gloves for each of us. “They had a real problem with fingerprints at first. The hash is sensitive to patterns like that — careful, careful,” she mutters, placing it into my hands. It has real heft, maybe double what I expected. “Here, take the front and give it a twist.”
I do, gingerly, feeling three tiny clicks and a satisfying counterclockwise whir. Then, from a seam unseen, the hemispherical cap falls into my hand. There’s a milky-quartz dragonfly eye behind it, or that’s how it looks, hundreds of nearly opaque facets that let light play through them only along intricate, rainbow-flecked micrometer grooves. An optical implementation of the Lam-Waldmann hash, carved by laser into real quartz. For the architects of the Mirror Sea, there could be no second-guessing the anonymizing properties of their surveillance system. A conventional lens, with the hash running in software behind it, would never win the public’s trust.
From a locked box beneath the cabinet, she produces a truly ancient LCD monitor no wider than my hand. She clips a CAT-5 cable into the camera and it beeps once. “Now look.”
I gasp softly when I see what appears onscreen. It has depth, this jagged and concentric formation. It reflects faint hints of Min’s Miscellaneous in the color, texture, and geometry of its facets. I would say it’s kaleidoscopic, but there’s a way in which it’s precisely not: while a kaleidoscope is sensitive to tiny movements, the Lam-Waldmann Hash of the store’s interior barely changes as I swing the camera around. I point the lens at the shopkeeper; she raises an eyebrow, but appears only as a dark bloom on the peaks of larger waves. After a while she gestures for the camera back.
“I’ll part with it for forty thousand ping.” She smiles at my nervous laughter. “But not lightly, and not for a stranger. It serves me better as a conversation piece, anyway. So what can I really do for you?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Zhang Peifeng.” I steady myself. I make it a statement and not a question, and scan her politely bemused eyes for recognition. “I — he — we talked on the —”
The door chimes open. She saw it happening, but too late, one hand stowing the monitor and the other reaching fruitlessly for a remote to lock the door. Two men in uniforms the color of impending rain stride down the middle aisle, eyeing the stock of cameras with evident disapproval. Min takes me by both shoulders and presses me to the floor. “Go,” she mouths. I retreat to the storeroom on hands and knees, trying not to rustle the clear plastic curtains.
“Summer sale’s over,” Min’s voice comes muffled through the plastic. “And I’ll remind you every one of these cameras was bought on clearnet auction. Did you boys lose your copy of the receipts?”
“Hardly,” one of the Weather Bureau agents cuts her off. The synthesizer at his larynx makes it impossible to form any lasting impression of his voice. “We’re tracing a purchase. Local. Guy would’ve come through here. Would have needed equipment that you happen to sell.”
“Have you tried taking that thing off your eyes?” Min suggests sweetly. “It might help.”
“At approximately quarter to one on the morning of 27 August,” begins the other agent, “the Weather Bureau detected an unauthorized incursion into a class-three mixed braid of Mirror Sea feeds belonging, variously, to Suowei Financial, Paracoin Technologies Limited, Beidou New Media Holdings, Fudan University, Fengzhen Ward...” He can’t get it all out in one breath, and the synthesizer makes a rattling gasp. “...Xianguo Ward, Pengpu Ward...”
“Yes, yes, and now the mystery party is slurping it all up. You boys must be new around here, then — you’ll forgive my trouble in telling you apart? This is no great mystery. What I would do, is head up the street to Wu Ke Nai He. I would politely ask the proprietors if they’ve put a tap on this particular braid — like they’ve done with every other Mirror Sea feed this side of the river.” She tuts. “Though you won’t get in dressed like that.”
“It’s not the Chalkers or their nightclub. The access patterns are markedly distinct.”
Min’s heels click as she steps around the counter. “Why don’t you tell me more directly what you’re looking for?”
A pause. “Why don’t you let us back there to check your records?”
Min peers back into the dim storeroom, and she makes eye contact, but not with me. The shock that someone else is back here sends me back onto one ass cheek — and then the other, when I realize I recognize him. Frantically donning a cheap, vaguely offensive Chalker costume, pulling the glossy white mask over his face. It’s Mbetethi. Tethi. Whatever.
He puts a finger to his lips: Shhhh.
Not that I could shriek anyway. Lord knows I tried, and what came out was a little teakettle eek.
With a telescoping baton, with metronomic four-four precision, one of the Bureau’s agents begins to break things. Tethi shakes his head with evident self-disgust, then steps through the curtain with a billowing flourish of black robes. “She’s ours,” he rasps, in a TV-ready Chalker voice. He clears the counter and steps into the fray. “Go.”
The Bureau’s agents exchange glances. The closer one draws his vialgun, but can’t quite muster the guts to raise it. “By the authority of the Special Provision for Psychological Safety, Ward Council Edict 131,” he insists in shaky synthvox, “you are hereby under arrest —”
“We will have you as our own,” proclaims Tethi, stretching out a robed arm. His voice is unrecognizable, almost backwards, speaking on the inhale. “Mine is not the hand that holds the Chalk.” When he keys Min’s remote the monitors flare with glimpses of the Mirror Sea and the grate begins to close, and, oh! The lights flicker! The effect is classic, but a little too clean. “Mine is not the hand that binds you to the pattern in the sunlight, the pattern in the salt...”
I always assumed the Chalker’s Binding was a fabrication invented to sell tea towels to tourists in Tianzifang. But the Weather Bureau appears to think otherwise. The agent in Tethi’s clutches stumbles back towards the door and his partner follows as though bungee-corded along, running his baton percussively along a shelf of rice cookers. “Expect a bill,” Tethi snarls, as the grate crashes down behind them. For a minute I’m not even there. He holds Min defensively, panting, expelling adrenaline. In truth, he looks more shaken than she does. Min merely surveys the damage with double-precision dismay.
“What are you doing, pretending to be a professor?” She ducks out of his embrace, smacks the back of his head with her still-gloved hand, and scans the back for a dustpan. “You’re bringing trouble to the shop, Teth.”
“Auntie Min.” He addresses her as Min ayi, with considerable disbelief but not an ounce of disrespect. He stows the mask and wipes sweat from his brow. “I’m bringing trouble to the shop?”
“This sweet young woman came in asking for a mister Dr. Zhang Peifeng.” She pronounces the name musically. “I saw that name on one of those N-1 licenses. Why do you do this? They are one thing, them I can deal with” — she points out the door — “but it is the height of foolishness to drag a Fudan professor into your schemes!” She turns to me, the fury draining so quickly from her face that I have to laugh. “Are you all right, dear?”
A lot has accumulated in Tethi’s eyes since we last met: a deficit of sleep, for one, and a surplus of neikotic debris. We stare each other down for a while, and when we tire of that, the same small, weary smile appears on both our faces. No doubt both thinking the very same thing: I should have known!