This is an early, partial draft of Upon the Mirror Sea. A new one is coming.

36 // The Straggler

The days are getting short. It’s twilight when Shanghai quits work, on this Thursday that feels a bit like a Friday. Maybe normal people don’t check the Mirror Sea, or at least they pretend not to. And maybe something new in there isn’t, well, anything new. The psychic tectonics here are constant: at first you take cover, and eventually you don’t even get up from your desk. But this is something else. Consensus reality is liquid beneath our feet.

Everyone can see it now, the sunflower lacework in the Sea. And no matter where you stand, it looks like it’s coming. It writhes ever-outwards, lithe and mesmerizing at scale, its wretched and clawing joints too small to resolve. Some people can untangle it, follow it back to the source, and there they spy a murky deep-field twinkling like a city on the seafloor. They point it out to their companions, who can see it too now, and that’s how it cascades. What is it? It’s not a Ripple, or at least not like anyone’s ever seen. It’s too precise, too mechanical, too technological.

And it’s on the news.

“I’m telling them to pull it.” Ma covers the receiver; he’s spear-fishing on speed dial.

“Don’t,” replies Rui, still with that odd and high-handed calm. “Or do. It doesn’t matter in the least.”

Ma fumes. “Zitian, tell him he sounds quadratic.”

“You sound absolutely quadratic, Professor Rui.”

“Well then — ?” Ma rolls his eyes. “We’re just going to let him say things like that?”

Xia Zitian is wearing his jacket like a cape, sitting backwards in a chair, and he looks amused by these developments. He may not run Shanghai anymore, and he may not even run the Weather Bureau, but the two goons who do are constantly competing for his attention, and that’s all the power he ever wants again. “Zhuming, are you going to linearize him yourself?” He waves a loose sleeve in the direction of the news. “What’s your explanation?”

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.

Rui 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 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. 

I grimace past him. “You’re saying we lose?” I ask Rui, 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.”

“We can see farther than the TV networks. We have more cameras, better angles, better technique.” Dr. Rui 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 —

“Deng’s right.” I hear myself say, without warning, at remove. “You need to turn the cameras off.”

“Mona, 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. Rui. Aaaand you. And especially you! I mean! Do something! Cause a fucking power outage!”

Rui 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, Rui Zhang, 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, Mona, 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 Rui. “Which does not mean I believe what you’re saying.”

It occurs to me that I could just leave. 

Not just this room. I could pick up and leave Shanghai.

“So we attack, and it fights back, and we lose?” Xia breaks such a long silence with such airy calm I almost have to laugh. He hasn’t made up his mind. “The Sieve helps the Ripples get more, say, civilized, and now everyone gets to watch Epsilon City on the displays. And — I really do mean this with the utmost reverence and respect — so what?”

“You know what, Xia. You of all people know what.” Rui scowls. “Within the next day, what’s happening in there will happen out here. Shanghai will experience a radical, cascading change in human consciousness. Things will just be different here. The Sunflower Sieve will — how do I put this — mediate our interactions in a new way. I can’t say exactly what it will feel like, but I’ll bet it’ll feel much more like them than like us.”

“And...?”

And?

“It just looked like you had an and there,” Xia offers timidly.

Rui sighs. “And it’ll feel so damn good that no one will ever want to go back.”

I sit up, check my wanji, tie my shoes, gather my bag, zip my coat. I grasp a piece of debris from Epsilon City that’s been catching my eye, that looks stolen from my collection. I snap it off the model with force I hoped would send the whole thing clattering to the floor. A memento.

“I’m leaving this city. There is nothing left for me here.”

And Rui nods like this is reasonable. “We are at your service. The university will disburse a modest stipend, that’s just our appreciation, and we can have you on a flight tonight, wherever you want to go. You will still feel it — the diving-bell incursion — but any distance you can get will help. In addition, you may invent any story that suits you about your time at YINS, and be assured the front office will confirm it. You can give yourself a doctorate in neikotics, if you want. Or ceramics, or animal husbandry. Whatever you desire.”

I’m already halfway to the door. 

“Or...?”

“...Or?”

Why, Mona! Run, Mona! But I know I won’t. Because Deng ran once, and now she’s back — not of her own volition, I suspect, but because she’s getting too old to keep swimming upstream. She won’t admit it, but she still has a role to play. I know some things have their own gravity, they involve you, no matter the distance you manage to get. Better to save your strength for the center of the whirlpool.

“Dr. Rui, I’m just sensing an or here.”

He picks up the remote and cycles through more footage of the battle to come between the diving-bell (me that’s me oh god that’s me) and the Sunflower Sieve. We watch the fluid mass of diving-bells losing the fight from every angle possible, in every spectrum possible, for every reason possible. And then we watch one more. This tiny blob of diving-bell, maybe a singleton, it looked like a straggler but from another angle it suddenly looks like the vanguard, not even engaging the Sieve but weaving right through it. It’s slipped their defenses, making for an already fractional, rapidly closing gap in Epsilon City’s hyperlagmite fortifications. Time is honey-viscous on this feed; I watch for a minute and it barely moves. But it looks like it’s going to make it inside.

“Or you could do this. Enter loop-lock, follow it in, see where it goes. We might learn something valuable. You might see something interesting. You wouldn’t be doing anything. Very low stakes. Just watching from the Observatory.”

Fuck you, Dr. Rui. Fuck you for smiling like you already know I will.

“The diving-bell wasn’t just me.” And is it true? I hear a bluff in my own voice — but it feels true, and who could say any better? I hear what’s actually keeping me from leaving, too, if only for a small while. There’s a way I can free Tethi in my last night in Shanghai. “I’m going to need him back.”