With four hours to impact, the Weather Bureau’s carveout of YINS is a great blur of mathematicians and bluelights, of shouted coordinates and brandished laser pointers — and most of all, of purple and white. As the Bureau’s Ripplechasing team emerges from marathon loop-lock sessions, they shed their neikosuits for billowing, many-stranded mycelial capes, positively fluorescing in the harsh light of Building 6’s hidden mechanical floor. Some have elaborate stretching routines; some are studying printed maps of Shanghai’s narrower tunnels and lesser alleyways; some are trying to keep Dr. Rui’s delicate soberware intact with sleep masks and ear plugs. All of them are half-gone, minds bursting with munitions, one foot already in the Mirror Sea. One of them, somewhere here, is Cai.
I have a copy of their soberware in hand. A glassy bolus of voxelite, hollow and not, transparent and not; its Klein-bottle concentricities make two chambers separated by a wafer-thin membrane. The first is to hold Sunflower Sieve debris, clawing uselessly against smooth manifold walls. The second is to hold the diving-bell, the inversion. It takes six hours to bring even this simple shape out of loop-lock, and when I see her...I swear to god that when I see her, I’m going to slap her so hard across the face that it triggers the mechanism. I’m going to see the flash in her eyes.
Or that’s what I said, anyway.
“Mona? Is that her? Is she real?” And Cai stumbles through the chaos, shaking her handlers, picks me up and spins me around, almost tripping on the strands of her costume. She looks positively moony, like Rui warned me she would. I can see the pulse of the diving-bell ring her Contecs in languid standing waves. “But how —” She squeezes harder, still unconvinced of my substance. “They shot this down!”
“It’s a long story,” I tell her, struggling for air. “It’s been a long day.”
“They said you were at Wu Ke Nai He.” She looks shocked and pleased and remanding all at once. She waves off a team of visored advisors, shepherds me into a negative space of ficuses and file cabinets. Goes quiet, conspiratorial, all girl talk in the side room. “They said you were there when it happened.”
I draw breath. Maybe this was a mistake. “Rui thinks I caused what happened. By looking.”
“And you made a Chalker friend, I saw that, very quadratic of you.” She’s talking a mile a minute and not slowing down, and I wonder what that autovial on her arm is dispensing to keep the soberware stable. “He’s cute though, Mona, we passed around the mugshots. Did you fuck him?”
“Cai —”
“Well, I can probably get him out on probation. I have some pull around here. And I am so sorry, by the way, that I never told you I was working with the Bureau, I wanted to, you know, but I don’t have that much pull, not as much as that old bitch Dr. Deng, who doesn’t even work here anyway —”
“Cai —”
“But now that, you know, now that you’re in, it can be different now. We can go to Wu Ke, oh, I always did want to take you there. We can teach you how to chase for real, and most of the time you don’t even have to come up here, even I forget that I work for the Weather Bureau sometimes, except of course when shit like this happens. Please tell me you’re coming out tonight —”
“Cai!”
She finally lets up. “What?”
And what had I even meant to say? I wanted to tell her that I knew everything, that our cohabitation was never a coincidence, that the Weather Bureau had planted her in my flat as the focal lens of a scope pointed at Dr. Deng. That she had been sizing me up all those months, looking for my weak angles, so that when the time came she would know just how to get to me: as the bird with the broken wing. I wanted to ask: did she know? Just how late I would wait in the clinic, listening for the rustle of the beaded curtain, dreading her arrival, dreading her absence? Did she relish the little alchemy by which her bizarre request became routine, and gradually hardened into a command? Did she like that they were watching? But I can’t find the anger anymore. Even now, even silent, she draws me back into her conspiracy. We took down Tenfold Gate together, and there’s more power in that than I can face.
“Why do you do it?” I finally find the words. “You love the Ripples, I know you do. I look into your love for the Mirror Sea, for all of it, and I can’t even see the bottom. Why do you fight Epsilon City?”
Cai frowns, purses her lips. In her moony eyes I see a lucid, razor edge. “Epsilon City isn’t real.”
“Isn’t real? It’s...well...what are we doing here, then? What’s all this for?”
“They forget that it’s not real. Ma and Xia and especially Rui. Sometimes I think they’re too far gone.” She sounds dead sober, suddenly, and I remember that this is why she’s the best in the game. She can hold a contradiction in her mind like no one else. She walks the tightrope like it’s ten feet wide. “And if it was real, it would be an aberration. The Mirror Sea is a wild place. It’s the last wild place, at least the only one I’ve ever known. There is something coming up...” And she’s losing the thread now, focusing past me, seeing something I can’t. “Coming up through us. It’s eaten our planet, and it will eat others, it will eat every mystery and spit out right angles and rigorous claims, and when there’s an answer...when there’s finally an answer for everything, there will be nothing left but to tear it all down. We have so much to learn from the Ripples, from how they are and how they aren’t, there’s nothing left like that! Do you see what I’m saying? God, am I making any sense?”
Even with an autovial to smooth things out, there are peaks and troughs. This is a peak, and just now Cai is in small, foolish tears over something words can never explain. And just now all I want to do is hold her.
“You’re making sense,” I insist.
“If Epsilon City were real, it would be an aberration. It would be just another gyre of plastic in the ocean. So what I do, what we do, is clean up after our mess. As neikonauts. I’m sure you of all people understand.”
And this is the hard part, because Rui has instructed me in no uncertain terms to tell nobody what I know. Aside from the inner sanctum of Weather Bureau leadership, and little old me, none of the hundreds of people involved in tonight’s operation know that we’re going to lose. I wonder what if I told her. If she’d believe me — unlikely — or if it might be the twist that holds the knot. So I stand stupid, weighing the possibilities, relishing a knife in Rui’s back, wishing for a different place in this, for no place at all...
“Say you’ll come out with us tonight,” Cai begs. “Say you’ll do it. I don’t have to say why.”
“I’m tired.” Which is honest, but bad news, because I have to enter loop-lock tonight. Tethi is en route.
“I won’t say why then.” And she sounds for all the world like she’s trying to rouse my ass off the couch, to come out to the clubs. “That’s not even why. I’ll say because we had so much fun last time.”
“Cai, this time I’m just going to watch.”
She sighs, and she hears them calling for her on the PA. Canary, Canary to 6-905 for final debrief. She squeezes the air out of me one last time. “Come find me afterwards then. I’m glad you’re here, Mona. After tonight, everything is going to be different.”
And I do see her again, from shrouded distance, from a back seat in 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 theater 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 to sustained ovation. 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. Rui 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.
But he 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. It’s Yue Fang, who intercepted me outside the Observatory several weeks ago. 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 who I don’t recognize. 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 Yuan. 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 headgear not unlike Tethi’s Introspecs. 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.
“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.”