38 // The View From Everywhere, Part II

[21:31:25]

For all those years since Dr. Rui met Captain Ma, the Weather Bureau has fought a clockwork war. I doubt either man believed they could beat the Mirror Sea back out of the noise forever. All victories were temporary; success was holding the levees for another month, another week, another day. Maybe behind all their bluster, they believed tonight was preordained from the moment Shanghai saw the first blurry stills from the Papers. Maybe I was another data point for them, hugging their grim trajectories, always knowing in the quiet of the night that no matter how hard I tried to turn away, someday I’d find myself in their custody again.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Heaven knows I never expected to be in their headquarters, counted by head if not by heart among their pallid number. I never expected to have a front row seat to watch them lose. Part of me smirks, shifts in the deep seat cushion, wants to enjoy this. More of me is shot through with growing unease, seeing the first convulsions of a citywide chaos not seen since the fall of Xia Zitian. I see the same trajectory that Rui sees, drawn bright through the chaos of Wu Ke Nai He. If he’s right, what will tomorrow be?

[21:59:04]

Yue Fang taps me on the shoulder and hands me a Weather Bureau heads-up display. I glare softly back at her as though to insist that this doesn’t make me one of you. But everyone else in the amphitheater is wearing one, and when I slide it over my eyes, I have access to as much as they do. I’m not so ashamed to say that I make a beeline for my own files in their database, a little node dangling off the bolus of open questions labeled Deng Jinghan. They have Contecs footage of my own detainment. Knee deep in tap water, shedding scales, putting trembling hands in the air. 

More to the point, the Bureau has my ward trail, or as much of it as they can gather. There is a button below my mugshot labeled Weather Report, and I can blink on it to see everywhere I’ve been over the past year, and which Ripples were there too, which of hundreds of distributed dramas of coincidence and correlation I might have been drawn into if I ever let myself peek at those screens. Cai has a huge file, keeps a huge file, filling it with her weekly reports from the bowels of the underground directly back to Rui and Ma. Tethi has one too. It’s only a few weeks old, and it traces his involvement with the Sunflower Sieve through weeks of near misses, before ending today at 15:28 ARRIVED INTAKE FACILITY. For a while I just refresh it. Then I tear myself away.

[22:07:31] #street-teams-all-units-voice

“Red team, report. Anything on those screens?”

A pause, and an anonymous crackle. “Red, negative.”

“Blue, negative.”

“Green — we’ve been seeing something here. A little.”

Dr. Rui perks up and clears his throat. “Do you think you could see it more?”

There’s a wheezing laugh on the other end. Green Three appears on the projector, soaked in sweat. “We’re doing our best. We could use more eyes.” And indeed one of them is taking a big rip of a tryptamine pen and squinting at a nearby display.

“Red, Blue, Yellow, converge on Green and circulate.”

[22:15:40] #sea-watch-all

[22:21:14]

Again on the overhead, the street teams through their own eyes. Often we find them crouched quiet, on a low rooftop or in a quiet alleyway, keeping to the margins of the growing throngs. But their heads are on swivels, looking for the next sign of the diving-bell on one screen or another. And then — there — they’ve spotted it again, all facing the same direction now. I rise from my seat when they pick up the chase, and so do their handlers, echoing their hollers, spitting encouragement into their headsets. I’m gripping the armrest, thinking I should be down there, not up here...

They’re far from alone. Every Ripplechaser in the city is out right now, in dazzling formations spanning the rainbow, calling each other onto the street with the promise of their predators and their prey. Grab a color, any color, it doesn’t matter. There has never been a night like this. And so the Bureau’s chasers in their stark purple-and-white attract little attention for now, just another set, just another sect, just another of the endless waves to catch. The streams from their Contecs blur together, true to the feeling of it, and god it takes me back, it makes it so I can’t sit still. I should be down there, out with Cai, tonight of all nights. Cai, though, is alone in a veetle. Still circling overhead, on a feed of her own, trying to hold the trigger steady in her mind.

[22:34:34] #dispatch-0x8ac5e-voice

“You’ve got the Weather Bureau. What’s your ward and intersection?”

“H-hello? I’m in Waitan Universal, I’m a few blocks off the — hello? Can you hear me?”

“Weather Bureau. Speak.”

Heavy breathing. “I’m looking at...it’s...I don’t know how to describe it! It’s not a Ripple, it’s like...it’s like vines, it’s like vines, it’s got me, I only looked once and now it doesn’t matter if I’m looking, I close my eyes and I still feel it, it’s going all the way through me, it’s like new arms and the arms have arms and I can move them but so can everyone else, I don’t think I’m the only one. I’m — okay, I’m looking at a display...”

“I need you to turn around. I need you to look away. Can you do that for me?”

“I can, I can, but I don’t think I want to. I — ahhh, ohhh, ahhhhhhhhhh — one just went right through me —”

“Miss, I — what went through you?”

“A Ripple, it was a Ripple I think, the whole thing, it came right up to me, the new arms, it tasted me, it was delicious, it was like the strawberry jelly I — I — I don’t know if I want it again, can you send someone to pick me up?”

“Miss, I need a cross street.”

“Okay, I’m at, erm, I don’t know where I am, I think I’m either on Nanjing Road or somewhere else now, I might be moving again, can’t you just trace the call? I’m going to try to sit down for a minute, I feel very cold now and things are very, um, very wide. Can you trace the call?”

[22:37:50]

But they can’t even field every call, the lines are saturated, the queue is an hour long. Ma Zhuming is on the catwalk now, shouting into his headset to thirty-one flavors of private law enforcement. He’s still trying to shut the whole thing down, on the line with teams of under-equipped redlights. Trying to find a generator to kill, conduit to cut, but it might be this building or that one, and they can’t find their battering rams. What he’s trying to orchestrate is too forceful, too direct, goes against the Bureau’s whole judo. He issues blanket shelter-in-place advisories, crestfallen behind his big hands, knowing he’s only fueling the fire. He glares down at impassive Rui, who has eyes only for the Sea, scanning its folds for the seeds of his swarm. Rui, who is watching the same thing everyone else is...

Down on the street Green Team are stuck in a crowd, picking their way through a lane where each resident, each and every one is back downstairs to watch, children slinking down in their pajamas, elders helped downstairs to bear witness to the great Ripple migration. Eyes wide, jaws dropped, hair whipping in the September wind, to see this it might even be movie night. A screen through a camera through a screen, but even so washed out we can see what they’re seeing, feel it assembling itself in our nervous systems, and when creamsicle Ripples arrive in foamy thrums they might as well be here, too, probing, prodding, our shared body-sense already putty to their tentative first designs. We share sudden mulitocular bubble-bath glances, an intersubjective vastness, the better to give them passage. “Get down,” rings Rui’s sharp and absurd order, and we do, we cower in our seats until he fumbles for the remote, manages to change the picture back to dry telemetry. But it’s not really gone...

[22:44:14] #dispatch-164edecb-voice

“You’ve got the Weather Bureau. What’s your ward and cross street?”

“Baoshan and I’m...I’m inside. I’m at home. I’m under the covers. I...” A long gathering of thoughts. “I think my brother needs your help, but if you take him, you can’t hurt him, alright? I want him back.”

“We don’t want to hurt anyone, we just want to help. Is he there with you?”

“He’s in the next room, but he’s...he’s going in circles. He’s been knocking on the door trying to get me to go out. He’s got this idea that...I don’t know. It’s too weird to say.”

“I’m listening. I’m here.”

“He says...listen, I know this sounds crazy, and I don’t believe it, not really, but he thinks the cameras are actually projectors. Like a Ripple goes by the lens and it picks it up and then, god, we come out? Shadows on the wall, he keeps saying. Shadows on the wall. And he doesn’t want to go to sleep unless he’s out on the street in their sight. Doesn’t want to...to go.”

“Mr. Gao, can I examine your ward trail?”

“Okay, but it’s not that! We’re not into this stuff, chasing Ripples, we don’t touch it! But I think he’s caught one, I think I’ve got it now, I don’t know...I’m not saying he’s right, you know? I’m just saying that I don’t know how you’d know. That sounds crazy and it’s probably not true but I’m just telling you what...what’s going on over here. Can you come pick him up? Can you pick me up?”

[22:49:02]

And Yue Fang must have been watching the same transcript as I was because now she stands up and switches to main comms and says: “We have to tell them to go outside. We can’t collect all of these people, we’re spread too thin. Sieve debris, it only hurts until...” And she looks at me for support, and I stare dumbstruck back. “It only hurts when it’s cut off, right? If they go outside and find other people at least it’ll unfold, and it won’t hurt.”

“Negative, Sea-watch,” Ma puts in from the catwalk. “This isn’t your purview.”

But Rui keys his mic. “She might be right. There comes a point where’s no reason to fight it.”

“No reason to fight it? No reason to fight it? Dispatch, do not send anyone outside.” And now he and Rui are both casting around the amphitheater for Xia, looking for support. But Xia must have slunk away a while ago.

Rui clicks his tongue in dismay. “Okay, Yue, please focus on the Sea. We need a lock on Epsilon City.”

[22:52:37] #sea-watch-all

[22:57:02] #street-teams-all

“Green team, report. Is that Red or Blue over there by the canal?”

“Neither.” The response is muttered, subvocalized. Synthvox. The attached pair of eyes turns towards a large crowd all dressed in haphazard zebra-stripes. “They’re not with us. They’re just...Ripplechasers. They’re just out.”

Over there in Memetics they pump their fists and high-five and send papers flying. A stray group that already believes in the diving-bell? That’s a goldmine. That’s Memetics, baby. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.

Even Dr. Rui can’t contain his excitement. “Can we corral them?”

Another crackle. “We’re gonna let them corral us. They think they know how to find it.”

[23:04:58] #sea-watch-all

[23:11:01] #dispatch-d52b34fe-voice

“You’ve got — no, no, tell him to put it down. You’ve got the Weather Bureau. What’s your ward and cross street?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, that is the wrong question! Are you the fuckers doing this to us?”

“Citizen, this is 1-1-4, if you’re seeing something you don’t want to, you tell us and we’ll, ah, we’ll come get you.”

“I’ve been...there’s a...I’ll try, okay? Everything is made of tubes, okay? And there’s a big, oh my god, it looks like to them it must be a post office, or a factory, there are things moving in and out, but it’s like it’s they’re glitching around the wrong angles, and when I guess right I feel pretty good but when I guess wrong I can feel them hit the wall and break, I can feel them getting upset with me, but not with me, see —”

“Things? Things like Ripples?”

“Yeah, like Ripples, but things, okay, things. Just...objects, very spiky objects, I wish I could be more specific, I wish I could name a single thing that I see right now, okay? They’re moving through me, and around me I see big, big, it’s like buildings under construction, it’s like uh, like bees are making it but all sped up? Like honeycombs? I think I’m getting walled in, I don’t think I’m going to be able to move from here...”

“Alright. This is not the usual advice, but I want you to listen to me, okay? I want you to get out from wherever you are and go find people. If you find other people they’ll help you carry it and you’ll ride it out, okay?”

“Other people? I don’t see other people, I don’t...I...I don’t feel like a person! I feel like a place!”

[23:19:04]

The chase picks up steam. It picks up direction. It picks up a dozens more Ripplechasers in twos and threes, all dressed like the same peculiar blob of something they caught on the displays throughout the day, that they hope to get cozier with now that it’s night. And when they find it, they find it.

Yue Fang sits bolt-straight. Presses a finger to her ear. “Did anyone see that?

“Fuck me sideways.” In the background you can hear the muttered wonderment that always seems to follow a visitor from the Mirror Sea. “We felt that.”

Someone rewinds the Contecs footage: a few blurry frames, vivid and concentric waves of its shimmering violet and bright white hull, utterly unmistakable. My hull — I tamp down the clenching, parabolic thought — not now, not yet... And there it is again: to Bo Yuan’s smug satisfaction, it reappears briefly on the side of a department store. And it lingers in the neikotic readouts of the Ripplechasers who caught it, who are now trying to enclose it like a resonator, to remember how it felt so they can find it again. A member of Blue Team plants another infrared signal flare to mark the spot. The cameras pick up its unique frequency, and the gold-flecked currents of the Sea shift in conformation.

“Go!” Ma roars, though with obvious delight. “Go catch it!”

The loop tightens. Again and again they wind around a few dense blocks. It becomes not altogether clear, between the street teams and the diving-bell, who is chasing who. Perfect.

“We’re — going to — peel it — off,” shouts Red Two between ragged breaths.

“Good. Fucking superb,” Ma replies. “Head to the drop zone.”

And when they go, the diving-bell follows. Not perfectly, not always. Sometimes it disappears for tense minutes before careening back through their manifolds, or just along the side of a skewer cart. A kilometer, half — it’s still following, weaving between the displays and in their minds. Only now the Bureau’s chasers are a tiny minority of the crowd.

“A few of them want to go somewhere else,” Blue One insists frantically. “They say it’s overdone. Played out. They think it’ll be swarming with casuals tonight.”

“Forget them.” Ma rolls his eyes hard at this, and turns to Rui. “Is she ready?”