She is. A few blocks away, one of the Bureau’s veetles descends, its red-hot thrusters yawning, to deposit its final passenger into a quiet alleyway. Cai Yuhui steadies herself on wobbly legs. Her breath is amplified to a roar by the amphitheater’s million-ping sound system. Minutes later she steps out in front of the ambling Ripplechasers, an apparition, a vision. Everyone on the scene knows who she is. Every chaser in Shanghai would be honored to follow her lead. Even the shallowbunnies, the weekenders, the jaded, the timid. Even into the Scrambler.
Furtively, I pull up Cai’s manifolds. On the Weather Bureau’s screens, she’s labeled Canary. It’s so clear how she shifts the soberware to the edges of her mind, just long enough to raise a pointed finger and speak two words. “Let’s go.”
And when they erupt into the Scrambler, there can be no question that this is the place. With no regard for redlights or red lights, Shanghai’s Ripplechasing population throngs the scramble crosswalk, the devoted and the casuals and especially the first-timers, necks craned in wonderment, after all these years finally seeing themselves on the other side of the lens. Countless Ripples crowd the displays, having followed the beacon of the Sieve to the outskirts of Epsilon City, which is unfolding itself into plain sight, turning its protective shell inside-out, laying itself bare for its new inhabitants.
Beneath dense and frantic footfall the Ripplechasers see the dense stripes of the crosswalk, amplifying the patterns of the diving-bell. I think Cai sees both. As she steps into the intersection I fall into her ‘folds. I feel, not insensibly, that I’m watching through her mind’s eye. She casts around, meeting the eyes of her chasers and all the others, letting the debris claw its way into her mind. She loosens, goes big, receives, until the scaffold takes shape in her mind. She was always so damn good at this. Too much Sieve debris for one mind — and now my own incantation comes unbidden — you’re holding on, just let go. But not yet, not yet, just keeping hold on, you’re almost there...
Rui’s voice comes high and reedy and barely steady. “Canary, prepare drop.” Cai doesn’t respond, but the soberware in her manifolds involutes to make ready, the mechanism on a hair trigger now.
“Oh my god...” croak Red One and Green Four in unison.
“Abort,” says Yue Fang.
“...I can see myself in it...”
“Abort.” Yue Fang shoots to her feet and shouts now, hands still flying at the keyboard. The sunflower structure reorients again, towards a hollowed-out nook between two of its massive, spiraling arms, and we see a few wild Ripples pressed up against it in fascination. “Don’t you see what’s happening?”
“Stay that order!” Captain Ma Zhuming turns on the balls of his feet towards Sea-watch. The entire amphitheater, and all the radio chatter, falls dead silent. His footsteps echo against the dome as he comes eye-to-eye with Yue Fang. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
“The red dot test.” She speaks fast. “You put a sticker on an animal’s forehead and you give it a mirror, right? And if it...if it looks and it touches its own forehead, what does that mean? It recognizes itself. Crows, gorillas, baboons, I think, they all pass. And Ripples — look, wild Ripples, this is a P. polynephrons all the way from an outer lobe, from Luodian Town probably...look at what it’s doing, it’s using the structure like a mirror! Look its the surface patterns, it’s mapping itself!”
“Yue, don’t go quadratic on me, not now.”
But she has. She absolutely has, and it’s written all over her face. “They’re learning to communicate. To coordinate. To recognize themselves. Do you know what this means for them? For us?”
“They’re not real. They’re not alive. They’re just chopped up light.”
Her response is low, low from her throat. “Now you say that.”
Ma, no stranger to insubordination, gets right in her face. “Now I do say that.”
“Look,” she cries. “Just look. Look what they’re doing.”
It’s hard not to. I can look at Cai’s manifolds, or at the great Mirror Sea projection, or even at the color-struck faces of the Scrambler’s throng. I can see Ripples prodding curiously at the edges of the Sunflower Sieve debris. The debris prods right back, and the Ripples mold curious, experimental clay-shapes this way. It’s hard not to think of them as a flock of Ripples, only Ripples don’t do that, they don’t coordinate, at least not outside the city. Only here, refracting onyx-and-gold light, they do. Something new is happening.
Yue agrees. “We can’t kill them. Not now. We need to learn from this. Let’s just hang back and observe...”
“We don’t even know what they’re really doing.” Ma steps three inches back. Gives this much ground.
“We do.” She glances at the rest of Sea-watch, shadowed in their seats. “We do.”
Ma gives her one hard, final look and wheels around towards the projection. “Canary, proceed to the center.”
Silently, Cai does. Stride by long stride, she parts the crowd like a liquid, all eyes on her, her eyes on all. Her ‘folds are inundated with Sieve debris now, but in her very center she carries the inversion, an enormous diving-bell, held back by the thinnest of neikotic membranes.
“Circle up,” Ma growls. “Direct attention. Make room.”
Through her eyes, and all the others, it’s clear that Cai is the epicenter of a swirling vortex of attention now. The stray Ripplechasers and passing pedestrians fall silent, offering space for the something is clearly about to happen. The entire intersection holds still. The entire city holds still.
“Rui?”
“Canary.” Dr. Rui Zhang steps forward. “Are you ready?”
“Mona’s here.” Cai’s voice is soft, high, full of wonderment. “I can see her, Mona’s here.”
“That’s right.” Rui’s tone is indulgent, even goading. “Mona’s here. She’s right here with us. Are you ready?”
“It’s all rather pretty, isn’t it? I don’t know if we should be doing this to them anymore. I think this might be good. I think this might just be what’s next.” Two long, uneven breaths. “Mona, what do you think I should do?”
And every eye in the Observatory turns back to me. Do I think we should? Do I have choice? Do we? I catch Rui’s eye, and more than any kind of conviction or trepidation I see exhaustion on his face. I see how long he’s been playing this game, and how — one way or another — he badly wants it to be over. I see a die cast, a future etched in stone, I see total certainty that it doesn’t matter. This time, Epsilon City will survive the worst I could concoct.
It comes out shaky all the way. “Cai, I think you should do what you came to do.”
There’s a long, crackling silence. Rui looks back at Ma, down at his tablet, and back towards the Sea. He offers one more word. “Fire.”
Cai whispers something, and the membrane shatters. Her manifolds flare, now white-hot, now rapidly striated with vivid, concentric streaks of violet. And in the Sea, a whole swarm of diving-bells falls heavy from the background noise. Larger than any of the Ripples, impossible that they weren’t already there. In an instant they find their target and bind: the Sieve debris reaches for their reaching, and their contact is annihilation, and from its knotted, inhabited center, the nearest sunflower node heaves and begins to collapse. The fabric of Shanghai’s reality contorts slightly to fill the Mirror Sea’s eyes with white and purple light, just for an instant, just to briefly interrupt the correlations in all that black and gold. It happens slowly, languidly, miles away, hours ago — but on screen, in the Sea, all here, all here...
And then the power goes out.
Not at YINS — although the sudden loss of Contecs footage feels like a kind of blindness — but in the Scrambler, in the center of Xintiandi Ward. The cameras there wink off, the displays go dark, and there’s a nauseating crunch as the projection reorients to display a Mirror Sea without them: an ordinary calm punctuated only by a distant, thrumming flash. In all this the Observatory goes much darker. It leaves me weightless, neither concave or convex. And for one moment I have an utterly arbitrary, all-consuming choice. Did we cause this, or did they? Is this really happening in there, or out here?
I hope I chose right.
“Control,” shouts Yellow Three frantically, “Is this us?”
“No,” cries Rui. “This is not us!”
“Yes it is,” bellows Ma triumphantly. But I notice he’s switched off his mic. “I made some calls. I told Blue Delta the truth, I told them what you said, that we don’t have it under control. And they made some calls too...”
“You — oh, my friend —” Rui sputters, in horrified disbelief at his partner.
“You said it couldn’t be done, Dr. Rui, but here we are, and this is all it ever took. First Xintiandi, but I’ve got others on the line, they’re finding the right cables to cut. We’re putting this whole city to bed for the night.”
“Did you think this was all it took? After all this time, Zhuming, did you really think this was about the cameras? The displays? It has been too late for that for half a decade! All you’ve done is blind us!”
On screen, the Contecs feeds are switching to infrared. The world is coming back in black and white. On the chasers’ neikotic manifolds, you can see how much Sieve debris is burning away, in scattered, thrumming fires — and how much more still remains. From their mics, the mixed panic and wonderment of the crowd. The cameras and displays have all winked off, Xintiandi is utterly dark...and yet they don’t need eyes to see. The Mirror Sea alone remains.
“Something is here,” one of the Ripplechasers shouts. You can see it, tentacular and tsunamically massive, in their ‘folds, emerging from the rent fabric of the Sea with a vengeful fury to survey the damage.
“No it’s not.” Rui lies so easily. “The cameras are off. Nothing’s there.”
Ma bites down hard and flips his mic back on. “Fall back and prepare for extraction.”
“They’re here.” A whirlwind of screams and shouts. “They’re here...they’ve got her!”
“Who, Red? Who has her?”
Just a beat. A double check. “They’re Chalkers. The other chasers, the ones we found, they’re...”
There’s a thump and a groan as Red Two is knocked to the ground. The Bureau cycles through Contecs feeds for a glimpse of what’s happening but gets only the blur of a panicked, dazzled crowd. Finally, through Blue Four’s eyes we catch three of the Bureau’s agents locked in a struggle with some of the other Ripplechasers, who have shed their costumes now to reveal stark black and lurid white. The Chalkers beat back the Bureau with their batons, with crackling, electrified arcs. And two of them have Cai’s arms locked in theirs, dragging her out of the Scrambler. We get her clearly for just a frame, mostly just the wide circles of her Contecs. Her Sea-struck eyes wide with — is it horror? Wonderment? Could it possibly be relief?
And then she’s gone. The Chalkers melt into the crowd.
“Tracker,” Ma cries, over the panic in the Observatory. “We’ve got her tracker. Let’s pull that up.”
The Bureau’s map of the city, dotted with a new wave of distress calls. Zoomed into Xintiandi now.
“She’s...” someone calls. “She’s everywhere. They’ve got signal replicators in the tunnels!” Cai’s dot doesn’t disappear. It spreads along unseen spiderways, over streets and through skyscrapers and across the river, until she blinks si tong ba da from every ward in Shanghai at once. The team shares a collective, dismal groan. And then? The Observatory falls dark, too. Briefly the only light is from tablet screens and Contecs and the emergency exit strips along the amphitheater stairs. A click, a count of ten, before YINS’ generators come online.
When the lights turn back on, utter silence. A black Mirror Sea readout, the coprocessors only beginning to reboot. Rui jogs up the aisle, finds me in my seat, and puts a trembling hand on my shoulder. “Your, erm — your counterpart is ready to enter loop-lock with you. We’re pulling in feeds from other cameras. It’s time.”