by Chen Qiufan
But the man ignored her. The world no longer mattered to him. The biofeedback signals gathered from Mimi’s body were being continuously fed into his helmet through a high-speed cable, creating the formula for this new brand of ecstasy.
The forty-ninth beam of light pierced Mimi’s body. Her spine arched so that her face was tilted as far back as possible, almost breaking her neck. She felt warm liquid flowing down her legs; she had wet herself. The indescribable pain blurred her vision, and countless sparkling lights seemed to shoot out of the edges of her field of vision toward the center. The entire world was distorted.
The shaft of white light slowed down, the intervals between its visits stretched longer. Mimi knew that this was only an illusion—the world had never changed one iota for her sake. Futilely, she counted: the light reappeared a hundred times, maybe a thousand, each wait longer than the last, interminable. Each shock from the tentacles caused the world in her eyes to shake, contract, fill with sparkling lights; she no longer felt pain, only numbness and a deep, abiding weariness.
Mimi didn’t know what kind of emotion she was experiencing: anger, despair, sorrow, hatred—maybe it was all of these, but none seemed quite right. She couldn’t pin that sensation down: it wasn’t capable of being captured by language, and it shifted and changed with the passing of the beam of light, the tentacles’ every movement, and the stimuli perceived by each of her pores. Familiar scenes flashed before her eyes: the trees of her home village, her mother’s tears, chili paste, the rise and fall of the tides on the beach, junk heaps, the swollen body of the chipped dog, the stench of burning plastic, the setting sun, the horizon undulating at night, the blue-green glow of the jellyfish, Brother Wen’s strange prosthesis, moonlight, Kaizong in the moonlight, Kaizong coming to her rescue on the night of the Ghost Festival, Kaizong lying on the beach next to her gazing up at the stars …
These distant, unreal fragments of memory were chaotically stacked together as the tentacles shifted through different patterns of motion. Mimi felt the inside of her body burn; drops of sweat on her skin sizzled and boiled, turning into steam that clouded her view. Everything in the room was slightly and eerily distorted, like mirages in a desert, like a nightmare from which she could not awaken.
Knifeboy’s two forgotten assistants excitedly discussed the newest attraction in Dongguan’s red-light district: made in Eastern Europe … highly modified lumbar suspension system … satisfy the most exotic tastes … prosthetic sphincter muscles with adjustable strength … foreign whores with electric motors … Scarface laughed lecherously and his facial features seemed to twist and jiggle like jelly, the scar on his left cheek glowing with blood. They were like an inattentive audience treating the violent spectacle before them as an episode of some poorly made soap opera.
Mimi felt a jolt as, without warning, the tape over her mouth was ripped away; the searing pain was like having her skin cauterized with a branding iron. Before she could even refocus her eyes, she felt something closing around her throat, forcing her to open her mouth to suck in air. A slimy, hot object forced itself between her lips and began to press into the cavity between her tongue and palate. One of the tentacles was trying to enter her, to seek fresh nerves to torment.
Knifeboy moaned again, an inhuman noise.
Mimi visualized the connection between the squirming object in her mouth and Knifeboy. In a flash, she made up her mind and bit down, her jaws clenching like a triggered trap.
A scream of unbearable suffering.
Mimi stared at Knifeboy’s convulsing face with hate-filled eyes. The veins on Knifeboy’s forehead bulged as he stumbled forward, trying to pry the helmet from his head. Mimi clamped down even harder, and as the tentacle between her teeth writhed and contracted, Knifeboy screamed again. The two lackeys milled around, seemingly unsure of whether to first help remove the helmet or try and pry open Mimi’s teeth. The white beam again swept through, illuminating by turn each person’s frozen pose and expression like some still scene in a pantomime.
You fucking cunt! Knifeboy’s howl finally broke apart the tableau vivant.
Out of the corner of her eyes Mimi saw a blue flash. Skinhead was coming at her with a taser, the arc of light between its electrodes flickering like the tongue of a black viper. Instinctively, she loosened her jaws and tried to get out of the way, but she was too late; a powerful force erupted in her head, and her vision exploded into millions of blue-purple daisies, spinning, tumbling, dancing with orange stripes, everything contracting and getting entangled, all the illusions stacking together and rushing through a tunnel, stalling, returning to the origin.
A cold, sparse, endless darkness.
* * *
The sea. Pale like the skin of a corpse, the sea stretched out until it touched the leaden gray sky. At first glance, the sea appeared as a block of solidified polyester plastic: there was no motion, no spray, no birds, only the horizon as still as death.
Mimi found half of her stuck in the dead sea. The water was up to her waist, not cold, not hot, like something that separated her from all sensory stimuli and made the bottom half of her body numb. She thought about turning around, and before she could even move her leg muscles, her face had already been turned 180 degrees. She saw the shore, equally pale, but glowing a rough, frosted, matte light, like sandpaper that had been glued around the edge of the sea; there was no sense of depth to it at all.
A figure appeared on shore. It wasn’t moving—maybe he was lying on the beach? But no, Mimi could see the entirety of his body as though she were hovering over him and looking down—the perspective was all wrong.
Who is that? The face expanded in her view until she could almost distinguish the pores and the wrinkles under the eyes. Chen Kaizong was staring at the sky, mesmerized. His gaze pierced through Mimi’s body and focused somewhere in the bottomless depths of space. A key seemed to turn inside Mimi and forcefully wound up the mainspring, causing her entire body to contract as though all her strength was compressed and curled up inside the minuscule space inside her heart, waiting for a moment of uncontrollable release.
A familiar anxiety swept across the tips of Mimi’s nerves, and Kaizong shrank back to a small figure on the distant beach. She turned around and saw the same nightmare that had tormented her countless times: at the distant horizon where the sea and the sky met, a nacre-like glow and an oil-film iridescence came at her like some roiling storm, rapidly devouring the pale edge of the world.
She didn’t know what it was; all of her senses told her: flee! But no matter how much she struggled to coordinate her muscle groups to shift her legs, the distance between her and the shore didn’t close by even an inch.
Mimi opened her mouth—she wanted to cry out, to make that man who had once saved her look away from the starry sky and lower his gaze to her. Kaizong’s figure shifted, suddenly close, suddenly far, like a shadow puppet cast by the flickering candle in the wind, illusory rather than real. What emerged from her mouth was no longer human speech, but piercing, metallic howls that were infused with the staccato tremors of her terror.
She didn’t turn her head but she could see the scene behind her. The iridescent wave was like some mutant aerobic microorganism madly reproducing and spreading over the surface, radiating into countless complex glowing paths like Moses emerging from the Red Sea. The sea was a piece of dull silicon being etched with incomprehensible markings, meaningless patterns and symbols that came from either the ancient past or the distant future—and all the lines, breaks and gaps, bumps and dips had only one ultimate goal: her body.
Mimi screamed Kaizong’s name, but her electronic howl seemed to dissipate rapidly in the air and could not budge the man. His face rose into the sky like a moai from Easter Island, and as Mimi was assaulted by waves of emotion, the face shifted between high-definition clarity and disintegration. She extended her hands desperately only to find her own skin reflecting the strange rainbow sheen.
The wave loomed behind her, solidifying into
a complex masonry arch decorated with fractal patterns, an electronic instance of Baroque architecture. The depressions and sliding tracks on the components clearly informed Mimi that her long-suffering, fragile body was the indispensable keystone for the completion of this masterpiece.
She saw a face in the smooth metallic surface of the wave, a trembling, iridescent face that seemed to be hers but also different: the expression on the face didn’t belong to her, didn’t belong to any person she knew; it was an expression of peace surpassing understanding, like a mirror reflecting itself, impossible for anyone to extract the subtle meanings hidden within. The face seemed to represent only existence itself.
Mimi’s face convulsed in fear, and that other face flickered into a smile, gradually transforming into the face of some Western woman. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember where or in which black market digital mushroom she had seen her.
Far behind her, Kaizong flashed once more into her view and then disappeared. She opened her arms, and as if accepting her fate, allowed that Hydra-like wave to pour into herself, to devour her. She heard the high-frequency whine coming from her own bones, all her nerves resonating, shattering, bursting into countless spinning mandalas. Her retinas twinkled, and billions of colors burned through the last defenses of her sense of self. Mimi’s nose was filled with a familiar scent—the smell of milk on her mother’s body—she struggled to hang on to the memory of it, the way she had tried vainly each time to leave this nightmare.
This time, she succeeded.
* * *
The first drop of rain drilled through the endless darkness and splashed against Mimi’s face.
Next, the raindrops began to tap-dance against her blue plastic shroud. The ice-cold rainwater flowed into her mouth, nose, eyes, and her respiratory system instinctively convulsed, coughing up a clot of blood and then taking in a deep gulp of long-denied air. Her chest heaved violently, like a pumping bellows. Chaos filled her consciousness, and her limbs remained limp. She hadn’t yet discovered that she was lying in a half-meter-deep hole in the ground and around her was a mass graveyard where the headstones stood as broken teeth strewn along the ground, phosphorescing in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse.
“Brother Knife, she … she’s still alive,” a confused voice said.
Knifeboy squatted down next to the hole, and the strain on his crotch made him cry out in a low moan. He watched the face in the grave and grinned after a moment.
“It looks like the heavens want this dumb cunt to die slowly.” He lifted his arms and a shovelful of dark soil flew into the grave, falling on top of the blue plastic tarp. More shovelfuls of soil followed, gradually muffling the crisp, cheerful cracking of the plastic.
The mud splashed onto the pale white face, like crows landing in a field of snow. Mimi’s eyes blinked rapidly a couple of times, as if protesting noiselessly. The black, malodorous mud covered her beautiful forehead, followed the curvature of her face and covered the delicate bridge of her nose, and slowly flowed between her lips and teeth. She seemed to cough a few times, but only lightly—a sound as insignificant as the breaking of a single reed stalk in the torrential flood of this black rain.
The depression in the ground gradually filled and all traces of disturbance disappeared, as if nothing had ever happened here.
Am I dead?
Mimi knew that this was not a dream, but her consciousness seeped out of her ruined body and penetrated into the tiny cracks in the waterlogged soil: it rose and rose like some soap bubble lifting off the end of the blowpipe, and lightly, leaving behind no trace, left the ground and hovered in midair.
She was familiar with this height, but she could no longer see her own body or feet. She gazed down at the patch of soil burying her body—not with her eyes, and without the weight of pain; she didn’t understand how this could have happened, just like she couldn’t understand her nightmares. The Mimi of yesterday had worked hard to sniff burning pieces of plastic for twenty-five yuan a day, for the hope of one day being able to care for her parents, but now, her violated body was lying underground and her soul was adrift in the night rain, no longer bothered by the raindrops penetrating her shapeless consciousness. She felt a chill, but it wasn’t a sensation from her skin; rather, it was a hallucination created by the shapes of the raindrops and the trajectories left by their rapid fall.
Almost subconsciously, Mimi reached out to dig through the soil to save herself, but she had no hands.
The three men stood not far away, smoking. The red glows of their cigarettes dimmed and brightened, and the white smoke seemed fragile in the dense rain. They were discussing something in whispers, and from time to time they had to stop to relight the cigarettes put out by the rain. Their expressions were as at ease, as if they had just returned from fishing. In the distance, a column of light pierced the darkness of the sea, lengthened, and swept across the world: the glowing lines of rain wove a dense fabric in the air like top-quality black cashmere mixed with silver threads. The men’s outlines were highlighted while their profiles remained in the shadows, and their familiar faces were twisted into expressions of laughter.
In a moment, all her memories returned to the core of her consciousness like a storm: the recurring sweeps of the beam of light and the lengthening intervals of waiting, the viscous, thick bodily fluids, humiliation, the strong fishy-sweet taste—anger expanded slowly like a vortex until it turned into fury. She rushed at the men, unconcerned about herself, and her consciousness expanded like a rubber sheet, resilient, bouncy, and stretched thin. She was almost at the man responsible for her violation—she was going to scratch out his eyes, break open his skull, chew up his brains, bite his cock in half and stuff it in his mouth. She was going to torture him in every way she could, even if she didn’t know that much about torture.
Despair filled Mimi as she felt herself pass through the bodies of Knifeboy, Skinhead, and Scarface like a wind passing through the dense rain: there was no contact, no friction, no body heat, nothing at all except a growing sense of powerlessness.
Is this my soul?
Abruptly, she “saw” the familiar Tide Gazing Beach. The sea, twinkling in extreme slow motion, inserted itself into the beach at a slant, and the waves of the tide appeared as silver scars that multiplied and healed repeatedly. Mimi suddenly understood where she was: the forbidden ground, the mass grave for babies born out of wedlock and unchaste women—the black guardian from Lockheed Martin stood erect in the storm, and she wondered if she had violated the spirits in some way for such a fate to befall her.
In a second, she had leapt in front of that god of death, but she did not take up the habitual pose of kneeling prayer; instead, she had descended from the air at a diagonal—if she still had had a flesh-and-blood body, her post at this moment would resemble an Apsara portrayed in the Dunhuang murals: a celestial nymph with lifted legs, arched back, face uplifted to stare into the eyes of the great robot, the ribbons on her dress dancing behind her like roiling waves.
The empty cockpit resembled an abyss. Mimi stared into the darkness and detected a familiar scent—it wasn’t the result of airborne molecules that could be picked up by the nose, but a kind of information-carrying trace left by Brother Wen. She felt some formless barrier between her consciousness and the robot extending endlessly in every direction, like the door of some safe that had been broken into and then left in place; all she needed was to give it a final push and a brand-new world would be revealed to her.
Mimi could not resist the temptation offered by the abyss, like the call of some ancient instinct; she had nothing left, not even life.
The tentacles of consciousness extended like flexible seaweed, wriggling into that wall, searching for cracks and the mechanism keeping the barrier in place. To Mimi’s surprise, the process seemed completely natural and she didn’t even need to direct her movements. In reality, she knew nothing about what she was doing—all she could remember was the vision of Brother Wen’s fingers moving in
a blur as he broke through encryption locks and altered the programming code as though he were possessed by some shaman’s spirit in a mysterious ritual. In her eyes, Brother Wen had seemed a god from another world.
And now, she had accomplished what even a god couldn’t accomplish.
The wall didn’t open or collapse—it simply disappeared. Which was more ridiculous: a formless wall disappearing or a dead woman struggling for life? Mimi’s consciousness was sucked into the abyss.
The churning sense of space led to intense vertigo. Peaks turned into chasms, and vice versa. Mimi struggled to adjust to the new sensory signals, like a soul embedded into a strange new body. She needed time to wait quietly for power to build up inside her, weak at first but then growing stable. A tremor appeared in her chest—unlike human heartbeats, the amplitude was low but the frequency high, like some violent beast disturbed in deep slumber giving off a light sneeze, sufficient to terrify anyone observing.
She convulsed, and convulsed again. The movement didn’t come from any flesh, but the depths of her consciousness. The invisible cilia of electricity gently brushed across billions of neurons and agitated crystal blue ripples, which extended and spread along a complicated three-dimensional topology. Another powerful spasm. Some switch seemed to be connected and she could see: the sights of a world unlike anything she had ever seen.
The raindrops were almost still: glowing crystals numerous as grains of sand in the Ganges hung suspended in the night air. Confused, Mimi tried to blink, but she had no eyelids. As her exoskeleton trembled, the starlike lights vibrated in sync, demonstrating their reality. The sky was a pale green and the sea indigo: wherever she looked, the center of her visual field became bright and limpid, with strongly defined outlines and clear details; however, the view grew dimmer and fuzzier in a radiating pattern from the center, distorted as though seen through the rim of a lens. All she heard was silence, as though the special alloy in the shell absorbed and filtered out all sound.