by Chen Qiufan
The raindrops began to move slowly, like a train departing the platform. A sensation of weight came out of nowhere, and Mimi almost collapsed before she instinctively resisted and held herself up. She finally realized that she was no longer controlling a flesh-and-blood human body, but a body made of metal.
Mimi-mecha stood still—it was a strange feeling. She knew very well that her real body lay dead under the earth, but she shook off the water gathered in the depressions in the shoulder of her armor and listened to the buzzing of the electroactive artificial muscle fiber bundles contracting. She didn’t breathe, wasn’t anxious, and there was no emotion standing in the way of her ability to act. She understood exactly what she had to do.
Not too far away, three green-glowing human figures trembled in the darkness.
Mimi-mecha began to walk, each stride leaving a deep depression in the muddy, soft earth. The green sky began to flicker irregularly, and the raindrops seemed to accelerate, though they still fell slower than they did in the physical world. She was starting to understand that this was a visual hallucination, like the enhancement brought by digital mushrooms. Time had slowed down because her mind had sped up.
The black armor smashed through the matrix of rain, and as the wind brushed across its perfect surfaces—the result of supercomputer calculations—the result was a howling like the call of foxes or owls. Mimi-mecha was amazed by how fast this gigantic body could move. The three human figures soon swelled from being about the size of seashells to man-sized, and the three pale faces lit up in her visual field, their ex pressions a mixture of confusion and horror, their facial muscles not even finished with the task of twisting all the features into place.
Mimi-mecha extended her right arm and slammed it down at an angle. The cigarette dangling from the lips of Scarface, squatting on the right, broke; a sharp, clean, red line followed the direction of the old scar on his left cheek and traversed the rest of his face at an incline—and the top half of his head slid off; the shear extended across his right scapula and took away most of his right arm. Mimi saw bright, pastel-colored liquid spewing from that clean, perfect cut. She understood now that the brightness of the color represented heat.
The minty green was so warm it was almost the color of milk.
Almost simultaneously, her other iron hand clamped around Skinhead’s skull and lifted him off the ground by his head. Skinhead struggled like a hooked catfish, and his kicking legs struck against the alloy armor in muffled, irregular beats. The wet spot in the crotch of his pants expanded rapidly. Mimi deliberately and slowly increased the pressure in the pincers, watching as the bald head slowly deformed and broke between her fingers, and more bright green-white liquid erupted from the crushed skull. She gazed at this process, entranced, until the broken corpse of the man fell to the ground, leaving only a mixture of bones, blood, and brain matter in Mimi-mecha’s hand, glowing like poor-quality jade.
She had spent too much time on this game and almost forgotten her real goal. Knifeboy was now several hundred meters down the beach. The flames from the body film over his shoulders flickered and shook violently in the night, as if about to go out at any moment.
Mimi-mecha took two great leaps, but then collapsed into the sand on her knees. Her consciousness grew blurred and thin, and she couldn’t gather enough strength to control the exoskeleton. Mimi realized that she wasn’t a completely free soul, but was still tethered to that buried, dying body. As soon as her body truly died, her consciousness was going to dissipate.
She struggled up, turned around, and with heavy steps returned to the mass graveyard, where she sought her own grave.
Her field of vision changed: the ground was divided by glowing lines of light into a grid, and Mimi’s gaze passed through the grid to see the bones, coffins, and grave goods buried with the bodies. She surveyed the bodies in strange poses: some were cats, more numerous were the dogs, and there was one grave where three bodies were packed together so that their limbs were entwined like some monster with six arms and three heads, a terrifying sight. She saw a tiny corpse curled up, an outsized head on top of an undeveloped body, a baby like a cicada larva sleeping in the darkness underground. All the muscle fibers in the robot contracted at once, as though shivering.
Mimi saw herself: a slender glowing shadow that was gradually dimming, stiff like some dead dog, lying quietly in one of the grid boxes, not much brighter than the other long-dead corpses.
She plunged her robot arms deep into the wet soil, shoved off armfuls of the black earth, and plunged them in again. Mimi dug so determinedly that she didn’t seem to care if she might harm her body. She saw everything and kept her immense power under absolute mastery so that her movements could be controlled within the precision of the width of a single strand of hair. Gradually, the blue plastic was revealed in cracks in the soil, like a sea rising under the greenhouse effect gradually swallowing up land until only scattered black islands were left.
Mimi-mecha extended her arms and gently lifted the body out of the grave and more gently set it on the ground. The plastic shroud unrolled, revealing the clam-like pale flesh speckled with hints of green, appearing swollen in the rain. Mimi gazed at that familiar yet strange face, an unspeakably odd sensation in her mind—this was not like staring into a mirror. In the mirror, a person unconsciously adjusted her facial muscles and expression in the hope of achieving the best aesthetic effect, but right now, she was looking at a completely slack face with no trace of life.
The cold alloy fingers manipulated the young girl’s body. Mimi didn’t know how she could save herself. She saw that the light green in her chest area was gradually cooling to match the cold cyan in the surrounding region, indicating that her life was seeping out of her grasp. Mimi ex tended two thick metal fingers, placed them between the two small breasts, and began to rhythmically compress the center of her breastbone like they taught on TV. The soft human body convulsed under the mechanical force, but the position of the heart in the grid remained still, giving no sign of life.
Get up! Get up!
Mimi cried voicelessly in despair. She lost control of her own strength and she saw her chest sink as her metal fingers pushed her flesh body into an indentation in the soil. She watched as a mixture of blood, water, and mud spewed from her nose and mouth, and she seemed to see hope itself.
Her heart still did not come back to life.
I need electricity!
The thought set Mimi-mecha’s nerve bundles aflame like lightning. Within thirty microseconds, the electroactive muscle bundles in her arms created a circuit and formed positive and negative terminals, with the current and voltage adjustable by contracting the muscle fiber bundles. She had no idea exactly how she was able to do this, just as a battle-hardened soldier could not tell whether his first reaction upon hearing the sound of a gunshot came from complex memories stored in his muscles or a command from his brain.
Crackle. Blue sparks flickered. The current flowed from the left side of the breastbone into the heart and then out of the right scapula.
In the darkness, that green, bud-like heart seemed to contract once.
She increased the current. Crackle! The whole body bounced off the ground and fell back, splashing mud everywhere.
The green bud contracted violently and then relaxed. Mimi felt some force pulling on her consciousness, trying to drag her out of the robotic exoskeleton shell—the force came from the naked girl on the ground.
Crackle. Another violent jolt. A feeling of nausea overwhelmed her. In a moment, Mimi seemed to be back in that cold, wet, scarred human body, but within tens of microseconds she was back in the hardened safety of her steel castle.
Crackle. Crackle. Crackle.
Mimi’s consciousness oscillated rapidly between the robot and the human body, her vision flickering uncertainly. The heart was gradually recovering its regular rhythm, and the life force was growing stronger, but at the same time, she was losing her power to control the alloy armor. The limp jo
ints were no longer able to support the weight of the shell, and she could feel the robot leaning over, collapsing under the influence of gravity.
Below the immense metal shell was the young girl in a coma.
Pain. Wetness. Trembling. Nausea. Extreme exhaustion. These uniquely human sensations filled the center of Mimi’s consciousness with more frequency, and the last sight Mimi-mecha could see was herself falling unsteadily toward the fragile human body. She could almost see that pallid chest and the freshly recovered heart within—the body was going to be crushed into a meat pie by the multiton war toy.
No!
To her shock, Mimi heard her own voice drifting weakly in the storm. She opened her eyes with great difficulty: in front of her was the immense, hideous visage of the black killing machine. Rainwater flowed down, following the simple, clear channels in the armor, falling into the space between her lips. The robot extended its arms against the muddy ground just as it was about to crush Mimi’s body and held its weight suspended above the young girl.
Between her and Death was the distance of a kiss.
Mimi struggled to move her pain-racked body, and inch by inch, crawled out from beneath the robot. The pouring rain pierced the endless night, drenching her, blurring her eyes. She was cold, trembling, and helplessly confused, her familiar body now heavy and disobedient to her will. The white beam of light appeared again, carelessly sweeping across the night sky, the surface of the sea, the beach, the graveyard, striking Mimi coldly and then departing noiselessly, leaving behind not a trace of warmth or compassion.
She recalled the nightmare she had been through, and vomited uncontrollably in the rain.
8
Luo Jincheng observed the trembling male figure curled up in the corner: the flames over his shoulders were dimmed; the stench of urine emanated from his body; trails of drool hung from the corners of his mouth; the wide-open eyes, laced with webs of blood, could not focus on anything—it was almost impossible to recognize him. Luo could not recall ever seeing Knifeboy so terrified and panicked. He had run away from home at nine and joined the street gangs with eyes full of hatred, and then Luo Jincheng had picked him out in a gang fight and turned him into a loyal dog of the Luo family.
The boy had been thin as a bean sprout, but he had wielded his bicycle chain like a silver snake in the crowd, with drops of blood splashing against his young face, twisted with rage—Luo could never forget the expression on that face, as if he yearned to destroy the entire world.
Knifeboy was a bastard, others had told Luo. His mother had been seduced by a migrant worker, who disappeared as soon as the boy was born. The mother’s relatives all advised her to get rid of the baby, but she insisted on bringing up her son. Under the contemptuous stares and whispered disapproval of everyone around him, the boy had grown up to have a pair of narrow eyes whose gaze was sharp as knives—just like that no-good migrant, everyone who had seen his father said.
Later, his mother had married a local man, and the stepfather had waited until the mother was away before tossing Knifeboy into the chicken coop and the dog house, forcing him to fight the chickens and dogs for scraps of food and covering himself with shit. Then the man had told his mother: Dirty and low blood flows in his veins—look at how much he enjoys the filth of animals! His mother had then held Knifeboy all night, sobbing, telling him, “You can’t stay here anymore. I can’t protect you from suffering.” Not a single tear dropped from Knifeboy’s beautiful eyes.
After Knifeboy ran away from home, his mother never looked for him, even though he lived only a few streets away—so close that, as the saying went, when he pissed, his mother couldn’t have missed the stench. He passed by his mother, stepfather, and half brother in the streets multiple times, but they never recognized him. He developed quickly: his frame and muscles strengthened by frequent fights, his hair cut in a wild style and dyed strange colors, his beard wispy, soft, and bluish. He always kept his eyes lowered as he passed his family, afraid that they might look into his eyes and know who he was.
His half brother disappeared mysteriously when he turned four. They searched everywhere but could find no trace of him; rumor had it that the boy had been kidnapped by outsiders and sold into Northwestern China. His stepfather howled and cried for most of a month and seemed to age a decade in a few weeks. Even Knifeboy felt some compassion.
Should have left him alive, he thought. Maybe even left them some sign. But it was too late.
Vengeance was a biological instinct deeply rooted in his constitution. When he had killed the child, he had stared at that much younger face, which bore some resemblance to his own, and acted without hesitation.
He hated himself, just as he bore a deep hatred for the world. Luo Jincheng understood this very well: it was the key for why Knifeboy was so useful. But now, the Knifeboy before him was like a castrated dog who had lost all will to fight; he squeezed his legs tightly together and mumbled fragments of nonsense.
Ghost. There’s a ghost.
The murders were indeed exceedingly strange. At the scene, they found the mutilated corpses as well as an abandoned exoskeleton leaning against the ground whose batteries had been exhausted. There were numerous trails of footprints: on the beach, in the mud, bare, heavy, not made by human feet.
Luo Jincheng concealed all information about the murders. Even though he had been in the business of intimidation and violence for decades and his imagination was as rich as his experience, he couldn’t puzzle out the sequence of events. The bloody maze before him lacked a critical clue, a key to unlock the mystery: that feeble waste girl.
From a variety of sources, he found out about Knifeboy’s dark habits, his reliance on violent, virtual devices to feel stimulation of any kind: Luo Jincheng guessed that this had something to do with Knifeboy’s harsh childhood, but he had never asked Knifeboy about it, as though it was some kind of awkward secret shared by a father and his son.
Mimi was a victim as well as a witness, perhaps even a suspect in hiding.
The date for the “oil fire” ritual designated by the lohsingpua was approaching, and his son was still in a coma, shrinking and weakening daily like the husk of a drying piece of apple. Things were not going as planned. Luo Jincheng felt uneasy: he needed the blessing and reassurance of the spirits.
Is our deal still in place?
He clasped two crescent-shaped wooden cups together overhead, closed his eyes, and prayed before tossing the cups to the ground. The two cups cracked apart and both came to rest with the curved side facing down. Laughing cups indicated that the spirits did not care about this matter, and had dismissed it with a smile. Luo Jincheng refused to give up and tried the augury three more times, but each time ended with laughing cups.
* * *
Brother Wen—Li Wen—sat in his simple shack full of strange smells and listened to the rain pitter-pattering against the corrugated iron roof. All sorts of broken prostheses lay scattered around the shed, and augmented artificial muscles of various thicknesses and metal tools hung on the walls. The entire room seemed like a bloodless abattoir, and he was the butcher.
Before him squatted a few young waste men whose dull gray composite fabric clothes were wet from the rain. They all wore augmented-reality glasses whose wires came together and plugged into the delicate black box in Li Wen’s hand. They seemed eager to ask questions, but Li Wen’s slow and methodical rhythm held them in check.
“Brother Wen, was it you who found Mimi? Where?”
Li Wen nodded and then shook his head. “… at the entrance to the village. She had walked there by herself.”
“How is she? Let’s cut the balls off all those bastards! None of them will ever have children!”
“She’s in the hospital, still in a coma. The police are guarding her. We can’t get in, but the Luo clan won’t dare to try anything either.”
“Fuck that shit! We put our lives on the line to make them rich, and they do this to our girls? What kind of world is this?”
/> “Brother Wen, let’s burn down the Luo clan mansion and kill every Luo and feed them to the dogs!”
All the other young men seconded the suggestion.
“Try using your brains for a second!” The veins in Li Wen’s temples jumped, and his expression was one of great suffering. In that moment, a familiar face flashed in front of his eyes: his little sister. That face overlaid Mimi’s pale, violated face, and the two seemed utterly similar, whether as a result of an actual resemblance of features or the shared expression of despair. He hadn’t been able to protect his sister. When the same thing was happening again to someone he cared for, the pain was nigh unbearable.
“Why do you assume it’s done by somebody from the Luo clan?” Brother Wen asked them. “Who witnessed it? Who got a picture? If you just attack without proof like a bunch of rabid dogs, how are you any different from them?”
He forced down the fiery rage threatening to erupt out of his chest. The anger was trying to turn him into a beast, incinerating reason to ashes until he committed some horror that could not be undone. But he could not give in. He needed time to analyze, to think. For Mimi’s sake, he had to make sure every move he made from now on would lead a step closer to true victory.
The young men went quiet. After a while, they timidly asked Brother Wen what they should do.
“If they adhere to their usual pattern, they’re going to monitor our communications. I’m sure they’ll activate all the panoptical smart CCTV cameras at all the street corners and watch everything the waste people do, including analyzing the video feeds to read our lips. Even though Silicon Isle is a restricted-bitrate zone, they definitely have some dedicated data lines for this.