Waste Tide

by Chen Qiufan

  Slight perturbations appeared in the recurrent waveform on the cardiogram, as though a pebble had been tossed into the pond. Ripples spread, shifting the positions of peaks and valleys, stretching and shrinking the amplitudes.

  The witch’s feet staggered, and the flickering tongues of flames almost licked her wrists. Kaizong was about to go up and stop her when a hand gripped him by the shoulder, gently but forcefully restraining him. Director Lin Yiyu shook his head at him. Wait. It will soon resolve.

  The flickering of the green light over the lohsingpua’s forehead lost its own beat and began to approach the rhythm of the other two, search ing for a new unity. She appeared weak, not even in control of her own howls. Her expression became even more hideous, a mixture of terror and exhaustion. Her eyes rested on Luo Jincheng’s glum face; she knew she couldn’t stop; she understood the price of failure.

  But even the smile on the golden Buddha couldn’t save her.

  The inevitable stumble came. The lohsingpua fell to the ground on her face. The fire-spewing porcelain bowl hung suspended in the air for a moment, tumbled upside down, and plummeted onto her body. The bright yellow flames, following the path of the flowing liquid, covered her body, turning her multicolored dress into a coat of flames. The assistant screamed and tried to help her out of the dress, desperately beating at her in an effort to put out the fire. Wretched wailing, accompanied by pungent smoke, filled the hall, mixing with the flames of the votive candles.

  The porcelain bowl rolled on the ground and came to a stop at Kaizong’s feet. Director Lin rushed forward, squatted down, and carefully tested the surface with the back of a finger. He looked up at Kaizong and silently mouthed a word: “Charlatan.”

  Kaizong quirked his brow and turned his gaze back to the boy in the bed. Luo Jincheng was already at the bedside, gazing at his son intently, completely oblivious to the two clowns rolling around on the ground next to him, screaming and trying to put out the fire. Luo Zixin’s cardiogram settled into a new steady rhythm. The chi characters on his and Mimi’s foreheads slowed down their blinking and dimmed until the green lights went out.

  Mimi gently ripped the film off her forehead, her face tired.

  Everyone took a few steps forward but dared not press up too closely against Luo Jincheng. The audience waited about a meter away from Zixin’s bed and watched as the boy’s eyelids began to quiver, as though he was entering a REM sleep cycle.

  “Him-ri, Him-ri…” Luo Jincheng called to his son in the local topolect, love suffusing his gaze.

  Kaizong had to admit some measure of admiration for how quickly Luo Jincheng managed to shift his expressions and emotional states. He thought back to Luo’s soliloquy earlier on the nature of a father’s love, and was reminded of his own faraway father. Perhaps Luo was right.

  The quivering stopped. After some time, Zixin’s eyes fluttered open, revealing pure, light brown irises.

  “Him-ri!” Something wet glistened in Luo Jincheng’s eyes.

  The boy looked uncertainly around him, taking everything in. He seemed to struggle to recall where when who he was how … and who this man was looking at him with tearful eyes.

  “… Baba?” he offered tentatively.

  Luo Jincheng remained still, utterly amazed. Everyone present had heard him clearly; though the tones were only slightly different, the change was unmistakable. This boy of Silicon Isle, after being in a coma for months, was speaking Modern Standard Mandarin instead of his native topolect.

  Kaizong looked over and caught a flitting smile at the corners of Mimi’s eyes.

  * * *

  Mimi was learning to compromise with this body. She started by overcoming her anxiety.

  When Luo Jincheng’s face had first appeared in the doorway of the ICU, she had been like a wild hare scenting a hunter, and the urge to run had been nearly impossible to suppress. But she didn’t. Mimi’s body held her in place. The golden film on the back of her neck dimmed only for a moment before brightening again. The horrible wave of memories seemed to be dammed outside her consciousness, and all that was left was the sensation of their uneasy pounding against the barrier. She was amazed by the ease with which she performed her role: her breathing was steady and her facial muscles relaxed. With blank eyes she conveyed to Luo Jincheng this simple message: I remember nothing.

  And Luo Jincheng had believed her.

  The control lasted until she set foot in the Luo clan ancestral hall and sat down by Luo Zixin’s bed. She recalled that distant, unreal past: the prosthesis that had pricked her, the boy taking a photo in secret, the cold blood. Everything had started then.

  Mimi was filled with regret. Her mother had always taught her to be kind because whatever we did, the heavens were watching. After coming to Silicon Isle, she had begun to doubt her mother’s teaching. Humiliation and harm were inflicted on the innocent around her every day; even if the heavens possessed billions of eyes, most of them seemed to be averted from the reality of this world.

  Mimi became a pragmatic animist, believing that spirits lived in everything. As long as she prayed faithfully and provided the required sacrifices, she would be protected. This was how the waste people could survive in this living hell. There were incense burners everywhere outside the waste-processing sheds, which the faithful fed with plastic scraps; combined with polyimide films charged with magical symbols and incantations, the censers glowed in the night like will-o’-the-wisps warning passersby to stay away from forbidden places.

  Could this boy also be a sacrificial offering for some spirit? Who will benefit from his sacrifice? Mimi watched the shuttling figure of the lohsingpua palming the bowl of burning oil, doubt creeping into her heart.

  Green flashes like raindrops appeared before her eyes, and Zixin’s and the witch’s foreheads lit up. One still, one moving, the two lights were like a star and a roving planet in a universe that did not distinguish between magic and technology. She understood that the lights had nothing to do with her; most likely, they were the result of remote manipulation by the lohsingpua or her assistant. The boy’s condition wasn’t affected substantively.

  Like some switch being flipped, she sensed a subtle transformation in Mimi’s body. The hairs on her skin stood up and her vision brightened; an uncontrollable tremor began somewhere deep in her brain and ended at the skin of her brow, where it spread, ripple-like. In a flash, she understood what her body intended, even though she couldn’t say how she had come to such understanding. An invisible bridge across consciousnesses had been constructed through the sensors in the body films applied to her and Zixin’s foreheads and radio waves: she was at one end, and Luo Zixin was at the other.

  She knew what she had to do. She had to awaken this boy to repair the harm from her earlier mistake. No matter what kind of violence his father had inflicted on Mimi, the boy was innocent. When Brother Wen had harmed the boy, Mimi had not stopped him, and that made her responsible. In Mimi’s eyes, the world should have revolved around such simple, clear rules. It was people, convoluted people, who added complexity to it, made it hard to understand.

  But things were not as simple as she anticipated.

  The meningitis caused by the viral infection had inhibited the boy’s consciousness. The neural receptors, blocked by proteins manufactured by the virus, couldn’t conduct the bioelectrical signals of thought. But that wasn’t the most important problem. The blocking mechanism had already decayed due to preprogrammed regulation of protein expression and should no longer affect neural impulses of ordinary strength. She couldn’t understand the meaning behind this piece of data, but Mimi’s body seemed to understand the implications intuitively. Her consciousness jumped across the springboard of her body film’s radio transmitter and reached into the boy’s brain like a tentacle sweeping through regions of the cortex, seeking a deeper cause.

  It was language.

  To her surprise, Mimi discovered that the virus’s consciousness-inhibiting protein functioned like a safety mechanism. S
imilar to the fuse in a circuit, it was designed to activate when the energy load of neural transmissions exceeded a certain threshold, shutting off the connection to protect the neurons from being burnt out. However, for some reason, Luo Zixin’s blocking mechanism had been set with an extremely low safety threshold such that as soon as he began to think with the Silicon Isle topolect, the fuses tripped and the neurotransmission circuits shut down.

  The Silicon Isle topolect was an ancient language containing eight tones with exceedingly complex tone sandhi rules. Its informational entropy thus far exceeded that of Modern Standard Mandarin with its simple four tones. This was the root cause of the boy’s coma.

  She was not at all prepared for what happened next. Abruptly, Mimi’s mental tentacle hardened and reached into the boy’s Broca’s area, located in the inferior frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere, which was responsible for speech production and control. Like a precise laser scalpel, the tentacle manipulated this most refined and complex artifact as though the wielder were in possession of billions of years of practice and experience.

  Sweat beaded at her brow, moistening her hairline. Once again she was astounded by the powers her body seemed to possess without her knowledge, but this time, she hoped for a good conclusion.

  The tentacle softened, contracted, and jumped back into her body through the film. Almost casually, as it retracted, it also touched the consciousness of the lohsingpua.

  A fraud. Mimi understood everything in an instant. Brother Wen’s mysterious helmet had accidentally planted the embryo of change in her mind, and Luo Jincheng and Knifeboy had hatched the embryo from its shell with violence, but it was this old woman who, by insisting on pulling Mimi into the clumsy con of an “oil-fire cleansing,” had connected all the triggers and brought to life the full form of the monster in her mind.

  The witch had created today’s Mimi.

  A fleeting thought, and it was done. Mimi watched as the bowl of flames floated up, turned, tumbled, and bloomed against the body of that middle-aged woman awkwardly sprawled along the ground. A little gift from me to you. A gesture of respect. The corners of her mouth lifted into a blameless smile.

  The scene descended into pandemonium. People rushed around, some trying to put out the fire, others watching to see what would happen next; Luo Jincheng knelt at the bed calling the name of his darling child; Director Lin and Chen Kaizong whispered to the side.

  Slowly, in response to his father’s cries, the boy opened his eyes. Out of kindness, Mimi had not modified his Wernicke’s area, responsible for understanding language, so that he could still understand the Silicon Isle topolect. However, for the rest of his life, he would only be able to speak in Mandarin with its four sparse tones, like the outsider waste people that his father so despised.

  He said ba4ba, instead of the tone-shifted ba7ba5 of Silicon Isle. Luo Jincheng was instantly transfixed.

  Kaizong’s worried gaze swept to her face. With some effort, she suppressed the impulse to laugh aloud even though she thought this a very appropriate joke.

  * * *

  A water-carrying rickshaw was parked outside the gate of the Luo clan mansion, waiting for servants to unload the bottled water onto handcarts. The middle-aged waste man driving the rickshaw looked particularly anxious, muttering incessantly while the augmented-reality glasses he wore flashed their green light. Finally, all the purified water had been unloaded, and the rickshaw cart rose slightly. The driver turned right around and returned at a mad dash the way he had come, not even bothering to wait for the Luo servants who called out in surprise, asking if he wanted his money.

  He glanced back a few times; no one was chasing him. Gradually, he slowed down, and merged into the crowded traffic of Silicon Isle Town.

  “Uncle He, what’s wrong with you?” a few waste people greeted him. “You are acting like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  There was no hint of a smile on his sweat-drenched face as Uncle He stopped the rickshaw and gestured for one of the waste people to approach. Still sitting astride the rickshaw, he leaned over as if attempting to bump foreheads with the other man. Soon, the glasses worn by the other man lit up with a green light as well. Uncle He didn’t linger but started the engine again and rode on, spreading the video he had captured about ten minutes earlier.

  The video showed a black car speeding into the Luo mansion grounds. Even from this distance, it was still possible to distinguish the figures climbing out of the car. A girl was supported by others and helped into the mansion. The loose white clothing she wore didn’t seem to be a fashion statement but more resembled a hospital gown.

  Uncle He was certain that the girl was Mimi. He had to let Li Wen know this news right away.

  The sun slowly climbed up to mid-sky and turned scorching. Uncle He felt himself enveloped by a sticky, thick cloud of steam that made progress difficult. Countless varieties of noise and stench assaulted him from every direction, and he found the smatterings of speech he heard incomprehensible. Many pairs of eyes swept past his vision: the eyes of waste people, natives, and others he couldn’t tell. He saw the waste people meeting in the road, inclining their heads at each other like nineteenth-century European gentlemen while the Silicon Isle natives around them cast suspicious side glances. The way the despised waste people greeted each other appeared incomprehensible and insufferable to the natives, who thought of themselves as superior.

  Uncle He kept the rickshaw steady and smoothly traversed the busy, crowded market, maintaining the appearance of normalcy for the sake of the monitoring closed-circuit television cameras. Still, in the end he couldn’t hold back a sweaty grin as his chest convulsed with laughter.

  * * *

  There were two Mimis, she had gradually come to accept this fact, and she named them “Mimi 0” and “Mimi 1.”

  Mimi 0 was the waste girl from the distant home village: cautious, guarded against everyone, oversensitive yet full of curiosity, pitying a malfunctioning chipped dog, liking a Silicon Isle boy with an ambiguous identity—but so lacking in self-confidence that she kept him at arm’s length. She would forever remember that night when the bioluminescent jellyfish had spun like a nebula, when the surface of the sea had glistened with silver light like billions of fish scales, when Kaizong had lain next to her on the beach to gaze up at the stars, and a feeling that she could not name or describe had caused her heart to skip a beat and the world to waver, making her dazed and dazzled.

  She was Mimi 0.

  Mimi 1, on the other hand, was a presence that she could not summarize at all. On that long, dark, rain-drenched night, it had come to possess this body like a ghost and become its master. It seemed to be omniscient and omnipotent. Though the two of them shared this body, Mimi 0 was like a hitchhiking passenger who knew nothing about the thoughts of Mimi 1 and certainly could not interfere with them. She saw everything Mimi 1 wanted her to see, and she struggled to follow the inhumanly complex and profound streams of consciousness, learning, understanding, being uplifted. Mimi 0 was terrified of Mimi 1 but also worshiped her, prostrate before a machinelike, incomparably precise, controlling power. She even sensed a beauty that she had never experienced in her life, like standing at the peak of a towering mountain and gazing down upon the magnificence of all Life. Her legs turned to jelly and she trembled uncontrollably, the pressure in her bladder growing, and yet, she was unable to resist the allure of the desire to find out the truth.

  In her mind, Mimi 1’s face was always overlaid on top of the face of a Western woman, like a ghost image. She yearned to know who she was, but she was also worried that the introduction of a third person wouldn’t make the situation any simpler.

  At this moment, however, Mimi 0 and Mimi 1 shared a rare consensus: exhaustion. Waking the boy had consumed too much energy, and they both needed nourishment. Mimi was starving.

  But the farce was still not over.

  Luo Jincheng screamed at the medical staff on site, who scrambled to examine the boy; the lohsingpua, her dre
ss full of holes from the fire that revealed the rolls of fat at her waist, tried to sneak away with her assistant, but the Luo clan’s guards seized them and made them kneel in a corner to await Boss Luo’s decision; Director Lin Yiyu was on the phone while he surveyed the room, reporting on the situation to his interlocutor with a glum, unchanging expression; Chen Kaizong’s face ap peared in her field of vision: he was kneeling next to her, his expression distressed, apparently asking her some question.

  All the noises had mixed together and knit into a textureless wall that buzzed and pressed against her auditory nerves. It was as if her blood sugar level had lowered past some threshold, causing some sensory channels to shut down to avoid giving her vertigo. Mimi tried to read Kaizong’s lips, but she couldn’t; her concentration seemed to slip away from cracks in her consciousness and scatter onto the ground, merging into the dust.

  Someone else broke into the hall, and white light expanded from the open doorway like a sphere that gradually faded. The newcomer was shouting something repeatedly at the top of his lungs, and everyone in the room stopped, turning to look at him. He repeated himself so many times that the syllables of each iteration stacked on top of each other, reinforcing each other in Mimi’s mind. Gradually, clear words emerged from the murk; she finally understood.

  “The waste people are coming!” he was shouting. “The waste people are coming!”

  The fear that flooded the faces of the Silicon Isle natives confused Mimi. In the world she was familiar with, such terror belonged only to the waste people, especially when they faced one of the natives. She had seen countless waste people kneeling on the ground, begging for mercy; strong, weak, old, young, dirty, helpless—they knelt before the Silicon Isle natives because they had dirtied his clothing, unintentionally stared at him for too long, touched her child, brushed against his car, or even for no reason at all, simply because they were waste people.