Waste Tide

by Chen Qiufan

  Kaizong understood his final, silent words. I’m sorry.

  That’s enough. A wave of disgust rose in Mimi 0. I said that’s enough!

  Your human weakness is going to be the death of you someday. Mimi 1 faded back into the darkness.

  Mimi 0 stayed silent for a while. She knew it was time.

  Kaizong pulled Mimi into a tight embrace. Two wet, trembling bodies pressed close to each other, sharing any residual heat. They kissed deeply, hungrily, as though this was their last kiss in the world. The water had risen above their waists, and the stench of the sea filled the air.

  “Let’s get out of here. The boat is about to go down.” Kaizong pulled at Mimi, but she didn’t move.

  Mimi pulled up Kaizong’s hand and aimed the EMP gun at her own head. “Pull the trigger.”

  “Are you crazy?” Kaizong couldn’t believe his ears. “Why?”

  “I’m no longer the Mimi you knew. I’ve killed many…” Mimi’s face twisted as though she was fighting with another self hidden deep inside. “… I don’t want to become a monster. I don’t want to commit murder. I don’t want to become a laboratory specimen…”

  “That wasn’t you! It wasn’t. Mimi, we’ll figure out a way. Believe me—” Kaizong tried to pull the gun away, but the girl, who looked as if she could collapse any moment, had impossible strength in her arms, and he couldn’t budge the gun at all.

  “You don’t understand!” Mimi sobbed.

  A series of images struck Kaizong’s right eye, flashing by one after another: the experimental subjects for Project Waste Tide; Eva, the chimp torn to pieces; columns of smoke and bodies strewn around a battlefield; the thousands and thousands of fragmentary glimpses that made up a city; the prisoners rushing out of the jail like a flood; pileups of dozens, hundreds of cars; bleeding men and women desperately crawling through the wreckage … the images came quicker and quicker, overlaying each other, turning into a blinding ball of light that burned Kaizong’s eye so that he could no longer bear to look at them.

  “Do it now! Before she recovers!” Mimi’s body convulsed as though she were a puppet using all her strength to fight the invisible strings. Abruptly, her expression changed, and a crude, hoarse voice emerged from her throat. “Don’t you dare! If you try, I’ll kill her first, then you, then everyone!”

  Kaizong’s right eye felt like a red-hot piece of coal embedded in his skull. He felt his nerves burn, charring inch by inch. He smelled the odor of singed flesh. A million trumpets blared while a billion canaries cried. His trembling eye seemed like a bomb about to go off at any moment.

  “I can’t … I can’t kill you…” Kaizong screamed in pain, and fell to his knees in the water. The skin around his right eye socket turned red, blistered, burned, and fragments dropped sizzling into the water, raising wisps of white smoke. The pain was like a drill on full power going straight into his skull.

  Then, for a moment, all the pain and noise disappeared. Kaizong seemed to be floating in a sweet, serene vacuum, reminding him of that night when he and Mimi had lain on Tide Gazing Beach and looked up at the stars. But almost instantaneously, the pain returned with doubled strength, and devoured what remained of his consciousness like a tide.

  “You can’t kill me! You can’t kill me!” Mimi’s bamboo-reed voice overlaid the demonic screams like an eerie duet. The voices were entangled together, repressing each other. “I’m only a beginning! Only a beg—”

  The voices stopped.

  Kaizong’s arm trembled in the air. He had finally pulled the trigger.

  The instrument panel of the speedboat flashed brightly, and sparks emerged from every seam and gap like the fireworks for some wild party. The electronic whistle blared, piercing the walls of the cabin, and gradually faded, until all was silent again. All the light-emitting components dimmed, as though a giant beast had been trying to prove its existence with its last ounce of strength.

  A look of astonishment froze on Mimi’s face, as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She tried to touch Kaizong’s deformed right eye. Her arm trembled in the air between them, but before she could reach her goal, her body stiffened and she fell backward into the water, making a loud splash.

  The gun tumbled from Kaizong’s fingers. He waded through the water and picked up the unconscious Mimi in his arms. Holding her tightly, he dove into the water, and the overheating right eye crackled in the sea, short-circuiting. Light disappeared, followed by a piercing pain. Relying on his remaining unenhanced eye, he looked for an opening, exited the cabin, splashed to the sparkling surface, and swam hard for the pier.

  Behind him, air bubbled out of all sides of the sinking boat. Like an iceberg, the white belly of the speedboat finally descended below the surface, carrying with it Scott’s ambition, leaving behind an irregular eddy. Typhoon Wutip, by now only a tropical storm, headed for Shantou, leaving a serene sea behind around Silicon Isle, as though nothing had happened.

  EPILOGUE

  It was July again. The sea south of the Aleutian Islands was in a trough of low pressure, and thick fog lingered for months, stretching westward to the Kuril Islands. From there, the cold, subarctic Oyashio Current originating in the Bering Strait flowed south, and met the north-flowing warm Kuroshio Current in the Pacific just north of 40 degrees latitude. The commingled current then headed east.

  A man standing inside the bridge of Clotho, a scientific vessel, looked out at the vast sea. The skin around his right eye was marked with burn scars. Such injuries could have been easily repaired with cosmetic surgery, but he didn’t seem to care.

  “Mr. Chen, would you like some tea?” The captain, William Katzenberg, appeared by his side, holding a cup of thick, fragrant coffee.

  “Thank you. I’ll get it myself.” Kaizong smiled at him. “Have you ever seen so much fog?”

  “Of course. To me, it’s no different from afternoon tea. If you live long enough, nothing will excite you anymore.”

  “I don’t know about that. A year ago—” Kaizong stopped.

  “What happened a year ago?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Kaizong changed the subject, and taking the hint, the captain began to tell stories about the blue fox of the Aleutians.

  That golden dolphin.

  The events of a year ago had left him half blind. The doctor suggested that he exchange his prosthetic eye for a new one, but he turned the idea down, opting instead to pay a higher price to repair the damaged eye. At his insistence, the optical defects in the eye caused by high temperature—barrel distortion and a tinge of yellow-green—had been preserved. The eye now saw everything through the filter of Silicon Isle, a hue that belonged to Mimi, an imperfect beauty. He hoped to forever remember everything that had happened, like the scars on his face.

  In the end, TerraGreen Recycling had signed an agreement with the Silicon Isle government to construct a recycling industrial park over three years. Due to the sudden death of the head of the Luo clan, the project encountered few objections. Lin Yiyu convinced the Lin clan to no longer rely on its relationship with the government to manipulate the markets, and compete with the Chen clan fairly as two shareholders to promote modern management practices in the waste-processing industry, the free movement of labor, as well as better working conditions and social safety nets.

  He still remembered Mayor Weng’s rousing speech at the formal signing ceremony: Win-win-win! A brand-new future for Silicon Isle.

  The brave deeds of the waste workers during the typhoon were duly recognized and rewarded. As a result of the heavy property damage and lost lives partially caused by the shutdown of network communications during the typhoon, the government, under heavy media pressure, announced a reexamination of the regulations for network monitoring and bitrate restriction. TerraGreen Recycling formed a special foundation to use part of the profits to aid those migrant workers who suffered damage to their health as a result of their work in waste processing. Mimi was the foundation’s first aid recipient.

 
; Mimi. Kaizong’s heart clenched with pain. He would never forget the last time he saw Mimi.

  It was a hazy afternoon. He entered the hospital ward and saw Mimi in her wheelchair with her back to him, looking at the trees outside the window. Kaizong walked in front of her, squatted, and carefully examined that blank face, softly calling her name, caressing her long hair with the same fingers that had pulled the trigger. Mimi gazed back at him as though looking at a lifeless thing. Something had been wiped from her gaze forever, leaving her a soulless shell. She opened her mouth, but no voice came out. Her face was expressionless, like a machine that had been restored to factory defaults.

  The doctor told him that she had been lucky. As the electromagnetic pulse penetrated her brain, the heat had instantaneously incinerated the neural tissue around the metal particles. However, as the pulse had lasted only a few milliseconds, the damage wasn’t life-threatening. The minefield in Mimi’s brain had been eliminated by this carpet bombing, but the damage to her logical thinking, emotional processing, and memory was severe. Currently, she was the mental equivalent of a three-year-old.

  But there is hope, whispered the doctor. We’re experimenting with trial medication. It requires patience, a great deal of patience.

  The trial medication was the legacy of Project Waste Tide, Kaizong knew. History certainly liked to make sick jokes.

  Kaizong gave Mimi a light kiss on the forehead. Mimi responded with animal-like mutterings. A spark seemed to light up in her eyes for the briefest of moments before disappearing. He stood up, left the room, and did not look back. He didn’t dare to look back. He was afraid that he would stay if he did, never leaving her side, living only on that shred of impossible hope. A hope would destroy the only remaining beauty between the two of them if he let it grow and fester and starve them both of the possibility of a real future that lay ahead, no matter how unlike the dreams he’d once had for the two of them.

  “Kaizong! Look what we found!” his assistant called excitedly from the deck. Kaizong left his memories behind and climbed down onto the wet deck. The crew crowded around something that had just been fished out of the sea.

  It was a crude but ingeniously designed machine, resembling a lotus flower made of metal and plastic.

  The assistant demonstrated how it worked. Normally, the device floated at the surface, extending a flexible, LED-lit tube into the water to lure fish. When it sensed something living within range, the device snapped shut like a mousetrap and flipped over with the seized prey at the center of the lotus. Then the device sent out a positioning signal and waited for the fisherman to arrive for the harvesting.

  A wonderful mimic. Kaizong was reminded of the prosthetic hand crawling along the ground in Xialong Village.

  “Everyone, stay alert! I bet that thing is nearby!” Kaizong whistled and gave the order, and the crew hurried back into position.

  “Mr. Chen, you’ve been searching the whole time since we started from the coast of California. What exactly are you looking for?” Curiosity was written all over the captain’s face.

  “You’ll see. I have to warn you, don’t get too excited.”

  After Silicon Isle, Kaizong had resigned from TerraGreen Recycling and traveled by himself for a while. Eventually, he returned to Boston and wrote freelance articles for small websites. This was an age that had little need for historians. Social networking, streaming media, and real-time computing provided more in-depth, data-driven analytical reports that were also easier to understand. In some sense, history had ended, at least as a narrative practice imbued with uncertainty. Kaizong sometimes even had the impulse to write a letter to the president of his alma mater, suggesting that history be eliminated as a department.

  He recounted his experience on Silicon Isle in a calm voice to his parents—well, he told them what he was allowed to tell. For the first time in many years, he embraced his father. His father thumped him on the back a few times, his hand heavy and sure, as though they had reached some kind of understanding.

  Kaizong thought a certain kind of urge in himself had vanished. He had once thought of himself as capable of changing things. Now he understood that it was but a fantasy. The world had never ceased to change, but it would also never change for anyone.

  He still remembered the last words of the head of the Chen clan as he said goodbye to the elder.

  People always think of themselves as playing with the tides, but in the end, they find out that the tides play with them.

  Then he had received the call from a stranger in Hong Kong.

  The caller introduced herself as Sug-Yi Chiu Ho, a project leader with the environment protection organization Coltsfoot Blossom. She was interested in Kaizong’s background, especially his experience with the TerraGreen Recycling project in Silicon Isle. She was offering him an unusual job.

  A chance to change the world, she said.

  Kaizong shook his head and smiled bitterly.

  Each year, hundreds of millions of tons of unprocessed trash were dumped into the world’s oceans from coastal cities. The nondegradable refuse traveled the globe by riding ocean currents. As the pieces of litter traveled, they attracted each other, melded together, reacted, and even formed into giant floating islands that threatened the world’s shipping lanes. Coltsfoot Blossom had always tracked these islands of trash closely. With RFID technology, they had built a map of the paths of the world’s major trash islands that they offered to the shipping companies for free to prevent accidents.

  But ultimately, someone had to pay. The efficient Asian woman smiled and added, We are tracking some promising leads. There are strange things happening; for instance, the incredible frequency of lightning above the trash islands. We need you, and perhaps the people there also need you.

  There are people on the islands? Kaizong asked.

  We don’t know. But we do know the islands are not as desolate as Mars.

  And so Kaizong had returned to the sea. The endless swaying nauseated him, but also seemed to become an addicting habit. The trash islands didn’t merely drift with the currents. They seemed to take advantage of the complex interplay of various currents and played a game of cat and mouse with Coltsfoot Blossom. Kaizong and his crew chased from one patch of ocean to another, following the ever-changing directives issued by headquarters. Any slight change in the conditions seemed to suggest countless guesses, and the chains of deduction reached absurd conclusions.

  Often, Kaizong lay on the deck to gaze at the stars as the waves rocked him to sleep. As he approached the border between dream and wakefulness, fantastical images would invade his right eye as though a giant eye glimpsed him from the universe. The clear gaze penetrated his entire being and elevated him into paradise. Like the gaze of Mimi.

  I’m only a beginning.

  Every time he recalled Mimi’s last words, a bone-chilling sensation would crawl over his skin, like some incurable form of allergy.

  Before leaving Silicon Isle, he had made a special trip to visit Luo Zixin, Luo Jincheng’s youngest son. Other than his excessively proper Modern Standard Mandarin, the boy seemed no different from the other native children as they played and horsed around on the exercise grounds. Occasionally, however, the boy stopped and stared into the distance at nothing, looking thoughtful.

  From time to time, Kaizong allowed himself to fantasize about meeting Mimi again. The visions were so detailed, specifying the season, light, temperature, the kinds of plants around them, the clothes they wore, their expressions, the type of birdsong, and their first words to each other. Then they’d reminisce, and like a regular couple, get married, have children, argue over trivial matters, hurt each other, annoy each other, and finally part from each other or live happily ever after. However, he knew that at least in this sublunary world, they would never meet again.

  The fog over the sea seemed to grow darker, as though cocoa butter had been poured into a swirling mug of milk, dissolving unevenly. Kaizong climbed onto the bow and watched as the immense st
ructure rose into view like a monster emerging from the mist. Gradually, the object solidified, grew clear, and loomed over the ship with an oppressive power. The sky began to flicker with uncertain arcs of pale blue light. An island of trash.

  It’s time to go onshore, he said to himself.

  AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to the following persons not only for making the publication of this book possible but also for guiding me in the grand world of speculative fiction: Ken Liu, Gray Tan, David G. Hartwell, Liz Gorinsky, Lindsey Hall, Han Song, Liu Cixin, Prof. Song Mingwei, Prof. David Der-Wei Wang, Prof. Cara Healey, Prof. Wu Yan, Prof. Yan Feng, Yao Haijun, Dong Renwei, Yang Feng, Shi Bo, Wang Meizi, Luo Yuhan, and my parents, Lijuan and Yingcheng.

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  During the long but rewarding process of bringing Stan’s haunting and moving novel to Anglophone readers, I was fortunate to have the help of many. I’d like to thank them here (though this is necessarily an incomplete list): Wang Meizi, Alex Shvartsman, Sarah Dodd, Carmen Yiling Yan, Anaea Lay, Kellan Sparver, Amy Franks, David Hartwell, Liz Gorinsky, Lindsey Hall, Desirae Friesen, Terry McGarry, Ryan Jenkins, Victor Mosquera, Jamie Stafford-Hill, Christopher Morgan, Bill Warhop, Russell Galen, and Gray Tan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chen Qiufan is an award-winning science fiction writer. He currently lives in Shanghai and Beijing and works as the founder of Thema Mundi Studio.

  Twitter: @ChenQiufan, or sign up for email updates here.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Ken Liu (translator) is the author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.