Make Shift

by Gideon Lichfield

  Despite having worked with Chan for a month now, her interruptions still flustered me. “I understand that, but Xi’s team don’t understand how triggers are meant to—”

  “Fine. Harden the barrier around Xi for now. You need to start testing the other artists.” Her avatar blinked away before I could even nod. When we couldn’t figure out how to smoothly move audiences from one area to another, we’d resorted to creating virtual barriers around artists. It was a hack that eliminated agency, but it was better than having no art at all. When the barriers were turned on, we’d give people a tasteful but unmistakable AR icon to move on every few minutes rather than expecting them to follow a confusing AR butterfly from Angela Cheng’s play.

  I pulled Cindy up from the floor and led her to Anna Hui’s area. I hadn’t spotted her at our team meetings, but her short festival bio said she’d performed in the Hong Kong Ballet for a few years, after which she started her own private artistic practice. Cindy slipped on her glasses, joining me back in the marquee’s AR testing layer. Two motionless wireframe humans appeared next to the two of us.

  “Is this it?” said Cindy.

  I swiped through the testing interface to see if I’d missed a startup command. “It’s meant to launch automatically. I guess Anna forgot to set that flag,” I said.

  “Look!” Cindy pointed at the wireframe next to me, which was mimicking my swipes. Her own wireframe raised its arm toward me a second later.

  We waved our arms and shuffled about, watching the wireframes as they followed us. They weren’t echoing our movements perfectly—that would be boring, I realised. I started walking around, trying to figure out the trick. My wireframe kept up, drifting ever closer until it settled over me like a second skin.

  As I paused, the wireframe subtly pulled from me, its mesh drifting a few centimeters away from my right side. I unconsciously followed it, not precisely—I wasn’t a dancer—and caught myself. Did I really want to be a puppet? I stopped, and it stopped with me. I slowly pivoted on my left foot, an inelegant turn, and the mesh came with me, but in a cleaner swoop with a graceful follow-through. I was in control.

  I glanced at Cindy, who was circling toward me. I couldn’t see her wireframe anymore, but I followed mine, or it followed me, as I circled toward her. I flushed as we spiraled together, approaching two meters, beyond two meters, almost at one meter.

  And in an almost-frozen moment, invisible planes of laser light intersected between us, scattering across thousands of droplets hanging in the air, the femtosecond pulses so fleeting they petrified us in stone, our exhalations as spun clouds. Trajectories weighed, temperature gradients observed, our heartbeats counted as closely as a lover. Then, as a stray breeze lofted a hundred tiny, deadly carriers of disease a touch closer toward our mouths, we were nudged another millimeter to the left by our wireframes.

  Time resumed. As we spun around wide-eyed, our feet crossing over in turn, there was barely a breath between us. I waited for my glasses to buzz their physical distancing warning, but nothing happened. We drew back, bowed, straightened up, and then burst out laughing.

  “That was way more fun than the land sculpture!” said Cindy. The whole experience had been barely two minutes from start to end, but it felt more intense than anything else I’d done since the lockdown.

  “So that’s what real dynamic distancing feels like!” I said. I was about to message the team about our discovery when I saw the alert in my glasses. It was from the Edinburgh Festival’s computing cluster: in the 109 seconds we’d danced, we’d blown through an entire hour of Little Kowloon’s precious festival computing budget.

  “Whoa, what the hell?” I exclaimed, showing Cindy. She peered at the graphs and pursed her lips.

  “That figures. Our glasses aren’t powerful enough to choreograph a dance like that. But Anna must’ve realized she could use something else,” said Cindy, nodding at the AR localizers.

  I shook my head in admiration. “Her code’s piggybacking off whatever resources it can find in the local network,” I said. Anna’s artwork had used the marquee’s sensors and high-resolution laser scanners to weigh every breath and map every droplet to steer us around each other, closer than I’d have thought possible. Celia Chan’s code was doing the heavy lifting; Anna married it with her wireframe dancing instructors.

  “She’s the best,” said Cindy, beaming.

  “She was the best.” I shared a pending update to Anna’s festival bio I’d just found. Cindy’s shoulders slumped. Anna had died from H1N3 last week. Apparently the Hong Kong festival team hadn’t made their minds up on whether they should still exhibit her work. But our testing results would settle the argument: there was no way we could spend so much processor time on a single artist’s performance. There was no way to increase our computing budget, any more than we could extend the walls of our marquee. Another “competition” rule.

  “We need to get onto the rest of the artists,” I said, shutting down Anna’s area.

  Two standups, three plays, and one band later, I was getting a headache from being in AR too long. Worse, none of the artists had gotten the point of dynamic distancing, their works lacking any but the most basic triggers. We could build triggers for them, but the whole concept of throwing audience members out of one area and into another at a moment’s notice was feeling like a fool’s errand. It wasn’t that it was impossible, it just wasn’t compatible with how these artists thought about their work. I couldn’t blame them, everyone was working under such tight deadlines.

  I knew what Chan would say: harden the barriers. No more headaches. No more arguing with artists. Our marquee would still be impressive simply by using dynamic distancing to pack bigger audiences in closer together. But we’d have given away a dose of freedom in exchange for convenience. I snorted at the obvious parallel.

  Cindy was lying on the marquee floor next to a heater, taking a horizontal break to scroll the news. I flicked into our private shared AR layer. Nothing too exciting. The Melbourne vaccine had been held up in its stage 3 trials, and two astronauts on the Alto Firenze space station had tested positive. In Scotland, the Yellow-Green coalition was at loggerheads on fast-tracking Hong Kong citizenship, hardly surprising given the recent polls showing which way the new immigrants would vote.

  I sat down, glumly gazing at our vast, empty space. I wondered if the Traverse or Assembly teams were facing the same problems we were. Probably not. Reuben had forwarded me a video from one of the Assembly crew setting up raked seating in their marquee. They were giving audiences what they wanted, an hour of AR theatre.

  “I could be enjoying my furlough right now instead of dealing with . . .” I waved around at the piles of tracking equipment and sensors and high-bandwidth networking points, “. . . all this.”

  “Yup,” said Cindy.

  “Wow, what a pep talk!” I flicked her an eyeroll emoji.

  Cindy propped herself up on an elbow and gave me a look. “You hated furlough! Every time we were at the crags you complained about it. That’s why I got Reuben to ask us to volunteer.”

  “What?! Why?”

  “I guess I thought you’d enjoy the challenge. And I had this spidey-sense that Celia Chan would take you on.” I raised my eyebrows. “But I had nothing to do with that,” she said hurriedly. “And neither did Reuben. No way would she give either of us the time of day.”

  “Yeah, but . . . why here? I mean, I was thinking about volunteering at the library, not the festival.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Cindy. “This is Little Kowloon. You want to be here but you couldn’t ask. And this lockdown . . . I know it’s lonely. I thought this could take your mind off things.”

  “Huh.” I wasn’t sure if I was offended at the subterfuge. I didn’t like being manipulated, but she was right. The last few weeks had been so busy that I hadn’t had time to get stuck in my loop. And it was nice to have a reason to be with people who looked like me. Who came from the same place my parents were from.

&nbs
p; I’d never felt comfortable around the Hongkongers. I’d barely been there. How could you miss a place you’d never lived? I hadn’t suffered as they had, and I couldn’t be proud as they were. For most of my life, I’d wanted to be accepted as a Scot, but lately I’d wanted to be accepted as a Hongkonger. Or both. I wasn’t sure.

  “Don’t overthink it,” said Cindy. “I can tell what you’re doing. We need your help, and this is it, you’re helping. Yeah, you’re having to handle all the shit, but that’s because Celia trusts you. Myself, I’m only good for stitching sensors.”

  “To be fair, you’re good at falling on your arse,” I said. She flicked her hand at me, grinning. “And pep talks.”

  CRITICS LOVED OUR PREVIEW PERFORMANCES, DELIGHTED BY THE SENSE OF BUSTLE and movement. A reporter from the Evening Journal remarked on the “illicit thrill” of being so close to others during a lockdown and praised the “Hong Kong dynamism,” hilariously unaware of how we’d fallen short of our ambition. In any case, our marquee was declared unmissable.

  It took a little longer to get the public beyond their understandable apprehension of being close to strangers. Most still remembered COVID-19, and H1N3 had rammed home the message of physical distancing. Few trusted our technology enough to be comfortable navigating crowds without the clear physical or AR markers telling them where they could move, despite the government’s imprimatur.

  “It’s hard being the first,” said Celia, as we listened to a family bicker about their supposedly buggy glasses. She had to restrain me from marching over and explaining how our dynamic distancing protocol was safer than a normal two-meter separation. “Let them figure it out.” Which they did. Eventually. Celia and I commiserated over plenty more incidents like this until we stopped fighting each other and united against a common enemy: the audience.

  Confusion aside, the public loved our show, chuckling at Doug Yau’s acerbic comedy, rapt by Chen Xi’s beautiful, rugged landscape sculptures, reminiscent of the highlands. “Authentically Hong Kong, distinctly Scottish,” wrote one visitor in a survey. Mission accomplished, said Tricia Lee in an email to our festival team.

  Celia tweaked her code in the following days to accommodate the growing crowds, introducing a new timing system to reduce bottlenecks. I designed a way to nest performances inside each other, so that Katie Cheung’s AR violinist and her audience could sit within a larger dance performance. The result was that people could linger at Chen Xi’s landscapes or Tricia Lee’s miniature city if they were enjoying them and we’d route other audience members around or even through them.

  During an operational review at the halfway point of the festival, Tricia hinted Little Kowloon was considering commercializing the dynamic distancing technology for use around the world, and that I would be welcome to join the team on a permanent basis. Rumor was that the tech could be worth hundreds of millions, a shot in the arm for the community and the wider diaspora.

  I spoke to Celia again that evening about my misgivings. “I know why we made the decisions we did. The dynamic distancing triggers barely worked and Anna Hui’s work would’ve burned through our entire budget in the first week. But still, I wonder . . .”

  “You were expecting something more unconventional? Or . . . logistically impossible?” she said, with a slight smile.

  I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I wish we could give people a more special experience, something worthy of what we’ve achieved here. Anna’s dance, it was so enchanting.”

  “Enchanting? I think mesmerizing is closer. Don’t look so surprised! You and Cindy aren’t the only ones who think it’s special. But special isn’t enough by itself.”

  “I suppose it feels like we’re only trying to get as many bodies through the door as possible, so we can be the best, whatever that means. I know this is only a festival, but these things matter. I never see anyone talking about the art, just the numbers.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong. There can be romance in numbers. Those numbers are people, and it’s not for us to say what they gain from our art.” She sighed. “They’re talking about making a TV show about me. About the Diaspora Project. A symbol of a glorious struggle. But it wasn’t romantic. It was awful. I had to fight for every dollar in donations, every boat, every plane, every person we could get out safely. The only way I got through it is by focusing on the numbers alone.”

  “I get it. Everything is for the greater good, and what is it worth two people dancing if a hundred can see a show?” I instantly regretted it, and quickly added, “I’m not the one who’s lost their home. I don’t know what that feels like and I can’t blame you for doing whatever you feel it takes to protect your new home. But I am a friend. And it doesn’t feel right.” I said.

  She was quiet for a long beat. “Yes, the CCP said the same thing against our demands for self-governance. I am not blind to the irony of the situation. You’ve done a lot for us.” Celia looked to her side, swiping through an invisible interface. “You can have the last day for Anna. Make the most of it.” Her avatar vanished.

  I MISSED REUBEN’S EMAIL AMID THE RUSH OF PREPARATION FOR THE DANCE. CELIA hadn’t left me a single extra penny of computing time, so I was determined to wring every bit of efficiency out of Anna’s code. Cindy received a field promotion to cover my technical liaison role, and I hunkered down for two weeks, puzzling over sensor interfaces and plugging in the latest H1N3 models.

  The night before the performance, Cindy ordered me to get a proper sleep and had the network admins bar my access to the festival’s servers. That’s how I finally ended up reading his email, buried under a mountain of unread newsletters.

  “Elaine,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I can’t make it to the performance. I tested positive, and because I have certain complications, I’m staying at Western General. I’m sure I’ll be fine, but if I’m not, let me take this opportunity to be candid.” Only Reuben could view contracting a deadly disease as an opportunity, I thought. “I respect your foresight in taking dynamic distancing to the next level with Anna’s dance. It’s what she’d have wanted, and it’ll make the technology that much more valuable. If you need help handling Celia in the future, just let me know. Heung gong yan, ga yau!”

  I took my glasses off and closed my eyes.

  AFTER A FITFUL NIGHT, I ARRIVED AT THE MARQUEE AT DAWN. THERE WERE ONLY A few people waiting in line. Some had brought thermos flasks with tea and coffee, and were sitting on folding stools and reading the news. I frowned, ducking inside.

  The marquee was deserted. The tech crew had cleared the few bits of equipment needed for the past month of AR performances, leaving the maximum space for the dance. I began the startup process, dozens of fans in the walls and ceilings whirring to life.

  With some creative programming, I’d figured out that a specific atmospheric profile would make it easier to predict the movement of respiratory droplets. And since I had the entire floor, I could run multiple dances at once. In fact, the more the better, because it was cheaper to run our servers hot rather than stop and start them, so I needed a constant flow of audience members, entry and exit as choreographed as a ceilidh, but everything in between as free as possible. More contradictions.

  I popped my head out the door an hour later. The line had lengthened considerably, and oddly, I recognized a lot of the people from Little Kowloon. Surprisingly, the Hongkongers hadn’t shown much interest in their own marquee, perhaps thinking they’d seen it all before, or wanting to give locals more space to explore. But today was different. I spotted Cindy further back in the line, chatting to Tricia. They both gave me a thumbs up.

  Everything was ready. I just needed to flick a switch and Anna’s dance would begin. I returned inside and imagined the space full of people spinning so close to one another, ribbons of lasers sparking in between them, orchestrated by a technology that anticipated but didn’t lead. The dancers became children and teachers, screaming and laughing and running but never colliding. Then a packed hall with voices rais
ed, an angry debate, circles and spaces forming and collapsing, then a raucous marketplace, then a factory, then an emergency ward.

  Then an empty marquee.

  I pulled back the fabric doors, and nodded to the first in line. “Come on in.”

  3

  Patriotic Canadians Will Not Hoard Food!

  Madeline Ashby

  IT WAS JUST AFTER THREE IN THE AFTERNOON ON THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN when the man from Toronto showed up for the third time.

  “Again?” Dionisia asked. “Seriously?”

  Erin chewed some of the skin flaking away from her lower lip. A dry fall was better for the wheat, but it was murder on the skin. Erin watched the man jump down out of his rented black truck. He was trying to dress like a local, this time: all-season boots, jeans, a collared shirt under some kind of tactical outdoor jacket that seemingly couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be green or gray. She watched him amble up the drive, boots crunching in the gravel, as he squinted at all the pumpkins dotting the path. Most of them had already been carved, and he was clearly trying to identify some of the faces.

  “He probably thinks the third time’s a charm,” Erin said.

  “Is it?” Dionisia asked.

  Erin twisted the linen tea towel in her hands into a rope and playfully snapped Dionisia with it. “Fuck off. Of course not. I don’t even know why he keeps showing up.”

  Dionisia arched her pierced eyebrow. “Oh, you don’t, eh? Well, I do.”

  Erin rolled her eyes. “You say that about everyone.”

  “You’re the last single woman under forty in Dowling who doesn’t already have children of her own.”

  “So I’m a withered old crone, is what you’re saying.”

  “I’m saying you live in a house with seven bedrooms and you could be filling them up.”

  “But then where would you and Ruthie live?”