by Sam Abraham
Professor Yang watched Li reach out in the cockpit of the mantiscraft, mumbling to herself. He watched her fling her arms wide as if struck by a bullet. And he watched as she then turned the craft around with a new gleam in her eyes, and said as she flew back towards the Tiger’s Den, “Save the city, Yang. I am Chang’e, the Lady in the Moon, and I command you to do whatever it takes.”
When the sliding panel opened again above the penthouse of the Tiger’s Den, soldiers rushed in, pulled Li out and forced her to her knees.
Cautiously, Mayor Hu came to stand over Li Aizhu, studying her as she babbled in tongues. “I hope you’re satisfied, Yang,” the Mayor said. “Your chemistry set has caused quite a bit of damage.”
“Yes, Sir,” Yang said, looking at Li curiously. “Come, Aizhu, let’s go make things right.”
Chapter 58 - Dui (兌)
During The Hunt
Han was sleeping when it started, roused by distant screams. He woke with blurry eyes and looked out at the familiar city. Above it, the sky was orange.
He rushed to the living room, still in his pajamas. There was his father, staring out high glass windows. Petals of ash fell, as if it was snowing inside the dome. The wall-length holoview was tuned to the news. Journalists in gas masks were filming Waitan as it burned, flame escaping from megamalls. Dead bodies wearing white were scattered among the burning refuse. Melting plastic littered the streets, alongside scattered jars of tea and machine parts and charred consumer trifles. Fire engines were spraying foam at skyscrapers, but the blaze just continued to churn and soon the fire fighters were lost in thick smoke. Lines of cops in riot gear advanced through People’s Park and Lippo Plaza and luxury villas built above elevated roads. Aerial shots from drones showed masses of the white-clad terrorists scattering, running north.
Han heard the roar of mantiscraft rattle every plate in the pantry. Sirens wailed in the normally quiet avenues of their luxury park. His father turned to him with utter disbelief.
“I’ve called everyone,” he said in despair. “No one is answering.”
Suddenly, loud banging came from their front door. Han tried to fight off panic, for he knew that he was no brave warrior. But when he saw his father frozen in fear, he thought of his time in the battlefields of the Purified Territories. He took a carving knife from the kitchen, went the front door and peered through the peep hole. On the other side were five men in white.
“They’ve broken into the building,” Han said, his voice shaking. The door banged again, shaking on its hinges as one of the men kicked it ferociously.
“That’s impossible,” his father said. He looked out his windows at Jade warriors running through the streets, brandishing torches and turning trees into burning candelabra.
In hours, the Jade had spread up from Waitan and met their fellow pilgrims in the northern districts of Youyixincun and Maojiazhai. Thousands in white now marched east, for they had seen the sign they had been waiting for: the image of Chang’e rising above the waters. Many wished for nothing more than to send a rich man to Hell before they joined God above the moon. Security doors meant to hold out humans were no match for those infected with longshui.
Han backed away, holding the knife before him as the wood buckled. At the last moment, a thought occurred to him. He dropped the knife and clasped his hands. The door flew in and the marauding Jade looked at Han and his father. “Welcome, brothers!” Han said, greeting them with a smile.
“What do we have here?” said one man in white, looking around the lavish apartment. “Captain Xie was right when he told us to track the rich man’s son.” Another Jade warrior grabbed Han’s father. A third held up a stolen scythe and was about to bring down the blade.
“Stop!” Han shouted, throwing himself between his father and the weapon. He pulled back his pajamas, revealing his shoulder tattoos. “I am one of you! This man you are holding is my father. I have converted him, and he now sees the light.”
The man in white held his blade, suspicious of this rich boy in blue silk, but could not argue with the boy’s tattoos. He knew the design, for he had his own, and he recognized a fellow brother who had taken the true Communion. So as the others were ransacking the flat, the warrior wielding the scythe smiled a mouth full of missing teeth and said, “Then you won’t mind coming down to the altar with us?”
Han nodded, and pulled his father close. They fell in line with the men, took the elevator down and marched away from the stately apartment buildings. “You saved my life,” Han’s father whispered. Then he thought for a moment and said, “What do they mean by the altar?”
“Stay close,” Han whispered back. “When I tell you, we run as fast as our legs will carry us.”
Waves of people fled from them between lines of deadlocked cars. The street congealed as hundreds in white overran a bridge that opened onto the northern end of the Huangpu River. Here was an industrial zone, with giant concrete drums and a desalination plant. Factories across the river in Pudong shone brightly.
Then the lights blinked out, and the sky split apart.
Han caught his breath when the pillar of fire shot up, veins of orange green coiling angrily to the clouds. He almost lost his footing when he felt the explosion at the northern seawall. It rattled the entire riverbank, echoing off the drums. And the rattling became a thundering roar as the gentle river swelled up into a wall of frothing water. The Jade around him whooped and hollered, running down to the shore, spreading along the riverbank. Thousands of them gathered, closing their eyes and praying, holding their hands to the dark sky, awaiting the last judgment on the altar of sacrifice. Han watched the wall of water rush towards them, unable to turn away, and knew that his friend Xie had gotten his wish.
Yanked backwards, Han heard his father whisper, “Now?”
Han nodded, and pulled his father with him towards the desalination plant. Soon Han saw his father break off and run towards the drums. Han yelled, “Where are you going?”
“Trust me!” his father shouted. Han followed his father to a narrow stairway curving up the side of one of the larger drums. In a few minutes they had climbed to the top of the tank, catching their breath as the raging flood came down the Huangpu. The flood toppled giant cranes at the port, ripping them from their steel braces. Water lifted hundreds of metal containers into the air, some the very bins that had smuggled the Jade into the city only weeks before.
Han saw the line of Jade on the shore worship the end of days, insects next to the crushing force of nature. And as the tidal wave picked up the metal cranes and containers and barges, it obliterated the riverfront, and the swarm of Jade who had laid waste to the city was washed away.
“Get ready,” Han’s father said, and they gripped the railing of the drum as the giant wave slammed into it. The entire drum lurched, but they wrapped their arms around the railing and each other, and held tight as the water breached the top. It was too much for Han. He cried out as his hands slipped and he was lost in the rapids. Han’s father, unable to bear losing his son twice, loosened his grip and let the waters take him.
Chapter 59 – Huan (渙)
Dissolves Herself
The Mayor’s manitscraft shot east towards the Mountain. Mayor Hu watched the carbon armature grow large, even as he kept an eye on the professor and the girl. It was hard for Hu to believe that this child had been the cause of so much trouble. The Bund was burning, and whole districts were smothered in blackouts, but it was the risk to the Mountain that made Mayor Hu itch most. The Shanghai Mountain had never missed a pass of the orbiting Spaceline since it had gone operational. Such a miss would be a global embarrassment. No, the Spaceline had to make its drop, no matter what happened to the city.
They entered a power plant built into the seawall, north of the Mountain’s towering stilt. The plant was new, retrofitted in recent weeks with all the speed that limitless wealth could buy. It was the first time Dr. Yang had set foot inside, but it felt very familiar to him. After all, he had designed it.
A police escort met them and strapped Li onto a wheeled gurney. She was manic. Slipping on latex gloves, the Professor plunged a syringe into her arm.
“And lo,” Li shouted, thrashing in her leather straps, “the Holy Spirit of Chang’e came with the seraph of death on one hand and the serpent of birth on the other, with six spears surrounding her, three broken and three unbroken, and as She inhaled into her womb, a child was born and vanished like wind over water…”
“What are you doing?” the Mayor asked as he watched the girl’s thrashing tirade.
“Longshui retrieval,” Yang said, the glare on his glasses hiding his eyes.
“…and the child of Chang’e saw hatred between brothers,” Li wailed, “and forged an obsidian blade to cut the sins of man…” She was in the temple again, the one from her dreams with the white stone. But the jade statues were no longer in their neat lines. They surrounded her, pressing in, their mouths gagging, their faces bulging. She looked at the white altar again, and saw herself. No, not herself but her daughter, her veins open, bleeding. And the floor dissolved.
Li was on the Bund. Chaos was frozen around her, as if time had stopped. Men in white were still upon the ground, or stuck in midair, midslash, midshot. Police were there too, caught in a timeless vice. Even the raging bonfires were snapshots, even the river was locked. Only Li could move, floating as she did through the carnage, watching, weeping. She heard a new sound, a deafening roar, and turned to see the tidal wave of churning black wash the world away.
She gasped, once again awake on the gurney as it was wheeled through metal halls.
Yang watched Li with concern as a tech came to draw her blood. “Her DNA, metabolome and the rest of her panomics profile is being sequenced,” he told the Mayor. “We’re downloading her cortical signature and calibrating the longshui extraction sequence.” A third tech shaved her head and placed electrodes on her scalp. A holo floating above Li projected a multicolored image of her brain. Nervous, Yang triple-checked the data from Li’s panomics profile. They would never have another chance to upload her organismic recipe for future use, whether for longshui extraction or any other venture.
Li was woozy as the world swam around her. “…and the child drew the knife…” she railed, and her eyes went wide as she saw a woman with ivory skin and crystal hair standing over her, a protomother from beyond “…and slit the mooring, and her belly bled out, and the ship disappeared into the great sea…” And Li saw the woman’s face curl into a silver smile as she reached out with translucent hands to draw a single character upon Li’s forehead.
Suddenly Li was lucid again, snapped back somehow. She grabbed Yang’s arm, gripping it so hard that he cried. “Yang, swear this will save the city,” she barked through gritted teeth. “I can’t have more lives on my conscience. Swear it!”
“I swear,” Yang said in pain, and gasped as Li let go and fainted into a deep sleep.
They wheeled the gurney to an elevator that descended underground. Five stories below, the doors opened into a control center. Yang scanned the room and nodded, satisfied. It was a perfect replica of the longshui core he had built in Anqing.
Holos surrounding the control center blinked with data as connections to the island’s grid came online. Yang scanned the numbers and approached an inner window surrounding a spherical core. Capillaries carried toxic water through the core, where longshui would strip electrons from heavy ions and harvest their energy. Of course, first they needed a supply of longshui, and their only source was trapped in the cells of a teenage girl.
As toxic water flowed into the core, a strong hand on his shoulder forced Yang to remember why he was here. He turned to see Mayor Hu bear his teeth and say, “Do not let me down.”
Yang nodded, remembering the fear in the Mayor’s eyes when they discussed the risks of bringing the core online before testing. If the power surged or the city’s grid stayed down for too long, they could cripple the city’s backup generators and not only would the island drown, but his Mountain would go dark for years. Yang contemplated his fate as Li’s sleeping body was loaded into the core. Submerged under drugs, Li hyperventilated, spasming from the cocktail in her bloodstream. The lid was lowered over her, the metal chamber sealed. As the girl was entombed, Yang thought of his wife and son, prisoners in the penthouse of the Tiger’s Den, watching the city burn. He nodded at Hu and rolled up his sleeves.
“Vitals?” Yang barked. He could see the readout perfectly well in his display, but he was not about to be cavalier with his greatest invention.
“Blood pressure dropping,” came the reply. “Unstable EKG indicates myocardial necrosis.”
“Microfluidics?”
“Primed,” said another voice. “Ionization near equilibrium.”
“How’s the membrane?” Yang said, fighting down the fear that he had miscalculated, that his design was somehow flawed.
After all, introducing longshui into a host, like the Jade, was one matter. A virus could hold synthetic mitochondrial DNA and use a cell’s own machinery to make the electron transport chain that gave the longshui its power. But harvesting the longshui from a host was an entirely different story. Longshui hybrids like Li were programmed to become cancerous to increase the yield of cells with longshui in the bloodstream, where they could be drawn like water from a well.
Only, Li was not yet cancerous. Nearly all the longshui in her was sequestered in healthy tissue. And that meant the extraction would get messy.
Yang’s method for pre-cancerous extraction was experimental at best. Every microgram of longshui was priceless, and if the host cells died, the electron transport machinery would decompose. Harvest had to occur with the cells alive.
So he had engineered a membrane with antibodies specific to cells expressing longshui. This mucosa would coil around the host, pulling cells to its surface, enveloping them in solution to keep them strong. But for it to work, the host’s organs had to be dissolved until all that was left was a shroud of skin on bone. For obvious reasons, the method had never been tested. Success for the host was suicide.
“Proteinase and collagenase influx doubling,” another tech said, collating data from nanobots sensing the enzymes that had been injected into Li’s bloodstream. The enzymes tore apart her muscle tissue, her gastrointestinal lining, every nitrogenous morsel.
The professor caught his breath as he watched Li’s vitals plummet, and reminded himself that she wasn’t human. She was just data on a holo, just one in a long line of experiments. Such was the fate of all Xinren, eventually. He knew that he too was a mere puppet to the Tiger, and imagined how the Tiger rewarded people who failed him.
Then, between Li’s fibrillating heart and boiling lymph nodes, Yang saw her EEG pirouetting. He pulled up an image of her brain. Her cortex was sparkling like fireworks. She was dreaming.
“Wherever you are,” Yang whispered, “may you find it to be a better place than this.” A sudden irrational fear penetrated him that it was his son in that coffin, and he leaned on a control panel to catch his breath. “Yield?” he barked.
“One-point-seven kilos and climbing,” the tech said. “Protein bath deploying now.”
Even as Li’s insides liquefied, she was being immersed from the outside in the same enzyme bath while being pierced with scalpels, stabbing holes throughout her body. Her slushy viscera leaked from her tattered skin, and soon many billions of cells from a woman who used to be Li Aizhu floated freely in solution.
The cells, of course, were protected by the same phospholipid bilayers that separate all cells from their surroundings. The enzyme bath dissolving her tissue could not attack the precious mitochondria inside the cells, or the longshui that the mitochondria created.
“Launch it,” Dr. Yang said. With a whirr, the mucosa coiled around the bath, attracting surface proteins associated with longshui that were expressed on the lipid bilayers, and amassing a countless number of the floating cells.
“Where are we?” Yang said, watching the gr
een yield grow.
“Two-point-nine kilos of longshui, Professor…three-point-four…three-point-eight and holding, sir.”
Mayor Hu came over to him. “How are we doing?” he said.
Yang looked at him and shook his head. “We are short. There is a method to increase yield,” Yang stammered, “but it will create instabilities. Within days we will need to replenish the core.”
The Tiger whispered in Yang’s ear. “Listen, you insect,” he hissed, grabbing the professor’s shirt, “I don’t care if you have to rip up her soul. Give me what I want, or I will rip your son into little tiny pieces.” Then Hu released him, and wiped the sweat from his hands onto Yang’s jacket.
Shaking, Yang turned to the tech monitoring the mucosa. “A thousand ccs of mitotic stimulant.”
“Are you--” the engineer began, but stopped when he saw Yang’s eyes. “Yes, Professor. A thousand ccs.”
An infusion of blue numbers lit up in Yang’s holo as the stimulant was delivered. Countless disembodied cells were dividing in mitosis, the waltz of life, the first ballet shared by all living beings. Each single, unbroken cell split in two. Their spindly chromosomes broke into chromatids, each cell cloning and doubling the count of mitochondria. The yield of longshui erupted in a flash.
Yang turned to the tech in charge of the grid. “Light it up,” he said, hoping it would be enough.
Valves in the core opened, pouring current into the capillaries around the chamber. Chemical byproducts flowed into the mucosa holding the cells and their longshui. Microsieves squeezed the cells, opening pores in them and penetrating them with nanochains. These nanochains in turn were barbed with enzymes transferring power from molecules made by longshui to ion pumps charging a massive voltage gradient. Data spiked as batteries beneath the lab jolted with chemical energy. The station core appeared no different, and the chamber was as quiet as a tomb. But on screen the numbers were flying.
Holos on the walls monitored the grid, spheres of green blooming as power returned to the Innovation District and the Mountain. Yang was so exhausted that it took a moment before he realized that his engineers were clapping, that the Tiger of Shanghai was laughing.
