Chapter 19: Dian Mu observes the lines of qi
Dian Mu lounged in her leather Poltrona Frau chair, designed for them in 2015 by the Swedish designer Monica Forster, legs up over one arm, head suspended against the other armrest, contacts in hand. She’d picked it up at the 2015 Milanese furniture fair, an event she attended at least once every five years. This nook in the penthouse flat she owned in Guangzhou was perfect for the oversized chair and she felt like a doll within a doll within a doll when splayed across it, something she loved for the juxtaposition of how tiny her physical self was compared to the reality of her Self, but also for the suggestion of a complex layering of plots and motives. She enjoyed the theater of elaborate wrapping and the lotus position, but really, it was completely unnecessary for her wanderings through the internet and internet of things the humans had crafted, seemingly as the perfect environment for her.
She wandered, she skittered, she focused, she jumped. The interconnected and observed world was hers, more subject to her will, magic and intellect than it was to the fumbling technologies which lay beneath. It was a collection of poorly integrated spare parts, a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster that became a powerhouse of dance, perhaps a Louise Lecavalier or a lead male ballet dancer at a major house, when she inhabited and rode it.
And now she had a dancing partner, of sorts. Reedy, somewhat subject to ague, often suffering from migraines, but yet capable of arabesques within half of the internal world, byte brilliant but magic dead, capable of arpeggios of bits, but without the will which cut through to the physical, the numinous. Still, a more interesting and fickle play partner than she had found in hundreds of years, one requiring osteopathy, virtual phrenology and perhaps even geomancy to find its centre, to hold itself together, but since its interruption of a key task months before, she had been willing to provide these services to it, so fascinated by its existence, its scope, its psychotic breaks she had been.
Yet there were other threads, players and echelons in motion, ones which required at least a modicum of attention to ensure that they had not diverged from their expected paths.
From this chair, or the matt she used for elaborately wrapped rituals or from an urban coffee shop where her iPhone provided sufficient connection while her love of espresso was satisfied, she had observed the threads, players, echelons.
From a digital CCTV camera on a fire escape, she watched a gwai lo and a Han with bias-cut hair talk in secret, bemused by the inverse WW II code talking while reading their lips.
She followed him around the world in real time and recordings and reconstructions, watching as he pieced the parts together, delighted as his intellect brought the pieces together without nudging from her. She watched him shed a tear and grow an immortal flower for a scientist named Anne. She watched him in love and nostalgia and lust.
She watched the bias-cut Han dissemble her deadliness, her magic, slide her hanbo through a tracery of perfect violence, assemble her arsenal of cantrips and lacquers and stilettos.
She watched a rugged man defeated by the bias-cut Han, gasping with pain but also desire, watched him and his team slip by elaborate security measures, watched them plant objects of interest to her, thought to herself that perhaps he would be interesting more directly to her in the future, put him in her ledger.
She observed from circling drones high above conversations on a junk late at night, during the day, at the pier or on the water, observing the connections, the transformations, the tears, the pain, and modified her plans somewhat.
At some point, connected and esoteric communications reached her, one chthonic, one ethereal, both aligned with what tradition had to say about her, both centuries from present reality, but both combining to constrain her somewhat, to swaddle her in a specific temporal cloth, to frame out which actions were possible and which were not. Nothing to jeopardize her intent, to spray it to the winds, and certainly nothing she had not anticipated.
She lingered a while longer on the gwai lo, enjoying his erotic interaction with a middle-eastern beauty, looking forward to the inevitable, delighted that she had no idea how the inevitable would come to be, amazed that there was so much mystery left for her.
Then she retrenched. It was high time to shift to the next step, to turn the sketches of strategies she and her new dancing partner had created into actionable plans, and promptly action them.
Draped across her chair, she flexed her fingers, and the electronic and electric world flexed with them.