Chapter 35: Dian Mu tests the mirrors
Splayed cross ways over the arms of her Poltrona Frau chair, Dian Mu looked down through the multi-spectrum eyes of a Predator drone thousands of meters above a smoky valley. What it saw was being recorded, itemized, imbued with ID tags and inset in digital amber, never to fade. At least unless she willed it.
She flitted among the other points of view available to her: a CCTV camera at a gate, a microdrone slowly circling on silent wings near the cooling tower, a hopper looking up at stacks of coal, smart grid voltage and frequency sensors at nearby substations, the IoT sensors within the plant itself. All of these feeds were captured, fed back to her rapidly growing store, which would be terabytes by the end of the show.
One of the joys of this era was that she didn’t have to rely on her fickle memory for supremely pleasurable moments like this, but instead could create massive data stores to delve into as she would, to run spiders through to pull back snippets, to expose to her custom variants of Google algorithms and Watson techniques. She would be able to replay this over and over from a hundred perspectives, enjoying it afresh as she watched it with different senses, different lenses, different angles.
She considered an art work based upon this, like the novels and movies which told the same story multiple times, but with more and less privileged and more and less reliable narrators, meaning emerging from the conflicting versions. And realized that her data store, enjoyable as it was to her, did not have that dynamic of self-delusion and limited attention that such fictions depended on. It would be interesting, even fascinating to some, but it wouldn’t be art.
Unless. Unless it was art for a new audience, an audience of one, a new form of art intended solely for her new dance partner in the ether. While she and most others had a single point of view and could only approach each new impression serially, slowly forming a gestalt view of the multiple dimensions of perception and action, violence and delight, her dancing partner could inhale it whole, multithread it, apprehend it as she took in a picture instead of a sequence of chapters, asynchronously instead of synchronously. But it wasn’t the time to explore this. She instructed an app to make a note of this for later exploration, but for now, for now it was time to play and play large.
Curtain opens.
Act 1: The evacuation
Beneath her multiple senses, the coal generation plant pulsed with flashing lights and blaring alarms, pre-recorded notices and text messages, even vestigial pages and faxes being extruded by the strata of historical systems she imposed her will upon. The hundreds of workers stumbled, ran, spat, cursed, walked, queued. They remembered, vaguely, disaster drills and invasion drills and bombing drills and did a hundred different slightly wrong things which combined to a singular right thing: they left the complex, gathered at points away from danger and fire and explosion. They removed themselves from harm’s way, at least enough to make her unconcerned for the rest of their safety.
Act 2: The light show
Dian Mu had considered a dozen approaches to turning a coal generation plant into a realm of twisted rebar and shattered concrete, scorched pipes and melted plastics, a shattered Lego plaything which could not be reassembled. All of them would have worked. But Zau had gone to so much effort and expense, and the craggy, pale-eyed Rex had risked so much, that she had decided for this night, this show, she would use the mirrors. They were her traditional channel for her power, although she hadn’t bothered with them for at least two decades, and there was something satisfying in dipping a toe into nostalgia once in a while. And of course, this theater was for Zau’s sake, so employing her more effective yet less obvious approaches wouldn’t do, wouldn’t satisfy his lust for destruction and ruin, wouldn’t forestall other actions he might take.
And so, draped across an exquisite piece of furniture on a slab of reinforced concrete covered in engineered bamboo two hundred meters in the air in Guangzhou, Dian Mu breathed in, breathed out, focused and six hundred kilometers away small mirrors spat hellfire, ozone-shedding, plasma-torquing hellfire, lightning beyond what humans had seen before. The hellfire arced through the dark night, glaring lines in the senses of the drone far above, overwhelming assaults on the closer senses of the smaller drones far below, destructive forces on the CCTV cameras and IoT devices of the plant.
And it burned. More, it melted, reshaped the plant into abstract or perhaps post-modern art, a new Guernica for the post-climate change age, a message which would persist until bulldozers came, a message intended for only one dragon, and perhaps his attending coterie.
Act 3: The response
The humans who had evacuated huddled, evacuated again but this time their bowels and bladders, screamed screams which were inaudible against the enormous destruction playing out around them. And then, when it was over, they patted their arms and legs, patted the arms and legs of those beside them, hugged each other, wept and cried, traumatized but not physically. They survived.
More flashing lights arrived, early responders from emergency services who had been alerted by the evacuation notices, the texts, the pages and the faxes. There was nothing they could do for the plant, so they focused on taking the workers to safety, putting salves on the odd burn, wrapping them in warming blankets, offering water and shelter.
And then more. The military and the intelligence services, with their guns, their badges and their barking voices, their equipment and their scanners, their suspicions and their orders, orders which she had ensured were drafted correctly.
Exit, stage right. Curtain close. No bow for the cast.
Dian Mu, still draped across her beautiful chair, relaxed, became boneless. Smiled in deep satisfaction.
And a scent of vanilla stole across her face. Her eyes opened. The lights of Guangzhou upon the ceiling of her penthouse had a ginger tinge. She smiled again, differently. Then frowned slightly. Had she underestimated him? How was it that she was experiencing this here, inside her nested matryoshka dolls of security, indirection and comfort. Without her being aware that it might have occurred?
A new sensation impinged. A static upon her skin, something she was uniquely equipped to sense, something that would be lost, or painful, or meaningless to anyone else. Her name in hanji, written in ions, electrified upon her flesh. Then more. A statement of desire, transcendent will, passion and skill. Something new and exciting.
Something that twined with the scent and the color to make a sensory aesthetic of surpassing beauty and eroticism. The hanji slid across her skin, promising further delights to come, exploring her, taking knowledge of her. And the scent eddied and the shadow of the almond tree, limned in ginger shook upon the ceiling.
Dian Mu gasped in pleasure, both from the sensations and the delight in being surprised. She loved the future that she was creating, but at that moment, in that place, she was totally invested in the present, as much as it was a spike of tomorrow intruding into today.