Chapter 14

Chapter 14: Cucumber Sandwich

The old man behind the mirror was Diao Chan in the flesh.

Qian Duoduo looked thrown for a moment, then settled fast.

Zhao Meiyou stepped up and reached for the glass when a sharp crack split the air, like a beam giving way. Qian Duoduo’s face changed; he snatched Zhao Meiyou by the collar and hurled him behind. “Move!”

He punctuated it with a kick to Zhao Meiyou’s ass, words flying: “I don’t know why Diao Chan’s dreaming inside the ruin, but the dream’s collapsing. You spooked his subconscious—now the whole ruin will come for us. This is his exploration home turf; I can’t hold it long. Go!”

The kick nearly sprawled Zhao Meiyou and he wondered if the vicious Qian Duoduo was a man or woman.

Bullets sliced in the next second. A stampede of boots hammered outside the car. Thermal readouts flooded Zhao Meiyou’s vision—lab security, in overwhelming numbers. The door was torn open by force.

Regardless of male or female; brutal was brutal. He snapped his fingers in rapid pops, tossed a smoke canister into the car, went in two-fisted with his guns, spraying fire while retreating at speed. Near the rear door he whipped around, lashed out with a side kick; the skin at his arch split, bone springing a long blade that sliced the door open like a watermelon.

He ditched the gun in his left hand and snapped once—at that crack of fingers, a motorcycle materialized on the lightless underground track.

Zhao Meiyou vaulted up, caught the bars. “On!”

Qian Duoduo booted an artificial human’s head clean off. “You go first!”

Zhao Meiyou didn’t waste breath. He buried the throttle. Twin tongues of fire roared from the exhausts; the headwind smacked him so hard it nearly peeled him off the seat. This was a modded beast—this fucker was faster than Diao Chan’s nuclear-powered flyer.

But at this speed—could he even keep up? The thought lasted less than a second before a world-rattling blast thundered behind them. Heat rolled down the tunnel like a mad dragon; Zhao Meiyou’s scalp prickled. The pillion dropped under sudden weight—he’d ridden the shockwave to catch up.

One somersault across a hundred and eight thousand li—fuck, he’s not the Monkey King!

“Hold.” Qian Duoduo cinched an arm around his waist, then bit off a single syllable, heavy and crisp: “Wind.”

In the next beat, the blast wind behind them kinked at a bizarre angle, hugging the bike’s tail as it surged past, punched clean through the tunnel, and blew a crater in the surface. Rockfall came down on their heads. This time Zhao Meiyou didn’t plan to dodge—he was ready to watch Great Sage Qian put on a show.

Clang—bike and riders were smashed to bits.

Judging by the pain, we’re talking at least comminuted fractures. One of Zhao Meiyou’s eyeballs got knocked loose, still tethered by its nerves, which meant he literally watched his own dismembered crash scene while red and white fluids pattered down.

Ugh—brain matter.

In the dark, the flinty wheel of a lighter rasped. Qian Duoduo lit his “smoke.”

A hand reached over. In a hoarse rasp, he spoke: “Heal.”

His soul snapped home; his body was remade whole.

Zhao Meiyou felt himself snap back in an instant. Qian Duoduo hauled him up and spoke again: “Wing.”

They shot straight out through the blasted opening.

The snowbound city had gone to hell. Searchlights raked the sky; on the skyways vehicles slammed together; airships blew apart midair. And yet in the heart of that chaos, the instant Qian Duoduo and Zhao Meiyou appeared aloft, almost every life-form locked onto them. Pilots screamed and dove to kill them—

Qian Duoduo: “Hide.”

Their figures bled away. Several freight trucks barreling at high speed slammed together, sparks erupting in a booming blast.

“I’m down to my last invisibility cigarette; it won’t hold for long.” Qian Duoduo touched down atop a tower, his mirrored skin cleaved as if by blade and axe—one more step and it was the abyss. “What’s the plan?”

Zhao Meiyou thought for a beat. “Go for the head.”

“Diao Chan should be in a lost state now. Under normal circumstances the chance of waking someone from that is under ten percent—otherwise why would we be running?” Qian Duoduo said. “The government didn’t know this ruin’s internal situation before. Your mission now has one objective: get out alive.”

Zhao Meiyou: “I insist.”

Qian Duoduo: “How sure are you?”

“You can’t use normal odds for us,” Zhao Meiyou replied. “Knock that ten percent down—call it one.”

“And you’re still going?”

“I am.” Zhao Meiyou bared his teeth in a grin. “One percent is already generous—it’s not like it’s a negative number.”

They held each other’s gaze for a breath. A small smile ghosted over Qian Duoduo’s face—the artificial human’s left side was completely burned away—and in that instant of crossed looks, at the lone surviving corner of his mouth Zhao Meiyou caught a glint of mad bravado, like a blade flashing from a cold sheath.

“Fine,” he said. “Then we go.”

Qian Duoduo took a cigarette case from his coat. Inside lay cigarettes of uneven length; one of them was already burning.

He plucked it out, and Zhao Meiyou saw what it was: Marlboro. The best-known cigarette brand in Megalopolis. Much of the civilization’s record from the twenty-second century has been lost, yet Marlboro’s headquarters still keeps the exact tobacco blend from centuries past. Zhao Meiyou had seen their new ad, said to restore a retro twentieth-century flavor—the cigarette’s white filter banded with a deep red ring, like a woman’s lipstick print.

“Next time you’re looking to die, say so earlier.” Qian Duoduo gauged the cigarette’s length, shoved it between Zhao Meiyou’s lips. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

Then he spoke another word: “Wind.”

As if an invisible force field swelled with the syllable, another cigarette in the case flared to life by itself. Qian Duoduo plucked it out and tucked it behind his ear. Zhao Meiyou saw the smoke it gave off was a deep blue-green.

The next second, Qian Duoduo shoved him off. Zhao Meiyou pitched from the high-rise. The wind howled, lifting him like spray; like a long invisible river, its current bore him straight toward somewhere in the city.

The moment Zhao Meiyou was sent away, Qian Duoduo must have lost his invisibility. A swarm of searchlights suddenly converged on him, and the lifeforms thrown into chaos within ruin all at once found where to strike, surging at him like a storm tide. The wind whipped hard; Qian Duoduo slipped out of Zhao Meiyou’s line of sight in an instant. All he could see, far, far off, was a burst of fire blossoming like a firework.

It seemed that, in the brief moments of their flight, Diao Chan had already come up from underground. The wind zigzagged, carrying Zhao Meiyou past one high-rise after another, then finally flung him onto a skyway.

The road spiraled upward around a colossal cast-bronze statue, several hundred meters above the ground. He now stood at the statue’s brow; he could see the eyes had been hollowed out, and inside someone had opened a burger shop.

Diao Chan sat at the shop’s entrance, the glass barrier at the edge of the roadway behind him. He was eating a burger. Zhao Meiyou knew there had to be pickles in it, which, just barely, made it count as a cucumber sandwich.

As for cucumber sandwiches, this particular quirk of Diao Chan’s diet dated back to the year they met, when they were sixteen.

On the day his holographic mother ran her self-destruct routine, the son, dazed and hollow, finished an entire piece and then collapsed over the keys, dry-heaving. That was when Zhao Meiyou realized Diao Chan seemed to have trouble expressing emotion—maybe it had to do with the cloned genome. He listened to the retching echo through the vast hall, like stomach acid and fresh blood boiling in a body, like a giant meat grinder roaring as it chewed viscera; it was the kind of sound you could describe as brutal, as if someone were dying.

But after listening to him retch for a long time, Zhao Meiyou suddenly thought: the man must, in fact, be crying.

He turned out to be right: for Diao Chan, tears were more like something he vomited.

No one knew how long Diao Chan kept heaving. Growing drowsy just listening, Zhao Meiyou asked whether he’d finished crying, and what he planned to do next.

The other was still retching. Zhao Meiyou was dead on his feet; he picked a corner at random, lay down, and went straight to sleep.

When he woke, Zhao Meiyou saw Diao Chan sitting on the piano bench, both hands black, a scorched smell in the air. He was cradling something in his arms.

“What’s that?” Zhao Meiyou walked over and asked.

Diao Chan didn’t answer directly. He swiped a finger across the keys, leaving a pitch-black print. This piano had broken once before. He said, “Back then I was young, and I clung hard to what was mine; even when the piano broke I wouldn’t replace it. I kept practicing every day, playing pieces that made no sound.”

“Then one day my mother suddenly had the old piano taken apart. She had me pick out a few parts, and they fitted those old pieces into a new piano.”

“She said, ‘The new will carry the imprint of what came before, and the old will be reborn.’”

Zhao Meiyou listened in silence. Then Diao Chan turned his head to look at him and asked, “When you ate your father, was that what you were thinking too?”

It took Zhao Meiyou a while to follow the logic. He shook his head. “By that reasoning, the one I wanted to eat should’ve been my mother. But back when she was still around, she was always saying I’d already eaten a huge part of her—ate it while she was alive. No need to come back for another helping after she died.”

Then, a little curious, he eyed Diao Chan. “Asking something like that—what is it you’re trying to do?”

If I were an artificial human made of machinery, I’d fit my mother’s parts into my body.

Diao Chan kept his head lowered, hair slipping over his ear; Zhao Meiyou couldn’t make out his expression, only heard him say, “But unfortunately, replicants seem to have flesh, same as humans.”

I looked for a long time before I found the monitor in the basement.

Only then did Zhao Meiyou realize Diao Chan was cradling a chassis—the terminal unit of a holo-display.

In a sense, it really was his mother’s corpse.

Diao Chan set the monitor on the piano keys; it let out a small chime. He suddenly asked, “Do you have a pot?”

“The pork stall has one.” Zhao Meiyou asked, “What for?”

Diao Chan stroked the casing of the display, and after a moment said:

“I’m going to boil it and eat it.”

They went back to the Lower District, and as Diao Chan wanted, Zhao Meiyou tried cooking machinery for the first time.

The monitor was a top-of-the-line luxury; even with the core chip burned out, its shell was fine as porcelain, warm and firm to the touch, calling to mind thick, milky-white fat. When the knife came down, a sweet, bloody tang spilled out; the circuit boards were silver tendon and bone. He tugged the fiber optics as though yanking intestines and veins; hot juices ran over his hands, and the residual current seemed to wick along the liquid into his skin, sparking a strange shiver.

Any act of dismemberment rouses desire—the most primitive urges: cruelty, hunger, curiosity... Once you’ve gorged on the thrill, you look at it anew. There’s a tension between the cuts: wet, sleek, seductive. That is where beauty begins.

Beauty, a wild hunger tamed.

This is good meat, Zhao Meiyou thought. That bone-white manor was, without question, the finest ranch: rich feed, the right temperature, meticulous husbandry. She had been given everything a great lady is fed on, and turned into the ideal piece of livestock. Zhao Meiyou had heard how they raise pigs in the Middle District—not lab-grown pork, but animals brought up over time. The moment of death also decides the quality: those pigs are put to sleep, killed gently, without the slightest pain, because fear sours the flesh. A woman, without doubt, is the choicest meat—she goes willingly to her death, without fear, perhaps even with pleasure.

The ingredient makes the meal; Diao Chan was in for a good one.

Zhao Meiyou boiled another pot of dumplings, then brought two plates to the table. The two boys sat facing each other, counted down three-two-one, the starter pistol went off, and they fell to eating and drinking.

The room reverberated with the sound of teeth grinding flesh and blood: thick, vivid. Food was milled in the mouth, like a baby writhing in the womb—so full, so joyous, so exultant. They ate with wild abandon, like savages from the age of the hunt, like the most carefree children of civilization.

It was an impossibly delicious meal. Loose-tongued from it, bowl in hand and still eating, Zhao Meiyou ended up hauling the food-poisoned Diao Chan to the hospital. He was out for a long time. When he woke, the first thing Zhao Meiyou said was, “What did your mom taste like?”

His voice was still hoarse, but he didn’t hesitate: “Like cucumber sandwiches.”

After that, something strange happened: no matter what Diao Chan ate, it all tasted like cucumber sandwiches.

Perhaps that was the most complete kind of fusion.

It was Zhao Meiyou who had a sudden brainwave. On the day Diao Chan was discharged, he made a box of cucumber sandwiches as a send-off meal. After the first bite, Diao Chan paused and said, “I think I tasted shepherd’s purse.”

Zhao Meiyou hadn’t put any shepherd’s purse in the sandwiches; that had been the dumpling filling the day before.

They tried it many times. From a cucumber sandwich, Diao Chan could taste all sorts of flavors, which ones entirely at random. They had no plans to chase down whether this was a physical glitch or a psychological disorder; to Zhao Meiyou, the condition seemed perfect to sell as a retro cosmetic-medicine product—a win-win for cravings and dieting.

After that, cucumber sandwiches became Diao Chan’s staple. He couldn’t do without them—like a fish without water. From this, Zhao Meiyou understood that Diao Chan still wanted to live; only someone who wants to live cares about the pleasures of eating, even if that life has to be sustained by cucumber sandwiches.

Sure enough, a few days later Diao Chan said to him, “I want to try living in the Lower District.”

“Sounds good.” Zhao Meiyou had an unlit cigarette between his teeth, patting around for a lighter. “Want me to hook you up with a place?”

“No, I want to try on my own.” Diao Chan broke off there, mouth opening, words rising and then held back.

Zhao Meiyou finished the thought for him: “If you want to mooch a meal, just come find me at the pork shop.”

They were squatting in the pork shop’s doorway watching the rain as he said it. The towers of the Megalopolis were too towering and grand; Level 33 could hardly catch real rainwater. Some said the Lower District’s rainfall was actually industrial discharge, some said it was holographic rain, and others said it was piss.

Zhao Meiyou preferred to take the Lower District’s rain as urine. He’d heard urine was actually fairly clean water; given the level of sky pollution in the twenty-fifth century, piss was cleaner than rain by far.

So in that sky-filling piss-rain, Diao Chan suddenly smiled. He bent down and lit Zhao Meiyou’s cigarette.

Zhao Meiyou asked him, “Want one?”

Diao Chan still refused. “I don’t smoke.”

Zhao Meiyou knew he and Diao Chan weren’t kindred spirits in any usual sense; even after years in the Lower District, Diao Chan still wouldn’t smoke. They met too early—so early they didn’t dare to trust—and too late—so late they were already caked with sorrow. To call them bosom friends or brothers wasn’t quite right. Each carried his own hollow. If he had to reach for a comparison, they were more like wild dogs crowding under the same eaves to get out of the rain.

But when two wild dogs huddle together, they’re no longer strays.

Three or five make a pack; two make a family.

The closest become the farthest, the dearest grow estranged. Families can hardly avoid it.

Now, standing before a burger joint on the aerial highway, Zhao Meiyou thought, I didn’t expect that after all these years, his mother would still be the knot he can’t untie.

Earlier he’d been mouthing off, making a show of solemnly tearing open the layers of metaphor in ruin; and so the savage wound lay bare again beneath the old scab, oozing pus and blood—within Diao Chan’s lostness, the mother was no longer a mech; she was finally, in the truest sense, a human being.

Zhao Meiyou had thought this was long behind them: that the day they swallowed their grief with a ravenous appetite, they could square their shoulders and be human again. That was how he had always survived. When his mother killed herself for love, leaving crates of expired makeup, he accepted the facts—almost instantly—and used them to paint himself a new face and carve out a new way forward.

Only now did he realize that he and Diao Chan had lived through very different versions of mother and son. From as far back as he could remember, Zhao Meiyou knew that a baby starts feeding on the mother in the womb—on her bones and blood—and, once born, only redoubles the consumption. His bond with his mother had been a cordial kind of eat-or-be-eaten, a contest over time and space, control and being controlled. When he was very young she told him: We will devour each other—but you will be the one who wins in the end.

As for Diao Chan, he had never managed to digest his mother’s death; he had been living poisoned ever since.

Zhao Meiyou also recalled what Qian Duoduo had said about the test subject—she had thrown the entire city into chaos.

“Mother” was the cause of the S45 ruin’s chaos—the agitator roiling Diao Chan’s subconscious.

Diao Chan had failed to eat his mother and inherit her life; in this struggle of the weak against the strong, she had turned defeat into victory by dying.

The son seemed to have consumed the mother, but in truth it was the mother who devoured the son—could it be read that way? Zhao Meiyou sank into thought. She had left Diao Chan an unanswered riddle about the soul and free will, but no guideposts; so from start to end he had been fighting himself, not even knowing whether to hate or to be reborn.

Earlier he had told Diao Chan, when the latter was posing as an old man: You’re an accomplice trying to flee the scene of the murder. The line had hit him like a hammer, even setting off the ruin’s alarm protocols.

One thing was certain: in Diao Chan’s unconscious, he was a friend from far-off Mars, someone who could ferry him into the depths of space, forever away from this chaotic city and the oncoming war. He wanted to run. And Zhao Meiyou was sure that on the ship that would carry him off, there would be no seats reserved for humankind.

Diao Chan would not be leaving with “Mother.”

If he wanted to escape Earth—wasn’t that also a flight from his mother?

Well, by that measure, I don’t seem to be much good at anything. The thought amused Zhao Meiyou. Hired killer, newly found family, old friend come all the way from Mars—whatever role he played, he hadn’t managed to pull the man out of the fire.

He hadn’t killed the source of the chaos, hadn’t seen the long grind of Diao Chan’s inner war, and now he couldn’t carry him off into the stars either.

He remembered how, back then, Diao Chan had hired him to kill: a sizable deposit paid up front. The job never got done, and the money was never returned. So yes—he owed him.

Brooding on old accounts was pointless. In that case, better to start again and set things right, one by one.

A sudden sizzle in the bone of his ear, then the channel clicked open. Qian Duoduo’s voice: “…Zhao Meiyou?”

“Hey, Qian-ge.” Zhao Meiyou headed toward the burger joint. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”

From the sound of it, Qian Duoduo was still in the thick of a melee; explosions flickered in and out over the line. “…you’ve got thirty seconds left on your cloak. Don’t move on your own, and above all don’t—”

“Sorry, Qian-ge, the signal’s crap.” Zhao Meiyou pushed open the burger joint’s glass door, the little bell over it chiming a ding. “You take care—I’m hanging up.”

Qian Duoduo probably had his coordinates pinned; the voice on the other end was cold and steady: “Listen to me—if… then you’ll…”

What a nag. Zhao Meiyou was annoyed. He didn’t know how to shut the channel off, so he simply ignored it. Through the crackle of static, he had twenty seconds left. He went into the back, found a cleaver on the stainless counter.

Ten seconds. The exhaust hood droned; the burger patty, veined with blood, hissed on the griddle. Zhao Meiyou stepped out, vaulted the counter. Time’s up.

The cashier in a red checkered apron looked at him, a little puzzled, wearing a professional smile. “Sir, may I—”

Before she could finish, Zhao Meiyou’s hand rose and the blade fell. He chopped the cashier’s head clean off. Years of pig-slaughter turned to crime in an instant; his hand was as sure as a master butcher carving an ox—he even severed the spine.

There were no customers inside, so none of the cinematic screams. Outside, though, Diao Chan seemed jolted—he sprang to his feet, pushed through the door in long strides, and when he saw what lay before him, his pupils pinched tight.

Zhao Meiyou was lifting a box of fries from the pass window. He looked at him and smiled. “Want some ketchup?”

He was soaked in blood, spreading his arms in a sleazy taunt. “It’s the taste of Mommy.”

The cashier he’d just killed—the woman who’d sold Diao Chan that cucumber sandwich—Zhao had noticed the moment he came in: she was the escaped test subject.

Which is to say, Diao Chan’s mother.

Maybe the turmoil of the subconscious knocked everything off the rails, tearing open the veneer of peace. The role that should have been the victim—the “test subject”—shifted into that of a cucumber-sandwich seller, peddling emotional knots, nightmares, and sourness.

Diao Chan’s eyes went wide with fury; his features twisted under the force of it. For an instant he seemed to recognize Zhao Meiyou—his face oscillated between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, struggling between being lost and clearheaded, half despair and half madness. Then madness won, and he lunged at Zhao Meiyou like a beast.

The burger shop door banged open and Qian Duoduo burst in. He couldn’t get there in time to stop it, so he raised his voice: “Zhao Meiyou!”

Zhao Meiyou acted as if he hadn’t heard, standing his ground, neither ducking nor dodging.

Mid-lunge, Diao Chan chopped in to wrench the knife free and drove it in without hesitation.

The pain slammed into him. Dazed, Zhao Meiyou watched the fluid spilling from his abdomen. So his transformation into an artificial human was still flawed; he remembered Qian Duoduo didn’t bleed at all.

“…Zhao Meiyou?” Someone seemed to be calling him—it was Diao Chan. The moment he stabbed him, he seemed to have come partly to. “Zhao Meiyou?!”

“I’m not dead yet.” With some effort, Zhao Meiyou passed him the cleaver, its tip set against his own heart, coaxing: “Come on—kill me.”

Zhao Meiyou had seen some case studies in the employee handbook: when archaeologists get lost while exploring the Home Field, there are ways to pull them out—one is to kill the source of the chaos. The catch is that in many a ruin the “source of chaos” is anything but easy to pinpoint.

For instance, back in Ruin A173, when the boy Liu Qijue dissolved along with the old man, the headliner snapped back to clarity.

Zhao Meiyou had meant to shapeshift into Diao Chan’s mother, only to find she’d already become the cashier at a burger joint.

Bottom line, he should have finished all this years ago. The first time he slipped into the manor, even if she caught him, he should have gritted his teeth and killed her, instead of standing by as a spectator there for kicks. Maybe then none of this would have happened—maybe Diao Chan wouldn’t have lingered in an old nightmare for so long, building a warped utopia out of it.

On top of that, Zhao Meiyou had one more prediction—if “Mother” was the root of Diao Chan’s nightmares, then after he killed “Mother,” he might well take her place, becoming the new terror in Ruin S45.

The way to stop fearing the dark is to face it. In other words, for Diao Chan to truly awaken from that lostness, he had to do it himself, with his own hands.