Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen

Author:Qiufan, Chen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765389312
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2019-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

10

“What in the world happened to Mimi?” Kaizong pressed the doctor.

That wasn’t Mimi, or at least not the Mimi he had known. It was more like something that deliberately imitated Mimi’s gestures and patterns of speech. Something inhuman. He shuddered.

Mimi had never called him “Kaizong”; instead, she had always said “Fake Foreigner.”

“The situation is a bit complicated—” The doctor hesitated and then brought up some three-dimensional scans on the display. “I’ve never seen such a … brain map.”

He manipulated the display. “This is a typical BEAM image—oh, that’s ‘brain electrical activity mapping.’” A darkly colored brain hung in virtual space, and the animation showed various horizontal cross sections as irregular blotches or stripes of color appeared and disappeared, indicating shifting activity levels in various regions of the brain. “And this is Mimi’s.”

Kaizong gaped at the magnified, flickering image.

If a typical BEAM image could be described as a brush-painting landscape done in the broad strokes of xieyi style, Mimi’s brain resembled a realist painting done in the gongbi style one might expect at the height of the Tang Dynasty, full of meticulous, fine details. As the ani mation flipped through the cross sections, the patterns built up into a complex, magnificent palace. The various colored regions were finely crafted components joined together by mortise and tenon, but endowed with dynamic ebb and flow. The whole scene resembled a carnival full of gaudy-hued costumes parading through a giant city, but order also emerged at the macro level, displaying a harmonious sense of beauty.

“How did she get to be this way?”

“Good question. Based on some biochemical indicators, we think a virus had invaded her brain—as a matter of fact, the infection had occurred in waves, with the last instance about a month ago. The virus could perhaps explain some aspects of this rare organic disease, but it is not the only cause. We also discovered this in her brain.”

Another brain map appeared. It was translucent and the folds and creases were only faintly visible. Kaizong thought some fog seemed to shroud parts of the image and made it impossible to see clearly—perhaps a result of the resolution of the display.

“This is the ACC—the anterior cingulate cortex, behind your forehead.” The doctor zoomed in on a region, much as one would use Google Earth to descend through the cloud cover and zoom in on some country, city, and street, evoking the perspective of God. “It’s an important area responsible for cognition, behavior, emotion, learning reinforcement, and registering pain. You’re looking at it under one million times magnification.”

The layer of fog gradually cleared as though some nebula in space drew near and resolved into individual stars, each giving off a metallic glint and suspended in a vast universe made of neurons and extracellular matrix.

“These metal particles have diameters ranging from one to two-point-five microns, smaller than individual neurons. Normally, harmful particles like this will become trapped in the lungs as the result of respiration, leading to pneumonitis and pulmonary fibrosis, even damaging the specific immune system.

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