Revolving Door: Volume 3
Liaoning Libraries - I
The sudden hard reality of concrete against their shoes gives way to a tide of voices. All four tumble off the slanting parapet of a skyscraper, catching their breaths as they land.
The chill is the first thing to hit Hong Yi—colder than San Francisco, whatever season it may be. Then comes his awareness of the stream of pedestrians parting around them, like water around a delta.
While Artur and Adelaide sit on the edge of the parapet nursing their ghosting sickness, Hong Yi crawls to his feet and peers about. Here, the buildings cast long, scintillating shadows; beneath them, walkers stream in and out of gleaming automatic doors. Across the road, a skyscraper clock flashes three P.M.
For a minute, he dazedly watches the LED storefronts glimmer and ripple with names: Baiwei Hotpot. Lele Travel Agents.
Then he hears a shuffle of feet, and Honourless claps him on the back, pushing her notepad and glass into his hands. “Oh!” He fumbles with the translation glass, sliding it across the words with his thumb.
Do you need currency?
Hong Yi returns the stationery assemblage. Sure, he writes back on his phone.
Honourless gives the words a cursory glance, and then winks out into oblivion. Blinking just once in surprise, Hong Yi turns around. Adelaide is crawling onto her feet with one hand gripping Artur’s forearm. The latter points at a nearby bench, then waves them both towards it.
It is a simple bench—white, plastic, sinuous—the kind that may have been molded without the touch of a single human hand. All three fit comfortably in the curve of the seat, and they watch from that vantage as traffic comes and goes. Among them, a scattering of drones the height of children roll quietly along in predictable lines while human pedestrians dodge around them. Some have LED faces on a front display, emoting when people halt them to ask questions.
“Which way to the high speed rail station?” asks a teen rolling her luggage along.
“Let me show you the way!” the drone chirps, and onward they ramble, into the crowd.
“Oh, that is kinda cool,” Hong Yi pipes up.
“This is…different from my Dalian,” Artur murmurs.
Adelaide stares resolutely at her lap. “I need to hide my face.”
Hong Yi leaps from his seat. “Oh—right! Maybe we can get you a mask when Honourless brings the cash?”
As if hearing her name, the woman herself pops in from the ether and lands before them in a crouch. In her hand is a stack of plastic hundred-yuan bills which she immediately starts handing to him like candy. “Whoa, slow down!” Hong Yi shoves bills away into his pockets even as the woman stuffs another wad into his hand. “How much did you even—even withdraw? Are you sure you don’t have bills to pay?”
Honourless chuckles as she begins dispensing bills to the other two. Only when she is done, and winks away with a lazy wave, does Hong Yi wave them out of the benches and point up the road. “Come on, let’s go find Adelaide a disguise.”
A five-minute stroll down the road makes it clear that they are in the very heart of the city, the streets full of shoppers and rolling drones. Though the language is the same, the simplified Chinese characters enduring as ever, none of the shops match the ones he remembers from home—countless strange names and unfamiliar logos, chain stores he has never seen in his life dominating street corners.
They stroll under construction scaffolding and past a handful of roving drones before stopping in front of a dollar store. Already, they have seen a few pedestrians wearing masks of various descriptions, from surgical masks to full-faced opera masks, so it is likely not a stretch for Adelaide to also be seeking one. Artur shields her from view as they slip through the sliding doors, and Hong Yi casts his eye about for security cameras, before waving the other two in through the shelves, shoulder rattling a rack of facial serum packets. “There’s a camera front and to the right,” he says. Adelaide nods and looks away.
The tiny entrance belies the bright mazelike depths of the shop’s interior. They forge in deeper like intrepid spelunkers. No one seems to think anything of the trio, nor their inordinate interest in the festive supplies section. Rifling through endless curtains of party masks—monsters and operatic faces and creatures of every stripe—Adelaide picks out the face of a mouse. It is matte molded plastic, pink streaks on white swirling around its eyes, petal-shaped strokes adorning its forehead.
Hong Yi leads her to the counter and Artur brings up the rear.
“Hello,” says the cashier in Mandarin, without any effort at emoting.
“Just this one please,” he says, pushing the mask across the counter. “I’d like to ask, do you know where there might be a cheap hotel?”
“Not sure, go ask the drones,” answers the cashier. “Eight yuan. Bag?”
He holds up a hand. “No need, thank you.”
*
While Adelaide is looping the mask strings over her ears, Hong Yi says, “I asked the cashier about hotels and got told to ask the drones. But I’m vetoing that. We don’t know who has access to their visual and voice data. Let’s go look around.” Then he smiles. “The mask is completely adorable, by the way.”
Adelaide clasps her hands together. “Thank you.”
The thought of being tracked by unseen eyes brings a shudder to Adelaide as they return to the chilly summer air and proceed down the avenue.
They scour the downtown with Adelaide between the other two, passing pedestrians, taxis and hordes of drones on wheels. At least one of these white boxes roams every block; once or twice a fellow walker starts to ask one questions only to storm off in frustration, pursued by the robot as far as the next errant bump in the pavement.
They walk past that drone struggling to surmount a sharp hump with its woefully tiny wheels, its LED face vacantly blinking. Hong Yi sighs and gives it a push; and then it carries on as if it was never waylaid.
“Damn faces, they get me every time,” he mutters.
It is not much longer before an inner city hostel declares itself with signage in English, Chinese and Korean, the warm lightning as effective of an invitation as any. Through a blur of unfamiliar characters, the ones Adelaide knows stick out like a billboard: Happy Dreams Backpacker House.
It is a modest hostel, furnished with white counters, chairs and shelves, aglow with lights imitating the sun. While Hong Yi asks for a room for three, Adelaide sits in the waiting bench and considers the brochures on display. There are only a few she understands—Historic Buildings of Dalian and Must See in Dalian.
Hong Yi only spends a third of his allowance on a stay of ten days. “Room 501. This’ll last us a while,” he says, counting off the remaining bills as they walk down the hallway to a spotless concrete lobby and its singular lift door. He searches for a button. “Where in the world…”
“Level five?” Adelaide says, bowing towards the receiver by the door.
The indicator above the lift lights up and the doors hiss open.
“Oh! Okay.”
The lift is plastered with ads for attractions and Korean barbecue, all things they won’t have the time to see. They exit at level five and traverse the windowless extent of corridor to find their room awaiting them. Hong Yi peers down at the brochure. Adelaide watches him enter the PIN, committing it to memory—56825821.
The room, to Adelaide’s eye, is not particularly roomy for three. It is much wider than it is deep, with three beds in a row, standing parallel with their feet pointing towards the outer wall. At the far end of the room, a desk is slotted under the only window.
“This’ll do nicely,” Hong Yi says, “but now we need a way to access the internet, or whatever the equivalent here is.”
“Internet is the word.” She slips the mask off her head and holds it between her thumb and index.
“Huh, let me try...” He pulls from his pocket a device—a smaller tablet phone with a thicker make than she often sees—and turns it on.
While he waits, Adelaide walks to the windowed end of the room and drops her luggage bag next to the last bed. She turns back to find Hong Yi seated on the bed beside hers, glaring down at his screen. “No luck, my phone’s certificates don’t pass muster. Anyway, reckon it’s time to get a device with internet?”
“Oh, I brought Felix’s phone.”
His head whips around. “Wait, really?”
She is already fishing around for the device. “He resets it all the time; I guess it might throw off the tracking.” She holds it out towards him. “Still, I think you should hold onto it. I don’t know how they found me. If it’s transmitting my voice then a reset won’t help.”
He takes it. “That helps a lot. We can start doing our research this evening.”
“How about lunch?” groans Artur. “I cannot think with an empty stomach.”
“Oh! I knew I was forgetting something. Addie, don't forget the mask.”
*
In this Dalian—or as his family called it, Dalniy, as it had once been called—Artur finds the streets riddled with unexpected pockets of nonstalgia. He cannot tell if it is the tang of salt on everything, or the brief patches where he sees words he can read, but it is a sense of homeliness that sits awkward, like a new beam in an old roof, shiny and alien. This friction settles into him as a permanent irritability: he both wants more time to appraise this place and doesn't want to be here at all.
Perhaps this is something he will come to find familiar. This is, at the core of it all, not the same city he once visited as a child. It is alive, the walls whole, the facade screens beaming like suns. And there are more of his compatriots here, more architecture that gestures at the kinds he knew—a Russian town threaded along a street in the city centre, yet to be cannibalized by the smooth sameness of the skyscrapers around it.
It is here that they break for lunch, noodles, rice and pierogi side by side on the menu. It has been so long since he could eat without dread that he feels some absence without it. None of these sumptuously laden dishes are borrowed, or stolen, or ten years old. Fresh meats, freshly seared, and real milk in real tea—creamy and even fetid to his nose.
Hong Yi talks to locals with such aplomb that Artur cannot help being a little impressed, even if he is still warming up to the chatterbox of a man. Adelaide’s eyes are always wide with dizzy confusion, and it is for her sake that he starts to ask strangers questions, saying what little he can in Mandarin and then venturing in Russian with the shops whose signage has the language on it. Once or twice, it pays off. Most know at least a word or two, da or nyet or spasibo. He reciprocates with what he knows of their language. But there are some who are fluent, like the waiter, who happily offers his menu recommendations.
“So, I’ve been reviewing the brief,” Hong Yi says over his plate of fried noodles, balancing his chair on its front legs. “We've got a few things to figure out, like who Chen Shanying is, and where the, uh, organisation's headquarters are. I guess that means we're in for a whole day of research.”
“I am not a researcher,” Artur says halfway through inhaling a scallion pancake. “I pilot boats, fix boats…lighthouses, sometimes.”
“And whip up some killer blizzards,” he puts in with a grin, and Artur makes a gesture of concession. “And Adelaide, what do you think?”
“I can help with research,” she says. “Will it work if I only know English?”
Hong Yi is typing something into his phone. “‘Who is Chen Shanying?’ Yeah, we got bunch of conspiracy theory articles in English.”
“I am starting to wonder why there's such an air of secrecy around the book we’re seeking.”
“I mean, if I were an organisation holding onto the secrets of the multiverse, I would guard them like a hundred tons of gold.”
The chatter loses Artur’s attention at some point, but he assumes they will tell him anything that he must know. Instead he focuses on the flavours of the meal, richer even than the hotel fare in San Francisco, and dwells on the perpetual motion of everything around him.
:::
Back in the hostel within the hour, Hong Yi boots up Felix’s phone to be greeted by a cloying voice tutorial. Once he has gone through the motions—exasperatedly—and taken a good number of minutes to run a search of their key terms, he drops onto Adelaide's bedside and shows her the screen. “I have a few leads,” he says. “The Sect of Multiversal Truth has a homepage that's super vague about where it’s headquartered. Apparently they'll meet prospective new members in the city and take you there once they're sure you're a genuine entrant.”
Onscreen is the overly blue homepage of that very website, all its elements housed in three-dimensional panels that seem to move in parallax as he rotates the device. Adelaide takes the phone and swipes the panels around, squinting at the text. Then she swipes the search bar down to type something.
The interface that pops onto the screen is flat, more like the ones he knows. He cannot see the text she is entering, but the results have more videos than text, and he reckons it must be a social application of some kind. She navigates it with such precision it is hard to follow what she is doing until she turns to him and says, “I’m seeing some results that look like they might be accounts of the initiation rites.”
“Oh, let me see!” He lunges over to look over her arm at the screen.
As he reads, Hong Yi can sense that Adelaide is withdrawing from his presence somehow. But as they begin delving into the research, she begins to ease up in favour of helping to trawl through the data.
Owing to the quality of the automatic machine translation tools, Adelaide’s lack of knowledge of Chinese proves no obstacle to her aid, as they chase a trail of ex-pages struck down for undisclosed legal reasons. Then, fifty pages deep into the results, in a blog post dated barely a week ago, they find a description of the journey to the sect headquarters that includes a portion where they meet an initiate at a port warehouse, board a small, clandestine vessel in the depths of night—blindfolded—and make a trip that lasts for about half an hour.
And when I was inside the building, I saw through a narrow window the cliff below, and an endless blackness that was probably the ocean. There were no lights, except for the lights on the island. I had never seen such darkness, but it was the perfect place to hide the secrets of the universe.
On the matter of their mystery publication and its author, the pair uncover a scattering of conspiracy theories housed on old, poorly styled websites. Some of it speculates on the identity of Chen Shanying. Some say he is Malaysian, others say a Chinese national, and yet others claim he is an individual who has never called any land home.
On one hobby historian website, in a slide deck that only works half the time, they find a pair of scanned yellowed pages of what are purportedly his writings. Those writings are in simplified Chinese, but that doesn’t eliminate one national origin or the other. It is an extract from a passage that appears to describe a fifth fundamental force—an anti-entropic force, a super-field that encompasses the entire universe, whose behaviour does not appear to be related to that of any other force already known.
With what little they know about the sect’s location, they move on to scouring maps. The Tesri Map app renders the entirety of China in a low resolution blur, so they switch to the noxiously self-promoting Chinese map service, GongDi.
“Artur,” Hong Yi calls towards the first bed.
Artur, who is in the middle of pulling on his boots, glances over his shoulder. “What?”
“How far can a typical power boat travel in half an hour? At top speed?”
“Top speed? Depends on size.”
“Er, a small one? For five passengers?”
“Mm…sixteen knots…eight miles.”
“Nautical miles?”
“Obviously.”
“Perfect, thanks!” GongDi provides a ruler feature, which Hong Yi happily uses to feel out a radius from the Dalian Port’s yacht harbour. A quick scan of the islands in the radius shows there are only five possible candidates for the site of the headquarters.
One by one, they pan over the five islands in satellite mode. The first three are connected by road bridges—Dashan, Ershan, Sanshan—part-forested islands, some patches stripped bare, clusters of lumber yards strewn about in the bald spots.
The fourth has a name—Bangchui Island. Hanging off the southeastern tip of the city, it lies too close to the land to be hidden to the eyes of a mainland parkgoer.
And the last, lying a few miles southeast of Dashan Island, is blurred to unintelligibility. Smaller than its neighbours, the ocean is crystal-clear up to its shallows, where everything disappears behind a fog of pixelated green and grey.
Hong Yi’s eyes narrow. “Okay, weird, but pretty damning.”
Adelaide leans over to look. “I guess sometimes secrecy gives the truth away.”
“These two…botan,” Artur mutters, pulling the door open with a creak. The hall outside is quiet. “I will buy dinner. What do you want?”
“Anything noodly or fried.”
Adelaide taps her chin, eyes still stuck on the blurry satellite photo. “I’ll have the same as you,” she finally says.
Artur nods wordlessly. The door bangs shut behind him.
*
He brings three packs of the same meal back. By then, Hong Yi and Adelaide have taken to writing their findings in their respective note-taking devices—Adelaide in her notebook and Hong Yi in a Word document on his phone.
“Still researching?” asks their roommate, and at the lack of an immediate answer, he simply trudges over, drops their dinners on the desk, and departs.
“Yeah, we’re really getting somewhere,” Hong Yi finally pipes up. “We’re pretty sure the Sect of Multiversal Truth is based on an island about fifteen miles southeast, in the open sea. Fun fact, the island doesn’t exist on my world.”
“Ah…you already know the place.”
“Yes. And now, we need to plan.”
Artur nods thoughtlessly, opening his box of noodles in a rustle of paper. He sits down heavily in the desk chair. “I told you. Botan. Both of you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You read too much.”
Hong Yi sighs. “We can continue planning at bedtime. I’m still jetlagged. Or, lagged in some way. No jets needed.”
“But dinner first,” Artur replies. “Let me tell you…in my town, we only dream of food like this. Don't waste this.”
Hong Yi is already crawling out of bed by then. “Wise words, my friend,” he answers, plucking his dinner from the desk. “Oh, fried shrimp!”
The aroma quickly brings Adelaide as well, and they both sit on the edge of his bed, wolfing down the rice and stir fried toppings in stops and starts. Midway, Adelaide puts her food down and says, “I’m really glad we're doing this mission together.”
“Aw, well, I wouldn't have it any other way,” Hong Yi replies. “You're both wonderful roommates.”
“Talk less and you will be even better company,” Artur chuckles.
“Did you just laugh? Was that a laugh I just heard?”
Artur folds his arms. “What laugh? I was clearing my throat.”
“You’re smiling! Where'd the real Artur go?”
“Ey, you want me to be sad? You want that?”
“Nah, I'm just used to you being so grumpy and dour.”
Artur mock frowns. “I am not grumpy.”
“Could've fooled me,” he chuckles, then shovels shrimp rice into his mouth. “Anyway, yeah, we need to get there under cover. They…” He swallows his mouthful. “They only let you in if you commit to becoming a member. And then they escort you the whole way. So that won’t work. We’ll need to sneak in.”
Artur nods slowly. “It is an island.”
“Yes.” Hong Yi eyes him meaningfully. “Yes?”
Artur frowns, for real this time. “No…you can't make me.”
“Oh no! Guess we'll just have to steal our own boat and steer it ourselves. And park it dangerously in a secret part of the coast. Without Artur. This will go so well and not result in any accidents at all!”
Artur groans, lifting both hands in surrender. “Fine. Fine. I cannot let you die crashing into a cliff.”
“That’s the spirit!” Hong Yi grins, patting his arm. “Maybe we’ll survive to see the island after all. Okay, I have an idea…”
*
Night has pulled itself over the land without their notice. The trio part at midnight and go to bed.
When Hong Yi’s eyes open, it is the unholy hour of three in the morning, his circadian rhythm refusing to abide by this new day cycle.
The lone window glows dimly through the blinds with the light of the facing building.
A sound catches his attention then: an intake of breath.
He goes still. From the other end of the room, he hears sobbing. He lets it continue for a minute, just to be sure he isn’t hallucinating.
“Hey?” he whispers. “What’s the matter?”
The sobbing stops. “None of your business,” Artur replies.
But Hong Yi is already creeping towards him, past a soundly-sleeping Adelaide’s bed. Artur is sitting up in his covers, back propped up by pillows. When he arrives, the other man folds his arms and looks away.
“Come on, this is a safe space,” Hong Yi murmurs. “If there’s a problem, especially if we're causing the problem, we can talk about it.”
“No, nothing wrong.” Artur sighs. “Nothing wrong. The opposite of wrong.”
Now intrigued, Hong Yi sits down on the edge of the bed, pulling one foot up onto the edge of the frame. “What do you mean?”
“It is nice to have people,” Artur finally carries on, head sinking. “To laugh together. To have dinner, smile, feel warm. To not be afraid—” His voice is eaten away by sobs before he can continue, and tears drip down his nose, “—afraid you will wait for me to fall asleep and tear my arms from my body and rob my corpse…I thought I will never see it again…”
“Oh, Artur…” Hong Yi feels his throat aching as he inches towards him. “Can I hug you?”
Artur does not answer verbally, but he gives a gentle nod, so Hong Yi scoots over, and throws one arm around his shoulders. “My family is gone,” the other man mumbles. “My parents. Zhenya. But still, sometimes, my dreams forget. When we eat together, and share jokes, it is like my family again. I had a dream tonight: we were eating dinner, but it was not you and Adelaide. It was them…”
“Oh, I'm so sorry.” Hong Yi lets go. “When was the last time you saw them?”
“Six years…six years.”
He closes his eyes, trying to imagine it. Two years is hard enough. Six years is unbearable—six years of knowing they are gone for good.
“I know we can't be your family,” he says. “But we're here for you. And I care about you a lot—even though we've only known each other for a few days.”
Artur nods morosely. His eyes glitter. “We will work together for a while. And it is better to be friends than strangers.”
Hong Yi smiles back. “Promise we won't ever tear your arms from your body. Or take your things.”
“Good. Good to hear.”
“Hope you sleep well.”
“I will try.”
:::
It turns out that boatjacking is far easier when one has no fear of arrest. Not because arrest isn’t likely but because, whatever should happen, they know Honourless will be here to bail them out within ten days.
So, given free rein to be the world’s most obnoxious tourists in this mirror copy of Hong Yi’s own country, they holiday for a good four days. Then, on the evening of the fifth, he and Artur blow a boat chauffeur off a pontoon while he is twirling a key on his finger.
Here follows the staged rescue, in which Hong Yi and Adelaide race up the boards—the latter in her mouse mask, no less—and lean over the edge to fish the sputtering man out of the waves.
Adelaide offers her arm to the sighing, grumbling man. “My mobile must be ruined,” he moans, amid Hong Yi’s comforting utterances. They manage to keep up the charade long enough that the man only notes the missing key—with a cry of dismay—at least five minutes later. “Oh, what a bother! I was supposed to repark the boat. I must go get the spare.”
By then, Artur—hidden till then on the ladder on the other side of the deck—has dived into the water to begin his search.
Once Hong Yi and Adelaide have seen the man off to the bathrooms, they split off in the other direction and wait on a shady bench at the other end of the seaside park.
Artur returns, dripping wet in his shirt and shorts, a smile tweaking at the corners of his lips. He shows off the glinting piece of metal, held between index and thumb.
The next part must happen in the wee hours of the morning, well after Artur has washed up and changed. As it is, the chauffeur does not return to repark the boat before nightfall. All the same, they will not need him to identify the boat for them, leaving them room to enjoy a Korean barbecue dinner in the embrace of dry land.
Then, off to work. They have a fairly good sense of where the boat must be, given the deck where they found him. They rock up to the pontoon with all their luggage at the hour of four in the morning. Of the six boats moored in those berths, all have traces of their drivers, skin and hair left behind on the surfaces of upholstery.
“This is absolutely the one,” says Adelaide from the driver's seat of a shallow powerboat. Its cabin is furnished with polished tables and cushy leather couches more at home in a casino than a vehicle.
“What gives it away?”
“Hair,” she replies, plucking a strand from the gap in the seat.
Artur, waiting in the cabin on the pontoon till then, swaps places with Adelaide. He takes a seat and with a click, the engine rumbles. He kills the engine and flashes a thumbs-up over his shoulder.
“Tonight, we travel in style,” Hong Yi declares, kicking back into his cabin seat.
“Somebody unmoor. There are some…how do you say, the metal knobs. Take the rope off.”
The other two need no telling to slip out the back door onto the deck, plucking ropes off of cleats. One of the ropes goes slack once detached, so Hong Yi piles that one onto the deck; the other seems firmly tied to a buoy. That one, he tosses onto the pontoon.
By now, most of the marina is soaked in inky darkness, speckled by boat lights. In this sleepless city, the port is alive even now, crane clangs echoing across the rhythmic gush of waves, but it is too far away to touch their plans.
In Adelaide's pocket is a collection of resources: notetaking stationery, a storage drive with a wrist strap, and a pen. While Artur prepares for the piloting, Adelaide and Hong Yi settle into the cabin.
The lights flicker on. Artur mutters to himself in Russian as he pushes levers around and then, with a crack, snaps a plastic box off the dashboard and rolls down a window to flick it into the sea.
“We need your map,” he says then.
Hong Yi fumbles the device out of his pocket and flicks open the GD map again. “Er, okay, how do you want me to give directions?”
“Tell me which way to turn—degrees, port or starboard.” Then he says in an undertone, “Ready?”
“Aye aye, captain!”
Then the motor rumbles to life under the cover of the night, and they jet off into the inky darkness.