2030.
I stared at the neon signage and thought about the gas trapped in its tubes.
It had once hung outside a karaoke bar in Mong Kok. The characters had been broken by a falling window, then repaired by Dr Lee in the room beneath the library. He had filled the room with lights salvaged from flooded shops, closed restaurants, abandoned flats: a plastic moon, an aquarium sign, a row of bulbs from a ballroom that no longer existed.
He called it the Light Archive. People paid a few dollars to stand underneath it. My mother said it was good for them to remember that things could still be beautiful.
We lived with Dr Lee because he had a water filter, rooftop batteries, and locks that did not connect to anything. Outside, the city was failing in slow, administrative ways. The harbour had taken the lower roads. The trains stopped without explanation. Every week, another building was sealed off with white tape.
The Chairman had been dead for three years.
That was what the broadcasts said, before they showed him again: his brain transplanted into the body of a woman who had loved him. The body sat before cameras, hands folded, face made strange by the knowledge behind it.
After that, a rich billionaire announced that he had found a way to make his body permanent. His cells would renew without limit. The news showed him standing in a windowless room, very still, explaining that death was a technical problem.
Then the rich began to outlive themselves.
Their bodies continued, their companies continued, their names remained on buildings. But the people who cared for them said their eyes stopped following movement. Their mouths forgot language. Their skin stayed warm.
It was difficult to tell which was worse: a mind that would not die, or a body that did not know it was already empty.
Dr Lee had been gone for four days when he came back.
It was raining then, hard enough that the glass doors of the library shook in their frames. My mother was asleep upstairs. I was in the Archive, replacing a wire in the aquarium sign, when I heard the lift open.
Dr Lee stood in the doorway with a black case in his hands.
He looked older than when he had left. His shirt was dark with rain. There was dried blood around one ear. I asked him where he had been, but he did not seem to hear me.
He carried the case to the centre of the room and set it beneath the broken karaoke sign.
“Don’t open it,” he said.
It was the only thing he said.
I followed him upstairs. He locked himself in the spare room. My mother woke when she heard the door close, but I told her he was back. We stood in the hall for a while, listening to the rain and the quiet on the other side of the door.
In the morning, the room was empty.
The case was still downstairs.
That evening, all the lights in the Archive went out.
At first I thought it was a normal outage. The neon sign clicked off. The room held its breath. Then a bulb burst above me and glass scattered across the concrete. The aquarium sign flashed blue, white, blue, and stopped. The plastic moon trembled on its wire.
My mother came down from the flat with a torch in her hand.
“Where is Dr Lee?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
She did not answer. She was looking past me, through the narrow window at the end of the room.
I went to stand beside her.
Across the street, the lights in the tower blocks were going out floor by floor. It was not a blackout. It was slower than that. One window went dark, then another. Whole flats disappeared. The darkness travelled up the buildings in irregular columns, as though something was moving through them.
From somewhere below came a scream. Then another. It was difficult to tell whether they were coming from the street or the harbour.
When I turned back, I saw Dr Lee beneath the ballroom chandelier.
He was lying on his back, eyes open, one hand closed around a bundle of cables. His face was turned towards the ceiling. I did not go close enough to see how he had died.
The black case sat three metres away from him.
I knew what was inside it.
I knew in the same way I knew a glass would fall before I heard it break. The knowing arrived whole, before any thought could catch up to it. Not a body. Not an organ. The mind that had survived after the rest of the Chairman had failed.
My mother said my name.
I pushed her towards the stairwell.
“Go upstairs,” I said.
Her face changed. She looked confused first, then frightened.
“What are you doing?”
“Lock your room.”
“No. I’m not leaving you here.”
“You have to.”
She held the torch between us. Its light shook over my hands, Dr Lee’s body, the black case, the broken lights around us.
“Then we go together,” she said. “We go somewhere else.”
The case hummed once.
“There isn’t anywhere else,” I said.
My mother reached for me. I stepped back.
“Please,” I said. “Please trust me. I have to do this on my own.”
She stared at me as if I had become someone she did not recognise. Her eyes were wet, but she did not cry. She looked at the window, at the dead tower blocks, then at Dr Lee beneath the chandelier.
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.
Neither did I.
But I knew the thing in the case had already noticed her.
“Lock the door,” I said. “Don’t open it, even if I ask you to.”
For a moment she did not move.
Then she touched my cheek with one hand. Her palm was cold.
“Come back,” she said.
I watched her go upstairs.
Only when I heard the lock turn did I open the case.
Inside was a brain suspended in clear fluid. Thin tubes entered the tissue. A small machine kept it pulsing.
When I looked at it, I heard a voice.
Open the door.
It did not come from the case. It came from behind my eyes.
I shut the lid, but the voice remained.
I carried the case to Dr Lee’s old clinic on the second floor. I held it against my chest. One of the seals had loosened. A thin mist rose from the fluid and touched my face. I breathed before I understood that I should not.
In the clinic, the voice grew clearer.
It was looking through me.
It found my mother first: her hands, the warmth of her body, the unguarded place behind her eyes.
She will do, it said.
I put the case on the steel bench and opened it again.
I did not know anything about brains. I had taken chemistry at school a long time ago. I remembered beakers, condensation, the strange smell of hot glass. I remembered being taught that matter was never destroyed. It only changed state.
Dr Lee’s drying unit stood in the corner. He had used it for flood mould samples. If something could be stripped of enough moisture, he had said, there was less in it that could grow.
That was all I had.
I lifted the brain from the case. It was warm.
The tissue grinder had a glass chamber and a metal lid. I put the brain inside. My hands shook as I fastened the lid.
You carry me now, the voice said. There is no outside.
I turned on the machine.
The sound was small. It was worse for being small.
When it stopped, the brain had become a thick grey paste, streaked with red. I scraped it into a steel tray, put it in the drying unit, and turned the heat as high as it would go.
The paste steamed but did not dry.
Outside, someone screamed again.
I took the tray to the roof.
The city was black beneath the rain. The Archive was visible through the broken windows below. The karaoke sign had come back to life. Gas moved through its tubes, from one damaged character to the next, searching for a shape it could still inhabit.
I tipped the tray over the edge.
The paste lifted in thin grey threads and disappeared into the floodwater.
For a moment, the voice was everywhere.
Then it was only in my lungs.
Then it was only a thought I could refuse.
The roof door opened behind me.
My mother stood there with the blanket around her shoulders. She had come back despite everything I had told her. Her face was small in the rain. She looked from the empty tray in my hands to the water below, and then at me.
I knew she could see that something had changed.
She said my name.
I turned towards her. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry. I wanted to tell her not to be afraid. Instead, I mouthed, I love you.
Then I stepped over the edge.
For one second, the city rose around me: the black towers, the flooded roads, the dying lights. The neon sign shone through the rain, red and broken, its gas still moving through the glass.
Then there was only water.
