遲卉 ： 雨林

The Rainforest

By Chi Hui

Translated by Jie Li

WHEN YE QI WOKE UP, the rainforest that had first made landfall on the East

Coast had already engulfed Pusen City.

She threw back her blanket, grabbed her clothes and hastily got dressed, then

packed her belongings swiftly in a backpack. The water in the cup was cold and

the hotel had long been abandoned, but after hesitating for a moment, she still

took out a few bills and laid them on the wooden reception desk where grey moss

had already begun to grow.

‘You always do such pointless things,’ Haer commented. ‘Nobody’s coming back

here any more, at least not before your money turns pulp.’

‘Since we’re going deeper the rainforest, money won’t do us any good

anyway, don’t you think?’ She replied indifferently and replenished her food sack

with some instant noodles and biscuits that she rummaged out from one of the

hotel’s cupboards.

‘Find me some batteries,’ croaked Haer. ‘And meat. Let’s see, what else …’

Ye Qi turned around to stare at the fist-sized, greyish-green toad on the couch,

its body emanating the greyish-silver gleam unique to nanostructures.

‘Haer, you’d better tell me what you want right now and then shut up.’

‘Batteries, meat, clean water—lots of water. Ye Qi, we need these, croak!’ Haer

jumped off the couch and leaped around the hotel. ‘Here’s food, Ye Qi, and some

food storage bags, croak!’

‘I know, I know. I have to find a pair of boots.’ With furrowed brow Ye Qi sized

up the fine drizzle and sodden ground outside the window. Corroded by the grey

tide of algae, the asphalt highway was full of bumps and hollows, and puddles

filled with foul water. If they were to go deeper the forest, the sneakers she

was wearing would not work at all.

‘We’d better get going, croak. No more humans ahead, Ye Qi, take whatever

you can. Croak.’

Ye Qi stripped off her sneakers, thrust her feet the boots, and stuffed

whatever she found in the hotel cupboard and fridge her enormous backpack,

which was half man-size to begin with. She grabbed Haer: ‘Don’t you think you’re

being a bit long-winded?’

‘A big mouth is a toad’s virtue.’ Haer bulged its cheeks.

Ye Qi, bursting with rage, threw Haer her backpack and zipped it up.

Shouldering the heavy load, she kicked open the hotel’s front entrance. The

toad kept kicking and thrashing about in her backpack, ‘Let me out, you savage

woman! Croak … let me out!’

Ye Qi did not even hear Haer’s complaint. Lost in thought, she looked at the

familiar yet strange city before her eyes, now changed beyond recognition.

A grey drizzle covered the Pusen sky. Bluish-green mosses climbed the glass

curtain walls. The skyscrapers melted gradually like chocolate under the erosion

of the grey tide, while the rainforest with its metallic hue grew from every corner

of the city, slowly blotting out the sun and the sky. She reached out and touched

a small blue tree beside the hotel entrance, its branches coarse and as cold as

iron. She snapped off a steel flower, and from the break trickled out a grey, sticky

liquid that contained billions of nanostructures, pulsing with a rhythm between

the organic and non-organic, flowing over her fingertips.

‘Better not touch those nanostructures.’ Haer finally found a comfortable

position in her backpack and stuck out its flat head. ‘Beware of corrosion.’

‘I am of no interest to them,’ Ye Qi observed. ‘They’re not carnivores like you.’

Haer croaked unhappily: ‘How can these nanostructures be compared with us?

They evolve automatically, they haven’t been modified—that’s why they’re even

more dangerous.’

‘Nevertheless …’ Ye Qi wiped the grey stains from her fingers: ‘Let’s just be on

our way.’

They walked for an entire morning in the rainforest. As though in slow motion

in a film, a skyscraper in the distance wilted slowly, turning a pile of sludge

under the corrosion of a mass of nanostructural moss. In a blink, large numbers

of nanostructural plants sprouted from the sludge. Between the greyish-green

leaves, dark black steel flowers bloomed in profusion. The GPS was useless

under the heavy interference, and the map of Pusen in Ye Qi’s hand became

increasingly illegible as architectural markers disappeared.

‘Are you sure this is the right direction?’ Haer grasped Ye Qi’s arm with three

legs and used a front paw to scratch at the map. ‘Can’t even prepare a good map

before going battle. Humans really are irredeemably stupid.’

‘This is not my war, Haer.’ Ye Qi cast away the compass that was utterly useless

in this metal forest, and struck out on her own.

‘Am I wrong in saying so?’ Haer jumped onto her shoulder. ‘Is this not a war

between humans and plants?’

‘No, Haer, this is a war between us,’ answered Ye Qi.

The toad suddenly fell silent, the suckers on its feet tightening their grip on Ye

Qi’s shoulder. After a while it spoke: ‘No, Ye Qi, hardly any of my kind is left.’

‘Even if only three households remain in Chu, it will still defeat Qin.’ Ye Qi

answered. ‘Haer, you must know what that saying means.’

‘Its about your human kind of resilience, croak.’ Haer jumped back inside the

backpack, its weight knocking Ye Qi briefly off balance. Its muffled voice sounded

from the backpack: ‘Back in the day when we had forced humans the southern

corners of the East Asian Mainland, you actually took back the whole of Asia

within twelve years.’

‘Aren’t you trying to learn as much as possible from humans?’

‘Ye Qi, you don’t understand.’ Haer stuck half of its head out of the backpack.

‘No matter how much we learn from humans, nanostructures still cannot exist

independently. Take me as an example: my body is 47% nanostructure, including

my brain, voice organs, eyes, and central nervous system, but the other 53% is

that of an actual frog. When humans created us, this is the way they did it. While

we’ve kept trying to improve ourselves these twenty years after we gained our

independence, we still haven’t been able to make any progress with our organic

bodies.’

‘And so you experimented with plants,’ inferred Ye Qi.

‘Idiotic experiments.’ Haer’s voice rose and fell with Ye Qi’s uneven footsteps.

‘When the corrosion first began, some nanostructures still had enough presence of

mind to send back some information. The merging of plants and nanostructures

prompted an explosive mutation. They acquired intelligence, but of an altogether

different kind from ours and human’s. They are extremely powerful, smart, and …

they need living space.’

‘Are you sure you can tell me this?’ Ye Qi snickered. ‘Humans and nano?structures are still at war.’

‘Damn this war! Croak,’ Haer spoke as if cursing. ‘Our entire network on the

American continent fell enemy hands within a week. Nearly the entirety of

our species that remained in America was corroded, assimilated, or swallowed

up. To this day, there may be no more than 10,000 nanostructural animals still

surviving. Now the war is between humans and nanostructural plants—you call

them the “grey tide”—not between you and us.’

‘From a structural point of view, you and they are more or less of the same sort.’

Ye Qi shook the water off her raincoat and tried to make out the bumpy road.

‘Not the same,’ Haer’s tone had a hint of terror. ‘According to the information I

received, it was as if the plants swallowed up the nanostructures, rather than the

latter driving the merger. Their difference from us is as great as that between us

and humans.’

‘It’s actually not so great,’ Ye Qi muttered.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ Ye Qi found a relatively dry area and sat down, leaning against a

bronze-coloured tree. ‘I need to rest a little.’

The year White Forest fell, Ye Qi was nineteen years old.

She did not remember the heavy artillery fire flying overhead nor the clouds

of gunpowder smoke filling the air. She was sitting in a truck, holding a bundle

her mother had stuffed her hand, and watching as the poplars of her village

receded from sight. Trucks headed for the battlefield, carrying odd-coloured

jars that contained chemical weapons designed to counter various types of

nanostructure. Through the goggles on her gas mask, she watched the plants by

the roadside wilt in the thick blue fog. An intense bitter smell saturated the air, it

seemed as if all the vegetation were weeping.

Nanostructural animals have biological components and must still eat,

drink, and excrete, something all humans knew. The war quickly escalated

from merely destroying the nanostructures to destroying their sources of food,

including all animals and plants in territories occupied by them, so that the

nanostructural animals had no choice but to retreat. This, however, left behind

stretches of desert where no humans could survive either. This wasteland

lay across the Eurasian continent—beginning in the Korean peninsula and

stretching through north-western China all the way to the Taklamakan

Desert—effectively segregating humankind and nanostructural animals to its

southern and northern sides, respectively.

Ye Qi was only one insignificant refugee out of the 60 million who couldn’t go

home because of this quarantine zone.

After the war to win back Siberia, the twenty-four-year-old Ye Qi returned to

her hometown. She still remembered how every spring, when the snow on the

hilltops began to melt, the moist black earth would be faintly covered with a veil

of soft green. Those young buds, while no more than rice-grain-sized green dots

to begin with, would grow overnight new patches of thick green without

flinching in the slightest from the early spring chill.

Yet before her eyes now were nothing but black sand, rocks, and a muddy

country road. The remnant snow had long melted away, yet the earth remained

lifeless. It was said that the poison that sank the soil would not dissipate for a

hundred years, and until then, this would remain an infertile wasteland.

She walked aimlessly, on and on, and suddenly, a splotch of green flashed

past her peripheral vision. She hurried forward and pushed aside the desiccated

thicket, only to discover the remains of a green poison gas shell hanging over a

skeletal branch.

We regained White Forest, regained the Northeast and Mongolia, regained

Siberia. But, did we really win the war?

She didn’t know to whom she should ask the question, nor who would know the

answer.

The road became even harder to navigate in the afternoon. There were grey

puddles everywhere with the glutinous mud covering Ye Qi’s boots and pouring

them, so that they emitted an odd squeak with every step she took. Gradually

turning pale, she took out a bar of chocolate, stuffed three quarters of it her

own mouth and threw the rest to Haer.

‘Hey, how much longer is it going to be?’ With the chocolate in its mouth, Haer

burrowed the backpack. ‘Are you really planning to spend the night in a place

like this?’

Ye Qi sized up the ruins around her, their original shapes already beyond

recognition: ‘It should be nearby. We’ll arrive before dark. Let me take a short

break.’

Though she said a short break, Ye Qi fell sound asleep as soon as she sat down,

her head bobbing up and down. Haer grumbled, jumped out of the backpack onto a

giant uranium fruit, and vigilantly surveyed the surroundings.

Ye Qi first met Haer outside the Pusen airport, on the edges of the grey tide

rainforest. At the time, the ‘grey tide’ was already overwhelming the land, and

she was the only passenger on the flight to Pusen. Everyone else was intent upon

leaving; only she was returning.

Moving against the turbulent human tide, she crossed the airport lobby and

when she walked the rainforest, Ye Qi suddenly discovered Haer, entangled

by a vine, as if being dragged the forest’s depths. For some reason, she

unravelled the vine and released the toad. She knew it was a nanostructure, but

the look in its eye at that instant was impossible for her to ignore.

Many years ago, she had seen this look on the battlefield, although it didn’t

come from a nanostructure. It was from a poisoned sparrow that had flown

the quarantine zone by mistake. The light in its small, brown eyes slowly faded. It

wanted to live, simply to live.

She had originally wanted to let Haer go, to let it get far away from the

rainforest, but the stubborn toad got her backpack and claimed to know a

pretty good hotel.

And so, without rhyme or reason, they became companions.

‘Ye Qi! Get up, hurry, Ye Qi!’

Ye Qi was still half asleep when a cold, sticky thing smashed against her face

with a loud squishy sound. She jumped up instinctively, only to realize that it

was Haer’s belly.

‘Ye Qi, quick, look at your foot!’ Shouting, Haer climbed onto her backpack.

She swallowed the curses she was about to utter as an iron vine as thick as

a finger twined itself around her ankles. She pulled out her dagger and slashed

at the vine, but only managed to cut through half of it when several other vines

reached out at her from behind.

She kicked with all her might, breaking the vine around her ankles by force.

Not stopping to rid herself of the remnants of the vine, she grabbed her backpack

and Haer, leapt to avoid the other vines, and dashed the depths of the forest.

The grey rainforest now tore off its temperate mask. The vines and branches

appeared to have come to life, meandering, reaching out to halt her steps. Above

her head came loud, clacking sounds. She leapt violently as a bronze tree, so

thick one could barely wrap one’s arms around it, crashed down behind her.

‘Heavens! What are they doing?’ Haer croaked. ‘What on earth are you doing?

You’ve scared them a frenzy!’

‘You should say “it”,’ Ye Qi corrected: ‘The rainforest is a single intelligence.

Haer, it hadn’t discovered me before, but now it knows what I am.’

‘Ye Qi, Ye Qi, what else do you know that I don’t? Croak …’ Haer mumbled

and pushed aside a vine that was reaching for the nape of Ye Qi’s neck.

‘Hold on tight, Haer!’ Ye Qi leapt onto a small mound of earth, dodging the


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