Chapter One: The City Only I Could See

Ten minutes later, Su Mi entered the data hall in a gray down jacket. Beyond the windows, rain had dissolved Shanghai into neon. Cold air from the server ranks stirred the hair across her forehead. She pushed her glasses up and leaned toward the main display. "What do you see?" Lin asked. She narrowed her eyes. "A high-reflectance band in sector C. Probably uplifted bedrock." "Anything else?" "An ugly orbital seam. Your engineering group should reprocess it." Lin stared at her. The hummingbird lay beneath her fingertip, its wings spanning four hundred eighty kilometers. An intern could not have missed it. He exported the image to a second monitor. The city remained. He printed it. It remained on paper.