At 8:00 a.m., service bots inside Ultragrace Tower begin preening front desk flower arrangements and coating board rooms in jasmine-scented cleaning agents. By 8:45, water starts rushing through the sprawling network of plumbing in the megaspire—a building so tall it brings renewed relevance to the word skyscraper. White-collar brass file into cavernous bathrooms, flushing toilets and urinals, rinsing their faces and hands clean of sweat, grime and any pathogen they might have picked up on the metro.
It’s shocking how much space is afforded for modern HVAC systems. I could assemble a school bus in here. Squatters before me have hung layer upon layer of shuangxi and chunlian on the walls. Gaudy, red paper banners painted with gold Chinese characters—喜喜 double happiness and Zodiac years, all hand-plastered over one another since the date of the tower’s construction.
Others live in here with me. I see them slip through the ceiling of the freight elevator, scuttling around pipes and ductwork like insects seeking shelter, spinning rent-free cocoons in the attics of East Asia’s largest beauty & cosmetics company.
The Hong Kong SAR Government must have a vague idea what’s going on, but they choose not to address it. It’s cheaper that way. Cheaper than locking us all up and paying for three hots and a cot. Cheaper than thalidomide in the drinking water. They’d know, they’d tried with a pumping station whoops-a-daisy in the slums, and the overhead ran into the billions. Like so many other bottom feeders of my generation, that little experiment in population control cost me my legs, right out of the womb. That and a chronically tender liver. In a way, they achieved what they wanted—now nobody has babies. The poor are afraid their offspring will greet the world with wriggling stumps for legs or sockets without eyes, while the wealthy who can afford gene-editing can’t be bothered getting spit-up on their lycra.
Just to remind me of the cards I’ve been dealt in life, on a clear morning, between the exterior air intake slats of the tower, I can see Xi Mingze’s hologram smiling over Victoria Harbour, her face scrunched into a tight, punchable grin that somehow feels directed towards me specifically. “You didn’t need those legs anywho Mèimei. It’s made you stronger, no?” Her colossal avatar waves on repeat to the city’s morning stampede, still presenting as bright-eyed, chipper, and healthy, though at 130 years old nobody really believes she’s still alive.
This morning, through the slats, I can see a bright red ball of energy twirling in place down on the street. Price Wong is in her red bikini top and matching PRC flag wrapped around her waist, hustling as usual on her little plot of concrete that just so happens to be invisible to CCTV.
She’s freestyling on a bullhorn, ostensibly rapping laudatory “rhymes for Mother Xi.” Normally the police chase off the local riffraff, but she’s got serious panache, a cute face, and a limp bob of Mao-era jet-black hair that inspires a kind of patriotism amongst the boys and girls in blue, who nod along to her rapid-fire rhymes from a distance, hands on holsters. The sarcasm couched in her verses coasts clear over their buzzcuts.
Papa worked his way from a pauper to a prophet,
Kep’ it in the family from the opera to the office.
99% of voters, voices loud and clear,
Mother Xi above us ‘nother 130 years!
Price never breaks the flow of her rhymes, but occasionally stops twirling to exchange dignified, suspiciously long, “together, comrade” handshakes with black-tied business types on their way into Ultragrace Tower. One, three or five hours later, these corporate hawks will be gassed up and soaring through keynote presentations, waxing poetic about this year’s model as if they’d been anointed by God to do so.
That’s the great thing about high-quality gas—the stuff the rich can afford—if you’re expected in a boardroom or at some symposium at 9:30 a.m., huff a 1er at 8:30 a.m. sharp, and you’ll be magnetically tuned like a bird of prey by the time you’re on stage. Thus is the beauty of time-release pharmaceuticals.
By 10:00 a.m., the sun has begun its true assault on humankind and the tower’s AC compressors throb to life like jet engines, sending birds nested in the corners of the building flapping off in panic. At 10:05 bang on the dot, dense chatter starts in the Ultragrace warm room. I leave Price to her hustle and wheel off on my chair for the Monday morning status report that’s about to kick off down below the vent I’m hiding inside.
I watch the Ultragrace cadre kick off their shoes as they file inside. These are the last human cogs in a well-oiled machine no longer in need of our interference. A handful of wizard-echeloncosmetic engineers, and Ms. Cherry Lao, CMO/COO, who—from what I’ve gathered over the last few weeks of watching her from the vents—broadly decides which demographics are most vulnerable to being drift-netted for aesthetic skin grafting.
Cherry is one of the legless few who somehow crawled her way up, out, and over the great monolith of poverty. She makes her disability work for her, leaning into humor when the right moment arises (“I’d say I’ve got a leg up on you hmm?”) and other times striding right past if it hampers business proceedings.
Lithe, age unknown, she’s had work done on her face, but it’s so subtle people don’t notice. Her skin is flawless and ash white, as if it’s never seen the sun. I’ve spent most of the last year lodged inside a utility dungeon like a cave cricket, and still I’m several shades darker than her. Today she’s in plaid ankle grazers and halter, her exposed midriff flaunting a long, roped scar—organ transplant no doubt, another keepsake from the thalidomide culling.
Her hallmark feature, of course, is her pair of pure osmium prosthetic legs, which shimmer with the true luster of rare mineral. Cherry doesn’t just use her limbs; she wears them. She could dress them with skin-toned silicone but chooses not to, leaving them awesomely exposed in all their sexy, gleaming mecha-chic. These legs were not government handouts. Weren’t shipped in bulk or mass-produced. These legs were crafted at Ultragrace’s own smithy, custom-built for someone who matters a great deal. In a word, they’re incredible. She’s incredible.
The team takes their seats around the boardroom table, and Cherry mounts the office floor like a catwalk, her ass sashaying, dazzling quads and calves sculpted in the taut shape of an Olympic sprinter’s. I’ve got the best seat in the house, perched in front of the vent grille spying down on the room. I wipe uncooked ramen dust from the side of my mouth and saddle in for the meeting.
“Levenhäus has their Gen Alpha users in a hostage situation at this point.” Cherry strikes a silver stylus against her leg, which produces a clear, crisp ringing sound whenever she wants to conjure an image on the room’s wraparound screen. “They’re begging to come to the other side; we just need to usher them in.” She’s extra jazzed this morning. Pupils dilated, wrists flicking like an angler’s. Gassed up for sure. “By the time you walk out of this room we’ll have roughly fourteen million locked and loaded in aeroadverts.” Cherry strikes the stylus against her leg again, and text appears on screen, multiplying in twos and then fours until the slogan wallpapers the entire room: WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF. 這，就是你的肌底未來。
Cherry pauses for effect before ringing her leg again. The text disappears and a hologram of Misty Shanghai—China’s youngest, brightest, most terminally doomed starlet—materializes in the center of the boardroom, sizing up her snow-skinned, slender figure in a full-length mirror. Misty’s reflection is, for women, an air-brushed version of themselves, or for men, their daughter, mother, wife or sister, in that order. Cherry explains the new marketing innovation in a few words. “Programmatic retinal masking,” she calls it.
When it dawns on the audience that what they’re looking at in the physical world is tailored to their own profile, it moves the room into a frenzy, the thin-necked engineers clucking, clapping their hands and exchanging giddy glances, unsure if what they’re witnessing is breaking any laws or regulations.
“We’ll take over Victoria Harbour for ten-second sprints, every three minutes at dawn and dusk. The magic hours. When they’re either green with envy or red with regret.” Cherry rings her leg again, and the image disappears, leaving the screen empty. “Thoughts?”, she dares the room. Black leather bleachers of eager faces gawk back at her, their heads dressed with extravagant employee benefits—blond hair grafts, pointed ears and noses, platinum alloy caps on their incisors. The meeting wraps, and Cherry shoos the engineers out of the room to go conjure whatever technological sorcery is necessary to keep the business in running order.
Once the boardroom is empty, she sits down in a chair at the head of the table, posture erect, staring into the middle distance. She runs her hand over the surgical scar on her torso as if out of habit. I sit and watch from the vent, gently massaging my own sore organ.
###
By 7:00 p.m. the AC compressors have slowed to a steady thrum. I hop in my wheelchair and trundle over a makeshift footbridge of plywood planks stretching across the attic, an urban bog of support beams and utility pipes running between the 10th and 11th floors of the tower. I pass by familiar squatters in various states of financial and physical decay—gaunt, slight-statured miscreants who look but do not act like children. Their faces lit only by the red evening sun filtering through the building’s slats. One clubbing her head with fingerless hands, trying desperately to knock something back into place. One shirtless with joints that could cut glass, thumbing stacks of ghost money into a burn barrel, the thin, rice-paperbills shriveling like spider carcasses against the flames.
One lacquerhead is belly up on the floor but still breathing, having huffed what smells like low-quality gas. I roll him onto his side and continue along the plywood planks until I reach the end of the floor, which dives directly down the vertical shaft of the freight elevator. I collapse my chair, tether it around my shoulders with two rubber cords and lower myself into the mouth of the long tunnel, using the scaffolding for leverage as I swing down the bars like a gibbon. I plunk on the top of the elevator, push the loose ceiling tile to the side and slip into the car.
Inside, I slap the B3 button, and the machine plunges down ten stories to its landing, where the doors open to a vast, empty parking garage manned by a single grub in security blues who—for as long as I’ve been creeping in and out of the building—has never once looked up from his phone to scrutinize me.
Outside the garage the stream of commuters has slowed a trickle of junior desk monkeys heading for the metro, seething office politics and working through equations in their heads. None of them look down to see me.
Price Wong is still within the same concrete sales floor she’s been rapping on since morning. The cops are long gone, and the shadows of skyscrapers are lengthening on the streets, leaving the zone wide open for any last splash of business. Price is sitting on an idling black motorbike, busy with something. I wheel over to her, and she waves me off without a passing glance. “I haven’t got any money,” she says, using the butt of her bullhorn to crack open a jammed gas capsule on her motorbike dash.
“How can you drive on that?” I ask, two feet below in my chair.
“It’s time-released, dummy. Time it kicks in, I’ll be three fingers deep in pussy.”
“Sheesh,” I say. “Can I get in on it?”
“The gas or the pussy?”
I’ve spoken to her before, a few times, but Price sees so many faces she isn’t going to remember you unless you’re a regular.
A sag-eyed man with open shirtsleeves comes up alongside her and leans in for a long handshake. He mutters「團結就是力量」“unity is strength” and sleepwalks off into the metro tunnel. Price winks at me and breaks out a verse to celebrate her last sale of the day.
Uppers comin in,
Downers goin home,
Without my help y’all wouldn’t sleep anymore.
“This new stuff is God-like,” she says. “Deep as Zen and timed to the minute.”
“How much for a gram?” I ask.
“Milligram dummy, ‘less you don’t want to wake up.”
“Ok, how much for someone my size to drop out?”
“Drop out?” Price rubs her neck like she doesn’t know if this is such a good idea, but then settles on a number. “For you, 3,000.”
I pat the armrest of my chair. “This is worth 10,000 easy. Carbon fiber, government-issued apology.”
She shakes her head pitifully, c’mon really?
“It’s a good deal,” I say.
“Not so good for you. Don’t need that on my conscience.”
“How about in your wallet?”
Price grapples with an inner dialogue that shows on her face, squinting, then rolling her eyes, then facing me with the icy countenance of someone so far down the scale of ethics they’re surprised to see anyone down there with them. “Anywho,” I say, “I’m paying for more than the gas. You’ll be here tomorrow for the a.m. commute?”
###
The following morning I’m perched at my usual spot in front of the vent grille. It’s hot as ever outside, and the inner mechanisms of the tower have been thrown into overdrive, sending gallons of water and roomfulls of frigid air across every floor of the building.
At 10:05 a.m. the board room door swings open and in comes the Ultragrace cavalcade, hooting and hollering, carrying multi-layered cakes and stainless steel buckets of champagne on ice, apparently celebrating some organizational triumph. They waste no time popping bottles. One wayward cork soars upward like a heat-seeking missile and nails the grille, inches from my face. I yelp and shrink back into the shadows, praying no one heard me, and after a minute sitting with my eyes closed it’s obvious no one has. The room is raucously preoccupied and, evidently, not on its first drink of the day.
Pop music thumps out of 1000-watt speakers bolted to the walls, drowning out even the chugging AC compressors. The entire team is in on the syncopated frenzy, grooving in short dresses and splayed open button-downs, hazarding regrettable dance steps to Misty Shanghai’s latest Top 40 crowd-pleaser. One long-armed engineer is rounding the room on repeat, refilling everyone’s slender, bubbling flutes and taking aggressive, “check this out everybody” chugs from each bottle after catering to his colleagues.
Cherry Lao is at the center of it all. Not much of a drinker, she keeps her feet firmly on the ground amongst the debauchery, cutting a figure of effortless elegance in her serpent-blue belted skirt and waistcoat. I’m drooling; she’s absolutely stunning.
The crowd of feral, half-clothed associates encircles her as she prepares to carve into the first of a cart-full of red velvet cakes with a serrated knife. They howl when the blade slices through the cream-colored frosting, the whole lot savagely drunk on vintage Moët and their collective loss of civility. When Cherry looks around the room, the party hushes to a low chatter, sensing there’s a speech on the way.
“I’ve just got one thing to say. One evening, one percent market share. By next July, Levenhäus will be back in the dog food business!” The boardroom erupts. Someone tired of the age-old practice of putting cake in your mouth and chewing decides instead to catapult one across the room, instantly escalating into a firefight aimed at the more junior members of the team. They take their licks like true corporate pledges, facing the abuse with hands over genitals. Once struck, they wipe their eyes, lick their lips, and smile drunkenly from behind crumb- and cream-covered masks.
As confectionaries fly overhead, Cherry’s appearance visibly loosens, as if she’s ever-so-slowly slipping into a warm bath. She wrestles with the sensation for a moment, stretching her arms and straightening her posture, but soon surrenders, settling her head into the crook of her arm. Timed to the minute.
By 11:05 a.m., the bottles are empty, and the partyjet has crashed into the hillside. Everyone has hurried out of the room to duck any impending shame or cleanup duties, leaving Cherry face down and alone at the cluttered table, a full, untouched flute of champagne gone flat in front of her.
The aircon is frigid, but I’m dripping with sweat on my forehead and neck, breath heavy in anticipation. When I’m certain of the steady rhythm of Cherry’s snores, I give the vent grille a good kick with the nub of my leg, pummeling the thing repeatedly until it’s dislodged from the duct and falls clattering onto the boardroom table below. I take a cautious look around the room, then follow the path of the grille, inching backward through the ductwork. As I reach the opening, I grip the edge with my fingertips and lower myself down. I let go, crashing into cake trays, ice buckets, and champagne bottles, sending several tumbling off the table and clattering onto the floor.
Despite the commotion, Cherry snores onward through what I imagine is a dark, sunken dream. I crawl towards her, maneuvering my torso across the table like a cruising gator. I grab an ice bucket, still cold to the touch, and go to work.
###
On the top deck of the Star Ferry, the evening breeze feels like feathers against my cheeks, halfway to Hong Kong Island and gassed to the gills. The Central Skyline is coming to life on the bobbing horizon, dancing the gorgeous, grotesque ballet of Friday night in the city. Thousands of windows into gala halls, cocktail lounges and hotel lobbies form a spectral blur in the black waves below. Foghorns sound. Cabbies lay on their horns in apoplectic rage. Traffic steams across freeway arteries, everything coming and going to the beat of some pulsing heart in the megacity’s center.
At the cityscape’s precipice I can see the financial Godhead, an urban mountain range of banking and insurance slaughterhouses. Spires of black granite and steel vaulting 100 stories into the stratosphere like dark space shuttles, prepared at any moment to launch into orbit and leave the rest of the wretched city to rot below.
The sputtering ferry glides under Xi Mingze’s titanic hologram, hands on hips in a superhero stance, straddling either side of Victoria Harbour. Kids crane their necks out of the boat’s windows to peek up at the towering avatar’s dress. “It’s all pixelated!”
I wave at our matriarch, and she winks back at me, “Attagirl Mèimei. Unity is strength!”
On my lap, a stainless-steel ice bucket is latched shut, beading with cold sweat. The loot inside will fetch a case of high-quality gas capsules and six months’ rent for one of those specks of light in the skyline, not to mention a fresh organ for yours truly. Cherry didn’t need her liver, kidneys or eyeballs anywho. The ferry docks and I strut downstairs, over the gangway and off onto the pier, deckhands rubbernecking as I bounce by on pure osmium, playing a little tune in my head.
I feel good,
I look grand,
Got myself a luxury brand.
Once on land I merge into the tidal wave of evening commuters. People who will stop at nothing to get to where they’re going—throwing elbows and beating each other over the head with briefcases and parasols, grasping at milliseconds of time. I look back over the harbor and see Xi Mingze’s image has been replaced by an aeroadvert: WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF. 這，就是你的肌底未來。The text blips and Misty Shanghai materializes, staring at my new reflection in the mirror.
