Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

2 Little Kowloon ^{Adrian Hon}

I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD WHEN I LIVED THROUGH MY FIRST PANDEMIC. THE RULES were exciting at the start, like a new game to be navigated. No touching the mail, wearing home-made masks like bandits, assembling miniature mountains of rice and flour in the cupboards. But the weeks and months dragged on, and I got headaches staring at my friends through the cracked screen of a tablet. I’d cry with boredom during our walks to the same park and along the same roped-off playground every day.

My boredom was accented with the fear of being near others. My brother had asthma and my mum didn’t want to take any risks. “If they get close enough, you lose a point,” she said. That kind of game wasn’t as fun to play. For one thing, she never told us what would happen if we ran out of our unspecified points, although my brother and I agreed we would probably die.

Some called it a dance. Even as a child, this struck me as yet another cheerful evasion, one of those romantic lies adults tell children and themselves to elide the awfulness of our new reality. A dance should be joyful, something entered into voluntarily, not forced upon you.

Most dances have rules. This dance had only one.

THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL STUBBORNLY REFUSED TO BE POSTPONED OR CANCELED. It was all my friends could talk about during those early months of the second pandemic, barely a decade from the first. No one understood how the festival planned to safely corral thousands of visitors without breaking the law, but damn it all—they promised the show would go on.

“That means it’s in VR. And if the festival’s in VR, it’ll be shite. As if they can compete against Epic and Disney,” said Cindy, warming up a safe two meters away. We were in Holyrood Park for our daily exercise appointment under the crags encircling Arthur’s Seat. Cindy had joined North Point the same year as me, which meant we’d been furloughed at the same time. Even though the company worked its artists hard, the job was nothing compared to the twelve-hour days she’d once pulled in Hong Kong.

But if work was a cakewalk for Cindy, furlough was heaven. She had dug up the garden in front of her flat, excited about swapping herbs and vegetables with the rest of Little Kowloon. She was determined to make the very most of her enforced holiday. In comparison, I’d been playing games and watching TV all day, every day. The closest I’d gotten to being productive was starting an augmented reality course in learning Cantonese.

I was stuck in a loop, reliving the worst year of my childhood. I hated having no control over my life, hated not knowing what would happen tomorrow. I was a planner and now nothing could be planned. Rationally, I knew H1N3 wasn’t COVID-19 again, but the lockdown felt the same.

“It won’t be in VR,” I said. “I saw Reuben’s name on the festival organizing committee. They wouldn’t bring him on board for something completely digital.” As I jogged backward, my glasses gave off a low warning buzz to remind me there was a runner approaching.

Cindy slung an easy pitch at me, the augmented reality ball catching fire moments before I switched to a catcher’s mitt. I peered down the line in my glasses and flung the ball back.

“No one gets around the lockdown, not even the festival,” shouted Cindy. “I’m calling Reuben.”

I sighed as I saw Reuben Leung’s avatar appear between us. I’d never gotten along with posh kids, especially ones educated at boarding schools like Fettes. Rumor was that he was close with Scotland’s “first daughter.” That would’ve been before he was suspended for vandalism and sent to Cindy’s school in Kowloon as punishment, before they both became involved in the Umbrella Movement.

Cindy demanded, “Is it true?”

“Yes, it’s true,” replied Reuben. “Some of us have to work for a living.”

“About the festival,” I snapped.

“The big announcement is tomorrow, so I trust you two will keep this to yourselves.” I rolled my eyes. “But yes. We just agreed it with the government. The festival will go ahead in augmented reality. Nothing to touch, nothing for the virus to be transmitted on.”

“Sounds boring. And they don’t know anything about AR,” said Cindy.

“We don’t have to. We’re setting up marquees for the most important theaters and troupes and groups, and they can stage whatever they want, as long as they do it safely. There’ll be one here, a few in the Meadows, a couple in Inverleith, one each in the Botanics and Princess Street gardens, the usual places. Six weeks to prepare, four weeks open to the public.”

“PR bullshit!” said Cindy. “As if people will buy tickets to walk through an empty tent.”

Reuben laughed. “We got the Treasury to pay for everything, through the business continuity scheme. All the tickets will be free. Yes, it’s PR. What’s wrong with that? This country is built on tourism, and we’re putting on a show so people will remember to come back next year.”

“Spoken like a true politician. Who decides which groups get to use which marquees?” I asked.

“Oh, I can guess,” said Cindy.

“It’ll all be announced tomorrow,” replied Reuben. “But I made sure there’ll be a Hong Kong marquee. Cindy, Elaine, you should volunteer.”

“Mmm hmm,” Cindy said, skeptically.

“They’ll need people who know AR, not a bunch of old folk with too much time. I don’t need to tell you how important this could be for Little Kowloon. For the whole diaspora, actually. We need to show we’re fitting in,” he said, before vanishing.

THREE YEARS BEFORE H1N3, MILLIONS OF HONGKONGERS LEFT THEIR HOMES forever. Having lost their struggle for self-governance, having being spurned by an America in turmoil, they’d been granted a pathway to citizenship in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK—and in the newly independent Scotland.

I was at the airport to meet the first arrivals, press drones buzzing about in agitation. Of course, there were bagpipers. I explained over and over, no, I wasn’t from Hong Kong, I was born in Inverness, but yes, my parents are from Hong Kong. Thank you, my accent is lovely, isn’t it?

Then the gates opened, a stream of tired and elated and anxious and scared faces coming without end, as if a portal between our cities had opened rather than a 787 touching down every thirty minutes.

They bunched up in the arrivals hall, accepting their welcome boxes, posing for photos, registering with volunteers, taking interviews, waiting for their trams and buses. I spotted Cindy’s family, friends of my mum from high school, and threw thick coats around their shoulders. It’s colder than you think, I laughed. You’re staying in Leith? That’s near me, we’ll be neighbors! We teetered between mania and trepidation. I wondered when someone would start crying. No one could tell if this was too much, too soon.

The bagpipers paused, catching their breath. The energy seemed to evaporate into the dry, cold air. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe it was all too little, too late.

“Heung gong yan, ga yau!” shouted a young man.

“‘Su ge lan yan, ga yau!’ Hongkongers, add oil! Scots, add oil!” I explained to the confused Scottish staff. Add oil–it means “go for it!” Or maybe, keep going.

So maybe it would work after all. It’d better, with a quarter of a million more Hongkongers on their way.

I WAS A LITTLE NERVOUS WHEN WE VOLUNTEERED FOR THE HONG KONG TEAM. Technically, it was the “Little Kowloon Cultural Delegation,” but everyone called them Hong Kong, much to the Chinese ambassador’s irritation. When I confessed this to Cindy, she told me to stop being ridiculous and no one cared where I was born. We were hoping our gaming experience would earn us accordingly important positions, but we were firmly told those roles were filled. We were welcome to apply for the logistics crew, though. I was about to send an indignant reply when I saw who’d sent the email: Celia Chan.

I spotted her the next day, when the thirty-strong Hong Kong team gathered in their marquee in the Meadows, erected overnight by PPE-swathed builders directing a fleet of construction drones. The technical specifications showed every marquee as identical: ten meters wide, thirty meters long, and a generous three meters tall. Festival teams were permitted to modify the interiors as they wished, within a set budget and adhering to strict health and safety guidelines.

The festival’s level playing field, an artefact of funding and pandemic regulations, led to unsavory talk of an “Arts Olympics.” Most teams publicly rejected the comparison, but Cindy wasn’t alone in joining the social media smack talk about who would get the biggest audiences and best reviews. The fact that audience numbers were being reported in real-time, as per health regulations, heightened the sense of competition.

Awaiting Celia Chan, we shuffled into a circle in the center of the marquee, gingerly testing how closely the social distancing software in our glasses would let us get to each other. Light streamed in through transparent panels in the ceiling, with a brisk breeze flowing through vents. Someone had set up high-resolution atmospheric sensors inside, feeding data to the physical distancing protocols on our glasses. As the wind dipped and rose, our circle expanded and contracted, a living, breathing diagram of viral transmission risk.

Scotland had been spared the worst of H1N3. After COVID-19, the public backed a swift and complete lockdown: security cordons across the border at Berwick, rapid antibody testing at the airports, overwatch and intervention drones to enforce physical distancing in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, and Aberdeen.

The Hongkongers, some of whom had landed only weeks earlier, handled the pandemic with grim determination. What were a few months of wearing face shields after years of struggle? They ignored the Scots grumbling about hospital beds being taken up, about the virus breeding in the cramped temporary accommodations of Little Kowloon. They shrugged off the rumors and leapt into the fight with the gusto of the newly converted, volunteering in their thousands as doctors and nurses and social workers. One group of students even helped set up the country’s biggest mask-producing factory.

But there was a worry in Little Kowloon that they were being a little too exceptional. The problem with being a model minority is that you’re still a minority. How, then, to be more normal, they wondered? How to become Scots as well as Hongkongers?

The Edinburgh Festival was the opportunity: the jewel in Scotland’s cultural crown, the world’s biggest arts event, somewhere Little Kowloon could contribute and distinguish itself. Among us, I spotted Doug Yau, an acerbic standup comedian with millions of followers; Tricia Lee, the hotshot architect named as the next Hadid; Chen Xi, darling of the Venice Biennale for his living sculptures; and Angela Cheng, whose latest play had been booked for Broadway. I was surprised to see them here rather than in the warmer diaspora destinations like Australia. Someone had twisted a lot of arms to assemble this artistic dream team.

Celia Chan finally arrived and clapped her hands. “Thank you all for volunteering your time for Team Hong Kong. I realize you all have other priorities in combatting H1N3 and helping our community become established in Scotland, but we shouldn’t treat this opportunity lightly.”

She turned slowly as she spoke. “We cannot be complacent just because we’ve been welcomed here in Scotland. We aren’t citizens yet”—I looked away, feeling out of place—“so we need to prove our worth, and remind our hosts and the whole world who we are.” Chan was an odd choice to be kicking off proceedings. She was one of Hong Kong’s most famous names and a programming genius, but not the type to be working at the festival.

I wasn’t used to this kind of tub-thumping speech from her, and neither was anyone else, judging by their rapt attention. “Let me cut to the chase. I’m not an artist. I can’t claim the faintest experience in staging a play or doing standup or, I don’t know, anything to do with dance. What I do know is how to develop technology that can give others an advantage.” Everyone knew what she was talking about: Chan was the technical lead for the Diaspora Project that helped millions of Hongkongers emigrate safely with their physical, digital, and financial assets intact.

Tricia Lee stepped forward, an unmissable presence in her trademark black jumpsuit. “After I first learned about the new festival format, I reached out to Celia. We’ve been working together on a new dynamic distancing protocol, developed with the Public Health group at the university. We’re going to adapt it so we can host the largest audience in the festival, but still give them more intimate experiences than any other team.”

“What’s dynamic distancing?” Cindy asked, messaging through her glasses.

I sent her a video I’d unearthed. The idea was that you could reduce the safe distancing requirements for respiratory diseases to a fraction of the usual two meters by predicting the exact movements of respiratory droplets that might carry the H1N3 virus. We were already using a crude form in the marquee by accounting for wind, but true dynamic distancing would allow people to get within centimeters of each other—especially if it adjusted for masks and face shields, speech patterns, sneezes, and everything and anything else that could affect droplet spread. The concept had been floating around ever since COVID-19, more as a thought experiment than a practical technique. The sensors weren’t good enough back then, and even now, the computational requirements were scarily expensive.

As Chan described the technical details, my mind wandered. I didn’t need glasses to imagine how she could fill the marquee. Dynamic distancing coupled with augmented reality would let us route audience members right next to each other. There’d be no flashing alerts or social distancing walls—if one person ventured too near another, the performance they were watching could adapt to pull their attention and control their movements, but otherwise they’d have the freedom to walk wherever they liked. The new protocol promised a lockdown experience like no other.

“Other teams will use the same old social distancing protocols that make it feel like you’re queuing at a theme park,” said Chan, summing up. “But here, you won’t have to. Here, our artists won’t have to compromise. Here, it will be as if there were no virus.”

“The audience won’t forget that,” Tricia added. “We talk about how the Hong Kong diaspora needs soft power to survive. This is what we’re talking about.”

Fierce nods and proud smiles all around. I raised my hand gingerly. Tricia frowned at me, her glasses no doubt itemizing my insignificance. “Um, as I understand it, the computational expense required for dynamic distancing rises exponentially with every additional agent. At least, that’s what Disney’s research group found.”

Chan nodded briskly. “I’ve read Mathy’s paper. It’s good. But there’s a way to scale the expense linearly. You can simplify the problem using moving cells, so you don’t need to model the particulate spread across the entire space. It only works in smaller controlled environments like this one, which is why it doesn’t work in a theme park. It’s not impossible, but it’s very, very hard.”

“We can do ‘very, very hard,’” said Tricia.

“I’m told China is sponsoring a venue,” said Chen Xi, the elderly living sculpture artist. “Ours will be better.”

CINDY JUMPED BACKWARD AS BOULDERS ABRUPTLY TUMBLED DOWN THE ESCARPMENT toward her, almost losing her balance. “Whoa!” she laughed, taking off her glasses.

“You don’t think it’s too sudden?” I asked.

“I thought that was the point?”

I sighed. To make dynamic distancing work, we needed the ability to trigger the audience to move at a moment’s notice, but not at the risk of injury. Cindy flopped onto the marquee floor, grinning. One of the logistics volunteers looked down from his ladder and shook his head in mock disgust. They’d been working for days on end painstakingly stitching AR localizers and laser arrays into the ceiling, and Cindy had gotten the day off to help me test the system. I was glad she was enjoying herself, but I’d already logged a dozen bugs and was dreading what the afternoon would bring.

As amazing as Chan’s technology was, wrangling the artists’ work into a format that would play nicely with it was proving almost impossible. Half hadn’t worked in AR before and the other half didn’t welcome being dictated to by me, a mere technician whose mysterious elevation they’d witnessed just a month ago. Barely a day after I’d questioned Chan’s approach, she’d taken me aside, peppered me with probing questions on my games programming experience, and unceremoniously announced my promotion to “Technical Liaison” between the artists and her tech team.

I was exhausted. My throat ached from explaining why they needed to design triggers that the dynamic distancing protocol could invoke to move audiences around, and my head ached from doing this as diplomatically as I could manage.

“Your land sculpture is sensational, it’s so evocative of the chaotic climate that our old and new homes share,” I’d said to an impassive Chen Xi. “I realize it’s inconvenient to add trigger elements for the marquee, but I think they could complement or even enhance your work.”

“What would you suggest?” he asked.

“We could add weather effects. Rain clouds and thunderstorms could steer people along a path.”

He nodded. “My granddaughter told me about such a thing she’d seen in Hong Kong. She enjoyed it greatly.” I smiled encouragingly. “It was at Disneyland.”

“Well… that’s just one example. We could try something else. Perhaps a wave of—”

“I understand what you need,” he said. “You need to move people. Leave it with me.”

The escarpment with its falling boulders was what Xi’s team sent. On first glance, it was perfect, an organic part of his land sculpture, its programming fully synced with Chan’s dynamic distancing protocol.

But it was all too dramatic. After a few of these surprises, the audience would figure out how they were being herded between artworks. Doug Yau’s standup set had Cindy and me in stitches but the dynamic distancing trigger was literally him yelling at us to get out. Not the most subtle of transitions.

As I tweaked the parameters on the escarpment and ran Cindy through another simulated AR crowd, Chan’s avatar appeared. “These things you’re filing aren’t blockers for opening,” she said.

Despite having worked with Chan for a month now, her interruptions still flustered me. “I understand that, but Xi’s team don’t understand how triggers are meant to—”

“Fine. Harden the barrier around Xi for now. You need to start testing the other artists.” Her avatar blinked away before I could even nod. When we couldn’t figure out how to smoothly move audiences from one area to another, we’d resorted to creating virtual barriers around artists. It was a hack that eliminated agency, but it was better than having no art at all. When the barriers were turned on, we’d give people a tasteful but unmistakable AR icon to move on every few minutes rather than expecting them to follow a confusing AR butterfly from Angela Cheng’s play.

I pulled Cindy up from the floor and led her to Anna Hui’s area. I hadn’t spotted her at our team meetings, but her short festival bio said she’d performed in the Hong Kong Ballet for a few years, after which she started her own private artistic practice. Cindy slipped on her glasses, joining me back in the marquee’s AR testing layer. Two motionless wireframe humans appeared next to the two of us.

“Is this it?” said Cindy.

I swiped through the testing interface to see if I’d missed a startup command. “It’s meant to launch automatically. I guess Anna forgot to set that flag,” I said.

“Look!” Cindy pointed at the wireframe next to me, which was mimicking my swipes. Her own wireframe raised its arm toward me a second later.

We waved our arms and shuffled about, watching the wireframes as they followed us. They weren’t echoing our movements perfectly—that would be boring, I realised. I started walking around, trying to figure out the trick. My wireframe kept up, drifting ever closer until it settled over me like a second skin.

As I paused, the wireframe subtly pulled from me, its mesh drifting a few centimeters away from my right side. I unconsciously followed it, not precisely—I wasn’t a dancer—and caught myself. Did I really want to be a puppet? I stopped, and it stopped with me. I slowly pivoted on my left foot, an inelegant turn, and the mesh came with me, but in a cleaner swoop with a graceful follow-through. I was in control.

I glanced at Cindy, who was circling toward me. I couldn’t see her wireframe anymore, but I followed mine, or it followed me, as I circled toward her. I flushed as we spiraled together, approaching two meters, beyond two meters, almost at one meter.

And in an almost-frozen moment, invisible planes of laser light intersected between us, scattering across thousands of droplets hanging in the air, the femtosecond pulses so fleeting they petrified us in stone, our exhalations as spun clouds. Trajectories weighed, temperature gradients observed, our heartbeats counted as closely as a lover. Then, as a stray breeze lofted a hundred tiny, deadly carriers of disease a touch closer toward our mouths, we were nudged another millimeter to the left by our wireframes.

Time resumed. As we spun around wide-eyed, our feet crossing over in turn, there was barely a breath between us. I waited for my glasses to buzz their physical distancing warning, but nothing happened. We drew back, bowed, straightened up, and then burst out laughing.

“That was way more fun than the land sculpture!” said Cindy. The whole experience had been barely two minutes from start to end, but it felt more intense than anything else I’d done since the lockdown.

“So that’s what real dynamic distancing feels like!” I said. I was about to message the team about our discovery when I saw the alert in my glasses. It was from the Edinburgh Festival’s computing cluster: in the 109 seconds we’d danced, we’d blown through an entire hour of Little Kowloon’s precious festival computing budget.

“Whoa, what the hell?” I exclaimed, showing Cindy. She peered at the graphs and pursed her lips.

“That figures. Our glasses aren’t powerful enough to choreograph a dance like that. But Anna must’ve realized she could use something else,” said Cindy, nodding at the AR localizers.

I shook my head in admiration. “Her code’s piggybacking off whatever resources it can find in the local network,” I said. Anna’s artwork had used the marquee’s sensors and high-resolution laser scanners to weigh every breath and map every droplet to steer us around each other, closer than I’d have thought possible. Celia Chan’s code was doing the heavy lifting; Anna married it with her wireframe dancing instructors.

“She’s the best,” said Cindy, beaming.

“She was the best.” I shared a pending update to Anna’s festival bio I’d just found. Cindy’s shoulders slumped. Anna had died from H1N3 last week. Apparently the Hong Kong festival team hadn’t made their minds up on whether they should still exhibit her work. But our testing results would settle the argument: there was no way we could spend so much processor time on a single artist’s performance. There was no way to increase our computing budget, any more than we could extend the walls of our marquee. Another “competition” rule.

“We need to get onto the rest of the artists,” I said, shutting down Anna’s area.

Two standups, three plays, and one band later, I was getting a headache from being in AR too long. Worse, none of the artists had gotten the point of dynamic distancing, their works lacking any but the most basic triggers. We could build triggers for them, but the whole concept of throwing audience members out of one area and into another at a moment’s notice was feeling like a fool’s errand. It wasn’t that it was impossible, it just wasn’t compatible with how these artists thought about their work. I couldn’t blame them, everyone was working under such tight deadlines.

I knew what Chan would say: harden the barriers. No more headaches. No more arguing with artists. Our marquee would still be impressive simply by using dynamic distancing to pack bigger audiences in closer together. But we’d have given away a dose of freedom in exchange for convenience. I snorted at the obvious parallel.

Cindy was lying on the marquee floor next to a heater, taking a horizontal break to scroll the news. I flicked into our private shared AR layer. Nothing too exciting. The Melbourne vaccine had been held up in its stage 3 trials, and two astronauts on the Alto Firenze space station had tested positive. In Scotland, the Yellow-Green coalition was at loggerheads on fast-tracking Hong Kong citizenship, hardly surprising given the recent polls showing which way the new immigrants would vote.

I sat down, glumly gazing at our vast, empty space. I wondered if the Traverse or Assembly teams were facing the same problems we were. Probably not. Reuben had forwarded me a video from one of the Assembly crew setting up raked seating in their marquee. They were giving audiences what they wanted, an hour of AR theatre.

“I could be enjoying my furlough right now instead of dealing with…” I waved around at the piles of tracking equipment and sensors and high-bandwidth networking points, “…all this.”

“Yup,” said Cindy.

“Wow, what a pep talk!” I flicked her an eyeroll emoji.

Cindy propped herself up on an elbow and gave me a look. “You hated furlough! Every time we were at the crags you complained about it. That’s why I got Reuben to ask us to volunteer.”

“What?! Why?”

“I guess I thought you’d enjoy the challenge. And I had this spidey-sense that Celia Chan would take you on.” I raised my eyebrows. “But I had nothing to do with that,” she said hurriedly. “And neither did Reuben. No way would she give either of us the time of day.”

“Yeah, but… why here? I mean, I was thinking about volunteering at the library, not the festival.”

“Oh, come on,” said Cindy. “This is Little Kowloon. You want to be here but you couldn’t ask. And this lockdown… I know it’s lonely. I thought this could take your mind off things.”

“Huh.” I wasn’t sure if I was offended at the subterfuge. I didn’t like being manipulated, but she was right. The last few weeks had been so busy that I hadn’t had time to get stuck in my loop. And it was nice to have a reason to be with people who looked like me. Who came from the same place my parents were from.

I’d never felt comfortable around the Hongkongers. I’d barely been there. How could you miss a place you’d never lived? I hadn’t suffered as they had, and I couldn’t be proud as they were. For most of my life, I’d wanted to be accepted as a Scot, but lately I’d wanted to be accepted as a Hongkonger. Or both. I wasn’t sure.

“Don’t overthink it,” said Cindy. “I can tell what you’re doing. We need your help, and this is it, you’re helping. Yeah, you’re having to handle all the shit, but that’s because Celia trusts you. Myself, I’m only good for stitching sensors.”

“To be fair, you’re good at falling on your arse,” I said. She flicked her hand at me, grinning. “And pep talks.”

CRITICS LOVED OUR PREVIEW PERFORMANCES, DELIGHTED BY THE SENSE OF BUSTLE and movement. A reporter from the Evening Journal remarked on the “illicit thrill” of being so close to others during a lockdown and praised the “Hong Kong dynamism,” hilariously unaware of how we’d fallen short of our ambition. In any case, our marquee was declared unmissable.

It took a little longer to get the public beyond their understandable apprehension of being close to strangers. Most still remembered COVID-19, and H1N3 had rammed home the message of physical distancing. Few trusted our technology enough to be comfortable navigating crowds without the clear physical or AR markers telling them where they could move, despite the government’s imprimatur.

“It’s hard being the first,” said Celia, as we listened to a family bicker about their supposedly buggy glasses. She had to restrain me from marching over and explaining how our dynamic distancing protocol was safer than a normal two-meter separation. “Let them figure it out.” Which they did. Eventually. Celia and I commiserated over plenty more incidents like this until we stopped fighting each other and united against a common enemy: the audience.

Confusion aside, the public loved our show, chuckling at Doug Yau’s acerbic comedy, rapt by Chen Xi’s beautiful, rugged landscape sculptures, reminiscent of the highlands. “Authentically Hong Kong, distinctly Scottish,” wrote one visitor in a survey. Mission accomplished, said Tricia Lee in an email to our festival team.

Celia tweaked her code in the following days to accommodate the growing crowds, introducing a new timing system to reduce bottlenecks. I designed a way to nest performances inside each other, so that Katie Cheung’s AR violinist and her audience could sit within a larger dance performance. The result was that people could linger at Chen Xi’s landscapes or Tricia Lee’s miniature city if they were enjoying them and we’d route other audience members around or even through them.

During an operational review at the halfway point of the festival, Tricia hinted Little Kowloon was considering commercializing the dynamic distancing technology for use around the world, and that I would be welcome to join the team on a permanent basis. Rumor was that the tech could be worth hundreds of millions, a shot in the arm for the community and the wider diaspora.

I spoke to Celia again that evening about my misgivings. “I know why we made the decisions we did. The dynamic distancing triggers barely worked and Anna Hui’s work would’ve burned through our entire budget in the first week. But still, I wonder…”

“You were expecting something more unconventional? Or… logistically impossible?” she said, with a slight smile.

I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I wish we could give people a more special experience, something worthy of what we’ve achieved here. Anna’s dance, it was so enchanting.”

“Enchanting? I think mesmerizing is closer. Don’t look so surprised! You and Cindy aren’t the only ones who think it’s special. But special isn’t enough by itself.”

“I suppose it feels like we’re only trying to get as many bodies through the door as possible, so we can be the best, whatever that means. I know this is only a festival, but these things matter. I never see anyone talking about the art, just the numbers.”

“But that’s where you’re wrong. There can be romance in numbers. Those numbers are people, and it’s not for us to say what they gain from our art.” She sighed. “They’re talking about making a TV show about me. About the Diaspora Project. A symbol of a glorious struggle. But it wasn’t romantic. It was awful. I had to fight for every dollar in donations, every boat, every plane, every person we could get out safely. The only way I got through it is by focusing on the numbers alone.”

“I get it. Everything is for the greater good, and what is it worth two people dancing if a hundred can see a show?” I instantly regretted it, and quickly added, “I’m not the one who’s lost their home. I don’t know what that feels like and I can’t blame you for doing whatever you feel it takes to protect your new home. But I am a friend. And it doesn’t feel right.” I said.

She was quiet for a long beat. “Yes, the CCP said the same thing against our demands for self-governance. I am not blind to the irony of the situation. You’ve done a lot for us.” Celia looked to her side, swiping through an invisible interface. “You can have the last day for Anna. Make the most of it.” Her avatar vanished.

I MISSED REUBEN’S EMAIL AMID THE RUSH OF PREPARATION FOR THE DANCE. CELIA hadn’t left me a single extra penny of computing time, so I was determined to wring every bit of efficiency out of Anna’s code. Cindy received a field promotion to cover my technical liaison role, and I hunkered down for two weeks, puzzling over sensor interfaces and plugging in the latest H1N3 models.

The night before the performance, Cindy ordered me to get a proper sleep and had the network admins bar my access to the festival’s servers. That’s how I finally ended up reading his email, buried under a mountain of unread newsletters.

“Elaine,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I can’t make it to the performance. I tested positive, and because I have certain complications, I’m staying at Western General. I’m sure I’ll be fine, but if I’m not, let me take this opportunity to be candid.” Only Reuben could view contracting a deadly disease as an opportunity, I thought. “I respect your foresight in taking dynamic distancing to the next level with Anna’s dance. It’s what she’d have wanted, and it’ll make the technology that much more valuable. If you need help handling Celia in the future, just let me know. Heung gong yan, ga yau!”

I took my glasses off and closed my eyes.

AFTER A FITFUL NIGHT, I ARRIVED AT THE MARQUEE AT DAWN. THERE WERE ONLY A few people waiting in line. Some had brought thermos flasks with tea and coffee, and were sitting on folding stools and reading the news. I frowned, ducking inside.

The marquee was deserted. The tech crew had cleared the few bits of equipment needed for the past month of AR performances, leaving the maximum space for the dance. I began the startup process, dozens of fans in the walls and ceilings whirring to life.

With some creative programming, I’d figured out that a specific atmospheric profile would make it easier to predict the movement of respiratory droplets. And since I had the entire floor, I could run multiple dances at once. In fact, the more the better, because it was cheaper to run our servers hot rather than stop and start them, so I needed a constant flow of audience members, entry and exit as choreographed as a ceilidh, but everything in between as free as possible. More contradictions.

I popped my head out the door an hour later. The line had lengthened considerably, and oddly, I recognized a lot of the people from Little Kowloon. Surprisingly, the Hongkongers hadn’t shown much interest in their own marquee, perhaps thinking they’d seen it all before, or wanting to give locals more space to explore. But today was different. I spotted Cindy further back in the line, chatting to Tricia. They both gave me a thumbs up.

Everything was ready. I just needed to flick a switch and Anna’s dance would begin. I returned inside and imagined the space full of people spinning so close to one another, ribbons of lasers sparking in between them, orchestrated by a technology that anticipated but didn’t lead. The dancers became children and teachers, screaming and laughing and running but never colliding. Then a packed hall with voices raised, an angry debate, circles and spaces forming and collapsing, then a raucous marketplace, then a factory, then an emergency ward.

Then an empty marquee.

I pulled back the fabric doors, and nodded to the first in line. “Come on in.”