The Cracked Ring

A ring floating in mid-air with a gap in it. Take it for a clock face with twelve o'clock at the top and the gap falls roughly between the three- and four-o'clock marks, as though cut by a small invisible knife. It is extremely fine, extremely clean, with nothing holding it up, and the first time it appeared it hung 3 storeys above the holographic figures of the signal at the intersection.

Finer golden lines run out of it and spread outward, like a sheet of paper being opened. One of them is shaped like a mandala, one like an old-style luopan compass, the third like one division on the scale of an astrolabe—not the whole face, only one corner of it. Close one eye and then the other and the three shapes will not come apart; they stay stuck to the same golden line and sway together as the eyes change.

Nobody else can see it at all. At that same intersection a passer-by who had just come out of the convenience store looked up to check the seconds on the signal, his line of sight passing straight through that position, and saw nothing. A phone cannot photograph it; switch to RAW and magnify 400% and it still cannot. The green LED on the municipal surveillance camera on the corner lamp-post stays lit, and yet the city administration center has no record of it, and no citizen has ever complained about a strange thing floating over the intersection.

People who can see it have usually piled up a long string of records that do not last. One person's paper notebook was on its 28th entry before it met this ring: the first 27 were gone within a blink—the strange bird turned back into a pigeon, the black shadow went back flat against the corner of the wall, the reflection shrank back into the glass. This one stayed where it was and would not go.

It also follows. Its position changes every day—the roof of a mixed-use block, the direction of the runway at the air-transit station, above an alley in the night market, the corner tower of a school—and the straight-line distance to the person who can see it stays at about 80 metres. One man tripped over it on a crossing and was helped up, and it drew back to 120 metres and stopped there, coming no closer.

Those fine golden lines answer the person who can see them. Point at them once and the tips of the lines will tilt very slightly toward you; later even the gap itself began to turn—as the man backed toward the station, the gap turned a little further with him, until at the end it faced the direction of the station. That time in front of the temple door, the ring slid down from the roof of the temple an inch at a time and stopped directly above the temple door, and the gap turned through an angle until it locked exactly with the beeswax seal on the letter in his palm.