EXCERPT From her suite on the thirtieth floor of the Wongtee Hotel, a newly opened, overstaffed tower near the container port of Shenzhen in South China, T.P. Chen is slowly becoming aware of the history she has just landed in the middle of, and that someone, or something, is now pulling her strings. Reclining into her fizzling bubble bath, she again loops around the recorded message, delivered in a crunchy digitized voice through a single blue plastic speaker with a white Buddha glued on for decoration. With comparably dizzying effect, she swills the synthesized words around in her head like a cheap rice wine, recalling her traumatic memories of today’s encounter with the anomalous liquid entity in the vinyl recycling plant. It has been impossible to erase from her mind’s eye its dripping shadowy form as it emerged from the vat of black plastic soup. Still vivid in her nostrils, that acrid, burning vinyl smell…