Upon the Mirror Sea

Upon the Mirror Sea is a complete science fiction novel by @phaseborn about psychedelics, surveillance, and first contact with ourselves. You can read the entire thing for free here.

Were the Ripples, made of surveillance footage and pulsing gelatinously through in the Mirror Sea, alive? This was the question Xia's inner circle had become fixated on. Yes had an unhinged, rising gleam to it; no reached for causality and free will and always ended on a minor seventh, a sucking of teeth. Their debates were a meter deep on A4 paper. They had become unhealthily obsessed with the behavior and well-being of the Ripples, and no one more than the big man himself. The closer you got to the center, the more likely you were to find someone who considered the Ripples the city's true inhabitants. It was the final piece his opponents needed to rip Shanghai away from him, away from China, creating the Yangtze Delta Orthogonal Zone. They promised to tear the system down. Even as they did, they couldn't tear their eyes off the feeds.

But I shouldn't be thinking about the Mirror Sea at all. They gave me pills to take if I start.