Fifteen years ago, loop-lock was just a twinkle in the eyes of Dr. Deng, Dr. Ren, and a few other names you’ll come across in textbooks. Beiwan Ward was nothing but chemical plants. Clockwise smokestack shadows over cabbage-patch and chicken-scrabble and a dubiously fishable stream. YINS’ Building 1 is now the tallest thing around, but not for long; soon this view from its upper floors, over the river to the other universities, will be blocked by true skyscrapers. Taller and taller still. Ren and Deng — with their folded arms and narrow glances — act like divorcees, and treat YINS like the air mattress they’ve both been forced to share. But I wonder: do they see, ever really see, what they’ve built here?

Just now, they don’t seem very much to care.

“Well here we all are,” begins Dr. Ren with a level-setting smile. He appears to have acquired a pen, and he bites the cap off to take notes in a leather day planner. “You have a way of finding your way into things, Mona.”

Deng glares at him. I’m not sure what he means by it either, and he seems briefly to contract into his shell.

“I only mean to say — you’ve been putting in the hours. And it appears to have paid off.”

Deng makes a speed-it-up gesture. “They’re losing brain cells down there, Ren. Save this for her defense.”

“Alright.” The level-setting smile disappears, and a field of wrinkles makes itself briefly known on Ren’s usually sweaty-smooth forehead. “Alright. Then let me be candid with what I know. Mona, what you have created is an inversion, at least a partial inversion, for Sunflower Sieve debris. Representatives from each of the Big Three have  made it clear that publishing this inversion would clear the way for a sizable donation to the YINS Neikotic Safety department.”

This is the first real confirmation I’ve gotten that the Sunflower Sieve is, well, a real thing. “They don’t have their own inversion for it?”

He shrugs a tiny shrug. “Not by the looks of them down there. I emphasize sizable. Furthermore, Mona, there would be stipends, grants, maybe an internship in this for you specifically. In my opinion well short of their usual outright bribery, but something to consider.”

I lean in, channeling Yao, wishing he were here. “And did they say what it is? What they’re using it for?”

“A new kind of dimensionality reduction on market data,” Ren says. “But the fact that they’re all using it together is, at least, fertile ground for speculation.”

“Full of manure, in other words.”

Ren ignores her. “So. Brass tacks, there’s no point in pretending we don’t know what we have on our hands, it will only impede adoption. We don’t play coy. It’s the Sunflower Sieve inversion. We dress it in LaTeX and socialize it to the big firms. We can be done tonight.”

“No. This meeting is over. Mona, let’s go.”

“Wait, for god’s sake, hold on, Jinghan.”

“You don’t dictate terms!” The way Deng practically spits this at him leads me to understand that, terrifying as it might sound, she’s been going easy on me this entire time. These are the big leagues and Ren, well, he’s the ball. “This is between myself and my student, and you are trying to do what you do, Ren Yi, which is interdict. Intercede. We are not shopping around for a middleman.”

“I am the department chair, Doctor, and I think you’ve forgotten who invited you here —”

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten why you invited me here —”

“Can I talk?”

Sudden silence. Rain beats hard on the blue-tint curve of the window behind me. YINS hasn’t tweaked the aircon to compensate and it’s frigid in here, and I’m retreating limb by limb into my crew neck. The cold, plus the tint, plus the faint fruity disinfectant up here, always has me feeling trapped in a bottle of peach Mai Dong.

It takes me an embarrassingly long time to know what I want to say.

“I want a paper.” I watch Deng nod too firmly and Ren chew his tongue. I count on my fingers, still tucked into my sweatshirt, more for my benefit than theirs. “I don’t care who else is on it, but I want to be first author. And I want it to be the kind that will become my dissertation. I’ll figure out my thesis from here.” I cough. “That’s all.”

“See? You see, from her own mouth.”

And Ren, fingers at temples. “What? I don’t follow. I never follow. You see, what?”

“She wants a real paper,” says Deng triumphantly. “Which I think rather precludes this publishing tonight business. Your friends at the big firms are going to have to wait. Maybe they’ll be more careful, digging around in the foundations, chewing away a the wiring of their own country’s economy. Maybe they’ll slow things down.”

“Maybe you’d like that,” Ren scowls. “Maybe old Xia would like that too.”

“I’m not —”

“I’m not saying you are, Dr. Deng.” He pauses here, for a long time, and then falls into the language of truce. “You know me. I know you. We can fling it back and forth all day. I know how you operate. You want to start from absolute scratch, break the inversion down into mathematical parts.”

“Yes.”

“You want to spend weeks understanding the wave mechanics of it, so you can say in full generality and add little footnotes about how this result is due to Zhang or Li. You want a version that works perfectly, one hundred percent of the time.”

“Yes.”

“And most of all, you don’t want to mention that your own student came up with this inversion, under her own initiative and supervision, using her considerable skill — with the Deng Bridge. At all.”

“Precisely. Yes. It’s good that we understand each other.”

“But we don’t have time! Mona, how many people has your inversion been run on?”

“As of this morning?” My chest tightens. I don’t like this. “Maybe a few dozen?”

“Seventy-seven as of last count,” Ren corrects. “We’re going to set up bays on the squash courts. The lofty side of this is that we’re the Neikotic Safety department and we have a duty of care. The dirty side is, if you don’t publish now, the Big Three are going to send their goons here, start turning people upside down, until someone gives them your inversion on a flash drive.”

Deng puffs air. “But it doesn’t fully work, Ren. You’ve seen what it does. It eats away around the edges, but the debris doesn’t truly disappear. It grows back in their minds. What if it becomes resistant?”

“It’s all we’ve got.” I can’t quite meet Deng’s eyes here, and if I’m getting light-headed it’s because I know that she’s right, or at least it’s very plausible. “That’s what Dr. Ren is telling us. It’s this or nothing.”

“It’s you,” Dr. Deng practically shouts. “It’s a little piece of you, more than anyone should be comfortable with. Let’s say it becomes indispensable, even, added to the standard full-spectrum cleaning regimen. Call it fifty thousand neikonauts in the city, receiving it monthly, though I suppose we should be so lucky. That’s six hundred thousand times in a year — that a little piece of you is born, and experiences terrible consternation, and then it dies. Have you thought about that?”

“...Mona?”

I don’t have any memories from the diving-bell. That’s how it works. What I do have suddenly is the flash, the view through the portal into Mallochi’s mind as the Sunflower Sieve collapsed, and then just nothing. Almost tranquil in there. But in the flash, in silhouette. It not merely debris. It was a whole horrible machine, a viciously many-petaled beady-eyed sphere of a thing, with gnarled roots innervating all the way to his edges, lording over him, gorging itself not just on tilespace constructs, but on the soft sands below, on anything in his psyche that wasn’t bolted down.

Deng breaks ten seconds of silence. “Give us seven days...”

“I can give you a week...” Ren says, at exactly the same time.

“...that’s all we’ll need, one way or another.”

“...then it’s out of my hands, one way or another.” 

Deng’s brow furrows with a particular vintage of suspicion. Ren’s eyes widen with relieved surprise, but as Deng turns away, snatches up her folio and still-untouched thermos of tea, I see them roll just a little. I don’t move until it looks like she’s gonna yank me out of my swivel chair.

“Well, don’t get too comfortable. We’ve got a paper to write, and we’re not doing it here.”

In early days I clung to hope that Deng and I would submit a paper together. But my ideas were soggy paper-mâché next to an honest-to-god volcano, a force of nature. She didn’t know how to nurture what little I could give her. It never played out quite like this, in those long-curdled fantasies. But here and now, I have something that Deng is interested in, for whichever of her amorphous reasons. This is the approval I craved. So maybe it’s not high summer sunshine on my face.

Down in her office she has textbooks that were out of print when I was born. She shovels them onto her side table and begins flipping through them with a younger woman’s fervor. As best I can tell, she’s warming up just by glancing at the figures, sub-vocalizing old mnemonics, screwing her eyes shut and then snorting with approval when she remembers, I dunno, the whole subfield of algebraic topology?

My job, at any rate, is to be her eyes.

“K&K. Chapter 7. Open it up and tell me what it says about boundary conditions in the section about neikotic closure.”

I have this one on my tablet; I ignore the tome skidding towards me. “Seven dot two, neikotic closure under discretization.” I enunciate. “Recovering a continuous wave function in the discretized environment of tilespace requires...blah blah blah...beta equals zero, dee-phi-dee-tee equals negative k squared phi...”

Her eyes flash. “Phi upon t minus tau squared, right?”

It goes on like this for hours. She slides out a whiteboard and allocates me a corner to work in. She pulls up a graphing calculator and fills the screen with equations. Several times I want to ask why we can’t just do this in loop-lock and print an egg. But Deng — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her enter loop-lock herself. And if I go in there, we’ll end up right back here in four hours: trying to retrace my own steps sober.

“So what did you do in there?” She keeps trying to catch me off guard with this question. “In that kid’s tilespace?”

And I tell her again, mouth half-occupied with one of her weird licorice balls. “I don’t know.” More aggravated with myself than her for this. “Like I said, I’m pretty sure I lost telemetry. It’s not really me who goes in —”

“I know how it works,” she snaps. Sighs. Lobs a dead marker into the trash, for three, and then adopts an apologetic tone. “But what about this angle. What did you mean to do? Just as you were going in?”

And I know she’s trying. Harder than she needs to, in defense of that little piece of me, and whatever it must have faced off against in Mallochi’s mind. So I give her some grace, even though she’s asked this already, too. “Let go, right? You go in there and you just tell it to let go. I kinda think that’s most of it.”

Deng beams. Makes no indication that she had heard me say this an hour ago. “Let go!” And she goes back into her pile of books. “Let go. Brilliant. What do you know about knot theory, Mona? Do they still cover that?”

We order takeout. She gets sauce on her fleece. Something like the diving-bell begins to take shape on her whiteboard. Not too long after, she hits a wall — drops her marker mid-thought, and yawns prodigiously. I think I can hear her brain sizzling.

“Nine sharp tomorrow,” she insists. “Get some real rest tonight, okay?”

But like Deng so often says, the debris is what I can’t put down. I can feel these shapes cluttering my mind, magnetically drawing themselves into complicated interlockings, tumbling all over each others’ rigid bodies as I start to nod off on the train. I promised not to look, I know. But I did. And why do they all look like they’re designed to fit together? I feel myself beginning to strain for a rational answer.

Off Zhaojiabang, I slalom through Wet Floor signs on my way to two scallion pancakes and a coconut bun. As night falls, the rain has become a downpour, a reminder of how much sky there is, how many layers of clouds can pile up above the mouth of the Yangtze this time of year. As I eat, I dutifully ignore the supermarket food court’s Mirror Sea display, glowing with a dull, persistent grey. Do the Ripples know what rain is? I allow myself the question, but not the answer. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

This was exactly the kind of thing Xia Zitian’s inner circle had become fixated on, all circling the same logical drain: were the Ripples, the things pulsing gelatinously through the Mirror Sea alive? 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. They had named them, taxonomized them, and 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. Blue Delta 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, so I pay no attention to the countless portholes that Shanghai has pried back open for itself: tiny LCD screens in storefront windows and in elevators. Spherical fishbowl quasigrams floating within the fountains of Century Park. Six-story projections on the sides of shopping centers. And then there are the cameras that feed them, winking everywhere from high, oblique shadows. The ones you see are from the Xia era: reflective, iridescent, teardrop-shaped things, with the iconic blind-eye symbol ringing the lens. The ones you don’t are modern, impossibly small, the anonymizing algorithm carved into nanoscale channels on the lens itself. Sometimes regular CCTV cameras are employed, the Lam-Waldmann Hash running entirely in software; this is considered vaguely obscene.

I’m not thinking about any of this, by the way.

Not even sterile Beiwan Ward is immune — the sidewalk from the metro to campus is paced out by slender, tasteful pillars, their edgeless displays frothing with suggestion. Beiwan is brand-new, a gleaming shell around YINS: dorms, a few pricey takeout joints, a lone tiyan-guan. It doesn’t need to attract nightlife by attracting Ripplechasers, or to lease its feeds to the highest bidder. Instead, its barren little Mirror Sea is public art, an insistence of placehood. Beneath the cameras, mesh baskets overflow with all the usual votives — prayer blocks and dried flowers and fluorescent voxelite beads — but these are refreshed on schedule by the maintenance men who shine the windows and renormalize the hedges. Any chalk on the walls would be power-washed by dawn.

But, as always, I’m not thinking about it. I’m going the long way to avoid it, in fact, splashing along beside the six-lane speedway that hems Beiwan against the east bank of the Huangpu. The way across is access-controlled footbridges; on the other side, light industry melts into a howling wilderness of warehouse fires, inhabited only by the desperate and insane. They say the Mirror Sea is thickest out there now, mostly aftermarket cameras installed (by who and for what?) after Xia’s fall. They say they show it live on solar mesh screens, jump-scares hidden around bends. They say if you see something floating by, you’d better run.

By the time I get home on this second night, the street is a sewer. So why am I struck by the urge to walk? I find myself pulling on rubber boots in the dead of night, tiptoeing downstairs against the ears of nosy neighbors, and finding footing on the slick cobblestones of Xietu South. I walk in long, rectangular loops around the ward. I trade brief glances with delivery drivers, redlights on patrol — who else would be out in this weather, at this time of night, and why? I know the answer, of course. But this night, I keep it bundled beneath my black voxelwear parka. At the boundary of the ward, I turn home, and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep.

But I can dream about it, right?