What happens to me next?
Your guess is nearly as good as mine. I found my way out of my own surprise party sometime before it died down. I found myself out on the street, doing what it took minute-by-minute effort to avoid this morning: looking at the displays. There’s something in there, all right. The goldenrod rays in the Sea — which, surely, must be caused by all that sunflower memorabilia — they’re always far in the background, extending in streaks that want to be straight, but can’t quite manage. They shine like crayon scrawl made of nighttime skylines, and they intersect at distant, twinkling nodal points. A structure is forming in there. No single display could show the smallest fraction of it. But I’m carrying around mental machinery that makes it impossible to miss: I draw connections, fill gaps, extrapolate.
I haven’t felt this way, not really, since those last few good nights with Cai. But the logic that we saw in the Sea back then was gooey and silty. It explained the quiet and ephemeral things, the fine texture of the world. This is different. The thing emerging in the Sea is rigid and discrete. Its structure mirrors the ward network’s: it almost seems to play it forward in stuttering half-steps. It echoes what little I understand of Shanghai’s network of L2 chains that control the parallel yuan and the court of minor currencies it keeps. The metro system, the traffic cycles, it’s all in there, it’s all far more interconnected, and yet far simpler, than we ever imagined. You just have to see these sunflower-yellow nodes and edges, you really do, glinting unseen but not quite, mapping hidden causalities...
Late afternoon in Hongkou East I see a man drop to his knees and put his hands behind his back, eyes averted from a particularly vibrant Mirror Sea display wrapped around a bank branch. Within minutes, faster than you’d expect, there are Weather Bureau agents storming out of a veetle with their visors and synthvox to sedate him. You can call 1-1-4 to sic the Bureau on yourself, see. That way they’ll go easy on you. I wanted to see if he’s a neikonaut, to ask if he’s seeing what I’m seeing. But it could so easily be something else entirely — the Sea is wide and deep enough to hold dozens, even hundreds of jostling delusions.
Night falls in what feels like a blink. I’m back in Beiwan, regaining a grip. All my stuff is still here at YINS. And the Safety floor is quiet, half-dark. I stride towards my desk, hoping to see no one.
“Mo-na,” someone whispers behind me.
I almost throw my back out, wheeling around that way. “Fucking hell, Yao!”
“Mona.” He peeks out of a frosted conference room, gesturing for me. “C’mere. You’re really going to like this.”
I’m not so sure about that. I smell hot glue in there.
I step inside and see about three hundred pieces of printed Sunflower Sieve debris on the table. He’s been assembling it. It’s — oh, Jesus, it really looks different now. All the same colors and surface textures, only far less gnarled and coiled. These new shards, they offer extended, jointed notchways. There’s no way Yao could have started with a plan; most likely he just found two matching surfaces and started gluing, until he ended up with this hollow network of scraggly spindles, a triangle-mesh self-scaffold, the endoskeleton of something ravenous and rotund, armspan-wide and growing. I have the uneasy sense it could expand forever in any direction.
“I saw it out there,” he explains. There’s a deeply quadratic twang to his voice, and I can’t make myself look him in the eye. “But it’s not the same structure, exactly. It’s not the mirror image, either. It’s the dual —”
“Out...where?” I ask. Not altogether sure why I’m playing it dumb, except that Yao’s presence in this room feels like a whirlpool. Instinct tells me to struggle away with all possible might, lest I get sucked into some dark vortex, some final calm.
“Oh, come on.” This is not his usual tone of voice, so languid and heavy-lidded. “I don’t mean to be weird about it, but we all know what happened to you last year. It’s okay though!” His usual brightness peeks through, pitched just too high. “I look at it too. Sometimes I’ll have a tough p-set, and I go and take a long walk, and the answers just come to me.” He angles around to meet my eyes, and smiles through me. “I can tell you’re using it too. It’s okay.”
Our debris clicks and chatters and interlocks, and I can tell he’s manipulating it in a way that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to understand. It feels like losing that game at the Weather Bureau, only the light is warm and gold instead of cold and white. Something tightens and flexes inside me, far too quickly. I want to be sick.
“Yao, you need to take the inversion.”
“That makes two of us.” He laughs like I’m in on the joke.
“I’m serious, dude. I’m gonna go warm up a scanner.”
“No.” He grasps my arms. “I’m serious. You can’t. While I was out there...I...it was the most wonderful coincidences, everywhere. Couples. Dogs. Buses.” There are whole stories brewing behind each of these words, which is why it takes him so long to force them out. “It’s all falling into place out there. And I’m causing it, Mona. I can keep doing this for people...”
“You better come with me or I’m going to call in a four-oh-eight.” Dangerously uncooperative patient.
“Please — no.” His mouth moves in fishy little o’s. “Please, would you please just go in there with the Bridge? There are some little snags in there, some, some, some little bits I know aren’t working right. If you get those, I can do the whole city.”
The four-oh-eight is both faster and more violent than I expected. I take two steps back and flex my wrist in a particular way until my wanji buzzes three times. I imagine some unfortunate grad student grumbling out of bed and pulling on pants — but within a minute Deng, Rui, and two others burst out from behind closed doors. Yao sees what’s happening and panics too late; I mouth sorry as we restrain him by the wrists.
“Mona, are you totally sure?” Deng asks, hovering over Yao with a sedative. He’s wiggling to get an arm free, and then he does, and then he clips her in the nose with a flailing hand.
Rui looks white in the face as they pin him back onto the table. “God’s sake, Jinghan, just do it!”
We take him to Medical on the upper floors, trying to prop him up and then resorting to a stretcher. The autovial of sedative, a squishy and translucent blue thing, adheres firmly to his limp forearm. YINS’ real medics are largely not neikonauts, and thank the depths for that, because I can’t interact with anyone else carrying Sieve debris right now. They receive us with the generally unsurprised demeanor of this again, huh.
“I showed him the video,” Deng informs me, nasally, as we stand over his hospital bed. She’s holding a cotton ball to her nose. “I thought that would help.”
A nurse knocks on the half-ajar door, holding a big fucking syringe. “It’s either this,” he explains, “or you can hotwire him when he comes to.” He begins clipping up Yao with all sorts of things, I imagine, to make him feel stupid when he wakes up.
We sit with Yao for an appropriate span, and I try not to notice the look that Rui is giving Deng, or the way she’s avoiding it. I don’t react much when they both rise to go. Instead I wait one minute, two, and follow them. They’re talking, animated and unhappy, in a little nook down the hall. I can’t make out what they’re saying — that is, until I take some quiet paces forward, and duck behind a large cart of linens. I begin the long process of untying and re-tying my shoe.
“...should’ve taken a page out of Peter’s book,” Deng is whispering, low and insistent. “I should have taken a sledgehammer to that thing the moment I arrived.”
“It’s university property.” Rui is not speaking quite so quietly, but he casts glances around. “She’s an enormously skilled neikonaut, and she has every right to be using it.”
“I know she’s a skilled neikonaut, Rui. That’s why I brought her to Shanghai.”
Oh, I hate when she says that. You didn’t bring me anywhere, old woman.
“This is all beside the point.” Dr. Rui sighs, low and frustrated, like he’s struggling to open a jar. “All the faculty are ready to proceed except you. We can do it a few different ways...”
“It’s not beside the point...”
“We can make the inversion mandatory. At least at YINS. Or — and this is what I’d prefer — we can bake it into the loop-lock virtual machine. Build it into the tile-out process. Isn’t that your entire godforsaken thing, Deng?”
“It’s her!” Deng erupts. “The inversion is her, more of her than anyone should be comfortable with. Fifty thousand neikonauts in this city. Call it two hundred loop-lock sessions a year. That’s ten million times it’s run!” They pause while the doctor shuffles awkwardly by, and Deng catches her breath. “I’m deriving a clean version from scratch. Her paper gets us most of the way there. I need a week. Maybe two.”
“The last thing — the very last thing — that we want to do is cause a panic. And the longer we wait...”
Their voices fade around a corner. I stride to follow them, hear nothing, then round the bend ever so casually. I catch Rui closing a balcony door. Blood thumping, I find a circular pillar to crouch behind and press myself against the exterior window, peeking out through a sunshade. The two are bathed in dim multicolored light from the library windows above, the wind whipping Deng’s hair. Rui gestures wildly: at her, himself, the school, the distant skyline. Deng keeps her arms folded, still gripping a bloody tissue.
Rui pulls a manila envelope from his jacket, seems to weigh it for a moment, and hands it to Deng.
She gives him a foul look, tearing it open. She finds something soft and circular inside. Deng examines it for a second and then positively snarls, raising the object and using it to smack Rui back and forth across the face. Then she tries to rip it in half, gives up, and leaves it in a trash can. She storms inside. The door swings in her wake.
After Rui spends a dejected moment scrolling his wanji, after he sighs and wanders away, I creep back down the hall and onto the balcony. I scrunch my nose, fishing through orange peels and surgical masks until I find whatever it is that made Deng angry. No, furious, in a way that even I have never seen. It’s a machine-stitched patch, a round and innocuous iron-on thing that you’d expect to see on a fighter pilot’s flight suit.
It depicts a flower, in full yellow bloom around the edges and beady-black in the center.
Four characters crest the bottom edge: kui hua yi hao.
Sunflower-1. Sunflower One.
On my way out, I stop by the Mirror Sea display in the lobby, pondering the faint golden streaks in the background. Someone passes, a neikonaut, and gives me a concerned look. I want to shake her and shout: how are you not seeing this? Instead, I keep my eyes fixed on the pixels. Willing, no, daring the diving-bell to appear.
If you’re really in there — I find the thought low in my throat, soft on my tongue — I’m sorry.