The thing you are fighting is impossible, or very nearly so, and so you call it Epsilon City.
And it was you, Dr. Rui, who picked through the charred remains of Deng’s work, who wrote the protocols for safely observing Epsilon City from loop-lock. A thick manual of linearization exercises, the many rounds of broad-spectrum inversions that your new, reconstituted Weather Bureau’s neikonauts must submit to afterwards, all to keep a certain kind of runaway curiosity from breeding within your walls. Is the cure worse than the disease? Sometimes you think so, but someone has to hold the line. After all, you’re not the only ones who know where to find it.
You could tell Tenfold Gate was trouble from the moment you saw the egg. It was too long a stride in the state of the art; they said it came out of nowhere, and that always gets the Bureau on edge. That usually means it’s from elsewhere. But not to panic, even as it rips through YINS like wildfire, sinking into every neikonaut’s workflow, leaving behind dense and un-invertible debris. Not to panic, as voxelite shards of it pile up below that great swinging model in the Observatory, laying bare the Ripples’ new construction kit, the ugly nouns of a new vernacular. Not to —
All at once you’re very, very tempted to pay a visit to the Observatory’s scanner bay. Why content yourself with a low-dimensional model of the enemy city when you can go in for yourself and see how it’s really shaped? There must be some flaw, some papered-over weakness in Tenfold Gate’s design only visible when...no. You count deep breaths until the urge passes. The Ripples want us to look closer, and you won’t give them the satisfaction. You will find an inversion. And when the time is right, you will rip Epsilon City’s new district to shreds, until there really is nothing to see.
An inversion.
And in loop-lock I remember suddenly and clearly how it felt to come upon Tenfold Gate debris in another’s mind. How it was pernicious, wart-like, with no clear boundary. How I found a spot of laggard and uncooperative tiles, and how I followed it with growing horror towards a shock of something like orange-red fungus, striated and deeply grooved, laced against no earthly blueprint through my patient’s soul. Its core was chitinous, unyielding, and strangely fiber-optic. It had an opaque and plasticine datacenter hum. It left me with the uneasy feeling that — not to put too fine a point on it — something alien was colonizing the tilespace, running warm and primordial logicks beneath its gourd-hull. In soberspace, between loop-lock sessions, it grew slowly and thoughtfully: folding up against itself, taking inches, never giving them back. And it was not painful, not unless you tried to pick at it, peel it off. Not until it outgrew the nooks and crannies. Not until it was.
It was a monoculture, and that’s why I made myself an ecosystem.
I remember again how in the moment of inversion, I didn’t strike, or rip, or unwind. Inside my patient’s mind, I came upon Tenfold Gate as dishwater, as fishwater, with a surfactant patience: let it soak. I grew around it, in ersatz purples and yellows and oranges, in smokestacks and fans. I brought the jellies and the flatworms and turtles, and gave the rigid folds of debris new purpose as a harbor. Let it soak. I gave it new grooves to grow into, new niches to fill. I changed its surroundings so gradually that it never noticed when it became a symbiote, utterly dependent on its context. Let it soak. And in the moment of inversion, I ripped that context away, and Tenfold Gate went down the memory hole with the rest of the reef. Coming down from loop-lock, I was briefly proud of how I went about that.
All those details were flushed and forgotten by the time I sat up in the scanner bed.
“You should be careful,” I whispered to Cai Yuhui. I felt triumphant, and warm all over. She, of all people, had been my patient, and the relief on her face was my new drug. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that again.”
The tiles heave and shutter, but they manage to stitch my memory to yours, to the same week in April, to the very same night. Across campus, you pace the higher floors of Building 6. There were calm stretches where you never had to come up here, where the Weather Bureau receded deep into the texture of YINS, where the fiction of the Observatory almost became fact. Those are becoming gradually rarer. But the Bureau’s crisis command center occupies a mechanical floor, chilly concrete and bare I-beams and high ceilings — at least up here, you can really pace.
“There’s an inversion!” Cai shouts, wheeling into the room. “A real inversion! I’m free of the debris!”
Heads turn jealously, as they tend to do, towards Cai Yuhui. Her relief from Tenfold Gate is palpable, but it is unfortunately not yet contagious. Every neikonaut in the city wants what she has.
“Slow down,” you tell her, though she is already laid out on a couch. “Who found it? What was it?”
“Mona Xu,” she mutters, eyes half-closed. Tenfold Gate has denied her too many REM cycles. “The Bridge.”
You toss a blanket over her and call Captain Ma with the news. If this is a solution to the Tenfold Gate crisis, it is a delicate one. You don’t really have the inversion, not yet, but knowing that one is possible keeps you working through the night in a way the pills can no longer manage. You’ll need to fashion a kind of soberware glue-trap, and send Cai back down to the clinic at least two, three more times to sample the inversion. You’ll need to get Mona Xu to repeat the process. This would be much easier with Dr. Deng’s blessing. But as it stands, she can’t suspect a thing.
You send Cai back to me a total of ten times. You would’ve liked to get it in one take, but your soberware glue-traps, let’s face it, Rui Zhang — they don’t work very well. Cai returns to the Observatory after each of our sessions so your techs can peel her mind apart, looking for soft imprints and gentle aftertastes of my Tenfold Gate inversion. Its interior clockwork begins to subtly modify her behavior, her expressions, her patterns of speech. For a desperate, flailing gamble, this is all working remarkably well. By the sixth of ten sessions, you can look at her manifolds and see wriggling traces of my inversion with the naked eye. It looks a little bit like coral, one of your technicians decides.
The codename Anemone Pop is floated the same day.
When they learn what they have to work with, the Bureau’s memeticists roll their eyes and tug their turtlenecks and muss up their squared-off bangs in frustration. The entire city is a great coral reef? It’s all a little on the nose, no? The Ripplechasing community burned out on ocean motifs five or six years ago — you do know that, right? It would be several years premature to go ironic, or retro, or ironically retro with this. You can’t force these things, Dr. Rui. There’s no way they’re going to pick this up. We all agree that these are the patterns that have to go in front of the cameras. But you’ve got to find another angle.
You shrug. You have Cai Yuhui on your side.
It never becomes clear to you which of the Big Three actually discovered the Tenfold Gate egg in the Mirror Sea. Suowei has the largest observatory, but Paracoin’s cameras are all in the right places. You don’t think it was Chaoyue. It’s never Chaoyue. Even so, each of them claims credit for the algorithm, once it leaks to the public, once the egg — a red-orange, angular, and internally reflective thing — has a street value barely exceeding the voxelite it’s printed with. But when Ma Zhuming sends the Bureau’s visored goons to their offices, they all claim to have found it through corporate espionage. Go talk to Chaoyue. They’d scribble down the WeChat IDs of their nemeses at the other firms. Go talk to Suowei.
You don’t press the issue. The private observatories think of the Mirror Sea as a kind of extended thinking aid, not the real home of a sapient civilization, and it’s of paramount importance that you don’t give them a reason to look more closely. The more the Weather Bureau insists that the Mirror Sea is dangerous, the closer Shanghai insists on looking. You cannot let the public think: they’re hiding something. You cannot let the public ask: what don’t they want us to see? This is the Bureau’s operating principle. You must be extraordinarily strategic in throwing your weight around. You must wriggle backwards out of all your jams. You, Rui Zhang, suspect this will continue to work until, one day, it doesn’t.
You worry that day is coming fast.
The more you look, the more you see it: Tenfold Gate debris in the Mirror Sea. As it builds up in the minds of neikonauts, it appears, just as rigid and unyielding, as rufous trim on the Sea’s caverns and ravines. In this sense, you are lucky: most people are interested in the churn of the Sea, where the Ripples thrive, and not its background stillnesses. But there are geologists everywhere. There is a kid inside all of us who loves to be shown a cool rock. And there are people on the message boards who are paying attention to these structures, trying to mine them for meaning. They are calling them hyperlagmites. You understand that there must be a mechanism by which the Tenfold Gate in our minds closes the loop somehow, and alters the glass-drip rhythms of Shanghai’s stillnesses to produce these formations on the other end of the lens. You do not want to know what that mechanism is. So on a scrap of paper you write out three rules:
1. Do not draw attention away from the hyperlagmites. This will backfire.
2. Do not attempt to explain them. Do not give them a way to be rational or mundane.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, wonder what the hyperlagmites are for.
Following these rules does not come naturally, not to a mind like yours, which is prone to the thing which is both panic and understanding. That’s why you lay them out in shorthand: Rules One, Two, and Three. You understand that the key to neikotic inversion is a logic of disinterest, a battle for frame. You try very hard not to think about how Tenfold Gate is already creeping directly between minds, easing Shanghai by warp and weft into the sensation that the Mirror Sea is already here, a simpler world haunting the epicycles of this one: ready to be remembered-again, to be annealed-into, to be inhabited-instead. Do not think about this. Do not pay any attention to the lurking shadow of Epsilon City, and its latest heaving foray into soberspace. Think about how Cai and her teams are out there every night, seeding the inversion on the streets with their coral and scales.
We cannot lose; we’re the ones on the right side of the lens; and other assorted falsehoods.
No one can tease a pattern from the noise like Cai Yuhui, and within a week Anemone Pop is the biggest thing in the Mirror Sea. It shows up everywhere, in broad daylight and the dead of night. There’s music about it, art about it, crime about it. By now flashes of Epsilon City are plainly visible on the displays, but they blend perfectly into what Cai has made of my own inversion, a carnival in the shallows, a languid and gaudy insistence that it’s not that deep. Even with feeds from a full quarter of the city’s cameras, your Sea-Watch team has absolutely no idea where its center is. You don’t feel even remotely in control of it. But nothing of that size can sustain itself in the Sea. It’s going to crash eventually. All Cai has to do is make sure it crashes into the right thing.
But still — you don’t breathe a sigh of relief until the night you step onto the YINS quad, and you feel it in your own body: The entire city is a great coral reef. You walk Beiwan Ward and you see it on the displays, in purple and orange and yellow: The entire city is a great coral reef. For the first time in weeks, you feel something in the air besides the rigid paranoia of a campus under duress, something wild and liquid and free. The entire city is a great coral reef.
You’re going to do it. And you allow yourself a moment of triumph. You’re sending the Tenfold Gate inversion back where Tenfold Gate came from, and even though you’re not a violent man, you let your blood run red for a few breaths, and savor the image of your vengeance raining upon Epsilon City. You can’t wait to rip those pieces from your voxelite model. You curl your fists and spit right on one of the Mirror Sea displays: now who’s causally downstream of who? You glance around; you hope nobody saw that.
You’re going to do it. Well, Cai’s going to do it. She’ll buy you, what, six months? Twelve?
Time enough to get Dr. Deng on your side, if you’re luckier than you have been.
You’re not.
Imagine a light mist on a late April day, a damp that you can’t get out of your clothes, something phlegmy taking residence in your throat. Every minute or so, you crane your neck down the street: the primer tiles on the windows of Building 1 are doing something soft and snowy in the low fog. Even in the petri-dish isolate of Beiwan Ward, you can tell the city is quieter than usual. Something has died here.
It’s always when you give up on Deng that she finally arrives; so for a while, you don’t. You keep your own company, checking your fussy platinum wanji at regular intervals, sipping from a paper cup. You watch the Weather Bureau hand the scene off to the bluelights and the fire patrol, then pile into their nondescript and bulky veetles and disappear into the fog. You don’t recognize any of the men and women behind those visors, and they don’t recognize you. Very few people understand what YINS is to the Bureau, or the Bureau is to YINS. You’re lucky you don’t usually have to explain it.
Then you hear her roller bag clattering along the sidewalk.
“I came as soon as I heard. What happened? Where is she?” As Deng catches her breath, she takes in the damage to the ten-story dorm building at the edge of YINS. It’s far from unsalvageable — it was water, not fire — but the entire tower will need to be gutted, rewired, sprayed for mold. Already they’re carrying out ruined lengths of carpet in waterlogged rolls. “Good lord, Rui, Mona did all this?”
“Not just her, no. When it died, Anemone Pop had a sizable number of YINS students in its grasp. You can think of this as a funeral rite for the Ripple. It left an enormous hole in the social fabric. It will take time to close.”
Deng huffs. You know she hates to be confronted with evidence, however indirect, of the Mirror Sea as anything other than pretty pictures on big screens. She hates your cutesy little codenames for the traitorous Ripples you summon from the silt. But you don’t press the issue, because maybe, maybe this time...
“So is she in some kind of trouble?” Deng takes a seat and begins to bang her shoe on the bench between you, dislodging a small rock. “I mean, with your people? Over this?”
All morning you’ve been telling yourself that you need to come clean to Deng. And Captain Ma, for once in his whole bull-headed life, he agrees with you. He says that dragging this out will make it exponentially worse — and to you, this sentence conjured an image of Deng in an lecture hall, putting chalk to board, drawing an unpleasant, shrieking curve. You haven’t decided how to broach it. You evade.
“No. She’s not in trouble.”
“But you are holding her.”
“We’re keeping her at a facility off campus for a few days of monitoring.” This displeases Deng, so you run your mouth, let too much slip. “We’re giving her the in-house linearization protocol and as gentle a comedown as we know how to manage. For all intents and purposes, we’re treating her like a member of Weather Bureau staff.”
Her eyes narrow. “Why?”
“Usually you’d tell me you don’t want to know.”
“Usually you don’t have my student in your custody.”
Your mouth opens. And this next part, it never quite got remembered correctly. You must have suppressed whatever it is Deng shouts at you, when you admit that I, Mona, unwittingly provided your latest weapon against Epsilon City. Mostly you register an acute fear of the bottom part of her right shoe, and I feel my tilespace ringing. When the memory recoheres, you’ve moved down the street. People are staring.
“So you sent Cai Yuhui to her for an inversion. Ten times. You knew that Mona would use the Bridge.”
“We hoped. We hoped, is all. She has a real knack for it.”
“And you, what, you recorded it?”
You hate how psychotic it sounds, retold from beginning to end. You try believing it at arm’s length, but that’s even worse — because then what has it all been for? It infuriates you, the gentle skepticism on Deng’s face when you explain with a patient frankness that the Ripples are once again building in the Mirror Sea. And who taught them how to do that? You want to shake the answer out of her.
“The hyperlagmites. Rui, aren’t you making a goddamn movie about the hyperlagmites?”
“That’s a plant. It’s three hours of nothing. We’re trying to draw oxygen away from it.”
You wish she’d tip her hand, just once. You’re playing with fire, Rui. You don’t understand the forces you’re interfering with. Something like that. Instead, she slides off the bench. “As usual, none of that makes any sense to me. If you think what people are seeing in the Mirror Sea is actually Tenfold Gate debris, you might want to have your own head checked.”
And you wonder if you, too, could just walk away.