This is an early, partial draft of Upon the Mirror Sea. A new one is coming.

18 // Causal Incursion

There is a commotion brewing outside the Dong’an metro station the next day as I’m heading to campus. Redlights and bluelights came to placate the crowd, but of course now they’re bickering with each other: a xiangsheng self-parody of relations between the wards and Blue Delta. The gate attendants look on haplessly from behind reinforced glass.

“They’re fucking with the ping again,” someone finally explains to me, waving their wallet app in my face. “It’s my mother-in-law’s birthday and they’re fucking with the ping.”

They are Suowei, Paracoin, and Chaoyue, the together-issuers of the parallel yuan. In Shanghai we call them the Big Three; up close, their relationship looks like an anvils-and-dynamite rivalry, which half-functions as checks and balances on the ping. But the rest of the world calls them the trident. From a distance they look fearsomely united, wielding Shanghai’s currency as a weapon. They de-pegged it from the Chinese yuan at the crack of dawn with a series of massive trades. Now its value is oscillating wildly. Every last drop of liquidity is in their firehoses. Unlubricated, the network of L2 chains governing ward entry tokens has ground to a halt. The subway gates aren’t letting anyone in or out.

“It looks like they’re going after Beijing,” speculates an auntie with a yoga mat under her arm and a fearsome, subscription-quality trader’s dashboard on her rollscroll. “They’re trying to reverse the peg.”

The pingxingyuan, the parallel yuan, has its value pegged to the regular yuan. It’s the Chinese economy’s parasitic, high-noon shadow. It slips into all the cracks in forex and treasuries and loans where China’s currency is supposed to go. It’s just a little more liquid, it settles just a little faster, its rates just a little lower. Same great taste, fewer calories: it does Shanghai’s bidding by staying well-behaved. But once in a while the Big Three go on offensive. Their massive trades are made of countless, tiny oscillations: they’ll be watching carefully to see which frequencies they can make the Chinese yuan vibrate at, and amplifying the instruments that carry those waves. The shadow is trying to make its master dance.

“Just let us onto the goddamn train,” shouts another one of my neighbors.

Eventually they do, and eventually I make it to YINS. The school is in rapture and classes are essentially cancelled. Shanghai’s best and brightest neikonauts are on the battlefield, stinging Beijing with trade after trade from loop-lock. Some students will be watching from a UTMS bed, hoping to glean subtleties of this financial warfare that elude us in soberspace. More of us are watching in darkened lecture halls. I slip into a back row. The boards are tuned to dazzling and incomprehensible visualizations of the trade flow. What I can say for sure is that Shanghai is blue and Beijing is red. But if you squint, and periodically hit your tryptamine pen, you can almost make out what’s happening.

Roundabout mid-afternoon, they pull it off. The e-sports commentators chattering from the sidescreens call it: the peg is reversed, wobbling, but reversed for now. A cheer goes up around me, if not from everyone. Beijing has neikonauts too, but it’s an open secret that they still send their best and brightest to YINS. They meet my gaze, a few of them: surely we all prefer our dogfights on this bloodless and silent new horizon. But there will be fighter pilots, neikonauts themselves, on elevated alert in Suzhou and in Beijing. In Sacramento and Washington they’ll be reading the wind for scraps of what’s happening. The loose joints of SHCA-MASA will flex: Beijing and Washington will find themselves on the same side of this — which, though no serious person in either place would ever admit, is kind of the point.

I’ve been entranced by this welcome distraction. It’s only in the evening that I stop to consider what it all implies. Onscreen I watch reporters hassling traders, panting and toweling off, as they exit the Suowei Tower. Their camballs buzz the upper floors, shot down, raining onto a terrified crowd. “Why today?” A streamer with a press pass shouts at a neikosuited Suowei employee. “What are you using?”

“It’s proprietary,” he replies, glowering.

Oh, shit.

But it isn’t proprietary, not any more. Late last evening it was posted on a storied neikotics forum, in the legendary Open Eggs thread: a .vxl file of a fairly simple golden orb. Now, this thread is legendary for a reason. Most of the eggs posted there are pranks or worse. Buttholes and cyanide capsules, or their neikotic equivalents, the immer-stuff of the anonymous web. But by now, many of the traders at the Big Three recognized this one. It circulated in secret over weeks past, this lethally precise spectral sieve. It was capable of reducing petabytes of rats-nest trading data to pure, simplified insight. They had a day, maybe, and then Beijing would have it too.

By sundown the peg is restored. Shanghai is clever, but Beijing is a giant, and they win these battles with torrential, three-gorges outflows of capital. Commentators still consider this a coup for Shanghai: you can do a lot of surgery on an economy with a two-hour causal incursion. China’s will run underclocked for a while, under diagnosis for snares and speed-bumps that Shanghai’s neikonauts have left behind.

“If we just had a Deng Bridge...” I hear one undergrad mutter to another, a Blue Delta pin on his lapel.

YINS turns its attention to the orb. The fab pumps out copies, and undergrads ponder them in threes and fours in warm-lit student lounges. I wander the halls, watching this play out in stupefied, muffled disbelief. Then the spell breaks. I make for the elevator and rush to the Neikotic Safety clinic. The entire staff seems to be downstairs. Yao is downstairs.

“The Sunflower Sieve,” he tells me, tossing me a copy of the neikotic egg. “That’s what they’re calling it.”

I have to feign a little surprise, inspecting the thing. But then again, I hardly caught a flash of it in Tethi’s hand the other night, moments before the commotion at Double Descent. He must have dropped it, I realize. He must be kicking himself. The orb is beautiful. It’s somewhere between transparent and translucent, doing something soft and inviting to light that I’ve never seen before, that I might have thought unphysical. How? How is this possible? The question is the gate to the garden path, and the answer is, precisely, the algorithm that the egg contains.

I consider the golden streaks bursting from the egg’s black and beady core. “It’s a good name.”

“No moving parts,” Yao mutters in admiration. He can’t take his eyes off it.

The Safety floor is preparing for a battle of its own. The clinic’s tryptamine cabinets are restocked, the EASL arrays shined and humming, the scanner beds disinfected. Some of our number are hatching the Sunflower Sieve egg, furtively, on some sure pretense. Dr. Rui is drafting memos about the damage we’ve already seen it do, urging caution, conjuring painful memories of Tenfold Gate. If Suowei and company are using the Sieve this way, their neikonauts surely won’t need to slink up to our clinic for the inversion. But this time tomorrow, everyone at YINS with neikotic channels will have tried it out.

In all of this, I realize, Deng is absent.

“Get ready,” Yao mutters gravely, gesturing for the egg back. “They’re coming.”

But they don’t.

I camped out in a YINS sleep pod. I treated myself to a long shower and a change of clothes from a bottom drawer. Daybreak brings me back downstairs, to disinfectant-scented anticlimax. I pass the cafeteria on the way: it’s packed with researchers coming down off all-nighters, trays loaded down, conversation low and scattered. But the clinic is emptier than it’s been in weeks. Sure, a few neikonauts have already burned themselves on the Sunflower Sieve. They arrive with ruffled hair and that thousand-yard stare, unable to pin two words together. Lucky them, that we’ve already perfected the inversion.

“What were you using the Sieve for?” we ask, reading from the intake form.

Everything. They were using it for everything. Simplifying proofs and reactor designs. Rifling through the back catalog, straightening out old formulations with clean lines and simple strokes. Later in the morning they arrive from beyond YINS: actuaries and seawall engineers. Political lackeys charged with untangling the net of rivalries and alliances holding the Ward Council together. Some of their work has already borne new, gold-flecked eggs. We have open scanner bays all day, and capacity to spare. Still, every so often comes that piercing zwoop! sound from down the hall. The birth and death of a diving-bell in the blink of an eye. Maybe it hadn’t bothered me much before, but now I have to try hard not to think about it.

With our morning freed up, the Safety floor crowds around monitors to bash refresh on the Soup: the open-access archive for the field of neikotics. It’s flooded with papers announcing applications of the Sunflower Sieve to fluid dynamics and circuit layout and game theory. Some are written by people, but gradually more of them are synthetics. These provide admirable summaries, but the actual synthesis tends to be a little gooey in the middle, and the figures are often nonsensical. We print out and paste up all the silliest ones.

That doesn’t stop anyone from setting up a script to fire thousands of synthetic papers into the Soup, and why should it? Some of the great guidestones of neikotic theory were produced in this rock-tumbler. Waldmann’s Folding Lemma was a synthetic paper, an offhand mathematician’s footnote about choice of sign that bounced blindly and abrasively off all the nonsense in the archive until its contours were clear. The computers are great at sifting these diamonds from the silt, and a synthetic paper that racks up ten thousand or so citations is usually worth at least a glance by a human being.

Yao finds me, watches these scroll by for a minute or two, and then asks me whether I have a second.

“Sure.” I slam my laptop shut, happy to be useful. “What’s up?”

“Sit with me in the waiting room.”

He picks an inconspicuous spot, behind a curtain of potted jungle plants. The neon tangle of calligraphy on the wall shifts fluidly from water droplets can penetrate a stone to three people make a tiger. I page through a pamphlet. No one’s here.

“What are we doing here, man?”

Yao clicks his pen, seemingly on edge.

Within ten minutes, though, a student arrives, clutching his head and gritting his teeth. He doesn’t see us back here. I stand to greet him; Yao hisses: “wait.”

“No one’s at the desk! Who’s front desk right now, anyway?”

“I am.”

“Well — what the fuck, Yao?”

To his credit he does look ashamed, to be pulling this shit. “Just hang back here. Five minutes. Please.” Then he preoccupies himself with his rollscroll. Our would-be patient has spotted us: he shoots us pained glances through waxy leaves, which make me wonder what he’s feeling. Maybe painful golden light at center of being? It’s very nearly the end of Yao’s allotted five minutes — I’m counting — when the doors slide open and a second neikonaut enters the room. Yao nudges my arm.

Watch,” he whispers.

The new patient settles in on the other side of the waiting area, facing the first. They ignore each other for a few minutes, but eventually one glances at the other, then at Yao and I lounging in our scrubs. His expression is an quizzical and unmistakable what the fuck, which mirrors my feelings exactly. The other patient looks up and smiles back. They have a rather information-laden and utterly silent exchange. The thrust of which is, why aren’t these assholes checking us in?

Fuck this. I stand halfway up to apologize, and then it hits me, a tilt-shift tidal wave pushing me back into my seat. It appears to me neither in my visual field nor my mind’s eye, but a third space which is cavernous, alien; and yet comforting, familiar. I have a name for this place, I realize. We all do. In it, I see two maze-like, almost cochlear fields of Sunflower Sieve debris. Their bumpy surfaces at close remove, their spiral arms extending and contracting at random. I see their probing roots make contact, and how others whip outward blind-quick to join them. I see a handshake, a protocol, an exchange, a relaxation of enormous coils of tension. All that in just an instant, and then defensive instinct kicks in. I nest blurry matryoshka domes against the vision, stemming the quadratic inrush. I don’t believe it, I don’t...

Are you seeing this? Yao swipes out a message for me on his rollscroll.

This is a real setback; this is what I sat all last night on that cushion to contain. If you’re getting flashes of the Mirror Sea sober, indoors, you’re probably pretty far gone. And that’s what it was. It was the debris, to be sure, but it was made of stoplights and umbrellas and taxis and mottled, backlit plastic signs that once said PHONE CARDS, all of that and none of it, flashing warm gold and sleek black.

“No,” I insist. I don’t know what Yao is making of these deep, regulated breaths I’m forcing myself to take, but I hope he’s getting the wrong idea.

One of them is about to leave, he types back.

I shoot to my feet, infuriated, and beeline for the clinicians’ lounge. Yao stands to follow me, and from the corner of my eye I see that, indeed, one of our patients is leaving. I expect the other will follow shortly.

Yao shuts the door behind him. All trace of anxiety or embarrassment is gone from his face; he looks utterly vindicated. “Tell me you didn’t see what just happened.”

“Oh, I saw what happened!” I snap back. Yao and I have never been anything but friendly. This is weird. “I just saw our on-duty clinician silently watch someone suffer in the waiting room until they gave up on getting treatment.”

“They don’t need treatment,” he insists. “Mona, everyone who’s coming down to the clinic today has been working in isolation for too long. What they need is a little human contact with someone else carrying the debris and then —”

And then it uncoils, relaxes, writhes pleasurably for having found more of itself. I saw! I saw!

“I’m going to write you up. I swear I will.”

“Mona, come look at these scans. Please. I’m not fucking with you.”

“I have to go. I’m meeting with Deng.” Maybe I let a drop of apology slip in there. I’m sorry, I really am, I just can’t let myself believe this. But also: “Get your shit together.”