There is a commotion brewing outside the Dong’an metro station on my way in the next morning. Redlights and bluelights arrive 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 line is spilling up the stairs and out onto the street. 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, as we huddle against the rain in the metro station’s tiny, incidental eaves. “It’s my mother-in-law’s birthday and they’re fucking with the ping.”

They are Haojie, 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 local fiscal policy. But 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. Campus is in rapture and classes are essentially cancelled. Shanghai’s best 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.

Deng is already fuming at the whiteboard when we meet. “I realized what we were doing doesn’t generalize.”

“Good morning to you too.” And I’m unnerved, sometimes, by how well she seems to tune things out. “Hey, you saw the news, right?”

“Look at our Kasibar matrix.”

“It...?”

“Take the determinant.”

“Gai si. Fuck.”

She purses her lips. Looks at me, maybe for the first time, as — not a sounding board, not a gofer, but a comrade-in-arms. “You see. It’s going to consume about a third of the debris each time, miss the rest, which is exactly the problem we already have. How we missed this...”

And so she wipes the board clean in three vivid, angry strokes. We try again. And here I am, in the very odd position of having to comfort Dr. Deng, who seems to be taking this very personally. I’ve never seen someone do math quite so...adversarially. She falls into ten-minute reveries with her hands on her head, staring past her office door, a look of final defeat on her face. Then she grimaces and picks up up the marker again.

“It’s not a fair fight,” I try to reassure her, over a long and poorly-concealed yawn. She asked that I sleep a solid eight hours — I got maybe four or five. “We don’t even have a copy of the Sunflower Sieve egg. And we’re supposed to build a defense against it blind, from down here?”

“We don’t even know it’s the Sieve,” she insists, muttering, retreading the same tangled path integral for the fourth time. She’s moving past equations into a world of pure shapes, diving-bell hulls, with a few parameters sketched around their edges. “Dr. Ren loves to blow smoke, you do know that, right? This is a cleanroom. I need facts and facts only right now.”

Onscreen I watch reporters hassling traders, panting and toweling off, as they exit the Haojie Tower. Their camballs buzz the lower floors, shot down, raining onto a terrified crowd. “Why today?” A streamer with a press pass shouts at a neikosuited Haojie employee. “What are you using?”

“It’s proprietary,” he replies, glowering. But it isn’t, not anymore. They must have gotten wind of the leak. They must know it’s forty-eight hours tops before Beijing gets ahold of it too, and they’re using it for everything it’s worth.

By the following day, the Big Three’s Sieve-addled operators are now overflowing onto the squash courts, as Dr. Ren promised they would. I spend the morning helping technicians unpack more scanners, untangling cables and running and calibrations, glad for something to do with my hands. Privately, I’m noticing a change in our patients’ behavior. They no long seem quite so cowed and doubled-over. There is a restored spring in their step. They’re gassing each other up over matcha lattes. 

“Oh, good. Just the person I was hoping to see.”

I was trying to slide unnoticed past Dr. Ren, who was just now deep in conversation with two expensively-dressed strangers loitering in the stands. They are not sipping matcha lattes. They look like everything that enters or leaves their mouth is approved by committee. Ren is trying to placate them, reassure them, or solicit something from them. But the moment he sees me, he gestures one-second and scurries my way. Fuck.

He gives me a worried nod, skips his usual bullshit, and cuts to the chase. “How’s that paper coming?”

And I give him the last answer he wants to hear. “I don’t know anymore.” Sometime last night, Dr. Deng’s manic towers of abstraction climbed too high, and I ran out of oxygen. I try fruitlessly to recount her tangled lines of reasoning. “She thinks she’s close to cracking it, though.”

Ren runs one hand over his face. The little paper cups of espresso in his other hand are stacked three high. I can tell he’s spent some quality time with this version of Deng, too. “You don’t say.”

“She’s getting...well, she’s getting a little irate. She says there’s only about two dozen people she knows who could have come up with something like this.”

This seems to confirm something Ren already suspects, the way he thumbs the bridge of his nose. “And probably half of them are higher-ups at Haojie now. Sure. It makes plenty of sense.”

I glance over at the two men loitering. “Are they...?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. They won’t say where they’re from, but in no uncertain terms they’ve made it clear what they want.” He grimaces, a practiced deliverer of bad news. “Listen. The re-derivation, your Kasibar matrices, Deng’s trips down memory lane, none of this matters. We have an inversion. You have an inversion, and right now you’re gatekeeping it from the city at large. I’m sorry to be blunt, but — we’re out of squash courts. What’s your call?”

I freeze. “You said a week. It’s barely been three days.”

“I said a week. There are now additional interests in play, and they have their own timelines. Maybe you want to go over and let them know that slow and steady wins the race?”

“What do you think about what she said?”

“About the origin of the Sieve?”

“About the inversion being a little piece of me.”

“I think she’s right, Mona.” He sighs. “But you put yourself in this situation. It was brilliant work, and you were right to do it. Does your inversion have consciousness? Does it experience pain, is that what you’re wondering? Well, it’s a disturbance in a conscious medium, same as you are, in the end. It probably does.”

“You know,” I cut him off at the end there, suddenly tilted, trying to quell an unfamiliar anger. “None of this has to be happening. Fuck these guys.” Ren’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t seem to disagree. “Nobody understands what they’re doing to the economy. Or whatever. What’s the point? Who does it help? Why should we enable them?”

“That’s a complicated question.”

“Respectfully, Dr. Ren, you’re a smart man.”

“I’ll say it again. We have a duty of care. You can call that a cop-out if you want — let me finish, please. You can tell me what you think of the domestic situation, and I’ll listen, I will. But I am warning you now that this is going to get out, one way or another. If it’s through a paper with your name on it, you get the credit. If not...”

“So, what, this is about authorship?”

“This is about control. If you release the first version, you’re in control of what happens next. If not — say it’s bribery, say it’s theft. Either way, you’re left fighting yourself from the outside.”

I fold my arms. Ren knows he’s gotten to me, but he doesn’t dig in, seems instead to find something funny at the bottom of his empty cups. “When you look at at Deng and I — the way we fight, the games we play, I bet you see two old farts with the privilege to have lost the plot. And I respect that more than you know, Mona.” 

I don’t know how I could possibly respond to that. 

“All I’m saying, maybe this is your moment to be the adult in the room.”

Whispers and speculation blow through campus. Who has it, who’s even seen it — the more anyone knows, the less they’re likely to say, but there is a finance-adjacent stratum at YINS that has certainly acquired a few copies of the Sieve. They skulk downstairs at what they hope are the casual off-hours. Every zwoop from the clinic’s beds puts me on edge. I grind myself against wave equations, then meet with Deng and confirm tersely that neither of us have made much progress on our paper, on breaking my inversion into lifeless equations for publication.

“I swear, I’m getting closer,” she tells me, with more than an edge of exhaustion around her voice. She swivels her screen around to show me a bulbous purple-and-white undulation taking shape in her graphing calculator app. The diving-bell, or something nearly so. For Deng’s part, she still seems to be having a kind of bleary-eyed fun in there. For mine — there’s a long, deeply weird moment before I realize I’m not looking in a mirror, or being accused of a crime.

“This will work?”

“I don’t know,” she says simply. “I’m not optimistic. But we have to try.”

I tell her what Ren told me.

“...He said he gives it about two days,” I conclude. “Before someone just steals it.”

“That’s just Dr. Ren,” she replies, not at all reassuring, combing her desk drawers for a hair tie. “The man has no decorum, and so he assumes no one else will, either. If anyone’s going to sell your inversion to them...”

But she won’t finish that thought.

“Just watch that you don’t let yourself get stage-managed,” she concludes instead. “In a day or two, mark my words, the dean of students is going to want to play squash, and this whole thing will mysteriously blow over. And then, we can get back to doing what we do best.”

I sling my bag over my shoulder. “Which is?”

“Math, Mona.” And she’s already back at her tablet, inputting more equations. “Check back in an hour or two. I’ll have something for you soon!”