Dr. Ren’s office is just down the hall from Deng’s, but I’ve never had so much as a peek inside. Twin floor lamps leak warm light into the hall. The shelves ringing the room are loaded down with glassware, in shocking amounts, so many flasks and beakers and tubes that it’s not even funny, so many more that it’s funny again. Some I can half-name from chem lab. Many more are of singular shape and inscrutable purpose, the whiff of neikotics about them.

Neikotics is a young person’s game, and in his stilted way Ren tends to play it so. He shoots around on the university courts, lets himself get crossed up by guys half his age. He intersperses his lecture slides with k-hop gifs. But now I see him in his element — dark wood, warm lighting, puttering around in suspenders — and his element makes him look comfortable in old age. He was Deng’s supervisor at Fudan, maybe? Which would make him, what, sixty, sixty-five?

The brusque, businesslike Ren from this afternoon is gone. His face is going through one of its reboot cycles, all blinks and nods, and he doesn’t try to hide it. “Nerves,” he explains. “I was worried about what you might try.”

“You were watching me?”

He smiles that off. “As the Neikotic Safety chair, they tend to give me a call up at the fab when somebody prints about a hundred pieces of neikotic debris.”

“But you knew I was up to something.”

“Something warm to drink? Let me guess, Deng has you hooked on her chamomile?”

My wanji says quarter to three in the morning. “An espresso?”

“Two espressos,” he shouts to a little machine on the back shelves, where my eyes keep wandering. In a hurry, he adds: “decaf.” In hundreds of reflections, his twin floor lamps gleam back like a pair of tiny golden eyes. Ren doesn’t seem to mind that I’m distracted by it all; to the contrary, so is he. His gaze darts all over before finally meeting mine.

“We’re all up to something. I felt it was better not to interfere, but also that it was probably better not to leave you alone on the floor.”

I shrug. I can’t really blame him.

“Your work with this debris is very, very stupid. I don’t think I need to tell you that. Instead I feel the need to remind you that there is no rule against it. That others may even share in the curiosity you think you conceal so well. Sometimes the only difference between reckless experimentation and cutting-edge research is, well, a friend.”

“I don’t know if I follow,” I reply, sounding miserably tired.

“I’m talking about soberware, Mona.” He gestures expansively at his hoarded glassware, which despite and/or because of his gravity almost makes me burst out laughing. “The study of which was born from the discovery of neikotic debris. If such constructs can linger in the sober mind, surely we can put them to good use! It excited us all greatly in the start, and — well, all these years later, it still excites me.”

I nod politely, wondering just what it is that Ren Yi does here all day. There is a certain type of professor whose one good idea has financed twenty years of bad ones. His good idea was pilfering Deng’s blueprints, and his bad idea is soberware; and progress on soberware has been, to put it politely, slow. State of the art is still that one viral video from a few years back, of a postdoc reading QR codes with his own bare eyeballs as he sips on a tryptamine pen. That’s what really throws people off. It’s right there in the name: it’s supposed to stick around after loop-lock and work while you’re sober. But they’re not there yet, not even close.

The machine behind us quits whirring.

“I shouldn’t, but I want to show you something. Consider it an apology.” Dr. Ren hands me a steaming glass doodad of espresso with one hand, rifling through his desk with the other. Produces a twisted voxelite something, smooth where mine are jagged, the shape of charred redwood and the color of cotton candy. There’s a hunched-over, furrowed lapse while he examines angles I probably can’t see, and then he peers up at me with a small, unplaceable smile. “Give me an expression. A chengyu. Any will do.”

I was not expecting this unpleasant callback to my least favorite part of Chinese school, or I might have brushed up. I give him one everyone knows. “San ren cheng hu.” Three people make a tiger.

“Nineteen.” Ren smiles. “Another.”

“Li bu cong xin.” I learned this one from Dr. Deng.

“Fourteen. Another. Dig deeper now.”

“Yi cu er jiu.” This one has a character I don’t even know all the strokes for. Which I suspect is what he’s after.

“Thirty-eight. Now really lay it on me. Give me any passage, as long as you like.”

“Shui shan li, wan-wu er bu zheng.” Somehow it’s Deng’s old recitations from my first months of neikonaut training that are springing to mind. “Chu zhong ren zhi suo wu, gu ji yu dao.”

“One hundred and ten.” Ren looks delighted with himself. “Have you seen that old drama, Zai Ye Bie Xia Yu? Actually — it’s based on an older American movie called Rain Man.”

With a bizarre flash of insight, I realize what Ren is doing. I draw Chinese characters in the air with my fingers, counting the strokes they make, checking his work. “You’re kidding me.”

“If you think so, then try me again.” He leans forward, rapping the desk with a fountain pen between his fingers. “Ordinarily, if you asked me to count the number of strokes in a piece of text, I’d do it in sequence. I’d picture every character, mentally draw them out in turn, and then sum the strokes in my head. But this, properly pondered, it anneals those mental pathways together so that it all happens in a flash.”

“So it is soberware!”

“Yes. And more often than I’d like to admit. As the supposed expert on soberware, it’s embarrassing that we’re still getting beat out by our own waste products.” He drops the debris back into his drawer with a sad little clunk. “But it also hurts terribly to use, and has any number of unpredictable effects, and so it’s also my job as the Safety chair to more or less keep this to myself. Only now I see you smoking DMT and examining debris, and now you see, and now there are two of us. So can you keep a secret?”

“From her?”

“Your advisor knows what I get up to.” This comes out nasally, as the debris has given Ren a nosebleed. “More like, from the world at large. But yes, we will have to break this to her delicately, even though it’s going to save hundreds of lives.” He plucks a tissue theatrically. “If Deng Jinghan wants to stand in your way over her own foibles, well, I’m not sure the rest of the neikotic community is going to let her. Not this time.”

“Why is she...?”

“Why is she like this?”

“You said it, not me.”

Ren smiles. “I have a sense. And I’ll tell you what I can. I owe my start to her, you know. Back at Fudan I was a lowly neurologist working with a horrifyingly cumbersome MRI machine, before she pulled me onto that original loop-lock grant. We had a single UTMS rig the size of a tank. Deng was fresh out of the Navy, nosing around for military applications, and don’t doubt me when I say she worked out about half of the fundamentals with her right hand, and the other half with her left. People say she came back to rest on her laurels at YINS, and that’d be a real shame. But they also say she’s earned it. Do you know who coined the term neikongren?” 

He smiles, raises his eyebrows, and accelerates past the question.

“It was secretive, back then, so secretive. Students were earning doctorates on the project who didn’t even know that psychedelic drugs were involved, and don’t give me that look! You couldn’t exactly get tryptamine pods at Easy Joy in those days. Circles within circles. Deng had the money, and the connections, and the mandate — and she sat in a circle of her own, at the dead center, building her Bridge. It wasn’t clear that anyone could help, not that she was offering. We got promises of a demonstration, then half-hearted memos, then glimpses through frosted glass. She turned farther and farther inward. She stopped coming to department meetings. We lost track of her entirely in the chaos with Xia and Blue Delta. Months later we learned she’d slipped overseas.”

I can’t even remember the full sequence of Deng’s subsequent stints: Tokyo, Oxford, Göttingen, mumble mumble mumble, and eventually Stanford. But there’s something completely unsatisfying about Ren’s explanation: basically, I knew all this already.

“So how did you end up with the plans for the Bridge?” I ask, a little frustrated, a little amused, trying to read the answer off his expression. “What, she hurt herself somehow? Is this why she won’t go into loop-lock anymore?”

“Well, nobody doubted that Deng would test the machine on herself. But the thing about the Deng Bridge, the irony of the whole ordeal, is that you can’t truly test it alone.” Dr. Ren has apparently been waiting for his espresso to cool to this precise temperature; he downs it now in an extended slurp. “She gave them to me, Mona. I woke up one morning and found a proverbial bundle on my proverbial doorstep. What was I supposed to do?”

I wait for more, and when it’s not forthcoming, I find myself stifling a yawn. “That’s the story?”

“Well.” Ren stretches his long limbs, letting his own yawn loose. “Some people came out of those early days unscathed, and plenty more didn’t. Only, most of those names aren’t in textbooks. It’s enough for you to understand. The rest is for her to divulge.”

I want to protest, but Ren is already standing to see me out.

“You frighten her, you know. And this is a woman who, between us, terrifies me.”

I smirk. “Yeah?”

“Playing with her discarded toys, retracing her steps through all the messy parts, oh, absolutely. She still doesn’t know what to make of you. But she wants to. Let her in, let her let you in, is my advice, not that you’re asking. Publish together. Enjoy this. Once your work is out there, things are going to change, fast.”

“Thanks, I — I appreciate that. Good night, Dr. Ren.”

He stands there in the doorframe, clearly with more to say, and it’s not until I turn away that he actually gets it out of his mouth. “But,” he intones, under the low hum of the Safety floor’s ductwork. “If you’re not getting the support you need from her, you can always come to me.”