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

5 // Decline to Say

There was no Neikotic Safety clinic at YINS until the year I arrived. So how it already seems so timelessly dingy downstairs beggars belief. Someone had to choose these low ceilings, this distressingly creamy paint color, these oddly faithful LED simulacra of fluorescent bulbs. It was presumably someone else who then decided to deck it out like a Palo Alto strip-mall spa, with bonsai plants, little self-contained waterfalls, and beaded curtains where in my opinion there should be doors. Dr. Deng has nicked half a dozen salt lamps from down here — first for her office and later, I suspect, as last-minute birthday gifts — and yet more continue to appear. Sunk deep into a fat couch in the lounge one day, Yao finally figured it out: the instructions had, naturally, been to decorate for a psychedelic therapy clinic.

On the wall of the waiting room is a faux-neon tangle of lines which can be lit individually to present a surprising variety of truisms in caoshu calligraphy. Today’s is, essentially, count your blessings. And underneath, each sulking in a different corner of the room, are three neikonauts — perhaps one more than we treat on an average day. I recognize that stare that can’t quite focus, the way their cheeks twitch involuntarily; I try to make eye contact and they can’t quite lock on. So I cast a not-so-subtle glance at their puffy vests, their lanyards, and their messenger bags. Each of them, somewhere, bears the stylized-lock insignia of Suowei Financial.

I wave tentatively as I weave between them — “Hello!” — and receive a disheartening chorus of low groans in response. Around the corner and through one of the damnable beaded curtains, is Yao Tongduan, tending to yet another Suowei employee. The tiles pulsing violently on the monitor show him repeatedly entering and exiting loop-lock. Yao is throwing every inversion in the book at him, and once every five seconds the scanner makes a delightful zwoop! These make the neikonaut’s legs dangle and dance, but are otherwise ineffective.

“Vest types,” I note mildly to Yao by way of a greeting. I’m starting to feel like I’ve been here before.

“Oh, po ge dan, Mona. Can you work another miracle?”

“You’re doing shifts yourself already?” I ask, impressed, and also deflecting the question of whether I’m ready to break out the Deng Bridge — ahem — the prototype, right this minute.

“Dr. Rui’s on the clock too. But you know how the profs are. They stop by, they sign the log, they leave.”

In fact, Dr. Deng has not even deigned to visit the Neikotic Safety clinic in several months, and there are empty grid squares where her name should be. I try to imagine what she’d say in this situation, aside from something about Suowei’s horrendously, acrobatically unsafe fork of the Loop-Lock Virtual Machine that does away with all of her patches.

“Well, okay. Have you done intake? What were they working with?”

I don’t know/decline to say. All of ‘em.” Our most hated checkbox on the intake form. But retaining memories from loop-lock is so hard that this option is probably checked more than any other. I make a disappointed little pfft sound, but Yao looks oddly, almost conspiratorially, delighted.

“What?” I ask, suddenly very curious.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he says, in his isn’t-it-obvious voice. “For one thing, why do you suppose they’re not at Suowei’s own clinic? With the gold trim and the cucumber water? They could be in and out with a fire-cupping to boot, but they trekked up here instead. It’s not I don’t know, Xu xuejie, it’s decline to say!

Annoyingly, it is obvious. “They’re using something way off the Suowei playbook, huh.” I lower my voice, though our patient couldn’t possibly hear us. “Something black-market, something their managers would never approve of.”

“They’re passing proprietary trades through some ten-ping egg from a Plaza 66 discount bin,” Yao snickers, his imagination running a little wild. “Look at them out there. They all look guilty as hell! Won’t even look at each other!”

This I had also noticed. Out there in the waiting room they’re spaced as far from each other as possible.

“So...” he intones, glancing at the closet where we keep the Bridge. “You wanna get in there?”

Yes, desperately. But not as badly as I want to stay on Deng’s good side.

“I dunno, man. I’m still a little loopy from last week.”

“You think I...” he begins, sounding overtly casual.

“Oh, hell no.” Even Fresh Start Deng will flay me alive if I start training undergrads on the Bridge. My thoughts linger on Mbetethi Okeme, who absconded without telling us anything about the algorithm that got him in hot water. I could totally see him trying out a mystery-box egg from Plaza 66. Maybe even selling them. I snap my gum thoughtfully. “Mind if I take the wheel here?”

Yao lends me his chair. I tap my card to retrieve an enigmatic folder in my home directory called One-Offs. Of its fifty-odd entries, the latest is just a few days old and bears Mbetethi’s name. I didn’t know what else to call it.

“These are...” Yao begins.

“One-offs, I know.” A loading bar grinds away. “But I’ve got a hunch.”

A recording of Mbetethi’s loop-lock session appears. I click through a cascade of beige dialog boxes. Inspect. Isolate. Bandpass. I slap my own Kasibar coefficients into a text box, and a considerable amount of color onscreen is filtered away. Tools. Bicubic smoothing. Smooth (1-100).

“No kidding,” Yao mutters.

“Pick a number,” I tell him.

He thinks for a second, and picks twenty-seven. “Wait, no! Twenty-three.”

The isolated, band-passed, smoothed blob on screen is the diving-bell, the little bubble of tiles that I rode through the Deng bridge into Mbetethi’s mind. I try not to think about the fact that it’s also a Boltzmann brain, a chunk of myself that will burst into existence with a fully-formed, well, something. I frown and muck with the smoothing some more. What’s left looks passably like any of the other inversion capsules that Yao has been firing into our patient.

File. Save. File. Import. The zwoop sounds cease. A big green button appears, but for a while, I only stare at the white-hot tangle of debris on the UTMS readout. A hollow, broken, hyperspherical shell crawls all over itself, sending arc-whips into our patient’s ‘folds. There is a cheery can’t hurt! very much stuck in my throat.

“Doooo it,” Yao whispers behind me.

The inversion happens so fast, it’s only an afterimage. A tiny striped jet flashed twice in hair-thin orbits around the debris. Then it met one of its arc-whips and, starting from this extremum, simply ripped it apart. Literally, I blinked, and now it’s gone. In tilespace, a dozen frantic diagnosis threads rush into the jagged vacuum it leaves, stitching it with mauve. But my eyes are on the neikonaut in the chair: his entire body relaxes, and he lets out a groan of relief that’s frankly almost obscene.

“I think it worked,” Yao observes, poorly containing a snort of laughter.

“No kidding,” I mutter.

The debrief is not very informative for anyone. On the comedown, our patient beams at us — no, me specifically — like some kind of dorm-room freetripper. He’s got that look, head shaven, the sigils winding in tight loops down his arm, the black and billowy tentcloak I suspect he’d have trouble pitching if it came down to it. But by the time he climbs out of the chair, he’s sullen and reticent, unwilling to say anything about what neikotic techniques left this debris behind. Which is just as well, because I’m quite reluctant to say how we removed it.

“It’s proprietary,” he insists in a tone just brimming with apology and gratitude. “Am I cleared to go?”

Yao wipes down the scanner chair, and I know I should help out, but I’m almost frozen by the shock of what just happened. The inversions that the Deng Bridge produces are, as a rule, one-offs. I’ve tried this smoothing business before with no results — otherwise there’d be a paper out with my name on it, or at least a Mona-shaped hole in Deng’s wall.

Now Yao peeks at his clipboard and shouts another name into the waiting room, but the head that pokes through the beaded curtain is just older than middle-aged, with faint waves of permanent worry cresting on its brow. Dr. Rui Zhang stoops into the room, looking a little too tall for the clinic’s doors, and also for the midnight-purple YINS tracksuit pulled taut to his wrists. He looks, as he always does, surprised by something in the middle distance that no one else can quite make out.

“Oh! Dr. Rui!”

“Yao tongxue,” he regards our young Yao somewhat airily, fishing for a pen in his waist pack. “And Xu as well. You know there’s no overtime pay, right?” He chuckles to himself. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“She came down to help with a new inversion,” Yao explains, and I do rather think he’s beaming at me, his senior classmate.

“Is that so?” Rui looks up from the logbook, glances at the closet where the Deng Bridge is stowed, and then back to me. I give him a smile like a shrug. “Mind if I take a peek?”

The next Suowei employee finds her way in, bumping into walls. She arrived complaining of intensely painful golden light at center of being due to don’t know/decline to say. We cluster into the control bank, wondering if what just happened was a fluke or something more. It takes longer this time, almost thirty seconds, but my new inversion binds flawlessly. Rui peers at its spectrum, making little hrmm noises, oblivious to the patient we help out of the chair. “So is this some clever trick with Lam fibration?” He clicks his pen in my direction, and, caught in his headlights, I can only stare. “Ah, quite right, that wouldn’t....” He mumbles. “Temporal smearing in the binding graph preimage, perhaps?”

Using none of those words, I recount the story of where the inversion came from. Rui’s eyebrows flee, caterpillar-like, up his forehead in surprise. Here I grasp for details of what I actually did in loop-lock, which only serves to stir them further in my memory.

“But you’ve tried that, right? And it’s never worked before. “ Then, as though rearranging the sentence might dispel the mystery, he declares, “Never before has that worked. Deng won’t be happy to hear that old box has a new lease on life, I can say that much. So it was the temporal smearing, then?”

“I...well, no!” The idea of Dr. Rui Zhang, the world’s foremost authority on soberware, eyeing me as a mathematical prodigy is both deeply amusing and not a ruse I can keep up for long. “It’s just something I did. I don’t really know how.”

But he smiles wryly. “You know, Lam herself used to say something similar. Math is what happens in the moment. Don’t sell yourself quite as short as that.” It looks like he wants to say something else here — the worst part of me is hoping for a dig at Dr. Deng — but then he thinks better of it. “I think that between you and Mr. Yao, the situation here is under control. But, interesting...interesting...”

As Rui hastens off in a kind of speed-walk, Yao turns to me and mutters: “could have applications to soberware.” 

It’s not Dr. Rui’s fault that his whole subfield is the butt of one of YINS’ favorite jokes. I mean, okay, it kind of is. Maybe he shouldn’t have stood up and asked about applications to soberware at so many guest lectures and thesis defenses. Yet I have a vague sense that the undergrads aren’t allowed to find it funny. I’m about to insist to Yao with a half-straight face: That man is a luminary! But then our next patient loses his balance, grabs for one of the curtains, and sends a hailstorm of rainbow-colored voxelite beads clattering to the floor.

So I hand him the reins, and take to sweeping beads out from under the EASL arrays, coolant reserves, and the tryptamine cabinet. From the corner of my eye I can see a few new sullen, stubbly heads bobbing in the waiting room. “Isn’t it weird,” I ask once we’ve shot our next patient into higher dimensions, “how they’re all sat so far apart from one another? Are they scared they’ll be seen by someone on their team?”

“Suowei is ruthless,” Yao replies, sounding more awed than scared. “I’ve heard they set up these honeypots. They stash unclaimed ping at internal addresses you can only see if you turn off their tileguide. They leave juicy-looking eggs in the cafeteria fridges that burn up your neikotic channels for weeks. That kind of thing. And they make you sign the ping chain with an admission of guilt on your way out, otherwise you get fucked by their Bloom filters forever.” 

His theory goes out the window when the next patient turns out to work for Paracoin.

After lunch, I’m supposed to attend a seminar on Causal Dipole Manipulation via Ephaptic Coupling: The Neural Basis for Loop-Lock. But, fun though it sounds, my curiosity gets the better of me. Instead I spend the afternoon reviewing intake forms, calling out names, and swabbing temples with electrode gel. If they all had the same symptoms, I’d probably let it go. But each of them presents with something completely different. And yet my inversion works on all of them.

Case study: Wang Yi, age twenty-three. Employer, Suowei Financial. Presents with —

“Y’know when you have unreachable rollups after using Tenfold Gate? It feels kinda like that. Tingly, tingly in my fingers.” He grits his teeth through what sounds like a very unpleasant sensation. “And my toes.”

He’s actually wearing the purple-and-gold Suowei neikosuit under his dress shirt and chinos, and looks a little disappointed when, starting to undress, we tell him the inversion will only take a few minutes.

Cause of debris: unknown/decline to say — “It’s my second day at this job,” he pleads.

After each run, the diving-bell quietly drops a .vxl file into my home directory. I peek at what was collected from Wang’s mind: a corkscrew bolus, a pasta shape from the forever realms. Structurally it scarcely resembles what I extracted from Mbetethi, but it has the same onyx-and-gold sheen. And when I look at it, I feel the same crawling, grabbing spiraling texture behind my eyes.

Case study: Gu Xiangyu, age twenty-nine. Employer, Chaoyue Labs. Presents with —

Auuguh chumoo geryoou...”

This is a serious case, as bad as Mbetethi’s. Her hand shakes as she fills out the form, her expression desperate and pleading. We let her skip all the checkboxes and bring her to the front of the line. But five minutes later, she barely bothers to look at us. “I really can’t tell you anything,” she insists, pulling on a heavy black overcoat against the warm September sun. “I’d expect that you hear that every day.”

Her debris is in a classic, even stereotypical shape: a jagged rectilinear pileup, dense with crystalline lines. But the texture and color mark it as a byproduct of the same mysterious algorithm. I limit myself to a peek at each of these, and force myself not to wonder how they’d look in voxelite. How I ought to categorize them.

Case study: Bui Thien An, age twenty-five. Employer, Paracoin Technologies Limited...

By midafternoon, the last of them is gone. Yao peers into the minifridge and lobs a Tsingtao at me.

“So this is good for at least an acknowledgement, right?”

I’m a little distracted by the salt lamp casting dim orange light from the lounge end-table. It’s hard not to see it as a chunk of neikotic debris, and to wonder what it would feel like to have it lodged, dull and bulbous and a little sharp, into my unconscious mind. “Whaddaya mean?” I respond, after a pause.

“I mean your paper, Mona.” He sounds half deferential, half astounded by my boneheadedness. “The one that you’re gonna write about this new class of debris, and your amazing new inversion for it? Thanks also to my trusted pal Yao Tongduan?

A paper hadn’t occurred to me at all, and a sort of chibi Dr. Deng appears in my mind to hector me for this. “I...well, yeah! I don’t see why not. Only we’d need to be able to infer something about the egg that produced it.”

“I oughta be able to...” Yao muses. Prodding his rollscroll, he peruses the fingerprints of the debris we removed: spectra, and eigenvalues, and impulse responses — but never, I notice, an actual model of the debris itself. “I mean, I’d better, with my exam on Thursday...” He gradually falls silent, takes a long sip from his Tsingtao, and sighs.