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. Anemic, shifty, out of place. Dressed almost conspicuously nice, like in their one button-down, body sprays intermingling. They will not look at each other; they can’t quite lock on. I wave tentatively — “Hello!” — as I weave between them. I get some shuffled feet in response.

Around the corner and through one of the damnable beaded curtains is Yao Dongyuan. He’s in one scanner, a patient is in another, and the Deng Bridge is already humming between them. The patient’s already in loop-lock. The computer’s 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. Yao’s fixing to tile in with him. I slide into the room just as he’s pulling down the visor hood.

“Oh, po ge dan, Mona.” Yao looks tremendously relieved not to be going through with this. “Can you work another miracle?”

“All by yourself?”And hey — my first time using the Bridge was exactly this reckless, so I layer on just the tiniest amount of disapproval. “Where’s...who is it today? Dr. Ren?”

“Being a prof. 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. Probably that none of this would happen if these people stopped stripping her improvements from the Loop-Lock Virtual Machine.

Yao slides out of the scanner and offers it to me with a flourish, and the unspoken suggestion that perhaps none of this ever happened. But I don’t take his place. “I’ve got something to try.” 

We hunker at the control bank. I want to explain where I’ve been, the idea that the egg left behind in my mind this morning — to lay out the tracks I spent all day following. But it’s easier just to show him. I invite him to fill the silence. “So who are these guys? Vest types?”

“Sure.” He doesn’t, though. He’s watching me peck away at the terminal, clearly curious.

“Haojie?”

He shakes his head sagely. “If so, then why not their own clinic? With the gold trim and the cucumber water? He could be in and out with a fire cupping to boot. But I’ll you what...” And here he lowers his voice. “It looks just like the other day.”

“Which we know nothing about.”

From the corner of my eye I see him wink. “Which we know nothing about.”

I tap my card to retrieve an enigmatic folder in my fileserve called One-Offs. Of its dozens of entries, the latest is just a few days old and bears Mallochi’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 Mallochi’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 Mallochi’s mind. The knot at the base of my throat is about the fact that it’s also a Boltzmann brain, a chunk of self-contained agency that will burst into existence with a fully-formed, well, something. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll know. And if it does work, it would relieve a lot of people from a lot of pain. Among other things. It’s not me. It’s my work. Conflating the two is how you never finish your PhD.

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 gyre of debris on the UTMS readout. 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 bobbing jelly bean of a thing appeared on one monitor, on the outskirts of the patient’s mind. Before I could get a lock on it, it flickered one screen over, flashed twice in hair-thin orbits around the swirl of debris. Then it disappeared inside, and literally, I blinked, and now about a third of the debris is gone. Supine in the scanner, our patient lets out a groan that’s frankly almost obscene.

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

“No kidding,” I mutter. Although most of the debris is still there, and I swear I can already see it growing back.

“Hit it again?”

In tilespace, a dozen frantic diagnosis threads have rushed into the jagged vacuum left by the debris, stitching it with teal. I press the button again: another orbit, another purple flash, another bite out of the debris. Another. And another. The debris never exactly disappears. But after eight attempts, it’s a quarter of its original size. The last few diving-bells I fire all miss completely. They can’t seem to invert away the last little kernel.

Yao’s watching me, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. I still have one eye on the screen. Wonder where, if anywhere, those diving-bells went.

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.

“We couldn’t get all of it,” I warn him. “It’s still eating you up in there, and it’s going to get bigger again. You’ll need to come back, maybe in a few weeks, and let us run this again.”

“You’d really be helping us out,” Yao adds, “if you could tell us what that was. This being an Institute of Studies and all.”

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

Which is just as well, because I’m just as reluctant to say how we removed it.

It happens again. And again. And again. I’m not even meant to be down here, realize — there’s a lunchtime seminar on ephaptic coupling I just got off the waitlist for. But more sullen, stubbly heads keep trickling in. A few of them are YINS students with pedestrian problems. There’s two undergrads that both ate it on the same problem set, and a Caltech refugee who needs to be talked through a benzo taper. But increasingly, they’re competing with:

“Don’t know/decline to say,” Yao reads off. Our most hated checkbox on the intake form. “Another one.”

I grimace at the pulsating model of the diving-bell on Yao’s monitor, and swallow a penance. “Okay. Let it rip.”

“Let what rip?”

Not stubbly, this next head — bald to a shine. Dr. Ren Yi stoops in, looking a little too tall for the clinic’s doors, and also for the midnight-purple YINS tracksuit pulled taut to his wrists. My heart sinks when I see him, and then rises, and then finds its level. On one hand, I’m not ready to explain this to him. At all. On the other hand, maybe he can help me explain this to Deng. In short order, I’ve given her exactly what she wants from me: a reproducible inversion. But I’ve done it with the Bridge.

“I’m late. Sorry. I’m late, I’m late.” Dr. Ren scribbles experimentally along the logbook, finds the pen lacking, and starts fishing the nearest drawer for another. “Yao tongxue, pen?”

Three years into this, professors knowing you by name mostly just feels like being hunted for sport. But it makes Yao perk up, and start digging through his waist pack. He does not have a pen, but what about a sharpie. He glances back at me, eyebrows aloft, wiggling of their own accord. They’re only starting to learn what half a lifetime of loop-lock does to a person.

“And Mona Xu. We don’t pay overtime, you know that, right?” Ren chuckles. “But always a welcome presence.”

“Mona has a. Wait, no, you say it.”

“A reproducible inversion.” I try — I always try — to match Ren’s odd, untethered flavor of good cheer. I figure that the man has fallen upwards for so many decades that whatever he’s doing must be worth a shot. “Or the beginnings of one. Maybe.”

What happens after half a lifetime of loop-lock is that your system accumulates all these little tics, twists them right into the wiring that transmits hunger, or arousal, or in this case, surprise. The slightest smile sends Ren’s whole face through a kind of test cycle involving involuntary little tongue-clicks and an underdamped oscillation of his wispy mustache by the muscles behind his right nostril.

“Interesting. Interesting.” This is probably the sixth or seventh time that it’s happened today, and Ren plows right through it. “An inversion for what?”

“We think it’s —” Yao starts. Behind the control bank, I step on his foot.

“Something going around the seedier firms. Lone wolves. Some ten-ping egg from a Plaza 66 discount bin.”

Ren glances sideways at the Deng Bridge, and then back to me. I give him a smile like a shrug. “Come see.”

Our next patient arrived bumping into walls, and complains now of intensely painful golden light at center of being due to don’t know/decline to say. Ren, Yao, and I cluster around the monitors as a quick volley of ten diving-bells dispatches about two-thirds of the debris. Ren peers at the inversion’s spectrum, making little hrmm noises, oblivious to the patient in the chair. “Is this some clever trick with Lam fibration?” He waves the Sharpie direction, and, caught in his headlights, I can only stare. “Ah, quite right, that wouldn’t....” Smacking his lips. “Temporal smearing in the binding graph preimage, perhaps?”

Using none of those words, I recount the story of where the inversion came from. Yao beams and Ren frowns as I grasp for details of what I actually did in loop-lock, which only serves to stir them further in my memory.  “I mean, is this supposed to work?” 

Knowing, behind the question, what I’m really asking Dr. Ren. This is the man who Deng credits the Deng Bridge to, and her words hang in a sour cloud between us. Ren and his team had some of my notes...an offhand memo...a dubious honor. That kind of thing. And, like, did he steal the blueprints from her? Did she leave them behind and hope he would slap his own name on the Bridge? Everyone in the field has a theory, probably even Yao has a theory. They pull me aside a conference happy hours and walk away crestfallen when I tell them that, even from my epicentral vantage point, I have absolutely no fucking idea.

“Well,” Dr. Ren begins. “Hmm. Of course we’ve tried replaying inversions before. Smoothing them, even.” And he’s got his own role to play here. It’s not his own invention, of course not — but he is the expert, in some ways. The holder of the golden ticket. And the Neikotic Safety department chair too, freed and funded for his latest wild goose chase, in no small part owing. “Which probably just means...”

“Their debris is unusually similar?”

“What I was going to say is that you’ve imbued it with real intelligence.”

I don’t know if I like the sound of that. And besides, the idea of the world 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, briefly. “You know, your advisor herself used to say something similar. Math is what happens in the moment. Don’t sell yourself quite so short.” It looks like he wants to say something else here, and the worst part of me is hoping for a dig at Dr. Deng. But he thinks better of it. “Do you have this under control?”

My I guess we do, yeah overlaps with Yao’s yes, sir.

“You’ll page me if anything comes up?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I have every confidence in your abilities, but by the book I’m still shift lead, okay?”

“Absolutely, Dr. Ren.”

As Ren hastens off in a kind of speed-walk, Yao — suddenly cool about it — turns to me and mutters: “could have applications to soberware.”

It’s not Dr. Ren’s fault that his adopted 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 the next patient loses their balance, grabs for where a doorknob should be, and scatters a hailstorm of voxelite beads across the floor.

When the last of the patients is gone, Yao peers into the mini-fridge 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. “You know how rare a reproducible inversion is. I mean, there’s the Fat Five, broad spectrum, and right now in NS-203 we’re learning about some of the more specialized ones, but you know...thanks also to my trusted pal Yao Dongyuan?”

Twelve patients. My inversion worked on all of them. I’m long past wondering, secretly even hoping, that this was a fluke. “Well, I’d like a paper. But I’d like it to really work, you know? If we’re shrinking the debris without killing it, it’s only a band-aid.”

“You sound like Deng.” Yao smirks from behind his Tsingtao, toeing the line.

“...and, ideally, I’d like to know something about the debris itself.”

“Now you sound like you.” He gives me a look. We both know we think we have on our hands. I don’t know if we’re ready for it to be true. Yao prods at his rollscroll; he’s supposed to be studying, but instead he’s perusing the mathematical fingerprints of the debris we’ve been removing. “You were right, earlier. It all looks the same. I swear to god, it all looks like it would fit together.”

“I know.” I pull myself off the couch and put down the rest of my beer. “I saw.”

I shouldn’t be thinking about the Mirror Sea at all. They gave me pills to take if I start.