Sunflower 1. Sunflower One.

I keep it in my pocket on the subway, but I keep running my fingers over it as though its stitched ridges might offer some essential clue. The sunflower it depicts is in full, stylized bloom. Spirals of seeds decorate the center. It all suggests some military or spacefaring origin, and I find myself searching the web for the phrase: sunflower 1. sunflower program deng jinghan. There are literally one million results on the Soup, of course, and the only way to filter out the Sieve-related stuff is to sort oldest-first, and then, nothing. I even download a copy of the Xia Zitian Papers, run some queries, my finger hanging over the search bar like a gavel.

On the other hand, maybe she wasn’t involved in anything called Sunflower at the Weather Bureau, back in the day. Except by her own admission, she was working for Xia Zitian. Probably just down the hall from where the first poor sops at the control panel discovered the Ripples in the noise. But that doesn’t mean it was her, and what was her anyway? What is this even evidence of? My head is spinning. Do I want her to be guilty? Would that explain — yes, I decide. It would explain the brick wall, the way she lets you suddenly no closer. The things off limits.

Ren had said it: I know you know far more about the Sunflower Sieve than you let on.

But so what? Is that a crime? Might she have volunteered this information to me if I had asked directly?

Of course not. But Ren had said something else, too. Exactly where to find Mallochi Okeme.

In the scant years that such a thing has been possible, Double Descent has accreted a reputation as a neikonaut bar. It did so by pioneering the benzodiazepine soda, an oh-what-the-hell last resort for candlestick cadets who spent all day in loop-lock with a Bloomberg terminal and desperately need the walls to stop moving. And for those who want the walls to start moving, tourists one step off the Bund seeking a righteously authentic place to try their first psychedelic, there are taps of guangpan and qingting nestled among the IPAs. Doled out stingily unless you know how to ask.

At the end of a long, gently-sloping service alleyway, Double Descent is both in the middle of Pudong’s dazzling finance district and conspicuously nowhere at all. It would be not just anticlimactic but laugh-out-loud funny to find Mallochi here, I figure. We’re already past the point where oddly well-lit photos of Double Descent have started to appear in Must-See Shanghai listicles, and most of the old crowd has long since scattered. But some have quite literally dug in. The venue is now at least five stories deep and counting; those who know best how many floors there are, are least likely to say.

“Two,” the bouncer decrees, after looking me over for a moment.

“Two?” All of my cool detachment disappears in an indignant puff. But I played it exactly right! From the back of the line I let a corner of my N-1 license show, betraying just a flash of its iridescence. This large man saw it and crooked his finger, summoning me past North Korean kids in spotless basketball springs, Ukrainians with phosphograft prison tattoos, and garden-variety local Ripplechasers. I felt, honestly, kind of cool. Until now.

“Two,” he confirms indifferently. “And I’m going to need to see your bag.” This I had not thought through, and I tense up as he unzips my backpack. “Kai shenme wan xiao?” he yelps when he sees what’s inside. “You trying to hurt someone with that?”

“It’s for my research. At YINS. That’s not a crime, is it?”

He zips it up with a sigh, but I sort of think I’ve gained a modicum of his respect. “Any trouble and you’re gone.” He breaks off a length of glo-band and wraps it once — twice around my arm. Not enough respect to let me down to the third floor, I suppose.

Just through the doors is the Double Descent you see in the listicles: the curving mahogany bartop, the qualia-resonance wall, the triangular pool tables. This is where they invented loop-lock, someone at the bar explains earnestly to their date. Guan Zhumi, the Haojie guy? He got the idea from the pattern of tiles in the men’s room. I make my way to the second level, past another bouncer and down a narrow stairwell. Here, at least, it’s mostly neikonauts. A few of them are grooving and spiralizing on the trance floor, creating a kind of glitchy beat that makes me want to offer them a cleaning. Many more are quietly enjoying a benzo soda — in fact, I recognize a few of them from the clinic.

“Yo...yo, it’s, it’s her from YINS.”

“Mona.”

“Mona!”

“You shouldn’t be drinking that,” I cup my hands and shout back. “You should be resting at home!”

They smile languidly and point to their ears. Too loud!

I make a quick sweep of the second floor. No line for the tile wars machine, or the zilla harness, or darts. The energy among the vest types tonight is low and tense. Late the other night, the mainland hooked its biggest research clusters up to the markets, matching Shanghai’s grey matter with its own big iron. The minds down here are exhausted, worn to the wire, still innervated with tilespace weaponry. Practicality demands that they bring it back down so they don’t have to spent time reconstructing it in loop-lock. Far too coherent now to be called debris, it hums through their quiet conversations with annealed and lubricated purpose. These are the middle decks of a war machine, and the way down is a circular elevator in the dead center of the room.

“No,” sighs the man guarding it when I approach, glaring down at my two-loop band. “Learn to count.”

I double-check the booths. Forced to concede that, whatever Dr. Ren might have implied, I doubt Mallochi would be caught dead in a place like this. If he were, he’d probably flop himself across the trance floor into the dumpster. But something stops me cold as I turn to leave. 

A little dead zone at the far end of the back bartop, respectful negative space around an altar of sorts. A picture of Cheng Qiaoling mid-laugh, strapped into that exact zilla machine I can see across the room. A handful of votive candles. A few vague words on her medical situation and a QR code for a fundraiser. Her favorite, one of the staff has scrawled on the paper, with an arrow pointing to a small bowl of hawthorn chews. Smiley face. Take one.

I don’t want a benzo soda, but I flag down the bartender and order a five-spot microdose of guangpan and a lime: bright, airy, no cross-tolerance with the work stuff. Sipping, waiting for the couple of neikonauts next to me to wrap up their conversation. Yes, it will make you see things. No, they’re not real. Yes, there is an inversion now. No, it’s from Fudan, don’t let anyone charge you for it. I grit my teeth through this blatant YINS disrespect.

“Excuse me? Excuse me, I’m so sorry, do you know this woman?”

The bartender visibly doesn’t have time for this, rocking on his heels to drop off my second five-spot. “Yeah,” he tells me, suddenly solemn. Gaze follows my finger to the picture of Cheng. “I’m picking up her shift.”

“You what?”

He gestures one-second. “Sorry, excuse me,” I hear myself shout to him now, rounding it off with a tiny burp, and this has the desired effect of making my neighbors pack up and move to a booth. “Sorry excuse me did you say that she works here?”

He ignores me long enough to set down three drinks, light them on fire, and bow coyly to scattered applause. Wheels back my way, finally. “Yeah. But, listen, she had a brain aneurysm this morning after pilates. On ice right now.” He sighs. “They’re charging her parents by the hour while they...figure it out.”

I gesture at the picture. “But she’s a neikonaut.”

“Qiaoling? No.” A weapon of a frown. “And even if she were, man, cryo is really expensive.”

My brain, I think, is making a last-ditch effort not to understand. “But her...the, you know, the hair?”

He laughs humorlessly. “Nah. She just likes the look.”

The first thing I ignored were her cutouts. No weekly buzz, ornamental beyond all practicality.

The second thing was the gas mask. It makes you look like a fighter pilot, but it also gives you acne, and most of us have a silicon port in our arms to receive the DMT drip.

The third thing. I had not just ignored it but willed it out of my field of view. Her coefficients. Seven numbers scrawled indifferently across her intake form, all of them positive and whole, like she made them up. Because she did.

Because she wasn’t a neikonaut at all. And the Sunflower Sieve found some other way into her mind.

I whip the lanyard out of my bag. My voice is doing something squeaky as I wave Mallochi’s picture in his face. “I’m sorry. That was a tangent but I’m very very sorry for your friend but I’m looking for him. Is he here? You ever see him around? I actually just need to return this license.”

He just stares at me, but I saw exactly what I was looking for in the first tenth of a second. I can feel my pulse in my teeth, barstool scraping, lights pounding red-purple-red. Cramming myself into a herd of Ripplechasers, and as one of their number makes an overt show of his friendliness with the staff, I simply cram myself invisibly into the elevator.

“Sneaking downstairs?” someone asks me as it lurches away. She’s wearing a garment covered in orange traffic-cone snailshells, with hair and nails to match. “Cool.” I smile back but have to turn away; the fixpoint pattern on her dress or robe or whatever is painful to look at. No doubt she’s hoping to get picked up on the cameras tonight.

The third floor is where Double Descent really starts to get picky about their clientele. And it sure would be nice to get a good look at who they let down here, which is why the space is low and maze-like, the walls lit only with waves of subtly off-white LED pinpricks. I duck into mirror rooms, foam rooms, scent rooms, and eventually stumble into the part that’s actually a bar. Faces in booths flash behind thick copper screens. I try casually poking my head into a few of them and hit the blank, disbelieving stares of the wealthy and influential. This works about three times before I wheel around and find two men standing right behind me.

Now, my rule for Chalkers is this: if you think a person looks like a Chalker, they’re probably not. Imagine, for instance, someone in billowing black robes and white face paint steps forward to offer you a blessing, pressing an amulet into your hands. That’s not an artifact washed from the shores of another causality — it’s got an RF entropy sponge in it, and it’s going to empty your wallet. This is sound advice on the Bund, in broad daylight. Down here, I’m a little less sure.

“You looking for something?”

The tall one is so thin, his face stretched so tightly against his skull, that he simply looks dead.

“I’m...I, uh....”

The short one, I would not generally find threatening, except for the distinct, chilling sense that his friend is the only person in the world he feels accountable to. He orbits the first man like a moon, like a bad dog on a short leash. And he barks, too, when he speaks. “We can get you so close you can taste it. Lick it. And we can leave you there if you want...” He only stops because the tall one puts a skeletal hand over his mouth.

“You’re not supposed to be down here.” The dead man points at the obvious, at my double-looped wrist. “But you came down here. What do you want?”

Suddenly it’s very clear what I’m supposed to say. “Trying to buy parts.”

“Buy parts.”

“I need a new beamformer. And some softmax arrays, and other shit.”

“You try Taobao?”

The first wave of guangpan hits, and it’s nice and shallow and wide, like there’s plenty of room to maneuver. Plenty of room for my new friends here. I hear the echo of fear in my voice, and the echo means it’s gone, and I’m smooth and symmetrical and all right. “I heard prices are reasonable here.”

The second one seems to object, seems to want to bite me, but the first one gives him a brick wall of a look. If she wants parts she wants parts. It’s not like bluelights, or redlights, or the fucking Weather Bureau care about parts. “C’mon,” he says. And he gestures at my wrist: “and lose that.”

I don’t know where I expected to be taken, but it wasn’t into the bright halogen light of the kitchen, of this utterly mundane workplace embedded behind another mysterious door. The two men — I still can’t decide if they’re Chalkers or not — greet the cooks with disarming smiles. We pass through another door, down another stairwell, into a storeroom. Just well-lit enough to read serial numbers. Twenty or thirty people are here, scattered around card tables. Mostly what they’re doing is unloading secondhand or stolen scanner components.

One of them is Mallochi.

There he is, in a makeshift corner booth, among spooled miles of fiber-optic cable. I spy him in the half-half-light behind black tarpaulin curtains, hunched in a too-small folding chair opposite a wiry neikonaut sporting a half-hood and pneumatic Rolex. An upended spool between them serves as a low table and is covered — as I suspect all surfaces in Mallochi presence quickly are — with all kinds of neikological miscellany. My general impression is of a kind of loading-dock fortune teller’s booth, which is greatly enhanced by the fact that both men are hunched over a tiny, gleaming orb. 

I don’t know how to knock on a tarp. I give it a little tug instead, and that’s when I realize there’s a third guy, must be six eight and on a diet of Russian hypertrophics, lurking behind it. He’s bald as a rock, a theme here, but somehow I doubt he’s a neikonaut. Somehow I doubt he’d fit in our scanner chair.

“Hey,” he growls, arresting me by the shoulder and pushing me a full three feet backwards along the linoleum.“Don’t you know how to knock?”

The wiry neikonaut, who is gazing at the orb in a kind of trance, doesn’t react. Mallochi looks up and squints into the dim light, sounding utterly bored. “He’s still got ten minutes.” Signals the numeral with his hand. So I post up nearby, watching two people slice open a styrolite crate of coolant tanks and offer wildly different appraisals of its contents. And not five minutes later, the big guy gives me the gentlest of tap on the shoulder. “He’s ready for you.”

“Ten thousand,” Mallochi says to the bottom of his glass when I enter. “For thirty minutes. If you are unable to hatch it in that time, go home and read Chapter 8 of K&K, and we’ll try again, half off.”

His Mandarin has a pleasant Afro-French twinge to it. Though this is the most I’ve heard him speak, I recognize a certain three-four musicality from his tiles.

“Let me see it,” I tell him. And to my surprise, still not really seeing me, he dips into a jacket pocket and tosses a grapefruit-sized orb of voxelite into the air. As it spins I get only the briefest glimpse of what’s inside — brilliant yellow jets like the sun’s rays, emanating from a black and beady core. In the same fluid motion, he catches the neikotic egg and it disappears with his hand beneath the table.

“Ten thousand ping,” he repeats. “Half an hour.”

I reach into my own bag, which our muscular friend does not like one bit, and produce Mallochi’s N-1 license. “I was hoping we could arrange something?” I’m going for listen, pal but it comes out more could I get an extension on this paper?

“I have dozens of these,” he laughs. “I —” Finally, he recognizes me. His face takes a round trip from mild surprise to pallid shock, and back again. “Dr. Xu — how did you — why —?”

“I’m not a doctor,” I grumble. “And I have something else for you, too.” I unzip my backpack and turn the contents onto the table with an extended, plasticky clatter. I imagine the scene through Mallochi’s eyes, through any neikonaut’s eyes. First he catches the glint of voxelite, of a neikotic egg, a whole pile. That alpha, that new shit. Then he realizes it’s not an egg at all, but a perversion of the concept: hundreds of shards of neikotic debris. He recoils in horror. Squeaks, even. And I find myself pinned against the table with a hand at my neck.

“It’s fine, Big Fish. It’s just voxelite. It’s fine.” But he can’t quite keep his eyes on the pile, nor look away from it. “Could you give us the room?”

The hired muscle, who I tardily realize must be Big Fish, shrugs and wanders out. I scoot forward again, my pride scraped but not dented. At this point Mallochi turns and folds his arms, conjuring detached amusement. “What kind of stupid are you, exactly? You realize this isn’t one of your poster sessions? No one is here handing out stress balls, and little clicky-clicky pens with the names of benzodiazepines?”

“That thing of yours has made my life a living hell over the last week.” Not strictly true. It’s made it more interesting. But I pronounce this so with a dramatic flair. “Do you have any idea how many people you’ve sent to my clinic? This is how you repay me for pulling that shit out of you?”

“Thank you for doing that.” He says this quite seriously, and lets it hang in the air for a moment. “How many?”

“I...I don’t know! Hundreds, at this point. Like a quarter of YINS. And who knows how many from the Big Three, who, if you haven’t been upstairs in a minute, are using it to start a fucking war with fucking Beijing!”

“I haven’t sold to that many people.” He flicks a glance down at what might be a spreadsheet, and his affect goes flat. “And I don’t sell to the Big Three.”

Of course he doesn’t. Among all of Yao’s theories I liked that one the least, and I discarded it for good the moment I heard Mallochi’s voice a second time. There isn’t a country in Africa’s federated west that one of the Big Three hasn’t tried to peel off, with varying degrees of success and catastrophe, into one of their parallel currency schemes. My guess — and it’s really nothing but —  is that I’m across the table from a refugee of the Gabonese Fork. So he didn’t sell to them, sure. And next he’s going to tell me he didn’t steal it from them, either. And what’s left?

What’s left is that they all saw it in the same place, at the same time.

“The daughter algorithms produce exactly the same kind of debris.” I draw loops on the table with my finger, circling, evading the heart of it. Trying to goad from him some loaded turn of phrase. “Exactly the same. Doesn’t that seem weird to you? Doesn’t that set off some alarm bells?”

“No.” He blinks at me. “To be honest, that sounds like quite the windfall for you! The entire field of neikotics on a single tileset? One inversion to conquer them all? But of course then you’d all be out of a job down there.”

How it’s not good for me looks like Cheng Qiaoling ghostly under my phone’s flashlight, choking helplessly on her own saliva, seeing and understanding nothing, left to pick through the ruins of a neikotic explosion in her soft and fundamentally untrained ‘folds. This thought is now the quadratic frontier, the thread I must not pull on. She wasn’t a neikonaut. It had found some other way into her mind.

“One of my patients,” I begin, with a clinical air that even I find irksome, “had a grand mal seizure. Ruptures in her cranial arteries! Plus — Double Descent, dude?” I wave my arm around vaguely, as if totally unimpressed with Shanghai’s neikological black market. “It’s actually kind of lame.”

“Just one of them?”

“Just one of them?”

“Well, look at the numbers.” He says this so earnestly, so evenly, that I have no choice but to direct my attention to the numbers. “This class of algorithm is known to produce bad neikotic debris. Comes with the territory. I even make them sign a little release form, just like you.”

“Really?”

“Of course not. The point is that probably one in a hundred really serious bits of debris has a nasty neurological complication. You said you’ve seen a hundred patients, so I’m right in the money! Am I not?”

I fold my arms.

“I am making them rich...” He waves his hand lazily, clearly forgetting something.

“Mona. Like the painting.”

“I am making them rich, Mona. They are going out there and tearing holes in the polyquasal derivatives market, in counterfactuals, in forex. Some of them will probably retire. They understand the risks! A little brain hemorrhage...bing, bang, et voilà. A giant vacation home in Bali.”

“So use it yourself. Retire.”

“You misunderstand me entirely.”

“So let me hatch it.” I lean across the table, look him square in the eyes. “Give me thirty minutes with it. Hell, give me fifteen for five thousand.” Do I even have five thousand ping? Maybe, kinda. “I’m a YINS neikologist, I’ve got a little guangpan in me, and I just read Chapter 8 of K&K.” I’m bluffing wildly, and Mallochi is absolutely eating it up. But he shakes his head calmly.

“Not you.”

I’m getting genuinely irked at this point, not just at those brilliant pearly whites, that amused indifference, but at the way something about our time in the Deng Bridge lingers in this conversation, in the faint xylophonic interplay of the tiles behind the words. Something happened while I was in the diving-bell, something neither of us can remember. I am made to feel as though, last we met, I yanked a tooth from him without warning or consent. He knows it, I know it, and he knows I know it, and it’s driving me crazy that I don’t know how to just bring it up.

“Oh? Not me?” I keep my eyes steady on his. In fact, I’m having a hard time tearing them away, and it seems he is too. It seems that a tiny, jerking oscillation passes between us as he gauges my intent.

“I looked you up, you know, and imagine where I found you? The webpage of Dr. Deng Jinghan. Do you have any idea how lucky you are to be in your position? Working with a luminary like that?”

I laugh bitterly, and he takes it the wrong way.

“No. Fuck that. I’ve been laughed out of too many rooms in this city. They laughed me out of the room at Chaoyue and Paracoin, and I learned to wipe the floor with their traders. They turned me down at Kanwei, and I built a scanner out of scraps. And now? YINS comes to find me. Perhaps they are on the back foot. Perhaps they do not send their very brightest. Yet I have the attention of the Institute all the same.” He dangles the egg like a lure. “You have what I want, and it seems I have what you want. So make the introductions, and I will tell you everything I know about this egg — as your colleague.”

“Bravo.” The laugh is different now, but I’m still laughing. “You’re very good.”

“Aren’t I?” And Mallochi is laughing too. “Don’t you think it would be fun to work together?”

“I mean...” I consider it. I really do. “You have no idea what she’s really like.”

“Don’t I? I did read a couple of her biographies.”

“Absolutely no idea.”

He leans in with a student’s earnest fascination. “So tell me.”

From far away in the building, perhaps on an upper floor, there’s a clatter, as though of cookware hitting folding chairs. To me it sounds like nothing of note, but for him, it’s more than enough. “They’re coming,” he says, in a suddenly flattened voice. He’s scooping the contents of the table, debris and all, into a backpack.

“Who’s coming?” He doesn’t reply. “Mallochi!”

“It’s Mal to friend, I like to sprinkle extra...”

“Will you please just tell me...”

“...extra bits in there. Throws ‘em off. Is it me, n’est-ce pas moi, shei zhidao ne. Get your stuff, ‘cause in a second —”

The tarpaulin curtain comes down with a ferocious velcro rip, leaving us exposed — and surrounded. “It’s her!” That barking voice, charged with amphetamines, and not the touchy-feely kind. Every hair on my body stands unit-normal jump-scare upright as I realize that its owner, who I can barely make out in the gloom, is pointing at me. “She led them right down here!”

A few more interested pairs of Contecs turn my way. Mallochi grabs my shoulder, and I can feel his weight drifting left, right, left, looking for a way around the half-dozen bodies now pinning us in the corner with their sneers and narrow flashlight beams. “Shenjing bing, paranoid freaks,” he snarls. “Gun kai. Fuck all the way off.”

“Mallochi. Hey. What is going on?”

“What do you think?” he whips back. And, hell, it’s a fair question. The distant clamor is close enough that I can pick out individual voices; I imagine a great katamari of riot armor and laser sights rolling our way. And then, trying to steer me a few steps left, he mutters: “It had better not be you.”

But there’s no escape, not really. A growing crowd of merchants and mercenaries, who I imagine might be very sick of Mallochi’s particular brand of bullshit, have convened in our far corner. He casts around for his by-the-hour bodyguard, but he must not have been paying Big Fish the big bucks. The enormous man redirects all the crisscrossing flashlight beams away from my face and towards Mal’s hand with just a few words: “The egg.”

He squirms. The Sunflower Sieve egg gleams in the dusty white light like this was its idea.

“Fellas. Huojimen. I don’t think we have time for this. The Weather Bureau —”

“Wants you,” finishes that same rumbling voice. Et tu, Big Fish? “And just you.”

“Maybe you won’t want to be holding that egg when they find you.” An Australian in a rumpled button-down threatens Mallochi with a hailstorm of falling tones and a give-it-here gesture. His friend pulls something from his waistband. “Why don’t you just put it down.”

“You laowai don’t know how to wait your turn,” a voice from the back complains. I hear a buzz baton drawn, see it waved menacingly to part the little mob like minnows, and the Australian gets just a few watts to the butt cheek for his trouble, and loses his balance with a ruddy little yelp. The owner of the baton — it scarcely matters who, but his accent is nasally hung, piratical, northern if not necessarily Beijing — he steps forward and waves the eighteen-inch segmented rod in Mallochi’s face. “You’re gonna drop that egg, dipshit. One way or another.”

I am stock-still, catching stray air in rapid fluttering breaths through my nose. I see more glints in my peripheral vision, but I don’t dare look at what’s being drawn or where it’s being pointed, because just now even a glance might count as sudden movement. The whole tableau, lit with silent and pure-white Maglite beams, reaches a critical tension and then an almost artificial stillness, as though held for applause. Among all these men with all of these weapons, only one or two of them have ever really chosen violence — the problem is, nobody knows who. 

Drop the egg, dipshit. I try simply emitting this thought to Mal, in recalled snatches of his inner language. The Weather Bureau is coming.

The Weather Bureau is coming for the Sunflower Sieve egg.

They’re here.

It’s almost a relief, it’s almost just like old times, when they burst through the swinging doors. Five of ‘em. Three in riot gear, waving rifles they never signed up to use, drawing shaky red circles on the wall. Above them looms something like an armed genzhe globe, and it draws spooky-smooth green dots on the backs of everyone’s head, and probably right between my eyes by the looks of it, dozens of individualized threats that I sure hope it can’t make good on. On the floor, shouts one of the agents, the waver in his own voice cutting over the synthvox from his visor. On the fucking floor all of you now!

But nobody is even looking at them. They’re not even much to look at compared to the other two Bureau agents now emerging on their flanks. These two do not have body armor. They carry no weapons. Each of them is wrapped in a luminescent bodysuit which is somehow both skintight and utterly formless, pulsing with slow concentric rings of brilliant purple and white that divide and merge silky-smoothly, that draw the eye in mesmerizing ways. Square peg, round hole, the thought nearly defies the thinking — these are the Bureau’s Ripplechasers. They’ve been following the diving-bell (a diving-bell?) through the Mirror Sea. 

They step forward with a lithe, metronomic grace. Point a rather redundant finger apiece in our direction.

“Cai?” The word leaves my mouth on an exhale, of its own accord. And it’s not even right. Both of the Ripplechasers are presently removing their visors, drawing eye contact. It’s hard to resolve them as individuals, but clearly neither of those people is...but...but I recognize them. I used to run with them.

Mal glances at me. The tendons in his egg arm flex. He hisses: “What?”

“Cai Duofan?”

It’s wrong. But it’s right. She knows these people. She introduced me to them, along that endlessly winding way, if perhaps never by name. And I know I know I know, only don’t ask me how, that she’s watching. Coughing up half a lung vaping, or eating a whole bucket of chicken fry and not getting bloated, or whatever else she does — I’d find her watching from a swivel chair if I could reach through the Contecs in those chasers’ eyes. 

They’re the threat. Their friends with the rifles seem to know that, waving them almost apologetically as they approach in loose v-formation. The Ripplechasers are holding concentration, focusing just past what they see. And something is building, bubbling, getting closer, in the space between our minds...

“Catch,” Mallochi shouts, and lobs the Sunflower Sieve egg towards the center of the room.

A long, weightless arc. It hangs like a disco ball. It shows us its every angle on the backspin, halfway between the Weather Bureau and the assembled profiteers of Double Descent’s negative fifth floor, before it striking the curved metal rim of a dim floodlight and taking the weirdest of hops.

Dunk-dunk-dunk, goes the voxelite orb as it disappears below a bench somewhere. One more moment of twitchy stillness and then all hell breaks loose, gravity itself shifts towards the far wall, stools and spools upturned, flashlights discarded and left to spin in the air, a war of all against all as almost everyone dashes for the egg.

Thwip-thwip-thwip, goes the terrifying virus-shaped genzhe globe. We all forgot about it a little too quickly, didn’t we? And now it dispenses five hundred cc’s of the Bureau’s favorite sedation cocktail in metal-tipped, aerodynamically stabilized ten-cc increments. Most of the darts miss, to be honest. One of them misses its intended target and pricks Mallochi through the leg of his trousers.

And there is no sound at all, only a flash of white light fringed with violet, as the Ripplechasers finish calling a diving-bell to mind, or deploying it into the Mirror Sea. And say it with me now: the difference is no difference at all. It rises through the motion and color of their bodies, reconstructed on a needs-must basis from cluttered half-remembered half-glimpses at the Mirror Sea, borrowing its hue and shape and concentricities from our assembled daydreams and infant memories. Remember this? It accretes a self-sustaining logical gravity, draws every neikonaut’s inner eye irresistibly to the point on its hull where the shrinking rings meet. It becomes everything in the room. Okay, what about now?

And then the flash, the loopback whisper: holdingonletgo. And the ensuing mental bushfire as any and all Sunflower debris in this strange vicinity melts like plastic, twists acridly, and drips through a weird tubular jumbling of all our neikotic channels. I watch it in Mal’s eyes as the diving-bell flings itself at the remains of the remains, annihilating itself on contact, until there is nothing left of either the debris or the inversion except a sharp, hollow ringing in everyone’s ears. The hunt for the egg proceeds frame by frame, through blurred vision, on hands and knees. 

Aside from Mallochi and I and I suppose the two chasers who conjured it, nobody has the faintest idea what just happened to them. And they look as shell-shocked as everyone else, doubled over, trying to vomit but nothing is coming up. I eye them with wary disbelief. I try to call names to mind, or any other specific facets of recognition, anything to grasp onto but the threatening vagueness of I know I’ve seen your face before. What they just did — to deploy an inversion at a crowd of thirty people at medium distance — is impossible.

Or that’s what I would say if I hadn’t done it myself at the Haojie Tower, a year ago in spring.

Mal’s is on his feet, barely. He has an unsettling wobble to his knees, and the dart that struck him gripped loosely in his right hand. “You need to get me out of here,” he croaks.

That’s rich. But I hand him his pack and give him a shoulder to lean on. “Which way?”