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

12 // Double Descent

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 had spent all day in loop-lock with a Bloomberg terminal and desperately needed 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.

An hour later, this is where I start my search. 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 almost anticlimactic to find Mbetethi here, I figure. When oddly well-lit photos of Double Descent started to appear in Must-See Shanghai listicles, some of the old crowd scattered elsewhere. But others 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, Ukranians 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 Suowei 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 check them for debris. 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 seems a little low tonight. I have to admit, Mbetethi wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this. If he were, he’d probably flop himself across the trance floor into the dumpster.

But what about the third floor?

There’s no stairwell. The way down is a circular elevator in the dead center of the room.

“Do I look that stupid to you?” asks the elevator bouncer when I approach, glaring down at my two-loop band. “I mean, I know your type thinks I’m dumb. But do you really think I’m a one, two, many kind of guy?”

I try the direct approach, and show the man Mbetethi’s N-1 lanyard. “I’m sorry. I’m looking for him. Is he here? You ever see him around? I actually just need to return this license.”

He just glares at me, but I saw what I was looking for in the first tenth of a second, and decide to wait him out. Over at the bar I order a five-spot microdose of guangpan and a lime: bright, airy, no cross-tolerance with the work stuff.

“Nobody I know knows.” A neikonaut in the stool next to mine is confiding to a friend. “I’m terrified.”

“I hear someone over at Fudan found an inversion for the debris, at least.”

I grit my teeth through this blatant YINS disrespect, and watch the bouncer go about his business. Within ten minutes a crowd arrives at the elevator 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. I was hoping to get a good look at who they let down here, but the space is low and maze-like, the walls lit only with waves of subtly off-white LED pinpricks. I poke my head 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 Mbetethi.

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 Mbetethi’s 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. Mbetethi 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 a gentle tap on the shoulder. “He’s ready for you.”

“Ten thousand,” Mbetethi 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 Mbetethi’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 Mbetethi’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. I find myself pressed against the table with the whir of a vialgun 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 Mbetethi 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?”

I regard the egg, which Mbetethi is now sort of sitting on. “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 dramatic effect. “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 saving me.” He says this quite seriously, and lets it hang in the air for a moment. “How many?”

“I...I don’t know! More than a hundred at this point.” I jab at the table. “Count ‘em.”

That number seems to surprise him. “And I suppose one of them led you here,” he ventures, sounding a tiny bit betrayed.

One of them had a grand mal seizure! Ruptures in his cranial arteries! Plus — it’s 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.”

He sounds so much like a proud scout leader that my original theory is going out of focus. Mbetethi — the name sounds Gabonese, and the accent sure sounds French. Was it so crazy to assume that it was a malicious act on his part, a  poisoning of Suowei Financial’s best and brightest for the havoc they brought upon his home country?

“So let me learn 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 Mbetethi is absolutely eating it up. But he shakes his head calmly.

“Not you.”

“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.

“Because you’re going to write a paper about it. Tell me you’re not.”

I can’t tell him I’m not. But 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.

“Well, I think it’s the least you could do,” I insist, tilted, my voice curling at the edges. “You’re poisoning all these people and sending them to me to fix. God knows I hate Suowei Financial as much as anyone else in Shanghai —”

“No you do not. But I am not so vengeful as you think.” Mbetethi’s speech is suddenly flat and guarded, and my stomach burbles with an admixture of phenethylamine and regret. Had I been aiming for that nerve? Just what had I even said aloud? “And if you’re going to —”

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 that same flattened voice. He’s scooping the contents of the table into a backpack, and briefly I get one last look at that brilliant golden orb.

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

I absolutely bungle the first consonant, and that’s what he responds to, snapping, zipping. “It’s just Tethi. Teth, if you like. I like to sprinkle...”

“Will you please just tell me...”

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

There’s a tink-tink-tink as, above us, the lights go out. There’s a pneumatic hiss as, God, I dunno — the doors seal up? Behind me, Tethi rips down the curtain, and all I can see is an eye-level orange-red, dozens of pairs of Contecs bobbing in the dark. Muffled voices, shouting, more clash-clang-bang. The clamor that was so distant a minute ago is now a short distance away. I wouldn’t last a day here. I scoop as much debris as I can back into my backpack.

“Evacuating in sixty seconds,” someone shouts, but my Mandarin must be doing guangpan barrel rolls because it’s the wrong evacuate, it’s the one that has to do with test chambers and pressure differentials. On the far end of the pitch-black space, an even pitcher blacker space opens up, damp and cold and somehow a little windy. I stumble over spools and stools, trying to keep up. How does everyone know where they’re going?

“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 cannot see, must be pointing at me. “She led them right here! We oughtta leave her inside for them to find!”

A few interested pairs of Contecs turn my way, but Tethi grabs my shoulder. “Shenjing bing, paranoid freaks,” he snarls. “Gun kai. Fuck all the way off.” And then, now leading me around a floor covered with abandonware, he growls, “It had better not be you.”

“Tethi. Teth. What is going on?

“What do you think?” he whips back. And, hell, it’s a fair question. The 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.

“Evacuation in five.” The voice is close and unamplified. We straggle through what I reckon, proprioceptively, as a large door. “Four...three...”

“Listen to me.” He points up the contours of a stairwell. “This leads directly to the top of the building. They’ll be waiting outside, so you need to get above ground level, as many floors as you can. Wait ‘em out. Don’t be caught here.”

“You’re not serious.” There’s a another hiss behind us and I raise my voice to a shout. “I don’t even have Contecs!”

Tethi is a pair of blinking orange circles. And then he’s nothing at all. “Don’t find me,” he warns. He pushes through self-imposed darkness, through the damp and gathered human throng. I can tell he’s trying to hide it, but by some blindsight I also realize he’s going the opposite way: down the stairs. The crowd moves forward at an uncertain pace, but near its rear I feel no tempo, no pressure, and I stumble towards the walls. A few countervailing figures, total darknesses, brush past me. A few sets of descending footsteps echo Tethi’s — descending to where?

With another layer of doors between us the clamor of voices is more muffled than before, but I hear one last thing as I make my sudden and frantic choice, up or down, up or down: “By order of the Weather Bureau, open up!”