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

24 // Dr. Zhang Peifeng

In back is where it really gets miscellaneous. We pick our way through boxes crammed with feather boas, lewd and dusty DVDs, and all kinds of electronic refuse: Optical-Rubidium Adapters (broken); Phased array drivers (fixable); USB cables (2.0). Tethi leads me past storeroom after storeroom. One amounts to a kitchen, full of tabletop induction burners and cube fridges, fed by daisy-chained power strips. The last door on the right bleeds blue light and bass-heavy Ulanbataar prog-shag. He lets me inside what I take to be his room.

“So she has you reading her mail? Is that it?”

And it’s not that he doesn’t look happy to see me. He just doesn’t look very happy. The last week has not been kind to Tethi, and I only have a faint outline of why. Still, that’s his hello?

“Hell no. Yours is so much weirder,” I insist. “You know Dr. Deng awfully well. The bit about SNB-9, the fucking chamomile tea — who are you, man?” The adrenaline of the Bureau’s visit and the double-catfish, all that is melting off, leaving a weird and mirthless grin on my face that I struggle to wipe away.

“You understand your advisor is famous all the world over, yes?” He drops into a swivel chair and crosses his feet up on a tall stack of books. “One of the great scientists of our time. Any biography would have it all in there.”

“And you fumbled the Sieve, and now you want credit. Your day in the sun.”

“It’s not anywhere near that simple.” It looks like he’s been drinking straight from a nearby bottle of baijiu, but now he reaches for and fills two little cups, clinks his to mine. “I suppose she doesn’t know you’re here.”

I drink, the sting a welcome distraction. “No,” I tell him, from the bottom of the glass. “You’re stuck with me.”

He stops to consider that. Nods. “I can work with that.”

“You know, you might have just messaged me to begin with.”

“I considered it. It was your footnote, yeah. But she told me not to.”

I give myself a few weary breaths to process it all. I — oh, fuck it, I reach for the bottle, but Tethi puts his hand over it. Twirls his index finger, a neikonaut’s sign for loop-lock. Okay then. “So you have something to show her. Or, under the circumstances, me.” I piece it together. “You’re telling me that the Sieve has something to do with the Sea. With the hyperlagmites.”

“That’s what you’re telling me.” He looks perplexed and distrustful. “Isn’t it?”

The conversation proceeds in this sort of circle, and in the end I finally insist that he just show me. So we squeeze out his window, down a long and narrow alleyway, to a strip of asphalt ringing a chain-link fence. Tethi walks two paces ahead of me, so silently that he utterly disappears when I close my eyes. He leads me a little ways around the edge of the fence, and frowns when he sees me peeking through it.

In these embers of daylight, it could be any large, muddy industrial complex of warehouses and loading docks. But, okay, that’s a lot of stuff, belonging to everyone and no one. Pushcarts and satellite arrays and blackened-out grow towers. Old military veetles tucked under giant fluttering tarps. A silent chorus of red LEDs blinks from walls dense with cameras and wires stretched taut across narrow lanes. No other outdoor light, not really. The high floodlights will be emitting that infrared color-of-nothing for the Mirror Sea’s eyes only. Something shifts, and momentarily all I can see is the chalk: ever-present on the walls of Shanghai, but here a brilliant white-on-black tapestry, thickening, spilling into the third dimension, detail crammed into the negative space of sigils within sigils within sigils. It looks like the back entrance to another world. It’s Shanghai’s most legendary trance venue. It’s Wu Ke Nai He.

“Don’t go in there,” Tethi tells me flatly.

But then, of all things, he produces a nub of chalk and puts it to the side of an electrical substation just outside the complex. “Yes and no,” he mutters, answering the unspoken, obvious question. “There are layers to it. I’ve picked up some tricks.” He pulls a long, left-handed stroke across the brick, slowly at first, like a thief picking for tumblers. It hooks suddenly, and there’s a received, passive quality to the slashes and arcs he draws next. The darkness around me feels formless, liquid. My head spins with a smearing of position, a sharp wherewards momentum. The shape of this street is, surely, interchangeable with another.  When he’s finished, he reaches for a door that — trick of the light? — I swear wasn’t there before.

Behind it, quasigraphic candles flicker down an uneven staircase, their false angles revealed in the shatterglass and motorbike mirrors lining the the walls. Thick cables dangle parabolically from the ceiling, emerging from grey PVC pipe stamped regularly with the blind-eye. “The Mirror Sea,” I state the obvious, starting too loud and falling quiet halfway through that, startled by the echo of my own voice.

A Mirror Sea,” he corrects. And, sure, he seems one to make such a chiding distinction. The Mirror Sea fell with Xia Zitian; what we have now are fragmented subnets, tidepools and shards. He runs his finger along a cable as it reaches a splice-box, and I find myself imagining all the places the cables could lead: anywhere in the city, all the way to Suzhou. And any given slice of cameras will point to a unique slice of Mirror Sea. I saw the view through a single camera earlier: not quite nothing. Perhaps only Secretary Xia Zitian knows what you’d see with all of them.

“It’s getting harder for regular people to access.” The lack of light helps me pick these qualities from his whisper: defensive, prideful, Francophone, and vaguely drunk. “They get what the Weather Bureau will let them see. Which is time-delayed flats and the odd quasigram. But the raw stuff…you need to be someone, or know someone.”

“Or just go Chalking,” I venture. There’s another way to see the Sea, of course, which is to promise yourself that it’s already there, that it’s always been there. To follow your intermingled hopes and fears down their steepest quadratic valleys, surrendering your agency in whole.

Tethi ignores this, but his eyes flash as he fumbles with a final lock. “So, I figured, set this up, charge by the hour, don’t ask too many questions. Wu Ke Nai He has been gathering Mirror Sea feeds for years. We sell them cable by the kilometer. All that I had to do was to tap in.” He grins, then leans on the door until it gives way to a makeshift scanner room. The UTMS rig, the monitor bank, the bare tank of liquid helium — you can see his gear as charmingly classic or terrifyingly obsolete, but it gets an appreciative whistle from me anyway.

“Does Min know you’re doing this?”

“She hasn’t a clue. But this is all for her. She has no one else, and that shop will be the death of her.”

“Do they know you’re doing this?” By which I mean the Chalkers who run Wu Ke.

Tethi laughs humorlessly. “I’m not afraid of them, you know.” He’s flicking more switches now, kicking the EASL array to free it from a boot loop. “Let me ask you. You ever consider why the market rate of a Mirror Sea feed is so high these days? Why the Big Three snatch them up?”

Suowei buys feeds because that’s what Suowei does: amasses a dragon’s-lair treasury of assets, homogenizing them into silken threads from which the parallel yuan is spun. Suowei has teams of astrologers operating lasers in space, vaporizing asteroids it deems inauspicious. Suowei’s reality-distortion field bulges across the globe, and it’s only here in the dead center that anything they do seems remotely sane, remotely sober. Chaoyue, Paracoin — they just follow Suowei’s lead, trying to keep the triumvirate less isosceles.

Tethi considers my answer with a thoughtful frown. “That’s part of it, maybe.”

The scanner is purring under my hand now. I’m trying to find comfort in the familiar noises it’s making, but my head is throbbing, my mouth is dry. “Min’s Mix,” he tells me once I’m sitting inside it. “Some 5-subs in here, probably spicier than the YINS breakfast blend. I’d spread out my zeroes to compensate.” He flicks an autovial and slots it into the machine. “I don’t want to bias you, so I’m just going to put you in. Let you see what I saw. Afterward, we can talk about it.” He clicks through dialog boxes complaining that his free trial of Kanwei Pharos is months expired. “Afterward, I’m going to ask a favor of you.”

I don’t like that knowing look. He seems to see how badly I want this, and how badly I need to keep that longing under control. I try to imagine I’m Cai, who does this all day, who keeps the queasy quadratic madness always at arm’s length. I channel her airy detachment as I pull the scanner hood over my eyes.

“So put me in.”