Of course I should have expected Yao. Tethi and I get lots of badly-concealed glances when we step onto the Safety floor the next morning, but Yao’s the one to come greet me. Which makes me feel terrible.
“You look terrible, Mona,” he tells me bluntly. “Everyone’s wondering where you’ve been.” And if he hates me, how could I blame him? I called in a four-oh-eight on him, got him sent to Medical, and then disappeared for an entire week to chase the very same strand of madness. I think he sees that, somehow. Sees it as a vindication, somehow. His head swivels past me now. “Wait, is that —?”
“Hello.” Tethi waves sheepishly from the water fountain. “I remember you.”
“He’s visiting for the day,” I tell Yao quickly, as if that explains anything. “Listen, I’m sorry for what happened last week, and that I’ve been away, and...there is something,” I go on, voice lowered, “about the Sieve. That’s why he’s here —”
“It’s all right,” Yao brushes me off. “You did the right thing. I went quadratic, and you made the right call. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear whatever it is you want to say.” And he strides away.
Tethi and I exchange an uneasy look. Good lord, the Bureau did a number on him.
We find Deng and Rui in the corner conference room, as arranged. For Deng and I, this is familiar ground: it’s hardly the first time I’ve dropped off for a week, refusing to answer or even look at my emails. But usually I don’t return with a friend, or with the lure of groundbreaking experimental data. She greets me with commingled where the hell have you been and I’m so glad you’re all right. Rui lopes over, enthusiastically shakes Tethi’s hand (“Mm-bey-teh-thi, do I have that right?”) and offers me a reassuring nod.
Tethi is not dressed for the job he wants. The YINS researchers walking by are in athleisure and graphic tees, struggling to manage even half a hairdo. He’s in bootleg Docs, dress slacks, a creamsicle-paisley buttondown. Deng looks him over and then addresses me. “So this is a friend of yours?”
“A colleague,” Tethi corrects, with a collegial smile.
“A researcher,” I add uselessly. Briefly I look her in the eyes, and my gut drops out with the memory of what it felt like to go unseen and disappear. “You might also remember him as our first Sunflower Sieve patient. He and I have something we think the two of you will want to see.” And what I don’t say is: Do you know? Do you know that there’s something out there wearing your face? In the six hours since we climbed out of the sewer, I’ve felt nonstop stings of panic every time I see a Mirror Sea camera over my shoulder. The horrible feeling of that thing watching me from just behind some gauzy veil, ready and willing at any moment to rip me back into that endless field of sunflowers. And then, even worse, that when I’m out of its view I may simply slip away.
Rui leans forward with interest, just as Deng leans back in her chair. Sometimes I wonder if she’s learned to flash her glasses that way on purpose. “Well, we’re here. Have at it.”
“Esteemed professors,” Tethi begins, and means it. He takes a deep breath — there’s still so much we haven’t gone over. “Thank you for the opportunity to present our work. It pertains to the events that have troubled the neikotics community since they came to light this morning.”
A beat. “We were there,” I add.
Deng’s face goes white. “You were there?”
Of course the word is out. Hundreds of neikonauts at Wu Ke Nai He fell into that same trance — and, sure, that’s not exactly front-page news. What’s unusual is the way they fell into the sunflowers — not transfixed by a Ripple, but forced into it by what they describe as primer tiles, flashed by a dazzling reflective structure in the Sea. Stranger still are rumors that the Weather Bureau took scores of non-neikonauts into medical veetles, where some remember sitting inside a UTMS scanner, for unclear reasons, for the first time in their lives. There has been no official word from the Bureau or Blue Delta, and so there has been no official response from YINS. But it’s on tip of our tongues, lodged in our throats: we are in danger. As a precaution, the Mirror Sea displays across Beiwan Ward have gone black.
This same morning, across the city in Hongqiao South, a middle school science teacher rose with an early alarm. He dragged his telescope up to the rooftop and snapped a beautiful photo of the moon, harvest gold, rich contrast along the rabbit. Then he swiveled the lens down past the horizon towards the side of a Super Eight motel — perhaps something caught his eye, or perhaps this is his habit — and produced a second, strikingly similar image. The Moon in the Sea, his plaintive caption reads. By mid-morning his paired images had thousands of shares, thousands of comments: The Vast-Cold Palace Alights Upon Our Banks or simply Anyone Know What The Fuck This Is?
Well, Tethi and I know what it is. He starts at the beginning, no secrets, no deception. Where he lives, why he lives there, what he saw when he tiled into stolen feeds from Wu Ke Nai He. Okay, we gloss over some parts. My professors listen — Deng’s lips tight, Rui’s fingers tented — until Tethi gets to the part where, on the damp of his floor, we ran Deng and Rui’s failed experiment for the second time in two decades. We found evidence of Sunflower Sieve debris reaching through words, through eye contact, reacting across minds. We —
“I showed you that video in confidence!” Deng finally interjects.
“It was an experiment.” I keep my voice low and level. Focus on the data. I don’t want a blowout. “You said that the two of you couldn’t get it to work. Well, we’re telling you now that it does.”
“We’ll see about that.” She folds her arms. Rui offers a gesture, to her, to us: careful, calm.
Tethi looks to me for support, and hell, I told him it might go this way. But it can’t be easy, being chewed out by one of your scientific heroes. It barely gets easier with time. Slowly, he lays out the parameters of a larger experiment. He does not condescend to Deng and Rui: he tells the story with impulse responses and correlation matrices. He slides a pair of Introspecs across the table —
And Deng’s eyes flash. “You were selling these?”
“Well,” Tethi tries helplessly to lighten the mood. “We were hardly going to give them away.”
“You know this is a massive violation of the YINS research ethics code?” Deng ignores him entirely. She leans across the table, her gaze boring into mine. Her voice is soft, steady, cold. “Do you know that I’m compelled by the bylaws of this institution to report you for running an experiment like this without the subjects’ consent?”
“Please. Let them finish.” Rui shoots me a laden glance. “Let’s see what they have to say.”
“In some ways,” Tethi continues, now with a nervous edge, “I think you already know the rest of the story. There was a massive correlation event at Wu Ke Nai He. We have neikotic evidence that, whatever was in the Mirror Sea, there was a...corresponding structure...operating across minds last night. What we have here is a composite of the sensor data, from almost a hundred headsets. From neikonauts, and...not.” He clears his throat. “I wonder if a brief primer on the popular mythology of the Mirror Sea is in order. Have you both heard the term hyperlagmites?”
“Yes,” Rui replies. He’s leaning in to get a better look at the Ripples’ handiwork, at the world’s first real application of soberware. Half-awed, half-devastated, and totally transfixed.
I spent hours on this next slide, and I’m a little pleased that Rui gasps when he sees it. The UTMS electrodes on the Introspecs were cheap, but in combination they worked like a telescope array tuned to a powerful frequency, clearly resolving that skeletal network of Sieve debris. As our unwitting subjects moved deeper into the crowd, it revealed hyperlagmites, high spires of debris, slow shapes moving among these that we didn’t dare name. Our images of the Ripples’ city come as a short, looping video. It’s low-res, monochrome, but chillingly clear. There in the dead center, a white-hot spherical blot, is the Sunflower Sieve. I remember how those whipping arms of it put me into loop-lock, even for just a few seconds. Perhaps it was a message: we can make you see whatever we want. But I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think they have any idea at all that we exist. They’re just working the material of their world.
“If it can be said to be anything specific, anything earthly at all...” And my voice is positively shaking now. “We think they’re tightening up the space between us. We think the Ripples have built a Deng Bridge.”
For a long while no one speaks. Tethi flips to the next slide — which just reads THANK YOU — and neither of us know quite where to look. Perhaps a PowerPoint was not the way to deliver this news.
“This doesn’t prove anything,” Deng insists, finally breaking the silence. “It’s insane. Mona, be serious about this.”
“Well, what’s your theory?” It’s grating to me how she barely even acknowledges that Tethi’s in the room. “We come to you immediately with this, and that’s your reaction? Don’t you think a teeny, tiny bit of speculation is in order here?”
She tries not to, but she sneers back. “Listen carefully, because I don’t want to explain it twice. You have some neikotic readings, questionably acquired, of a mass gathering. Shared aural and visual stimuli easily explain these high baseline levels of correlation. Your data is highly overfit to your outlandish theory. I note that drug use was most likely involved. There are some pretty pictures here, some nasty collages of neikotic debris. But it doesn’t add up to anything coherent. You have to see that.”
I find the slide that, to me, shows the Ripples’ city most clearly. I try to see it afresh, without bias or preconception. I can’t, of course. But you have to see the spires, the dwellings — even, if you know how to look, wispy hints of the Ripples themselves. “What does this look like to you?”
“I don’t know,” Deng replies, her voice meticulously, vacuously calm. “What does it look like to you?” I open my mouth and she cuts me off, fishes for a stylus. “Wait! Let me write this down. I’d like to include it in my report to the ethics board.”
It’s going to be a blowout. Last week of September, right on schedule. And this time we have an audience.
Oh, fuck it, I might as well.
“Level with me for once,” I match that iciness. I reach for my bag. “What, exactly, is this?”
Deng and Rui glance at the Sunflower-1 patch, then at each other, then at me. And now Deng is on her feet, not exactly looming over the table, but terrifying all the same. Something in her face, a deep-set stability to those wrinkles and lines, has broken. “How dare you,” she snarls. “After everything I’ve done for you? After I plucked you from a miserable life in your sad, senescent excuse for a country? After I put up with years of your laziness, your antics, your childish inability to focus? After I delicately hold your little hand and walk you to publication? This is how you repay me?”
She grips the table so hard that her fingers are shaking. I cast around for Rui, for Tethi —
“The Ripples have a city,” Tethi interjects. Quickly, but calmly, all things considered. “They have material culture, in the deeper correlations, in a hidden corner of the Sea. It’s built from neikotic debris. The Sunflower Sieve is one of their experiments. Take us to the Observatory and we’ll show you.”
Deng finally turns to face him with a prim smile. “And just who the fuck are you?”
“I think we should go up there,” Rui offers mildly. He was actually on his tablet a moment before, taking notes, reading the fucking news or something, but I guess he was paying attention after all. “There’s a simple solution to this.”
Deng tightens her grin. “The Observatory has a rather high bar for research proposals, Dr. Rui.”
Rui smiles back. “You have to admit, Dr. Deng, that they’d be fascinated by the hypothesis.”
And somehow, it’s settled. We ride the elevator wordlessly up one floor. Rui leads, Deng follows, we trail. He gives us one long glance backwards which I decide to read as approving, and then keeps his eyes dead ahead. Deng is fixated on something in the middle distance. I’m sorry, I mouth to Tethi. My arms are shaking. That was insane. He raises his eyebrows, but barely seems flustered. He can see the prize. I suppose he’s seen worse.
We push through the lobby and cross the leafy zigzag trails of the quad for Building 6. On the ride to the top floor, I consider that I might see Cai. How unhinged I’ll look, marching back in with a whole team to validate my delusion. But it’s not a delusion. The parabola realigns. I know what I saw in there, and I’m not afraid of the knowing. And surely the Observatory must, at least, have their own suspicions. Surely, in all those tight timetables, on all those scanner beds, they must have noticed something?
And then it all clicks. It hurts, badly, how I had all the pieces. How I could have put them together at any time but I never did, not until the elevator doors open on the right visual cue. These blank white walls. After all those close calls, after all our work...I led him right here.
“I think it’s just to the left,” Rui suggests hoarsely.
“Teth,” I whisper. “Run.”
He’s already running. He’s too slow. There’s a joke about how you never see more than two Weather Bureau agents at the same time. Like there’s only a few of them flitting around. Four burst now from an unmarked door, in their visors and grey bulletproof silk. It doesn’t take that many to subdue Tethi.
“By the authority of the Special Provision for Psychological Safety, Ward Council Edict 131, you are hereby under arrest.” Do they really need four? Two to pin him down, the third to draw a vialgun and inject him with antipattern sedative, and the fourth to read him the conditions of his detainment? The voice from their visors is artificially high, somehow reflective in its own right. “You will be held until such time as your own psychological safety, and that of those you truck with, can be assured according to the mechanisms and evaluation guidelines of Edict 131, section six, paragraph two...”
He’s already out. His arms dangle limply. My stomach sinks through the floor.
“You’d better take me too,” I hiss. At Deng? At Rui? They both look unsurprised, vaguely dismayed, as Tethi is dragged back through the door. “I was every bit as involved. That experiment was my idea.”
“But you didn’t sell the Sunflower Sieve,” Rui tells me flatly. “Which, as he himself pointed out, is Ripple technology.” He leads us through swinging double doors into the Observatory’s dim, domed theater.
“Rui —”
“I can’t do this anymore, Deng. She’s already at the very center of it. It’s time she knows.”
It takes a skipped beat of the heart to be sure they’re talking about me. It takes the courage of one last breath to step into their crossfire and interrupt them. I’m shaking all over, vibrating with nerves and adrenaline and now, rage, preemptive rage at Dr. Deng. “It’s time she knows what?”
“Well, where to begin?” Rui runs his hand over his head, through phantom hair. “That your advisor was a close confidant of Xia Zitian? A consultant, for years, training neikonauts within the Mirror Sea project? That we brought her back to Shanghai on condition that she tell us what she knows? Help us manage the second Sea?”
“You didn’t bring me anywhere,” Deng insists.
“That she won’t?” Rui ignores her, raising his voice. His echo crashes back down from the dome. “That she’s been stonewalling on anything related to the Mirror Sea? Pretending her work under Xia never existed? Fussing with the trimmings of the loop-lock virtual machine as the Ripples regain their —”
“Turn the cameras off!” She roars. “The Bureau wants my advice? Here’s my advice: you’re worse than the Ripplechasers, worse than the fucking Chalkers. You’ve gone as quadratic as any of them, and they couldn’t do it without you. You sick freaks just can’t stop peering into it, looking harder, daring it...” She runs out of breath for a long moment. Venom, too. That anger is fear now. A pleading, nearly whispered fear. “Turn — the — cameras — off.”
Rui, calmly, sadly: “You know we would if we could.”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” she snaps back. “Not for a damn second. Mona, let’s go.”
But Rui has unlocked a door in the back of the Observatory, and he’s holding it open. The offer takes shape in long, silent glances between the three of us. From me, devastated and confused, hungry for something just out of sight. From Rui, flatly irritated, hurried by an unseen drumbeat, but obviously curious for my reaction. From Deng, wild, desperate, and drowning…
“Mona, I never wanted this for you, I wanted —”
I don’t look back. I close the door and follow him inside.