A YEAR AGO IN SPRING

In a private room, in their maze of frosted glass and whitewashed mezzanines, the Weather Bureau kept me apart from the others. Their holding facility might have been the size of YINS; there was even the same constant drone of fans, the same sickly sweet mango-scented disinfectant. In my first re-corporeal hours, trapped in my own body like a zoo animal returned to its cage, my soul howled for the others. I knew there were hundreds of us, just in this one holding facility, who were in deep withdrawal from the entire city is a great coral reef. I knew the Weather Bureau to be briskly calculating but not needlessly cruel, except perhaps to Chalkers. For low-risk detainees they offered group comedowns, in vaulted cells with padded walls and matching white beanbag chairs, where the erstwhile hosts of one Ripple or another could learn to see each other as separate beings. They even let you vape in there.

My first truly lucid thought was that my isolation meant I was not low-risk. Then memory crashed down again. I flywheeled. I began to assume that I was high-risk because I had killed it — I had ripped an entire city of Ripples to shreds just by looking at it askance. They could never bring me to the dayroom, leave me with the others, because they would know me for what I was, and would rip me apart in turn. I twisted in the hot sheets. I shrieked in grief, in rage, in self-pity. I cried out for Cai Duofan and for my parents, half a world away. I heard nothing but the aircon.

A medic came, in one of the Bureau’s mirrored, ovoid face shields, to take my vitals and turn over my snot-soaked pillow. There was a readonly net on my head, and she watched my ‘folds on her handheld, probably on alert for a wake-parasite or a sidewinder or some other hanger-on that my Ripple had left behind. She asked me to hold out my arm in a dispassionate, resynthesized voice that was itself somehow reflective. In her visor I watched myself wince as she picked glass from my limbs. That was the first time I knew for certain it had actually been me, I had actually been there, at the Haojie Tower. I was in deep trouble.

I asked myself again: where was Cai?

Later. A man came in. He did not wear a face shield. He wore a long wooly coat over a Weather Bureau patrol uniform. He had a wide, wind-bitten face and wore his long hair in a single platypus-tail braid. He did not look happy to be there. Still, I noticed that he took a moment to comport himself when he entered, to soften his expression from truculent to merely gruff. He fished through some papers, and then plucked one out and put it aside.

“The damn thing about police work in this city is that we have a billion cameras and never any photos to work with.” 

He blinked at me. He was trying to lighten the mood, and he gave up with a sallow grunt.

“But still. We have you at the Haojie Tower the other night. To say nothing of the mess you just made of your dormitory at YINS. Now. This is usually when you protest. You say that wasn’t really me, it was the Ripple, I just got caught up in it. And you’d be right. The Weather Bureau takes the position that unwilling, first-time Ripple hosts are to be prosecuted under Section 166, which means...”

“I killed it,” I muttered, barely audible even to myself. The man paused, cocked an ear, and then went on.

“Which means that for crimes committed in participating wards, and in Universal Access Zones, the Bureau may elect to take on total or fractional legal liability for your actions. Now, Haojie is out for blood on this one. And if any of them had actually gotten hurt — fallen out of a one-hundred-tenth story window, say  — you and your friends would be going up against a Pudong South private magistrate. For the most part, all you did was scare the motherfuckers. Which means...”

“I killed it,” I repeated, just a little louder and a little more miserably.

“Which means that the Weather Bureau are your advocates here, Mona. We are going to make this go away for you, because we hate to see what happens in the Mirror Sea ruin real lives out here. But if we do — and this is Section 166 talking, not me — you will need to undergo linearization. You will be kept here until we are satisfied that the Ripple really has passed through you, and that you have learned to recognize and resist quadratic —”

“I killed it!” This time with a hoarse, stuffy shout. Something spiked on the the monitor behind me as I burst into fresh tears. “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to, it was the most beautiful thing — you’d never understand. It’s just, I’m a neikonaut, all right? And there’s something called an inversion, it’s what I study, it’s like a way to clean up the junk that gets stuck in your mind, and I...I don’t know, I think I unleashed one, and that’s what killed it —”

The man’s badge read Ma Zhuming. I knew who he was, I had read the Xia Zitian Papers, and yet in the moment it barely registered. As I sobbed and sobbed, Ma stopped and thought and finally spoke. “When a Ripple...ceases to exist, everyone thinks they’re the one who killed it. Everyone comes up with a reason. I’ll admit I never heard yours before.” He tapped the sheet of paper. “That’s your second chance. You’ll want to look it over and sign it.”

This time I just stared back at him. What he said changed nothing. I knew I had killed that Ripple, and that I would bear that shame for the rest of my life. But it was the words second chance that made the moment at hand real to me. Where on earth was Cai Duofan? I wanted to ask him that, but was I really going to give them her name?

“Linearization is a bitch. But when it’s done you’ll hardly remember the whole ordeal, as long as you don’t, y’know, pick at it. It’ll be something that happened to someone else.” Ma Zhuming rose to go. He tried to smile and settled for a grimace. “You’re a neikonaut. I’m sure you know what that’s like.”

Nothing I told them surprised them. It was just the way the Mirror Sea worked, they said. If there was a Ripple bloom, then inevitably there would be a crash. When I told them I had been seeing films at the Observatory, they nodded and checked boxes and clucked disapprovingly: I ought’ve known what I was getting into. And it seemed Ma was right: the Bureau expected to find its worst patients in a state of not just shock but abject self-loathing, for having failed to keep the Ripple alive. Some believed that they killed it out of neglect, like a houseplant in the back of their mind that they failed to water with belief. Others drew on dubious and superstitious webs of causality: they had killed it with a white lie or a petty theft, some minor slice through the psychofauna’s gelatinous weft, some fatal pollution of the coral reef.

But they didn’t actually know what to do about me, and my own particular brand of survivor’s guilt. They tried bringing me to a group session where, cross-legged on a folding chair, I made my own case. 

When the talking pillow came round to me, I explained with sputtering lucidity that, no, the reef itself was a kind of pollution. It was made of neikotic debris — this alone took several frantic minutes to explain — from a popular but dangerous pathfinding algorithm called Tenfold Gate. It had spilled bountifully from the minds of my fellow neikonauts, providing our Ripples with a safe home, safe from everything but the weaponry I had been developing in the back of my mind. Remember what it was shaped like, I insisted, quickly going hoarse. Really try to remember what it was actually like. The guidance counselor’s stopwatch went off. They insisted, in soapy and sexless synthvox, that I pass the talking pillow to my neighbor on the right.

I was not invited back.

“And this — this debris, this is the object of your study?”

I was transferred to solo counseling. I was sat on a cheap white futon facing another iridescent visor, another false voice lilting with skepticism. In the strangest ways, they really did try to make me comfortable, with a tray of snacks and a can of my favorite bubbly water. They explained that I was a typical case. I may have been near the center of Anemone Pop, but it had engendered personalized manias in workaholics of all stripes.

“You must understand it is the nature of the Mirror Sea that you will see, in a certain fashion, what is already within. We come across accountants spending their clients’ money based on what it shows them. We have a man who believes that Anemone Pop was triggered by a pufferfish keychain that his company wholesales. We tend to have large number of plumbers in our custody. You sound like an extraordinary young scientist, Mona, but in this regard I need you to understand that you are not special. Only you, unlike many of these unfortunates, have a job still waiting for you when you return to normal life.”

I gleaned from their charts that I was falling off the linearization schedule. The rest of my cohort was untangling itself apace from the mass delusion. The Weather Bureau had named it, pinned it in a glass case, and so disenchanted its victims. They were beginning to ask after their friends and family for the first time in many weeks. On one axis I had made progress — I no longer believed that the entire city is a great coral reef — but on another, I would not budge. I had killed Anemone Pop. The guilt of it hardened into a cooly factual stone in my heart, and I argued my case soberly, scientifically, with cogent references to neikotics. I knew this worried them.

“What about Cai Duofan?” I finally let the name slip near the end of this session, my last chance to show reason. “She was — well, she was with me through this. She’s a neikonaut too.” I paused for thought, not wanting to open the Pandora’s box of what happened between us down in the clinic. “I think she would back me up.”

The psychologist flipped through their notes. “Cai Duofan is a well-known Ripplechaser. Her mind may seem permeable to quadratic belief, but I expect she is capable of channeling it in a way that you cannot.”

“But what about Section 166?” I sputtered. “Surely you brought her in? She — fucking — she was there! She must have...God, she must have mentioned me?”

I heard a distasteful cluck through the visor. “Ms. Cai is also a repeat offender. Section 166 largely does not apply to her, as she has chosen to wear down its protections over the years. Following this incident at the Haojie tower, which we judge her to be something of the ringleader of...she is...in the Bureau’s custody now. I assure you, you’ll be out a long time before she is.”

Microdose-assisted talk therapy ineffective. Patient continues to score medium-high to high on all QBSI factors with peaks 65dB above city baseline. Recommendation: deep UTMS neurotherapy, three to six sessions, reevaluation to follow.

I was transferred to another wing, where even the fans were drowned out by a foreboding magnetic whine. I spent the night in loose restraints, in a room full of Chalkers. These were people who would not let go, who clung to their Ripples for dear life, whose shrieking and consonant glossolalia pierced my bed-curtains with the moonlight. I was still awake at daybreak, when I heard one of them flatline — he had reached into his brainstem and stopped his own heart rather than submit to the Bureau’s conditioning. I was bumped up the schedule.

“Don’t,” I snapped at the technician who led me into a UTMS bed and tried to fit me with an IV. I held out my bandaged arm to show them the silicon port in the crook of my elbow. “Here.”

There was no visor. This was not loop-lock. This was a decrepit old Kanwei Quasar set on a fat sinusoid for two hours of mental sandblasting. I remember trying to resist, as its onslaught flooded my neikotic channels with a pure and brutal tone. I imagined myself too clever for this, that I was a neikonaut and I knew how to fight back. I remembered Dr. Deng and her insistence that there is another color. But the machine was not listening, and there was no other color. It offered no way for me to take control. Finally I let it take me. I shuddered and spasmed and wet myself in its harsh and indifferent light.  I let it bleach away the hollow remnants of the coral reef, and when it was done with that I let it go deeper. I let go of my insistence that Anemone Pop, its rise and demise, had anything to do with me at all. I let it tell me that I was a stupid foreigner who had ignored the black flags and gone into the water. I had, in essence, been stung by a jellyfish. All that was left now was to let it hurt.

“How do you feel now, Mona?” The Weather Bureau technician asked me with cruel concern after the scanner whined down, after electrodes were finally removed from my temples. At the end of the first of my six sessions.

I stood and wobbled and retched at the way I smelled. I was relieved to feel absolutely nothing at all.

Somehow, the biggest indignity of the whole ordeal was that Dr. Deng had been my one phone call. I had no one else. I saw pale, crass sunlight for the first time in a week from the rooftop of the Weather Bureau’s tumbledown holding facility. I was lucky, I knew, to have someone pick me up. I knew most of my cohort had been discharged, wristbanded and hollow and possibly homeless, onto the streets below. But I groaned when I heard she was coming for me in a veetle. The ride across town would have cost her as much as my weekly stipend, and I felt this was her way of letting me know what a burden I had become.

She did not get out. But she brought me fresh YINS scrubs, and looked out the other window as I changed, as the craft circled for clearance and then pitched into the skylanes. I buckled my seatbelt and tried, ineffectually, to stop my own heart.

“I suppose this is my fault,” she finally said, softly, but I took it for a grouse. I watched in the window as she reached for my shoulder and then withdrew her hand. “I brought you here and warned you of nothing. I despair at what this city has become, and most days I manage to ignore it entirely. I should never have expected the same of you.”

I nodded indifferently. I watched the patchwork of wards below, the way their sharp boundaries shaped traffic, the way the city went from grey to green and back again. I saw YINS gleam on the horizon and understood dully that I was starting from absolute scratch. Two years in, and it might as well have been my very first day. Deng’s gaze never left me. Something clouded her eyes that might have been genuine, even motherly concern.

“I want to talk to you about what I saw in there,” I blurted out suddenly. “It’s not that I believe what I saw, I — I know I was fooled. But it’s something I think only a neikonaut would understand.”

“Mona, it’s not worth dwelling on.”

“I’m just saying that — I don’t still think it’s real, but I know what I saw, and I want to know why. I want to know how the mind works, how the Sea works, how it made me think that the whole thing was made of —”

“Neikotic debris. I know. I was briefed. And I am telling you now what I should have told you when we arrived. There is nothing — nothing — worth thinking about in the Mirror Sea. It is a drug, a woefully expensive mirage, it is a parasite on a befuddled city. I hope, whatever else the Weather Bureau did to you, that they made this clear.”

“They signed me up for classes,” I groaned. I was not ready to discuss the rest. “Remedial belief modulation. It’s on Wednesday nights — I’m probably not going to be able to make the thing in Shenzhen. I’m probably going to fail my constructors seminar. And my quals.”

Deng puffed air thoughtfully. “It was a bad Ripple by any standards. The biggest crash in years. The faculty is not insensate, and you were certainly not the only YINS student pulled in. Arrangements will be made. What’s important now is that you keep moving. Find a new place to live. Find a groove to lock into, something human, something that lasts. I will help you move on, Mona, but you need to stay away.”

Finals had come and gone in my absence, and YINS had calmed. I saw students swaggering along with heaping cups of shaved ice, tessellating the quad, sunning themselves on blankets. The cab came to a midair halt and began to descend vertically onto the helipad of Building 3. It yanked my stomach down with it and I realized, for the first time in several weeks, that I was hungry.

I turned to Dr. Deng and swore that this would never happen again.