A YEAR AGO IN SPRING

Cai Duofan spoke in curlicue Shanghai slang no dictionary understood. She wrote in shanzi, that semantic ultrasound of obscure Chinese characters floating disused above the spoken language. I’d have to hit my tryptamine pen, sometimes, to make sense of her messages. She’d eat her takeout, crouched with her feet on the couch, engaged in dozens of chats. She’d take two bites and throw the rest away. She was skin and tits and bones and she circled around with it all on full display, like she still lived alone. 

Her father was a Blue Delta midwig, a Ward Council subdelegate for some heap of glass in Pudong, and as she slept in through the first two weeks of the fall semester, I sketched her as a do-nothing socialite faildaughter trying to turn her nights out into a streaming career. To be fair, it can be very lucrative, chasing Ripples. If you have the eye. If you can look just around the bend and pick the big ones before they break containment, you can sell the aesthetic backsplash to ad firms. Let the suits sort out what you meant by caramel-baritone bubble-wrap or variegated yarncore. The whole thing made a sad kind of sense, or so I thought at the time.

I’d leave in the morning before she woke, come home to shovel down some three-step instant noodles, and notice that she was gone. But I wouldn’t see her on the Safety floor — certainly not in the clinic — or on the quad, which at that point was just a dusty carveout between construction sites. Multiple times I gathered the words to ask about her research under Dr. Ren, how that was going, hoping that the way she was struggling and the way I was struggling were similar enough to reveal some common ground. Only to see that again she had those headphones on, and again her lips were pursed just so. 

Multiple times I almost asked outright: where are you going during the day? But in the end I found it easier to post up at the Jellycha down the street from our apartment building and suck down two Green Apple Cardamom-type items, one iced one hot, both half-sugar, all the while waiting for her to emerge. And when she did, round about three-thirty, I strolled in what loosely speaking might be considered the same direction. If she was heading to YINS, she would have made a left instead of a right.

That’s when I knew where she was going.

The Mirror Sea Observatory is just a few blocks from campus. It’s not affiliated with YINS, but it was planted with intention nearby, mind you — with a great reflective dome and ivy-wound ionics, to capture some of the university’s legitimizing glow. I trailed Cai at a distance, through the sliding doors and into the cool and the dark, and at first I scoffed at what I saw. They want you to think it’s a science museum, with all the educational displays and interactive exhibits. At best, it’s a science-flavored coating around the woo-woo goo of our city’s collective obsession.

I watched Cai badge into the back rooms. I flashed my student ID and paid five ping for a ticket.

Where Do Ripples Come From? asked one display, which started by cooly toeing the Weather Bureau’s approved line (they are emergent artifacts of correlative mesh-net architecture) and ended by giddily nodding to Chalker mythology (they are as old as humanity, and we finally have cameras that can see them). You Could Have Invented the Lam-Waldmann Hash, lied another exhibit, with kid-friendly switchboard cables that could be plugged together just so to anonymize a nearby webcam stream. With clever tricks of light and shadow, they managed to trap a small population of harmless Ripples on the building’s CCTV system, and I began to attune to their tingling passage through the sparse crowd, all menthol and cinnamon.

“Boo,” whispered Cai. She emerged from a side door with a cart full of cold-storage drives, and each of my limbs tried to scamper in a different direction. Forty-five minutes had gone I-know-not-quite-where; I was staring at that door to the back, wondering what the hell it was she did here all day. And suddenly there she was in the flesh, a map of Ripplechasing culture from the top of her head downward. Oh, all tasteful, of course. Her hair back then was pure, shocking white. Those sigils were done in neuro-fade ink, probably wiped and remapped every six months. Her long, folded arms, her almost cranelike neck, were ringed with minimalist strata, topaz and bone. The Mirror Sea, I realized, was Cai’s research and her hobby, her livelihood twice over. I turned red and choked up a hairball of greeting and apology. Her Contecs flashed with amusement, and she smirked as she wheeled the cart away.

She never mentioned that moment.

She never talked about any of it, but it wasn’t like she tried to hide it either. Along with her group chats and keyword spiders and Doujiang amalgams, she’d always have five or six windows open right into the Mirror Sea. Some of these feeds were public. Some she paid for. I later learned that some were hers alone, a thousand cams sliced off some unsuspecting ward’s subnet as a gift from her fans. A unique vantage point in the high-dimensional silt of that other world, a competitive edge, for her eyes only. But most of these were Observatory property, and soon I guessed at the real reason why she volunteered there. Aside from the Weather Bureau or maybe the Big Three, no one since Xia had assembled a bigger, clearer picture of what was happening the Mirror Sea.

I never saw much float by. Just the odd tendril, or the corner of a choir-bubble clipping through her projections. But her eyes were always darting back to those screens, seeking something. And when she’d find it —

“Wo xian zou la,” she’d shout into the apartment at nine, nine thirty at night, as though we had been deep in conversation. The door would rattle and I wouldn’t see her again, sometimes for days. Then there was a whole week where I thought she was gone for good. I thought about calling...who? Building security? The Beiwan redlights? It seemed stupidest of all to call the bluelights, knowing it would probably get back to her father somehow. Fuck it, I wanted to say. She was probably on holiday. But we all knew, the whole department, that she was teetering on the edge. People talk. I only barely had the vocabulary phrase my worry properly: that she had probably followed something on those screens into an outer-ring ward, into the hands of the Chalkers.

So understand that I mean it when I say she resurfaced in the very last place I expected: in the clinic. At my job. I was alone in the Neikotic Safety clinic, scrubbing vomit off a scanner. Maybe she was surprised to see me there, maybe not, I dunno. But even in the half-light I could see it behind her eyes. She had been using Tenfold Gate.

“T-t-ten...”

She couldn’t get the words out; that’s how I knew. Tenfold Gate was the clinic’s newest nightmare, ripping through YINS like a fever for weeks before the Safety faculty could even begin to compute an inversion. The debris that it left behind was atrocious. It worked farther into the lower functions of the brain than anything else. Vestibular chaos. Arrhythmia. Phantom limbs. But it computed graph traversals faster than anything else, too. It was becoming a subroutine in everyone’s research. They’d come to the clinic unable to swallow, speaking in tongues, but elated by the heights that it let them reach in loop-lock. They’d take the inversion, which didn’t really work, and be back within days. We started to realize, even if they didn’t, that Tenfold Gate itself was addictive.

I led Cai to the least-filthy scanner bed. I had to strap her in. She had been scratching welts into her skin.

“I have to warn you, this isn’t very effective yet.”

I felt bad admitting it. Deng and Ren and Qin were sleeping in shifts in the faculty lounge, sharpening their Dirac deltas, trying to find an inversion that would stick. And here I was, Deng’s supposed protégé, still good for cleaning up bodily fluids and not much else. I fired what we had over and over into Cai’s tilespace, zwoop and zwoop and zwoop and so forth. It bounced right off the debris.

Zwoop.

Even my professors couldn’t use Tenfold Gate correctly. So who the fuck did Cai Duofan think she was, and what on earth did she need it for? I had the bare facts, by then, of her work at the Observatory. It was mathematics, until you got those motherfuckers high, and then it was biology; they were looking for the rules that set the Ripples in motion. And so what? I wanted to chastise her, to shake her furiously, to impress upon her that whatever was in there, it couldn’t be worth her body and her mind. But she was already shaking from her fingertips to her core.

Zwoop.

No one told me about the Deng Bridge during my training as a clinician. But stories swirled around my advisor: I knew that it was supposed to exist, and I’d heard several variations on what she had supposedly built it for. I hadn’t been looking for it; I had been looking for mop heads. But I had found it in the back closet, a dark metal box the size of a mini-fridge with two gigantic, antique EASL 1.0 ports. It was impossible to mistake.

Zwoop.

Cai came down in bad shape. Her debris was resistant to inversion, and all we had done was provoke it.

“I can run it a few more times, but I’m already damaging your neikotic channels.”

She pulled the visor hood off her eyes. She was a mess. Never a glint of vulnerability from her, and now this. I could tell she hated me seeing her this way. I was shocked to find I might hate it even more. And I was ready for her question, in that voice she used to get her way: “Isn’t there anything else you can try?”

In the dead of night, months previous, I had tested the Bridge in loopback mode, probing around my own tilespace, learning how to manipulate myself at remove. And at the peak of the Tenfold Gate crisis I overheard a brief, furious exchange between Dr. Ren (I wouldn’t ask if we weren’t desperate) and Dr. Deng (If you so much as show me that box, I will walk right out of this institute). This wasn’t the way to prove myself to my advisor, but then, what was?

Reckless, reckless, Mona! But I swear even then I knew it would work.