And that’s what I wake from at half past midnight this third night, sheets wrapped around me, channels buzzing deliciously. My boots are still damp, still squeaking, on my way down the stairs. This time I’m not so coy with myself about why I’ve ventured outside. I toe the western boundary of another ward, preparing to tap my card. What you’re looking for isn’t in Xietu South, I admit to myself. That’s why you moved here, remember?

And this is how I find myself in the private gardens of an apartment complex two wards over, crouched in the shrubbery, staring into their fishbowl. It’s hurting you to avoid it, which is the rationale of the insane and the addicted. You just need a little peek. The neikotic debris in my head claws at the concrete, the mud, and especially the display in front of me, looking for more of itself everywhere I go. The fishbowl is mostly dormant, but narrow strands of a Ripple flick in unmistakable standing waves along its edges. I lean forward, keeping to the shadows, for a slightly better look. Get in closer. It’s on a delay, anyhow. But I know that plenty of “delayed” Mirror Sea feeds run realtime, because the entire carnival of commerce surrounding Ripplechasing depends on it. I remember Cai telling me that —

“You there! Freeze!”

And my body gives me no other choice. My knees are locked like this, my hands in the air.  A redlight enters the courtyard, wearing a rose-quartz badge and bulletproof silk, lofting a Maglite. But his beam catches a man way to my left, scrawling deftly on the compound wall. His lines flow like topography, like a heatmap, bulging and wiggling but never intersecting. He draws counterclockwise from the center out, and his little jerky pauses tell me the pattern is not random, not memorized, but somehow...transcribed. He keeps going, red-handed, flicking glances towards the fishbowl, and the lampposts, and the LEDs blinking in high shadows. Getting a few more strokes in...

“Come with your hands up! I’ll shoot!”

The redlight twists open his vialgun. But it’s an empty threat, and I see what he doesn’t. Another black-clad figure is crouched on a high ledge, adjusting a camera. The first Chalker looks left and ducks right. He gains altitude off a bench and, clutching the arms of his companion, is carried to safety over the compound wall. The redlight swings his flashlight around halfheartedly; I hold very, very still. Then he grumbles away. And moments later, by pure coincidence, the last tendrils of the Ripple in the spherical quasigraphic display flick out of sight.

I crouch, shivering, for five minutes before I dare to move. I try all the old tricks for getting into it: I stare blankly into the fishbowl and its lazy hints of Ripples, focusing just past it. I loosen the boundaries of self, trying to make my vision go wide. I look for my head, hoping not to find it. Finally I admit that it might be a lost cause. Ripplechasing is just no fun when you’re alone.

I emerge from the bushes to inspect the sigil, wondering what I can glean from it, if it could help me find a Ripple to take me where I want to go. But the chalk has already melted in the downpour.

The Big Three’s causal incursion worms its way into the curves, rides along silent and smooth, instantiating hollow and seemingly meaningless financial abstractions that Beijing’s neikonauts can’t understand fast enough to counter. Then there’s a tks-tsk-BOOM — totally silent, mind you — as the fuse goes off, as trees of levered orders meet their execution condition and fire in sequence, as counterfactual pools merge and resolve in ways that no sober person could possibly foresee. China would like to withdraw and lick its wounds, but can’t. Its economy is so tightly intertwined with Shanghai’s — even now, such a statement reads as tautology — that each round leaves them with no rational option but one: buy more parallel yuan.

And today, they pull it off. The e-sports commentators chattering from the sidescreens call it: the peg is reversed, wobbling, but reversed for now. A cheer goes up around me, if not from everyone. Beijing has neikonauts too, but it’s an open secret that they still send their best and brightest to YINS. They meet my gaze, a few of them: surely we all prefer our dogfights on this bloodless and silent new horizon. But there will be fighter pilots, neikonauts themselves, on elevated alert in Suzhou and in Beijing. In Sacramento and Washington they’ll be reading the wind for scraps of what’s happening. The loose joints of SHCA-MASA will flex: Beijing and Washington will find themselves on the same side of this — which, though no serious person in either place would ever admit, is kind of the point.

Meanwhile, all afternoon, the rest of Shanghai holds its breath and casts nervous half-glances at the heavily overcast sky. Surely Beijing would not simply bomb the city, not for this. It would be madness on the part of the Interior Chamber. But as the days wear on, and as China deploys three-gorges outflows of capital to stem the bleeding, it starts to seem plausible that they might simply roll the tanks. YZTV’s most-watched streams are now eerily silent views of border checkpoints west of Suzhou. Periodically a vehicle emerges tentatively from the fog, and chat lights up — is this vanguard that finally puts the collective hallucination of the Orthogonal Zone to bed?

I spend these uneasy hours in the clinic, watching the abstract financial ebb and flow on Yao’s rollscroll as we spray down the scanners and restock the cabinets, preparing for a battle of our own in Neikotic Safety. We know they’re coming — not the People’s Liberation Army, sorry — I mean the traders, to the clinic. We can tell because we can see the footprint of a familiar algorithm, those black-and-gold fibonacci-spiral bomb-bursts of underdamped corkscrew confetti, lighting up the trade-flow viz. I know I’ve seen these shapes before. It’s a strange relief that other people are finally seeing them too.

“It’s crazy,” Yao intones. “You can see the shapes of it in the trade flow itself. And it does really look like —”

“I know,” I snap. Then I wince when he looks back reproachfully. “Sorry.”

Then he asks me what’s got me so on edge, and I gesture vaguely at the financial warfare, and the possibility of going up in nuclear smoke if Blue Delta can’t bring its overfed attack dogs to heel. I wish that what was gnawing at me.

“I — okay. Listen.” A minute later, Yao drops his voice even lower. “Where did the Sunflower Sieve come from? The Big Three all have it, which means that either they developed it together, which I doubt, or they all bought it from Mallochi Okeme, which I also doubt.”

My stomach tightens. “Probably it’s Haojie make, and the other two just stole it. Hand me a bleach wipe.”

“You think Haojie would let them off the hook for that?” No, Yao, I don’t think that. I’m trying very hard not to think what I think. “It would be a bloodbath between the three of them. They’d be ripping each other to shreds instead of Beijing. Maybe they all just discovered it at the same time, but...”

“Sometimes these things are just in the water,” Dr. Chen offers in passing.

I drop my bucket of disinfectants and rise. “I need a break.”

But the break room is no refuge: a third of Safety is clustered around the coffee tables, reading the memo that Dr. Ren just sent out to YINS, on our behalf, urging the university to treat the Sunflower Sieve with extreme caution. Has anyone actually seen the egg, someone asks. No, but it’s definitely circulating outside the Big Three. Okay well has anyone here actually seen it. Nervous laughter, webbed glances. I mean we’ve seen the debris and it’s brutal. Thank god for Mona. This is Tenfold Gate all over again, someone points out.

I shut myself in the broom closet. 

I try to shake it out, to breathe a little heavy. I try thinking that any second now, someone will come forward to claim credit for inventing the Sunflower Sieve. But then I think about the debris clawing and spiraling in every direction at once. I picture the entire city is a coral reef. Briefly I think the thought clearly, and then I nest blurry matroyshka domes against it. I know the more I look the more I’ll see.

I treat myself to a long shower, and a change of clothes from a bottom drawer, and a night in one of YINS’ pine-scented sleep pods. I don’t want to walk the streets. I don’t want to admit to myself why that is.

Things seem contained in the morning when I come back downstairs, practically in my pajamas. There are reporters in Building 1 looking for a passing comment from anyone with cutouts on the nature of the Sunflower Sieve. There are Blue Delta officials, tourists on pilgrimage, a mainland diplomat or two. I don’t see it happen but a scuffle breaks out, someone trying to shake down a Haojie employee for the egg in question, but he doesn’t have it, and they both end up bruised and confused on the floor before Beiwan redlights drag them both back to the station.

Almost a week into this, with a ragged causal battlefront now stabilizing somewhere deep in red tradespace, and nobody I know except goddamn Mallochi Okeme has even seen a Sunflower Sieve egg. But the algorithm is making its mark. The Soup is flooded with papers announcing applications of the Sunflower Sieve to fluid dynamics and circuit layout and game theory. It’s being used to smooth out the back catalog, to redraw the foundations of neikotics in smooth lines and simple strokes. Updated versions of practically every other notable egg are dropping online, newly inflected with flecks of black and gold. And these, in turn, are being applied to more previously intractable problems. Terser proofs, more elegant solutions, whole new avenues of inquiry — all simply falling out of the sky. 

And these are sending a growing number of YINS students down to the clinic with exactly the same kind of debris. 

Every zwoop from the clinic’s beds puts me on edge. I’ve been bashing refresh on the Soup, watching the download count skyrocket on my Sunflower Sieve inversion for days now — without the slightest sense of satisfaction and a growing, unplaceable sense of shame. How many times has it been run now? Why had Deng’s warning seemed so abstract, before?

“Look what I found,” Yao tells me, later on, same day. He drops a whole clutch of neikotic eggs onto my desk, where they roll all over my chickenscratch attempts at understanding Deng’s work.

I frown at my paper. “I don’t think that’s very polite. It said, take one.” Indeed, a growing number of YINS labs are leaving the Sunflower Sieve’s daughter and granddaughter eggs out on the free tables. There’s simply not enough time to hatch them all back to soberspace.

“I’ve already hatched a few of them.” He says this in a very here-nor-there way, grinning with uncanny distance.

Tentatively, I put down the pencil. “And...?”

“And something. So far. But I think I need to need to hatch the rest.”

Aside from the fact that he clearly hasn’t been sleeping, something is wrong with Yao. The machinery of the Sieve is still latching the muscles in his face. I get the whiff of a framerate. And then his gaze grazes mine and oh christ there’s a blinding flash of something Rube Goldberg in there, something Von Neumann in there, some kind of xylophonic, burbling self-assemblage taking shape behind his eyes, behind my eyes, and just for a moment they touch...

“Bud, I think you need to take the inversion.”

“I’m not going to do that.” He shakes his head like I just don’t get it. “Then I’d have to start all over.”

So maybe the next day I don’t come to campus. Maybe I spend a day whiteboarding at home, working through some of Deng’s equations for the diving-bell, trying to understand it from soberspace. I factor and integrate and divide, and wonder: are these my symmetries? My boundary conditions? The parameters by which I turn my guts out in a single destructive act that defines my whole existence? Is this what I’m good for?

I keep my head down and my eyed fixed straight ahead, as a lull opens up between two bouts of rain, as sunflower mania grips Shanghai.

Consider my downstairs neighbor, a man with red cheeks and a shock of white hair who we call Lao Miao. A retired mechanic, the man to beat at chess in our little combover of a park, a big hit with the aunties. Miao considers himself a citizen of Xietu South Ward, and then of the People’s Republic of China, and nothing in between. He keeps his long-expired Chinese shenfenzheng card taped to the back of an old cell phone, the chip from his YZID reluctantly stuffed inside. He gambles in RMB, wins in parallel yuan, and goes down the street to exchange it right back. He gripes about Blue Delta’s overreaction to the Xia Zitian thing. Now there was a man, he once mused to no one in particular, who made a single mistake! And admitted it!

For Lao Miao, Shanghai’s estrangement from Beijing is a sad, slow-motion mistake orchestrated by the masochists at Blue Delta and the maniacs at the Big Three. It’s not something normal people want. And it does take a certain lanyard-induced hypoxia to muster pride for the Yangtze Delta Orthogonal Zone, and its strange new exports: parallel, counterfactual, virtual, neikotic. But the Sunflower Sieve itself, still spilling out theorems and reactor designs, eclipses even the ongoing financial warfare that pushed it into the foreground. It’s as though we’ve finally produced something the rest of the world actually seems to need. On a day like today there’s a sense of being here and not there, now and not then, in the eye contact on the subway and the downbeat of the chatter with the danbing guy. Today, even Lao Miao might be cajoled into wearing a little sunflower on his lapel.

“Good morning, Mona,” he calls as I step outside. I wouldn’t have guessed he knows my name, but he positively sings it (high-high) in that reedy voice of his, classic and fine-tuned like one of his mopeds.

The ads on the metro, for skin cream and yogurt and daycare, have all been convolved to bloom with sunflowers. The Malaysian women in the interchanges are selling the things by the dozen, newly dead or freshly printed. A subtitled YZTV broadcast features a Blue Delta rep, flanked by glowering Ward Council delegates. Impossibly, they all agree that the Sieve will succeed where countless strategies and programs have failed, lighting the way to reunify the wards.

Camball footage now: reporters outside Xia Zitian’s dingzifang compound, rabid for his take. He emerges in a bathrobe, adjusts his ankle monitor, and shoos them away with a slipper.

Nobody mentions the debris.

Loop-lock is becoming an endurance sport. The neikosuit, fallen from fashion first as a practical measure and then a status symbol, is seen on campus again; no one feels like taking bathroom breaks. And nobody feels like taking the inversion, either. I have two theories about this, and nobody to share them with. The first is that the daughter eggs are less painful to work with than the Sieve itself, its golden light titrated to manageable amounts. The second, I keep not even to myself. I shut myself into a meditation booth and do my belief modulation exercises.

The campus is festooned with black and yellow streamers, which could almost explain the blooms of the same color appearing in the Mirror Sea displays, clawing for my attention from the corner of my eyes.

I need to continually push back the strange, queasy feeling that it appeared in the Mirror Sea first.

And when I finally make it back to YINS, there is an italicized, fairy-lit wonderment in the air. The triage lines keep getting longer and longer, but the keep are getting milder and milder, as though a single nucleus of pain has dispersed itself over a wider and wider set of minds. The second week of classes, and nobody even looks stressed. The school thrusts a precarious waterfront over the river, made of trellised, interlocking courtyards, and on the first truly cool night of the year, each of those is overflowing with the raucous and the impromptu.

Recitation sections spill out into the nightingale air, and the lecturers draw larger audiences as they become bolder and more unhinged, wandering off into whole bedside notebooks of half-baked ideas. Postdocs tumble downstairs with armfuls of eggs, more than they could ever possibly have time to hatch. They keep the most promising for themselves and hand out the rest according to whim and footraces and ranked reverse auction. With ironic grins, wizened luminaries crouch on failing knees and chalk the five fundamental neikotic recurrences onto the paving-stones, marveling at them as though for the very first time. It feels like everything is possible tonight.

“Mona.”

Just now I was lost in thought, casting glossy glances over the froth of neikonauts. My name has always been a bit of a jump-scare, but this time I let out a reedy little eek. “Oh, ta ma de, Yao! You scared me half to death.”

Yao Dongyuan appears from behind a trellis of sun-baked, dying violets. His forehead is beaded with sweat. He has a weird, warped air about him right now. His voice sounds laden. “I’ve got something I really think you should see.”

I know what he’s going to show me, and I don’t want to see it. Once I look, I won’t be able to deny it, and then I won’t even be able to push it to the fringes. On the other hand. My pulse quickens. On the other hand maybe I should just look. Maybe it’s all in my head, which...well, no, but maybe I’ll look and I’ll see nothing, which by the Weather Bureau’s own admission and insistence is what should be happening. I passed their test. I should be cleared.

The scowl I’ve been offering Yao takes several seconds to sculpt back into an expression of neutral, casual interest. Yes, I decide. I’ll look, and I’ll see nothing, and after sixteen months of Remedial Belief Modulation I will finally put this to bed. And what’s more — in my gut, a well-tuned rationalization engine shifts into higher gear —what’s more is that Yao looks up to me. And when he sees me see nothing, he’ll let it go, and we can both get back to not seeing anything where there isn’t anything to see. Ultimately, I decide, I am doing this for him.

I tell him sure, fine, okay, but we gotta be quick. I sound normal, right? This is how a normal person sounds? “I’ve got a photo shoot tomorrow.”

It really worries me that he doesn’t react to this. He glides two steps ahead of me up the path from the river. He leads me into Beiwan, past a tram stop and a bougie ice cream joint now slinging gold-flecked fudge-ripple scoops to YINS’ last tour bus of the evening. “I noticed that down in the clinic,” he begins, breaking a minute’s nervous silence, and then trailing off. “I noticed that there aren’t a lot of people even choosing to take the inversion.”

We take a right, and pass the Observatory. I thought maybe this was where he was taking me — the building is usually draped with silky LED banners displaying exactly what you’d expect. But tonight it looks closed, even somewhat abandoned. There are light on in the upper floors, but nothing on the Now Showing board.

“Well, that’s good, right?” I try to insist. “Inversions really burn people out. Maybe the Sieve’s special sauce is getting diluted into its successor eggs. It’s probably one of those things that only a handful of people can safely use without hurting themselves.”

“Like Tenfold Gate.”

I concur through gritted teeth with absolutely plasticine cheer. “Like Tenfold Gate!”

Or maybe we were lucky with Tenfold Gate. Maybe the flaw in its design was that it hurt too much, set off too many alarm bells too soon. Maybe this time they’ve figured out — oh for fuck’s sake, stop thinking about it!

“And then I thought...” He trails off again. I doubt he realizes it, but he’s struggling to wield language, with how much debris has probably piled up in his mind these past days. “Here. Look. Just look, and tell me what you see.”

Yao has led me to a wide, gently curving Mirror Sea display wrapping around the side of what I believe is an overfunded genomics startup. He can’t possibly know that this used to be one of my favorites. That Cai and I used to live in the building across the street, which only re-opened this summer and probably still smells like mildew. That we could see this one from the balcony of her flat, that we’d lie there for raptured hours, just staring down at it.

If I don’t look, the fear will grow and grow until it eats me alive. 

If I tell Yao not to look — well, when has that ever worked?

First I let my eyes graze it, for a sign that it’s on time-delay. When I see cracks of sunlight being annealed into the picture, I let myself look a little more closely, and wonder where the cameras are that might be feeding this part of the Sea. I try — I always try, these days, if I have to peek — to see it that way. It’s just surveillance fragments. I see patterns that look like Xuhui, or like the gaudy developments along the safer segments of the Switchgrass Ring. It’s somewhere else, somewhen else. It’s not here.

The edge of a Ripple slicks by. I turn quickly back to Yao, who already looks bewitched.

“Do you see it?”

“What am I supposed to be seeing?” A very dangerous question indeed.

“Look away.” Yao glances around, and so indicates that we’re not the only ones here. A very diffuse crowd has wandered out of YINS and into these shadows, all eyes on the Sea. They’re scattered in twos and threes, deliberating with low whispers and animated hand gestures. It’s the kind of attention I usually see reserved for a whiteboard. “And now look back.”

And when I do, in the moment before my eyes focus, I can see it dimly. I see it first as leftover sunlight, giving teasing silhouette to the very shapes that have consumed my imagination these past weeks. I can still see that they’re made of stoplights and umbrellas and taxis and mottled, backlit plastic signs that once said PHONE CARDS, all of that and none of it, flashing warm gold and sleek black. But it all comes together into that demanding alphabet of zigzag shapes, of languidly uncoiling spiral arms finally making their frantic connection. It is the gently bending, slowly triangulating shadow of some great exoskeleton, a scaffold, a substrate...

I step forward instinctually for a better look, and it disappears.

I peek again, this time less forcefully, and it returns, dim as ever. The Ripples are flowing through it. They branch, divide, merge their way through the negative spaces, around slow corkscrew bends and through vertebral arches. Their motion no longer looks quite so passively tide-borne; rather, they seem all to be moving towards various somewheres, with a clear idea of where they might be. And yet it feels equally true to say that nothing has changed, that this is how they have always moved. It is as though their new surroundings explain their usual motion in retrospect. It is made, unmistakably, of Sunflower Sieve debris.

Which I’m not carrying. My fingers find my forehead, and there’s a displacing jolt, a widening and a vaguening, which comes with the realization that others around me are making the same absentminded gesture. But they are.

“Try stepping in.”

I was already three steps in, and Yao — thank you Yao, damn you Yao — his voice pulls me back. I lie quickly and firmly, and I think he sees through it entirely. “I’m not getting anything.”

“Are you going to make me spell it out for you? They’re — I don’t know how many of these people can actually see it, but they’re looking for their own debris in the Mirror Sea. They’re trying to find out where they fit in the structure. And when they do —”

And when they do, it stops hurting. It writhes pleasurably for having found more of itself — I know, I know! But instinct, and my Weather Bureau conditioning, is kicking in. It says, no, no, make it go away, and with sudden retch of gut-borne understanding I realize that I know how to do that. 

Something is coalescing around the edges of my vision, a flickering, panicked little purple-and-white blob of something. It might almost be a flayling or a wake-parasite, some tiny Ripple picking towards the debris: the waterfall-curtains of it, the gentle-twinkle of it, the clawing, spiraling, murmuring of it. I know I’ve seen these shapes before. The thought unfurls unbidden, prophecy into fact. I have seen them before, now, in Mallochi’s tiles and the shards in my gram-baggies and here, right here, kelp-like strands of it in the Mirror Sea. And orbiting it, probing it, that flashing blob knows its only purpose, seeks an opening. Am I really seeing this or is it just in my head but the difference is no difference the question is no longer fun it’s a pit it’s a parabola...

There’s a flash: a loopback whisper — holdingonletgo — and the debris is gone. Gone from the screen, gone from my mind’s eye, gone from their brief and terrifying confluence. And from that paraeidolic maw, from that churn of everything and nothing, the diving-bell has disappeared as well.

“I saw that.” Yao’s mouth moves in fishy little o’s. “Mona, I saw you do that, please don’t say —”

I hiss back. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He looks like I slapped him. But he doubles down, in this languid and heavy-lidded tone that I hate hate hate. “I don’t mean to be weird about it, but we all know what happened to you last year. It’s okay though!” His usual brightness peeks through, pitched just too high. “I look at it too. Sometimes I’ll have a tough problem set, and I go and take a long walk, and the answers just come to me. Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe the Ripples are building something to make it all easier for us and — maybe it’s okay, Mona. Maybe it’s just all okay.”

I do actually want to slap him now. “It’s not okay. Ripples don’t build things.” But out of the corner of my eye I can see them prodding curiously at the the fucking structure in the Sea, very precisely as engaged with it as we are. I take two steps backward and I am doing my best right now not to flee the scene, to walk back to campus calmly and soberly and with my head held high. “Get your shit together.”

I, personally, do not have my shit together. It’s happening again.

On my way through campus, I stop by the Mirror Sea display in the lobby, pondering the faint golden streaks in the background. Someone passes, a neikonaut, and gives me a concerned look. I want to shake her and shout: how are you not seeing this? Instead, I keep my eyes fixed on the pixels. Willing, no, daring the diving-bell to appear.

If you’re really in there — I find the thought low in my throat, soft on my tongue — I’m sorry.