The next morning, I allow myself just a few minutes of toying with Mallochi’s debris, and tuck it among the stacks of schedules and flyers and bills on my desk.“Welcome back, Mona,” calls Dr. Deng from across the Neikotic Safety floor when she sees me. Which is odd, because she’s the one who’s been away. One conference after another — I’ve barely seen her all summer. “Want to take a walk?”

Deng and I have begun every semester for the past three years by making each other our priority. We agree that we meet Mondays at nine sharp and take the week from there. And every semester, nine becomes ten thirty, ten thirty becomes after lunch, which gradually, torturously becomes try and find me in the building, I dare you. By December we’ll be lucky if we’re on speaking terms. But today is September 3 and she’s smiling, holding a coffee with my name on it. I’ll take it.

“Let’s take a walk,” I concur. And again to Deng’s credit, she doesn’t mention that I’m late. We take her way, winding back through the basement annex of the Neikotic Theory department. We’re not the only ones getting an early start. You can smell these guys breaking loop-lock into its constituent parts, with their expensive Japanese chalk and little mothball hits of DMT. In the oblique, dusty silence they keep, you can hear its shell crack gently. At a blackboard covered in commutative diagrams, a chain-vaping postdoc cusses reverently under his breath.

“So, Busan?” I venture, once we’re in the elevator. I hiss inwardly at the glorious morning sunshine.

“Busan,” Deng concurs. Behind her severe ponytail and ovoid rimless glasses, I imagine gears whirring, even in the most casual of conversations, trying to find the...crispest thing to say. “They’ve invested a frightening sum into neikotics. A second hub for the field, Shanghai without all the interesting bits, that’s what they imply. A bloodless twin on the operating table. You should have come.”

“And what do you think of it?” I ask, biting my tongue. I would have come, with more than four hours’ notice.

“I think it’s good to be home.”

Out of the elevator, into another glassy mainsail of a building, past a cafeteria churning with undergrads — still an introduced species here, still clambering for a niche. Three years ago — hell, three months ago — the Yangtze Institute for Neikotic Studies was under construction. It was a freakshow of acidheads and gremlins and category theorists converging timidly from Fudan and Tsinghua and Hong Kong University, blinking in the LED track lighting. Now it sells hoodies. My Son Is A (Provisional) Neikonaut. It’s a school.

Despite all that’s gone down between us, it’s nice to see Dr. Deng. Next week she starts teaching for the first time since we left Stanford together, and the woman — thirty years my senior and a titan of neikotics — is nervous. What if they hate me, she wants to know, and I brush that off as impossible. As a lecturer, she’s magnetic, and she smiles when I tell her that. Our last conversation of any length, on my boneheaded failure to grasp Lam fibration, feels distant now. But it’s like this every year: fall semester, new prospects, a fresh start. By the spring, our relationship is in tatters.

Then we round a corner into Building 7 and —

“Mona, should we...”

I realize what’s in the corridor. Or should I say on, on the just-installed floor-to-ceiling Mirror Sea displays?

“No,” I mutter, stealing just a tiny glance before fixing my eyes straight ahead. “It’s okay.”

This hallway is long and narrow, newly reopened last week. It’s walled by two screens which bathe us in white and blue light as we pass through. In my peripheral vision I try not to notice details: the soap-bubble sheen of the crystalline cavern walls, the stoplight pinwheels and traffic-cone snail-shells, the honeycomb maze of their world refracting through. It’s daytime in Shanghai, and so it’s daytime in the Mirror Sea: it blooms languidly with the shapefeel of taxis and snack carts and great magnolia trees, though I know close inspection would reveal a shifting tapestry of suggestion and no discrete objects whatsoever. To our right, a Ripple wriggles along at roughly our speed, but I react not at all. Not by changing pace, and especially not with a tiny, sharp intake of breath.

On the other side, Deng tuts: “They really shouldn’t be putting more of these up. People are sensitive.”

She’s sticking up for me, but it rankles. “It’s on a time delay. Totally Weather Bureau-compliant. I’m fine.”

“You’re doing your belief modulation exercises?”

“Every day.”

She steers us on a long meander through YINS’ hexagonal quad, keeping to the shade and primly ignoring stares from the more well-read freshmen: that’s Deng Jinghan! And some ratty grad student! But she can’t fool me. I know what day it is, and I know the general direction we’re heading. I play along through the small talk, all the way into drafty Building 5, where echoes rise and our voices drop. She slows near some enormous mahogany doors, inlaid with wink-nudge stained glass mandalas. What are the odds? say her eyebrows. Should we have a peek?

It’s time for her yearly spiel in the Hall of Eggs. I roll my eyes hard and follow her inside.

There are a smattering of tourists in here, and several rows of glass shelves, and thousands of volts of electricity between us and their contents. Deng falls museum-silent as we pass under a body scanner; everyone else is chatting about which of these might be a precursor to the Sunflower Sieve.

Neikotic eggs are intricate, spherical little gizmos, printed to dazzle in all the colors voxelite can be coaxed into. Their puzzle-box unfurlings are messages from a neikonaut in loop-lock to their future self. Stuck with a breakthrough too immense to lug back to consensus reality, this is the first line of defense: printing an object that, pondered and fidgeted with, will lead the sober mind to the same insight. Textbook-wise, they’re TSPs, tangible soberspace projections. But everyone just calls them eggs.

“Mona,” Dr. Deng mutters eventually, eyes fixed on a little cerulean blob labeled A low-cost manufacturing technique for strontium-alloy superconductors. “We need to start thinking about your dissertation.”

I expected her to meander further to this point, loudly admiring the PhD-worthy eggs of former colleagues or students. In past years, this was her way of reminding me whose company I was in.

I sort of gulp, sort of sigh. “I know.”

“This is your fourth year at YINS. Now that doesn’t put you behind, exactly. But I look at what you’ve been spending your time on here, and I worry about your prospects for graduating...not just on time. At all. Now,” she rushes to add, “I don’t put this all on you. There was no real neikotics department at Stanford, and I considered their cognitive science curriculum an unhelpful distraction. You’ve had plenty to catch up on. The language, the culture, too. I think we can chalk up your incident last year as a kind of acclimation sickness to Shanghai.”

I catch her eye in the glass and she pauses to let me add to this list. And in years past I would have let her have it: I would have told her straight up that she may be a magnetic lecturer, but she could be an absentee, forgetful, and even condescending advisor. That she had a way of dangling the mathematics I needed to know just out of reach. That I may not know much, but even I could tell her research program was a garden path to nowhere, a maze of distractions and abstractions tolerated only because she might one day snap to her senses and resume work on what everyone really wants from her, the thing she dangles above the whole field of neikotics: a many-way Deng Bridge.

“I want this to work,” I tell her instead. All those older feelings, they roll harmlessly in my gut, their sharpness smoothed by time and combat. “I really do. But I’m starting to think I’m never going to find it in me to care about the guts of the Loop-Lock Virtual Machine, compiler invariants and higher-order fragment lifetimes...y’know...”

“About my research,” Dr. Deng finishes, with a sheen of amusement. “I think you’ve made this very clear by now, one way or another. And Mona...” She loves to buy herself another second by drawing out these two syllables. “I ought to say that I might have picked up on this sooner. I wasted your time, wondering why I had to chase you down, year after year, for every paragraph or diagram or line of code. Perhaps I was asking the wrong question.”

Let me see if I can do this quick. See, Deng discovered neikotic debris, back in the bad old days at Fudan University or the People’s Liberation Navy or whatever. She came up with the principles of inversion, the mathematics that wipes it from our minds. But somewhere along the way, she decided it was a lost cause. She abandoned years of research and declared that her new goal was to prevent loop-lock from generating any debris to begin with. This would be a simple matter of unrolling an endless toolbelt of category theory and applying it to the most complicated computer program in existence.

On her invitation, without a degree, I left Stanford! To come and help!

“I am interested,” I finally conclude out loud. “Just not in a, five years plus the rest of my life kind of way. Of course it’s better to prevent debris than to invert it away later. So admitting that I still want to do that — that I still like the clinical side, well, it felt stupid. It felt like you’d be disappointed in me.”

Deng smiles wistfully, and it occurs to me that, although I’ve played this conversation out a hundred times in the shower, she’s hearing this for the first time. I want to shake her and insist, don’t you see what you’ve done to me? Don’t you understand how low you’ve made me feel, for so many years, for struggling up this impossibly steep trail you think you’ve blazed? For a moment I swear we’re right there together. But now she composes herself and says what she prepared to say, probably also in the shower.

“You’re the first student I’ve taken on in a long time, and I thought...” She hardens herself. “To be honest, back in Shanghai after all those years, I thought it’d be obvious. I’d heard the horror stories, from a distance, and I thought that neikotic safety would be a more pressing concern. I am disappointed, Mona, but not in you. I’m disappointed that all of this” — she gestures vaguely at the shelves of eggs — “comes with so much needless pain.”

“I feel it too.”

“And I know that’s why you spend much time in the Neikotic Safety clinic. Whatever I said.” Whatever she said, in the last weeks of last semester, had been biting. Venomous. If all you want to be in this life is a clinician, it began, and I drowned the rest in drink and tryptamines and the tiles, parked right at the ledge that so many of the city’s neikonauts find themselves tumbling over. And now, unbelievably, I hear my own insistences in her voice. “And there’s something very selfless about that.”

“You said it’s a waste of my time.” I don’t quite mean to throw her words back at her; my voice is soft, hesitant. “A waste of my mind, a waste of rare neikotic instinct.”

“I meant your use of Dr. Ren’s prototype. It’s dangerous. It’s not a toy.” It’s never the Bridge, and never ever the Deng Bridge with her. Always the prototype, and usually someone else’s in particular.

“You would know best, I suppose.”

“The fact that it is named after me,” she responds levelly, “does not make it my invention.” And this is goading on my part, but everyone does it. In the department lounge, over drinks, in biographies and hardback compendia. “And I stand by some of what I said. What you do in the clinic helps one person, one time, at incredible risk to yourself. I worry that instead of replicable protocols, you’re looking for a thrill. I worry that you’re still too interested in the debris itself. And I don’t want to see you go down that path again.”

My heart stops when I see what she has between her fingers now. That black-and-gold voxelite shard, the seed of whatever it was I found growing in Mallochi’s mind. I want to protest. My mind reels backward fifteen, twenty minutes. By what sleight of hand had she pulled it from my desk?

“It’s your print budget. I know.” She folds her arms and drums her fingers. “But these trophies of yours, others in the department find it a little perverse. And they talk. You should know that.” Her tone is getting loud and insistent, producing hissing echoes around the high ceiling of the Hall of Eggs. She glares daggers at a pair of rubbernecking, Polaroid-wielding Japanese tourists, but modulates her voice. “If we can get past this, I think we can meet each other halfway. But I worry about what you’re looking for, and I need you to stop.”

This is how all of our fights start. Deng follows up something mild and reasonable with some left hook, something she just couldn’t keep to herself, and then...what happens next, Mona? You say the first stupid thing that comes to mind. I go red, see red, seethe briefly. I want to snatch back the debris, pocket it, tell her it’s mine. I couldn’t imagine a better way to prove her point. Our one endless argument is made of tiny loops, smaller, interlocking bickerings. She’s trying to break some. I can break others. Let it go.

“Alright.” I regard her a little sadly. “What’s halfway?”

“You want to focus on inversion. Fine. But be a scientist about it. Try stepping back from the individual cases. You don’t need to save everyone who wanders into the clinic. Start looking for trends, seeing patterns...” She stops, unhappy with that phrasing, and starts over. “What I mean to say is, if you want to focus on inversion, fine. Great. I will stop insinuating that it is a tu lao wu gong dead-end research area and I will cheer you on every step of the way. But you need to...”

“Publish,” I finish, matching her exasperated tone perfectly. “I know. I know.”

She blinks, almost amused. “There are some exercises —” 

“Exercises in Kasibar and Kuang you’d like me to review.” Deng looks taken aback until I add: “You know, I do actually read your emails, right?”

“I’m choosing not to answer that,” she says briskly. “And I think you could stand to spend more time in the Soup, staying abreast of the literature. They are doing a lot of interesting work in Busan these days. I ran into an old colleague from Goettingen there, she works on encapsulation theory, I think you two should get on a call...”

“I think I have something,” I blurt out. The eggs made me say it.

“Oh?” And one more time, to her credit, she keeps her surprise and skepticism out of her voice. ”Really?” 

Without deep neikotic channels you can’t possibly know what it’s like to stand in this room, with neikotic eggs filling your peripheral vision. Sometimes they’re just plastic. But sometimes...all these warm colors and soft shapes, bending light in ways that sometimes doesn’t even seem physical...it gets to you. “Yeah. We had a patient the other day.”

She tuts. “That’s not exactly novel.”

“And I...” The eggs bob and toy at the edges of my mind, ripe fruits with thick rinds — and just now, just for a moment, there was a confluence of ideas, a flash of memory from loop-lock: the part contains the whole, brilliantly, dangerously. I don’t even know what the idea is yet. I just know what I have to do next. “Sorry, I’m...can we do this later?”

I bring a hand to my mouth. Where did that come from? But I think she recognizes the look on my face. “Yes!” She practically cheers. “Is something hatching for you?”

Not quite. Not exactly. But close enough for me to nod, to indicate that words aren’t coming right now. I gesture for the piece of Mallochi’s debris — and Deng hands it back with a weary, reluctant smile. “Go do your thing.”