When the Weather Bureau finally released me, a year ago in spring, it was with a toothbrush and a towel and a seventy-two hour ward entry token for Xietu South, where they suggested I might find refuge from the Mirror Sea. The rest of my possessions were to be found in a few waterlogged plastic bags outside the dorm building I had just flooded. Only then did the scale of the disaster hit me — I realized that I wasn’t — of course I wasn’t the only one. Dozens of other YINS students had opened their taps, too, overcome by the same wave of blind, psychotic grief.
But we were instructed not to find each other. To forget and move on. There were faces in the halls that I remembered dearly from those heady weeks, but I never knew them as people, nor they me. We’d been reflective to each other, concave to each other, in a way that names would only have impeded. Afterwards we ignored each other conspicuously. We were jilted ex-lovers staking out the far corners of a new vastness. We were survivors of a private apocalypse, and had nothing but scar tissue in common. Never in my entire life had I felt so alone, and that was saying something.
The worst of it, though, was the sense that I was still in Bureau custody, still under observation in one of their warrens. I hallucinated uniformed agents at the edges of my vision, in the back of lecture halls, slipping through unmarked doors. I read too much into obscure research posters on the upper floors. I was fairly certain YINS used the same mango-smelling disinfectant as the Bureau’s holding facility. There was this horrid sense that if I took one step out of line, I’d find myself starting awake in one of their scanner beds, not a day removed from my episode. A visored face would peer down, and a re-synthesized voice would tell me: Making progress. Nearly linear. Let’s try that again. Long after the worst aftershocks had passed, I would pause at the threshold of Building 1 — deep breath — and remind myself that here, of all places, I was out of the Weather Bureau’s reach.
I was wrong. Or rather, I was right. I was fucking right.
Dr. Rui warned me that I’ll forget everything the Face told me, only to remember it over the course of the next several days, triggered by the right cues. But the sunflower patch still is clutched hard in my left fist, and something pops, and suddenly it feels just like I’ve known for years and years that Dr. Deng sent fifteen neikonauts to their deaths. And what if I had known her for a murderer from our first meeting at Stanford? Would things have gone differently then? Not in a way I’m proud to admit. I would have been elated that she felt she could confide in me. Her secret would have been my prized possession.
I hate this, I hate this, how he’s has denied me the shock of it all. Even when I think about the Weather Bureau weaponizing my inversions — not just against Tenfold Gate, but more than a dozen times since then — there’s nothing that feels new. I try to conjure some spasm of anger and it comes up limp like a fake sneeze. This half-feeling, these sparks that won’t catch, there’s only one thing worth directing them at now. Rui’s Face showed me more than it probably meant to: I can’t remember an address, but the important thing is that I’ll recognize the building from the air. I know where on the roof of Building 6 the Bureau keeps a few spare veetles, and I’m not all that surprised that my fingers remember a six-digit code to open the grate. Am I an instrument of the Bureau? Am I the irreplaceable tip of something very sharp and very expensive? Good. Let’s see them try to stop me.
Cai always said these things fly themselves, but I’m looking at an awful lot of buttons here. I’ve gotten myself into the cockpit of a Bureau medical transport and inched it onto the helipad. I’ve got four of the rotors running and the radio blasting and I think also the heated seats. I’m a foot off the asphalt, then three, then six, and now the button to fire the ion-pulse thrusters goes green. I’m coming for you, Tethi.
“Transport oh-nine-one, I’m gonna need you to back off the pad for a second there.”
Another veetle is inbound, fast, something sleek and black and half my size. It makes an orbit of the tower while I figure out how to key the comms to respond. “Uhh, negative.” I hear myself doing a voice. My whole life, my last three years in Shanghai were a cardboard cutout that just fell over and, you know what? I feel cool as a cucumber. I feel pleasantly detached. “Let me just, just gonna...be out of your way in...” Whoa, this thing does fly itself. I have a map dialed up and all I have to do is...
“Oh-nine-one, this is Captain Ma Zhuming, and I don’t know who authorized you to take out a YINS reserve bird in broad daylight, but it sure as shit wasn’t me. Back off and put down and we’ll see about you keeping your post.” The other veetle hovers about thirty feet away now. Its windows are perfectly reflective. It flashes its brights in consternation. That name sounds ever so vaguely familiar.
“Captain Ma, this is Mona Xu from the inversions-on-demand department. I’m thinking I might do a quick lap around Pudong and then fly this bitch into the Suowei Tower, how does that work for you?”
“Oh, hell, I told him not to —” And here follow a string of curses that seem directed at Dr. Rui. “Mona, I’m here to see you. It’s time you spoke to a real person from the Bureau. Let’s please just go inside and have a chat.”
“Tough stuff, Ma Zhuming.” I angle upward a few feet; everything loose in the cabin thuds.
“Mona, I have Xia Zitian with me. Put down, I repeat, put down.”
So that was my first ride in a veetle.
Captain Ma definitely looks familiar, and yet I still can’t place him. As tall as Rui and twice as wide; with dispatches streaming down a pair of affected spectacles, he looks like the bull running the china shop. But he helps the other man out of the backseat with a kind of gentle, brotherly affection, trading handcuffs for a cane.
“Ma Zhuming. Wait, I do know you!” Dr. Rui’s memory crashes down anew as Ma offers a stinging handshake.
“Well, nothing to be done about that, I suppose.” The bluelight scowls, leaving little doubt how he feels about Dr. Rui’s Face. “Hope I made a decent first impression in there.”
The other man lingers behind Ma, with an air of plausible deniability, in coal-black xizhuang suit and tie. Xia Zitian was devastatingly handsome once, before his house arrest left him looking quite so hollowed out. Of course some say his decade of solitude has only added a sort of vampiric aspect to his charm. “Xu Maoli.” He declares my name, in a dusty voice once used to unveil monuments. “The unsung hero of the battle of Tenfold Gate. The student Deng Jinghan decided to take. I hope I can be the first to thank you for your service to the Weather Bureau.”
This is fake, your life is fake, give it a push and it’ll fall right over.
It was the Weather Bureau who taught me how to quiet that voice, and it was the Weather Bureau’s hidden presence at YINS, I’m sure it was, that kept it coming back up. Look, see, it’s flat! Why don’t you have a peek around the edges? But I tamped it down, forced myself to heed reason. There’s simply no way their influence could be so fractal and all-binding. Now I wonder what happens to the occasional undergrad who leaves the circuit of skyways on the lower floors to find out what’s up there in Building 6, in this paranoid maze of frosted glass and mezzanines. Are they hotwired, Faced, and tucked into bed with false memories? Does it happen once a month? Once a week? Every day?
“What’s going to happen to Tethi?” I try rounding on Ma, but he doesn’t break stride. “I know you people have him, and I know where you’re taking him. And I know...” I almost get ahead of myself here: I know what you people do to Chalkers. “If my work has any value to you, if you want me to keep quiet, I don’t want him harmed, you understand?”
“What will happen to him is, in principle, what happened to you. Which, by the way, I will not apologize for. The good doctor Deng would not have liked it if we lost you to the Chalk.” He sees my objection and frowns, cutting me off. “Now, some people who have led deeply quadratic lives, they struggle with linearization, they —”
“They crumple,” I hiss back. And I know how the stories go: imagining Tethi stripped of everything he is, dropped at some random intersection with a white wall of static as a past. This is the kind of situation the Chalk reaches out to meet, but now he’s been stripped of the ability to believe in the right way, he can’t give what it takes, and he slips through the final cracks, dead in a week, found if he’s lucky.
“It’s not my department,” the policeman says, more quietly now. He looks back at Xia for support, but the man is two steps behind, his expression pleasantly neutral, clearly relishing confinement within a different set of walls. Officially, he’s been checked out for a rheumatics appointment. “Listen, I’m with you, to a point. I think Mr. Okeme is a distraction, but Dr. Rui doubts he was even lucid when you knew him. He considers the man the focal point of the whole thing.”
“The focal point of what?”
“Well, to hear him tell it, the end of the fucking world.”
It’s dark behind the next door, and half of me expects to see that pantsuitted Bureau woman on the floor, waiting for a rematch. The other half knows this place from Rui’s memory. Low track lighting illuminates rows of shiny black file cabinets, and instantly I remember what I’d find if I looked inside: hundreds and hundreds of foam-nestled neikotic eggs. All labeled, in a variety of haphazard coordinate systems, with the place they were found in the Mirror Sea. I even know where to find Tenfold Gate: second row, second on the right, fourth drawer down. How good would it feel to lob the thing at the back of Dr. Rui’s bald fucking head?
“I’m here,” I jeer when I see him. “I’m ready for that coma! In fact, I’m thinking two months would be nice.”
Rui is holding court over a group of mathematicians at a great donut of a conference table, or at least he’s trying to. But, God, I can’t even hold the grudge! When he turns around, the image of the mild-mannered professor is shattered. His Face has rearranged his face; those dark circles and worry lines paint a new picture, of a man too long at war. Unearned sympathy floods me for the way he looks pallid and drained, trying to hold court over what looks like half the YINS faculty. Something strange — some self-recognition — lights up his eyes when he sees me.
“Folks, we’re going to need the room.”
“So that’s it?” Dr. Guo shouts from the far side of the donut. “We lose? We call it off?”
“We’re not calling anything off,” Rui snaps. “We couldn’t if we tried.”
They all look tense, filing out, but I don’t go unnoticed by those thousand-yard stares. Deng’s kid, I see one prof mouth to another. Dr. Qin pirouettes and offers me a silent little golf clap. And then it’s just the four of us, gathering along one quadrant of the table. There’s a good-cop bad-cop routine playing just below the surface here, even if I haven’t quite decided who is who. Rui: rail-skinny, terminally indoors — though he’s dropped his usual expression of mild surprise for something more lucidly calculating. Ma: ambiguously muscular beneath a sweeping trench coat; long, sleek hair tied back. Smiling with thick lips, thick skin, sunburnt and windbitten.
Xia? He just looks happy not to be in charge anymore.
“You probably don’t want to hear that we’re sorry.” Rui addresses me, after some scraping of chairs. “If I know you, what you want to hear is that you were right. And, Mona, you were right.” He draws my attention upwards; I already know what I’m looking at. Every day the Bureau harvests neikotic debris samples from across the city, and every moment these tiny spidery robots descend from the ceiling on gossamer strands, angling to fit the next piece. The work is half-hollow, forever-unfinished, swaying gently, floodlit from below, but it’s clear what it’s a model of. I’ve been here. In hazy half-memory with vivid freeze-frame peaks, I’ve travelled the sunways and spires of Epsilon City, the place that almost doesn’t exist.
“It was one of my larger mistakes, not to bring you on sooner. Many times I asked Deng to let us clue you in, but always, she insisted we stay away. I think, at least originally, this was a kindness.”
I don’t want to look at Rui, and I don’t want him to see me like this. So I’m craning my neck upward, watching the colorful facets of Epsilon City blur with tears. All the new pieces are Sieve debris; the city seems to recede in deference from its egg, as golden skeletal arcs blossom every-which-outways with an ambitious purity of form. A quarter way round comes a great gash, an architectural disaster whose negative space cuts all the way to the core, leaving only traces of Tenfold Gate debris along its fringes. An apocalypse happened there. I know it in my bones.
After a long moment, after I’ve collected myself, I turn to the trio of men. “Do you really think she’s in there? Not you, I already know exactly how you think. Secretary Xia, Captain Ma, do you actually believe that Dr. Deng left part of herself in the Mirror Sea? Is the...Ripple they became, that what’s behind all this?”
“I am no Secretary,” Xia offers mildly, “and it was not just her. Sixteen of them diving as one. I hope for their sake that they made it, because I believe it’s what they wanted. And I hope for our sake that they made it —”
“Because there’s a chance that they remember where they came from. There’s a chance that the Sunflower Sieve is an invitation to parlay, and not just a maker’s mark.” The way Ma says this, I can tell he’s eager to change the subject. “Okay, okay. Dr. Rui, what the hell was that message all about? I don’t like hearing you talk that way.”
“We’re not ready.” Rui steadies himself. “And we’re going to lose.”
“Now you listen. I’ve worked my ass off all day to accelerate the timeline. We have hundreds of Ripplechasers ready to deploy tonight, and those may not be the numbers you wanted, but that’s a fighting chance...”
“And I appreciate that, my friend. And tonight will proceed just as you planned. But we’re going to lose.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because Mona and her Chalker friend gave us a kind of data that we consider too dangerous to collect.” With a thin smile, Rui flattens Tethi’s rollscroll, and I want to erupt in protest, that’s not yours. “They built a network of devices to monitor correlations across hundreds of minds, and make no mistake, Mona, to seek is to find.” Rui’s tone edges vortically around an accusation, something he won’t say aloud. “What we have here is the clearest view of Epsilon City ever assembled from neikotic data. It puts what’s dangling above us to shame. Unfortunately it also confirms that the Sunflower Sieve is now expanding directly from mind to mind.”
“Just like Tenfold Gate,” Ma insists. “And we won that one. It’s compromised, obsolete, not a concern.”
“We learned the wrong lesson from Tenfold Gate. The debris was painful. It was impossible to ignore. As it expands, the Sieve’s debris is actually becoming more pleasant to hold. Neikonauts aren’t taking the inversion.”
“So we deliver it through the back door. We put it in front of the cameras.” Ma is getting seriously angry now, or seriously worried. “Again, like we did with Tenfold Gate. Memetics says we’re in good shape. We’ve got street teams already suiting up. We hit those Ripples tonight.”
“We will. That I can guarantee you. And it will not be enough.”
“I’m not seeing it, Professor,” Xia offers languidly, bidding Ma calm with a wave of two fingers. “How can you already know this?”
Ma is not having it. “Rui. Partner, don’t go quadratic on me, not now. We are on the right side of the lens, do you hear me?” He snaps his fingers, trying to break Rui from some reverie. “You can’t know that. Everything that happens in there, it happens out here first. We are in control — I want to hear you say it.”
“Not anymore.”
Ma blinks, stupefied.
“We have it down to the second, actually. You can watch the Sieve structures on the cameras align with the ones in Mona’s data, just at moonrise. And since then, for the first time, we can see structures appearing in the camera feeds before we collect them as debris. And, I said, okay, what do we have here? We have a bipolar, bicausal system, which is what the whole field of neikotics exists to study...”
“Dumb this down for me, you old prick.”
“...And of course you can calculate the net causal flow between them, and so we did, just in time to watch it flip. Jinghan’s known for years, I’m sure. This is what she’s been afraid of, but you know what? We’re still here. We’re still here.”
“Dr. Rui, what was she afraid of?”
“Things happen in there first, now. As of quarter past five this morning, the Ripples have reversed causality between Shanghai and Epsilon City.” And I swear the relief on his face tells the whole story. Rui is done. The game the Weather Bureau has been playing for years is finally over, and reality is out of his hands. There’s something gleefully reverent in the way he starts calling up projections of the Mirror Sea. “So who wants to see what happens next?”