Deng’s making a show of it. As I pull up a cafeteria chair, she slides me a heavy sheet of paper marked up in her own hand, in tight blue ink — even her handwriting has good posture. It’s the same set of nine equations she showed me earlier. Or very nearly so. She smiles.
“The Sunflower Sieve has appeared. It’s time to write the paper on its inversion, or you’ll soon be scooped.”
Deng is narrating the world. I know not to interject, even when she takes a long sip of chamomile and bites into a pastry. Of course I’m worried about getting scooped, I insist to myself. Even though any mentions of the Sieve’s danger in the new literature are vague and performative. Even though the part of me that cares about any of that feels scotch-taped together right at this moment. My sense of normalcy is so fragile that every blink and twitch and saccade sends me back to that vision of interlocking debris.
She pats her face with a napkin. “Now, I know you were hoping to work with Dr. Rui, but you might have noticed that he’s taken to spearheading the Safety department’s response to the new egg. He’s become awfully preoccupied with his memos and whatnot.” She sniffs. “So that leaves you with me.”
“You want to co-author my paper?”
“Yes. It’s...past time.” She stumbles on that, tapping at the sheet of paper. “And I would like to do it in a particular way. A purely mathematical formulation. A clean sheet.”
I read between the lines. I wonder where she might take this if I happen to push back.
“You don’t want to mention that I used the Bridge. At all.”
“I want a work that is as objective and useful as possible.”
In early days I clung to hope that Deng and I would submit a paper together. But my ideas were soggy paper-mâché next to an honest-to-god volcano, a force of nature. She didn’t know how to nurture what little I could give her. It never played out quite like this, in those long-curdled fantasies. But here and now, I have something that Deng wants, for whichever of her amorphous reasons. This is the approval I craved. So maybe it’s not high summer sunshine on my face.
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “Let’s not mention the prototype.”
A whole cloud of unease dissolves pleasantly at this: about the diving-bell and the debris and the Sea. All of that’s just math, isn’t it? Just equations playing out in predictable ways?
Then it hits me again, in a different light, genuinely warm: I’m submitting with Dr. Deng Jinghan! Oh, god, the citations! I try not to salivate, imagining them stack up.
“First author, though, right?” I ask, feeling faintly craven.
She smiles, crosses her legs, and takes another bite. “First author.”
And she looks pleased to see me the next day, outside the faculty lounge. Pleased, I realize, to see my hands. She glances down at them, once, twice, with wry approval: “Did you manage it?”
“I think so.” I give it another moment’s thought. “I think I’ve got it down.”
My hands are covered with ink, because late last night and into the morning I was whiteboarding. I don’t have her mind for math, and I probably never will. And it’s been a long time since I’ve had to do any outside of loop-lock. I cursed Deng, as I factored and combined and plotted her equations, for not just giving me an egg to ponder. But that’s not how she operates. Even if she hadn’t sworn off loop-lock, she’ll always prefer ink on paper in soberspace.
The look she gives me is of a master claiming a novice, and I try not to imagine getting used to it. “Excellent,” she exclaims brightly, and leads me down a hallway. She opens a series of doors with her card. “Mona, this is the fun part. I think you’re really going to like this.”
The faculty isn’t hoarding the best scanners for themselves. Not really. They’re breaking them in, they insist between chuckles. Working out the kinks. Still, there’s nowhere on campus outside of the faculty lounge where you can use a late-model Kanwei Pulsar. The last door on the left is for a tiny scanner room, not really big enough for the both of us. It’s dimly lit, the suggestion of sunlight through dense conifers. Ambient music pulses quietly from the walls. And, god, the Pulsar! It has citrus-scented moisture-exchange padding where the clinic’s beds have sweat-stained foam. It has chrome-plated controls on the armrests. It has fucking teak accents, man, I dunno.
Deng watches my reaction with contained delight. “Kanwei claims they’ve nailed prose with the Pulsar. If you’re going to be writing, you should try it.”
Prose doesn’t mix so well with loop-lock. Writing in this way amounts to tiling in with a vague intention and letting the scanner rapidly probe your mind with a language model. It’s remarkably fast and eerily passive. Personally I doubt that Kanwei has nailed prose, but the Pulsar could hardly produce worse results than the first couple of papers I handed in written on student-center Gliders, five or six years old even back then.
“It might take a few tries, but I’m told it’s very fast. I’ll be waiting outside.”
So I close the door to the booth. A stillness descends, punctuated by the scanner’s clicks and beeps. I do know how to write this paper, I realize, looking at my blue-stained hands. Most of it will be the model’s doing, the guardrails of academic prose. But I can supply the rest. I have a mathematician’s sense, imperfect but immediate, of how my inversion works.
Even the visor smells nice. I paw at the shiny knobs, dialing in my settings, and then the Kanwei logo hovers in front of my eyes. STAND BY FOR TILES. The magnetized whine of the scanner encroaches and overtakes…
And I understand the Sunflower Sieve debris better, too. I understand it with textbook words like pathological subdomain and measure-zero Kakei expansions. It spills and twinkles from the negative space of Deng’s equations. I won’t think about that.
The nearly ultrasonic whine takes on even higher, tangy, citrus harmonics as an absolute wall of tangerine assails my eyes. The tryptamine hits: I feel a wave of intricate bliss, a vivid image of Deng smiling knowingly — the trip almost gets away from me before I can focus on the color, willing it to burst into four, and then again and again, primer tiles looping more than a hundred times a second, until I'm right on the verge of it. The sync is crisp, the colors bursting with skylike luminescence, the computer firmly but smoothly under my control, and I under its. The building blocks of my reality in loop-lock with the Pulsar are like a gemstone dust, almost fine enough to let real emotions swirl misty around me.
I could get used to this, I think. And then I’m back. There was the flashing, oscillating sensation of the language model scrubbing my channels. A blinding, rainbow-road prismatism. Now, just the sound of blood in my ears. Barely thirty seconds have passed, so little time that the DMT has only just peaked. I let the trip fade, birdsong made of bells made of birdsong, and then rise from the scanner to see just what it is that I’ve written.
A Generalized Inversion for Sunflower Sieve Debris
Xu Maoli (xu.mona@yins.edu); Deng Jinghan (deng@yins.edu)
So far so good. Introduction, yadda yadda. Background and motivation, stop me if you’ve heard this before. All is well until about halfway down the second page.
without the usual considerations of dimensionality (Fang). However, the Sieve’s unusual choice of pathological subdomain presents a second challenge: irregularly spaced attractors in the k-space of its debris that, when the Waldmann operator is applied to the binding graph by , again produce elements of the pathological subdomain. We therefore consider the debris as a truncated warning that it’s coming, we all feel it and yet none of us can form the words to fence it in the tide is too high and still rising () and if any of us are to escape it will be in pieces
Ah. So much for Kanwei’s new prose models. I climb back into the scanner and try again, my head still throbbing from last time. This one’s better:
introduce the notion of “smeared” seed sequences which are computed via a moving window deep below deck moving up and down. Are you feeling it (Lam et al.) the tension on the line the hook in your mouth the porthole convex. Known as hyperlagmites, these structures in the Mirror Sea
…until it’s not. I swig half a bottle of chilled water. On a heavy linen paper towel I put down Deng’s equations in cramped hand, steering my mind away from all that, towards dry and objective formalism. Take three:
third case in which has we can choose arbitrarily whether the binding curve is concave () or convex () (Waldmann). Recovering this degree of freedom reveals runes unseen. The cardinality of is deeper than you thought, but then you’ve already seen stolen sunlight twinkling on their edges you’ve been there you’ve been them it cannot (without loss of generality) be otherwise. It builds because it builds rises because it rises loops because it loops and it will overtake silent and silky the mirror sea will be the sea they crawled out of
I make myself delete this draft before I read any farther. It descends into shanzi, characters with no fixed meaning, radicals echoing with sinister suggestion. Whatever gnarled half-truth is trying to climb out of me and onto the page, reading it back is only going to make it worse.
Deng raps quietly on the door. “Are you all right in there?”
“I’m fine,” I shout back. Sweating now. Knowing that when I next walk through the cafeteria, I’m going to feel that debris hanging in midair, overflowing from the tiny crevices between word and gesture. I’m going to remember vividly how I saw it chattering silently in the Mirror Sea in just the same way. And the loop is going to tighten. The gap between here and there is going to feel like no space at all. Last time, with Cai by my side, I loved this feeling, loved it all too much. Now I climb into the scanner again and fire a massive magnetic charge into my channels, trying to burn it away.
The seventh draft still has madness around the fringes, little throwaway references to the Mirror Sea that I snip out as I see them. Otherwise it’s rather coherent. After forty minutes of trial and error, I crack open the scanner room door, feeling gross but intact. Dr. Deng is sitting where I left her, hands folded and lost in thought; she makes some effort to look busy with her laptop as I emerge. I wave a hard copy of the paper at her triumphantly. For a brief moment it seems like she’s going to give me a hug.
“This is exciting,” she’s muttering to herself an hour or so later, hands flying at the lab server’s keyboard. Deng is corresponding author, which means that it’s her job to fill out the various declarations and disclaimers of the Soup’s submission process. My job is to pace uncertainly around her office, swigging from a water bottle. I watch her compose a two-paragraph abstract without hitting the backspace key once.
“Jesus Christ,” I exclaim, looking over her shoulder.
“I’ve written a lot of these, you know, in my time.”
“No, I mean — your inbox. Do you ever clear that out?”
Deng has “99+” unread messages on the Soup. She smirks, clicks and scrolls lazily through them. “When you’re one of the…” she begins, and stops when she can’t find a self-effacing way to finish the thought. “I mean to say, a person in my position attracts a lot of crackpots with their crackpot theories. It’s not really a good way to get ahold of me.”
Later on, she lets me click the button. Submitting to the Soup is a pretty visual affair; I watch my paper drop into the citation graph, losing track of that single star in a spiderwebbed milky-way. Within a minute, there’s a flash of activity as the synthesizers get ahold of it and deem it worthy, tying A Generalized Inversion for Sunflower Sieve debris in silken strands to the rest of the field. No doubt Deng Jinghan’s name has a lot to do with that. A relieved exhale, almost a sob, as the citation count ticks into the hundreds, and my work is woven into the story of the Sunflower Sieve. I’m published. I finally did it.
Behind Deng’s big stack of tea boxes she’s apparently been stashing several pricey blue bottles of Yanghe. She twists one open with some difficulty and sloshes some into her teacups, and then we drink, laughing and coughing as the baijiu stings our throats. It feels like there’s nothing left to say. I sigh contentedly and cast lazy glances around her office, which is half-illuminated by a stolen salt lamp. There’s a gunmetal-grey piece of a Navy loop-lock rig. A wall of degrees and certificates and commendations. Only one photograph: Deng’s mother, who died the year we moved here.
Maybe there is more to say here, between us. Maybe the drinking accelerates just a little as we both try to figure out what it is. After my third cup I pick up the hard copy of the paper, put it down, and then after some hesitation pick it up again. “Is this useful?” I ask, breaking another silence. “I mean, I get that it describes the inversion accurately. But is it enough to reconstruct it?”
“Is it enough to reconstruct it…” Deng mutters to herself. “No. It’s not. For a motivated reader, it would be a good leg up. For someone else it might be the starting point for a new inversion entirely. That’s the beauty of math, isn’t it? You cast an idea in a shared language, and then it’s the world’s to interpret.”
She looks pleased with this thought, but I must look crestfallen.
“Oh, Mona, don’t —“
“I want to be able to do what you do.”
She shifts in her chair, leans forward, and eventually puts a tentative hand on my shoulder. “Please don’t get it wrong,” she offers, after a while. “What I do — on paper with symbols — maybe it’s happening too slowly to see just yet, but that’s a dying art. You did do this, in loop-lock, because you’re a neikonaut. Math is what happens in the moment. I knew someone who always liked to say that.”
Deng knew Adrianna Lam.
“I’m worried about Yao.” I blurt it out, and hope that Deng will see this as a non sequitur. “Yao Tongduan, the undergrad. He’s…got some ideas about the Sunflower Sieve debris. He seems to think that it’s computing something in…” it’s hard to separate what he said from what I saw. “In…I dunno, the space between our minds? Does that make any sense?”
“In the Mirror Sea,” Deng concludes.
“I…” My face goes cold. “I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mona, it’s okay! Don’t give me that dreadful look. I suppose you’ll be shocked to hear this, but I look at the Mirror Sea too. I struggle, sometimes, with what I see in it. And I know, in the limit, that what happens on those screens and what happens in our minds, well…” At loss for words, she slowly and portentously enmeshes the fingers of both hands. I nod.
Deng was off at a conference, a year ago in spring, when my Ripple crashed and I snapped and the Weather Bureau brought me in. I had moved to Xietu South by the time she returned. This, now — this is us talking about it.
“In that case, I have something you should see.” Then, quickly: “I mean, that Yao should see.” She’s at her keyboard again, digging through directories. She pulls up a video with a timestamp nearly two decades past. She fast-forwards through most of it. And, wow — that’s her on camera, wearing a chunky necklace in saturated primary colors. And now there’s Dr. Rui in a threadbare Fudan University crew neck, with a full head of hair. In their accelerated bustle, they’re wiring up two test subjects with primitive electrodes.
“An empathetic baseline was established between two subjects.”
The readouts from the electrodes appear: low-res neikotic manifolds, barely clear enough to see anything. The lights go out, but there’s a candle on the table between N.001 LI WENHAI (he’s saying something) and N.014 QIU MIN (she’s smiling, and now she’s responding). Gradually, painstakingly, some correlations appear in their ‘folds. There’s something else in there, too.
“Debris,” I mutter.
“Soberware,” Deng corrects, a little warily. “Or at least debris constructed with a certain amount of intention. Which was, in this experiment, to transmit just a handful of bytes from one skilled neikonaut to the other.”
I find I’m biting down on my tongue, and I don’t know why. “You mean, like, telepathically?”
“Well, it sounds rather stupid when you put it like that, doesn’t it?”
She lets the video play at true speed, silent and dim and nearly greyscale, for a minute or so. The hoped-for transference doesn’t materialize and, after a while, the correlations in their manifolds disappear. The video is affecting Deng more than she realizes. I can see her getting lost in faces that, quite likely, she hasn’t seen in a long time. When it ends, though, she closes it briskly and blinks that all away. “It’s not possible, Mona. We wasted too many months believing that it was — and we did believe, we really did.”
“So you’d never consider running it again?” This sloshes out of me before I can consider it. “I mean, with modern hardware, surely, there’s a possibility that you’d pick up a signal you missed last time?”
“No,” she says, quite firmly. “Thankfully this was never declassified. Now, let’s just say, I prefer this to be an embarrassing little secret for Rui and I. It’s…good…though, that you brought this up about Yao Tongduan…” Right. Yao. “Perhaps it’ll help him to see this.”
It’s time to call it a night. I toss back the last of my baijiu and Deng really does hug me now, squeezing me loosely with her arms and tightly with her hands.
“Talk to your patients, before you draw conclusions.” She says this to me just before the door clicks, her feet up on the desk. She sounds a little drunk. “You and Yao. That’s what good clinicians do.”