“Let me see it,” I shout when I come down, flipping up the hood, ripping out the tube. “Let me —” It unfurls from fuzzy memory like loose yarn: the Ripple, the one Cai and I loved, is alive. And it took me...and I brought —
Two steps out of the scanner, nausea overtakes me. Tethi, bless him, is holding a bucket. And a while later, when I look a little better, he hands me a little bottle of water. “I’m sorry. Not to have warned you, primed you, whatever. But there’s nobody I can go to. You have no idea what a relief it is that you found it too.”
“No, no, no, no...you don’t understand,” I insist weakly. Retch again. “People see things in there all the time, but it’s just delusion, it’s...” What was the word the Weather Bureau used? “It’s maladaptive...”
“I thought that too, for a while. It was how I justified selling it.” He smiles faintly, and I’m aware now of how foolish I sound explaining the Mirror Sea to a Chalker. Maybe a Chalker? There are layers to it, he’d said. “Come here. I’ll show you what we can see from soberspace.”
He offers me the lone swivel chair at the control bank. In his printer bed, a copy of the Sunflower Sieve egg is under construction beneath several slashing injection heads. And on the floor is a massive, whirring beige box. “It is a correlation coprocessor.” He slaps it and regrets that immediately; the casing is still hot. “Dug myself into quite the hole to afford it. Every Mirror Sea display in the city uses one to find interesting correlations, but as I have been learning, a good neikonaut can blow a whole room of them out of the water. Here — this is what it can piece together, but prepare to be underwhelmed.”
He has a flat view of the Sea up now on one of the monitors. He flexes his wrists, panning and zooming. “Look. This was the night I found it.” The dull grey Sea, roughly nothing, though the poor contrast of his monitor doesn’t help. Infrequently there are spectral intrusions of sunlight, that’s all. “Uhh, here.” More nothing. Then a dim, silent, spherical flash of gold light. I’m locked and loaded to insist that this doesn’t prove anything. But he begins to fast-forward with a theatrical flick. “That was when I saw it for the first time. Now, time passes, day, night, day, night…watch carefully, they test-fire it a few more times…”
“Test-fire it?”
The feed slows. Night falls on Shanghai, and night falls in the Sea, except for one insistent little pinprick, a tiny sun that won’t set. And then another, and another, three more now. It’s tentative, like a flame in wind, and then fierce, like a flame in wind. It looks like it comes from nowhere, only we know better. The Sea becomes a pulsing stellarium; the isolated nodes claw for one another, lacing the night with golden fissures. “That was the night it leaked online, when the Sieve came into general use. All of those nodes? In fact they’re that same point in the depths of the Sea. Only the coprocessor can’t pick that up.”
He smiles grimly at me. I don’t smile back. I focus just past it, a flash of something reflective, and probing it as the diving-bell. The hollow, barely-recalled horror of wondering which side of some ragged mirror I was on. You looked too hard, hisses something awful inside me. It insists that I caused this, even though I know that doesn’t make any sense. It’s got Tethi too. It’s what he’s been trying to drink away…
“Mona?”
He catches me just before I hit the floor.
I just need to lie down for a while. My body is taking this like an infection, fighting it with a fever. Tethi takes me to the roof of Old New Prosperity. It’s the first truly cool night of autumn. He sets me up with musty microfiber blankets, plus a chipped mug of chamomile, his idea of a joke. I don’t speak for a long time. I have waterlogged, chewed-through foundations that must finally come down, and nothing to replace them. Everything I understand about the Ripples comes back as a needling, random-access prickle, and I recast it through the image of them operating machinery in their own world. Their agency is supposed to be faint and illusory. Their motion is supposed to be borrowed from ours. If they can be said to be doing anything at all, they are ultimately and inevitably doing it here.
Something is hiding in the texture of time.
And if that weren’t enough, something else is making a periodic ker-thoink sound that’s driving me absolutely crazy. Through stray, fever-slick strands of hair, I see Tethi bouncing a rubber ball against a concrete backstop. Ker-thoink. It ricochets off the ground, against the wall, and back into his hand. But I have become deeply unmoored, so that the cause-and-effect of ball, wall, gravity, and hand is…doing a thing. A stare into the dot and the lines will wiggle thing. A how do these lights get so tangled just sitting in the box thing.
“Could you please stop that…” I groan as I put palms to concrete and force myself onto my ass.
“Watch it move,” Tethi tells me. Three short English words. He looks relieved to hear me up and speaking. Ker-thoink. And something about watching the ball does it. It all reels up rather imperfectly, but Tethi and Mona snap back into focus.
“Should have warned you before I put you in. Don’t take it right to the head,” he says, gluing English to Mandarin by way of French. “In there you need to be perceiving things obliquely, yeah? Not looking directly at them.”
I have only an inkling of what he means, so I choose to keep focusing on the ball. “It bounces?” I ask. Because, thanks to a glint of moonlight, I’ve realized it’s actually one of his Sieve orbs. “The Sunflower Sieve bounces.”
“Nothing in the Soup about it yet.” Ker-thoink.
“No one’s tried dropping one, I guess.”
Ker-thoink. “Could be your next big paper.”
The orb hits his palm with a satisfying smack. For a minute of pleasant silence, through an unlikely gap in the skyline, we enjoy a clear view of distant and twinkling Pudong. Blurry Ripples crawl the twist of the Suowei Tower. Close by, Wu Ke Nai He is just rumbling to life, throwing off the embryonic basslines of a party that will last until dawn.
“Mona — I can call you that, yes?”
“Well, it’s sure as shit not Dr. Xu,” I lob back, but politely. I have the egg now and I’m very much enjoying its ker-thoink.
“Mona. I said earlier I was going to ask a favor of you. So I’m just going to come right out and say it. No preamble or anything. But I think it’s justified. I think I’d do well.” He rocks back and forth a little. He looks pretty nervous for a maybe-kinda Chalker, for a hardened refugee of the Gabonese Fork. “Take me to YINS.”
I give him a look. “What do you mean, take you?”
“I mean take me. Introduce me to people. Get me involved.” He falters, a rehearsed argument melting in his mouth. “Straight up, I want what you have. You’re working under Deng Jinghan, do you know how many people would kill for that?”
I laugh bitterly, and he takes it the wrong way.
“No. Fuck that. I have been laughed out of too many rooms in this city. They laughed me out of the room at Suowei, and I learned to wipe the floor with their traders. They turned me down at Xiaomi, and I built a scanner out of scraps. And now I’m sitting on a revelation, you and I are, now. Think about what I just showed you. The Ripples are building something —”
“It’s not possible!” I shout, still feverish, newly shaken. “Please stop saying that!”
“It is possible,” he insists flatly. “It wouldn’t be, if the Mirror Sea was only what’s on those screens. But I’ve seen too much to believe that.” He fixes his gaze on my forearm where the moonlight, the right light, reveals remnants of my sigil tattoo. “And I think you have too.”
A trillion once-unseen coincidences woven together by a billion eyes. The slow, impossible, inevitable accretion of stability, unfolding of patterns, dripping of glass. The curves tug and tighten, indistinguishable from need, from agency, from life. The Ripples aren’t what’s on those screens. They’re what we see there. So of course they want. Of course they create. We’ve watched them too closely, let them too deep into our minds. And now we’ve given them lightning from their crystalline sky, a stranger kind of fire. We’ve given them neikotics. And they’ve built a city of what we took for debris.
“And another thing. I think whoever leaked the Sieve is there. I would like to meet them.”
I give him a dull look, not another thing, please. “You don’t mean the Sieve leaked from inside YINS?”
Tethi has not one but two more Sieve eggs in his jacket. He raises his left hand and then his right. “This is the one I found, and this is what was posted online. They’re —”
“They’re different,” I gasp, as I inspect them. Subtly so, in the details of the flecks and the tubules. A parallax view, the same egg discovered twice. “Someone else is seeing this!”
“That third one is yours, yours to keep, and I will bet it’s different too.”
“I thought...” I palm the last egg, giving it a hard look for a self-signature, some quirk of my own perception. “I thought, that night at Double Descent, that you dropped it.”
“Then you don’t know me very well yet, Mona.” He wags a finger, smiling, trying to be funny. “The Bureau is tailing me, but I believe they suspect another player.”
“And how could you possibly know that?”
“Because I’m very good.” He stands a little differently, offers me a harder edge, and then melts into a shadow as clouds brush the half-moon. He offers a cheeky wave from entirely elsewhere: over here, silly! “They find my trail from time to time, and we play our game, and eventually it’s me trailing them. I overheard two of their agents talk. They said they need to start looking at YINS.”
“So that’s where you want to go?”
“I find myself with the Bureau on the left and the Chalk on my right, and both are closing in. YINS can give me...now just what is the word...”
I give him a sorry look. “Academic sanctuary? Tethi, that’s not a thing.”
“Yes! And yes, it is,” he insists. “Do you know what the Bureau sweats over even more than the Chalk? The YINS Observatory! Between them is one spat after another regarding those films they release. But they’re untouchable!” He huffs. “Where else do you expect me to turn? Blue Delta? The Big Three? I’ve thought it over and over and over, and at the end of the day I trust YINS.”
I whip my Sieve egg at the wall, relieved at the predictable way it moves under familiar forces. Resenting that: wishing for a wider mind, ample space to fit new ways of seeing as they come. The orb takes a weird hop. Flies past my face and into Tethi’s outstretched hand.
“And I am a hell of an engineer,” he adds. “I belong there. Tell me otherwise, or introduce me to Deng Jinghan.”
I scan his face for the usual twitch of smile, of self-deprecation, but why the fuck should I expect to find it? The man built a loop-lock rig from scavenged parts and wired it into the Mirror Sea. Of course he deserves to be at YINS. Probably more than I do. And of course, if the leaker is there, snacking in the Building 3 cafe, I want to find them as badly as he does…
“You know this is insane, right?”
“If the Bureau doesn’t catch me, my scanner will kill me. And if my scanner doesn’t kill me, what’s here for me but taking odder and odder jobs for the Chalkers, until I’m one of them again? I was only ever supposed to stay with Min for a week.” He gazes out towards Triple Point, down towards Min’s shop across the courtyard, lights blazing past midnight, and I know he’s thinking about what he’ll tell her. “Just tell me how to impress them. Give me one shot.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Wait. Hold on.” Something is coming together. “Hold the fuck on. You’re an electrical engineer. You can work with readonly nets, beamformers, all that good stuff?”
The way he nods, I might have asked whether he can tie his shoes.
“You wanna help me run an experiment?”