And after all, YINS is still right there, just down the block.

Granted that it’s not so easy to get down the block these days, when every interaction is computation. Granted that you might forget your sunglasses and feel your perception fray fiber-optically thrice around the city, and then deposit you where you were going — or perhaps not — with a pounding headache. It doesn’t have to be eye contact, either. You might just notice a pattern of nested frames or a rule of three, and discover a neikotic pattern-matcher already lodged in your mind: ready to offer you a spooling readout of strange and lucrative thoughts, the more of the pattern you can give it. You might even pass stalls spilling over with neikotic eggs, mystery-box soberware, with sharpie-shorthand claims to cure dementia or factor primes or cubbyhole the name of every person you ever meet. You might buy it like a peach from a pushcart. That’s Shanghai now.

The city belongs to nobody, and Beiwan Ward belongs to nobody, and even the campus belongs to nobody. Even Dr. Ren cannot really prevent the barely-furtive sale of soberware from YINS, with its deep gravity well and deep ties to Blue Delta. As much as anywhere else, Epsilon City is here, and stepping inside is an act of faith. Still, there are ongoing protests in west block, under the deep eaves of Building 8. These have budded off the riotous demonstrations outside the Haojie Tower and Delta Hall, all self-defeating in their social proximity, all of them ready loam for the Ripples’ strange, automated neikotic bulldozers. The truly nervous — or the truly shrewd — are holed up at home.

I stand in the Building 1 lobby, watching human consciousness shift in and out of phase, feeling the waste heat from the year of work that’s happened in the last week. I tap my feet impatiently. The down elevator never comes first.

The Neikotic Safety clinic is under reconstruction, at massive scale, in the fitness center and the tiyan-guan. And most of the postdocs in Safety? It turns out that they actually worked for Dr. Ren, and in a strange sort of way now answer to me, their efforts redirected to a the new challenge of removing Sieve debris from minds with no neikotic training. So the basement is all but deserted. Yao’s desk remains untouched, a small mercy. There is no queue, no intake, no zwoop. The neon tangle of caoshu calligraphy reminds me that practice makes perfect.

It is nine sharp on Monday morning. It is still on my calendar. I almost come all the way unraveled, but I make my mind make a fist make three taps on Dr. Deng’s office door.

“Come in.”

I hear her stowing paper, closing her laptop. With this new and unwanted but universal attunement, I can practically feel her attention shifting, deep layers of cognition rustling into the background. I see an entire spectrum in her eyes, of surprise and resignation and shame and yes, still fury — when she sees that I’ve come. There are two periwinkle blue chairs on the far side of her desk, and I do what I always do: put my backpack on the left chair and my butt in the right chair. Neither of us speaks for a good long while.

“So what have you found out?”

There’s no mirth or snide irony in the question. I really think she doesn’t know another way.

“I found out what you were,” I tell her. I find that my voice does not crack. I do not burst into tears the way I was certain I would. The word murderer, the English word with its attendant purr, reaches my lips and stays there. “I found out about the Sunflower dive. That all those people...died on your watch.”

There is no grasping in her eyes. Nothing latches onto or resists my words.

“I found out that the Weather Bureau is here. In our corner of YINS. I found out how they used me.” My voice does crack now. A familiar, absurd feeling, that I should have put this down in my notes app before our check-in. “And you let them, Dr. Deng, why did you let them?”

I can tell she has no ready answer; she takes the question just as I asked it. “Because I am a weak old woman,” she replies, after some time, with soft scorn. “Because at first, I was content to blind myself willingly to their presence. And then, when I learned that Ren had made you his weapon, I was furious. Too furious to think straight. It is not my best quality, this rage. And I have been waiting for the chance to tell you how sorry I am for what I said to you the other day. That was not really about you.”

And I have been thinking about how right she was: how lazy and insensate I’ve been. How willingly I let those years slip through my fingers, waiting for something to happen to me. But that’s not really what this is about.

“You never told me the truth.”

“How could I have?” Her mind is a restless animal. I watch her rise as though to pace, as though to pounce, and then settle back into her chair. “You had become trapped in a web of delusion, and...to their credit, by the time I picked you up, you had already begun to heal. What could I possibly have said to you, Mona, that would have helped? The story...the story of what happened to you...it only makes sense, it’s only possible to tell, by stepping into the Weather Bureau’s frame. And I couldn’t do that. And I won’t do that. And I will never apologize for that, except to you, only this once, and only for this. I am sorry.”

“So you just said nothing!”

“They’re unwell, they’re worse than that, they’re sick in the head. So yes, better silence! They are tilting at shadows and making them more real with every thrust. The rule is so, so simple, and yet after all this time they’ve never figured it out: the more you look, the more you see. The more you look, the more you see. And nobody is looking harder than the Weather Bureau.”

I fidget. I think about the Weather Bureau, whether that’s an us or a them now. More than once, I’ve put on my new uniform, admired the the sharp angles and gunmetal grey. I’ve even tried on the visor, and felt a profound sense of relief to lose my own face in the mirror. But more than once, I’ve thought about sabotage. About calling up Mallochi, and doing something drastic.

“You really don’t think any of this is real, do you?”

She huffs. “My colleagues are picking sides. I see sunflowers going up, and see that purple-and-white bullseye going up, and soon both of those symbols will mean something clear and diametrically opposed, even to the ordinary people. I cannot deny that something is happening. But at the very bottom of it, at the very center of it, there is an utter absence of meaning. This is all about nothing except the human will to self-delusion. Believe me. I would know.”

There’s a long, quiet moment. I realize that I’ve already gathered my things. Deng is looking at me with a kind of quiet desperation — and yet a little bit past me, like there’s something else in the room with us. I hate to give her the satisfaction, but I have to know:

“What do you see on the displays?”

“I see what’s actually there. Coincidence, and noise, and wave mechanics, and absolutely nothing of interest. And it would be better, it would be a favor to everyone, if you could do your best to see that too.”

“And back then? What did you see in there that made you run?”

With a small tilt of her head, on the fulcrum between defiance and defeat, she both confirms the premise of the question, and lets me know that she will never, ever tell me the answer. So I shroud it. Ask the next best thing.

“Are you in danger?”

I think we both know what happened outside the Observatory last week. How specifically, how vengefully, something rose out of the Mirror Sea looking for Dr. Deng. And this is when I notice something she didn’t want me to notice. The pillows and bedding stacked neatly below her desk. The new stratum of weary wrinkles below her eyes. She’s been sleeping here. Holing herself up with her hot water dispenser and whatever comes out of the vending machine. I can only pity the look on her face. She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. Says nothing. Like she aways does.

I begin to gather my things.

“When I was just a little bit older than you are now,” Dr. Deng offers suddenly, “I began to think a great deal about having children.”

My head shoots back up. This is a new tone of voice, a new look in her, something unbundled from so many blanketed and wrinkled layers of obfuscation that it squints, that it can barely stand the daylight. It croaks at me in a voice I thought I knew.

“Heaven knows my own mother wanted me to. She resented the circumstances by which she herself only had the one. She told me things that I knew were not true: that my scientific career would come to nothing, and that I would be mired in loneliness in my old age. And she told me things that I was already beginning to feel in my own heart: about the miracle of small hands, small feet, the necessity to break our own stale loops and grow it all again from seed. I knew that there was a part of me that needed to create life. I believed the worst of her fictions, the most desperate of her tales: that my barren ghost would haunt the land, its work unfinished, until it had done so.

“But I resented my body. I felt — and I still feel — that I had good cause to do so. Pregnancy and childbirth, and even death as we understand it, these are our yoke to break. I imagined our descendants would smile sadly and fondly at our perseverance, at our toils in the feudal fields of the human form. I sat down and really, really thought. I gave it six generations, maybe ten, until our discontent saturated, until our technology matured. I saw myself as interstice. I never asked to be here. The kernel of who I am only ever wanted to be scattered to the four winds, to exhaust itself in its work, to actually break the loop. To fallow the fields for something truly new to emerge. I never sat down and made the decision, not really. I simply threw myself at the work. And in the end, I have this instead.”

She casts a solemn glance at the room, at the old loop-lock rig in the corner, at YINS. I do not manage to entirely avoid it.

“Yes, I worked on the Mirror Sea project. Yes, I went very, very deep inside — and I hurt myself, and I hurt others, and I hurt my nation. That creative ache never went away, and I finally had in my hands something that would give me everything that I wanted. I can barely relay the details, looking back, but the feeling was like this: I felt that we were suddenly on that verge. That the society the Mirror Sea could birth would look back on us not just as feudal peasants, but as the fish that crawled to shore. And I...but I...ever since I’ve been back to Shanghai...”

She leans in, composure gone, shaking like china. She doesn’t want to say it. She wants me to see it. She wants me to see the Mirror Sea always encroaching in her peripheral vision. How hard she has to work just to keep her head above water, sunup to sundown. How on a good day she sees through peephole, and how it’s shrinking to a point.

“I don’t think I can leave this building, Mona.” She sobs. “But I always, always see you. And you always have the choice to look away.”

It’s only later, after the most uncertain of goodbyes, after hours of walking, flashing my Weather Bureau badge listlessly through quarantine gates and checkpoints, that I really begin to understand. What this moment is, what this looming war is, and how precious this awareness is, how it sloshes, nearly defies the holding. I walk the Bund and see it barren, empty of tourists. I walk through Tianzifang and feel the forges of another world lapping gleefully at the edges of my mind. By the time this is over — well, there is no over, no resolution except in momentary, counterclockwise whirlpools. But when all of us, all of this, is dead and gone? There will be no descendants to look back on us, fondly, as distant ancestors.

We will be the Sea they crawled out of.