Once in the backseat, age twelve or so and bored to death by the Pacific Coast Highway, I saw a UFO. I remember two phosphoric balls spinning around each other on a fixed axis, hurtling away from the night. Mom! Dad! But by the time I had their attention, it was lost in the sunset. At the time the Air Force was still overflying California, slow-rolling down the street like a jealous ex, but with that? My mind reeled over the implications. I was certain this would upend my whole impression of the cosmos, soft as it still was. And then I took a brief nap. Thirty minutes later I was on my phone, and the UFO was something that had happened to someone else.

This is the strategy. It doesn’t work. I choke down two sleeping pills and wake up to a 10 AM alarm, still in my street clothes. I force myself to get a good look in the mirror — this is you, you are here — and not to feel the relief when it fogs over. The debris and the diving-bell in the Mirror Sea last night — it still feels so viscerally real to me. But isn’t that the point? Have I really learned nothing? For a long time I stand frozen in the bathroom, remembering what I once said to Deng: that I would never let it happen again.

Realizing that I’m late for, of all things, a photo shoot.

Over and over I return to what I saw on that screen. I push heedlessly through the metro. At first I keep my eyes dead ahead during the transfer at Century Avenue. Then I cave. I scan the endless, scrolling Mirror Sea displays for any sign of the diving-bell, striding backwards along the moving walkways. And I’m not the only one looking. I can tell, by the scattered craning of necks around me, that others can see odd new fissures of golden light.

Yes. I resolve it. I can’t keep this inside me again. I am going to say something to Dr. Deng.

I burst twenty-two minutes late into the YINS press office. Someone rushes in front of me to open successive doors, and I find my advisor applying lipstick in the the glass. “You know, I’m starting to favor these darker reds.”

“You know they’re going to do that in post, right?”

Pssh, is the sound that she makes. “Your hair is all...”

“I know, I know.”

Lights and cameras assemble around us.

“The spread on the site is going to say, Heroes of Neikotic Safety,” the elfin woman from the press office tells us, pacing back and forth behind her array. Her massive platform boots bring her to about Deng’s height; she jabs a stylus around to show us where to look. “So, back up straight, you too, let’s look heroic, okay?” At this Deng makes a tiny face which I understand to mean gag me, which makes me snort. “Ladies! I love those smiles. Now let’s go back to back...”

We break for a snack. I try to pull Deng aside, and I try get her attention, to tell her everything right there. I need to talk to you, I keep hearing myself say, but my mouth won’t actually make the words for me. Actually, though, I’ve been meaning to talk to you.

Deng is already halfway out the door, apparently late for something else. “I have to hustle. They have some questions for you, I think. But let’s catch up after this, okay? I’ll be down in room 1-B109.”

Oh fuck. Wait, does she already know?

“Cali girl. Do they still say that?” The press office woman takes a seat across from me. “Tell me about growing up in California.”

So I tell her about cable cars and a flock of stray parrots. Dim sum on Sundays with men in vests and women in blazers, my parents and their friends always talking about building this or that, me staring out the half-fogged window wondering where it could possibly be. Geriatric beach-fossil San Francisco given six months a hundred times, her sweets and stories for me, the sickness glimpsed early through car windows between soccer and robotics. Tents. Fire. Asthma.

“We need a few hundred seconds of facial movement,” she says when I pause for breath, peeking up from her tablet. “Just keep talking.”

My first acid trip too early, the whole city hanging by the thread of the Bay Bridge. The long running joke about how California should go it alone. The conspiracy, from left and right, from within and without, that made it real. The President calling it a Mexican colony, a Chinese colony, old snarls on new lips, the last few rungs of that awful ladder rusting and snapping off. A mayor walks into a drone tipped with carfentanyl, and no one in her office carries narcan. Smoke. Tremors. Waves.

"Tell me about Stanford?"

Men in uncertain uniform watching who gets off at Palo Alto station. Ha, not redlights, but you get the idea. Hills of quiet flax, my world shrinking. My parents in deep Marin with solar panels and a sheepdog and a gun, more train rides in the other direction. Los Angeles, vibrant and present with its own decay and regeneration. Ayahuasca work with fortunate sons and poverty's daughters. The fog I was born in lifted briefly from my mind, a repressed urge to engage rather than observe, wondering if I should change majors, change schools, on the return trip north. Right, Stanford...

"When you met Dr. Deng, did you realize who she was at the time?"

Another bad semester, another summer break with a near-stranger in Venice Beach. In October, an oddly formal email to the “plant-medicines” mailing list. A ten-minute conversation in Deng's pompous English and my underbaked Mandarin, a half-finished machine and her inside it with a soldering iron. A stack of papers in Chinese filled with words my translator app didn’t even know yet, laying out the field of neikotics. And suddenly, a reason to stay enrolled and keep my GPA above water: I was a barnacle on this group building something called a UTMS scanner, one of the first of its kind Stateside. When it was done, I would sit inside and — in a way that I could hardly imagine — speak directly to a computer in its own language.

And no. I didn't realize who she was at the time.

1-B109. The conference room where I keep my ceiling tile stash, if you’re keeping score at home. She’ll probably have it arrayed on the table when I get there, like an intervention or a podunk drug bust. And I will welcome that, I will, I’ll be glad that she understands.

“Surprise,” shouts the entire Neikotic Safety department. Someone blows on a noisemaker.

The name of the game is Mona Is The Big Hero. There’s a banner over the whiteboard that says this, more or less. There are streamers (YINS-colored), some kind of sunflower cakes (store-bought), and summerpop playing on Dr. Ku’s bluetooth speaker. I note with discomfort that some of the balloons have been printed in the shape of the diving-bell. Who besides Deng here has examined it so closely?

More congratulations. Dr. Qin stands up and gives a nicely parceled speech about how my inversion is going to make the Sunflower Sieve safe to use. “This is only the first step,” he concedes. “YINS must redouble its efforts to derive a version that produces no debris.” He nods graciously to Deng, who has been looking awfully flustered. The secret behind my paper is no secret, really — people keep muttering about the Bridge, the Deng Bridge, and she roves around white-knuckling a plastic fork like a prison shiv. She and Ren are doing this binary-star thing where they’re on opposite sides of the room at all times. Each seems to silently dare the other to approach me.

When Deng does finally sidle up, she seems to clock that something is going wrong with me. “Please try to enjoy this, Mona. You deserve it.”

“I think I’m going to need some tips from you on hiding from the press, going forward.” She laughs, and I try for a smile, but it comes out a bit lemony. “Listen, I really need to talk to you. Somewhere quiet, maybe.”

Deng tuts. “I know they’re just ‘the profs’ to you, but these are the biggest names in the field,” she continues. “They’re here for you. We’re here for you. This is good! This is real! This could be the beginning of a storied career. Just do the rounds for a while longer, okay?”

I glance back at Dr. Ku, who’s doing a where-did-my-thumb-go trick. “Okay. Sure.”

Deng leans in. She looks very earnest. “You know very I’m proud of you, right?”

And that’s when we hear a scream from the clinic.

It’s sharp and terrible and long enough to curl with the surprise of still being alive before it finally burns out. I sure wish I was scrubbed up right now, trying to push through a line of neikonauts of all stripes, all the way to the fifth scanner bay, which didn’t even exist last week. A woman is collapsed in the scanner, fingers curled like dead spiders, eyes stunned open, the rest of her face still hidden behind a gas mask for DMT vapor.

“I don’t know what happened.” Yao Dongyuan is rigid and pallid and fumbling with defibrillator pads, but I think he’s too shy to reach into her shirt because none of us are doctors, suddenly this is all just cosplay, and —

“Pulse is high, it’s very high, it’s there.” Something calm finds me and reminds me how to perform the bare rudiments of checking whether the patient is still alive. She’s gotta be late thirties, old for a neikonaut, but she’s got her ragged pixie cut buzzed beautifully — I wonder where she got that done, and this is not the time, Mona! What’s next? Where is the — the little light?

“The fucking — the flashlight for her eyes, where is that?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Yao is mashing buttons on one of the clinic’s tablets, summoning an ambulance. Gotta give him that. “Use your phone.”

“She’s not tracking it.” I feel like this must be literal medical malpractice. But — thank you thank you thank everything — I see a flicker of recognition in her eyes. She focuses on my finger as I move it towards the freckles on her nose and away again. I ball my left fist and — following either basic neikotic safety protocol or the oldest primate instinct — she does the same. She’s alive in there. “Yao, man, what did you do?”

“I gave her the inversion!”

“Okay. Okay. Did you get her coefficients?” His clipboard is on the ground, all filled out. The patient scrawled her name so poorly that the handwriting engine drew a blank, but it looks like she wrote Cheng Qiaoling. Her employer she left blank, fine, the cause of the debris is unknown/decline to say, fine... “These look wrong. I don’t think this is a valid Kasibar polynomial, unless this is supposed to be a seven. Did you check for imaginary zeroes?”

“Did I check...?” Yao gives me a void and mournful look, like I’m grading his math paper.

“You’re supposed to check!”

“Do you check?”

“I check!” Sometimes, I mean. The computer is really supposed to do it for you, but that’s why we have protocols. “That’s why we’re the YINS fucking Neikotic Safety department! We check! What’s in her ‘folds?”

The rest of the staff is crowding the curtains of Scanner Bay Five now, and two muscled undergrads are gently tilting Cheng Qiaoling onto a stretcher. Before they lift the sensors from her head I get a peek at her manifolds on the screen, which are hot with grey-white fuzz, tuned to a dead channel. The remaining neikonauts look almost as ghostly, because they were the mild cases, the ones chatting and ribbing and even making trades in the back of the triage line.

We chase the stretcher back towards the quad. By the time we get her up the service elevator, some Big Three rubberneckers in tow, we can already see a medivac veetle’s pulling in over Beiwan’s modest skyline. The EMTs who land ask Cheng Qiaoling’s home ward and, based on this information, two of them begin to triangulate a suitable hospital; the third fits her with an oxygen mask and a readonly electrode net. “Grand mal,” an EMT explains, staccato, leaning over the stretcher. “She’s got a little rupture in the the anterior cerebral artery. Can I get a fucking terahertz pen?”

“It’s debris from, we think, a novel spectral sieve,” I begin breathlessly. But she glares at me, in my scrubs and badge, across the neikotic abstraction. To me, the patient’s brain is made of Lam columns and Kasibar recurrences; she knows that it’s made of cells and filling with blood. But her eyes are open, and moving, and I know this could be my only chance to answer the question that’s been driving me crazy, now charged with real urgency.

“Listen,” I whisper, sidling up to the stretcher and rifling through my bag. I must have it on me, I must. “I need you to tell me where you picked this thing up. We’ve got a room full of patients down there. Friends of yours.”

Cheng is trying to cooperate. There’s still a grasping in her gaze because some of it survived. Her lips are making the shapes of words.

Fucking — there it is. I hoist Mallochi Okeme’s N-1 lanyard from my knapsack and wave it in her face. “Do you know this man? Did he sell it to you?”

Her bloodshot eyes flare with recognition. “D-d-d...”

“Where?”

She raises her wrist. She’s trying to show me something. The problem is that there’s too much on there, beaded bracelets and bangles and leftover admission bands from two or three nightclubs. She sputters: “D-d-do —” 

“Don’t talk to her!” The EMT hisses at me. She mutters something about shenjing bing de neikongren as they heave Ms. Cheng into the veetle. “We’ll have them call you,” she promises flatly. The craft lurches back off the ground, choking us with ozone and leaving tiger-striped singe marks in the grass.

Back downstairs the clinic is a vortex of silent panic. You can hear necks crack and lungs inflate. “I’m sorry,” Yao stammers, into the silence and mostly to himself, hunched in grief behind the reception desk. I came down to chew him out but now I don’t have the stomach for it. “I didn’t...I don’t know what...do you think...?” He looks up miserably at me. “Did I?”

“It’s my fault,” is what I tell him, just because I’m not sure he can handle the blame. “It’s my inversion. It’s...a little piece of me that did that to her. All you did was press the button.”

“Her coefficients,” he mutters miserably.

“I checked.” The key to a white lie is to feel the relief you’re offering as it flows through you. “They all added up, otherwise the system wouldn’t accept them. You did everything right. It could have been any of us. Okay? I think you just need to sleep, Yao. Just go home.”

It’s only after he departs without another word that I realize I shouldn’t have said that.