Sunflower mania grips Shanghai.
Consider my downstairs neighbor, a man with red cheeks and a shock of white hair who we call Lao Miao. A retired mechanic, the man to beat at chess in our little combover of a park, a big hit with the aunties. Miao considers himself a citizen of Xietu South Ward, and then of the People’s Republic of China, and nothing in between. He keeps his long-expired Chinese shenfenzheng card taped to the back of an old cell phone, the chip from his YZID reluctantly stuffed inside. He gambles in RMB, wins in parallel yuan, and goes down the street to exchange it right back. He gripes about Blue Delta’s overreaction to the Xia Zitian thing. Now there was a man, he once mused to no one in particular, who made a single mistake! And admitted it!
For Lao Miao, Shanghai’s estrangement from Beijing is a sad, slow-motion mistake orchestrated by the masochists at Blue Delta and the maniacs at the Big Three. It’s not something normal people want. And it does take a certain lanyard-induced hypoxia to muster pride for the Yangtze Delta Orthogonal Zone, and its strange new exports: parallel, counterfactual, virtual, neikotic. But every so often Shanghai produces something only it knows how to produce, that the rest of the world actually needs. On such a day there’s a sense of being here and not there, now and not then, in the eye contact on the subway and the downbeat of the chatter with the danbing guy. On such a day even Lao Miao might be cajoled into wearing a little sunflower on his lapel.
“Good morning, Mona,” he calls as I step outside. I wouldn’t have guessed he knows my name, but he positively sings it (high-high) in that reedy voice of his, classic and fine-tuned like one of his mopeds.
The ads on the metro, for skin cream and yogurt and daycare, have all been convolved to bloom with sunflowers. The Malay women in the interchanges are selling the things by the dozen, newly dead or freshly printed. A subtitled YZTV broadcast features a Blue Delta rep, flanked by glowering Ward Council delegates. Impossibly, they all agree that the Sieve will succeed where countless strategies and programs have failed, lighting the way to reunify the wards.
Camball footage now: reporters outside Xia Zitian’s dingzifang compound, rabid for his take. He emerges in a bathrobe, adjusts his ankle monitor, and shoos them away with a slipper.
Nobody mentions the debris.
The whole city is converging on Beiwan, tour groups and school buses on pilgrimage to YINS. The one little ice cream shop is drowning in business. Sunflowers everywhere: on hats and glo-wands and streamers. I really can’t help but notice that our barren little Mirror Sea is dense with Ripples today, and that it’s flecked and stranded with goldenrod. I keep my eyes away.
Deng’s experiment wouldn’t be so hard anymore. With a willing partner I could run it in an afternoon. I’d need a pair of readonly electrode nets, easy to borrow from the library. And to establish an empathetic baseline, these days —
“Do you have an intersubjectivity optics kit?”
The librarian nods, and fetches a velvet bag clattering with heavy lights and mirrors and prisms.
Downstairs, I search for Yao. Maybe I’m not ready to drag him into this yet, but I consider how I’d couch it to him. If it doesn’t work, that’ll be good for both of us. If it does work, well. His desk is unoccupied, and empty aside from his copy of the Sunflower Sieve egg. I consider leaving a note. Instead I find myself handling the orb, weighing it in my palm. Really, you shouldn’t. But of course I need to, sooner or later. This thing is going to be part of every neikonaut’s toolkit within weeks. Besides, if I’m going to help Yao out of his delusions, I need to see what he sees.
I hatch the Sieve. It’s bizarre and otherworldly, sure, but really it’s straightforward as neikotic eggs go. Its amber mantle softens and bends light with a fibrous nest of tubules in the core, and their basic structure is the shadow of something more profound that I know will unfold in loop-lock. Tethi gave his customers thirty minutes to learn the thing in the darkness of Double Descent. Were there any real light down there, they could have done it in ten.
I return the egg to Yao’s desk, and I bring the Sieve into loop-lock. With each eye two inches from a screen, I force myself to hallucinate its secret patterns in the again-again staticky tile-shapes. In loop-lock, I don’t feel anything immediately.
Then the Sieve unfolds like an optical illusion. I notice that certain shapes I thought far in the distance are actually alarmingly close, and when I focus on moving them (for of course they are my own thoughts) I see how they articulate. I peel the machinery into the foreground, willing it to flex and bend, watching carefully how its pieces interact with each other, shocked at the size of the thing. Soon the ways it moves become apparent, its stiffnesses and affordances more familiar than the body reclining in the scanner chair.
If I had to describe it, and I guess I do, I would say I feel like a translucent, semirigid nest of millions of tubes ranging from the carotid to the capillary, like a pipe organ from the distant future. The bulk of my attention is not so much fixed on the Sieve as is the Sieve; but there’s enough of myself left over to admire it from all kinds of angles.
Then I look for some shit to put in it.
The thing about the Weather Bureau is that they really do still report the weather. From their servers I braid feeds from millions of sensors — temperature, pressure, humidity, wind, sunlight — from Chongming to Suzhou. This is the rawest data I can find, terabytes free of context or cleaning, and I spool it into the Sieve until I think I might burst. And as the Sieve churns, some of its pipes do burst. They go — ahem — thoing! Overloaded arteries spill half-digested data into tilespace. Thoing! Thoing! Thoing! More than half of the tubules snap and wither. Ninety percent. Ninety-nine. In ingesting a year of weather readings, the Sieve has become a sparse yet highly predictive little snowglobe that says exactly when it’s going to rain. It sings with probability amplitudes tinged with petrichor.
It’s so good that you could easily ignore the neikotic debris spilling out of it by the megabyte.
I leave the Sieve behind, paging it to disk, and follow the debris as it sinks into the lower eta band. The loops are slower down here, the tiles darker. The debris is hard to spot: flaky distortions in tilespace, thousands of tiny jitters. I descend. Focus. Oversample a single piece. It’s barely ten tiles wide, quantized and comb-like, flitting rapidly. It collides with another piece. And another. Their eerily primitive snowflake-arms and cilia and corkscrews dazzle me with all the ways they fit together. The clumps become complex chunks of tile, reaching and darting with a microbial quickness. But as they reach a certain size, they converge towards that familiar coiling, meshing alphabet of shapes. Only now ten times larger...
I watch, astounded, as the golden flakes of the Sieve’s debris reassemble themselves, sticky and motile and almost velcro-like, into the same patterns at ever larger orders of magnitude. A single enormous piece emerges in the flurry. I dash and slosh around it, chasing good angles, watching the corkscrew-nautilus grab for another piece at its own giant scale. It scintillates frustratedly in place, too fast for the garbage collector to have a chance, heavy enough to hurt.
And it’s...reflective. Its outer layer flashes with the eta-band’s murky blue. It occurs to me that in loop-lock, things don't just reflect light. The reflection has to be computed, ray-traced. It takes tiles, cycles, time and energy to do this. Why bother? I draw closer, expanding its surface across my awareness, trying to untangle the pattern...
Suddenly, there’s a faint and discordant rumbling from even deeper in my tilespace. You’ve really done it now, Mona. With a flick of intention I collapse the Sieve and even more debris comes snowing down. I cast around, I realize, for a defensive weapon. I fashion myself into something wily and sharp. The rumbling grows into something orange and un-ignorable, into a buzzing. That’s when I realize, feeling faintly stupid, that someone is ringing the scanner booth’s doorbell. Poking the beehive.
“Yes?” I grumble, two minutes later. One of the Safety department’s undergrad researchers is at the door. She looks nervous — God, is this how they see me?
She explains. Which is to say that her mouth is moving, but just what I get from this is glimmering chatter, half-information, total nonsense. It enters through my ears but then seems to veer away from the language center of my brain.
“I’m sorry, what?”
She repeats herself slowly, those same mouth movements. I realize — and I don’t know how else to explain this — that I’ve been focusing in the wrong place entirely. There’s that sudden, tilt-shift effect again, and language snaps into focus. I arrive in time to catch the words conference room and emergency meeting. I don’t think I’ve blinked once.
She gives me a weird look. “Are you coming?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” I mess with my hair tie, and wipe sweat off my face. “Lead the way.”
The Sieve debris hurts like hell, for a minute. All those symptoms from the checklist — facial tics, golden light — those are real to me now. A micro-pixelated marimba-fountain with the metallic aftertaste of encryption burbles in my gut, and I worry that if I open my mouth again, something incomprehensible and yet legibly horrifying will come out.
Then I catch the eye of a neikonaut in the hall. I feel it, primarily, in my teeth: a millisecond of intricate tumbler-clicking. Emotionally I parse his look, the half-smile, as you too, huh? And then there’s a release of pressure, a reconfiguration, an expansion. My Sunflower Sieve debris interlocks with his and levels out, and suddenly it’s no more than ankle-deep. Wait! I want to shout at him, my language center back in the foreground. What just happened? But the moment is already long gone. I don’t think he noticed anything at all.
“What did you say this meeting was about?” I ask, sure that I’ve already been given the answer twice.
But she doesn’t seem to really know. “Something...I dunno, about the Sieve. They’re waiting for you.”
We turn a corner, and then another, and she lets me pry open the door.
“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. I don’t like that anyone’s examined it so closely.
“Oh, good, you’re here.” Deng greets me briskly, as though this really were an emergency meeting. “I sent Yao to fetch you half an hour ago. Have you seen him?”
My fingers trace lines in my forehead. It’s awfully bright in here. “Not at all.”
She puckers her face disapprovingly. “Well. Have a cake!”
The room is lousy with Sieve debris. There’s a noisy, feverish tingling at the edge of everything. It’s just a little extra something — a filmy lens that bobs in and out of my awareness, showing me the words behind the words, the colors behind the colors. If it wasn’t so terrifying, it would be sort of funny, clocking which of the department’s biggest Sieve whistleblowers are using the algorithm themselves. As it stands, I feel it sloshing and between us, filling up the space between the pleasantries and the paper-cup toasts. The Sieve seems to want to gently copilot my words — and for a while, I let it, tuning out my own mouth-sounds and wondering, is anyone else seeing this? And also, where’s Yao?
Dr. Qin stands up and gives a nicely parceled speech about how my inversion is going to make the Sunflower Sieve safe to use, for now. “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 Rui are doing this binary-star thing where they’re on opposite sides of the room at all times.
The real, unpleasant surprise is that someone from the YINS press office is here to profile me.
“Tell me about your childhood,” she says, over the whir of the camball.
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.