THREE YEARS LATER
Everyone in Shanghai knows what a neikonaut looks like.
And if you don't — board a train bound for Pudong, and find it peppered with young people in designer silks and Italian leather and gold rings, paired with a puffy vest from a large financial firm. You'll see some false positives: middle managers, or regular traders in a less intimate relationship with their Bloomberg terminals. The giveaway is the hair, with cutouts where they need to be for the sensors to make contact. Or the fact that he's — let's face it — he's sitting half-lotus across three subway seats, dutifully clearing his mind. You glance at him, he glares at you, and you go back to playing mihuan mengyuan on your wanji.
Or maybe it's just dusk, and you see him stumbling out of the Suowei or Paracoin offices with three or four of his work buddies. His vision is still wobbling from a day in loop-lock, or maybe he's already hitting his tryptamine pen, dipping back in to smooth over painful fragments of arcane and proprietary trading algorithms. Maybe it's nighttime in Xintiandi, and there are whole packs of them wandering the streets, cheering and jeering in lines outside basement clubs and crash-landing their veetles in the flowerbeds. They've switched to tacts and phens by now — no cross-tolerance with the work stuff — and they've mostly shed their vests for gauzy black shirts, chunky heeled boots, and nightshades. You look at him, his eyes graze you, but then you realize he's staring at the dripping neon quasigram behind you, seeing it move in ways you can't.
Or maybe it's far past midnight in one of those Xintiandi basements, and the smoke is doing funny things to the lights, and the lights are doing funny things to the music, and you think the bassline might come up on your EKG, and his too when you see him. In ultraviolet light you see those tattoos clearly: blacklit loops and whorls across his torso and arms. Inscrutable obscenities and vows. And then for a moment, his dilated eyes. Briefly you imagine what might be left over behind them, what it could possibly be like to go through life that way. Whether he's trying to remember, or trying to forget.
That's a neikonaut, and maybe it's no secret why the word picks up a kind of sneering, rhotic derision as it leaves the mouth of your typical Shanghairen. Everyone knows that it all comes back to them — the estrangement with Beijing, the fragmentation of a single city into hundreds of wards, the parallel yuan. Then there's the weirder stuff, the smoke between your fingers at the bottom of the bottle, the way it all just feels haunted. Even the biggest detractors have conceded neikotics isn't causing mass psychosis, not directly. Even the CCP calls it quadratic belief. But when you step outside and discarded vials of huixing and qingting squish beneath your feet, street names barely emerged from a primordial alphabet soup — well, who else is there to blame?
Yao Tongduan meets me at the door to the clinic, finds me panting and sweating through a set of totally superfluous scrubs. He clicks his pen impatiently. “You picked one hell of a day to come late.”
No I didn’t. I’m late practically every morning. A year ago Yao was a fresh-faced freshman, putting in long hours at the front desk for a preferential slot in the Applied Neikotics lottery. When he made the program, he started looking the clinicians in the eye, and when he achieved loop-lock, he started swearing at us like a proper shift manager. I sort of prefer this.
“It’s all on the checklist, Yao. Coffee maker needs a double tap. Toilet paper in the back closet.”
“I’m serious, Mona.” He pronounces my English name in a rising, then falling, but mostly exasperated tone. “We have a patient.”
“And you, my friend, have your cert now.” I jab towards the N-1 license (provisional) dangling proudly from his lapel. “Says you’re qualified to do inversions now and everything. You think you’re up for it?”
“No, this is — c’mere.” Yao sounds nervous, and suddenly I feel foolish. “Follow me.”
The YINS Neikotic Safety clinic gets two, maybe three patients a day. Mostly the neikonauts Shanghai doesn’t see — the mathematicians and engineers, less ostentatious than the financiers but hardly less reckless in loop-lock. When Yao leads me into the scanner room, I expect a half-familiar face from the halls. Some fellow student who got lost in the catacombs of category theory, and now winces at right angles, that sort of thing. But I don’t quite know what to make of the man already lying in the scanner bed.
He looks West African, about my age, curly locks falling to his shoulders and a zircon rhombus embedded in his forehead. The wanji around each of his wrists is idly hallucinating runes, and his mesh tank top is an admirable idea in this heat. I approach the scanner bed and his eyes track me, barely. This man has a face predisposed to smiling, but right now he’s in obvious pain.
“Hi, I’m Mona Xu,” I tell him, extending a hand he seems unlikely to shake.
He turns his head as far as the loop-lock headset will let him and groans, “Yi....yi-sheng?”
“Not a doctor,” I tell him, trying not to think about what 400 blank pages look like stacked on my advisor’s desk. “But close as you’ll get this morning. You got a name?”
He makes a sound — it’s hard to be more specific — and then closes his eyes, wincing at something unseen. Yao and I have a silent exchange:
Holy shit!
Yeah, I warned you, his eyes say. We duck behind the control bank, maybe kinda out of earshot.
“This is bad.” Like 98th-percentile bad. “Have you gotten anything else out of him?”
“Not at all,” Yao’s round face is shaded with concern. “He stumbled in about half an hour ago — didn’t even fill out a waiver, mind you — and collapsed into the scanner bed.” He passes me an N-1 license on the usual turquoise lanyard, with a name, Mbetethi Okeme, and its owner’s face in a cheesy grin that suggests he’s getting away with something. “If he has any other ID, it’s on his person.”
“So what’s he do for a living? Vest type?”
“No vest,” Yao shrugs. “But he’s got the look of someone in that orbit. My guess is lone-wolf trader feeding on whalefall. Because, check this out.”
Mbetethi’s rucksack is stuffed with bits and pieces of electronic salvage: LCD screens and beamformers and batteries and GPUs. If you really, really knew what you were doing, you could build a working loop-lock headset or two from what’s inside. If you get one little thing wrong, well...
“He’s lucky to be alive,” I mutter. “I don’t even wanna know, but what’s in his ‘folds?”
All six of the control bank screens are almost humming with color, fractalized swirls of organic thought like the inside of a higher-dimensional marble. Each is a different vantage point on the thing that’s causing Mbetethi so much pain: a nearly white-hot bolus of jagged, pixelated noise lodged in the higher-dimensional manifolds of the Standard Neikotic Projection. If you ask where some process is happening in the cells of the brain, the answer is everywhere, kinda. The ‘folds give you something you can point to. Dr. Deng loves to chastise us about how these images are projections of projections, how they don’t purport to show cause and effect, but it sure seems like the debris lodged in his mind is tangling up the gently undulating sheets of his very soul like a kite stuck in a washing machine.
“Can we oversample on the lower tau band?”
Yao mashes a few keys and the picture slides from greens to violets.
At a surface level the picture is pretty, even mesmerizing. A few fathoms deep and I understand it, loosely, as mathematical constructs escaped from seminars I passed by a hair. But deeper and deeper still...there’s a part of me, dormant now, that knows this colorful space, is roused gently by even these shadows of shadows. To see it scarred in this way brings up bile, but mostly a shot of adrenaline so strong it pools in my fingertips. I can fix this, I know I can, even if from down here I can scarcely imagine how.
“Down a few megahertz?” I ask, trying to smooth all of this out of my voice.
“I’ll save you the trouble.” Yao replies in a lowered voice, but he taps at an arrow key and winces as something like a pufferfish briefly takes shape. Mbetethi lets out a despairing groan from a few meters away. “I cross-checked it against the whole Municipal database, and the scraps we have from Suowei, and not a single inversion in the database will bind to it. Most of them can’t even detect it. This is totally novel. Brand new. Wo cao, Mona, can you try not to look so excited?”
“What?” But I can’t help but let a smile rise from that deepness inside me. “Is it showing?”
See, at the end of a loop-lock session, when the primer tiles stop and the drugs wear off, whatever computational constructs you were working with will disintegrate. They leave behind the sensation of cathedrals collapsing silently in six dimensions, of powerful truths rendered obscurely into decaying frescoes, of illuminated texts being shut in the tomb of the last person who could read them. Depending on who you ask this is like waking pleasantly from a profound if deeply strange dream, or like having a stroke. It’s not for everyone. There’s a thousand-yard stare you see these days, from traders on the subway or Fields medalists on the podium, their breakthrough in hand, but the intermediate steps belonging to the human-machine hybrid that, for a short time, they were. That bothers people — it bothered Adrianna Lam enough to spend years returning to her Collatz proof at smaller and smaller doses, trying to understand how she got there, leading to a wave of secondary results. It bothered Peter Waldmann enough to take a sledgehammer to the machine in Goettingen where he did his wormhole structure work, leading him to a showdown with Interpol.
Sometimes these existential crises find their way to our little basement clinic, but to put it bluntly, they’re not our problem. We refer them to counseling on a floor with windows. Like I said, when you exit loop-lock, your mind springs back to its original, organic shape. Mostly, usually. But things can get...left behind. Lodged up in there. Sometimes it’s a fantastically complex graph structure, casting spindly shadows, forcing complicated detours — you can’t think straight, because you have to go around it. Sometimes it’s a million pieces of digital gravel, each byte just — crunch! crunch! — against every other. Or sometimes it’s a megalithic crystalline shard, splitting the background noise of life into prismatic arcana. It stays behind, rattles around, takes on a life of its own. It’s computational residue, is what it is. Junk, waste, debris.
And Clinical Neikotics is in the business of garbage collection.
“So here’s the bad news,” Yao tells Mbetethi. He taps around his tablet, dredging up the consent form for what we’re about to attempt. “We have absolutely no idea what it is that you did to yourself. Homebrew loop-lock systems are dangerous business,” he goes on, with the confidence of someone who just aced an online training module on the topic.
Mbetethi looks at him, then at me, desperate for the good news.
“The good news is that, one, the box on the floor next to you is a piece of neikonautical history. Something like three were ever built, back in the People’s Republic era. And two, our ranking clinician on duty today” — he nods briskly in my direction — “is certifiably insane.”
Neither of those things sound like good news. Mbetethi’s mouth curls with horror and despair.
“It’s a Deng bridge,” I explain, wincing at the thought of Dr. Deng hearing me say it. Half of everything she’s done since we arrived from Stanford was to distance herself from this machine, all but deny that it ever existed, and here’s her advisee giving out free rides. “It...well, it will let me enter loop-lock with you. We would share a tilespace, sort of, and I could attempt an inversion by hand...in a manner of speaking.” I could go on hedging, but something in the way Mbetethi’s jaw drops fractionally suggests he’s already familiar with the concept — or at least the rumor — of a Deng bridge. When he’s out of this mess, maybe we can talk shop.
“I’m going to need you to sign this,” Yao interjects, placing a stylus in Mbetethi’s trembling hand.
Five minutes later I’m reclining in another UTMS scanner that’s been wheeled up next to Mbetethi’s. The Deng Bridge itself is a piece of hardware on the floor between us, wired up with a series of finicky adapters. While Yao runs to the storeroom for a couple of autovials, I turn to our patient and try my hand at the reassuring clinician thing.
“I know this is unorthodox. But if it’s any consolation, this is the only thing in the world I’m really good at.”
For a long second it’s hard to tell whether Mbetethi even heard this. But then his eyes close and something like an amused smile peeks through the tremors of pain in his face. Yao returns a minute later, and shows our patient a series of fast-acting psychedelic tryptamines like a dentist offering toothpaste flavors. I make note of his selection (the one he groans at the least), but I focus on fitting a tube into the port in the crevice of my elbow. Then I flip the stereo visor over my eyes and begin to configure my own UTMS bed.
“Ready?” Yao inquires from the control bank, already sounding distant.
“Ready,” I reply, remembering at the last moment to spit out a piece of gum.
“Auuurgh,” notes Mbetethi.
STAND BY FOR TILES, flashes my visor.
The DMT hits my bloodstream almost immediately. This is the strong stuff, completely overkill for almost anything but a passage through the Deng bridge. It’s like being shot forward on a thousand tiny roller coasters at once, branching, merging and looping around each other in curious ways, all at incredible speed. My being, my I, is squishy, now gelatinous, now molten white-iron pixelated-starfire hot. All around me I hear music like Shephard’s tones in a Phygrian scale, the blackness before my eyes positively blooming with geometry, waves upon waves of soft curves sloshing with neon, the simple truth of myself a womb —
And then, from the visor, light. Solid turquoise like the chair God gets his teeth checked in. It fills my field of view so totally, so urgently, that I can’t help but fall into it, bask in its hum, think about what it might be trying to tell me. It’s such a beautiful color, and the next ones must be...orange, maroon, a deep pine. The thought occurs unbidden, and in this precise moment those three colors pop! into my field of view, chorded along with the turquoise across four quadrants of the screen. I open my aperture, letting the message of these colors wash over me, and — pop! — they divide again into nearly the precise pattern I had in mind, and then — pop! — wherever my mind and the computer agree on the next tile it subdivides into four more. Now the pattern on the screen is curious, it seems to rush into me through familiar and deepening grooves, it’s trying to tell me something — if you look at how the colors line up it — pop! — I’m starting to see it now. It all feels very familiar. The tiles, spanning the rainbow in a thousand different shades, are telling me something, if I can just listen in and — pop! — a thousand doubled doublings in a breath’s span, and my visual field is filled with these pixel-fractals waving gently like shoreline trees.
I feel my consciousness start to extend a little...outward. The tiles are the carrier wave for a mode of thought that’s new? Or just forgotten? And I start to remember the building blocks of this foreign language, impossible nouns and strange verbs clicking together like glossy golden-emerald Lego blocks that build sentences, then whole paragraphs, poems like programs, rhymes like quines. This never gets old. I’m thinking like the computer, and the computer is thinking like me — in billions of tiny symmetries between neurons of my brain and the memristors of the computer’s RAM, something altogether new is beginning to take shape.
Far below I feel my thumb trembling at the controls. It has one last job, just one big dumb button to press — now. Allocation: a glimpse at the magnificent architecture of my new self; raw stimulation of the optic nerve; more color than I can bear. Then my thought loop closes around the computer’s in an immensely satisfying double-knot, and suddenly, spontaneously, I start to compute. Conway’s Games of Life and Lisp interpreters not just abstract concepts that I’d struggle to simulate with pen and paper but concrete and tangible things, arrays of bits that I can see and touch as if with my own hands. The tiles, now solid and high-dimensional but still raggedly geometric, are the medium and the material; I can soar through them just as easily as I can stack them, into beautiful self-assemblages that are both plaything and instruction manual, input and output, thought and code. I have no field of view — I can see with perfect clarity in all directions at once.
This is loop-lock.