The machine at Stanford was dangerous in a number of ways, and the Institutional Review Board was finding more every day. It was my job to fill out the forms that they’d send up to our dry but meticulously dust-free stucco lab at the edge of campus. They would have questions — about voltages, dose-response curves, psychological baselines — and I became adept at answering them in Dr. Deng’s voice, with her trademark deflection. It was not that I had to lie to them about what we planned to do with a UTMS scanner and industrial quantities of DMT. But I did have to fashion a kind of viscous bubble of confusion around the project. Sludgy narrative tar-traps that the IRB would count their waking hours against and eventually give in to. I learned from the best.
“Okay, they have questions about eye strain,” I would shout across the lab, during early autumn afternoons when I should have been in class. “They want to know how many lumens the headset gives off. And whether we can shift the colors off the blue side of the spectrum.”
Then that descending whir as Dr. Deng shut down the scanner bed and crawled out from under it. “Do you think,” she would grumble, brandishing a multimeter, “that they understand what it is we’re trying to do here?”
Six of us had to sign special waivers from the university, the city of Palo Alto, the state of California and its quasi-sovereign candy shell. We had been drawn from the fat intersection of Stanford’s giant cognitive science department and its even larger circle of drug enthusiasts. We had been trained on the fundamentals: processor architecture and qualia-wave mechanics and the teachings of Zhuangzi. We were to be the first neikonauts west of the Mississippi. I was the youngest by far.
“You first,” we’d mutter to each other, only half kidding, watching the engineers add ramshackle patches and eleventh-hour coolant tubes to the machine. YINS had shipped an entire Kanwei Glider all the way from Shanghai for us to train on, but it arrived in shattered pieces, reeking of foul play. This set Deng back about five minutes. She bought a regular transcranial magnetic stimulation bed and fashioned it into the thing we needed. Charging its supercapacitors had, several times, knocked out the soccer field’s floodlights.
In the end, I went third. I took an evening time slot, and was at the lab just as the sun disappeared behind the foothills. There had been no mailing list chatter about the day’s first two sessions, which I took to mean they hadn’t gone well. The look on Deng’s face confirmed this as I arrived. Her technicians were visible, barely, inside a maze of matte black Dell monitors. A lot was riding on tonight.
“Are you ready?”
In our final days of training she had steered us away from the technical stuff and begun to pump us full of koans. Those rattled between my ears as I was fitted with sensors and tubes. Two fields of sunflowers grow side-by-side. I would have been muttering this to myself as they tightened the visor around my head. Why do they not grow together?
Then I was supine in powder-blue scrubs, alone in the scanner room. Voices in my ear plowed steadily through checklists and failsafes.
“Point two seven five milligrams per second squared, standard curve.”
“Manifold pre-lock in nine…eight…”
Deng’s voice cut into a countdown just then, staccato and nervous, a recitation in classical Chinese: “Between man and butterfly there is necessarily a distinction.”
This woman. I had never met anyone like her: she held this entire loop-lock system in her head, had designed it half from scratch in six months. There was nothing happening in this room that she didn’t fully understand. I smiled and allowed myself to relax. “This transition is called the transformation of material things.” I finished the verse, barely, feeling my tongue go thick.
STAND BY FOR TILES.
The DMT hit my bloodstream almost immediately. My vision, my headspace, went symmetric and insectoid and alien. It was always like this, the feeling that I had been away a long time, and was finally coming home. But I had to remember: tonight would be different. I let the drug move me but soon I began to move back, feeling out the depths in my vision to hallucinate the clockwork of a processor, my finger its metronome. I’m thinking like the computer and the computer is thinking like me. Deng had said we would have to meet it a little more than halfway.
And then, from the visor, light. Solid red, of the very center of the earth, which melted smoothly into magmatic orange and yellow. Eruption to the surface, to interlocking fields of lime and emerald, and then into sky blue, deepest sapphire and indigo, then the violet of night, of the stars behind the stars. Then red again. The cycle gathered speed, and I knew that I was mirroring it, that the colors would continue behind closed eyelids. And I knew there was a mental move I needed to make, an assertion of something like control…
RED. Red red red red red.
I grasped, and the cycle ground to a halt. Red red red red red. Magnets clicked and warbled unhappily at my temples. I blinked my eyes closed and there it was, roiling, howling, untold fathoms of loon-eyed malice. Open again and the same color exactly, stuttering in tight styxward spirals. Red red red red. It was all there was, this knowing glowing campfire red, not scarlet or crimson or cardinal but red red red just red it closed around me, thumping through me, drowning thought and sensation, rising past my high-water mark, any scrawled notch of past psychosis. I was breaking myself to become this color to perceive it to venerate it to actualize the concept of it. I was the very conduit by which it became reality, a brutally simple solution to a hard problem. I would never be anything else but red,
red red red red red
red red red blue red
No thinking or remembering just now, but knowing: that this particular moment had been the focus of all our neikonaut training. There was a kernel of something else, shrinking fast, in the center of all this red, but I to focus elsewhere focus just past it. There is another color. This was scrawled on a chalkboard once, and she had us recite it, chant it eyes-on-eyes until we gasped for air, until we broke from sleep screaming it to terrified roommates. There is another color. It red was red impossible red to red believe red it, but we simply had to believe it, and believe that believing it would make it true. There is another color. There was a different frequency, maybe. A background note of summerday, discordant in its beauty.
There is another color.
There is another color.
There is another color.
That thought spread out like a Cheshire smile. It was working, and because it was working, it was working. I was about to invent another color.
Red red red red
Red blue red red
Red blue red blue
Red blue blue blue
And I believed it into existence, that next tile. It burst cloudless and heavendeep into the visor, a wide-open resonator for birdsong, blue blue blue blue blue of tears of relief of possibility because I was thinking like the computer and the computer was thinking like me and two things were enough, you could build everything out of that. Blue blue blue blue bluebell bluebird blueberry I hit terminal velocity and could have fallen through that blue all night. But training was really kicking in, the registers and busways of the processor searing deeper into my mind. I was ready to do it again.
Blue blue blue blue GREEN.
I came down to as much applause as ten people could possibly muster. There was hooting and cheering and a tear or two. The postdocs stamped their feet, clasped their hands, scrubbed the footage. Onscreen they circled the twists in my ‘folds that appeared as I mastered the color changes: from red to blue to green to yellow and soon in any order I pleased. Deng stood in the back, beaming at me, but she put a hand over my glass after my first sip of champagne.
“That was just one tile,” she said of my loop-lock session. Not dismissively; conspiratorially. She was ready for more. “Think you could manage four?”
It was the first day of my life.
Deng concluded that it was safer to build a second scanner than to move this one from the edge of campus. The engineers grumbled about all the extra work, all the grant money they’d need to spend, how much smaller and more elegant this new iteration could be. December came and went. I failed two of my classes, and Deng yanked hard on some strings to keep me off probation, so I could do six sessions a day tiling deeper into the machine. In the moment I felt I made this choice lucidly. It sure felt good to be her favorite. Her favorite what, though?
Student, maybe: we spent hours together, poring over the history and theory and culture of neikotics. In Shanghai, half her sentences began. She unpacked dusty boxes of gleaming voxelite playthings and claimed that, once my neikotic channels were fully developed, I’d find deep reserves of knowledge lurking inside. Perhaps I was her favorite…test subject? Sometimes that felt more accurate, especially as I struggled to grasp the blackboard math of what was happening in her machine. She was oddly cavalier about that: it will all make sense in loop-lock. One session, a pre-lock hook failed and I was treated to a plain old bad DMT trip, immobilized by panic and foam-lined restraints. Deng herself pulled me from the scanner and asked me a litany of questions, rushing quickly past are you alright towards can you make this motion with your fist and please blink your eyes left-left right-right, as though she had tweezed me from the motherboard to test for defects. Maybe I was her favorite part.
It was the middle of April of my junior year. The second scanner was more reliable but somehow even louder, so when we wheeled it into a lecture hall for a demonstration, we kept the first six rows empty. Deng began by introducing me, and I peeked out of the tube to applause and general mirth. She had a magician’s stage presence, and she used it to great effect here. “No one on my team has seen the contents of this flash drive. I do not even know what kinds of files it contains. Last week I asked the cryptography department for a novel cypher that they believe would take six months to break on their best hardware. Tonight, Mona here — or perhaps, the thing that is both Mona and the machine — will solve it in six minutes.” Tonight I will saw this young woman in half.
“What you’re seeing on the projector is what Mona is seeing now on the visor,” I heard her say, as the tiles encroached and overtook. Not one or four or sixteen, but untold thousands, panchromatic pixel-dust. “As she makes contact with the computer these patterns will become more and more detailed, a map of a world that only she can see.”
And then I was gone and I was back to a standing ovation. Whatever I did in there made a lot of VCs very happy, and some of them approached me discretely at the reception. We love Deng, they said. We all love Deng, but we’re looking for someone a little more aligned with our strategic concerns. If we gave you a lab, do you think you could rebuild it? I was so drunk that I was glowing, and I joked that I could try.
The next afternoon Deng led me on a walk back out by the Dish, to tell me she was leaving. She stopped me mid-pleasantry and blurted it out. “I’ve been offered a position at YINS.”
I blinked back.
“The Yangtze Institute of Neikotic Studies, in Shanghai.”
“No, I know what it is, but...when? Are you going to take it?”
“Last night, and this autumn, and yes, I am, Mona. Stanford has been what it needed to be, but I’ve been away from home for far too long.” We took ten long strides up a cresting hill, past the wildgrass. Deng kicked a rock through this silence, double-balancing a mental ledger, finding some dram of courage, and spoke. “In turn, I am offering you a position as my student.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“I...yes. I do.” She flashed that tired smile of hers and then rushed on. “There would be logistics to manage, and a great deal to catch you up on, and your Mandarin needs a certain degree of improvement, but I think it would be good. For both of us. I could use someone like you around.”
“Dr Deng.” And here the obvious struck me. “I’m a junior. I have a year left here.”
“Yes, well...from the perspective of YINS, that’s no problem. You would begin as a first-year doctoral student.”
“I have classes to finish. I have to write a thesis, or something, I think. Or I won’t get a degree.”
“You’ll get another one.” She sounded awfully chipper about this. “A better one. I’m working with the assumption that you want to be a neikonaut. Right? And if so, there’s nowhere better to be than Shanghai. In a lot of ways, there’s nowhere else. Mona, the scanner that I built here is, I’m sorry, it’s garbage. It’s a bucket of parts. You have not tasted the first spoonful of what a person can do in loop-lock. Or to work among those who really understand the mind in neikotic terms. That is on the table for you now.”
“This fall?”
“This fall.” She was insistent here. “The neikotics program at Stanford is not going to survive in any form I can condone. When I leave, the vultures from Sand Hill Road are going to pick it clean of postdocs. If this is what you want...” And it was. She knew it was, it was all she had to say. “...then this is it.”
I asked if I could think about it. She told me that, given what a big decision it was, I would have until the end of the week. I tried to think it all the way through, but my surroundings were already shrinking in the rearview mirror. My parents? My bare handful of friends here? A long time ago, I imagined a degree from Stanford was the thing, and maybe the only thing, that would make me happy. More recently I hoped it would make me sane. But what was it, really? A piece of paper with my name on it? A life jacket to keep my head above water, circulating clockwise around the filth of the Bay? I already knew so much about YINS that I would be embarrassed to admit it to Deng. I hadn’t even needed to tamp down the thought, because you needed to be a genius to go to there. But it was on the table.
“I think you’d like Shanghai,” she mused, as we stopped for a break, resting against a fence. “You know, whole months go by in Palo Alto where I feel only half-awake. Half-alive, even. Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon, should be the motto here. You never feel like that in Shanghai. There’s always something to see, to eat, to do. Some decision to make.”
“I’ve heard some crazy things about Shanghai.” Wasn’t it run by street gangs that spent their entire lives in some kind of drugged-out ritualistic trance? How’s that for half-awake?
Deng snorted. She really did. “That’s mostly hearsay and propaganda. Internal propaganda as much as anything, you know. The ruling party makes a big deal out of the stranger elements because they’ve deemed it good for tourism.” She began to lapse into Mandarin here. “The truth is that Shanghai has worn many faces, been through a great deal, and it’s always kept the same heart.”
“Why did you leave?” It was a question I’d never thought to ask. I felt bad about that, suddenly.
“I’m sorry?”
“Shanghai. It sounds like it means a lot to you. Why did you leave to begin with?”
“It’s a long, boring, and very political story.” Deng laughed, and then she gestured up the trail — time to keep moving. Just over the next hill, Stanford’s great radio telescope gleamed in the setting sun. “I’ll tell you some other time.”