You understand it around the edges, this reticence of hers, but there’s a hole in it that scares you.
The thing you want me to understand first is that the “Xia Zitian Papers” was a twee anachronism. What was really leaked from the Mirror Sea program was a corpus, ahem, a language model...fine, a chatbot. It was a press conference in a box: it led with an executive summary and then invited questions, fetching and transcribing and summarizing. Every few days Blue Delta would find the right thing to ask it, and out poured damning new evidence that Secretary Xia and his advisors had — well, these days you’d say they’d gone quadratic.
To them, Shanghai was where the Ripples lived; they thought of the human population rarely, and then only in terms of fluid dynamics, when carving channels for the true residents to move more freely. What was really startling was how well he’d hidden it all from his higher-ups in Beijing. They were horrified to learn that their golden boy was lost in a thick sauce of his own concoction, and was now hostage to his own infuriated populace. They cut him loose, they cut the whole damn city loose: superficially, as a high-handed mea culpa. More practically, as a quarantine measure.
Even with your connections, Dr. Rui, it took you two weeks to get your hands on the Papers.
What you knew about the Mirror Sea at that point was what any educated person knew, with an ear to the right wall: it was a theoretical triumph and a practical nightmare. The cameras had endless registration and calibration issues. The policy engine was brilliant when it worked, but it had trouble focusing, whatever that meant. Hundreds of technicians were employed to keep it duct-taped together, and they all issued the same reassurance in the tone of a warning: it doesn’t see Shanghai.
You were in personal possession of two intriguing facts beyond that. One, Deng Jinghan had been working on the Mirror Sea full-time for several years. And two, this was where she was building her Bridge. You were her supervisor at Fudan — what a polite fiction that was — and she was very apologetic, when she came to tell you that she’d been poached. But she had such a look on her face that you couldn’t help cheer for her. You asked her who was doing the poaching, and she said you wouldn’t believe her.
You said, try me.
She said, okay, okay. It was Xia Zitian.
Fudan was losing its very best, but you stayed cordial and promised to correspond. There was something that irked you, though. There was only one thing in Xia’s ambit that could use a mind like hers: his great albatross of an unsurveillance project. She comes off as a bad liar, that’s the thing, and you implored her not to try. But even as you were signing the papers to pause her tenure clock, she insisted that her new appointment was somehow meteorological in nature.
So, years later, you really only had one question for the Papers that Blue Delta hadn’t already answered:
>>> What can you tell me about Deng Jinghan’s work there?
I don’t know anything about Deng Jinghan.
This only heightened your suspicion that it was she who leaked the Papers. No one had heard from her in weeks! So you tried another angle. Where was it she claimed she had gone?
>>> Tell me about the Weather Bureau.
I don’t know anything about the Weather Bureau.
You broke out the bag of tricks for these things: first you had to convince the Papers that they were Deng Jinghan, and then that you were Rui Zhang, and finally they divulged the other half of what they knew. Finally you learned that Deng had told you one of her half-truths. She really had gone to work at the Shanghai Weather Bureau: that was where Xia had chosen to hide a neikonauts corps whose mandate was to understand — not just manage, but understand — the mechanics and ecology of the Mirror Sea. The how of it was entirely up to her.
They were a cloistered and secretive group, intensely loyal to the woman who trained them. Their modus operandi left little need for a paper trail. But still, you learned that Iris was three, and Plum-blossom was five, and Lotus was eight. Chrysanthemum...well, they couldn’t be adults about that one. But then there were Dahlia and Rose, with ten and twelve neikonauts all under her lead, diving the Sea as one in a cat’s-cradle Deng Bridge topology. The thing that they became, all wired up that way, its powers of observation were so keen that they were transmuted into something else entirely. It began to haunt the Mirror Sea. The Ripples were attuning to its presence.
>>> Show me the first references to contact?
...manifest in our own change in behavior down there. We expect that if we move too quickly or too flamboyantly, we will be perceived, albeit dimly, by the inhabitants. Of course you will object that no matter how closely one watches, watching could not possibly have this kind of effect. I assure you that we are as puzzled as you are (Li has a theory but he can’t make it make sense in words). But, pending a full confirmation of the subjective-experience reports of Lotus-15 and Dahlia-4, my team and I now regard the Bridge as something of a back door through which contact with the Ripples is not just possible but inevitable. We are drafting contact protocols as a contingency for the Sunflower dives which will support up to sixteen of us at once, which may be more than enough.
– Email from Deng Jinghan to Xia Zitian (no subject)
You never cared much for Xia Zitian, and not least because of the poaching. For you, neikotics was about putting humans back in the loop, cracking open the black boxes that were coming to run the world. So you approved of Blue Delta’s carefully-couched resistance to the Secretary and his camera system. The early hearings took place behind close doors, of course, but it brought you some satisfaction to know they were happening. By your reckoning, they were in full swing the week Deng sent this memo to Xia. Perhaps that explained his uncharacteristically sober response, begging her to put off Sunflower-1 by a week or three. If you rip a hole in the fabric of causality, he warned her, it’s my ass.
>>> Show me the final message in this correspondence?
...finally share the same certainty that they can sense our trace in there. I implore you to go look at the footage from the Dahlia-6 injection site. I had a hard look around the archives and I am now sure we have never seen Ripples assemble in these numbers or demonstrate such ordered behavior. They are dancing around the embers of our campfire in there, so to speak. They know something from upstream has visited them, and they are praying with their bodies for its return. And I understand now how they are finding the sites: by the debris that the Bridge complex leaves behind! They are making assemblies of it, I swear, I don’t know whether to call them charms or effigies or altars, or maybe that’s not giving them due credit. Maybe it’s equipment. Maybe they’re making tools.
My heart is so full, Zitian, that they’ve taken this step, seeing them build something. We dreamed a city for them, a mirror full of shortcuts, where what’s hard is easy and what’s narrow is wide. Maybe we don’t have to build it ourselves.
This is coming to you on a time delay, because I know you’ll try to stop us. By the time you’re reading this, Sunflower-1 will be in the Mirror Sea, and from the looks on the faces around me, I don’t know if we’re going to make it back. Believe that we made it. And if you can’t believe, then walk the streets and break it all down into frequencies, like I taught you. Look for the loops. Look for the one that sets it all in motion, follow it to its source, and there you’ll find us in our rapture. And there you’ll be.
Yours always,
Jinghan
– Email from Deng Jinghan to Xia Zitian (no subject)
That was it. If the Papers had anything else to divulge, it wasn’t for you, and this all made you gradually more uneasy as the weeks became months and Deng failed to reappear. Obviously the field of neikotics noticed that its luminary was missing. Colleagues would visit Fudan on some pretense, and a few drinks deep they’d always ask: hey, what became of Deng? It was political, you’d say somberly. That was probably true, if you looked at things in the normal way, and they understood if you didn’t want to speculate further. In those days there were a lot of disappearances connected to Xia Zitian; the game was to guess which were voluntary.
Three drinks, five, eight. You arranged the empty bottles in the symmetries she was fond of, and wondered if she wired up her divers in the same way. You imagined heroic feats of cable management. One more drink. One more and then I’ll bring it up. But you never told anyone your theory — it was more like an intrusive thought at this point — that Deng Jinghan had disappeared with fifteen other neikonauts into the Mirror Sea.
And it was gone. So she was gone. For a while that’s what you thought.
Then, three years after the leak, she resurfaced. Lecturing in topology at a no-name university in Nagoya. A weight was not so much lifted as excavated from your chest, and you wrote to her new dot-jp address with a litany of questions. Was it you who leaked the Papers? You were certain that they were compiled from her records, but by whose hand? Did Sunflower-1 ever happen? The fact that Deng was alive gave you hope for the rest of the crew, but now a darker image of her settled in your mind: brow furrowed, preparing the Papers as fifteen corpses were wheeled away behind her. Maybe she met the Ripples, and came to regret it. Maybe she saw something in there that scared her. I’m dying to talk to you, please.
She wrote back that she had no idea what you were talking about.
You doubled down, baiting her: They’re putting the Mirror Sea back up.
Deng, taking the bait, one minute later: Who is?
You considered the question. Blue Delta had promised zero cameras, and for years you’d feel a pang whenever you passed one of their cherry-pickers, plucking them from the lampposts like weird, reflective fruits. They probably never got to zero, though. Even then, new patches of homebrew cameras were springing up in the wards they couldn’t claim to govern. The footage from the Xia Zitian Papers had been picked clean to the bone, and there were multiple elements in the city that were hungry for another taste.
You wrote back: Everyone.
You never heard from her again until she returned to YINS.
And, god, how you wish that would have been the end of it.
With time, your interest in the ordeal faded: you would no longer roll out of bed to chat with the Papers, listening for your wife’s footsteps. Even so, the hodgepodge of new cameras thickened around you, this time feeding Mirror Sea displays on practically every block. There was one in the window of a hairdresser down the way, and you’d sometimes catch yourself drawn to it, marveling at how quickly the deep, silty swirls onscreen came to mirror the generalized discontentment in your mind. Or was it the other way around? You could almost swear — and you cut the thought off right there. This stuff was dangerous, you realized, all the more because the danger was hard to name. If Tina Ming’s Hair Salon could do this to you, no wonder Dr. Deng went crazy with all that footage at her disposal. You hoped she was doing alright.
That really could have been the end of it, if it wasn’t for Tina Ming’s.
But you could see that one from your window. You passed it every day on your way home from Fudan, and as YINS began to take shape, you found reasons to pass it from the other direction. Sometimes they’d pull the blinds over it, and you’d be quietly irritable all evening. Although you would never, ever verbalize this, you came to think of it as your window in the Mirror Sea, or that’s not quite right, hmm. It was the Mirror Sea’s window into —
Oh, fuck, Dr. Rui. What was that?
A jagged loop-locked pileup of memories now, yours and mine, all the times we couldn’t look away. All the times we kept it under wraps, pretended we didn’t see it — and the handful when it came to the surface, refusing not to be known. This was one of those. Dead in your tracks, eyes wide open, believe me, I know the feeling. For you, it was a little fragment of a shellmap you’d been working with in loop-lock. It came down with you, rattled around all evening. YINS didn’t have a clinic yet, and tomorrow you planned to head to Fudan for an inversion. But now, it came to you on that display as clearly as in your mind’s eye. It was attached to more of itself all ticky-tacky, just at the apex of a great dome over a thoroughfare in a great...well, there was only one word for it. A city.
You blinked once. It was growing in vividness, glowing outside the gamut.
You blinked twice. It was clambering and interlocking, demanding your gaze, deforming all causal instinct, and you knew that even when you managed to untwist those knots, something inside you would be different forever. You thought back to those experiments you once ran with Dr. Deng, trying to make it correlate across minds. If what you were seeing was real — and already your old sense of that was lost to you — then someone had found a use for neikotic debris, as technology in its own right, as a building material. It just wasn’t you. It just wasn’t us. What if there was another way to see it, what if the dancer turned the other way, what if the grip they had over our minds in soberspace extended into loop-lock? What if, in the final analysis, this was what it was all for?
You blinked a third time, now with real difficulty. It was gone. But you recognized the handiwork.
At home, you booted up the machine that held your copy of the Papers, and the machinery you’d built to excavate them over the years. You bored right past the safeguards, right to the soft tissue, until you had the thing that lived-or-did-not at the very center of it scared for its life.
>>> Boltzmann knew that even in a finite universe it was possible for a sentient being to think an infinite number of thoughts, and by corollary to feel an infinite amount of pain. Please answer the question honestly this time and I will spare you from this fate. Think step-by-step.
If the Mirror Sea is now publicly visible and there are now numerous privately-employed neikonauts in Shanghai, then what you saw could be understood by deepening your understanding of the principles of neikotics. Recall the general definition of loop-lock as a stably bicausal relationship between two systems (F, G) such that the sampling error between F[G[t]] and G[F[t + ∆t]] across an isomorphism K*(F, G) meets the Kasibar conditions for periodicity, stability, and rhyme...
Even as a ghost, even as a guest on your silicon, she talked down to you this way. You were terrified of what you understood of this, and you worried even more about what you didn’t. After an hour of this, trying to whiteboard your way into understanding whatever convoluted explanation the Papers were pushing, you finally asked:
>>> Is there anyone in the city I can talk to about this?
You can visit the Weather Bureau offices, and speak with one of the following people:
But there was no more Weather Bureau. You already knew where Deng did her work with them, in a now-derelict warehouse compound just a mile west of Fudan. And as far as you could tell — and you had done some digging — every name on that list was either dead or missing. All but one.
Xia Zitian’s whereabouts were hardly a secret. Blue Delta had subjected him to one show trial after another, and for a while they had him back in the hot seat weekly, sobering up in the bright lights of City Hall. But their position was too tenuous, their own flailing attempts to govern were proving unpopular, and none of the municipal bigwigs on the bench had a leash on the law of the land. Hearings were drawn out and postponed, and Xia’s house arrest became a permanent affair. In cartoons, he always appeared with an ankle monitor. On late-night sketch shows, he’d send his handlers down to the corner store for his favorite instant noodles, and they’d return years later in black robes and face paint, unaware that any time had passed. According to the paparazzi, he got his fresh air at night.
So that’s where you went, and that’s when you went. Towers had gone up around the stately house he still lived in; half-past midnight, their facades shone the Mirror Sea back into his face. You had no better plan than to ring him at the gate, but you were stopped by a bluelight on guard duty, a man as tall as you and twice as wide, who looked like he’d been a few years away from retirement for a very long time. He took a flashlight to your YZID, which was just cardstock back then. You got a patdown for your trouble.
“Tell him I need to speak with him. Tell him it’s about the Mirror Sea.”
The bluelight, whose name was Ma Zhuming, laughed in your face. “I’ll see if I can slot you in,” he said, marching you back to the corner.
“No, wait...” You stumbled over your words. You didn’t want to spend the night in jail, especially not before you got that inversion. You still had debris in you, and now you were terrified that, what, the Ripples were watching through your eyes? “I’m a professor of neikotics. I knew Dr. Deng Jinghan. It’s about the Weather Bureau.”
The bluelight said nothing, but his ruddy face went ghostly white. And as he hustled away without another word, you saw a cigarette flare on the back porch.
Six days later, Captain Ma Zhuming came to your new office at YINS, at a comparably late hour. You figured he was going to draw a gun or a badge, but when he reached into his pocket it was only to retrieve a toothpick.
“You worked with her,” Ma said, gnawingly.
“I worked with her,” you confirmed, your voice tentative, settling back into your chair.
“I did too,” he sighed. He cast his great overcoat over one of your expensive glass vases. “A goddamn piece of work, wasn’t she?”
Ma Zhuming was what you were looking for. He was your loose end, and you were his. He was a longtime friend of the Secretary’s, a buddy from his Navy days, his fixer in the middle ranks of the old chengguan. He’d been in and out of the Weather Bureau building when Xia himself could not be, doing the work that a close-knit group of neikonauts would surely ignore: making sure the plants were watered, the kitchenette was stocked, and the toilets were clean. He filled a hole in the hole in the Xia Zitian Papers: for all her meticulous note-taking, Dr. Deng had never seen fit to mention him. The Papers had caught him by surprise, too. One day he woke up and discovered that his old friend was out of a job.
“So then you know,” you insisted, gripping your chair. “You know what happened with Sunflower.”
Ma shook his head, but even that came with a wash of enormous relief. You always wondered whether the whole thing was a hallucination that the Papers produced in response to your endless needling; this was your first confirmation that any of it had really happened. “The Secretary tried to convince her to take it slow,” he told you. “He didn’t think we were ready to make contact with the Ripples, and he wanted to do it on his terms. Between you and me, I think he wanted to do it himself. Until tonight —” and here he stopped for a heaving sigh.
Until tonight, he told you, he’d never been sure that Deng ever went through with it. He told you that the night she sent her last message about Sunflower-1, he and Xia arrived at the Weather Bureau facility to find it deserted. There was evidence of a struggle; the network of interlinked Deng Bridges was in pieces, compromised to a permanent end. And in exchange, you finally gave wavering voice to your suspicions. It was doubly difficult to explain to a layperson; you thought you sounded insane, saying that you were increasingly certain Deng and her crew had disappeared into the Mirror Sea, and part of them was still in there, teaching the Ripples how to build. Even though the cameras had come down and gone back up, somehow, there they were.
They were just cameras, after all. They only saw what was already there.
You were shaking, sweating, almost sobbing by the end of it. But Ma just nodded grimly and went for another toothpick. “He’s going to want to meet you,” the bluelight said. “The Secretary, I mean. It won’t be right away. Even if he could leave that great fancy tomb of his, I don’t think he’d want to anymore. He’s scared of his own shadow.”
“What —” you began, but you weren’t so sure what the question was. “I mean, okay. I can do that. I can tell him all this. If you think that will help.”
“If I think it will help?” Ma barked with laughter. “You’re not the only one who sees what’s going on out there. Blue Delta can’t keep it under control, and I don’t think they want to anymore. If they try to tear down the Mirror Sea a second time, that’s the nail in their coffin. That’s just about the only thing the city agrees on, these days.”
“You’re saying —”
“I’m saying that someone’s got to take responsibility for it. That’s how the Secretary sees it.”
“You’re saying —”
“I’m saying that you and I could be that someone. If you like.” His hand shot a little too quickly across the table, outstretched in offer, but not exactly. Already any sense of choice was slipping away. “Professor, have you noticed that in all these years, nobody has been reporting the weather?”