My Ripplechasing stint ended in disaster, bleeding from every limb, cut through with glass and empty to the core, and shot through with sedative. I also had to take a class. Remedial belief modulation, in a building across town. On the first day, the instructor drew a squeaky parabola on the board and wrote the words: QUADRATIC BELIEF. You give it this much, he explained, and it gives you that back squared, and so you feed it and feed it. Yes, you in the back, you personally. We had all shown ourselves susceptible to quadratic belief, and we were all to avoid so much as thinking about the Mirror Sea — never mind that we could see it through the window blinds — as it was a canvas on which we might paint any delusion, any fantasy, any distortion of consensus reality. 

The Weather Bureau made me keep coming back.

“One eighty-nine!”

The Bureau isn’t big on muzak, or salt lamps, or beaded curtains. When I step into the lobby of their Psychological Linearity Center there’s nothing to greet me but a wall of cloudy marble bearing a single, thick-framed Mirror Sea display, an utterly unremarkable view of a few mindlessly frolicking Ripples, plastered over by their opaque umbrella watermark. The meaning could not be clearer — we’re not scared of it — but I notice the feed is on an absurd one-week time delay. They’re not big on seating, either. I stand fifteen minutes in a loose and nervous queue until my number is called.

“One ninety-one!”

What they’d like you to forget is how far back this all goes. Back to a time when it was circles within circles inside Xia Zitian’s government. Thousands of people working to implement what they believed to be the Mirror Sea’s algorithmic recommendations. Whole agencies bursting into and out of existence as Xia chased quixotic hunches about stormwater and traffic flow diagonally across the board. The police cursed the anonymization layer, but no one denied that all the curves — poverty, contagion, violent crime, worker-reported life satisfaction, for heaven’s sake — were bending in the right direction. If all Shanghai shared one complaint, it was about the eerie way the cameras moved, rolling lazily in their sockets to follow things that were so obviously not there.

The pragmatists at Blue Delta complained about a waste of public funds. The superstitious talked of ghosts.

“One ninety-four!”

And when the city finally saw what the cameras were seeing, when Xia’s mania was laid bare, they all felt vindicated. Everyone here remembers the quiet voice he used at the podium, when he declared that he was unfit to lead the people of Shanghai, emphasis his. They remember the confusing turn in his short speech when he called for accountability at the city’s weather bureau. No one understood what a bunch of meteorologists had to do with this, until it sunk in that it was the perfect place for Xia to hide a metastasizing shadow government of fluid dynamicists and predictive modelers to hunt the Ripples though the hidden layers of the broken algorithm in greater and greater detail.

Blue Delta dragged the Weather Bureau’s leaders through show trials, and even put some of them behind bars. For a while the Mirror Sea was gone, and so were they. And yet as blooms of bootleg cameras began to re-emerge, and the first Mirror Sea displays went up in glitzy Xintiandi and along the no-man’s-land of the Switchgrass Ring, the Weather Bureau began to reassert itself as well. It expressed grim regret for bringing the Ripples into focus, blasted Blue Delta for loosing them on the imaginations of a defenseless city, and avowed responsibility for the delusions that it caused among the weakest, poorest, and most vulnerable.

As the years dragged on, as Beijing’s withdrawal left a power vacuum no one else could entirely fill, the Bureau emerged from its meek and screen-sick origins as something very different indeed: the adults in the room. Their warning to the quarreling factions at City Hall is simple and often repeated: if you do not govern us, there is something else that will. I can’t say I like the Weather Bureau, after what they did to me. I certainly can’t say I enjoy paying them these penitent visits every month. But I’m not sure I could survive in a Shanghai without them.

“One-ninety-seven!”

That’s me. I brush past Weather Bureau agents in their grey tunics and full-face reflective visors, filing mirthlessly in and out of unmarked doors. The man at the reception desk is dressed the same way, and something flashing behind his visor gives him a full accounting of my name and my crimes.

“Mona Xu. Month sixteen of Remedial Belief Modulation.” He subvocalizes my name (rising-falling) behind his mask, and the voice that comes out is soapy and sexless, almost reflective in its own right. There might be a raised eyebrow, too, but I can’t see it. “I see you’re here for your individual assessment.”

I didn’t know that, but I nod like I did.

“You will proceed to room 124. Your examiner will be waiting for you. Good luck.”

Beyond the security gates, another interchangeable man leads steers me down a series of interchangeable hallways to a room with dark walls instead of white. Properly speaking there’s no light at all in there. A woman sits on the floor, surely uncomfortable, cross-legged in her gunmetal pantsuit. She gestures for me to take a seat and the door clicks behind me. No light bleeds in from around it. I’ve been making periodic visits to this woman for over a year and she’s still never told me her name.

I don’t respond. I’ve learned over the past year that the less I say to these people the better off I am.

“You are here as part of your court-mandated belief modulation treatment under Section 166, in accordance with Ward Council Edict 69-1305. I see you were a victim-perpetrator in the Ripple with designation 2074 MSO 213, known colloquially and posthumously as Anemone Pop. I understand that you were bodily implicated in the aerial attack on the Haojie Tower last spring.”

That wasn’t me, I want to protest. It was Cai Duofan! But it was me. I was there. Even though, just as the Weather Bureau once promised me, it now feels like something that happened to somebody else. But I keep my mouth shut. And besides, my interlocutor is wearing a half-visor, and for the first time ever in this building I see someone smile.

“Upon extraction, you were found to be in severe remission from levels of quadratic belief typical of former Anemone Pop hosts. You also exhibited what we call vocation-specific delusions about the Ripple and its environs in the Mirror Sea. You work as a neikonaut, and so you insisted that you were perceiving structures made of neikotic residue or debris. Do you still see this residue when you look at the Mirror Sea?”

“I don’t look at the Mirror Sea.”

Her smile curls. From the bag she produces a hemispherical tangle of wires and sensors. “Mona, I am going to ask you to wear this. I am going to show you a short reel of imagery that I expect you may find challenging. In your belief modulation classes, you learned to practice a state of non-doing, and I will ask you to abide in that state for the extent of this exercise. Please do not try to react in any particular way, so we can clearly assess your reaction. Do you consent?”

By way of response, I tighten the net around the crown of my head. I can see my ‘folds dimly cloud the flip side of the woman’s visor; she’s looking right into my mind in stereo vision. She puts five businesslike fingers in the air and counts down slowly. “Three...two...one...”

The four walls of the room flare with liquid color. This is Mirror Sea footage from the peak of my delusion last year, and it’s achingly high-resolution, so that I can pick little snatches of raw surveillance footage — orange sneakers, yellow postboxes, purple veetles — from the patchwork coincidences that make up the Ripples. These ones are just following a current in the Mirror Sea, but they’re flocking in such numbers that the images bleed with suggestions of intent, the feeling of a triumphant parade. They seem to be going somewhere, to want something, and even the antipattern agent can’t quite flatten the tug in my gut.

Now the picture begins to change. The Bureau is manipulating it to bloom with images of coral skylines and underwater streetscapes. They’re trying to trigger the old mental pathways, to see if there’s still some part of me that believes that the entire city is a great coral reef. I went to my great-uncle’s wake back in California, and met him for the first time in a gaudy VR funeral-parlor simulacrum. This is like that, both technically impressive and pathetically hollow. It means nothing to me. It cannot change the fact that Anemone Pop, the only Ripple I ever loved, is long dead.

It cannot change the fact that you killed it.

I shrug off that small voice, that unwelcome trailhead. I shrug to my examiner as though to say, is this all you got? But she makes me watch through the end of their little précis. Then the room is mostly dark, until she turns out her bag, and out clatter triangular devices of illumination: lights and mirrors and prisms. Fifty, maybe.

“YINS, right?” She still offers that soft smile. “I suppose you might know what these are?”

“No,” I reply, half-dazed.

“That’s all right.” She speaks to me as though to a child. “I’ll show you.”

There are rules to this game, and I spend more than an hour on the floor learning them: the names of and legal placement of the different optical elements. Finally she allows me to manipulate them, heavy and angular, to grok the possible moves. In all of this she says little about how to win.

Now she arranges the pieces in three overlapping circles. The antipattern agent is still in my system, and she startles me in several ways, taking off her visor. The drug is a Cubist grandmaster; it pushes the parts of her face around as I try to parse it, try to remember why I find it familiar — she can’t be much older than I am. But if I focus on her eyes, and just her eyes, I can lock them in place. I think that’s what I’m meant to do.

“In this exercise you will experience quadratic belief in a safe setting. You will demonstrate that you are able to modulate it.” She gestures to the pieces, offering advantage, or maybe not. “You go first.”

I try my best, which in my condition is not saying so much. I understand each move she makes, and nod to show it; I never quite see what they add up to. The balance of the light begins to shine in my direction. Maybe thirty moves in, I see some crazy gambit. My hands shake as I arrange two mirrors and a prism equilaterally, shining a bit of light back her way. “Not bad,” she offers, breaking an extended silence. And then she places an important-looking piece, its LEDs glowing in three directions, and wins the game. 

This is stupid, I should be thinking. This is meaningless. But in this moment it’s everything, and I feel exposed, surrounded bodily, floodlit from above. It’s dysphoric and claustrophobic, but with her encouragement I focus on that feeling beneath long and measured breaths. It’s on the way to where I’m going. She keeps her hand on the winning piece, and begins to rotate it very slowly. Sensations, suddenly, from entirely elsewhere: a low rumble in my cramped lower back, and my nose cold as through pressed to foggy glass. She pauses, hooking me with her small eyes, still turning it fractionally: is this okay?

I nod.

She continues rotating the piece. There is a lot to see in the way the light through the optics dances on her face. I understand that this is where I am to focus. Our eyes lock. And now my spine straightens involuntarily.

"My grandfather worked himself to death in an antimony mine,” she begins. The words are clearly rehearsed and clearly spoken. “Coughed up one lung and then the other, gone long before I was born. My father agreed with him on exactly one thing, and they fought about all its particulars: his own life would turn out differently. At the end of the millennium he boarded a train to Shanghai with eighty yuan, the highest gaokao score the village had ever seen, and a deathbed blessing. He trained as a civil engineer, built some bridges, and had a family of his own. His hopes for my life were complicated. What I became was even harder to explain.”

And I can’t quite tell whether she’s speaking the words, or I’m speaking the words, or whether we’re speaking together, or trading off, or I’m repeating them back. As she turns that piece, sensations from elsewhere swim into focus. I’m on the floor, but I’m also on a coach bus, somewhere mountainous.

"What my father did retain from my grandfather was a fascination with mines, caves, the low places." She closed her eyes for a deep breath. “Have you ever been so far below ground that you forgot the shape of the world?"

I follow her unspoken instructions and I repeat that question to myself five times, between slow breaths.

“He and his friends were serious spelunkers, and every year they’d visit the Huanglong caves in Hunan. My mother would fret through those nights. But he would always call us the moment he emerged, and he’d come back with disorienting photos, smelling like another planet. And one year he invited me to come along.”

I repeat this, too: one year, he invited me to come along. I let myself shiver in the coach’s frigid aircon. I feel just how long I’ve been stuck in this seat, my face against the window, watching steep peaks emerge and retreat in the fog.

“I had lived in Shanghai my entire life. I watched them tear down the Mirror Sea, and I watched as it began to re-emerge. It took leaving the city to realize what this had done to my mind. I had felt shadows of it. A bump of panic every time I climbed out of a metro station. But now I was down in this cave, a dozen bends removed from sunlight, and the surface of the world felt distant and abstract. I was weightless between two worlds the moment we turned off our lights.”

At this the pieces on the floor between us go dark, and I am down in that cave with her. I count out thirty deep breaths, measured out to the calcified drip of water on stone.

“Back on the surface, something started to eat at me. I didn't know which of two worlds I had returned to. But I also couldn't say anything about what made them different, so I didn't mention it at all. It was only in the evening, on the bus ride back to Changsha, that I realized a familiar pattern of lights was missing from the sky.” The uneasy edge to her voice is honest quadratic delusion, conjured from memory and expertly modulated. “I turned to my dad, pointed up past the tree-line, and asked, Where's Seoul?”

I inhale and feel the surface of our planet go concave. Where’s Seoul? I mutter. There it is, hanging just over Pudong, where I always see its streetlights winking on, duetted with ours, at nightfall. Exhale: the world goes flat, and then convex. And of course there are no cities visible in the sky...that’s where the sky is. Inhale the impossibility, and there's Seoul again, of course it is. Exhale, and let it out. I ride the sine, mastering the inflow and outflow of quadratic belief, modulating the shape of the world. Acknowledging how readily I can make myself believe almost anything. And then the hard part — coming back down on the right side of things.

“That was my delusion,” she tells me, almost sighing as she lets it go. “Now why don’t you tell me about yours?”