I shouldn’t be thinking about the Mirror Sea, I know, I know.

But it’s not easy, not thinking about the Sea, when its inhabitants are the city’s unofficial mascots. This summer we passed a milestone: ten years after Shanghai Party Secretary Xia Zitian’s signature surveillance project was outed as a fraud, after the original system was hastily dismantled, there are more Mirror Sea cameras than ever before. An official tally would be impossible, would involve unprecedented cooperation between Blue Delta and the Weather Bureau and tribes of squatters in abandoned power plants. But that’s what they think.

Why? Why? It was the first question I posed to Dr. Deng when we stepped off the plane at Hongqiao International. She gave a quiet little sigh when she saw the fiberglass Ripple models hanging from the terminal ceiling, projected into three dimensions and frozen in a wispy moment of wall-clock time. The city had torn itself to pieces when it learned that this is all there was to the Mirror Sea: no model making sense of the latent space behind the billion eyes. No enlightened, forward-looking governance model to replicate all across China. Only a small cadre of officials watching the blobs in the world’s most expensive lava lamp, pawning their own opinions off as a supercomputer’s. So why on earth had the city resurrected it, block by block, ward by ward? What was there to celebrate?

“I don’t know,” Deng had said curtly. Her eyes were fixed on the baggage carousel — mine were already drifting to the screens proudly pointing out known thoroughfares in the Sea. Dozens of Ripples streamed by, though back then I could barely see them, much less pick them apart. “I’ve been gone for too long. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.” I bet, even now, that she regrets saying that.

But I shouldn’t be thinking about the Mirror Sea at all, so I don’t. Not for my entire hour-long commute, clear south across the city, to Xietu South. I live there because it’s one of few wards in the city where there are no cameras and no displays. At night, Xietu is the hum of ancient air conditioners, parents chasing children chasing bubblecopters, a starmap of flaring cigarettes. It’s a flimsy plastic bag of dumplings, my own footsteps on five flights of dusty stairs, the echo of the click of the light. I fish out Kasibar and Kuang, which Deng wants me to review, and fall asleep with it tented on my face. Nothing else happens this first night except that it starts to rain.

Over email, and well into the early morning, Yao treats me to more of his theories about the leak of the Sunflower Sieve. At eleven or so, they were pretty simple: Mallochi Okeme stole the egg. He was a disgruntled ex-employee with a grudge and a private key. Three hours later they’re unhinged, corkboard-spanning things full of scanned PDFs and translated AP wires — involving a decade-old parallel currency scheme, a dead Gabonese finance minister with the same surname, and an elaborate revenge plot to take down Haojie from the inside.

The rhythm of Mallochi’s tiles buzzes into my half-sleep, and I wake from a frantic sense of trying to match them, to write loops and build monads in his logic. We conversed in there, I could be sure of it — or at least, he spoke to the part of me that had crossed into him via the Bridge. Maybe he explained clearly where he got that debris. But whatever he said, it’s now lost to me across two chasms — one between waking life and loop-lock, and another between myself and the diving-bell.

“Miss.” I wheel around, finding myself already at YINS, already past the sopping lobby of Building 1, in the basement elevator bank. I am catching some ire. “There’s a line.”

Every seat in the waiting room is taken. Very few of the usual crowd of students, or of Yao’s “lone wolves”. It’s crammed with puffers, lanyards, and messenger bags. Each bears the stylized-lock insignia of Haojie Financial, the arrhythmically cresting wave of Chaoyue Technologies Limited, or the simple, understated roundel of Paracoin.

I guess word has gotten around.

They’re in all kinds of bad ways. Two of my fellow clinicians are trying to triage them; one gives me a long look as I try to wade through the lobby. The merely immobilized, who can sit still in their borrowed wheelchairs or huddle shaking against a wall, they’re last. The ones in the throes of psychosis, banging on the walls and crying out for it to end, just end, they’re up front. How long have they been suffering this way? Days? Weeks? All summer? As the calculation engine left over in their minds eats them from the inside, always reaching greedily for more of itself? I read it off their collective posture: they are holding it in.

The guy at the end of the line is the very image of a Haojie man. The thing that a certain kind of YINS student aspires unabashedly to be. The fact that he has clearly not slept in days, that his hair is way out of coif, even compounds a kind of vampiric charm. But he can’t walk. His legs are supported in the rear by those exoflexible stabilizers that keep yeye and nainai puttering around well past even their mall-walking heydays. The mahogany cane topped with amethyst and amber is a dignifying flourish, but — listen. Nobody feels bad for these guys. Everyone here knows they’re doing it to themselves. I feel for him, though. I do.

“What happened to you?” I ask plainly. “What is it?”

“It’s proprietary,” he sniffs. Doesn’t miss a beat.

I fish through the detritus in my backpack and feel for a strap. Yank out one of Mallochi’s several ersatz N-1 licenses. “Do you know this man?” I press, hissing, as Mallochi’s face winks at me through holographic foil. “Did he sell this to you?” He stares back blankly. “Do any of you know this man?” Now I raise my voice, shaking the license, insisting fruitlessly that they insisting circulate it among themselves. “If you’ve seen him, please come talk to me.”

But nobody does.

Case study: Wang Rui, age twenty-three. Employer, Haojie Financial. Presents with —

“Y’know when you have unreachable rollups after using Tenfold Gate? It feels kinda like that. Tingly, tingly in my fingers.” Gritting his teeth through what sounded like a very unpleasant sensation. “And my toes.”

He’s actually wearing the purple-and-gold Haojie neikosuit under his dress shirt and chinos, and looks a little disappointed when we tell him it’ll only take a few minutes.

Cause of debris: unknown/decline to say — “It’s my second day at this job,” he pleads

From each patient, the diving-bell quietly collects a model of the debris. I didn’t program this in, and I don’t know how it works. It’s just something that happened in there the first time, so it’s happening again. I peek at what was collected from Wang’s mind: a corkscrew bolus, a pasta shape from the forever realms. Different shape, same onyx-and-gold sheen. And when I peek at it, even just a picture on the screen, I feel a blindly familiar crawling, grabbing spiraling texture behind my eyes.

Case study: Liang Ziqi, age twenty-nine. Employer, Chaoyue Labs. Presented with —

“Auuguh chumoo geryoou...”

Here’s a bad one. Her hand is shaking as she fills out the form, and she basically pleads with us to take her to the front of the line, words coming all out of order out the sides of her mouth. So we skip all the checkboxes. But five minutes later, she barely bothers to look at us. “I really can’t tell you anything,” she insists, pulling on a heavy black overcoat against the warm September sun. “I’d expect that you hear that every day.”

Case study: Bui Thien An, age twenty-five. Employer, Paracoin Technologies Limited. He lies like a dead fish in the scanner, for the better part of an hour, because just as the scanner gets a lock on him, its overheated beamformer dies and needs to be replaced. A requisition form is dashed off and handed to one of Yao’s classmates.

Yao isn’t down here, but unbelievably, Dr. Deng is. I find her working with Neikotic Safety’s only real medical doctor, Chen Haofei. They’re preparing a Paracoin trader for loop-lock. For an uncooperative patient, this is quite the ordeal — we have to recover their Kasibar calibration polynomial using what amounts to full-bore magnetic depth charges. His impressive loadout of piercings is laid a safe distance away from the scanner head. “Clear!” shouts Chen, and the display briefly lights up with a spider-map of his neikotic channels. Deng and I share a glance.

“You sorry sons of dogs!” shouts the man in the scanner. His eyes meet mine for a moment and I feel beheld, even grasped, by the madness behind them. “Do you have any idea who I work for?”

“He forgets where he is,” Dr. Chen explains dryly, pinning the neikonaut down with thick forearms that I kind of suspect are what got Deng out of bed this morning. “He thinks we’re trying to hotwire him.”

Every neikonaut ever to hold court in a booth at Double Descent claims to know a guy who was drugged, dragged, and sent into loop-lock, forced to execute some proprietary algorithm for nefarious ends. The perps vary: it might be a Taipei-trained splinter cell, or Chalkers, or just a jealous manager from down the hall. Verified reports are scarce, but this is why we don’t just carry our Kasibar coefficients on, like, a medical card.

The man in the scanner dry heaves, and I scramble for a trash can.

“So you did this with the prototype.” Once the patient is sedate, between the bzzzzt and the zwoop, Deng pulls me aside with an inscrutable expression.

“Earlier this week,” I insist, by way of excuse. “Before —”

“Good.” She’s not indignant; she’s maybe, actually, impressed. “But we need to talk.”