I shouldn’t be thinking about the Mirror Sea at all. They gave me pills to take if I start.
But it’s not easy, not thinking about the Sea, when its inhabitants are the city’s unofficial mascots. This spring 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 Ward Council and tribes of squatters in abandoned power plants. But that’s what they think.
Why? Why? It was the first question I posed to 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 large language 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.
This first night, I take the train right home to Xietu South. I live here 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 happens this first night except that it starts to rain.
The rain is a reminder of how much sky there is, how many layers of clouds can pile up above the mouth of the Yangtze this time of year. The lobby of Building 1 is a muddy mess, and the Mirror Sea display in the corridor beyond glows with a dull, persistent grey. Do the Ripples know what rain is? I allow myself the question, but not an answer.
Today, I will focus on neikotic fundamentals. I will let someone else handle the clinic. At noon, I attend that seminar I signed up for and take scratchy, feverish, multicolored notes. At two, I visit the voxelite fab again, search the catalogue for spectral sieve, and walk out with an armful of seminal eggs in the field of dimensionality reduction. I ponder one for a while, managing to peel back the entire first layer, the shadow of an algorithm taking shape in my mind. Something else competes for space — the dim golden spikiness of last night’s misadventure with the debris. I wonder if I should go down and get an inversion. But that, Mona dear, is just an excuse to visit the clinic.
When Deng arrives for our check-in, I am conspicuously reading K&K on a couch in the department lounge, gritting my teeth against Kuang’s Identity. Deng seems more than ready to pretend last night didn’t happen; she greets me with a brisk smile and a terrifyingly businesslike crack of her knuckles.
“So what have you found out?”
Keep in mind that this is how she starts probably half of our meetings. Over time I’ve learned to come with an answer to this question, even if it’s just a tidbit from a distant subfield of neikotics.
“You said that the mystery algorithm leaving behind all this debris must be a spectral sieve. I think I understand why you think that. So there’s this bit in K&K...” It hurts a little to admit how illuminating my half-hour with a foundational textbook was. “A spectral sieve is going to take a complicated structure and spit out a simpler model of it. That model excludes parts of the original that don’t belong to what they call a full, uh...”
“A fully convex recurrence,” Deng offers, not unkindly.
“And those are expressed as spikes at relatively prime frequencies in the spectrum of the model. And that’s exactly what we see here, and here, and here in the debris that we’ve been collecting. In the spectra of the debris,” I hurry to add, flipping through a deck of spectrograms. In my ziplock cataloging system, I’ve numbered it in Sharpie: this new debris is Material #110. But I keep that to myself.
“All that in one day?” Caught off-guard, she looks impressed for exactly one second. Then: “So what’s next?”
This comment brings us right up to the edge of one of the great pits of disagreement pockmarking our relationship. But — you know — fresh start?
“Well,” I begin, drawing a diver’s breath. “I was hoping that this would help us, you know...reverse-engineer my inversion a little. And, you know, I think we could probably put a little paper out on this? Whatever the egg is that’s messing up all these Big Three traders, it’s already an open secret. It could hit the Soup soon, and we could be ready...”
Deng’s brow furrows in a particular way which is shorthand for hours and hours of exasperated pleading. I inflect my voice with a particular sympathetic insistence, looking for an opening: “I know your policy on publishing about the Bridge. And I get it — the inversions it produces are one-offs. They’re not replicable, they’re not quantifiable...and so writing about them...doesn’t...help...anyone.” I try not to audibly grit my teeth. “But this is different! It’s worked on more than a dozen patients with the same neikosis. Two dozen! If I’m going to have a research agenda —”
“You’re right,” Deng agrees simply. “It’ll make for a fine paper.”
For the second, third, fourth time this week I have to wonder, what did they do with the old Deng?
“But I’m not going to get involved,” she adds. Ah. There she is. “I’ve been trying to convince the world that neikotic safety means more than just computing inversions and extracting debris. That it can be proactive, and not just reactive. Forgive an old woman a little puffery, but I’m trying to be the standard-bearer for another way. So if I...now...especially with the...” She sighs. “It’ll be a damn good paper, Mona, and that’s exactly why I can’t put my name on it.”
Rain beats hard on Deng’s basement half-window as I consider this, and find, to my astonishment...
“That...you know, that actually makes a lot of sense.”
Deng beams at me. She leans over her desk a little. “This is growth, Mona. This is you finding your way as a neikologist. And there’s more than one person in this department who would love to help you with the analysis and slap their name on as corresponding author. I can set up a meeting with Dr. Qin, perhaps. Or Dr. Guo, he’s not in safety but he knows a thing or two about spectral sieves...”
“I was thinking Dr. Rui.”
I haven’t given it any thought, actually, but suddenly it seems right.
“Dr. Rui Zhang?” Deng sounds taken aback. “Why him? Any particular reason?”
“It could have applications to soberware,” I suggest with a smile. Deng snorts, but I can tell she doesn’t find the old joke particularly funny. “He was in the clinic the other day. He already had a few guesses about what my inversion is, mathematically speaking. And, y’know what? He was nice about it. He —”
Best to leave the rest unsaid.
“Then you should reach out to Dr. Rui,” Deng says evenly. “And soon, perhaps, because he can get very busy.”
I doubt this very much; the soberware group is not known to publish at a breakneck pace. Our conversation moves on, into discussions of a study plan and departmental goings-on. But Deng is suddenly very interested in polishing her glasses on her YINS fleece, and I can’t stop wondering whether I misspoke. I recall Deng steering away from Rui at department mixers. Their bizarrely stilted interaction with an old Fudan colleague at a poster session. I remember the airy, offhand way she once called him a bridge troll. I hope she doesn’t think I mentioned him to spite her.
There were plenty who assumed from the start that the Mirror Sea was a fraud: that there was no anonymization, that it was seeing faces and tracking individuals, that nothing had really changed. When the Xia Zitian Papers dropped, everyone assumed they’d prove as much. But the story they told was much stranger. The cameras really did what Xia claimed: they blurred and abstracted, sliced and diced. It really was a glimpse, as the Secretary himself loved to say, at the fabric of society itself. The bombshell was that the fabric was inhabited.
Were the things wriggling around in the Mirror Sea alive? This was the question that Xia’s policy team had fixated on. Yes had an unhinged, rising gleam to it; no reached for causality and free will and always ended on a minor seventh, a sucking of teeth. The debates were a meter deep on A4 paper. They had become unhealthily obsessed with the behavior and well-being of the Ripples, and no one more than the big man himself. It was the final piece his opponents needed to rip Shanghai away from him, away from China, creating the Yangtze Delta Orthogonal Zone. Blue Delta promised to tear the system down. Even as they did, they couldn’t tear their eyes off the feeds.
But I shouldn’t be thinking about the Mirror Sea, so I pay no attention to the countless portholes that Shanghai has pried back open for itself: tiny LCD screens in storefront windows and in elevators. Spherical fishbowl quasigrams floating within the fountains of Century Park. Six-story projections on the sides of shopping centers. And then there are the cameras that feed them, winking everywhere from high, oblique shadows. The ones you see are from the Xia era: reflective, iridescent, teardrop-shaped things, with the iconic blind-eye symbol ringing the lens. The ones you don’t are modern, impossibly small, the anonymizing algorithm carved into nanoscale channels on the lens itself. Sometimes regular CCTV cameras are employed, the Lam-Waldmann Hash running entirely in software; this is considered vaguely obscene.
I’m not thinking about any of this, by the way.
Not even sterile Beiwan Ward is immune — the sidewalk from campus to the metro is paced out by slender, tasteful pillars, their edgeless displays frothing with suggestion. Beiwan is brand-new, a gleaming shell around YINS: dorms, a few pricey takeout joints, a lone tiyan-guan. It doesn’t need to attract nightlife by attracting Ripplechasers, or to lease its feed to the highest bidder. Instead, its barren little Mirror Sea is public art, an insistence of placehood. Beneath the cameras, mesh baskets overflow with all the usual votives — prayer blocks and dried flowers and fluorescent voxelite beads — but these are refreshed on schedule by the maintenance men who shine the windows and renormalize the hedges. Any chalk on the walls would be power-washed by dawn.
But, as always, I’m not thinking about it. I’m going the long way to avoid it, in fact, splashing along beside the six-lane speedway that hems Beiwan against the east bank of the Huangpu. The way across is access-controlled footbridges; on the other side, light industry melts into a howling wilderness of warehouse fires, inhabited only by the desperate and insane. They say the Mirror Sea is thickest out there now, mostly aftermarket cameras installed (by who and for what?) after Xia’s fall. They say they show it live on solar mesh screens, jump-scares hidden around bends. They say if you see something floating by, you’d better run.
The second night, when I get home, the street is a sewer. So why am I struck by the urge to walk? I find myself pulling on rubber boots in the dead of night, tiptoeing downstairs against the ears of nosy neighbors, and finding footing on the slick cobblestones of Xietu South. I walk in long, rectangular loops around the ward. I trade brief glances with delivery drivers, redlights on patrol — who else would be out in this weather, at this time of night, and why? I know the answer, of course. But this night, I keep it bundled beneath my black voxelwear parka. At the boundary of the ward, I turn home, and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep.
But I can dream about it, right?