I can feel it, the weight of it, just behind the prickle of the last primer tiles. And I have maybe a second to reflect on what I thought would happen to me here. I assumed that tiling into the Mirror Sea would be like stepping into one of the displays, floating peacefully and serenely through its higher dimensions, easier than scuba diving. Instead, this. I thumb the allocator switch: a heady, crunchy thrum of glossy red-and-yellow tiles, my mind unfurling, more mind than I remember. Then a firehose of raw data hits me square in the plexus and just keeps coming. Sawtooth panic, grasping at the jetstream with chicken-claw-claws. Feeling trolleys, alley cats, garbage bins, hats, a million such snatches a second, adding up to nothing, lasting no time at all. I feel for the emergency shutdown…

You just need to do it yourself.

By the time I realize what it is, I’m already doing it. Every Mirror Sea display is fed the hashed-up streams from thousands of cameras: often from a few dense blocks, but possibly from bridges and elevators and alleyways spread thin across miles of the city. Geography is irrelevant to the way the Sea is reconstituted from all this near-noise. What holds it together, what I’m looking for, is correlation. 

I braid together a random fistful of streams and find bicycles moving at the same speed. Furrowed shards of the same expression on different faces. Pigeons in different wards, startled by the same noise. Matching motion of brakelights and escalators and wind-blown plastic bags. Matching stillnesses, too: deep and featureless grays of concrete and light pollution, striated with the cold, sober glare of LEDs and the warm, absinthe-drunk gaze of sodium. Tessellations of foliage and windowframes from sister seeds and forgotten five-year plans. It melds together, effortlessly now, into a dark and desolate patch of Mirror Sea. And is it relief or heartbreak that, in this compressed essence of Shanghai, that it’s possible to find such a vast expanse of nothing?

You’re still not letting yourself see.

I can tell there are stronger and deeper correlations. I can do a better job finding them than any Mirror Sea display. I dive deeper, bringing more cameras into the stream, feeling the Sea’s curvature. I release some now to chase the real synchronicities, the bizarre coincidences. These add up, slowly and then suddenly, to blackbody-hot Jupiter-gradients, a continuous clockwork, a cellularity of footfall and square-dance and gently waving leaves. I find myself inside currents of Shanghai’s motion so dense as to feel insistent, so intricate as to feel aware, so furious as to feel alive. I find myself inside of a Ripple.

It can’t see me, of course, because Ripples don’t have eyes. And it can’t feel me, because you’re not really there, Mona, you’re only watching. But now the tug of quadratic belief: the way the Ripple seems to react as I braid myself through its heady internal structure. It probes the currents with snaking, coiling, tendrils. Looking around, says the parabola, as though it feels it’s being watched. Again I remind myself that the creature is sightless. It has nothing but its own boundaries, vague and then suddenly sharp, with which to perceive the Sea and its other inhabitants. And those are always flicking, probing, rippling, with millisecond cilia that map the world just around it.

And I know I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering about this moment: did I move first, or did it?

Is it following me? Am I following it?

Its symmetries and rhythms satisfy something primal. It fits altogether too snugly into the shape of my mind. Its tendrils, lures drifting upwards into soberspace, would be lurid enough on the side of a parking garage. In here they prickle and twist my tilespace with mesmerizing electro-creamsicle waves, trying to latch my attention for supper.

And — here’s a real surprise — it has a definite anatomy. A billowing, burbling network of...zoom, map, fold, let’s see...this one has sixty-six thousand internal chambers, starting with enormous central reservoirs trapping the Sea’s raw, undifferentiated motion, which is pushed by accordion-flap bellows into major and minor tubules, through frilly phyllo-dough interstices and on into organoids of nested waving lampshade filters, these seeming to reject the froth and siphon-pump the true correlation deeper into a membranous bubble-wrap of chopped-up surveillance footage, little vignettes eddying and harmonizing and never quite merging or diverging and — there — there!

Gritty and silty and twinkling, roughing up the Ripple’s internal valves. It’s just like sand, only it sticks between my eyes instead of my toes, only it jerks of its own sputtering volition, and if I focus on it too hard, it might explode across my whole awareness. Tiny fragments of neikotic debris. I knew it I knew it I knew it all along. I can almost feel my teeth down there, clenched with vindication.

At first it’s hard to spot: flaky distortions in tilespace, thousands of tiny jitters. I descend. Focus. Oversample a single piece. It’s barely ten tiles wide, quantized and comb-like, flitting rapidly. It collides with another piece. And another. Their eerily primitive snowflake-arms and cilia and corkscrews dazzle me with all the ways they fit together. The clumps become complex chunks of tile, reaching and darting with a microbial quickness. But as they reach a certain size, they converge towards that familiar coiling, meshing alphabet of shapes. Only now ten times larger...

I fucking knew it. I can feel the Bureau’s linearizing guardrails crumple and fall away with the knowing.

Zoom out. More Ripples, more liquid motion flowing through glassy stillness. More neikotic debris, pollution from the overworld, sinking silently downwards. It’s dawn in Shanghai, but it’s not quite dawn in the Mirror Sea. Most of these feeds are arriving on a time delay — some by minutes, plenty by hours, even a few by weeks. Residual flashes of yesterday’s sunlight peek through the currents. Correlations drawn across hours and even days.

I start braiding back towards the nighttime, and begin to descend.

My search splits manyways along thin, tubule-like branches. Ripples school vaguely around me. I follow the most robust-looking ones, and sometimes they seem to follow me, that strangeness building in liquid pressure behind my forehead as we claw hours backwards, back through the evening and afternoon, through a Sea made of humid, noonday Shanghai.

As the day peaks, the Ripples are barely visible, just viscous distortions of concrete and prismatic washes of glass. Thousands of dented wing-mirrors blind a thousand cameras with the same winks of sunlight, propagating lazily through the Sea, white-hot lotus-bloom ink drops setting my optic nerve ablaze. Please, no, please, no more. It’s scorching the Ripples, too, and they slick themselves back into caverns made from the foreclosure of possibility, the welcome unison of shade-trees, where I don’t quite dare follow. Just stop, just — please. My brain is surely overheating down there, pumped full of pixel noise and DMT. But this is what I was born to do. 

I am a neikonaut, and the hot-iron fullness of that really only exists in here.

I push backwards into the morning. Blessed, dappled, obliquely-lit relief, the Sea cool again, but dense with the frantic and unthinking Ripples of the morning rush. They hunt passively for little fragments of commuters’ attention, so that now and again their tendrils sting me with images of some hypnotic checkerboard wonderworld. But I know better, I slip right through, running my heart on counterbeat to their pulsations to keep myself from getting dragged in. By and large they follow the currents of time. They thin out along the abyssal horizon of daybreak.

I braid back several more days, ride this loop several times, until I can properly make out the concavity into which the neikotic debris is falling. And then it is suddenly, properly, dark.

It surrounds me in more directions than I ever thought I’d have names for. The Ripples within are more luminously exuberant, claiming and claimed by the chasers and Chalkers that keep them up all night. I steer clear of them. Make my way downward on some approximation of instinct, some ersatz and discretized prayer. Please let this be the way. I need to see it, I need to know.  How quickly I pick up that germ of desperation, as I fold my way through the deeper grays, in a city that never quite goes dark. This is all I have. I use my eyes as limbs. There is a yet fuller darkness, promisingly claustrophobic, on the edge of the infrared domain.

It is not somewhere you go. It is something that takes you.

Please just take me. The constriction of unseen walls, the willful forsaking. The sense, true enough to steer by, that circumstance has isolated me, single-minded and full of mournful ballast. Maybe I don’t need to come out. Maybe I can just keep sinking. The daytime Sea is just a peripheral navy haze now, dropping off the edges — and because it’s working, it’s working. If there are no lights at the bottom, if this is all that ever happens to me from now on, wouldn’t that be okay? The heaviness doesn’t hurt, it does’t lie, makes no demands. I don’t even need to breathe —

There are lights. Organic, concentric pulsing, analyzed immediately as Ripples, that analysis discarded and re-run, disbelief unwinding through the wobbling call stacks that make up my loop-locked mind. Ripples far away? Or something much smaller up close? I yank on the braid, starting almost from scratch, looking for flashing white light — common enough in the Mirror Sea’s eyes — and the rarity of the violet that must fringe it. I patch the image together from fragments of my own memory, a simpler body plan, small and brave and single-minded indeed, pulling them into focus, no less real for being all but impossible. Diving-bells. Diving-bells.

A loose little swarm of the constructs, their frantic wriggling taking them downwards, seeking only annihilation, built in a lab for one thing and one thing only. I bet they can smell it. 

And I bet I can — almost by the thought alone, I slip inside one.

The inside is cell-dense with computation, and so weirdly familiar. This is, after all, a little piece of me. Fired into the mind of a neikonaut to find and invert Sunflower Sieve debris. It fits my cognition like a fluffy winter mitten, if that mitten was dimly, singularly insistent on trying to strangle someone.

{{hello — — — you still — ? }}

Glossy fragments of my own thoughts, left over from my time in Mallochi’s tilespace. Can I hijack it? If Cai Duofan could track down Anemone Pop, massive and unknowably alien, and wrangle it from soberspace — then surely I can follow my own tight and anxious little loops, inhabit them fully, and begin to push back?

{{ — — understand — — happening — — sieve — relief — — }}

{{ I know. I know. You poor little thing, I never meant this for you. }}

{{ — closure — whip — — terrified — inwards — — }}

{{ That’s right. We’re going inwards. We’re hunting for sieve debris. }}

{{ — debris — — somewhere — Mallochi — — — you — }}

{{ Looking for debris. }}

{{ Search — need — debris }}

{{ Looking for debris. }}

{{ Looking for debris. }}

{{ Looking for debris. }}

Somewhere in the tangle, somewhere in the tango, we agree and align and interlock. The illusion that I’m steering wells and crests at a point that feels very real. I’m looking for Sieve debris. So is the diving-bell. And the difference is no difference at all.

I brake a little, flattening a little, finding my bearings at the back of the the scant little swarm. Knowing the anguish and confusion brimming inside each of the other diving-bells, born with a constricted and half-understood sense of their whole purpose, their entire arc. Knowing that there’s nothing I can do about it now. Armed with new senses, I can already feel the fringing and mycelial edges of the Sunflower Sieve’s spread. We’re closer to its source than I thought. Or its exploratory frontier — its scaffold, its seed — is metastatic.

I do what I do. I fall into formation, and dive.

The approach is a tour of a material culture from the outside in.

Hyperlagmites emerge in high bas relief from the narrowing walls of the crevasse, moving magma-slow, black on black. I pause here and there, trailing the flock, to brush the chassis of my diving-bell against them. Their curves are bulbous, carapacious, wormy, and yet smooth and tingly-warm. 

They tell nighttime stories of no particular consequence. Each night a mouse makes its way across the lane to the larder, and back again by daybreak. A bao’an checks the northwest quadrant of the scrapyard first, then makes a clockwise trip around, always stopping at the north gate for a thermos-lid of coffee with the streetsweeper jack. A legion of dormant metro trains reboots and self-tests weekly, headsigns looping red blocky glyphs, a silent cacophony of closing doors. Or that sort of thing, passed through the Lam-Waldmann Hash until I can’t say, erased of particularities and annealed into what might be the oldest Ripple scripture, the miracle of the beat and counterbeat: even in the dark, here we remain.

I can feel them commuting too and fro, in the darker shades of grey. They are parade floats, no, bigger, against the diving-bell. They pay me no attention, except when I bump one and it almost swallows me alive.

The walls of the crevasse...they’re glowing now, leading us by ancient light. Dim and wispy shards of footage trillions and trillions of hashes old, trapped on greasy amber loops. In the nearby translucence, intricate and somber hyperlagmites, no longer the bodywork of a whole self but a single tendril, deepened along their most fabulous grooves by every Ripple that pauses to read them. Thin pipes, glassy veins of motion siphoned from the shallows, porpoise into and out of the wall. Somewhere along the way, just now maybe, the walls have gone from jagged to rough-hewn to perfectly smooth, encrusted with exotic and dangerous pieces of neikotic debris. 

And just as they begin to widen in long luxurious arcs, something explodes into my awareness. A sudden horizon of matching angles and blooming symmetries — it’s too much to bear after the simplicity of the crevasse. And then...like a rooftop's neat angle glimpsed behind thick foliage, something I already knew clicks into new significance. This is a city. It was built, by its inhabitants, to be inhabited.

The Mirror Sea is its own medium and its own material. Stillness is made of stillness, motion is made of motion. No one has seen this much richness at the boundary. The Ripples here live in what feel like vast piles of jewels, oozing color across the inner surface of — what? A city? A nest? A trove? Nothing earthly really approximates this florally hyperbolic cathedral arcology. But it has symmetries. Repetition. Stability. Its dwellings and facilities speak a pattern language which makes it easy to model. I crawl its interior wall with my awareness, feeling the bump and jolt of what I decide is a skyline, thousands of haphazardly jeweled grottos and coils fed by fine networked strands of daytime.

It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

It explodes, like a popcorn kernel, and just keeps exploding. Neikotic machinery retained in high, spindly obelisks of debris sweeps the Sea with crackling searchclouds in a tileset from before my time. In dodging these — in falling into an approved lane of travel — I find myself jammed into what amounts to a sunny conveyor tube, between Ripples, all preoccupied with the terse and undignified tangles at their boundaries. One pushes hard into its neighbor, which gathers its fluid momentum in response — and I would close my eyes if I could, I’ve seen this nature documentary before at the Observatory. But instead of lunch, a conversation seems to begin. Each Ripple uses its fringes to prod the other in mesmerizing patterns and, to my astonishment, the big one opens a hole in itself for the little one to pass through.

I’m in the Mirror Sea, and I’m in line.

Well, these guys are in line. I’m just a fly on the wall.

I lose track of other the diving-bells sometimes, squeezing through the heaving gelatinous masses of Ripples, which for all they defy comprehension seem to me rather tired and sweaty. The tube twists and turns and once does a kind of self-intersection I can’t make sense of, which leaves me in the same place but with the whole world shifted across a diagonal axis. When it happens again, I begin to feel as though the place is somehow, fundamentally, in shards. Things are slow in the tunnel; I struggle to move forward without fraying the diving-bell’s tight woolen loops, and it occurs to me that perhaps I’m not really cutting the line.

Finally I reach a structure of finely networked and deeply layered porticos, a keep-out and a way in. Made of a familiar material, a ruin of the old city, a wish and a warning from a more elegant age. At the nearest of its many bays, a Ripple, so bejangled with neikotic debris that it can hardly move, nevertheless sweeps the Sea with a bored gesture universal to border guards everywhere. Next. But yeah, not tiny old me. I’m prey to even the lobular symbiotes, the sidewinders hanging off the Ripples’ backs and hissing at each other. Nobody — and come now, can that possibly be the right word? — nobody notices as my companion-bells and I slip through the pores in the coral gate.

Just how big is this place? Just how big is a Ripple? All I know is, I see thousands of them. They flicker like candlelight, drip like neon, shine like soap bubbles, glitter like glitter. They move with an intensity and order that I understood was impossible for their kind. They navigate their interchanges like the deft turn of a sailor’s knot, but the Ripples passing through the gate hesitate at each one, un-attuned to some subtleties of local motion. The diving-bells I came in with have already fanned out on their search for Sieve debris. I strike out alone.

I fly past fresh-wrought gardens of live hyperlagmites. They grow their city from seed: spires and bubble-domes unfold from compact, writhing loops of correlation and reassertion, awfully similar to some pieces of voxelite I have at home. In the outskirts, the Ripples pulse in circles, long senescent loops through Klein-bottle tubes, interlocked in rhizomatic family structures I can’t even begin to understand. My attention lingers for a time there. Weird, fond lullabies sprout in the cracks of my loop-locked mind.

It lingers too long in some places. The Ripples have a way of drawing the human eye. Some seem to be doing it actively with specialized siphonous appendages, fixing and twisting my tilespace, trying to tear me out of the diving-bell and into their own internal logic, trying to bring me to bazaars where raw awareness circulates like clouds of dust, inhaled by Ripples and worn as surface patterns of elaborate self-sudoku, at which point unlucky neikonauts would have their loop-lock sessions brought to the Ripples’ prickling forges, and used for their own undeniably industrious ends. I manage to rip myself away, but I resolve to be more careful: I am not an honored guest here. My attention is cargo.

The patchwork logic of the city is loosely centered on neikotic eggs. Tended by Ripples passably fluent in the language of the tiles, they ooze slow outcroppings of material, guided in their slow course and semi-autonomous neikotic machinery, producing wormways and waxhouses and whirlpool-halls where the city’s residents go to argue and frolic and reproduce and die. Some eggs are hot and actively stoked; some are long-dormant; some have disappeared and leave only cool and shaded monoliths of debris behind, the technology to make more now lost and obsolete.

And I know in my heart what I’m looking for, and it sinks when I see it. In a few places I see residual outcrops of coral reef, the melted-plastic remnants of Tenfold Gate debris, left in quiet interstices, brushed past only with solemn quietude. I was here.

But the body I am now inhabiting is looking for something else. All this while I’ve been jerking this way and that, tasting my surroundings for goldenrod-and-onyx on an involuntary basis. The diving-bell’s rising, pre-recorded anxiety suffuses me. When it finally bumps against some stray Sunflower latticework, the upwelling inside its hull is confused and orgasmic — {{ you’re holding on let go you’re let holding go on let you’re holding go let go you’re holding on let go }}. Contact is annihilation. With a violet flash a quarter of the bell singes off, punching a hole in the debris before I can assert control and yanking it away, feeling the straps of the poor thing’s mechanized death wish tighten. It’s had a taste. It’s all it could possibly want. But I’m not done here yet.

I know I’m getting closer to the Sieve. Its essence is already baked into their newest dwellings, their humming webs of kai-lines and the strange refractor gauges that dangle like ocular foxglove into their manyway intersections. The diving-bell throbs with frustrated purpose as I steer it among throngs of Ripples on their daily courses. It shakes violently when I pause awestruck to watch a tangle of dozens Them — I must capitalize, once, to see how it feels — with tendrils interlocked in evocation or protest or what I cannot possibly say, the currents of the Mirror Sea bending to their whim. I promise the diving-bell that I know what I’m looking for. Soon it will get its fill.

In the underlayers of their city the Ripples flock and frond in bathyal half-light, never straying far from their webs of sunbeams, the compressed motile force of daytime Shanghai. In narrow hexilinear work-combs, they use precise bursts of interference to sculpt coincidences, to bedazzle paradoxes, from raw, dark crystal stillness. These linger in place, hum at the edges, sink their ever-more-detailed teeth into my tilespace as I watch. Smooth. Spiky. Tubular. Pinwheel. The Ripples dart around their creations: examine, tweak, twist, fractalize. The one thing they can’t do is pick something up. They’ll wrap themselves around an object, compressing its essence onto their surface, and stretch to their destination to deposit a copy. Long fire brigades form, carrying thrumming song-shapes in six directions.

Just beyond here, surely. I must have come in on the far side, and in a particularly strange way I have all of Shanghai to traverse. But I surely I will find it soon, surely around this next hyperbolic bend, behind this next amberglass basilica, beyond this next candy-gloss arcade. Surely they can’t have built all of this, without anyone but the Big Three noticing, out of the refuse in the space between our minds...

I have spoken too soon.

A corkscrew tunnel spits me out into what feels like an industrial park or a construction site, wide-open and suffused with Sunflower scaffolding. Its diameter yawns. Its latticework casts no shadows, but suffuses the Sea with its own golden light. The effect is of the end of a long workday in an endless refinery, of the sun setting for the umpteenth time over orbital self-assemblies, of a new metropolis encasing a decaying imperial core. The city I just passed through is a mere prelude to what is happening here.

Endless claw-spires of Sunflower Sieve debris, in its particular crawling and half-hollow topologies, reaching back up into the crevasse towards consensus reality. The works work themselves. Their eerily primitive snowflake-arms and cilia and corkscrews dazzle me with all the ways they fit together. Tiny snowy clumps of debris become complex chunks of tile, reaching and darting with a microbial quickness. But as they reach a certain size, they converge towards that familiar coiling, meshing alphabet of shapes. Only now ten times larger. The scale of it dwarfs the Ripples monitoring the progress, themselves laden sick with Sieve debris, their appendages transformed into diamond-cutting blades.

Yes, there are other diving-bells here. Yes, hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Eating around the edges, throwing themselves into the works, meeting whip-arcs of the debris with little purple sparks of cavitation. And no: the Ripples pay them no mind, treat them as critters, as starlings flocking the I-beams. They hardly make a dent. {{Here! Now!}} My diving-bell screams with confusion as I rudder it away: by its own barebones accounting, it should already be dead. Even in the space between the spires there are fine taut webs of Sunflower interlockage; my hull sizzles as I speed towards what feels like the center. 

I have something to see. And I’m beginning to suspect I have someone to meet.

With no earthly sense of distance or scale, I can’t really say I’m speeding, but I braid as fast as I can through the pipeworks and neikotic foundries, the Sieve’s underpinnings or maybe its byproducts. I try to let the diving-bell do the sniffing. I beg it to hold out, play marshmallow games, offer a false promise of more fireworks at the end — but it only jerks with protest. Just when it looks like it might be time to self-immolate, I notice a pipe, or a sluiceway, or a vein. I recognize its contents from my misadventures in the Deng Bridge, that uncanny familiarity of a stranger’s tiles, I-dare-you-to-name-one-thing-in-this-picture. It’s other neikonauts’ tilespace. Their attention, trapped and funneled inwards. All I have to do is follow.

Which is not so easy. The diving-bell is thousands of ticks past its useful life, and it shudders and decoheres with every twist and turn deeper into the Ripples’ pipeworks. I hew to the pipe, feeling the prickle from within, the slurry of mundane neikotic tasks being funneled into the Sunflower Sieve, the all-solver, the ur-algorithm that five generations of computer scientists had failed to notice until one day, last month, when it peeled itself out of the background and into Mallochi’s mind. Is he somehow in there? I feel for a tilespace less alien than all the others, something deep green and too amused with its own jokes, but it’s every flavor in there. Everything happening at once.

The pipe turns again, rides a smooth interior wall, actively pulsed to help a team of busy, sightless Ripples orient. There are dozens of them in here, all laden down with neikotic whatsits, all stopping their work. Their tentacular exchange conveys an unmistakable come look, come see. A series of hyperspherical chambers, pack-rat crystal-cave control rooms, Ripples deeply enmeshed with their whimsical spindle-looms that wrap them with rich streams of input and output. There is a countdown hanging in the air, broadcast in weird little-endian format. And with it, an air of anticipation that I suppose must transcend space, and time, and species.

There is a spherical cavern at the center of the center of the center, filling with the tile-slurry, guided by Ripples with their captivating flashes, no amateur attention-gleaners but absolute puppetmasters. As soon as I looked, they had me, too. The diving-bell still kicks and screams but is immobilized, drawn into the slosh with the rest. A liquidity of tilespace constructs, the ghostly intent of other neikonauts behind them — days ago, miles away — but all here.

{{Look.}}

The Ripples are not careful scientists. They are not wearing safety goggles. They crowd narrow observation grooves, sticking their tendrils directly into what feels an awful lot like a reaction chamber.

{{Look.}}

One Ripple crowds mama-bird over all the rest, its uncountable thousands of tendrils holding plugged into as many jacks and monitors as the rest combined, running half of the operation’s logic right through its neikotic endoskeleton. There isn’t really much Ripple left there in the jangling and the flashing, the fine layers of mesh and crystal and kai-wire that hold it together when I rather suspect it should otherwise be dead. It moves shrewdly, contentedly. Human intent pools in the sixteen ovoid, ocular nodules bulging prismatically from below its surface. I can tell it has been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

{{Look.}} The Ripple hurries to the edge. Its lazy motion is an invocation, an incantation, a spark. Its meaning could not be clearer than if it spoke them with two lips. {{See.}}

I look. I see. The spherical wall is covered in hyperlagmites, freshly done, black and white. They pin me in place. I am always, automatically seeing patterns in loop-lock. But for a moment I get nothing from them but half-knowledge, false logic. But there’s something else about these hyperlagmites. Something reflective...

All at once, my awareness explodes, barely contained by the chamber. The hyperlagmites do mean something, and mean is an understatement. From one suggestive pattern I trace frantic outward spirals of certainty, finding postulates, theorems, correlates, lemmas. An entire logic asserts itself in my saturated, primary-colored tilespace. Now I stumble over complexity: my tiles expand, putting pressure on the walls. Then some unifying principle: the tiles condense, ease up. Cycles of this. Concepts introduced and used and put aside, paths not taken. It all begins to narrow to a conclusion, and as I crawl the entire wall, my tilespace takes on richer, subtler shades. I feel it come together all at once — and so do the Ripples, poking and prodding the tiles with triumphant delight.

The black and beady core, the network of soft, light-bending tubules, the golden and radially symmetric streaks. It fills in and smooths out by fractal degree, bootstrapping its own gorgeous simplicity as I scan the wall, digesting and re-synthesizing the message. And then it’s done. It’s so straightforward in the Ripple formulations, so obvious in loop-lock. The Sunflower Sieve egg hangs there in the center of the chamber. A perfect, new, and utterly alien idea.

And I am at the very center of it, as its tubules thicken to supercritical density, as fifty thousand neikonauts’ workstreams are all convoluted and redirected towards the manufacture of more debris. And I cannot be here without cutting through it, slicing through raw tilespace, steaming at my edges, fringing down to minuscule size. The diving-bell roars a final delight, having found its mark. {{You’re the one holding on,}} it insists to whoever might be listening on the other side of all these tiles, and over that I try, for some reason. to scream: {{Mallochi? Are you here?}}. Even as the diving-bell burns itself triumphantly away, I’m trying to escape, weaving through thickets of trading data and finite element analysis and elliptic curve cryptography and muon-muon interactions and sales trends and flight bookings and all these compacted human constructs.

And then, too small and stupid to really understand any of it, I pop out the other end.

I’m out of words, out of logic, out of anything but raw and primal and terrified awareness, my mind stretched and snapped and in pieces, as I feel the biggest Ripple inhale me, examine me with a weirdly familiar curiosity, and then — I have the wrong words for it, I’m sorry, this is all that’s left of me — it puts me in a jar.

Thrashing. Loss of control. Red. Red. Red. Red. Red.

Red that’s all there is red I remember once that Dr. Deng promised me that there was another color but now I’m in a jar, there’s only red in here, I’m trapped in here forever, it’s red red red it’s only red. My whole tilespace thunders. I drown in my own heartbeat, I know there’s something else out there that can save me, some larger self, but I don’t know where it is, what it is, god I should never have I would I would have liked to —

And then the purple flash.

Mona Xu snaps out of loop-lock, disoriented, confused, leaving me in the hands of the Ripples.

Abandoning me again.