Deng is gone at eight. Off to be wined and dined, she explains, hopping on one foot from the restroom, jamming the other into a flat. Once a month or so, some enterprise catches wind that Deng Jinghan is back in Shanghai and makes discrete and dimly-lit inquiries about whether she might, properly motivated, see fit to start building more Bridges. She deflects these and does what she can to parlay them into enormous, unrestricted grants for the Neikotic Safety department. And, hey, we do need a new beamformer.

“Plans for tonight?” she asks mildly, clipping on an earring. “You should decompress. See a film. Have a drink.”

“I’m — uh, just going to take it easy.”

She knows me too well not to know what I’m planning. She looks at me a little sadly as if to say, don’t get carried away.

I ride up to the voxelite fab on the sixth floor of Building 3. Great translucent tubes descend from the ceiling. A handful of neikonauts pace between them, waiting for their eggs to finish printing, hoping that today’s loop-lock session might have been the big one. On the wall, between chemical hazard symbols and laser warnings, the largest chiding of all reads simply, NO PEEKING! At an open workstation, I tap my card and dump all our debris samples into the printer. Clink! My first job is done in fifteen seconds. Clunk! I get a glance or two from around the room. Clink! Clunk! My prints pile up in the tray. Someone glances quizzically my way, no doubt wondering what kind of neikotic egg comes in dozens of small pieces. I scoop my prints surreptitiously into a black shopping bag and stride away.

The acrid, vaguely metallic smell of the fab follows me back into the elevator. “Ai — zhu ni ge hao dan!” Someone wheeling in a cart of priceless-looking optical arrays catches a whiff, smiles knowingly, and wishes me good egg!

I can no longer fit my collection of neikotic debris in my desk, or under my desk, or anywhere near my desk, without Yao asking questions I don’t feel like answering. Back in July I moved it to the black filing cabinets along the far wall of the Safety floor, before briefly and lucidly coming to my senses and throwing the entire thing in the trash, before fishing it out again, suddenly convinced of its immense scientific value. As a compromise between one self and another I stashed it away about one of the basement study rooms. There I hoped that nobody would happen across it, least of all me.

And that’s why I’m on top of the fiberboard conference table in 1-B109, prodding the ceiling tiles with a broom. When I find the one with too much weight on it, I gingerly slide its neighbors sidelong and retrieve a pair of plastic tubs, these in turn being full of smaller tackle-bock type containers, which overflow with all kinds of plastic bags. I consider Deng’s warning — people talk — and frost the windows. I wish Yao could see this, but this time I’m glad he’s not here.

Some pieces of neikotic debris are gloriously unique. These are the gems of my collection, tucked into cubbies of honor, in tiny street-powder gram baggies. But I could never ignore the grotesque similarities in all that I’ve unlodged from minds over the years. Most of my prints clink around in categories that fill larger, even gallon-sized ziplocks. You can read the story of my failures from scribbled-out masking tape labels. The first bag I reach for used to be #11 (ominous/fibrous/trapezoidal), but is now #56 (warm/wet grooves/oblong). The next is #70 (involuted-pinwheels — careful!). But I reach right through these, towards the one I’ve pretended all this time wasn’t there.

At the bottom of the first box is an opaque electrostatic bag labeled Cai Duofan.

It’s all I have left of her, really. A dozen or so pieces of Tenfold Gate debris, red and orange with streaks of purple — spongey to the eye, soft around the edges, but hard to the touch. Nothing like my Sunflower Sieve pieces, still warm from the printer, sharp anthracite shards shimmering with amber. Except if I squint, ignore the colors, focus on the silhouettes. A quarter-arch. A broken tube with a half-twist. A weird eight-pointed nexus. You would be forgiven for wondering if both algorithms were authored by the same mind, from some quaint and forgotten kit of parts. I would be in violation of my parole.

And as I tear into almost three years of furtive hoarding, it’s like these latest samples explain the entire of the collection in retrospect. The archway, the twist, the nexus. These vague and muffled in the older stuff, growing increasingly sharp, and finally rendered in confident precision in Sunflower Sieve debris. I take out my headphones, listen for the low and intermangled percussion beneath the chaos, and start to build.

Deng’s asked me countless times what it’s all for, printing neikotic debris. I would mumble something about potential patterns I was seeing, ways of taxonomizing it. Potential patterns, she’d groan. The proto-science of 19^th-century dilettante naturalists, desiccating and naming and classifying, willing truth to the surface with idle musings and musket shot. Potential patterns were the stuff of men unwilling to put down the brandy and really, really think. She’d glance towards trash bins of empty bottles and bento boxes, just kind enough to leave the last part unsaid: you wanna categorize that, too? I never had the courage to tell her that her own words, scrawled across a Stanford chalkboard the day we met, were sufficient to explain this hobby, this predilection, this madness of mine: 

REPETITION IS THE SHADOW OF STRUCTURE.

The debris comes together in threes and fours and fives, in endless configurations, along well-formed grooves and channels that never quite matched up in the older pieces. Of course I’ve tried this before. I even have a hot glue gun in here somewhere. But find that I don’t really need it — I don’t need to squint, to imagine, to self-delude. It takes me like four hours — hearing the Neikotic Safety department quiet down and head home for the night — to know for certain that it’s all fractal. Each of the nine shapes comes together again at larger scale.

And now that I see that, I know why the diving-bell worked in other patients’ minds at all. And also, why it almost never finishes the job. What I created in Mallochi’s mind saw only some of these combinations, all grown around a single piece of debris, one of the nine. But — here, finally, sliding my laptop out of my knapsack — what if can train it on the other eight? I drop a fizzing tablet into my water bottle, something to keep me going. At half past midnight I have code that grows endless configurations of Sunflower debris from one of the nine seeds. At quarter past two I have a fleet of nine diving-bells, their innards tweaked just the slightest amount, living in the same simulation. I press the button over and over again and watch as they annihilate every piece of debris, every time. At least in theory.

I let my eyes fall heavy and its spikes dance behind them, because of course they do; the thing they teach you about debris, once you’ve developed neikotic channels, is that even in soberspace you’d be a fool to look directly at it. And if I had a death wish, I’d bring all these models into loop-lock. I’d see all the angles and sides that three dimensions can’t capture, I’d run a thousand tensor comparisons a second — and in the last moment before my mind is crushed irretrievably under the weight of all this junk, I’d have the insight that eludes me in this cold light, in this frigid basement room. But I’m not so stupid as that.

Not quite.

I twist the knob on the bottom of my tryptamine pen: micrograms per pascal-second. Tryptamines are for loop-lock, sure, and if you freetrip too hard your neikotic channels will be all gooey the next day. It’s why neikonauts are always fucked on phens, and why mushrooms are a tourist drug. But my problem has never been achieving loop-lock. I find the bottom of the heavy mesh swivel chair, calm myself, and inhale.

The DMT hits my bloodstream almost immediately, and with no tiles and no scanner it’s like constellations of triangles it’s like rivers of eyes it’s like jack-in-the-box-of-snakes-and-ladders it’s like layers of jade and snacks in the ballroom and sliding through saturated concentric and waving and fractal and alive and frames of mmmmmmmmmmmmme overlapping and unfolding primary-colored origami on the downbeat of a rhythm from just down the nautilus...and then I remember, somehow, what I brought myself here to do —

grasping at remove, raising mmmmmmmmmmmmmmy lead-dead contraption of a hand to inspect what I have made of

this piece of debris and this one and this one and this one

spikes glisten facets heave with the suggestion of others

popcorn-kernels with zigzags of sight’s fullness of color’s precursor

And it explodes, not really, but it tessellates itself across my awareness, crawling triumphantly across the surface of my world. And when I close my eyes — which is very hard not to do — it bursts outward and therefore inward, remaking me always with the same shapes at increasingly larger scales, no longer ridges and channels but passageways, ravines, atria, intersections, caverns whose walls crawl with spiraling affordances, templates for unthinkable think-things, emerging from their snicks and whispers. A whole unfurling workshop of tools gleefully seeking reunion with their master’s hand, but I don’t know what any of these things are, don’t know how they work, it would take lifetimes —

But I remember, somehow, what it is that I meant to do. My splayed hand finds a flash drive on the table, and I stumble out onto the Neikotic Safety floor, voxelite spilling out of my lap and my pockets and my hands, harsh lights clicking on as I go, each one adding to the torment swirling around the bolus of debris still self-assembling in the center of my awareness. Is this what Mallochi felt? It’s a weird hot painful comfort to watching the pieces clicking together in familiar ways, to understand precisely how it’s eating my mind from the inside out. 

Scanner room. Flash drive. The doo-ding and the hot plastic whir of the machine’s boot sequence. The trip is peaking, the colors are beginning to fade, but the debris is leveling out in size, its tiny corkscrew hooks finding purchase, leaving my thoughts redirected and indirected through tiny tubules, my world jerky and riddled with tics. If I got anything wrong here I am fucked. Reckless, reckless, reckless, Mona!

Just enough left in my bloodstream for the tiles. One, two, four, sixteen — I find purchase in the mid-thousands, pulling the machine into sync with my thoughts. I claw my way through the flash drive. I can feel the computer’s grinding frustration as my very own as it loads up the inversion...

And then I hear the zwoop echo nine times, one for every diving-bell that it fires into my mind, a calibrated orchestration of my own devising, broad-spectrum by pure unmitigated brute force, melting away the debris along all the weak points, all the seams I saw. I feel it collapse into tiny gritty pieces, see flash after flash after purple as my diving-bells annihilate themselves against the last of the debris. Then it’s silent and dark. I let the rest of the trip fade, relishing in the expanse of my mind.

That’s about when I hear footsteps. I’m shocked upright in the scanner chair.

“Are you okay?” 

It’s a voice I recognize. It’s only Dr. Ren. Briefly I wonder if he recognizes me by my trainers, but then I see him holding a little piece of voxelite picked off the floor and, like I said, people talk. He addresses me like a flighty animal. When I pull the visor hood from my eyes, I can see his apprehension about what might be behind them.

“I knew you could do it,” he says. There’s something strange in his tone.

I offer him a weak little wave. Dr. Ren. Three in the morning. “I don’t even know if I have,” I tell him.

But he inclines his head at the readout in the control bank. With my head still strapped in, I can’t quite turn to see it. Still, his meaning couldn’t be clearer. The debris is entirely gone.

“Will you come with me?”

Dr. Ren’s office is just down the hall from Deng’s, but I’ve never had so much as a peek inside. Twin floor lamps leak warm light into the hall. The shelves ringing the room are loaded down with glassware, in shocking amounts, so many flasks and beakers and tubes that it’s not even funny, so many more that it’s funny again. Some I can half-name from chem lab. Many more are of singular shape and inscrutable purpose, the whiff of neikotics about them.

Neikotics is a young person’s game, and in his stilted way Ren tends to play it so. He shoots around on the university courts, lets himself get crossed up by guys half his age. He intersperses his lecture slides with k-hop gifs. But now I see him in his element — dark wood, warm lighting, puttering around in suspenders — and his element makes him look comfortable in old age. He was Deng’s supervisor at Fudan, maybe? Which would make him, what, sixty, sixty-five?

The brusque, businesslike Ren from this afternoon is gone. His face is going through one of its reboot cycles, all blinks and nods, and he doesn’t try to hide it. “Nerves,” he explains. “I was worried about what you might try.”

“You were watching me?”

He smiles that off. “As the Neikotic Safety chair, they tend to give me a call up at the fab when somebody prints about a hundred pieces of neikotic debris.”

“But you knew I was up to something.”

“Something warm to drink? Let me guess, Deng has you hooked on her chamomile?”

My wanji says quarter to three in the morning. “An espresso?”

“Two espressos,” he shouts to a little machine on the back shelves, where my eyes keep wandering. In a hurry, he adds: “decaf.” In hundreds of reflections, his twin floor lamps gleam back like a pair of tiny golden eyes. Ren doesn’t seem to mind that I’m distracted by it all; to the contrary, so is he. His gaze darts all over before finally meeting mine.

“We’re all up to something. I felt it was better not to interfere, but also that it was probably better not to leave you alone on the floor.”

I shrug. I can’t really blame him.

“Your work with this debris is very, very stupid. I don’t think I need to tell you that. Instead I feel the need to remind you that there is no rule against it. That others may even share in the curiosity you think you conceal so well. Sometimes the only difference between reckless experimentation and cutting-edge research is, well, a friend.”

“I don’t know if I follow,” I reply, sounding miserably tired.

“I’m talking about soberware, Mona.” He gestures expansively at his hoarded glassware, which despite and/or because of his gravity almost makes me burst out laughing. “The study of which was born from the discovery of neikotic debris. If such constructs can linger in the sober mind, surely we can put them to good use! It excited us all greatly in the start, and — well, all these years later, it still excites me.”

I nod politely, wondering just what it is that Ren Yi does here all day. There is a certain type of professor whose one good idea has financed twenty years of bad ones. His good idea was pilfering Deng’s blueprints, and his bad idea is soberware; and progress on soberware has been, to put it politely, slow. State of the art is still that one viral video from a few years back, of a postdoc reading QR codes with his own bare eyeballs as he sips on a tryptamine pen. That’s what really throws people off. It’s right there in the name: it’s supposed to stick around after loop-lock and work while you’re sober. But they’re not there yet, not even close.

The machine behind us quits whirring.

“I shouldn’t, but I want to show you something. Consider it an apology.” Dr. Ren hands me a steaming glass doodad of espresso with one hand, rifling through his desk with the other. Produces a twisted voxelite something, smooth where mine are jagged, the shape of charred redwood and the color of cotton candy. There’s a hunched-over, furrowed lapse while he examines angles I probably can’t see, and then he peers up at me with a small, unplaceable smile. “Give me an expression. A chengyu. Any will do.”

I was not expecting this unpleasant callback to my least favorite part of Chinese school, or I might have brushed up. I give him one everyone knows. “San ren cheng hu.” Three people make a tiger.

“Twenty-two.” Ren smiles. “Another.”

“Li bu cong xin.” I learned this one from Dr. Deng.

“Fourteen. Another. Dig deeper now.”

“Yi cu er jiu.” This one has a character I don’t even know all the strokes for. Which I suspect is what he’s after.

“Thirty-five. Now really lay it on me. Give me any passage, as long as you like.”

“Shui shan li, wan-wu er bu zheng.” Somehow it’s Deng’s old recitations from my first months of neikonaut training that are springing to mind. “Chu zhong ren zhi suo wu, gu ji yu dao.”

“One hundred twenty six.” Ren looks delighted with himself. “Have you seen that old drama, Zai Ye Bie Xia Yu? Actually — it’s based on an older American movie called Rain Man.”

With a bizarre flash of insight, I realize what Ren is doing. I draw Chinese characters in the air with my fingers, counting the strokes they make, checking his work. “You’re kidding me.”

“If you think so, then try me again.” He leans forward, rapping the desk with a fountain pen between his fingers. “Ordinarily, if you asked me to count the number of strokes in a piece of text, I’d do it in sequence. I’d picture every character, mentally draw them out in turn, and then sum the strokes in my head. But this, properly pondered, it anneals those mental pathways together so that it all happens in a flash.”

“So it is soberware!”

“Yes. And more often than I’d like to admit. As the supposed expert on soberware, it’s embarrassing that we’re still getting beat out by our own waste products.” He drops the debris back into his with a sad little clunk. “But it also hurts terribly to use, and has any number of unpredictable effects, and so it’s also my job as the Safety chair to more or less keep this to myself. Only now I see you smoking DMT and examining debris, and now you see, and now there are two of us. So can you keep a secret?”

“From her?”

“Your advisor knows what I get up to.” This comes out nasally, as the debris has given Ren a nosebleed. “More like, from the world at large. But yes, we will have to break this to her delicately.”

“You could say that.” I frown. “What do you think about what she said?”

“About what?”

“About the inversion being a little piece of me.”

“I think she’s right, Mona.” He sighs. “But you put yourself in this situation. It was brilliant work, and you were right to do it. Does your inversion have consciousness? Does it experience pain, is that what you’re wondering? Well, it’s a disturbance in a conscious medium, same as you are, in the end. It probably does.”

The amusement on his face is cycling over to a kind of resignation. No doubt, even at this hour, my discovery means he has some calls to make.

“It’s going to save hundreds of lives. To me everything else is just formalities.” He plucks a tissue theatrically. “If Deng Jinghan wants to stand in your way over her own foibles, well, I’m not sure the rest of the neikotic community is going to let her. Not this time.”

“Why is she...?”

“Why is she like this?”

“You said it, not me.”

Ren smiles. “I have a sense. And I’ll tell you what I can. I owe my start to her, you know. Back at Fudan I was a lowly neurologist working with a horrifyingly cumbersome MRI machine, before she pulled me onto that original loop-lock grant. We had a single UTMS rig the size of a tank. Deng was fresh out of the Navy, nosing around for military applications, and don’t doubt me when I say she worked out about half of the fundamentals with her right hand, and the other half with her left. People say she came back to rest on her laurels at YINS, and that’d be a real shame. But they also say she’s earned it. Do you know who coined the term neikongren?” 

He smiles, raises his eyebrows, and accelerates past the question.

“It was secretive, back then, so secretive. Students were earning doctorates on the project who didn’t even know that psychedelic drugs were involved, and don’t give me that look! You couldn’t exactly get tryptamine pods at Easy Joy in those days. Circles within circles. Deng had the money, and the connections, and the mandate — and she sat in a circle of her own, at the dead center, building her Bridge. It wasn’t clear that anyone could help, not that she was offering. We got promises of a demonstration, then half-hearted memos, then glimpses through frosted glass. She turned farther and farther inward. She stopped coming to department meetings. We lost track of her entirely in the chaos with Xia and Blue Delta. Months later we learned she’d slipped overseas.”

I can’t even remember the full sequence of Deng’s subsequent stints: Tokyo, Oxford, Göttingen, mumble mumble mumble, and eventually Stanford. But there’s something completely unsatisfying about Ren’s explanation: basically, I knew all this already.

“So how did you end up with the plans for the Bridge?” I ask, a little frustrated, a little amused, trying to read the answer off his expression. “What, she hurt herself somehow? Is this why she won’t go into loop-lock anymore?”

“Well, nobody doubted that Deng would test the machine on herself. But the thing about the Deng Bridge, the irony of the whole ordeal, is that you can’t truly test it alone.” Dr. Ren has apparently been waiting for his espresso to cool to this precise temperature; he downs it now in an extended slurp. “She gave them to me, Mona. I woke up one morning and found a proverbial bundle on my proverbial doorstep. What was I supposed to do?”

I wait for more, and when it’s not forthcoming, I find myself stifling a yawn. “That’s the story?”

“Well.” Ren stretches his long limbs, letting his own yawn loose. “Some people came out of those early days unscathed, and plenty more didn’t. Only, most of those names aren’t in textbooks. It’s enough for you to understand. The rest is for her to divulge.”

I want to protest, but Ren is already standing to see me out.

“You frighten her, you know. And this is a woman who, between us, terrifies me.”

I smirk. “Yeah?”

“Playing with her discarded toys, retracing her steps through all the messy parts, oh, absolutely. She still doesn’t know what to make of you. But she wants to. Let her in, let her let you in, is my advice, not that you’re asking. Publish together. Enjoy this. Once your work is out there, things are going to change, fast.”

“Thanks, I — I appreciate that. Good night, Dr. Ren.”

He stands there in the doorframe, clearly with more to say, and it’s not until I turn away that he actually gets it out of his mouth. “But,” he intones, under the low hum of the Safety floor’s ductwork. “If you’re not getting the support you need from her, you can always come to me.”