There is a commotion brewing outside the Dong’an metro station on my way in the next morning. Redlights and bluelights arrive to placate the crowd, but of course now they’re bickering with each other: a xiangsheng self-parody of relations between the wards and Blue Delta. The line is spilling up the stairs and out onto the street. Attendants look on haplessly from behind reinforced glass.
“They’re fucking with the ping again,” someone finally explains to me, waving their wallet app in my face, as we huddle against the rain in the metro station’s tiny, incidental eaves. “It’s my mother-in-law’s birthday and they’re fucking with the ping.”
They are Haojie, Paracoin, and Chaoyue, the together-issuers of the parallel yuan. In Shanghai we call them the Big Three; up close, their relationship looks like an anvils-and-dynamite rivalry, which half-functions as checks and balances on local fiscal policy. But from a distance they look fearsomely united, wielding Shanghai’s currency as a weapon. They de-pegged it from the Chinese yuan at the crack of dawn with a series of massive trades. Now its value is oscillating wildly. Every last drop of liquidity is in their firehoses. Unlubricated, the network of L2 chains governing ward entry tokens has ground to a halt. The subway gates aren’t letting anyone in or out.
“It looks like they’re going after Beijing,” speculates an auntie with a yoga mat under her arm and a fearsome, subscription-quality trader’s dashboard on her rollscroll. “They’re trying to reverse the peg.”
The pingxingyuan, the parallel yuan, has its value pegged to the regular yuan. It’s the Chinese economy’s parasitic, high-noon shadow. It slips into all the cracks in forex and treasuries and loans where China’s currency is supposed to go. It’s just a little more liquid, it settles just a little faster, its rates just a little lower. Same great taste, fewer calories: it does Shanghai’s bidding by staying well-behaved. But once in a while the Big Three go on offensive. Their massive trades are made of countless, tiny oscillations: they’ll be watching carefully to see which frequencies they can make the Chinese yuan vibrate at, and amplifying the instruments that carry those waves. The shadow is trying to make its master dance.
“Just let us onto the goddamn train,” shouts another one of my neighbors.
Eventually they do, and eventually I make it to YINS. Campus is in rapture and classes are essentially cancelled. Shanghai’s best neikonauts are on the battlefield, stinging Beijing with trade after trade from loop-lock. Some students will be watching from a UTMS bed, hoping to glean subtleties of this financial warfare that elude us in soberspace. More of us are watching in darkened lecture halls. I slip into a back row. The boards are tuned to dazzling and incomprehensible visualizations of the trade flow. What I can say for sure is that Shanghai is blue and Beijing is red. But if you squint, and periodically hit your tryptamine pen, you can almost make out what’s happening.
Deng is already grinding away at the whiteboard when we meet. “So what have you found out?”
Keep in mind that she starts about half our meetings this way. I’ve learned to come prepared with some tidbit from some subfield of neikotics, however distant. And I try to bring to mind the paper that she sent me last night, that I skimmed on the subway. “I thought the thing in the Yamamoto paper about renormalization was...interesting.”
“Exactly,” she fumes. “Exactly. I realized what we were doing doesn’t generalize.”
“Good morning to you too.” And I’m unnerved, sometimes, by how well she seems to tune things out. “Hey, you saw the news, right?”
“Look at our Kasibar matrix.”
“It...?”
“Take the determinant.”
“Gai si. Fuck.”
She purses her lips. Looks at me, maybe for the first time, as — not a sounding board, not a gofer, but a comrade-in-arms. “You see. It’s going to consume about a third of the debris each time, miss the rest, which is exactly the problem we already have. How we missed this...”
And so she wipes the board clean in three vivid, angry strokes. We try again. And here I am, in the very odd position of having to comfort Dr. Deng, who seems to be taking this very personally. I’ve never seen someone do math quite so...adversarially. She falls into ten-minute reveries with her hands on her head, staring past her office door, a look of final defeat on her face. Then she grimaces and picks up the marker again.
“It’s not a fair fight,” I try to reassure her, over a long and poorly-concealed yawn. She asked that I sleep a solid eight hours — I got maybe four or five. “We don’t even have a copy of the Sunflower Sieve egg. And we’re supposed to build a defense against it blind, from down here?”
“We don’t even know it’s the Sieve,” she insists, muttering, retreading the same tangled path integral for the fourth time. She’s moving past equations into a world of pure shapes, diving-bell hulls, with a few parameters sketched around their edges. “Dr. Ren loves to blow smoke, you do know that, right? This is a cleanroom. I need facts and facts only right now.”
Onscreen I watch reporters hassling traders, panting and toweling off, as they exit the Haojie Tower. Their camballs buzz the lower floors, shot down, raining onto a terrified crowd. “Why today?” A streamer with a press pass shouts at a neikosuited Haojie employee. “What are you using?”
“It’s proprietary,” he replies, glowering. But it isn’t, not anymore. They must have gotten wind of the leak. They must know it’s forty-eight hours tops before Beijing gets ahold of it too, and they’re using it for everything it’s worth.
By the following day, the Big Three’s Sieve-addled operators are now overflowing onto the squash courts, as Dr. Ren promised they would. I spend the morning helping technicians unpack more scanners, untangling cables and running calibrations, glad for something to do with my hands. Privately, I’m noticing a change in our patients’ behavior. They no longer seem quite so cowed and doubled-over. There is a restored spring in their step. They’re gassing each other up over matcha lattes.
“Oh, good. Just the person I was hoping to see.”
I was trying to slide unnoticed past Dr. Ren, who was just now deep in conversation with two expensively-dressed strangers loitering in the stands. They are not sipping matcha lattes. They look like everything that enters or leaves their mouth is approved by committee. Ren is trying to placate them, reassure them, or solicit something from them. But the moment he sees me, he gestures one-second and scurries my way. Fuck.
He gives me a worried nod, skips his usual bullshit, and cuts to the chase. “How’s that paper coming?”
And I give him the last answer he wants to hear. “I don’t know anymore.” Sometime last night, Dr. Deng’s manic towers of abstraction climbed too high, and I ran out of oxygen. I try fruitlessly to recount her tangled lines of reasoning. “She thinks she’s close to cracking it, though.”
Ren runs one hand over his face. The little paper cups of espresso in his other hand are stacked three high. I can tell he’s spent some quality time with this version of Deng, too. “You don’t say.”
“She’s getting...well, she’s getting a little irate. She says there’s only about two dozen people she knows who could have come up with something like this.”
This seems to confirm something Ren already suspects, the way he thumbs the bridge of his nose. “And probably half of them are higher-ups at Haojie now. Sure. It makes plenty of sense.”
I glance over at the two men loitering. “Are they...?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. They won’t say where they’re from, but in no uncertain terms they’ve made it clear what they want.” He grimaces, a practiced deliverer of bad news. “Listen. The re-derivation, your Kasibar matrices, Deng’s trips down memory lane, none of this matters. We have an inversion. You have an inversion, and right now you’re gatekeeping it from the city at large. I’m sorry to be blunt, but — we’re out of squash courts. What’s your call?”
I freeze. “You said a week. It’s barely been three days.”
“I said a week. There are now additional interests in play, and they have their own timelines. Maybe you want to go over and let them know that slow and steady wins the race?”
“What do you think about what she said?”
“About the origin of the Sieve?”
“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.”
“You know,” I cut him off at the end there, suddenly tilted, trying to quell an unfamiliar anger. “None of this has to be happening. Fuck these guys.” Ren’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t seem to disagree. “Nobody understands what they’re doing to the economy. Or whatever. What’s the point? Who does it help? Why should we enable them?”
“That’s a complicated question.”
“Respectfully, Dr. Ren, you’re a smart man.”
“I’ll say it again. We have a duty of care. You can call that a cop-out if you want — let me finish, please. You can tell me what you think of the domestic situation, and I’ll listen, I will. But I am warning you now that this is going to get out, one way or another. If it’s through a paper with your name on it, you get the credit. If not...”
“So, what, this is about authorship?”
“This is about control. If you release the first version, you’re in control of what happens next. If not — say it’s bribery, say it’s theft. Either way, you’re left fighting yourself from the outside.”
I fold my arms. Ren knows he’s gotten to me, but he doesn’t dig in, seems instead to find something funny at the bottom of his empty cups. “When you look at Deng and me — the way we fight, the games we play, I bet you see two old farts with the privilege to have lost the plot. And I respect that more than you know, Mona.”
I don’t know how I could possibly respond to that.
“All I’m saying, maybe this is your moment to be the adult in the room.”
Whispers and speculation blow through campus. Who has it, who’s even seen it — the more anyone knows, the less they’re likely to say, but there is a finance-adjacent stratum at YINS that has certainly acquired a few copies of the Sieve. They skulk downstairs at what they hope are the casual off-hours. Every zwoop from the clinic’s beds puts me on edge. I grind myself against wave equations, then meet with Deng and confirm tersely that neither of us have made much progress on our paper, on breaking my inversion into lifeless equations for publication.
“I swear, I’m getting closer,” she tells me, with more than an edge of exhaustion around her voice. She swivels her screen around to show me a bulbous purple-and-white undulation taking shape in her graphing calculator app. The diving-bell, or something nearly so. For Deng’s part, she still seems to be having a kind of bleary-eyed fun in there. For mine — there’s a long, deeply weird moment before I realize I’m not looking in a mirror, or being accused of a crime.
“This will work?”
“I don’t know,” she says simply. “I’m not optimistic. But we have to try.”
I tell her what Ren told me.
“...He said he gives it about two days,” I conclude. “Before someone just steals it.”
“That’s just Dr. Ren,” she replies, not at all reassuring, combing her desk drawers for a hair tie. “The man has no decorum, and so he assumes no one else will, either. If anyone’s going to sell your inversion to them...”
But she won’t finish that thought.
“Just watch that you don’t let yourself get stage-managed,” she concludes instead. “In a day or two, mark my words, the dean of students is going to want to play squash, and this whole thing will mysteriously blow over. And then, we can get back to doing what we do best.”
I sling my bag over my shoulder. “Which is?”
“Math, Mona.” And she’s already back at her tablet, inputting more equations. “Check back in an hour or two. I’ll have something for you soon!”
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 discreet 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 above 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-box 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 entirety of the collection in retrospect. The archway, the twist, the nexus. These are 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 19th-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 I 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 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 the full 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?”