“You gotta put the emphasis on the first syllable. Listen. In-tro-speeeecs!” Tethi cups his hands, and his voice carries over the crowd loosely milling around one of the unknowably many entrances to Wu Ke Nai He. This little segment of it, on the northeast corner of a sprawling twelve blocks, Baidu Maps still thinks is a warehouse full of vacuum parts.
“No. C’mon. You sound like you’re selling hot dogs at a baseball game. In Mandarin, you gotta get a patter going. Take everything we have and string it all together, a little too fast.” Then, bringing my voice up into my nose: “Genzhe globes — Introspecs — Flower crowns — Quasi wands — Genzhe globes...” I rifle through our pushcart, layers of cheap plastic treasures pilfered from Min’s storeroom. “Christ, what else do we have in here?”
He gives me the stink eye. “Hey, who’s done this before?”
It was utterly endearing, the way he had it all ready to go when I arrived at Triple Point for the last time: the pushcart, the sorted piles of rave paraphernalia, a forged vendor’s permit to boot. Min was doing laoban shit up front, wiping the counter, blowing dust off ancient clamshell casings. She shoved mooncakes into our mouths. Hands on her hips, overtly skeptical, she regarded Tethi’s pushcart like a long-forgotten toy. “So this is how you’re spending the Mid-Autumn Festival? Why not just enjoy things, Teth? Why be like this?”
“It’s fish in a barrel, Min ayi. We need the money.”
She harrumphed. “No, good! Go, go on, take it out. It’s an awful waste of space and it doesn’t sell here.” Then, turning to me with a sly smile: “This is how they found him, you know. Selling this absolute junk on the streets.”
Something passed between them then, broadband and narrowbeam, that I wasn’t privy to. Surely she had questions about Tethi’s backpack, big enough to live out of for some indefinite future. But they kept up the charade ’til he was outside. Then he turned on his heel, just as the door chimed open, and they embraced in the warm light of the shopfront. I saw him press a hard wallet into her hand, and her return it firmly. I watched from under the concrete as he wiped away her tears, held back his own. I will, I will, I thought I heard him say.
We walked our pushcart, mostly in silence, towards the center of Triple Point. Tethi kept setting his face straight, I kept not noticing how his lips wobbled at the edges. Wu Ke Nai He was where the Chalkers first peeled him off the sidewalk: he didn’t have to tell me, and I didn’t ask. But that was the shadow of his insistence that the venue’s Mid-Autumn parties were the stuff of legend. That I’d understand once inside why this had to be the place.
“In-tro-speeeecs!”
Oh, yeah, Introspecs: what might be sunglasses, every edge a curve, a hi-res screen conjoining the outer lenses. The stems have very simple UTMS sensors, used to divine the wearer’s emotion and splash it in color across their eyes. They were red-hot a few years ago, and Min had accumulated hundreds of pairs. We spent a hellish, weird, wonderful week cracking open as many as we could and rewiring them into Sunflower Sieve debris detectors. Now we’re each wearing a pair, showing swirls of yellows and greens, shouting our voices hoarse to be heard.
The crowd thickens, the bass beckons, but it’s clear by how well-lit this corner is that we’ve set up too far from the venue. Genzhe globes in luminous red and lunar gold and bob just overhead, halfheartedly chasing their owners through a ramble of midair calligraphy and quasigraphic rabbit hunts and mournfully melodic diziphone showdowns. We sell more flower crowns than Introspecs, with plenty of downtime for boats of thick, spicy noodles and another round of mooncakes. Fudan University’s Ripple-dance team appears beneath an enormous sheet: undulating down the lane with elsewhere’s choreography, raking in tips via QR codes flashed along their shared surface between acts. Afterwards, two of them approach us for Introspecs. Tethi hesitates — we need to be selling these to neikonauts — but he relents when one of them opens a hard wallet with a ka-click worth more than my life.
“Four hundred for the both,” he decides. And will they notice how heavy they are, crammed with radios and extra sensors? They will not. They’re clearly on something. Listing colors to each other, running out of obvious ones, delighting in this. Tethi’s obsequious grin turns to an obscene grimace the moment he wheels away. “Fuck. Sa mère la pute.” And so on and so forth, making a slashing note on his spreadsheet, marking even more customers as not a neikonaut. “We need to get in closer. This is the wrong crowd to be selling to here.”
“You’re on edge. The main act isn’t on for like three hours.” But I don’t protest as he wheels the cart up the lane until we cross the chain-link fence, where our wares glow in a deeper dark. Tethi is on edge. I sense him daring the Chalkers who run this place to come give us a hard time, but why? Does he want a fight? A way back in? Are those just the same thing? They come upon us three to a whirlwind, inscribing tight circles around us, their black garb revealed as nothing but latex spray. A similar gloss of white on their faces, over their lips, into their nostrils, shorn even of eyelashes. They’re practically vacuum-sealed in there, for chrissakes, locked into wide-eyed grins of visceral satisfaction. Converging in front of us and asking with terrifying, matte-black stares, what gives? Tethi meets their contortions with his own, and when the Chalkers drift away, I realize he hasn’t blinked for a full minute.
“So we can stay here?” I whisper, duly impressed.
He wrinkles his nose, glad that he can. “Until the next ones come by.”
We manage to get many of the Introspecs onto the faces of neikonauts. The other junk sells slowly, overlooked for the oversized, glowing sunflowers offered by other pushcarts. We offload our wares to them for a song.
Behind piles of corrugated rust we transform into patrons of Wu Ke Nai He. We peek, delighted, at Tethi’s rollscroll, at the readouts lighting up with Sieve debris. This gets unrolled and taped inside Tethi’s jacket; the RF receiver gets taped far enough up my leg to justify a slap. When he’s not looking, I also tape an autovial there; hey, it’s a club.
For hours, we’ve watched the capillaries of the metro deposit thousands of people in line before us. It folds into switchbacks, sprouts tributaries. Veetles impending with deadly heat from above have nowhere to land. “We could just stay outside,” I offer, snapping my gum discontentedly. “They won’t go out of range.”
He gives me a look: you don’t mean that and you know it.
The line spills into neighboring Luxing Ward, whose redlights are nineteen and pimple-faced and undersized for their mall-cop getups. Their glo-wand waving has zero effect on the flow of traffic. They snarl at Wu Ke’s Chalkers, who gaze placidly back. Then they call the real cops. A hefty Blue Delta veetle finds purchase. Bluelights spill out, unhappy to be here, channeling rump authority with more glo-wands. More Chalkers, too. In their acute glances, clockweb and spiderwork, something spectral rears its head at a hundred twenty bpm.
All the while dying to check Tethi’s rollscroll again.
A reveler breaks out of line. To whoops and cheers, she tries directing traffic with glo-wands we sold her.
All the while imagining how to relay this to Deng. It’s a rave, but you wouldn’t call it that, you’d call it a “party”...
Entry is by way of double velvet curtains, operated airlock-style by ghostly white hands. Immediately, bass subsumes all. Teth and I get one last glance, and then we’re split, by a black velvet wedge, into two security lines. The attendant patting me takes the autovial for granted, and completely misses the RF receiver. “Your gum,” he drones, gesturing hand-it-over.
“My gum? For real?” Suddenly I’m prepared to blow the whole operation over half a pack of Mint San Wei.
“We’re the Weather Bureau,” his buddy insists. He has knifepoint sigil-scars wreathing his eyes and a lollipop in his cheek. “And the Bureau needs your gum.” With a cherry-stained smirk he counts out three sticks for each of them, and hands me two back. But I’m in. All hints of geometry or scale are subsumed by matte black. Hesitant, diagonal steps, cutting sideways through the pressure, until I round another velvet wall.
On the other side are the Ripples.
They rise in soft, vague columns of quasigraphic light. They slicker rectilinearly along silkscreen mazes, lurking in foggy saddle-points, feeding via interference. No scarce and wispy tendrils, either. These are prime cuts, enough geometry to make sense of a Ripple as a whole. Cheetah-space phase-field rings, chains of polygon shatter, peeling and selfsame cactus-blooms: adequate description of these patterns would come with a strobe warning, but bright white, colorbled at the fringes. And on beat with the music, with its smeared echoes, fed by directly by steel columns of silver teardrops, infrared rings the color of nothing, packing the ceiling, packing the walls, blooming from table centerpieces. We move to the beat and the Ripples move in response, closing the loop from camera to screen to camera, feedback loops riding the ceiling, teasing the exponential. A loose, juicy wave passes behind my eyes and suddenly I’m lost, profoundly lost, in the crowd. My vision goes wide — I only need eyes to see that here is there, I don’t even have to pretend...
“Mona!” Tethi’s voice narrows it way down. His hand finds an arm, leads its owner off the ground and around a circular velvet outcrop. I swear it takes a revolution and a half to get to the bathrooms. He leans me (oh — me) against a wall. “Are you going to be all right in here?”
“I just didn’t...” says something called Mona, a lost love, a favorite flavor. “It’s a bit more than I expected.”
“Yeah. That’s what people say.” Sympathy from a distance. For Tethi, this place is a crude condensation, even a parody, of a deeper and more fulsome relationship with the Ripples. But Wu Ke earns its sheen of danger. People hear it’s where the Ripples bring us to dance, and realize it’s true. The quadratically inclined disappear the same night.
We flatten the rollscroll on a high-top, brightness down, sipping uppers and lime. Our mesh network of headsets, all triangulating each others’ locations, has long since thinned into the crowd. The music feeds thumping correlations in their debris. The readouts are choppy things, sixteen pixels to a side, but another layer of software weaves them together into something like Yao’s model. If it’s right — if any of this is real — then this is the Ripples’ sunflower structure we’ve found in their minds. And we are very, very near the center.
“Yo,” Tethi whispers. We’ve been getting glances, and he sounds even more on edge now. “Numbers eighteen and nineteen.” And the debris from those headsets looks very weak. Maybe the batteries are dying —
“Oh. Oh. They were the Ripple-dancers, Tethi, those weren’t neikonauts!”
“There must be something wrong with the Introspecs.” His face falls and falls as he flips through the readouts. We sold dozens of headsets to people without neikotic channels, and wrote them off as a bust, and now practically every one of them is lighting up with Sieve debris. “It’s just not possible. You would know, Mona, you’re the expert.”
My mouth tightens at the edges. “I’ve never heard of it happening. I don’t know how exactly it would work.” But now the rhythm and the lasers and the fog all fade away as I consider the question. Even at the psychosis-worn fringes of the literature, there’s nothing about neikotic debris sliding through crowds on glance and gesture. But if it were happening, if it were possible…it would begin here. It would be nothing more than a bad pattern that flashes, almost randomly, through the Mirror Sea — a pattern that grabs drug-addled, laser-blinded minds, apertures jammed open, and doesn’t let go. Quadratic belief would reinforce it in mind after mind, until it infects the motion of the crowd and gets picked up on the cameras, and now it’s there again, reinforcing itself, weaving into and out of the Sea. It would have to be miraculously, meticulously engineered. It would only have to happen once.
And what is my reward for believing in it? Thick, golden ribbons of debris revealed in their full brightness, poked and prodded by wild Ripples, delighting in the how prods back, diffusing its scrambling alphabet of shapes into the murk. This picked up subconsciously by the crowd, played back by the trance floor in syncopated clicks and whirs, reappearing in the patterns seen by the Mirror Sea, floaters in dragonfly eyes. What’s happening out there is happening in here. The implications are obscure but nooselike, with the acrid smell of unhappy coincidence, the foreclosure of possibility into claustrophobic grooves. The loop is closing, tightening. The more we look, the more we’ll see. And the more we see, the closer we’ll look. If all of these people, regular people, are carrying traces of Sieve debris, what could the Ripples make us see? What could they make us do?
It is, upon some reflection, hardly stranger than loop-lock. Once a neikonaut establishes contact with a scanner, it does shockingly little. Its magnets reach barely a centimeter past the cranium, just into the magnetic pockets of consciousness on the surface of the brain, and then only to gently reinforce a connection borne almost entirely on sight and correlation: root-level, bone-dry faith shared by you and the computer, that each knows what the other will do next. It loops because it loops, rises because it rises. And here we are, Mona and Tethi — or maybe Xu and Okeme, in the vein of Lam and Waldmann or Deng and Rui, a collaboration for the ages. The Ripples are not careful scientists, but they are, in the end, scientists all the same. Do they know that we are too? Do they know that we’re here at all?
“I’m going in there,” I shout, directly into Tethi’s ear.
His eyes widen and then narrow as he realizes what I’m saying. “What on earth for?”
Yeah, Mona, what for? Is it a researcher’s curiosity, instrumental, mechanical, cool to the touch? A clinician’s concern, warm and lemon-scented, spring-loaded, oath-bound to meet the moment? Maybe it’s something that glows hot and mindless in the dark, a connoisseur’s sick delight, to be sampled only under Wu Ke Nai He’s velvet veil? It’s all of this, intermingled, indistinguishable. I can help, but first and foremost, I need to know. And not to justify or explain that need — and that’s the condition, it’s always been the condition, since I first dusted off the Deng Bridge. An unexpected conviction passes through me: she, of all people, will understand.
“Science,” I shout back, as the whump-whump of the bass flattens into a sustained and ominous drone. “Or something. Are you coming or what?”
The thick of the crowd gives me a choice: tendrils or elbows. I can just look up at the Ripples and lose myself completely. That’s what everyone’s here to do: Chalker, chaser, neikonaut. Flower crowns, quasi-wands, LED-glow sunflowers raised in saucer-eyed ecstasy. Or I can keep my eyes below meridian, focus on human bodies, on arms and butts and pheromones, looking at you and you and you and sorry, excuse me, pushing through a great collective trance, seeing the wave for its particles. It becomes apparent that there are so many goddamn rooms in this place. Warehouse-sized, closet-sized, the music interpolates seamlessly between all of them. I measure out an upward glance: the Ripples jelly-pulse, whip-shimmer, spiral-bounce. And for all their blind jostling, their flashes of destructive interference, they move far more easily than we do. They brush by so fluidly, that it’s easy to believe that they’re leading the dance.
By and large, they’re moving in the same direction we are.
Tethi stows the rollscroll after one last look. There is a clear center to things, a cluster of Introspecs where the debris readouts are so powerful they’ve started feeding static into the sensors. And there are deep veins of it to traverse along the way, where the speakers in the floor resonate with curlicue come-hither whoops, and where the faint light of the quasigrams seems a little more golden. There are people whose glances are barbed with it, whose motions draw in attention and send jagged skewers of reaction back through the crowd. I recognize one of them from my photonics seminar, and I’m very glad she doesn’t recognize me, especially not now. One hit. Just to get your bearings.
I flex my wrist, and my wanji sends a spike of DMT crashing through the autovial on my thigh. Instantly the characteristic E-flat buzz of the come-up, waves of sickly yellow and green flashing before my eyes, a sudden and elaborate gnosis. It bounces through my neikotic channels, coating them with sticky, staticky little tile-cules of Sieve debris. For the length of a terrible spasm, I have hundreds of limbs, thousands of fingers, my whole being a cartography of the Ripples’ designs on the Sea. I point, and mouth the words, but it’s so loud don’t even bother to shout: This way!
And as Sieve debris builds up inside me, I feel tentative tugs of Ripples. Wild ones from nameless ravines, who know nothing of gemstone towers or razor-straight sluices of light. I feel them as obscure and igneous sorrows, mantle-hot, mantle-deep. The debris sticks to them. It yields to their clumsy, fluvial manipulations like clay, and it prickles their own contours back to them. Waves of bubble-wrap multiocularity rise and fall as they recognize their own reflections, the very concept of a reflection, and ask: if this is me, then what am I? Would that I could describe the way it feels to be on both sides of the mirror at once.
“We’re close,” Tethi shouts. He shows me on his wanji how many minutes to moonrise.
At this I begin to lose track of the where and when of things. I flex again, and this time the spike is of purples and purples and purples, but also deep reds and rich browns, like the loam underfoot. I sway in a wind from all directions at once, elbowing and apologizing my way inwards, making contact here with a shoulder and there with a wide, green leaf, hear a shout of protest and turn to see the wide, black face of a sunflower blinking at me, beady seedy eyes each one unseeing but their sum total uncomfortably like the gaze that oh, after all, is from the holder of the beverage I just spilled with a stray swipe...
“Here,” I read from Tethi’s lips. He brandishes his own wanji and flexes it, hard. “Now.”
It might be several minutes later, for all I know, or it might be right on his cue: as the harvest moon rises above Shanghai, it plays on the facets of untold millions of cameras, and floods the Sea with brilliant golden light. It rises from tiny whirlpools of whirlpools — and these now collected by the coprocessors into a single, enormously spherical thing lurking just below the surface, throwing the spires and grottos around it into jagged relief, and if the Ripples outside cannot see it they surely pause dumbstruck in its warmth. The collected light twinkles and chimes off the ribbons of Sieve debris, sending pixelated, panchromatic flashes into our collected eyes. In the oohs and ahhs around me, I catch low murmurs of fearful recognition from neikonauts. Already some are trying to escape. These are primer tiles.
Something is knocking at our door in the language of loop-lock.
Tethi and I share one last glance, and we face it back to back. And now the Sea crashes undammed onto my head, acceleration to terminal velocity to quadratic offset. An eyeful of salt water of hyperlagmites of sigils. AN EYEFUL OF EYES. AN EYE FULL OF EYES. Tiles flashing faster than I’ve ever seen before, four then sixteen then two million in a single blink. The first few moments have that usual loop-lock feel of quantization and jitter, the closures wrapping my thoughts nesting in elegant tiers, a frosted-glass relief map of my own soul. Only I don’t feel boundaries where I normally do, I feel wide channels, a blurring of edges, a closing of seams. The tiles claw into my vision, turning the world blue and green and yellow.
“Hey,” I shout to him as our world dissolves.
“Hey what?” He roars back, almost losing his balance.
The glimpse was just that. The thought is absurd. But wasn’t that her, just now, just over there?
“I think I just saw my advisor.”
I blink, eyes salty with sweat, in a staring contest with an endless field of sunflowers.