The air outside made Gabriel’s eyes water and his lungs ache. The electric plant had browned out and a stench of dead fish filled the city. Regulars passed with face masks and personal air tanks, off to work in the skyscrapers that disappeared within the yellow haze. Next to a public toilet was a working air station. The stations sat like lily pads throughout the city, a dozen face masks attached to municipal-grade air. When the tanks were new and properly maintained, the commute to work was manageable. But too often the city forgot to refill them, or teenagers found it funny to piss into the masks, and he’d put the face cradle on only to inhale the ammoniac stench. Today, however, none of the face masks smelled of urine and all the tanks except one had been refilled. Gabriel made it from lily pad to lily pad, waiting only once by the tanks closest to the train station, where an old man sat breathing slowly through a working mask, the back of his suit rising and falling like a wounded moth. Then the old man rose and went zigzagging into the crowd, fluttering like a drunk through early-morning commuters, and Gabriel placed the mask over his mouth and took his last breaths of Beijing air.

David had called the technicians sacred healers—said the way they tracked the branching tunnels of neurons was a kind of magic. They found trenches deep within the brain worn thin by traumatic memories and filled them with the electronic spackle of pure light.

“Wherever there’s an open passageway of depression, they patch it,” David promised.

They were at another after-work soiree, the party at Sheraton’s VIP lounge, thrown by a visiting holographer to promote his latest watch. There were dragon-fruit cocktails and neon hookahs smoking from dimly lit tables, while high above the crowd, neuro-technicians stood like go-go dancers beside illuminated lounge chairs where they gave partyers microsurgeries, repairing the wrinkled brows of executives’ bad memories as quickly as giving a shot of Botox. Gabriel was buzzed on lychee mojitos, watching the young techies patch up the partygoers’ pain. The music changed to AcidHop and a woman came down the spiral staircase, radiant from forgetting.

“Come on, let’s get patched!” David yelled over the music.

“I told you, I don’t want to.”

“Suit yourself.”