Location from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Wang Miao's lab — a high-security materials facility in Beijing where the Sinotron II particle accelerator was meant to deliver the next decade of Chinese physics, until the sophons made every result chaotic noise.
The Center used to feel like a temple to forward motion. After the countdown begins it feels like a hospice. Researchers stop running the most ambitious experiments because the results have stopped meaning anything. Wang Miao's flying-blade nanowire program, half a year from breakthrough, becomes a project everyone is afraid to talk about — first because it might fail, and then, much worse, because Da Shi is going to find a use for it.
A modern low-rise of polished concrete and dark glass, set behind a perimeter wall in a science park north of the third ring road. Inside, sealed clean rooms with airlocks, electron microscopes the size of small cars, a silent corridor of glass-fronted offices smelling faintly of acetone and ozone. Wang Miao's office has a window onto the central atrium.