huh, it really has been over a decade, and my efforts are purely reconsctructive; "nanowire" didn't "ring any bells", although I do remember that a lot of the difficult science, and possibly reason why it's ultimately -fiction, was about dimensional nanotechnologies.

I'm worried chasing hints further might leak spoilers, given how the plot starts out in our China, without any indication that events will reach the other hemisphere... and I really do recommend that book strongly. It is often considered "hard^[1] scifi" although I found that the weight of the novel is mostly characters and plot, so it was actually interesting for me to read it as a glimpse into some part of Chinese zeitgeist.

1. splitting between hard and soft scifi usually doesn't win friends, although some folks who love arguing by their nature get a kick out of not quite agreeing to disagree ↩