Qiu Li-hua waited outside the elevator doors, just past the armed guards and the scanners, and listened to the slow grind as the giant machine slowly climbed its way up through the kilometer of bedrock. The all-important equipment bag was at her feet, with the only electronic equipment they’d be allowed to bring in or out. The post-docs and technicians were arranged respectfully behind her.

I’m Senior Researcher Qiu, after all, she thought. Top aide to the great Chen Pang. Though I should be Professor Qiu. Distinguished Professor Qiu.

She’d have that professorship already, tenure certainly, perhaps a departmental chair even, if Chen Pang hadn’t blocked her, hadn’t hoarded the discoveries coming out of Su-Yong Shu’s mind for his own, hadn’t refused to share the glory, even after all she’d done for him.

Chen Pang, the greatest mind in quantum computing, Li-hua thought scornfully. A fraud.

Oh, he had been once. He’d designed the cluster Su-Yong Shu’s mind ran on. But all his discoveries of the past several years? Well, it was clear to Li-hua who really produced those insights, even if no one else seemed to have made the connection.

Su-Yong Shu had long since eclipsed her husband, or any other human for that matter. The great Professor Chen was little more than front man.

Now they’d shut Shu down. Chen’s star would fade. And Li-hua’s would rise. Fast.

The Shanghai Crash had done it. That was the reason they were shutting Su-Yong Shu down, even if no one wanted to say it.

Two weeks ago, everything in Shanghai had failed. Power had failed. Water had failed. Subways and trains had failed. Self-driving cars – completely autonomous things that should be fully independent from the outside world –had failed. Automated food and goods delivery trucks had failed. The sewer pumps that kept Shanghai from flooding over had failed. People had died. They’d drowned in basements and subway cars as filthy water rose up over their heads.

Li-hua shuddered.

Even surveillance had failed. Red-lit surveillance drones with their quadcopter frames had simply stopped flying, had fallen out of the very skies, had crashed to the streets like broken toys.

How that must terrify the people in charge.

There were riots. There were soldiers, shooting people. Shanghai teetered on the edge those first few days before order was restored.

A “cascading systems failure” they called it, “shoddy western code”. Some junior deputy assistant sub-minister’s aide was arrested for laxness in management of civic systems.

Yet here they were. About to de-activate the most advanced electronic entity she knew of on the planet.

And in politics, in Beijing? Well, the Politburo had suddenly had a rather sweeping change in membership, hadn’t it?

Was there a connection between all those things? Oh no… Of course not.