The drones are rising, now, their fans whirring faster, lifting them up to clear the hundred meters and more of the buildings all around. Su-Yong lifts her head to watch, to track them, and she sees the sky full of drones, drones of all type. Small and large. Copter and winged. Fan and jet. Unarmed and armed to extreme lethality. They are rising, blotting out the sky of Shanghai. Her army. Off to do her bidding. To conquer this world.

She screams again, dropping to her knees, beating her hands against the broken asphalt of the street. Where her fists land, fissures appear, race forward, cracking the street in two.

I’m still mad, she realizes. There hasn’t been enough time!

Distantly, she can feel the humans sending messages to her, punching text in through interfaces in her exoself. They’re pumping sedatives into the body they provided her with, now, injecting anti-nauseants, anti-convulsants. She doesn’t care.

She closes her eyes against the chaos.

Behind her eyes the world is just as overwhelming. Dense tree-like structures are blossoming in her inner sight. They are multi-dimensional, tightly packed, fully immersive. They’re unpacking themselves, now, loading themselves into her attentional space.

Simulations. Future projections.

She sees her drones shoot down the antiquated fighter-bombers sent against her. Sees her forces secure nuclear armaments. Sees herself seize the world’s electronic systems. Sees Confucian Fist soldiers jab injectors loaded with silvery nanite-laden fluid into the necks of Politburo members. Sees her provocations and protests paralyze the world while she does her work.

Sees Ling. Sees Ling healed, after Su-Yong’s victory. Restored. The avatar she released, its purpose complete, erased from the nanite processors in Ling’s brain, allowing Ling’s own biological mind to gradually regrow into that cleared space, to eventually grow into something greater, an digital upload of herself, expanding, transcending, no longer compelled to hide who and what she is from the humans.

She opens her eyes and Shanghai around her is whole, better than whole. It is gleaming, iridescent. She looks up and the sky is blue. The towers around her rise not a hundred meters, not three hundred meters, but a thousand, three thousand. Towers a kilometer high. Three kilometers high. They gleam gold and silver and cobalt and crimson in the afternoon sun. She lifts up her hands and rises into the air. The buildings are sculpted into intricate whorls and arcs and geometric shapes made possible by breakthroughs in materials. Humanity, no longer constrained, has turned its cities into art.

The street where she walked is a park, alive with verdant growth, plants she recognizes and plants she has never seen before. Every street she sees is a park. Every rooftop. Humans – no, posthumans – walk along the paths of that giant city-park, or through the tubes and spires of the glorious buildings.