“Kade,” she said. “You may think it’s symmetric, you may think you know how they’re using you, but in this game, the pawn seldom knows what the king has planned. Remember that. The pawn seldom knows.”

41
Monster

Su-Yong Shu stares down at her own face, sculpted out of the cityscape of Shanghai, in this future she dreams of, this posthuman future, where she has cleared away the obstacles to enhancing the human mind, where she has ended the incessant war and stupidity, where she has replaced mere capitalism with a new economics born of quantum game theory, where she has ended poverty, where she has broken the iron laws of death and biology and scarcity that have ruled humanity for so long, where she has unleashed an intelligence explosion like nothing since the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens.

Where victory has given her back her daughter.

Her mind is spinning. The world is spinning below her. The landscape is transforming. The lines of her face are no longer buildings, but the trajectories of virtual particles. The blacks of her eyes are bubbles in the quantum foam. Shanghai is a lens into other universes.

Mad. I’m still mad.

She splits the air with a silver portal, steps through into another virtual world, a safer world, a grounding world, with its wide grassy plain ringed by the massive purple mountains.

She is in the white dress again, barefoot. The tall grass is soft against her feet. The golden chrysanthemum boreale, her favorite flowers since youth, are in bloom, dotting the plain with brilliant yellow, filling the air with their sweet perfume. The sun is perfectly warm against her skin, the sky a deep deep blue, the sun directly overhead. The mountains are glorious giants, capped in white, ringing her in majesty, comfort, and hints of adventure.

She drops to her knees, cups a flower in her hands, inhales its scent.

Could it work? She wonders.

She inhales again, savoring the sweetness, the sun on her back, the grass below her knees.

Maybe, she thinks. Maybe I can do it. Strike, and win, and save Ling. And more. Maybe I can make the world a better place.

“Every monster in history has thought the same.”

The voice comes from behind her. She tenses. Pain and anger rush through her, memories of torture and pleading and more torture.

“Chen,” she says aloud, the memories rising. “How could you betray me? How could you let me die? Torture me, just for fame, for money?”

“I’m human,” her husband says. “I’m selfish.”

She rises and turns, her hands clenching at her side. He’s there, not ten feet away. Chen as she last saw him. Chen at nearly fifty, his trim frame going to paunch, grey at his temples, a tailored suit, an odor of arrogance.

“No,” she tells him. “You’re a monster.”