“Hah!” He barks a laugh at her. “I knew my own selfishness. Real monsters think they’re pure and good. The real monsters think they have a vision for a better world. The real monsters impose it on others, through force if necessary.”

He stares at her. “That’s you, wife. You’re the monster.”

She feels her nails bite into her palm. “I’m no monster.” Her voice is level, controlled. “I want the best thing for the world.”

“And you know exactly what the best thing is,” her husband says, nodding. “Mao Tse Tung was certain he knew. Pol Pot as well. Adolf Hitler, of course.”

“I’m no monster!” Her voice is cracking, her muscles tense, her virtual body vibrating at the accusation.

“Of course not,” Chen says, soothingly. “That’s why you brutalized your daughter. That’s why you sent out an agent of death. That’s why you’re about to wage war on humanity.”

“I was insane! You left me without input, without the clone, knowing what would happen! You tortured me! You brought this on. You and all the other humans!” She’s yelling, she realizes, gesticulating with her hands, screaming at her husband, who isn’t even real, who isn’t even here.

Chen smiles at her. “Oh no, wife. You had these plans long before this. There is a war coming. A world war. Between humans and posthumans. Isn’t that what you told the American boy?”

And for a moment she’s there, in Bangkok, sipping tea across from Kade, the rooftop restaurant on the banks of the Chao Phraya, the golden magnificence of Wat Arun rising above them, the Temple of the Dawn.

Chen is still speaking to her. “The world has more than eight billion people on it, you told him. Surely we can afford to lose a few. You’ve always been this arrogant, wife. Always been this willing to commit atrocities in the name of your vision. You’ve just been waiting, waiting to let it out.”

There’s a buzzing in her head now, a chaos, a confusion. No. They hurt her, they wounded her, they tortured her. That’s why she did what she did. That’s why she hurt her daughter.

“No,” she says aloud. “No.”

Chen laughs aloud.

“No!” she yells at him. “You weren’t even there! You weren’t even there!”

Her husband opens his mouth and spreads his arms wide. Storm clouds boil out of the clear blue sky above, and his voice booms at her from every direction, from the sky, from the mountains in the distance, from the grass at her feet, from the golden chrysanthemums she loves so much, from the very earth itself.

I

AM

YOU

I

AM

YOU

The whole world booms the words at Su-Yong Shu, in Chen’s voice, straight into her mind.

NO! She screams back.