She opened the compartment for the third data cube, lifted it out, and replaced it with the spare from the equipment bag.

This time the test worked perfectly.

From there it was smooth sailing. Su-Yong Shu died in pieces. Li-hua watched in fascination as the diagnostics became more and more erratic, as her simulated brain became aware of what was happening, as activity spiked, even as each fragment of her was collapsed and written in triplicate to the waiting diamondoid cubes.

What are you thinking in there? Li-hua wondered. What are you feeling? Are you frightened? Does it hurt?

She shook her head. Irrelevant.

Hours later, at the end of it all, Li-hua carefully lifted the three cubes out of their compartments. The first two went into the first two cases in the equipment bag. The third data cube, with a perfectly valid recording, went into the case for the unused spare.

The third data cube rode along in the equipment bag on Li-hua’s shoulder. It rode through the parted meters-thick blast doors into the cavernous elevator car, then up the kilometer long shaft to the top. It rode with her out through the security screens, past the guards who scanned them again to make sure no contraband had left, who opened the equipment bag, took careful inventory inside, verified that only the protocol-specified number of devices were emerging. It rode out into the Secure Computing Center, to a conference room, where Li-hua opened the bag again, removed the other three data cubes in their individual cases, handed them to the men from the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Science and Technology. It rode in the re-closed bag to Li-hua’s tiny closet of an office.

There it was lifted out of the equipment bag, into a small plain paper bag in Li-hua’s spacious purse, knocking momentarily against a nearly identical data cube, before its doppelganger left the purse to take its place in the equipment bag.

From there the data cube rode in Li-hua’s purse to facilities, where she returned the equipment bag and reported that one of the data cubes had shown an error and was being returned, unused, in place of the spare.

It rode with Li-hua to the surface, to the grey and soggy campus of Jiao Tong University, where power had only recently been restored, to a café where Li-hua ate noodles on a communal bench, stared up at a viewscreen showing a news program about the restoration of power and services to the rest of Shanghai, and almost absentmindedly pulled the data cube in its plain paper bag out and left it on the table when she departed.

From there it was swept up by the innocuous looking female student seated beside Li-hua, who walked with the bag across the damp campus, towards the political science building, where she handed it to a dark skinned man carrying an umbrella as they passed, neither of them breaking stride.