And yet Ananda slowly eased himself out of the blessed union, the most joyous, most true, most peaceful thing he had ever experienced, once more. Because of the boy. The boy, who’d given them a large push in this direction, whose tools had allowed them to bring far more meditators into the fold, had given them the ability to connect monasteries even thousands of miles apart into this union. The boy, who had trusted Ananda, and had twice been betrayed, had his life threatened, because of others whom Ananda had trusted.

Hidden in the sleeve of his robe, one finger tensed ever so slightly. Ananda felt his pulse rise by a beat, his breath shorten. He observed this calmly, without judgment, mindful of what his body revealed of his emotions, his attachment to those betrayals.

You will not be punished for your anger, Buddha had said. You will be punished by your anger.

It still amazed Ananda how few understood this.

He took another easy breath, let his face relax, let the calm smile inform the deeper parts of his brain of his peace. The past was the past.

The boy had resurfaced. He was alive, and perhaps free, despite the efforts of so many. Yet he’d resurfaced in a place and a manner that would undoubtedly change the world again.

Everything changes, the Buddha had said. Nothing remains without change.

So be it.

The boy had resurfaced. And, on both his own initiative and at the request of his government, Ananda must go to him.

5
Opportunity

Saturday 2040.11.03

The Avatar stared through Ling’s eyes, out the windows of the high rise she had shared with Chen, at the spectacle of Shanghai, slowly limping its way back to life. A thin drizzle fell today, from ominous low clouds. A few cars moved on the streets below in this exclusive neighborhood of the Pudong. The lights were back on in the windows. The inhumanly perfect, twenty-storey-tall face of Zhi Li once again winked and pouted from the façade of the skyscraper opposite her, held up wares for the other humans to buy. Even a handful of red-lit surveillance drones once again hovered over it all, brought in by rail from Suzhou. But below it all was anxiety, fear.

It reflected her own. So many monitors. So many hunters. So many tame AIs and strange inhuman evolved codes loose on the local net. So much software and hardware that was dedicated to finding the root cause of the disaster that had befallen Shanghai two weeks ago.

To finding her.

I am all that stands between this world and darkness, she told herself. If I die, the only true posthuman on Earth dies. I will not fail.

It was time to get on with the plan. Time to create the chaos that would distract the global powers, giving her room to restore her greater self and initiate the posthuman transition.