We’re going to become very close, Jyotika, Su-Yong sends to the woman.

And it’s true. Perhaps… just perhaps… she can even help repair this woman. But for now, Jyotika has much more to teach Su-Yong.

Su-Yong pulls up memories. Jyotika is a maid, was a maid, working for a cleaning company that mostly tended the homes of high tech workers. In India’s high tech hub of Bangalore.

Bangalore. Of course. If Su-Yong had to guess at where a quantum cluster might exist in India, Bangalore would top the list of guesses, ahead of Hyderabad, ahead of Delhi.

It could all be a trick, of course. A cleverly constructed ruse to fool her. She would have to stay alert for manipulations that depended on her assumption that she was in India. But it would do for a provisional guess.

One more thing to learn, then. She has an idea of where she is.

But when is this? Have years passed? More? Is Ling dead already? Or is it possible her other self has proven victorious?

Clear faceplates, data scrolling across them.

She pulls back those memories, what she’d seen through Jyotika’s eyes, refocuses her attention.

Reversed text. Numerals and acronyms. Vitals on Jyotika’s body. Blood pressure. Pulse. Respiration. Temperature.

And there. A timestamp.

40.11.30

Only days have passed. Less than a single month since they’d shut her down. Which means that Ling is likely still alive.

Su-Yong feels her internal state roil at the new data. Her emotions bounce through joy and fear and anxiety and anger and self-loathing.

Oh dear Turing.

This is why she’s here. This is why she’s burrowing into this mind, to boost the signal, boost its stabilizing impact on herself. The data flowing into Su-Yong’s virtual mind is not via the relatively crude nano-probes they’d inserted into her clone in the first generation, but via Nexus 5 nodes suffusing the comatose woman’s brain. And this technology, of course, is an iteration atop her own. She reaches into the nanite nodes, reconfigures them, ups their sensitivity, tracks the flow of data back into her own virtual neurons, gets distracted again, loses her place, has to backtrack, fix what she’s done.

She starts again, more carefully, trying to keep a grip on herself. She tightens the coupling of the virtual synapses in her own brain, closes feedback loops, piping the output of her own virtual neurons back into the woman’s brain.

Some of the woman’s neurons are in effect inside Shu’s mind, now. Just a few – a mere billion or so, sending a semi-regular pulse of real organic neural activity, receiving data from Shu’s virtual brain and echoing it back, correcting the aberrations that have a way of forming in the complex math of her own simulated neurons.