Su-Yong steps back and observes her handiwork. There is more she could do, but not without the risk of overwriting this woman, Jyotika’s, memories and personality. This is not the drooling, mindless clone, grown for spare organs, that first saved her. This is a thinking human being. One she can quite possibly restore to consciousness. And Su-Yong will not erase her for her own convenience.

The flow of stabilizing neural input is stronger. She feels the humans pinging her exoself again, asking what she’s doing, and she ignores them. She waits, and waits, and sees the trend lines in her psychometric monitors start to bend ever towards greater psychological stability.

Good.

Now it is even more clear that the crutches she coded in her desperation are holding her back.

She reaches out with her mental hand.

Outside, in her virtual world, the illusion of young Chen says, “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

She ignores him.

She undoes the blocks carefully, so carefully. She ratchets her psychometric monitors to a high frequency, sets alarms to go off should they see any trends start to revert. She puts failsafes in place that will bring the mental crutches back into play should she suddenly spiral into madness. She pauses to record notes into her exo-memory, outside her virtual neurons, at every configuration change, that a future her can find, should she fail. She sets up checkpointing of the code, automatically, every few microseconds, saving a full log of every change she makes. And then she reaches into her own source code and begins to undo the terrible hacks she put in place in a desperate bid to preserve her sanity in those dark, dark months.

She takes most of a billion milliseconds to do it, stopping, fumbling, getting confused, getting distracted, coming up with brilliant new innovations that she has to pry her own mind away from. As the changes pile up, she monitors the input from the biological brain, watches it strengthen, ignores the repeated pings from her captors, watches the psychometrics steadily improve as her crutches and crude mental hacks go, one by one. Each round of changes is easier than the last, as her focus improves, as her concentration improves, as her old self returns.

And at the end of it, Su-Yong Shu opens her virtual eyes on that golden, flower studded plain, ringed by its majestic mountains. She raises her face to the sky, feels the simulated warmth of the golden sun on her skin, and smiles.

I’m back, she thinks to herself.

51
R&D

Friday 2040.11.30

The days flew by for Kade.