First, she must take stock of her resources. The Avatar reached out, searching through the net, carefully, dodging hunters, doubling back on her trail, masking her every move, triple checking each step before she made it, conscious that any slip could mean the end of everything.

Slowly, so slowly, she searched for the rest of her children.

At a secret complex within Dachang Military Air Base, she carefully siphoned a few hundred frames of video from the least guarded security monitors, taking whole minutes to do so, mindful to not set off any monitors watching for unusual use of the network.

The images confirmed what she suspected. Bai and his brothers were here. The Confucian Fist. Clone soldiers, each more deadly than any human being ever born. They were under guard, arrested, as Chen had been told, on the suspicion that she was behind the attack on Shanghai. The imagery showed her that their weapons had been confiscated, that they were penned in behind reinforced titanium doors watched by armed human and automated sentries.

Penned in like animals, the Avatar thought, like the slaves they were before I freed them.

She would need these men. She would need them free. She eased back, away from Dachang, to the civilian infrastructure around it. Then she set up her own monitoring systems, watching who came and went, looking for a way in, a way to subvert the place, and free her children.

Her students and staff came next. The ones she’d augmented with the neurotech herself. She found them one by one. Tony Chua, who’d returned from Canada to take a position as a Senior Researcher on her team. Jiang Ma, who’d been brilliant when she finished college at fifteen, who’d reminded Su-Yong of a younger version of herself, who was closing in on her PhD at eighteen. Fan Tseng, who’d gone from abrasive and cocky to humbly full of awe when she’d injected the nanites into his brain and shown him what was really possible. Others.

They were watched, all of them. Direct taps on their network connections. Physical surveillance devices on their clothing, in their homes. If she tried to contact any of them, there was a good chance it would be detected.

More insults the old men who ruled this country would answer for. Her daughter’s fists clenched involuntarily.

She’d take other routes, then. She reached deep into herself, found the fractally compressed plans she’d created, the meta-model with its probability trees and complex interconnecting webs of viable routes that her greater self had laid out in that hour.

She let it rise up within her, consuming her, sucking at the outside world through her, absorbing information from the ocean of data, the news of the world, updating the model’s thousand future projections with the latest information.