And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind.

I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me.

I’m Yuguo!

His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood.

There were minds around him. Wei. Xiaobo. Longwei. More. Even Lee had done it. All of them. He could feel them, feel their thoughts, feel them tripping though their own inner journeys, their own self-discoveries, so different from his own.

Yet all the same. All flecks of gold, all grains of sand, yet part of a whole.

The only way to survive.

He was on his feet now. His friends were laid out on the bare concrete floor of the dingy room. But there was sunlight up above. A woman named Lifen, who’d told him the truth. And a revolution to be won.

“I understand,” he said aloud.

Eyes snapped open all around him.

“Fall apart, and cease to be. Or come together, and be something more.”

They were looking at him, staring at him. He could feel their minds tugging at his, feeding his. Wei. Wei was nodding, was trying to get up. Yuguo could sense the comprehension in his friend’s mind. Wei understood what he was thinking.

Yuguo spoke again. “I won’t defect anymore.”

And then he stumbled towards the door, and towards the revolution.

Behind him, he sensed minds pulling themselves together to follow.

57
With Friends Like These

Sunday 2040.12.09

The Avatar stood before the giant wallscreen, her eyes closed. Inside, she watched the traffic flow in and out of the Information Ministry data exchange in Beijing, petabytes of it, to and from every corner of China. This was the heart of the empire, the central location from which the firewalls were controlled, from which the censor codes received their instructions.

From which the Peace and Harmony Friends received their programming.

This was the pulsing nerve plexus that kept the populace tame and malleable.

And now she was going to invade it.

The next few steps would be her most dangerous yet.

One floor below her, a simulacrum of actor Wang Yao was running in local processors, receiving model updates from the Information Ministry’s servers. She’d been ready for hours, had been waiting patiently for this moment, for the occupant of the luxurious unit below to return home and start conversing with his Friend.

The Avatar reached out, straight down through real space, avoiding routers and net hardware infected with hunter killers, and inserted the thing she’d made, the virus, tightly compressed, packed with new code, into the Wang Yao simulacrum below.