She looked down at the streets, hundreds of meters below them, then looked back up at the digital representation of herself, twenty stories high, on the skyscraper opposite her, a more perfect version of herself, more beautiful than she or any human woman could ever be, flawless, un-aging.

Unthinking.

“They look to me,” she told her lover. “You said it yourself. Millions of them talk to me every day. What kind of person am I if I don’t go to them? If I don’t fight for what’s right?” She twisted to look up and back at Lu. “What kind of people are we?”

Lu pursed his lips, held her more tightly. “You’re a living person, my love,” he said, squeezing her again. “Remember what Bo Jintao said. He could kill you, kill us. And he’d still have that screen over there.” Lu gestured with his chin, and Zhi turned to look at the digital her again.

“He’d still have his simulacra of us,” Lu went on. “Give him a reason to kill you, and you’ll be under his control forever.”

Zhi slammed her palm against the glass in frustration, hating the face she saw across the street now more than ever before.

“Impostor,” she cursed aloud at the thing with her face.

78
Viral

Wednesday 2041.01.09

Bo Jintao sat at the emergency meeting of the State Security Committee. The giant wall screens showed the massive, still growing protests in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Tens of thousands of protesters in the larger cities. Approaching a hundred thousand in some.

A disaster of historic proportions.

“We must turn off transit, block the streets, set up barricades, force these people back to their homes,” Bo Jintao said. “The sooner we act, the better.”

There were nods everywhere.

Deputy Minister Ho spoke up, “Premier, I agree. To do this, we need more than State Security. The police in some cities may actually be outnumbered! We need to call in the Army. May I pull in General Ouyang?”

Ouyang. The Minister of Defense. Not a Politburo member, but instead a career soldier, the head of the nation’s military, the man who’d thrown his weight behind Bo Jintao and made the coup possible.

Bo Jintao looked around. There was assent everywhere.

“Do it,” he told Ho.

The Deputy Minister for State Security bowed and hurried out of the room.

Another giant screen showed estimates of illicit message traffic, drawn from hand analysis. Information was still spreading, still drawing more people to the protests. That had to be stopped.

“The system is blind to these videos and messages,” Information Minister Fu Ping said again. “It simply does not see them. And our human censor staff are overwhelmed. That is why they’re spreading.”

“So, fix it!” Wang Wei repeated. The head of the Commission for Discipline Inspection was clearly growing impatient.