Bao turned, swiveling his chair, looking out past the lake at the high, fortified wall that surrounded the complex. From this view you could just see the Xinhua gate at the southern part of the wall, with giant word’s in Mao’s handwriting. “Serve the People.” Beyond it was Chang’an Avenue, and across from that was Tiananmen Square, where the protesters massed.

Bo Jintao followed Bao Zhuang’s gaze, then narrowed his eyes. “Send you to talk to them… And make you a hero? Play up your popularity even more? Is that your goal here?”

Bao Zhuang swiveled back to face him, then sighed and shook his head. “Not everything is politics, Bo. Sometimes you just find a solution.”

Bo Jintao brought his hands to his face. He was tired. “There are times to talk to protesters. To de-escalate.” He dropped his hands away and shook his head. “But this is more than a protest. This is an attack. Either we regain control of the information flow,” he took a deep breath, “or we’re going to have no choice but to fall back on older methods to restore order.”

The Avatar moved under the cover of night. Two cars transported them to the edge of the protest zone. From there they walked. The four Confucian Fists formed a perimeter around her and Chen Pang, equipment bags strapped to their backs. Yingjie took point ahead of them.

They reached her soldiers, the ones who’d been deployed from Dachang, at the outskirts around Jiao Tong. They were a tiny set, but they obeyed unblinkingly, forming a further perimeter, sneaking her small team across the lines, unseen by the other police or military.

Inside the lines, on the Jiao Tong campus itself, it was chaos, thousands and thousands of humans, huge numbers of them carrying the nanites in their brains. It would take hours to reach the Computer Science building through this press.

Instead, the Avatar reached out, gently touched the minds around her, and a path opened for her, the nanite-laden humans forming a boundary, moving other humans aside when necessary.

At the door to the Computer Science Building, Xu Liang met them.

“The upper floors are yours,” he told her. “The Secure Computing Center and Physically Isolated Computer Center’s systems are yours. But the human guards remain. I brought these as instructed.” He held out a case towards her, and opened it, revealing two hypersonic injectors within, already loaded with silvery nanite fluid.

The Avatar nodded, and gestured to her men.

Bai and Quang lowered their equipment bags and opened them, pulling out chameleonware suits taken from Dachang, and began to strip down.

She walked past the blank faced security guard twenty minutes later, and took the lift down to the Secure Computing Center.

Her staff were all assembled there for her, smiling, beaming love for her. These could not be simple automatons, after all. These had required a more subtle form of programming.