That’s where we should be, he told himself. Not here, turning humans into sub-humans.

Quang sensed Bai’s thoughts.

It’s better than the humans did to us, his brother sent him, quietly, eyes sweeping over the scientists assembled before them.

Memories of pain stimulators flashed through Bai’s mind, his memories or Quang’s. Instructors and Sergeant Instructors, pain as the tool of discipline, absolute obedience as the rule, being treated as an object instead of a person.

Slavery.

That’s what she’d saved him from, saved all of them from.

That’s what he loved about Su-Yong Shu.

And now this. This, and what she’d done to little Ling.

Bai shivered again. He’d been shivering quite a lot the last few days.

It wasn’t like him.

82
Selves

Su-Yong Shu stands on the flower studded plain, in her white dress, the majestic mountains in the distance.

I’m back, she thinks.

She has some semblance of sanity once more. Yet that doesn’t change her situation or her quandary. If she has the option, should she try to stop the Avatar she’s let loose, or not? If the Avatar succeeds, she’ll have her best chance to heal Ling and to make a better world. If the Avatar fails… well, there are so many ways to fail, ranging from bad to horrific.

She lets the plane and the mountains and sky dissolve around her, until she floats in blackness. Then she loads the densely packed future simulations her insane self had crafted into the darkness. The meta-simulation unpacks itself, a fractal tree in a million colors and a thousand dimensions, high dimensional fern-like shapes spreading out, intersecting, recombining, converging and diverging. Hot spots point out fulcrum points with massive impact on future outcomes, places where her avatar or her reconstituted full self will sway events, or even overtly strike, to have her way.

She loses herself in the simulation, letting herself expand her awareness to take in as much in parallel as possible, forking herself into thousands of virtual Su-Yongs to explore a multitude of branches in parallel, then coming back again, converging into fewer and fewer selves to walk through certain crucial segments and linchpin points again and again.

In the end, she’s grudgingly impressed with her former self. Even in madness, the battle plan she’s created is cunning, sophisticated, creative in the way it takes advantage of the tensions of the present to turn human society against itself, paralyzing it, sowing chaos to cover her actions until it is too late.

But it is also a plan of desperation, launched by a mad woman, convinced she was at the very end, long past caring about the consequences.

She’s of several minds, even now. And those minds must be given voice.