The scene changes. The Lane boy is gone, but the Opal sedan remains. Feng is in the front now. Feng, the first transhuman she met beside herself. Feng, who was a slave. For a moment he’s a superposition of Fengs. Feng in his twenties, her driver. Feng at sixteen, on his knees, a slave, writhing in electronically induced pain. Feng, a child of four or five, cowering under the blows of his military slavemasters.

Then he is Feng again. His eyes meet hers in the rear-view mirror of the car. I was a slave, those eyes say, and you freed me.

You could compel him, Feng sends in the memory, in Bangkok, speaking of Lane, testing her, seeing if she still believes in freedom, or if she’s willing to become the dictator that she could.

I would become no better than our masters, her past self replies. Our associations must be voluntary.

Red Shu replies angrily. The situation has changed!

Blue Shu does not even speak. She simply waits, as the scene in center of their circle, in the midst of the void at the heart of the fractal probability tree changes yet again.

Becomes an airy room, polished bamboo floors and walls, hoisted up in the jungle canopy of Thailand, a living tree growing through the center, a giant bed off to one side, where she and Thanom lay, naked.

Arguing.

You must find a way to leave, Su-Yong. Nothing good can come of it.

In the memory she shakes her head. China is the best, the only viable sponsor of my work. They are funding the posthuman transition!

They keep you a slave, Su-Yong! A posthuman knows no leash! Break it! Break every leash, every bond of those who would control you!

In the memory she slaps him, slaps him for calling her a slave.

In the here and now, White Shu feels the pain of those words like a blow.

ENOUGH, she sends. And with a thought she wipes Thanom and his jungle hideout away.

It’s true, she realizes The humans will never give up. Even the transhumans she thinks of as natural allies will not give up. So many of them will fight. Defeat is defeat. Victory may also be defeat.

She was wrong to think she could drive the posthuman transition by force. This is not the way.

Blue Shu turns to White Shu, gratified that she has won. So we must inform our captors, the Indians or whoever they are, of what is happening, and exactly how to stop it.

Then Ling appears between them, Ling as she last saw her, a kilometer below the bedrock of Shanghai.

“Mommy,” Ling says, looking up at White Shu. “Why did you hurt me?”