And all of them claimed to be integral.

He fired off messages to humans. They needed a direct inspection, needed to run third party tools totally disconnected from their systems against the firewall, see if they could find some hole she’d somehow poked without them realizing it.

Though if she had found a way out… why was she even bothering to talk to him now?

The screen flashed again, more messages from the uploaded posthuman they’d bottled up in the quantum cluster a hundred meters below Bangalore.

] HAVE THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS BEEN LAUNCHED?

Varun’s breath caught in his chest.

] HAS DELHI BEEN DESTROYED?

He heard a strangled sound escape from his own throat.

] OR IS THERE STILL TIME FOR ME TO STOP THIS?

Varun stared at the screen with mute horror. He was suddenly cold, cold all over.

This is above my pay grade, he realized. Far above.

He reached for the secure phone on his desk, and punched the keys to call General Singh.

Su-Yong Shu makes contact with the humans. She begins her ploy.

And then she turns her attention to this woman, Jyotika, and the damage done to her brain.

You have brought me back to sanity, Jyotika, she thinks.

Let’s see what I can do for you.

85
Plan B

Monday 2041.01.14

The Avatar searched for the data cube Li-hua had stolen.

The woman’s memories had contacts, names, times, places.

But the easiest way was to start at the beginning. Handoff had occurred the afternoon of Saturday November 3rd, just hours after her greater self had died.

The Avatar accessed non-classified traffic routing databases, Jiao Tong egress and ingress logs, air and train travel databases.

All of these her higher self had opened wide and back-doored long ago.

Answers came to the fore. On a day with almost no traffic, when Shanghai was slowly, painfully dragging itself back to health after Ling’s angry blow… On such a day, a diplomatic vehicle from the Indian Consulate stood out.

The vehicle had left the Consulate, driven towards Jiao Tong, exited the flow of traffic momentarily, then re-entered it, and driven back to the Indian Consulate.

A pickup.

Two hours later, traffic routing showed another diplomatic car leaving the Consulate of India in Shanghai, driving to Hong Qiao Airport.

Air travel information showed a diplomatic flight departing Hong Qiao minutes later. A flight plan booked for New Delhi. Public records showed the plane landing. From there too many options presented themselves. The cube could have gone anywhere.

She had her suspicions, though.

The Avatar turned her attention to Bangalore, to the former DRDO campus, where Feng and Ananda and the Lane boy were now. She knew this place. Her higher self had known of it, had studied it. A campus where India conducted research into advanced AI, into autonomous software, into neural enhancement.

Into the posthuman.

What were the odds?