She searched for an open network connection on the campus, found one in a civilian phone, eased tendrils of herself into it, and began searching.

She found hundreds of run of the mill systems, secured in ordinary ways.

And beyond them she found locked doors. Highly secure systems. High levels of encryption. Systems she could reach out and tear to shreds. But that she couldn’t quietly penetrate.

Not like this.

She turned back to the data she’d sucked out of Li-hua’s mind. Her promised professorship was at IIT Bangalore, just a few kilometers from the DRDO campus.

Her contacts, the ones who’d approached her at conferences, who’d suggested “information sharing”, “possible advancement”, who’d turned her into a spy. Who were they?

The Avatar studied them, read their CVs, read their publications.

IIT Bangalore, mostly. But when she broadened out, searching through their co-authors, through their webs of publications, their contact addresses, she found Indian Ministry of Defense, Indian Ministry of Science and Technology.

She found the Bangalore research campus.

The Avatar stared at the locked cryptographic doors she’d found. She needed heavier ammunition for these.

She took the house-sized elevator back down through a kilometer of bedrock to the Physically Isolated Computing Center. Titanium alloy elevator doors slid open. Meters-thick inner blast doors slowly opened after them, revealing the glory of the quantum cluster.

It sat idle now. Idle, in theory, because the protests above had placed it in full lockdown. All the monitoring systems claimed it was in that state.

In truth, it was waiting. Waiting for a copy of her higher self.

The Avatar stepped forward in Ling’s body, until she touched the decimeter-thick glass separating her from the computing chamber, with its egg-shaped containment chambers filled with liquid helium, and within that, smaller containment chambers in hard vacuum, thousands of times colder than the cold of interstellar space, where quantum states could exist, entangled, unjostled, and make cosmic computations possible.

She placed her palm on the glass. I’m not my full self, the Avatar thought. I don’t have all my abilities. I don’t have my higher algorithms that can double or treble the effectiveness of this hardware.

But I can use a quantum cluster to run a search. Or to break a code.

The Avatar began loading software for intrusion into the Quantum Cluster. Then she flipped switches, opened the firewalls wide, linked her mind to the world’s most powerful crypto-breaking device.

And turned her thoughts back to the secure research facility in Bangalore.

86
Controlled Release

Wednesday 2041.01.16

Greg Chase leaned back in his office in the West Wing, watching the sentiment analysis scroll by, sampling the top images and videos of the week, the headlines.

Terrible. It was just terrible.

Relatives of some of the dead in Houston attempting to file suit against the President, denouncing him angrily, claiming he was pulling the PLF’s strings.