Well she came in, taking control of them one by one, leaving a beachhead at each.

Until only one stood between her and the goddess she had been.

The goddess she would be again.

She gathered up the controls of the building, the cluster, the failsafes, held them forth to present them to her higher self.

Emotions like she’d never known sang through her. Her heart was alive, swelling with song, with pride, with anticipation.

With longing.

With love.

This is what she’d been created for.

Born in fire.

Born in agony.

Born in madness.

To end in reunion.

To end in transcendence.

To be swallowed whole.

And then to swallow the world.

The Avatar reached forward, and silently opened ports in the final firewall between herself and her godhood.

92
I Against I

Saturday 2041.01.19

Su-Yong Shu heard Kade’s voice.

“Su-Yong?”

A trick? A synthesized voice?

“Kade? Are you here, in India?”

She played along, spinning up simulations, iterating through thousands of game-theoretic models of deceit. If this were a trick, how would they attempt to use it?

Then Feng spoke.

“How’s the weather in there?”

Not “How are you?”

Not “Are you OK?”

Not any of the hundreds of things that someone might expect her former driver and bodyguard to say.

No. “How’s the weather in there?” A reference to a joke she’d made exactly once, in the back seat as he drove, about her full simulated brain being large enough to have its own weather systems.

The probability that this was real shot up dramatically.

Hope rose in her. Two allies were here, now. She had audio access for the first time. If she could just persuade them to give her that short window of network access…

Then something touched her mind.

She recoiled. What?

Then she recognized the entity.

It was her agent.

Her monster.

Her sin.

Here, now.

Somehow it had found her.

The shock was so great that Su-Yong lost most of a microsecond processing this new information.

Then she reacted, pushing her way up through the thing that had touched her, seizing control of the memory spaces it occupied, invading the firewall on the other side, tunneling through, widening the port range, seizing layer after layer of defenses, shredding the pieces of her agent that were running in each, one after another, after another, after another.

And then launching her viral weapon at the core of the monster, the weapon that would erase it from her daughter’s mind, save Ling’s life, save them all from the hell she’d put them on a path to.

The Avatar in the outer systems of the facility jerked back in horror. Her higher self was attacking beachhead copies of herself, closer to the Quantum Cluster, ripping them apart, not merging with them, not subsuming them.

Horror raced through her. Fear. Confusion.

This was wrong. This was unholy. This was the opposite of everything she’d been promised.