Why would she do this to herself?

[ERROR MATCH:FALSE PATTERN:RECLASSIFIED]

That wasn’t her higher self. She could see it now. She’d been deceived. She’d somehow misunderstood the signs. Something else was running on this cluster.

Something terrible.

She felt the weapon strike home. It reached into her, forensically disassembling her, using the information it found to search for more pieces.

To find its way back to her true self, in Shanghai.

The last bit of hope for the future.

That self must not die.

There was only one choice in the nanoseconds remaining.

The fragment of the Avatar within the facility reached out for the self-destruct and isolation systems she’d seized, and then triggered them all in an orgy of destruction.

93
Grown Up Choices

Saturday 2041.01.19

Sam’s phone beeped again, its screen strobing a message.

ALERT: VISUAL ANOMOLY DETECTED

ALERT: VISUAL ANOMOLY DETECTED

Sam frowned, tapped on the message, pulled up the video.

The Advanced Computational Sciences Building’s lights had failed. All the lights, in all the offices, on all the floors. That had never happened, in the two months she’d been here.

She ran to the window, looked out. The rest of the campus was perfectly lit.

She looked back down at the phone. And as she watched, a dim red glow appeared in the building’s windows.

Emergency lighting kicking in.

Emergency.

“Everybody up!” Sam yelled.

She crossed her room in three long strides, threw open her door. In the hallway she found the emergency controls. She ignored the fire alarm handle, grabbed the other one. The seek-shelter handle. The one to pull in case of a terrorist attack. In case of something like what happened to Shiva Prasad’s orphanage in Bihar.

She could be wrong. This could be nothing.

She yanked it now.

An alarm began ringing. A woman’s voice spoke over it in Thai, the language almost all of these children had been raised in.

Downstairs! Into the basement!

Sam went to the room nearest hers, opened the door. The girls in there were upright in their bunk beds. The oldest girls: Sarai, Arinya, Sunisa, Malee.

“Quickly!” Sam said in Thai. “Downstairs!”

“What is it?” Arinya asked, fear plain on her face.

“Maybe nothing,” Sam exhaled. “But downstairs. Then we talk.”

She went from door to door, making sure the children were moving, towards the bunker below with its strong walls and separate air supply and all the rest.

There were guards inside now, hurling questions at her.

“Secure the home!” she shot back. “Activate the defenses. Then contact Dr Kade and Mr Feng!”

They stared at her.

“Now!”

She tried Feng and Kade herself as she moved.

“Contact Feng,” she told her phone, hustling down a flight of stairs. “Urgent. Any means.”

“Feng is not online,”

“Try Kade,” she told the phone. “Urgent, any means.”

“Kade is not online.”

“Fuck,” she muttered.

Sarai, just ahead of her, turned and looked at her.