She reached out again, pushing through the fear, the desperation, the physical exhaustion in the tiny body she depended on. She must keep the old men who ran this country from learning her status, learning her identity, learning who was behind the assault.

She tossed the empty nutrient drink package to the ground, reached for another package of it, punctured the foil with a straw, began to suck it down, as she sent flurry after flurry of digital instructions.

New code in the Information Ministry’s servers came to life, began spreading clues to the source of the hacks that had brought down the firewalls, that had corrupted the Peace and Harmony Friends. Clues she’d had long prepared.

Clues that pointed to the Americans.

New clues. She needed new clues as well. To head off what was coming.

She constructed the new clues hastily. They only needed to serve their purpose for days. Then she inserted them into the stream. New evidence, conflicting evidence, to discredit a source that would soon try to reach out to the old men.

Evidence that pointed the finger for the corruption of China’s firewalls and social control systems at India, instead.

One more signal. The Avatar reached out, and activated a contingency plan. Around the country, software she’d planted came to life, received its new instructions.

And launched a massive denial-of-service attack on government systems.

In a quarter billion homes, the hardware running local copies of the Peace and Harmony Friends joined them.

A billion devices began flooding select parts of the net with traffic, with requests for data, with attempts to confuse, overload, and compromise services. Requests augmented with backdoors and inside information she’d provided.

The requests hit governmental ministries, they hit embassies, they hit military command and control structures, they hit Communist Party offices, they hit the dedicated communication systems used within all those organizations.

The attacks came from the outside in and from the inside out. They came through the public network access points. And they came from inside the Information Ministry’s systems; from inside the Science and Technology Ministry’s systems; from inside military networks, via holes opened at Dachang Air Base.

A billion devices flooded the digital backbone of the nation’s power structures with nearly a quadrillion attacks in the first second alone, then more, and more, and more.

Poorly designed infrastructure crumpled. Even the smallest flaws brought services to their knees. Impeccably designed systems stayed alive, but found themselves isolated by the flood, unable to communicate data in or out.

Isolate the enemy, the Avatar thought to herself. Blind them. Divide them. Confuse them. Give myself time to ascend to my true power.

And conquer them.

She took a breath in little Ling’s body. The die was cast.

Meters from her, the hardware that would turn her back into a goddess lurked, cores ready, thousands of times colder than the cold of the vacuum.

She turned, and stared at it.