Up above, in the building. There was the monster’s proximal route.

They shot copies of the virus by the million at the mind there.

Firewalls and hastily invoked anti-virals shot them down, scrambled the viral structures on the wire before they could penetrate, destroyed millions.

A handful got through, snuck into the human mind in the chaos, found it fertile, began replicating again, carrying Kade/Feng into it, into the mind of this man called Sun Liu.

They felt the monster recoil again, felt it reach out, grab hold of parts of the man’s mind, seize vital centers to scramble them, to wipe this mind clean, to reduce it to a vegetable, to kill him if it could.

They sliced viciously at the trunk of the tendril connecting the monster to this mind, sliced through process after process, closed ports wholesale, replicated viral code into crucial occupied memory, fast, faster.

The human screamed!

And then the monster was gone.

The last wisps of her in this mind dying.

The human on his knees.

The Avatar shrank back in fear.

The hostile posthuman! It had sent them here! They were aligned against her!

And they were reading her thoughts.

So close. She was so close.

They would come this way. There were things they couldn’t be allowed to discover.

She reached into the Secure Computing Center. There she found Xu Liang, found Li-hua, found all the other staff she’d turned. How they loved her. How they worshipped her. Like puppy dogs. Just her presence in their minds brought them such immediate joy, set their little human tails to wagging.

She stroked them, stroked them one last time.

You know too much, my dears. She sent. The elevator’s on its way up to you… but there isn’t time. They’ll reach you first.

Her little pets sat at their terminals, their faces flush, their chests rising and falling, so gratified by her presence, by her mental touch.

Still not understanding.

Goodbye, the Avatar sent them.

Then she reached into their worshipping minds and stopped their hearts, one by one, as their adoration turned to confusion, to betrayal, to horror.

Sun Liu lay on the cold tile of the Computer Science Building.

Free. He was free. The dead woman was gone from his mind.

He forced himself up onto his feet. He stumbled down the hallway, down stairs, down another flight, down another.

And then out into the square.

“Sun Liu?” he heard someone say.

He turned, and it was no one he knew. Just some student, some student holding a sign. A sign with his name on it.

“Sun Liu!” someone else said. He turned. Another student, with a sign demanding democracy.

And then his name was being taken up, all around him.

“Sun Liu. Sun Liu. Sun Liu! SUN LIU!”