Her firewalls blocked them, categorized their mutations, fed them to her digital immune system for new rounds of phage evolution.

She counter-attacked at the most basic hardware level of the nanites, using protocols her higher self had emplaced there when she designed them. She ripped into parts of the boy’s brain through those low level hardware controls, made the nanite nodes her own, as they always had been, seized control of the boy’s cortex, of his brain stem, of his mind, of his life.

The human screamed.

Control channels opened, handed off nanite circuits from within the human brain to hers.

She accepted.

End his life now? The Avatar debated. Or keep him around as a useful pet?

Circuits from the boy’s mind opened. Data returned. Systems inside her own mind went haywire.

With horror she realized she’d been played.

Dummy circuits. Trojan horse attacks. They dumped more viral assault weapons, fresh ones, laden with exploits she’d never seen, directly into protected memory space deep within her mind.

The new viral attacks took root in microseconds.

She screamed.

No choice.

The Avatar invoked emergency procedures, cauterized whole segments of her mind. She cut billions of nanites out of her network, flash-zeroed their data, forgot and lost whole swaths of herself.

The firewalls over the rest of her snapped into new shapes, adapting, learning from these new tricks, reforming themselves to resist these exploits. Darwinian immunity engines kicked into high gear, evolving new generations of phages to kill these new viruses.

Behind her, she felt the boot sequence of her greater self draw near to its conclusion.

Seconds. That’s all she needed. Just seconds.

Kade pushed forward, panting with exertion, with the epic draw of the Nexus nodes on his brain’s blood flow, on its nutrients. He was burning up. A fever inside his skull. Wattage from the spillover of the transmission power of the Nexus nodes was physically warming his cranium to dangerous levels. Red emergency messages were flashing on Nexus control panels in his mind. He couldn’t keep this up too long. His brain would fry.

He had to. No choice.

It was injured. It was constrained. But it was a caged beast now, smaller, with a more limited surface to defend, and learning fast.

He fired another flurry of viruses into the shared bandwidth between them, millions of them, the newest ones used in the Trojan attack, ones she hadn’t seen until less than a second ago.

The monster responded with billions more phages, new ones, evolved even faster, slaughtering his viruses on the wire.

Then he felt something, something incredible. Inside the mind, he felt a struggle.

Ling!

Sam watched as the unknown Confucian Fist flying through the air brought his rifle around to shoot her.

She pulled her arms in to accelerate the spin, ducked her head to turn it into a half-flip, knowing it was too late.