He was a girl in Nairobi being beaten by riot police. He was a student in Shanghai, his leg shattered by automatic fire. He was an old man in Kazakhstan, his arms being wrenched back by the dictator’s thugs.

He clenched his mind down, pushed it out. There were tens of thousands of people running mesh in this crowd. But the mindstream sites themselves were acting as a kind of global mesh. And they were being used to spread rage.

That’s not here! Rangan tried to tell everyone around him. Don’t get confused! Don’t give them a reason!

But the anger was strong. And it was growing.

Yuguo crouched down as the deafening roar came overhead.

FLEE INDOORS, the clones who called themselves Confucian Fists sent.

Up above the army helicopters dove towards them. He saw missiles fire. Red streaks hurtled this way. Explosions lit up the night. Buildings all around suddenly erupted in flame. Bodies were hurtled from the ground. Pain burst out in staggering amounts. Minds were silenced. Helicopters exploded. Other craft flew over them. More explosions. Everything was chaos.

Yuguo grabbed for the controller they’d built, the controller for the electronic weapons, the ones that disabled tanks.

“WE HAVE TO RUN!” Lu Song shouted it into his ear, over the deafening roar of explosions, of engines up above.

More gunfire, on the ground now.

He heard the crack and whoosh of Molotovs breaking, fireballs erupting.

He heard screams.

“NO!” Yuguo yelled, hunting through the menus, there must be something, something for helicopters.

“TANKS!” Zhi Li yelled, crouching down next to him.

Yuguo looked up. More tanks, pushing in from the end of the square. Dozens of tanks. He saw their turrets turning, heard massive booms.

He hit the button for the tanks.

The world exploded all around him.

Pain like he’d never known ripped through his body.

Ekaterina Naumenko yells in rage as she runs towards the faceless, shielded state thugs in Moscow’s Red Square. They are killing her comrades in Shanghai! Gunning them down with tanks, with helicopters!

“Murderers!” she screams. “Cowards!”

From behind her, she feels it in her mind as patriots launch a volley of Molotovs into the air, hurtling at the lines of riot police. The fire that bursts forth inflames her heart.

Fazil Kamal hauls harder on the stun gun in the hands of the soldier in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The soldier won’t let it go! Fazil’s cousins, Burak and Mustafa, hold the man down and pummel him.

“Damn you!” Fazil yells. He kicks the soldier again.

With a final heave the stun gun comes free.

Fazil stumbles backwards with the shock of it, then raises his prize high into the Turkish night.

Yes! It’s theirs. He looks around the square and he sees soldiers on their backs, freedom fighters rising triumphant.

He can feel it.