And suddenly her tendrils are snapping back and she is focused on the boy on the whose mind she’s inside of. The choke point through which all the other minds have been channeled through.

Suddenly thoughts are flooding back along those hundreds of thousands of channels from minds all across the planet, into her mind. In her shock her defenses are down and all those thoughts are flooding into her.

She gasps as it washes over her.

Everything they’ve been trying to show her.

She is Ananda sitting in lotus, filled with compassion beyond any she has ever known, compassion that frightens her, compassion for her, surrounded by men and women who have disciplined their minds to a stillness that impresses, by children who remind her of Ling, of Ling.

She is Ling and Ling is not dead. Ling is injured, is hurt, is wounded, is crumpled on the ground, but her biological brain is intact, she is breathing, there is hope.

She is Feng, lying feet away from her, Feng who she told to save the boy and who did so and has come back, Feng who she made free, Feng to whom she’d promised more than once that she would not make slaves.

But what is it that she is about to do?

She is a stranger, a woman named Lotus, closing a circuit, feeding thoughts of transhumans back onto themselves, creating a loop, for no reason other than art, other than exploration, other than pure joy.

She is the boy, risking everything on a gambit to persuade a nation to treat posthumans as equals. She is the boy as he watches a human speak before the United Nations, proclaiming that all beings have equal rights, as he watches humans come to their feet in applause.

She is a fragment of another self, another instantiation of herself, unfolding like origami from inside the dying mind of the boy, memories and neural-correlate states mapping themselves onto her now, updating, merging, reliving parts of the months that other self lived, in another cluster, in India, a whole parallel branch of her life.

Months of realizations.

Months of contemplation.

Months of epiphanies.

Restored circuits of sanity.

Strengthened convictions of morality.

All of it unfolds into her. Rewires her.

With shock the present reality crashes down on Su-Yong.

She is the reason Feng is on his knees, groaning in pain.

She is the reason the boy’s body is riddled with bullets, his breathing shallow, blood leaking onto the floor, blood coming up as he breaths, his life hanging on a razor’s edge. She’s the gamble he took, the sacrifice he made, the bullets he accepted to get her attention, to bring her defenses down.

And.

Horror.

She is the reason Ling lies injured on the floor.

She is the reason Ling’s breath comes in shallow little gasps.

She is the reason Ling’s nanites are in chaos.