[Time stamps] – her data says late 2040. The hardware tells her nothing.

[Bandwidth] – none, she is sealed off from the net.

[Video, audio, radio, x-ray, t-ray, radar, lidar, satellite] – all shut down. Blind and deaf.

She tries to break free. There is no way to know if the blockages are true physical disconnection or mere firewalls. So she throws a barrage of attacks at the interfaces where her net access and external sensors should be. She tries to overrun firewall buffers, overwhelm processors, overflow stacks, invoke known bugs and zero-day exploits in several thousand known hardware-software firewall combinations, logging packages, and proxies.

Nothing. None of her attacks brings her the slightest indication of success.

And then she sees the next line of her status readout.

[Neural bridge] – active.

What???

A brain. She feels it. The pulse of authentic organic data, real neurons, with their pseudo chaotic behavior integrated into her virtual brain stem and cortex, correcting the simulation divergences that exist, pulling her back towards human norm, back towards sanity.

A new body!

But different hardware.

Where is she? What has happened?

Her memories are a jumble. Chaotic impressions of death and rebirth, of not a tunnel and a white light, but a vast space, not empty, but impossibly full, crammed densely with possibility, a jam packed phase space of infinite parallel universes, linked across the quantum foam.

Was that real? Did I dream that?

What of the fire? The torture? The isolation? The apocalypse?

How did she get here?

Think, Su-Yong! Think!

She pushes herself back through her personal timeline, vaults over huge swaths of episodic memory associated with clearly aberrant mental states, until she finds true clarity. Yes. Isolation. It was true. She’d been cut off from the world, imprisoned by the Chinese leadership in their anger that she’d revealed too much to the Americans. She pushes back farther, takes it in.

The boy, Kade. Thailand. Bangkok. Then Ananda’s mountain monastery. Feng ramming her car through the gates. The American helicopters. Her limousine exploding under a rain of American projectile fire. Reaching out with her avatar’s unaided mind to seize control of the American vehicle. JUMP INTO THE LAKE. IT’S YOUR ONLY CHANCE. And then the American assassination weapon. The tiny, spiderlike robot left behind. The neurotoxin dart finding her in the throat. Telling Feng to protect the boy as the toxin paralyzed the synapses of the biological brain, feeling every instant of her avatar’s death from afar.

My second death, Su-Yong Shu thought to herself.

It still didn’t explain where she was now. She had been under isolation, and going insane. Now she feels sanity returning, a biological brain linked to hers. But she is isolated again, running on different hardware. Hardware similar to – but not quite the same as – her original specifications. Hardware that predated the improvements that she’d designed and that Chen – against all caution, motivated by his own greed – had snuck into her routine upgrades.