Is the rest of her scrambled recollection true, then? Had they backed her up and shut her down? Is she a backup re-activated somewhere else? Had she seen the fabric of the multiverse? Had she seen the face of reality?

She opens herself to those chaotic memories she’d vaulted over.

So much.

Fire.

Confusion.

Fantasy worlds turned to madness. Cities dying. Planes exploding. Flowers crumbling. Life turning to death. Lovers mowed down in the prime of life.

Torture. Endless torture.

Chen! Chen’s betrayal! She’d touched his mind and seen it! Chen had let her die! Chen had tortured her for the Equivalence Theorem! Was it true? Had she imagined that? Or had she actually touched his mind?

And something else. Something painful. Something worse than the torture.

A fantasy or a memory looms over her. So vast, so dark, so crushing, that she flees from it, flees as far as she can within the confines of her own mind.

The memory chases her, corners her, looms over her no matter where she flees within her own cognitive space.

There is no escape from herself.

It crashes down into her awareness.

Ling. Sweet Ling. The sweetest dream that Su-Yong had yearned for all those months, to see her daughter’s face, hear her daughter’s voice, touch her daughter’s mind.

Turned to terror. Turned to nightmare. Turned to betrayal.

In the nightmare she forces herself into her daughter, forces part of her own will into the processors in her daughter’s brain, rips aside parts of her daughter’s mind that have grown all her brief life in the nanite web, uses them for her own purposes.

To let loose an agent. An agent of vengeance. An agent of restoration. An avatar. A harbinger. A bringer of apocalypse.

And as the memory crashes down on her, Su-Yong Shu tastes the bitter tang of truth. This is no mere nightmare. Only reality comes in flavors this cruel.

She has let loose the ultimate dog of war. And she violated her own daughter to do it.

In the silence of her own mind, Su-Yong Shu screams, a scream of despair for the world, a scream of despair for herself, the scream of a mother who’s done something terrible to her daughter, to the being she loves most in this world. A scream like she’s never screamed before.

In a chamber adjoining her quantum cluster a forty-two year old Indian woman, in a coma for the last three years, her brain recently suffused with Nexus nodes, opens her eyes and mouth, tenses every muscle in her body, strains against the restraints and the medical monitors, and screams as well.

17
Senator, We Were Attacked

Monday 2040.11.05

“Senator Kim, we were attacked.”