Kim took a careful sip from the coffee. Still too hot. Coffee was a pretty piss poor neuro-enhancer in his book, but it’s what he chose to limit himself to. Just one of the many sacrifices he’d made for a life of public service.

“I almost believe Reid,” he told his campaign manager. “He’s usually so evasive. Always with the caveats. ‘Not under this program, Senator’, and that sort of thing. Not today.”

Brooks shrugged. “He wasn’t under oath just now. It’s not perjury to lie to you when he’s not testifying in front of the Senate.”

Stan Kim grunted.

“And,” Brooks went on. “He knows you’ll clean house if you win.”

“That’s the truth,” Kim said. He sipped more coffee. “OK. How do the numbers look for tomorrow.”

Brooks tapped the slate on the coffee table. The screen on one wall of the suite came to life with an animated electoral map of the nation.

Red dominated, with pockets of blue in the west and north east.

Kim whistled. “Still that bad, eh?”

Brooks shook his head slightly. “Early voting. Too many votes went in before the news broke.” He tapped the slate again. “Here’s what it would look like if it was a fresh vote tomorrow.”

Now blue dominated.

“…Or,” Brooks went on, “If enough people tried to change their votes, filed suit when they found they couldn’t, and the court ruled in their favor.”

Stan Kim stared at the map, then took another sip of his coffee. The temperature was better now, at least.

“OK,” he told his campaign manager. “Pull the trigger.”

The Avatar woke, in Ling’s bed, in Ling’s body, pulled from her slumber by alerts from her sub-agents.

The net was alive with evolved codes, strange, wild things that obeyed no order, architectures neither human nor AI.

The Avatar waited, waited, until the density of the hunter-killers searching for Shanghai’s assailant thinned out.

The she opened herself, swallowed the tiny stealthed agents she’d let loose whole, digested their information payloads.

Ahhhhh. The Americans had found the breadcrumbs she’d left behind. And now they’d taken the bait.

It was a relief. More payoff from the risk she’d taken. Fewer risks she’d need to take in the future.

There was still more to do in the United States, though. She must prepare for the inevitable events of Election Night in the United States.

The Avatar began rifling through anarchist message boards across the United States, carefully planting ideas here and there. In parallel she sent a message to the man who called himself Breece.

The Avatar let herself return to her maintenance state then, the state where she integrated and made sense of the day’s input, the state a human would have called sleep.