“Ling!” he yelled. Her father came after her in three long strides and he was going to hit her again, but she reached out with her mind and slammed the security door first. Happiness jolted through her as she saw him forced to yank back his fingers rather than have them crushed.

Chen pounded on the door for a while, but it was no use. Let the little abomination rot in there.

He crossed the room of his magnificent flat, the flat that fame and wealth and success had brought him, and stared out at the chaos of Shanghai, the dark wreckage of the shattered city.

Some part of him whispered of guilt and remorse. Remorse that he’d struck his eight year-old daughter, that he’d threatened her life. Guilt that he planned to torture the ghost of his dead wife to extract more discoveries that he could pass off as his own.

No, he told himself. I have no wife. I have no daughter. My wife died ten years ago. And that thing I’ve called a daughter is no child of mine. It’s a construct. A golem. It’s not even human.

Chapter 25: Ambush

25

AMBUSH

Wednesday October 24th

Breece almost died near Austin.

The cemetery was in the hills to the west of the city. He arrived in the afternoon, parked the Lexus, shut off his phones and slate to keep distractions at bay, and hiked up the hill to his parents’ graves.

He could see his dad smiling, hear his mom laughing, their faces full of joy. They’d be in their early sixties now, if they’d lived. Still sharp. Still helping people. Still young enough to have a chance at immortality, to have a hope that uploading or the reversal of biological aging would come along in time. They might have lived to become posthuman. They might have lived forever.

But they hadn’t.

Ten years ago now. Ten years since the war had begun.

He still remembered waking to the news that morning, waking to the videos of people vomiting blood, of bodies piled in the streets of Laramie, Wyoming, of National Guard vehicles surrounding the city, of hazmat-suited early responders trying to make sense of it all. Marburg Red. The virus had killed thirty thousand, wiped out the town, and almost killed millions more.

Then the Aryan Rising clones had been found. The new master race. The sociopathic blond neo-Nazi children. The genetically sculpted children who’d butchered the scientists who’d created them. Who’d released Marburg Red prematurely, eager to see it wipe out the genetically inferior races that populated the planet.