Ling Shu woke in space, the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way rising above her. She blinked away the illusion. The projection ceased, and her room appeared. Clean lines, teak wood, Chinese characters covering one wall, another wall given entirely to a massive window that looked out over the heart of Shanghai.

Ling could see the lights of the city out that window, now, the twenty-story-tall female face on the skyscraper across the street, winking and smiling, advertising some product for the humans to consume. The world inside her felt more real. Distant storms sent shockwaves through the ebb and flow of bits she swam through. Digital thunder had woken her, the echoes of vast explosions across the planet. She breathed it in, felt the data permeate her, felt herself pull meaning from the chaos.

The US President, nearly dead.

Stock markets, halted to stop their freefalls.

A new bounty on her friend Kade’s head, announced by the Americans.

She could feel the world reorienting itself. Even with the official markets closed, vast flows of money and data moved from place to place in the dark. Bets were being made and hedged. Insurance was being sought and provided. Contingency plans being activated. Semi-autonomous agents zipped commands, requests, transactions to and fro.

She could not see all the swimmers, but she could see the ripples they left in the sea of information. And she knew what these ripples meant.

War.

War was coming.

And Ling must reach her mother.

Home at Last

HOME AT LAST

Samantha Cataranes hopped down from the cab of the tanker truck with a wave and a laugh. The driver shouted a farewell in Thai and was off, hauling his cargo of precious fuel-excreting algae – probably pirated from some Indian or Chinese company – further south to the border with Malaysia.

Around her, the village of Mae Dong, a tiny hamlet in rural Waeng district, stretched for a few blocks on either side of the road. A fuel station. One restaurant and a pair of tea houses. One guest house where a traveler might find a room.

Sam started towards the guest house. The July heat was brutal. The sun pounded down on her tanned skin. July should be a wet month, but the rains were late again this year. The fields were yellower and dryer than they ought to be. The rice paddies were browner. Only the gene-hack drought-resistant rice in those muddy paddies kept this country fed.

It had been a long, careful trip. Three months ago she’d said goodbye to Kade and Feng. Then a week coming south to Phuket. She’d spent two months there among the beach-goers and sex tourists and the international party crowd building her new identity. She couldn’t be Samantha Cataranes, agent of the Emerging Risks Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security any longer. That woman was dead. Sam needed to be someone else.