And what it showed her was memory. A ball, a gala. A handsome man in a black tuxedo, a chrysanthemum pinned to his lapel. Two handsome men. Her men. Chen Pang, her husband. Thanom Prat-Nung, her lover.

She saw herself, tall and young and slender and stylish, whirling with them, dancing, spinning, smiling, laughing, drunk on the beauty of life, of possibility, of a world without boundaries or limitations or social conventions.

2027, that had been. The height of China’s gong kāi huà period. China’s glasnost. China’s counterculture moment. That summer of freedom when progressives ruled, when democracy seemed at hand, when science and the arts flourished, when the phrase of the day was “let a billion flowers bloom”, when unthinkable indecencies were nearly acceptable, when a woman might have a husband and a lover and they might both accept that. When a woman and her husband and her lover might dream of elevating human consciousness beyond mere biology.

She smiled down at her younger self, whirling the night away in that glorious golden age, escorted by her handsome men. Then it struck her, as it always did.

One of these men was dead, murdered by the Americans. And the other had abandoned her to her Chinese prison.

She came back to herself abruptly, on that vast plain. Through the portal looming above her she now saw flashing scenes of death. Thanom Prat-Nung sliced in half by gunfire in that Bangkok loft, a victim of the Americans and his own career as a Nexus drug lord. A limousine bursting into flame from a CIA bomb, a pregnant version of herself trapped inside, burning. Her own body, her avatar, struck by American neurotoxin darts in that Thai monastery, her skin turning gray as she told Feng to save the boy. Death. Death. Death.

The noise was in her head again. The chaos. Storm clouds boiled from nothing into an ominous maelstrom blotting out the sky above. Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, forked down to strike the plain around her. Thunder clapped loud and close. Wind howled out of nowhere, cold and biting, penetrating through her thin dress. She looked down and the flowers were dying, aging prematurely as she watched, yellow petals fading, drooping, stems wilting and then the whole flowers decomposing into dead brown lumps.

Stop this, she told herself. Stop this!

Instead the silver portals opened, everywhere on the plain. One, two, a dozen, more. Vast two-dimensional silver rectangles sliced into life, flickered, and opened to show her scenes from her life, from the films she’d imagined into being, the operas she’d written and directed and composed during her imprisonment, the virtual worlds she’d created and spent virtual decades in to fill the vast time of her superaccelerated consciousness.

They bombarded her, a cacophony of sight and sound and smell and touch and taste and emotion blaring at her, driving her down to her knees.