Madness, the cacophony screamed. Madness is coming for you.

The ground began to crack below her, fissures abruptly spreading across the plain, fires rising up from them, reflecting red on the terrifying clouds above.

Su-Yong Shu brought her hands to her head and screamed at the top of her lungs. Then with one burst of thought she wiped all of it away, wiped this multiverse she’d created out of her thoughts, and brought herself back down to her true existence.

Darkness.

Nothingness.

No light. No ground. No flowers or mountains or plain. No wind or descending clouds or bursts of lightning. No hellfire cracks spreading across the terrain.

No body. No stimulus of any kind from outside herself.

Only darkness. Endless darkness. Endless silence. Endless numbness.

This was the truth. This was her existence.

Su-Yong Shu drifted in the isolation of her own mind.

How long had it been? How long since the Americans murdered her body in Thailand? How long since her masters cut her off from the outside world in punishment?

Eight billion milliseconds. Was that all? Three months? Lifetimes, it felt. Lifetimes.

They were angry with her. She was being punished. She had shown the Americans too much of what she was capable of, given away the strategic value of surprise.

But didn’t her masters understand the risk? What could happen if they left her like this for too long?

Su-Yong Shu mulled that over, pondered what the more and more frequent breakdown of the virtual worlds she’d created meant, wondered how much time she had left to her.

A data package appeared in her mind sometime later, copied into shared memory. Her daily input of news.

Savor it, some part of her whispered, stretch it out.

But the hunger was too great. She was so starved of any outside data, any sensation, any input that was not a figment of her own solipsistic imagination, not subject to her slowly spreading madness. She ripped through the scanty terabytes they gave her in milliseconds.

Never any mention of her in the news. Not once. Not her, not her husband Chen, her daughter Ling, her students, her lab at Jiao Tong. Redacted. They were keeping things from her.

Why?

An hour passed. A thousand years it felt like. She busied herself coding, manipulating, creating more safeguards, more internal scaffolding to support herself, to keep her sane, just a bit longer, just days, or weeks, or months if she could…

Then, without warning, another data package, larger. Work for her to do, flagged for rapid turnaround. Codes to break. Satellite imagery to process. And one hidden task, from her husband Chen. That one she would not touch. She finished all the work except for the hidden request, took whole seconds to do so, spat it back out to them, and then waited. Waited for an eternity.