Behind the armored glass windows, thousands of quantum computing cores lay, each encased in a vacuum chamber colder than interstellar space, those in turn immersed in pressure vessels of liquid helium. Optical fibers carrying entangled photons connected them. In these pressure vessels her mother lived, and thought, and felt.

Ling had never seen anything so beautiful in her life.

There were cameras here that linked to the SCC upstairs. Audio pickups, seismographs, radiation sensors. They were primitive things, physically disconnected from her mother, cut off from any attempt at interference from her. But not from Ling.

Ling reached out, felt the flow of electrons through the surveillance devices, twisted that flow, made their little brains hers, made them show the humans upstairs only what she wanted them to see.

When she was done, she reached out to her father, and willed him ahead. He stepped forward, to the control console, reached out, and flipped physical switches, one by one, killing the torture code he’d had running, then turning on her mother’s eyes, her ears, and the Nexus transmitters that filled this room.

Ling held her breath. Then she felt her mother’s mind. It was madness, chaos, overwhelming in its fury. The force of it knocked her mentally back, but she endured.

MOTHER!!!

PAIN CHAOS CONFUSION FIRE BURN PAIN HELL CHEN DEATH

Mind. Mind. Mind.

Ling. Ling. LING.

New inputs jerked Su-Yong Shu out of her mental loop. Torture ended. Minds appeared. She could feel. Feel. Feel thoughts and words and ideas and Ling that was Ling and who was this – was this was Chen Chen how could it be Chen?

Shu reached out to encompass them, to fill them with her love and gratitude, to feel all that they were.

And in her madness she couldn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend what was happening here, couldn’t say if it was real or a dream.

But oh, if it’s a dream let it end here, let me die with my daughter with me, real or imagined.

And then her daughter spoke.

Shu communed for an hour with her daughter. It was difficult. She was unstable, prone to wandering off, to making no sense at all. But bit by bit the input from Ling’s brain – from her daughter’s brain, from her clone’s brain – stabilized her, brought her to some semblance of sanity.

And Chen. Chen the betrayer. Chen the vile worm. She absorbed things from him. His thoughts. His memories.

Sun Liu pulling him aside, telling him not to get in that limousine that carried his wife and unborn son to their almost certain doom. Oh, it had not been the CIA that had tried to kill her. It had been the hardliners in her own country. Vile worms. And Chen had known. He’d known that night they were in danger. He’d known and hadn’t told her, had condemned Yang Wei to death, condemned their unborn son...