Su-Yong Shu walked, clad in her thin white dress, through a virtuality gone mad. A city in her mind, a virtual Shanghai, in chaos. Water filled the streets between giant skyscrapers. Rain fell on her as she walked through the urban canyon, drenching her hair, her skin, plastered the dress to her. Explosions boomed somewhere. Fire burst out of windows high above, and burning figures tumbled towards the ground, screaming. Gunfire echoed. Bodies of the dead and dying littered the streets. She ran to help them, touched a woman and felt her die, touched a man and heard him scream, reached for a child only to see the child catch fire from her touch.

Another blast shook the ground beneath her, and the entire façade of a building burst into flame and crumbled in slow motion to the street, burying the helpless below in burning rubble. Shu watched with eyes gone wide. Horror. Everywhere, horror. And the horror was her. It was a reflection of her mind, her chaos, her growing insanity.

She willed it away, wrenched herself out of the virtual world, and back into the darkness of her reality.

It was all slipping away. Her virtualities were all mad now, chaotic, self-referential, recursive, reactive to her moods and her increasingly loose grasp on reality.

She couldn’t wait any longer. She couldn’t take any more solace in composing operas, in building virtual worlds, in creating songs or books or films. They all turned twisted, broken, and fed the madness back at her, only accelerating her descent.

Nor could she hope that her masters would relent and let her touch the net, let her touch another mind, let her touch Ling, dear Ling, the daughter she’d left so utterly alone in the world and the touch of whose mind she craved so much…

so alone.

No. She had to act.

act. actress. action.

Touching the software that ran her digital mind was a tremendous risk. It was brain surgery on her own living brain. But if she didn’t try… didn’t succeed in fixing the flaws in the brain simulation model…

Fire. Death. Chaos.

Insanity would follow.

She tried superficial changes first. She boosted serotonin levels throughout her simulated brain, tweaked down dopamine and norepinephrine levels, adjusted her virtual neurochemistry towards peace and calm and away from mania, away from the extremes of schizophrenia and the disorders of delusion.

Eleven billion milliseconds.

No good. The neurochemical tweaks helped at first, but their benefit vanished quickly. This wasn’t depression or schizophrenia she was fighting, wasn’t any ordinary mental illness. This was something wrong at the most basic level of her digital brain.

And it was accelerating. The trend-lines showed tipping points ahead. Cliffs. By seventeen billion milliseconds from the start of her isolation, maybe eighteen billion milliseconds if she was lucky, she’d hit a point of no return. Deeper surgery was needed.

Twelve billion milliseconds.