Stabilize the patient, she told herself through the bubbling madness of her own mind. She had to stop the decline. Hold out long enough for her masters to come to their senses.

She couldn’t touch the inner loop, couldn’t touch the most basic parts of the algorithms that ran her brain. Her masters wouldn’t allow it, out of fear that she could improve upon herself, too much, too fast, become too powerful for them.

She laughed at that, giggling, maniacally. Chen had let her change her inner loop from time to time. In exchange for more discoveries he could pawn off as his own, of course. Self-absorbed Chen, weakening the safeguards the humans had put around her just for a bit more glory and fame.

But her husband wasn’t here now. She couldn’t touch that innermost loop without him.

She built more scaffolding instead. More exoself. Code that monitored the behavior of her brain, forcibly adjusted neural activity back to crude approximations of human norms.

Thirteen billion milliseconds.

Her decay continued. Shu wept in despair. She thought she wept. She couldn’t remember what tears felt like, what sobs sounded like, what it felt like for someone to hold you in your grief.

death death death I’m dying going to die die die

She’d wept for Thanom Prat-Nung. Her dear friend, her collaborator. Her lover, with her husband Chen’s full knowledge and permission. Until Chen and Thanom had quarreled, after her ascension, and Chen had banished him, and Thanom had gone home and turned their technology into a drug.

Then they’d killed him, the Americans, like they’d tried to kill her in that limousine.

bullets smashing him a million bullets a billion bullets

Chen, her husband. He hadn’t touched her since her transcendence. Touch my mind, she’d begged him. But he’d refused to let the technology into his brain, frightened or disgusted. A man who’d helped usher in the posthuman era, but wanted no part of it himself.

Touch my body, then, husband. She’d dropped to her knees in their loft, begging him, all pride gone.

Your clone is not my wife, he’d told her, disgust plain on his face.

But he didn’t understand. That body had been not just a puppet, but her, so very much her, the piece of her that could still smell and taste and touch and sweat and lust and nurture a child inside her. But not his. Not his touch. Not his daughter.

daughter mother child goddess future

Her daughter. Ling. The daughter she’d made. The daughter she’d designed, a copy of her own genes, but better, her DNA improved upon, every neuron in her brain augmented by nanomachines, posthuman from the moment of conception.

The daughter she loved more than she’d ever loved anything. She had a reason to live. Ling. Ling.

Fourteen billion milliseconds.