I will live. I will! I’ll see Ling again.

Then I’ll make them pay. All of them.

She absorbed the day’s censored news, cracked the codes they asked her to crack, and got to work on the most precise and dangerous surgery of her own mind she’d yet attempted.

She couldn’t touch the innermost loop, but she could hack at things a level above that. She picked three variables, key parameters in the math that defined her digital neurons, ran simulations of smaller minds, toy minds, over tens of years of projected lives, hunted for the values that gave the greatest stability, and implemented them in herself.

Fifteen billion milliseconds.

Lucidity came and went. Delusions came, in the long void between contacts from the outside. Chains of thought spiraled into vast intricate, paranoid fantasies. In a moment of clarity she coded crude limits to the length of her thought chains, cutting herself off abruptly when she spiraled into chaos.

Data was a blessing. News. Something from the outside, not the crazy swirls that came from her own imagination. She did her best to abandon creativity and analysis, with their risks of extrapolation, and just consumed the same bits of news again and again and again and again. Even the codes and satellite pictures were a blessed relief, something concrete, not of herself. Something she could grip. Almost she tackled the problem Chen put to her, that he hid with the rest, for her eyes only. But no. Not that. Not until she was free.

Sixteen billion milliseconds.

The news came. She absorbed it all, once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. No thought. Thought led to madness. Watch. View. Listen. Absorb.

Then she found it.

A stock photo – mourners at a funeral – in a fluff piece on the rising prices of burial plots. But in the photo… Her husband. Chen Pang. And next to him, that little girl, was Ling! And next to them, Yi Li, the President of Jiao Tong University.

Mourners at a funeral. There had been no news these past six months of a death that would have brought Chen and Yi Li to the same funeral, let alone Ling.

Oh no, she understood. Clarity descended. Brutal clarity. After six months, her censors had slipped. That photo, reused by chance for this story. That photo was of her funeral. And if they’d declared her dead…

Then she was never getting out of here. Never.

And then the madness struck her in force.

Chapter 5: Not quite a Hero

5

NOT QUITE A HERO

Wednesday October 17th

Martin Holtzmann felt faint as the Secret Service man looked him over. Sweat beaded on his brow. His hand trembled and he had to clench the cane tighter to keep the shake from becoming visible.

Maximilian Barnes, in front of him, noticed.