“And who are you to judge that? You agreed to live here, to practice dharma. Did you lie to us? Will you bring suffering to people who haven’t harmed you?”

Welga had prepared for this. “You’ve helped me, but you’ve hurt hundreds of people and thousands of bots. I didn’t lie about my intention to live here, but the Buddha also teaches us that we must do what our duty requires. I believe this is mine. My dharma is to stop blankers like you, not become one, and that is what I’m striving for. Considering what you’ve helped set in motion, you should understand. I don’t want to hurt anyone on this station.”

“But you’ll do what you must,” Ao Tara said. She nodded.

Whatever it takes. Welga shuddered. Hearing that from Ao Tara made her wonder if she was on the right path. Would killing people on this station make her the same? She fought in the name of justice, but so did they, in their own way. She shoved the doubts aside. No time for that right now.

She turned off the fans. “Leave, or another component goes off-line.”

“We didn’t want to overwhelm you,” the monk said. “This is the culmination of our vision. We don’t seek to bring the physicality of dakini bodies to humans as much as the state of being. Awareness. Sati!”

Welga’s mind exploded with input. She closed her eyes, but it made no difference. Visuals, audio, file streams, connections upon connections, spanning the space stations to the nascent moon orbital and down to Earth, where the stellas lit her thoughts like the heart of a galaxy.

The riot of data drowned all thought.

It overloaded reality.

She could see Connor… greeting Ammanuel… speaking to Hassan and Olafson. Taking pills! Gaining his health back. She saw Nithya and Luis and everyone in their flat. She saw the frail Indian rocket engineer gasping for breath. The American president accusing India of harboring the world’s enemy. The Chinese prime minister shouting that it was all a hoax by the US, that they’d downed the constellations, that they wanted access to biogenetic technology. Every exfactor. Every care-bot and minder-bot and swarm. Entertainment feeds from decades before. From the previous century. Books. Birth records. Tip jar balances. Bank accounts. Coin transactions—

Good morning, Welga. Whatever it takes.

Welga latched onto Por Qué’s voice, her own voice, and surfaced from the drowning flow of information. She found her life preserver: stop the Machinehood.

She heard the phrase as if she had woken for the first time in her life. Made it her meditative mantra. Stop the Machinehood. Aimed the immense conduit of data into a new compartment in her mind and added a partition around it.

Whatever they’d done to her body to cause this change, she couldn’t undo it, and she didn’t have time to learn how to control it.