Machines first, just like those she had destroyed as a child, but now she was working with more effective tools. Freyda taught her all about explosives: which ones to use in what situations and how to maximize their destructive effect. Aphran learnt impatiently -she wanted to do something soon about the injustice done to her two sisters. Obviously it was all the fault of the AIs. Why wasn’t that s-con cable adequately shielded? Why no safety nets in that ventilation space? Why didn’t these godlike AIs look after people? At the age of seventeen she killed her first monitor. He had fancied her, so was not sufficiently on his guard. She shot him once through the throat, again through the back of the head as he lay gagging for life. Then she spewed up her guts nearby. The organization got her out of there—she’d left just too much of her DNA as evidence at the scene. On another world she graduated to mass murder with a bomb planted in a runcible facility, but it failed to take out the AI there. The only AI she ever managed to actually . . . kill, was a free Golem, and that at close range with a missile launcher, while its back was turned. But though the AIs were the main enemy, the most hated of all were those who willingly served them: ECS and its agents—no agony could be too much for them to suffer. How utterly and completely did the Separatist organization brainwash her, and how downright stupid of her to allow it.

Skellor—the brilliant biophysicist who was promising to change their fortunes—brought ECS down on them like an avalanche. Subverting an ECS dreadnought by using Jain technology, he then made Aphran and some of her fellows his crew in the most horrific way possible: subsumed in Jain tech, becoming mere adjuncts to him, suffering and yet not dying. Then he killed her, burned her in a never-ending fire, the only escape being for her mind to flee inside the Jain structure. Next came Jack, who uploaded her from there to a partitioned segment of his own crystal. She combined with him, embracing him for the sake of her own survival, and there found clarity with which she began to see everything thereafter. For open to her were the massive historical files that Jack contained, giving sharp contrast to the peace and plenty enjoyed across the majority of the human Polity. She saw how the AIs allowed the human race the freedom to enjoy luxurious eternity, or even to destroy themselves personally, but not the freedom to destroy each other. She came to recognize her past life as the stubborn intransigence of a spoilt child. But most importantly she saw Jack. And that alone was enough.

‘I wondered why you were not prepared to die for the cause, but you did not answer me,’ she enquired over com.