51 SHANGHAI






In a luxury apartment eighty floors above Shanghai, a little girl named Ling gazed absently down on the city. The people moved like ants. The highways were like rivers.


Her tutor called to her in Mandarin. "Ling, we must finish our studies now."


Ling ignored her. There was nothing this woman could teach her that she couldn't learn twice as fast, ten times as fast, from the net.


She opened herself to it, felt the pulse of it, the flow of it, the almost primal energy of it. It was qi, she'd decided. The qi of the world. The life force of the planet was data.


She'd shared that thought with no one. They'd think she was quite odd, even more than they did already. She'd shared the thought with no one but her mother, that is. She shared everything with her mother.


Her mother. Her mother had died the death of the body. Her mother's mind lived on, but it was constrained, now. The old men that ruled this country were punishing her, cutting her off from the outside world, cutting her off from Ling.


Ling didn't like that. Not one bit. And she didn't intend to stand for it.


"Ling?" her tutor called. "Come here now."

Ling put her sweetest little-girl smile on her face, the smile that showed her teeth. She turned back to her tutor. It was important to at least pretend to be human. That's what her mother always said.



In a secret barracks on the outskirts of Shanghai, three dozen identically faced men moaned uneasily in their sleep, tossed and turned from side to side. They dreamt of violence. They dreamt of fire. They dreamt of death.


They woke in a ripple of consciousness. Their mother had died. Their mother was in danger. They rose as one, checked their weapons, checked their bodies. Somewhat calmed by this, they returned to their bunks and eventually to sleep. Their mother might need them soon.


In a secret complex below Jiao Tong University's Computer Science campus, a distinguished-looking Chinese man in a suit stood, hands clasped behind his back. He gazed thoughtfully through the armored and insulated glass into the vast room beyond, where banks upon banks of quantum processors were ensconced in liquid helium pressure vessels. Red and blue lights blinked softly, showing the status of parts of the computing apparatus. "Wife," Chen Pang asked softly, "what have you done?"

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