Chapter Three: Gatekeepers in the City

"The city is the instrument," she said, paling. "As long as someone here is observing, the network persists." Lin looked upward through the server hall. Hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete, thousands of uninfected occupants, every physical connection threading the building—he perceived them now as a dense geometry of gravitational lines. He could not destroy the tower. He could remove the servers from the city's body. "Su, clear everyone from level six." "What are you going to do?" "Make a satellite that never leaves the ground." He pressed both hands against the floor and pushed his perception past its limit. Twelve meters. Fifteen. Twenty. Blood flooded from his nose. Direction fractured around him like glass.