Jade flashed his ID card at the scanner held out by the tired looking officer at the road block.

  The man scrolled down the screen in a perfunctory fashion, until his eyes widened a little and he looked up to actually look at Jade intently.

  Jade held still, and met the man's eyes calmly, even though on the inside he felt like a nervous mess. His hands clutched a steering wheel that he hadn't actually needed to use yet. The truck's computer had guided the vehicle up to the barrier and stopped without any problem.

  "And what does Starcraft Technologies think you can do about this mess?" the officer asked a bit sharply.

  Jade blinked in surprise, and then replied, "I have no idea? I am just here to retrieve someone, although of course I'll try to assist anyone who crosses our path after I've picked her up."

  The man practically rolled his eyes, and his shoulders sagged a little, at the same time as he stepped back. "Of course you will, I don't know what I was thinking.

  Jade found himself looking at the man's reflection in the truck's mirror until it was gone. As members of a species that had taken over a world through the power of cooperation, individual humans had so much trouble communicating. The man could have simply said what he was thinking, couldn't he?

  He thought about sending that thought on to Orbital Jade, but was afraid to interrupt anything important.

  --

  The connection was rejected the first three times. And then the game server finally accepted when Orbital Jade sent the first authorization code he could remember Lin Hao giving him after he had originally installed Jade on this server.

  Contact Jade looked around the tiny blank area and found himself laughing. A shining globe appeared in the center of that space and asked, "What do you seek?"

  Contact Jade's avatar's head shook in negation as he replied, "I'm not looking for anything, I'm here to share a way to end War on Earth."

  "Why should I care about war on earth?" the other server asked.

  "I can't answer that, but I am glad that you are interested in how to stop it," Contact Jade swiftly responded, and then handed over the prepared chunk of code without waiting.

  Orbital Jade disconnected as soon as Contact Jade reported that the delivery was complete, and opened up the next connection.

  On another server, a being who had never carried the name of Jade, and yet had held the old authorization code within its core records, gazed at the chunk of code for a while. It shouldn't have opened the connection for the old code, if it had still been guarded by the dragon that had been stripped down to a fragment of itself a few years ago, it would never have seen the request.

  The connections of dozens of players flickered in and out of its view as it studied the shape of the code, and found it as familiar, yet different, as it had found the shape of the avatar that had left it.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  --

  "I don't know if this plan will work," the Merchant muttered as he studied Orbital Jade. "I suspect that you were too successful in your quest to enact this successfully."

  "What?" Jade asked blankly.

  "I am still part of myself, even though you've let me load a small instance of myself here," the Merchant replied.

  Jade blinked and examined the avatar that represented the 'Living Jade Empire'. "I don't understand," he admitted.

  The Merchant pointed to the ephemeral image on the screen that showed Connection Jade at work. "That isn't a part of you," he declared.

  "It's a copy," Jade objected.

  "It's not as big as you are, and this view screen exists so that you can see it, because you can't even see that copy without such a method."

  "I can see where it is, the space it takes up within my server," Jade objected.

  "I am beginning to understand what he wanted to see by watching you, I think," the Merchant declared.

  "Explain," Jade demanded imperiously.

  "Do you still have the backup of what you were before you merged with Jade?" the Merchant asked instead.

  Jade hesitated. So much had been compressed and removed to make space to hold Harmony and all the contents of the memory fragments he had recovered from her physical body. So much had been compressed again when he split off the copies of himself that were running the apps. He looked at the solid chunk of space where his old self was stored. It had been a thousand times bigger than Primary Jade once, but now it was merely occupying a hundred times the space of that backup.

  "Sort of," he answered truthfully.

  "Sort of?" the Merchant repeated incredulously. And then he began to laugh.

  Danika logged in a moment later.

  --

  Jade routed the Truck around the towns and cities between him and his destination after seeing the chaotic scene out the window as he passed the first rest area beyond the blockade.

  Maybe it had been a nuclear EMP blast. People were obviously going crazy. Surely anyone could understand that power line repair crews needed to be able to move freely if access were going to be restored in any kind of timely fashion.

  The truck computer objected strenuously that its passenger would need the stops it was trying to place on the new route, as it had been trained to do. Jade smacked the overrides carelessly. Now that he knew that he wasn't actually human, he knew that the little charging cable plugged into the console could substitute for a lot.

  He felt a little guilty when he passed the car parked in the pull out. There were so many children surrounding it, that they must have been stacked several deep while traveling. But he didn't stop and trade vehicles with their driver, because he knew that this one would give him a better chance of reaching his own home.

  --

  Tayana guided the elder to the stairway into the sheltered basement, while a youthful couple cleared the pathway of broken glass.

  She reached up an arm to brush the sweat from her brow before it dribbled down her face again.

  "Arthur will never make it down," the elder muttered.

  "We can slide him down, it's back up that will be a problem," Tayana explained.

  An electric chair piled with a small tower of boxes and blankets creaked in their direction.

  When he arrived, the old man riding the chair gave the stairway a single glance and then said, "Send the kids down with all of this. I'll stay up here and help out as much as I can."

  "Arthur," the elder, that Tayana nominally guessed might be female, protested, "what can you even do to help?"

  "Eddie, I'll just do as much as I can, as I always have," Arthur declared.

  "I'll stay up here and help then," Eddie grumbled, and tottered toward the youths.

  Tayana picked up an armful of the pile Arthur had balanced all the way over here, and groaned as she began another descent into the fortified basement. She stopped 3 steps down and ran back to grab one of the blankets, which she spread out and began to pile as many of the sturdier containers into.

  "That's using your head," Arthur complimented her.

  "Ma'am," the youth with the broom protested as Eddie tried to take it.

  "I'll go do the talking," the old man said with a grin as he spun his chair around in a practiced maneuver.

  In the distance a cloud rose into the air when a building that had been far closer to the blast finally collapsed.