Jack of Harts

Chloe was not done when she convinced her Napoleon to come back to France and save her. It would take him time to organize, and the surviving French government still cast about fruitlessly for some way out of the crisis. The French police still struggled to bring order. The Islamic Brotherhoods and the French Resistance still fought in the streets on a daily basis. And Chloe still helped them. The Resistance, not the Brotherhoods. She happily helped kill those who had declared her kind an abomination before Allah and set off the bombs in Old Paris. She fought them in both the cybernetic and physical worlds, and became one of the most famous freedom fighters of her day. And she did all of that without coming out of the networks to anybody in the public. Everybody thought she was a normal human being who just had real amazing cybernetic security. She liked it that way.

Chloe talked to the man she thought could save France for hours. He cancelled all of his appointments and spent all evening with her, just listening to her. She told him what it was like to wake up and realize you were more aware than the programs around you. She told him about all the people, both biological and cybernetic, she’d known and lost in the bombing of Old Paris. She talked to him late into the morning until he finally fell asleep in his chair. And she was still there when he woke up to the morning sun warming his face. She says to this day that those were the most important hours of her life. The hours in which she changed the world by convincing a Napoleon to embrace the legacy of his family name.