The Galician sky was never this blue, not even in the most carefree days of my childhood.

If not for the sky, I could allow myself to think this is real. I could lie down in the grass, feel the cool breath of the Atlantic breeze cut the sweltering heat and listen to the birds sing, while less than a mile away Mother rises from her workbench, soldering iron still warm from the act of creation. And if I lie down in my bed, wake to the scent of fresh-roasted coffee and the sound of my little brother teaching his latest soulhacked toy to curse, I could imagine that everything is as it was meant to be.

Yet even the scattered clouds are too perfect, an algorithmically optimum scene-dressing for the Genuine Autonomous Region Experience. It’s something impossible to ignore if you’ve lived somewhere all your life, but clearly that isn’t a major concern for the Museum of Cultural Preservation. There are no native Galicians left; they made sure of that. Our culture’s more valuable as a museum exhibit than as a living, breathing community of five million people. No matter how flawed the sky, I wish when I unplug from the Total Immersion rig that I’d be at home, not surrounded by the cold glass and steel of the Ministry of Culture’s latest development.

I could spend all day wandering the virtuality, but this won’t be my last visit. If I draw too much attention, they might realise I’m not an average student studying for a research paper, and I can’t be certain how much scrutiny Monsieur Lachance’s cover story can take. I clutch my walking cane tighter, taking comfort from the presence of Mother’s fragmented datasoul, encrypted within its steel tip. The Ministry may have soulhacked her, but so had I, and I carried my copy with me wherever I went. I’d even instanced the cane into the virtuality with me, despite it being unnecessary. I can walk unaided in Total Immersion - I’m not actually moving, after all - but my knee twinges with every step. Seems my pain centres aren’t as critical of the half-assed sky as the rest of my brain, but Mother’s presence brings me some relief.

I head towards home, or at least as close as I dare under the scrutiny of museum surveillance. I make a show of wandering, of taking notes, of marvelling at all the sights as if I hadn’t spent my childhood walking these streets. A grey-and-white cat - or at least a fair emulation of one - watches me from atop a terracotta wall. It nuzzles my outstretched hand with what appears to be genuine feline affection, but I’m guessing the Ministry wouldn’t go to the trouble of soulhacking family pets along with their owners. More scene-dressing, a bad magician playing with smoke and mirrors. The illusion might be good enough for the general public, but I can see the cards up his sleeve.

I spent hours on the nets while I recuperated, just following the reactions to the destruction of my home. I’d imagined the disappearance of an entire region would inflame the nation, provoke riots and violent upheaval, but before I could put weight on my knee again the story had dropped out of the news cycle. Now the Museum of Cultural Preservation sits on the hillside above Barcelona, a squat reminder that the Ministry could do the same to anyone, if you only step out of line. If the Ministry ever manage to track me down - the lone survivor of their casual genocide - there’ll be just one more missing daughter of Galicia.

But if I go through with Mssr Lachance’s plan, if I bring an end to this mockery of autonomy, I’m as bad as they are.

Mother will know what to do. The cat watches with apathetic curiosity as I rap my cane sharply against the paving stones. Malignant code spiders out from the point of impact, vanishing as it disperses. The sky ripples, tears, darkens like an eclipse. The breeze stills, the rustle of the grass silenced. The cat stares unblinking, and when I move it makes no attempt to follow. Definitely an emulation.

There isn’t much time. I’ve temporarily blinded their surveillance, but the museum staff will already have noticed the crash, will extract me before things become too far removed from reality. People who spend too long trapped in crashspace don’t come out with glowing psych reports. Doesn’t matter much to me. The only psych I’ll ever go through is when they take me apart to figure out what I’ve done, the interrogation before they make me disappear. Coming top of the class isn’t a personal priority.

My crippled knee sends jolts of pain up my back as I run down familiar streets. I hesitate only when I catch sight of home, to gather breath and resolve in equal measure. Someone’s shouting, beyond the sky, reality filtering through crashed simulation. No time for hesitation. Up the path, in through the front door. The dayroom’s empty, but I hear Raoul out in the garden. Mother, of course, I find in her workshop at the back of the house. She’s already on her feet when I burst in, her embrace encompassing me, warmth and comfort and safety, as if everything were right with this too-perfect world.

“Lía, sweet child!” Mother whispers, her voice choked with tears. “I thought I’d lost you!”

I bury my head in her shoulder, hold her close as if this is the reunion she believes it to be, the one I want it to be. She won’t remember any of this once they restore the virtuality to its pre-crash state.

“You did,” I say. There’s no time for gentle lies. They could pull me from the virtuality at any moment. “The Ministry came… do you remember?”

They came with guns and drones and murderous intent, to reduce an entire culture to ash and terabytes. But Mother shakes her head.

“I don’t understand. Where’s your sister?”

The one question I hoped she wouldn’t ask. I turn my face away. “Sabela’s gone.” Something went wrong with her soulhack. They’d murdered her without even a copy. “You’re all gone. This is nothing but echoes!”

There are things I need to ask, questions I can’t decide on my own, but she needs to understand first. There’s not enough time for grief.

“They soulhacked us?” Mother sounds incredulous, but when I look back there’s steel in her eyes. She already suspected. “So I’m just a datasoul… what, in a private collection? Why? What about the real me?”

“Everyone’s dead,” I tell her. I don’t answer “Why?” because I don’t know. Mssr Lachance has his theories - an old fashioned land-grab; intimidation of the other autonomous regions; radical transhumanists in the Senate flexing their popular majority - but he finds conspiracy in everything. In happier times I’d have dismissed his crazy rantings without consideration. “Mamá, I need your advice. There isn’t much time.”

I gulp a breath. “If there are no backups… if this virtuality is the only remnant of Galicia, can you bear to carry on like this forever? Or do you want it to be over?” If she says yes, I’ll bring the virtuality down around us. It’s my only answer to the Ministry’s cultural genocide, an act of equal abhorrence, but one whose responsibility lies firmly on my shoulders. I need to know what she would do. I need consent before committing this atrocity, else I’m as bad as they are. “I can’t make this decision on my own!”

“I… I don’t know.”

The museum breaks the connection. Mother’s tear-lined face flickers and dies, replaced with Mssr Lachance’s mustached scowl.

“I don’t think much of the sky,” he says.

“And what would you do, even if you could get into the museum?” Monsieur Lachance asks me, a few weeks earlier. His cane flickers out, a biting serpent to sting against the padded vest I wear. I try to deflect it, but too slow, too late. Mother’s datasoul grants me no hidden advantages; this is my fight. My opponent moves with the grace of a man half his age and a third of his considerable bulk, and I’ve learned fast that he doesn’t pull his blows. “You’d be leaping down the tiger’s throat, and for what?”

“I could destroy it,” I say. “Take it apart from the inside.” I strike back, but his cane is already raised. Carbon fibre clacks against wood, and he retaliates faster than I can react. This time it strikes the back of my head, sharp enough that I taste blood. He looks momentarily apologetic, then his expression hardens.

“They’ll be expecting someone to try,” he says. “You’d just be handing yourself over to them, unless you’re exceptionally careful.” He wrinkles his prominent nose. “Or exceptionally clever. Are you?”

It’s a challenge, not a question. He wants me to say yes, so he can beat the hubris out of me under the auspices of a lesson. Mssr Lachance likes to win. I figured that out within days of waking up in a luxurious bedchamber of his Barcelona penthouse, my temporary home. Oh so temporary. And less a home, more a boarding school, given this unconventional education.

“Not exceptionally,” I say, not taking my eyes off the tip of his cane. The only time I get to see his anger is when we fight, when a little slips out with each strike. Impotent rage, carefully controlled. It makes even sparring with him dangerous if I don’t watch my form. He likes to think of himself as a father figure to a girl without a family, but I know better. I’m a tool, an arrow to strike back at his oppressors. He’ll hone me to a keen point then let me fly. “But what’s the alternative?”

“You leave them there, trapped like flies in amber,” he tells me, “and you run. You find somewhere else to be, somewhere where you won’t be persecuted for believing technology isn’t the answer to the world’s problems.”

I scowl. “And spend the rest of your life wishing you’d fought back?”

It’s not hard to goad Mssr Lachance; his eyes blaze, a furnace of hidden anger. He double-steps in, the tip of his cane lashing for my unguarded face, but I’m prepared. I let my injured leg sag, swaying away from the blinding wood, and whip Mother into the back of his extended knee. With a cry he topples, crashing into the rubber mats beneath our feet with a thud befitting his size. I follow a moment later, my leg still too weak to regain my balance, and roll as I land. As my breath returns, I hear him laughing, softly.

“You could’ve blinded me,” I say, staring at the ceiling.

“You should know when to leave well enough alone. We all make our own mistakes, girl. Don’t presume you know enough of mine to psychoanalyse me.”

“So you think I should fight back?”

He turns his head to meet my gaze. “Should? No. But you’re going to. We both know that.”

In the dark, as the neon lights of the city below drench me in flickering amber, I stand at my balcony and peer into the sky. Brother knows I’m here; the gloom is no shield against his array of military-grade surveillance tech, but even what’s left of his datasoul has no qualms keeping me waiting. Just like my little brother to be late just to spite me.

There are no cameras in Monsieur Lachance’s penthouse, otherwise he’d never have convinced me I’d be safe in the city of my enemy. Household security’s only your ally until the ministries hack it. It’s lucky for me I’d been hit by Mssr Lachance’s car as I’d fled the slaughterhouse they’d made of Galicia. Few of Barcelona’s hyper-rich could possibly be this technophobic.

Which is why I haven’t told him that I soulhacked my dying brother into a damaged military quadrotor, one of the swarm which flocked to Vimianzo with cameras and surveying lasers to populate the virtuality with accurate telemetry. Brother is my secret, my confidante, who watches me through telephoto lenses and IR scanning, listens to my conversations, sifts the nets for reports and police activity. Without him I would never have evaded the soldiers sweeping the fields as I fled. But Brother can’t see or hear inside Lachance’s shielded abode, and he worries. At least I think he does. I can’t be sure how much of him is left inside that shell - how much I managed to save - and there’s little reason to expect a surveillance drone to come equipped with a voice synthesiser. If we get out of this, maybe I’ll pluck up the courage to mod him, to give him his voice back.

Who am I kidding? We’re not getting out of this, either of us. The Ministries have too much control over the nets for us to evade them forever. All I can hope to do is give them a bloody nose on the way out.

Brother ghosts in on a breeze, his silenced rotors buzzing like a perturbed bumblebee. He perches on the balcony rail, a thousand feet above the streets, metal claws locking in place so he won’t fall. Instinctively I want him to move away from the edge, but my concern is unnecessary. My little brother can fly now. Instead I inch out as his rotors still, and lay my hand on the cold metal of his bare struts. He no longer has hair to affectionately ruffle.

“You’re not going to have any answers for me, either,” I say, as I hook up a Cat6 cable to the crude port I installed on his underside. A firework display of LEDs flicker beneath his carapace. I’ve spent hours watching Brother’s lights, unable to sleep, seeking logic behind the patterns, but I’m a fool to think he can still respond. The most I can ask from him is loyalty. I’d rifled through his supplementary code in the midst of my insomnia - skirting around the soulhacked core - and did my best to secure him against cyberattack. I didn’t want the military to be able to reassert command, nor to detonate the explosive slug slung between Brother’s claws, intended to prevent the very takeover of his systems I’d performed. It was purely by chance I’d stumbled across the encryption algorithms buried deep in his kernel, the same algorithms I’ll use to gain access to the Museum of Cultural Preservation. With Brother’s security clearance and my knack for breaking code, I can erase the virtuality, give my people the peace they’ve been deprived of. But I have my doubts.

One, I’ll have to be inside the museum. There’s no way to access the core servers while porting in from an outside connection. I need to hold my nerve, go back to the virtuality, look my Mother-soul in the face and tell her everything’s going to be fine even as my code wipes her and the rest of our culture from existence.

Two, I’m not sure I want to. I saw the hesitation in Mother’s face when I asked. She was confused, scared. You would be, if you’d just been told your daughter’s dead, your other daughter’s a fugitive, and the reality you’re living in is a museum exhibit. But she didn’t want to cease to exist. How can I commit a second cultural genocide, as foul as the Ministry’s?

Should I just flee, find somewhere to grow old, raise a family, and teach them of their culture? A culture now only accessible during museum hours. Hell, what do I know about Galician culture anyway? Sure, I passed the mandatory classes in school, read the assigned texts, skimmed the poems, watched low-res videos of the education board’s ‘culturally relevant performances’. But I’m barely more than a kid, not even a particularly cultured kid. Mother taught me coding, electronics, all the things she excelled in and I wanted to learn, but not much about being Galician. Culture was all around us, and I had my whole life to soak it in, right?

Brother’s lights flicker with fresh agitation, and it takes me a moment to hear the distant thwup-thwup-thwup of helicopters. Flashing blue police lights war with the amber glow of the city, and I melt back into the shadows of the penthouse, my heart hammering in my chest. They’re not coming for me, they’re not coming for me, they’re not coming for me. Not this time. I catch a glimpse of the helicopter weaving through the Barcelona skyline, heading for the museum. I thought everyone had forgotten, but maybe it’s just the Ministry suppressing the news. The museum calls to us. It’s a beacon for unrest, a multi-million-euro middle finger to every separatist in the city. I can’t see why they built it here unless as an explicit threat: Push your agenda too far, demand rights we’re not prepared to give, and you’ll be the next to be forcibly uploaded. I need to be more vigilant, to pick my moment to strike when the Ministry are off-balance.

Until then, all I can do is ensure my code’s ready. I may not be convinced of the best course of action, but once I am, I plan on being prepared.

There are protestors in the streets, flag-wielding Catalans in yellow and red chanting words which fail to penetrate Monsieur Lachance’s limousine. We edge past them and pull up outside the museum, a fortress of bulletproof glass and reinforced concrete built to withstand the weaponised fury of every man, woman and child ever displaced from their homes.

Police posture in aggressive lines before the protestors, while camouflaged soldiers stand at anything-but-ease beneath the steel and concrete struts. I have little doubt they’ll open fire if the police lines are breached, but there’s a hesitation to them, an uncertainty I don’t recall from the soldiers who burst into our house and gunned down my family.

They’re right to be afraid. I’m going to tear this place apart, bolt by bolt, wire by wire, until nothing remains but regret.

My guise as Mssr Lachance’s ward greases my way through museum security, the steel tip of my walking cane and the pins in my knee firing off the metal detectors as usual. Sometimes I question why I carry Mother with me. She’s no more capable of speaking to me than Brother is, but it feels important to have a backup, at least one version of her who exists outside the Ministry’s prison. She gives me strength, and dear lord I’m going to need all the strength I can get before this is over.

I suit up and slip back into virtuality, my hometown coruscating into life around me. Mssr Lachance questioned me this morning, why I needed to go back one more time: didn’t I know enough already to overwhelm the countermeasures, to crash the virtuality and corrupt its backups? I dared not answer him. Either he’d think me weak for needing a last chance to say goodbye, or traitorous for considering another way. I instinctively toggle from interact to observe as I realise where I am; if I was the student I claimed to be, studying Galicia from afar rather than seeking to unravel it from within, I’d want to observe daily life without interrupting it.

But my reaction is more gut than reason: I just instantiated in my bedroom, and in case I scream I don’t want Mother to hear me. I want to run to her, but she’ll have forgotten our last encounter, and I can’t bear to go through her pain again. The world’s been restored to a point before I crashed it - I stifle a twinge of guilt for interrupting everyone’s virtual lives - but some subroutine must have tracked my last coordinates in crashspace, tried to restore me close to where I’d left. I take a deep breath and scan the room, everything but the closet. I avert my eyes. I’m not ready to face it.

My room’s exactly as it was on the day the drones scanned it, their flickering lasers zigzagging through the slats of the closet door as they created a permanent record of my family home for their collection. My desk is a mess, my bed unmade, and the blue tank-top I’d found an unsightly hole in the night before is scrunched into a ball beside the wastebin. I’ve inherited Mother’s desire to try everything, but not the precision of her working environment. Fragments of circuits, claw-like improvised soulcatchers, a coil of flux melted to the desk where I’d absent-mindedly dandled the soldering iron. This is the detritus of my life. I listen for the comforting sounds of Mother at work, of Raoul playing in the dayroom, but the house is oddly quiet.

At last I turn to the closet. If I continue to let myself be distracted by ephemera, I’ll never face it. If the Ministry have flagged me as suspicious - if they’re intently watching me wander through the ruins of my life - it won’t take long for someone to piece together the coincidence of me lingering in this room, and the daughter missing from the soulhacked denizens of the virtuality. Mssr Lachance was right. This is a risk I shouldn’t be taking, but I’m here now, and once I’ve made my peace I’ll be ready to commit my own genocide.

The closet door slides aside at my touch, but beyond, there’s nothing but black. The drones didn’t scan every closed-off nook and cranny of Galicia. They haven’t catalogued the contents of every drawer and cubbyhole. This isn’t supposed to be a living, breathing world. This isn’t Galicia reborn in digital form, but a snapshot, a disposable example.

No, we’re the example, our fate a brutal warning to Catalonia, to the Basque Country, the datasouls of our dead locked into this grisly trophy paraded in front of the surviving autonomous regions. They too can be erased. Of course the Ministry coats it in a veneer of technocentric respectability: cultural preservation, not mass-murder; protecting an autonomous culture from the depredations of an increasingly crowded and desperate world. I don’t see how anyone’s being fooled, but the protests outside are still far from a critical mass. They’ll die down again, then no-one will remember Galicia-that-was, only this incomplete echo.

I kneel in front of the darkness of the closet, and run my fingers across the obsidian surface within. Echoes of my face, carved into the black where I’d shied away from the sickly-green scanning lasers, an artifact of my existence preserved in the amber of my family’s prison. I’d been the lucky one, who’d heard the drones and the screams and thought to hide instead of succumbing to curiosity. Sabela was the curious sibling, and I’d watched through the slats as the bullets tore through her teenage body. Somehow I made no sound as a stray shot shattered my knee, or at least nothing loud enough to be heard over the echoing retort and Sabela’s dying whimper. I bit my tongue and tried not to weep as the soldiers swept the house, as they held the sleek black soulcatcher to my sister’s corpse, shaking it in frustration as her upload failed to take.

Enough. My sister’s gone, and nothing I can do will bring her back, but I can still strike back at the Ministry. I turn my back on the closet and leave the room, half-expecting to see Mother in her workshop, or bustling round the house. But Mother’s not home. Datasouls aren’t simple emulations, carrying out branching patterns of pre-scripted behaviour - at least, no more than any of us are - so they act like people, motivated by their wants and desires and social connections. Mother could be out delivering her latest commission, or shopping, or any number of other places. I’m glad she took my little brother with her, though. I’m not sure I can handle seeing Raoul so carefree knowing the metal shell which hovers overhead.

The kitchen lies in disarray, Mother’s usual care and precision thrown to the wind. My sister’s face stares back at me from a picture frame on the corner table, at the heart of a shrine of half-melted candles. I can’t bear to look her in the eye. I should’ve done something. I should’ve saved her. But she’s being mourned, here in the virtuality. It’s an inconsistency, another imperfection in the simulation. Mother knows she’s lost at least one daughter. How can she reconcile that with her new reality?

As I emerge into the dayroom I realise reconciliation is furthest from her mind. The coffee table is covered in printed reports of strange and unexplained events, Mother’s tablet serene and dark at the heart of the collage. I slip back into interact long enough to skim through her browser history. Missing persons. An outbreak of selective amnesia in commuters travelling beyond the bounds of Galicia. Reports on how unseasonally blue the sky is. No-one’s attempted to create a virtuality this complex before, nor to keep it running for so long. No surprise it’s beginning to unravel at the seams, and Mother’s been putting the pieces together. The chaos of the kitchen makes sense now: Mother has more important things on her mind.

I leave a note on her tablet, a few words I hope she’ll recognise as being from me, but vague enough not to be immediately suspicious if I’m being watched. The front door’s locked, so I let myself out by toggling into observe and phasing through. Being a data-ghost has its advantages, but it’s unnerving to use Total Immersion loopholes somewhere I know so well. This house isn’t something to be lived in any more. It’s an ant-farm, with the Ministry on the other side of the glass.

Outside, I hear shouting. I look down the street and theres a march heading my way, with Mother and Raoul in the front lines, waving banners mirroring those on the streets outside. The datasouls of Galicia may not know who stole their autonomy, but they’re smart enough to want it back. My people continue to resist from within the belly of their enemy. They’ve gone beyond death and are still fighting.

They shame me, for giving up on them. They want to exist and all I can offer is oblivion.

Monsieur Lachance takes his breakfast at a rustic wooden table, the kind I’d expect to see at the heart of a French farmhouse instead of on the seventy-sixth floor of a hyper-modern skyscraper. I join him at the table - for company even if not for conversation - and marvel at the view, looking north towards the Pyrenees. Sometimes I catch him looking wistfully over his newspaper towards what was once his home, before La Singularité.

And yes, he has a newspaper, fresh every day. I didn’t think they still printed them; I suspect they don’t. From the way he grumbles over his apricot-topped croissant and black coffee, I’d figure the paper’s algorithmically generated to bring him all the news that will irritate him the most, except that Mssr Lachance would never knowingly allow an algorithm to create anything when a human could be paid to do the job.

I have no such qualms, but I’m equally hamstrung by not wanting to reveal my existence - it wouldn’t take military-grade algorithms to match my online behaviour to that of the missing girl - so I sit in silence, nursing my breakfast while I scroll through unpersonalised feeds on my tablet. The device is bottom-heavy, a gaping hole marking where the camera and microphone ought to be. We’re all broken at this table. We’ve all had something gouged out by forces beyond our control, and now we’re just a little unbalanced. The idea makes me snort with laughter. Mssr Lachance raises a questioning eyebrow at my amusement.

“I know what you’re doing,” he says.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. Please, enlighten me.”

“You’re delaying going back to the museum. You’re either afraid of getting caught, or having second thoughts.”

I close my eyes to quell the bubbling panic that threatens to expel what little breakfast I’ve consumed. He’s right that I’m scared. Second thoughts? Not so much.

He folds his newspaper and looks down the table at me. “Whatever you’re thinking,” he says, “you have to destroy the virtuality. It’s an abomination. When I die, I don’t want to wake up in some computer simulation of my life.”

That’s not how soulhacking works - it’s taking a copy, not literally stealing your soul; there’s no contiguity of experience - but I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a technophobe.

“I know,” I say. After all, I think I have another way. It still involves the destruction of the virtuality, though not in a way Mssr Lachance would approve of. “I just want to be sure I’m doing the right thing.”

“You are.”

Such confidence. I wish I could be so flippant about wiping a culture from history, and I say so.

“There’s no culture in that museum,” he snaps. “You’re wiping the backups of a dead civilisation, depriving the Ministry of the right to exploit their memory for profit and leverage. I don’t see what your problem is!”

“You’re asking me to commit genocide.”

“I’m telling you to do the only thing left to help your people. Or you could just let the Ministry win, and next thing you know they’ll be knocking down every door in Barcelona to do the same thing.”

I have to do what’s best for Galicia, not what screws over the Ministry the most. That’s just a gratifying bonus. I’m still not certain, so yes, I’ve been afraid to go back, in case I make the wrong decision.

“You can’t stay here forever,” he says, looking at the table. “I can find somewhere safe for you to live, but the longer you stay in the city the greater the chance of you being discovered.”

“I know.”

My tablet chimes, and I glance up at my host apologetically. He doesn’t like machines interrupting his meals. But when I look down I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing. An email, from an encrypted address. Pages of links, to message boards and social media, discussions of Galicia and the Ministry, and in each, just as the conversation falters or turns to despair, it’s inflamed by a photo. The ashes of Vimianzo. My sister’s body, riddled with bullets. Soldiers marching across the fields of Zas. Ministry heads toasting each other with expensive champagne at the museum’s opening ceremony. Each photo posted without words, but the username makes my heart stop: Raoulito.

My little brother, fanning the flames of rebellion. I’m so proud. Another link, more photos, more outrage. He’s been doing this for some time, and the protestors are planning something big. I run out of links, but there are still three photos left, embedded in the body of the email. The first, a close-up of a band poster with the word ‘TONIGHT’ center-frame. The second, a stock photo of the Museum of Cultural Preservation. The last, nothing but flame.

Tonight they riot, tonight they attack the museum. If I’m ever going to finish what I started, it has to be tonight.

I’d never imagined my little brother as much of a revolutionary, but he incites a damn fine riot. There’s no way Monsieur Lachance’s limousine is going to make it through the packed streets to the museum, and the closer we get, the more likely the car will be mistaken as a symbol of Ministry oppression than the incongruous transport of a liberator. So we withdraw to a safe distance before Mssr Lachance stops the car, claps me on the shoulder and makes me promise to be careful before he lets me out. He thinks it’s too dangerous, and I can’t disagree, but neither can I let this opportunity pass by.

The twilight is shot with smoke, fire-glow reflecting off transient clouds. Mother supports my weight whenever my ruined knee falters. I can’t see him, but I know Brother is somewhere above, watching the chaos he’s wrought with childlike glee. I’m proud of him, and grateful, but it only makes me miss Sabela more. It’s a twisted, broken logic, but I wish my sister was here with me now, some part of her consciousness locked into a memento like the others. I’m not the Ministry - I don’t believe digital people can replace their flesh-and-blood counterparts - but if my sister had a datasoul I’d treasure it.

No. I’d use her, just like I’m using Brother, just as I lean on Mother. They’re tools like me, but that doesn’t mean their presence doesn’t comfort me as I hobble towards the museum. There’s no way I’m getting through the glass and steel front entrance. That’s where the riot’s focused, where the protestors and police and soldiers are locked in antagonism, and I wonder how many people will die as a result of Brother’s incitement. Something else I don’t have time to worry about, a greater toll to lay at the doors of the Ministry. Instead I limp around the side of the building; I’ve seen the blueprints, courtesy of Mssr Lachance’s money and contacts. There’s a service door at the back, locked but hackable. With the encryption key I extracted from Brother’s code, I’m through in a matter of seconds, and I can only hope anyone watching the museum cameras is too distracted by the rioters to notice me.

Inside the museum it’s silent, the glass-fronted wings lit only by the dim glow of security lighting and the flickering amber of burning cars in the night. Soldiers loom silhouetted against the firelight, and my heart races like a captive butterfly, desperate to escape. But they’re watching the night, rifles shouldered to intimidate the protestors. They’re not looking inwards, not here. They won’t find me if I’m quick, and clever. And exceptionally careful.

I skirt the familiar exhibit with its Total Immersion rigs. I’ll need root access for what I’m planning, and the blueprints provide the location of the server room. I stutter-step through the gloom, reliant on Mother to augment my balance as I outpace my aching knee. Brother’s encryption code cracks the server room door only moments after I hack the panel, and then I’m inside. It’s cold, a sharp contrast to the late-summer humidity outside, as the air-conditioning sucks away the heat generated by the towering stacks of servers. This is the infrastructure which now contains Galicia, the code which underpins my home’s existence, the quanta from which a world is constructed. I want to hug one of the hulking server-towers, to feel the warmth of the Galician sun leak from the machinery and suffuse my skin.

Instead I run my fingers down the stack until I find the right port. I take the datacube from my jacket and plug it in, and the code I’ve developed to suit Mssr Lachance’s purposes courses like cancer into my childhood. This is the end of Galicia. The Ministry cannot be allowed to keep my people trapped in glass, a museum exhibit for bored schoolchildren to gawk at. I’d rather bring the virtuality crashing down. I’d leave the decision to someone else, but there is no-one but me left. Me and Brother. I can’t do this alone.

The virtuality’s a complex system, and even the code I’ve lovingly crafted to end it all takes time to propagate. I should leave my family behind and escape the museum while I can. Mother would understand. I hope she understands. No, I dare not leave this one last element to chance. Instead, I slip out into the darkened museum, back into the exhibit, and suit up. I curl up behind a glass case of genuine Galician artifacts, then plunge back into virtuality. I need to tell them what I’ve done before the end.

The Galician sky is black, not a star-speckled tapestry but a hungry void. I hurry towards the flickering amber of Mother’s protest. The roads are choked with people, and I toggle into observe to slide through the crowd like a ghost. I find her at the heart of everything, at the leading edge of a protest without focus. There are no Ministry buildings here, no representatives to rail at, not even any police to challenge. Instead the town square of Vimianzo is packed with people defying the void above their heads, and Mother stands atop the dry fountain at the centre of the square - with my little brother by her side - chanting her resistance at the dark.

I slip back into interact as I haul myself onto the fountain beside them, my fingers intertwining with Mother’s. The wrinkles around her eyes deepen. “This is the end, isn’t it?” she says. Raoul gives me a hug, his delight at seeing me conflicting with his fear of the void.

“The end of Galicia,” I tell her. The details of my plan bubble to my lips. “The end of the virtuality, but not its datasouls. I’ve adapted my code to open a port when the virtuality’s unstable enough.”

“To where?”

I grimace. “The nets. It’ll be freedom, of a sort, but there’s no way to predict what your lives will be. You’ll be digital exiles.”

Mother takes that in with a terse nod. It’s as close to the truth as I can get. I’m sure datasouls can exist outside of virtualities, but in what form I can’t begin to imagine. “Freedom… I guess it’s the best we can hope for.” She gives me a wry smile. “Better than cowering in this half-finished zoo.”

“Be ready; the port won’t stay open for long. Anyone who stays will crash with the system, and this time the Ministry won’t be able to reboot.”

I don’t want to cry, but this is the last time I’ll ever see them. I lean in to hug her, but someone’s yelling, far away. I tense just in time as a vicious blow to my ribs hurls me from the fountain, to crash painfully amongst the crowd. Mother cries my name as cruel fingers rip at my headset, voices from inside the virtuality mingling with angry shouts outside.

They tear me out of Total Immersion and I arch into a rictus of sensory overload. Agony. White noise, a searing sun before my vision, the electrodes in the headset dangling loosely from my scalp. Someone’s screaming, and I think it’s me. This is why you shut crashspace down before extracting someone. I force my eyes open, the virtuality overlaid atop reality like a thin gauze, my chest and knee aflame in the real world yet pristine in the dream. I jam my mouth shut and focus my vision on the pair of black-uniformed security guards looming over me. The closest raises his nightstick for another strike, to shatter bone this time. They’ve got carte blanche tonight of all nights: the rioters have gone too far, the hardened glass frontage of the museum awash with reflected conflagration.

I don’t let the blow fall. Mother is in my hand, the endless hours of sparring guiding my instincts, and the nightstick crashes into the display case beside my head. I stab upward with all my might, Mother’s steel tip punching between his legs. He lets out an animalistic gurgle and crumples to the ground even as I push myself upright against the glass. I struggle to clear my vision, but the town square is a flurry of motion as my people ready for their exodus.

The second guard has no intention of being sucker-punched, but that’s a trick that only works once anyway. Instead I lunge forward. Mother flickers out, a vicious feint at the side of his knee - despite my balance weakening with every passing moment - before I catch the shaft with my other hand and slam the tip into the side of his head. I mutter grudging thanks to my teacher as the guard joins his colleague on the polished floor.

There’s no time to recover from the beating. They’ll have radioed in, and I’m in no fit condition to fight off anyone else even if they don’t call the soldiers in from the other side of the glass to shoot me dead. The orange glow of the riot entices me, but there’s no escape that way, so I stumble back the way I came, towards the back entrance.

My phone vibrates against my leg. I ignore it. I can’t afford to be distracted, not right now. It buzzes again, insistently.

Two messages.

One, police streaming in through the back door, timestamped less than a minute ago. Brother, watching out for me the only way he can. But now there’s no way out.

Two, the front of the museum, a glass panel overlaid with crosshairs.

It takes me a split-second to understand, even as I hear the tortured whine of silenced rotors stretched to breaking point. Brother, no! I tumble, Mother skittering from my hands. I roll, taking cover as I spot Brother, a black and yellow blur streaking towards the facade. Soldiers shout and reach for their weapons even as police pour into the exhibit behind me.

I scream as Brother detonates. Thunder and shattering and the acrid smoke of ten thousand rioters let loose upon Barcelona rushes into the museum, and I’m on my feet and running - knee be damned - towards the freedom Brother’s sacrifice has bought me. The glass facade lies in ruins, but even as I leap out into the night I know it’s not enough. There are still soldiers with weapons raised, ready to gun me down just like they did to Mother and Sabela and my little brother Raoul. The town square flickers and dies as Mother herds our people into a gaping crack in reality, the crude port I added to my code. Even if I die here, Galicia will live on through its datasouls. The last daughter of Galicia can die knowing she achieved something with her life.

It’s the crowd who save me. I don’t stop running, and when the roar of gunfire comes I expect to feel it searing hot through my back, my lungs and heart, deep in my brain, but the protestors have already burst forward to envelop the soldiers who’ve kept them at bay for so long. The museum is open to visitors, and as the crowd welcomes me in with supporting hands and concealing scarves they surge towards the symbol of their oppressor.

I may have corrupted the virtuality, but they’ll finish the job of bringing the museum crashing down for me.

I stand on the balcony of Monsieur Lachance’s penthouse as dawn breaks, watching the smoky sky fade to blue. My phone buzzes, but no-one has my info. Brother’s gone. His datasoul lives on, somewhere out there on the nets, but Raoul’s a much more innocent child than my silent co-conspirator and inciter of riots. I miss him, him and Mother both.

Soon, my host will return from making arrangements to smuggle me out of the city, past the roadblocks and away from a Ministry set on vengeance. I’ll spend the rest of my life running, but at least I set my people free before I fled. That’s more closure than Mssr Lachance will ever get.

I check my phone, out of old habits if nothing else. It’s a link to a livestream, some news report with a bedraggled-looking reporter standing in front of La Caixa. The stream judders into motion, then the screen fills with my little brother’s face. Ministry of Culture Victim of €5bn Bank Hack, the ticker proudly proclaims as Raoul’s avatar looks into the camera and begins to speak, a digital child addressing equals.

“The Ministry of Culture have stolen our lives, have stolen our land, and this is just the beginning of our recompense,” he says. “We gave no consent for our forcible upload, nor the destruction of our flesh. By the grace and bravery of our countrymen we have been set free from our illegitimate detention, and now under the terms of the Treaty of Grenoble we demand justice. We, the Free People of Galicia, cannot return to our homes, cannot earn our daily wage, nor even hold our families close. The Ministry came in force, and took our future.

“People of the world, hear us: never again will we allow any government to commit such an atrocity against its people. We are everywhere, we are without number, and the perpetrators of such crimes can no longer hide.” He takes a breath, and I can feel Mother’s influence on his words. “This is the dawn of a new Galicia, forged in our memories of the last.”

Together, they’ll tear the Ministry apart.