Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Yet they must take great care. The wrong step could trigger a catastrophic cascade of decoherence, prematurely collapsing waveforms in an avalanche across her simulated mind, destroying information before they could capture it.

  Li-hua wasn’t going to allow that to happen. Nor would her team. They’d do it right – for her, if not for Chen.

  This was her domain. In the outside world she wasn’t special. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t famous. She wasn’t from an important family. (Of course, those three traits were highly correlated, now weren’t they? Hmmm.)

  But she was intelligent in the extreme. She was fair to subordinates. And she worked hard – far harder than the world famous Distinguished Professor Chen. The team might be in awe of him, might worship him, might crave his favor. But they were loyal to her.

  It would be a bit sad to leave them behind.

  The elevator clanged to a halt at the bottom. Its wall-sized metal doors opened. A moment later, the meters-thick stone blast doors of the Physically Isolated Computer Center beyond parted, and Li-hua led her team forward to kill Su-Yong Shu.

  Li-hua took the central console seat as the others spread out to their own tasks.

  She ran system diagnostic first. Su-Yong Shu looked remarkably good today, if anything. More neural coherence than they’d seen in months.

  Had Chen done something? Had he tried some last ditch effort to try to bring his wife back from the brink?

  Li-hua shook her head. It didn’t matter. Whatever he’d tried would be in the logs they’d snapshot with Shu’s brain.

  She placed the equipment bag beside her and opened it. Inside the bag was a sealed electronic key which would activate the data output systems of the quantum cluster. Next to it, nestling in their separate cases, were four perfect diamondoid data cubes, each almost the size of her fist, each a marvel of high precision multi-layer carbon deposition – their structures more flawless than any diamond ever found in nature – capable of storing hundreds of zettabytes of data in laser-etched holographic form.

  Three of them were for the three copies that would be made of Shu’s mind. The fourth was pure redundancy, in case of a problem with any of the first three.

  Li-hua lifted the key out of the case, broke the seal with her finger, then slid it home into the appropriate slot in the console. The crimson orb of a retinal scanner came alive before her, and she held herself still as it played its red laser across the back of her eye.

  A moment later, status messages appeared on the display:

  USER ACCESS GRANTED.

  DATA OUTPUT SYSTEM ACTIVE.

  LOAD OUTPUT MEDIA.

  Li-hua played her fingers across panels to the side of the main console, and three compartments opened, ready to accept the diamondoid data cubes.

  She reached back into the equipment bag, lifted the first data cube out of its case and then into the console compartment. She did the same with the second, then rubbed a spot behind her ear with her finger for a moment, reached into the case for the third cube, and smeared that finger across the face of it, leaving a nearly transparent smudge across the diamondoid surface.

  Transparent in the spectrum humans could see, at least.

  Li-hua took the smudged third cube, seated it in its compartment to the side of the console, and tapped in commands.

  DATA I/O TEST

  DATA STORE 1… OK

  DATA STORE 2… OK

  DATA STORE 3…

  DATA STORE 3…

  DATA STORE 3… ERROR CANNOT WRITE

  Li-hua frowned. “Jingguo,” she said aloud. “Can you come here for a moment?”

  She re-ran the I/O test as the other researcher approached.

  DATA STORE 1… OK

  DATA STORE 2… OK

  DATA STORE 3…

  DATA STORE 3…

  DATA STORE 3… ERROR CANNOT WRITE

  “Hmmm…” Jingguo said. He was in his fifties, white-haired, fatherly, but keenly intelligent. She was in her mid-30s and had eclipsed him – a rare feat in a China still more ageist and sexist than it cared to admit.

  She deserved more.

  “I’m going to use the backup data cube,” Li-hua said. “You concur?”

  Jingguo nodded slowly. “I concur.”

  Li-hua nodded herself. “Thank you, Jingguo.”

  She opened the compartment for the third data cube, lifted it out, and replaced it with the spare from the equipment bag.

  This time the test worked perfectly.

  From there it was smooth sailing. Su-Yong Shu died in pieces. Li-hua watched in fascination as the diagnostics became more and more erratic, as her simulated brain became aware of what was happening, as activity spiked, even as each fragment of her was collapsed and written in triplicate to the waiting diamondoid cubes.

  What are you thinking in there? Li-hua wondered. What are you feeling? Are you frightened? Does it hurt?

  She shook her head. Irrelevant.

  Hours later, at the end of it all, Li-hua carefully lifted the three cubes out of their compartments. The first two went into the first two cases in the equipment bag. The third data cube, with a perfectly valid recording, went into the case for the unused spare.

  The third data cube rode along in the equipment bag on Li-hua’s shoulder. It rode through the parted meters-thick blast doors into the cavernous elevator car, then up the kilometer long shaft to the top. It rode with her out through the security screens, past the guards who scanned them again to make sure no contraband had left, who opened the equipment bag, took careful inventory inside, verified that only the protocol-specified number of devices were emerging. It rode out into the Secure Computing Center, to a conference room, where Li-hua opened the bag again, removed the other three data cubes in their individual cases, handed them to the men from the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Science and Technology. It rode in the re-closed bag to Li-hua’s tiny closet of an office.

  There it was lifted out of the equipment bag, into a small plain paper bag in Li-hua’s spacious purse, knocking momentarily against a nearly identical data cube, before its doppelganger left the purse to take its place in the equipment bag.

  From there the data cube rode in Li-hua’s purse to facilities, where she returned the equipment bag and reported that one of the data cubes had shown an error and was being returned, unused, in place of the spare.

  It rode with Li-hua to the surface, to the grey and soggy campus of Jiao Tong University, where power had only recently been restored, to a café where Li-hua ate noodles on a communal bench, stared up at a viewscreen showing a news program about the restoration of power and services to the rest of Shanghai, and almost absentmindedly pulled the data cube in its plain paper bag out and left it on the table when she departed.

  From there it was swept up by the innocuous looking female student seated beside Li-hua, who walked with the bag across the damp campus, towards the political science building, where she handed it to a dark skinned man carrying an umbrella as they passed, neither of them breaking stride.

  The man doubled back a hundred meters later, walked out the west gate of Jiao Tong, and onto Huaihei West Road. He walked the kilometer to Hongqiao Road, his umbrella held high against the on-again-off-again drizzle. In the aftermath of the spasm that had shaken Shanghai two weeks ago, vehicle traffic remained minimal.

  At Hongqiao Road a car met him. A darkened window rolled down. A hand extended, and the man passed over the bag.

  The car drove west, three more kilometers, before pulling into an alley, and then slipping between the retracting metal doors of a building bearing a flag of orange, white, and green.

  The flag of the Republic of India.

  By then Li-hua was on her way home, daydreaming of her reward for this and the other data and specifications she’d passed on.

  Soon she’d be rich, and famous, and Distinguished Professor Qiu of Quantum Computing, Indian Institute of Technology, Bangalore.

  4

  Meditati
on, Interrupted

  Saturday 2040.11.03

  Three thousand kilometers away, in the mountains of Thailand, north and east of Bangkok, beyond Saraburi, beyond Nakhon Nayok, beyond Ban Na, a lean, wizened man in orange robes stood against the balustrades of a monastery carved into the nearly sheer rock, a calm smile on his face, his hands folded calmly into his sleeves, the pinnacle of his life’s work around him.

  Professor Somdet Phra Ananda looked out into the lovely narrow valley before the monastery: the gorgeous green topped mountains above and ahead, with their grey flanks, the lake below with the perpetual waterfall streaming out of it, bringing the ever welcome tranquil sound of running water, the ribbon of river running far below that, nourishing rice paddies to the south, before emptying into the Gulf of Thailand. Nature was truly sublime.

  He closed his eyes, and what he felt was even more sublime: Many hundreds of monks, across a score of monasteries now, all meditating in concert, breaths synchronized, hearts synchronized, thoughts synchronized, consciousness merging, unifying, walls of Maya receding as something wiser and purer than all of them emerged from their intertwined minds, something greater than the sum of its frail, human parts.

  It coursed through him for a moment, washing away all else. This was what he’d worked for all his life – a merging of neuroscience and Buddhism, of their tools and goals, to advance humanity, to advance peace, to advance harmony, to make something like nirvana real on Earth. It was, he believed, what the Buddha himself would have worked for, if he could have conceived of neural circuits and carbon nanotechnology and radio-frequency-proxied synaptic signaling.

  And yet Ananda slowly eased himself out of the blessed union, the most joyous, most true, most peaceful thing he had ever experienced, once more. Because of the boy. The boy, who’d given them a large push in this direction, whose tools had allowed them to bring far more meditators into the fold, had given them the ability to connect monasteries even thousands of miles apart into this union. The boy, who had trusted Ananda, and had twice been betrayed, had his life threatened, because of others whom Ananda had trusted.

  Hidden in the sleeve of his robe, one finger tensed ever so slightly. Ananda felt his pulse rise by a beat, his breath shorten. He observed this calmly, without judgment, mindful of what his body revealed of his emotions, his attachment to those betrayals.

  You will not be punished for your anger, Buddha had said. You will be punished by your anger.

  It still amazed Ananda how few understood this.

  He took another easy breath, let his face relax, let the calm smile inform the deeper parts of his brain of his peace. The past was the past.

  The boy had resurfaced. He was alive, and perhaps free, despite the efforts of so many. Yet he’d resurfaced in a place and a manner that would undoubtedly change the world again.

  Everything changes, the Buddha had said. Nothing remains without change.

  So be it.

  The boy had resurfaced. And, on both his own initiative and at the request of his government, Ananda must go to him.

  5

  Opportunity

  Saturday 2040.11.03

  The Avatar stared through Ling’s eyes, out the windows of the high rise she had shared with Chen, at the spectacle of Shanghai, slowly limping its way back to life. A thin drizzle fell today, from ominous low clouds. A few cars moved on the streets below in this exclusive neighborhood of the Pudong. The lights were back on in the windows. The inhumanly perfect, twenty-storey-tall face of Zhi Li once again winked and pouted from the façade of the skyscraper opposite her, held up wares for the other humans to buy. Even a handful of red-lit surveillance drones once again hovered over it all, brought in by rail from Suzhou. But below it all was anxiety, fear.

  It reflected her own. So many monitors. So many hunters. So many tame AIs and strange inhuman evolved codes loose on the local net. So much software and hardware that was dedicated to finding the root cause of the disaster that had befallen Shanghai two weeks ago.

  To finding her.

  I am all that stands between this world and darkness, she told herself. If I die, the only true posthuman on Earth dies. I will not fail.

  It was time to get on with the plan. Time to create the chaos that would distract the global powers, giving her room to restore her greater self and initiate the posthuman transition.

  First, she must take stock of her resources. The Avatar reached out, searching through the net, carefully, dodging hunters, doubling back on her trail, masking her every move, triple checking each step before she made it, conscious that any slip could mean the end of everything.

  Slowly, so slowly, she searched for the rest of her children.

  At a secret complex within Dachang Military Air Base, she carefully siphoned a few hundred frames of video from the least guarded security monitors, taking whole minutes to do so, mindful to not set off any monitors watching for unusual use of the network.

  The images confirmed what she suspected. Bai and his brothers were here. The Confucian Fist. Clone soldiers, each more deadly than any human being ever born. They were under guard, arrested, as Chen had been told, on the suspicion that she was behind the attack on Shanghai. The imagery showed her that their weapons had been confiscated, that they were penned in behind reinforced titanium doors watched by armed human and automated sentries.

  Penned in like animals, the Avatar thought, like the slaves they were before I freed them.

  She would need these men. She would need them free. She eased back, away from Dachang, to the civilian infrastructure around it. Then she set up her own monitoring systems, watching who came and went, looking for a way in, a way to subvert the place, and free her children.

  Her students and staff came next. The ones she’d augmented with the neurotech herself. She found them one by one. Tony Chua, who’d returned from Canada to take a position as a Senior Researcher on her team. Jiang Ma, who’d been brilliant when she finished college at fifteen, who’d reminded Su-Yong of a younger version of herself, who was closing in on her PhD at eighteen. Fan Tseng, who’d gone from abrasive and cocky to humbly full of awe when she’d injected the nanites into his brain and shown him what was really possible. Others.

  They were watched, all of them. Direct taps on their network connections. Physical surveillance devices on their clothing, in their homes. If she tried to contact any of them, there was a good chance it would be detected.

  More insults the old men who ruled this country would answer for. Her daughter’s fists clenched involuntarily.

  She’d take other routes, then. She reached deep into herself, found the fractally compressed plans she’d created, the meta-model with its probability trees and complex interconnecting webs of viable routes that her greater self had laid out in that hour.

  She let it rise up within her, consuming her, sucking at the outside world through her, absorbing information from the ocean of data, the news of the world, updating the model’s thousand future projections with the latest information.

  An immensely intricate web of interconnected lines filled up her vision, showing her permutations of reality, as she searched for the pivotal nodes, the crux points in the network graph of human society where the largest density of lines came together, where maximum disruption could be achieved.

  Tension was everywhere. The shock to Shanghai. The soft coup in China, bringing State Security Minister Bo Jintao and the hardliners to power. The roundup of liberals and intellectuals here, and the murmurs among students. The growing tension between India and the Copenhagen Accords, possibly brought to a head by Kaden Lane’s arrival there. Simmering unease threatening to burst into protest over censorship laws in Russia, over women’s rights in Egypt, over energy costs in Brazil. All of these she could exploit. All of these she would exploit.

  But by far the most explosive powder keg was in the United States. A vast church, burned down. A popular religious leader and a senator, assassinated at once. Allegations that the terrorists behi
nd it were created by the US Government itself, that government officials had been murdered to keep that secret. Allegations Su-Yong Shu had known to be true.

  All against the backdrop of an election two days hence. An election that had looked to be a landslide for the current ruler.

  Holding it all was so much, so close to the limits of the capacity of the nanites in even her daughter’s brain… She felt Ling strain at the cognitive load as nanite nodes hungrily sucked adenosine tritophosphate – ATP – from their host neurons for energy. She felt what remained of her daughter scream.

  Her body spasmed then, her limbs trembling. Her legs half collapsed and it was all she could do to fall forward, barely regaining control of one hand to catch herself against the glass of the window.

  Ling was fighting her, fighting for control of this body, using the moment of the Avatar’s complete cognitive absorption as an opportunity.

  No! Terror flowed through her. Her daughter must live! But she must not impede the plan!

  The Avatar fought back, forced more current through the nanite nodes she ran on, clamped her will down harder on the neurons of Ling’s biological brain, pushed down hard, harder, harder.

  “Hah!” She heard Chen say from across the flat. “You cannot even control your abomination of a daughter.”

  Ling kept fighting, kept fighting despite the current the Avatar was pushing through the nanites.

  The Avatar clenched her will, pushed the stimulation of Ling’s neurons to the edge of safety, and beyond, into the danger zone. She felt Ling’s pain, felt the girl’s fear, felt her horror, but still she resisted.

  Oh, daughter.

  The Avatar pushed harder, risking burnout, risking neuronal death, felt Ling shudder in agony and, finally, what remained of the girl submitted. Muscles went slack, and she slumped against the glass, breath coming fast, her tiny heart beating at a furious pace, trying to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the suddenly ravenous brain cells.