Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Pryce remembered the look on his face this morning. That mix of devastation and rage.

  Family. That mattered to John Stockton. God help anyone who Stockton saw as a threat to those he loved.

  There had been hope of a family of her own once.

  Once.

  “Thirty seconds, Liz,” the President said into the phone. “Then send them in.” He clicked off.

  “So that’s a ‘yes’, then,” he said to Pryce.

  Pryce looked at him for a moment. “I want to talk to President Jameson.”

  Stockton frowned. “Miles is old, Carolyn. He’s tired. He had a second stroke..”

  “Miles Jameson was President during the dates those memos mention,” Pryce said. “His name is on them. I only take the job if I can talk to him.”

  Stockton frowned and shook his head. “Fine. Just go easy on the old man.”

  Pryce nodded. “Then that’s yes, Mr President. Carte blanche. With those terms, I’ll do it.”

  “Good,” Stockton said. “Go get to the bottom of this. Come back and tell me it’s all a pack of lies. Or tell me what the hell’s been going on.”

  “And if it’s all true?” She asked him. “If we created the PLF? If Barnes killed Holtzman? And Becker? If he staged that assassination attempt on you?”

  If he won you this election, she didn’t add.

  Stockton smiled at his National Security Advisor. “Then I’ll fix it. But mark my words, Carolyn: I’m going to win this election. I’m going to be the next President of the United States. And however we got here, I’m not going to bend to anyone over this – not terrorists, not ‘post-humans’, not someone trying to screw up the election with two days left to go.”

  Then the door opened, and Stockton was rising to his feet, and his daughter Julie and her son Liam, his first and only grandchild, were rushing into his arms for a giant hug. Pryce watched as his giant, football-hero arms engulfed his family, saw the fervent mix of emotions race across his face, and the thought went through her mind again.

  Woe unto anyone who threatened those John Stockton loved.

  7

  Final Testament

  Saturday 2040.11.03

  Maximilian Barnes stood on the back porch of the sprawling country house he’d inherited. The fierce rain pounded hard on the wooden awning above him. The wind snapped at him, sprayed him with a hard shrapnel of icy rain, blew through his thick black hair. Out there, down the long lawn, the Susquehanna River was running high and fast, almost at flood stage, testing its boundaries. White tops crashed on the riled up river surface. Even here, a hundred miles north of DC, what remained of hurricane Zoe was making herself known, thrashing the countryside with her ire.

  Barnes’s face was as furious as the storm, his brows knit, his jaw clenched, his dark eyes flicking to-and-fro, as if searching for something upon which to take out his anger.

  “Goddammit!” He brought his fist down hard on the wooden rail, felt something splinter below his hand.

  After all he’d done for this country.

  He’d been so stupid. Holtzman wasn’t like Becker. Wasn’t like the others. Wasn’t a patriot. And Becker… How could Becker have left that data behind? Why hadn’t the virus taken care of it? How had Holtzman gotten hold of it?

  It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was the mission. Keep America safe. Keep America vigilant against the threats he understood so well.

  Barnes closed his eyes, and it all came back to him. The indoctrination. The beatings. The constant striving to be perfect, knowing it would never be good enough. The crazy rants about the master race, about perfecting humanity, about starting over. He’d left that house at fifteen, changed his name from Bauer to Barnes at eighteen, and still found himself unable to ever do anything but push and push and push, still found himself looking at every enhancement that came on the market, legal or no, to see if it would give him that edge, turn him into something closer to what the father that he hated and hadn’t spoken to in years had wanted.

  And then to wake up one day, and hear the news of thousands dead in Laramie, and hear the words “Aryan Rising”, and see the pictures of those clones, those “perfect” Aryan transhuman clone kids, genetically immune to the plague they’d intended to use to wipe out humanity. Evil little Aryan transhumans bent on wiping out the rest of humanity. Vicious little clones that didn’t quite look like Maximilian Barnes. But resembled the boy he’d been at that age a bit too much for comfort.

  He’d been in the Asher administration then, had gone to the FBI immediately, told them everything about his background, about what he knew of the Aryan Rising, told his bosses in the White House, and somehow found himself rewarded, thrust into a policy role, carried forward into the Jameson administration, and then Stockton’s. The emerging technologies hawk. The man who’d convinced President Jameson to euthanize the Aryan Rising clones. The man who’d been put in charge of the program to make sure the US public never faltered in its opposition to transhuman technologies.

  Maximilian Barnes was a man who knew the face of evil. And he’d be damned if he ever let the US public soften in its resolve, or ever let a capitulator like Senator Stanley Kim take the White House, and throw open the floodgates to transhumans and AIs and worse.

  In a rented room in a roadside motel in Massachusetts, a man named Breece leaned over a table, staring at a slate. He was tall, broad of shoulder, muscular, but not conspicuously so. His hair was sandy this night, the indeterminate color between brown and blonde, long enough to need combing, but not much longer. His eyes were as unremarkable as his hair. He preferred them that way.

  Breece played the video again, his hands tense on the oversized slate, the sound coming in through headphones, so no one in this cheap motel would realize just how obsessively he was watching and re-watching this.

  “PLF is a lie… you created.”

  Breece shook his head in wonder.

  He flipped back to the documents that had been released with the video. A memorandum signed by President Miles Jameson. A memorandum creating the Post-human Liberation Front, as a false flag operation, a front group run by a splinter office of what would become Homeland Security’s Emerging Risks Directorate, run specifically by a man named Maximilian Barnes.

  Maximilian Barnes had gone on to be Special Policy Advisor to Jameson, and then to President John Stockton after him.

  Maximilian Barnes had become Acting Director of Homeland Security’s Emerging Risk’s Directorate four months ago when Breece’s bomb – aimed at Stockton – had killed the last ERD Director.

  Goddammit. Breece had gotten this guy promoted.

  And all this time…

  All this time Maximilian Barnes had also been Zarathustra. The leader of the Post-human Liberation Front.

  Breece’s superior in the Cause.

  The man who’d given Breece his marching orders, sent him on missions, for all these years.

  Breece yanked the headphones from his ears, tossed the slate onto the desk, and pushed back in his chair, his hands coming up to his face.

  It all made so much sense. All the missions that made headlines, but where human targets just barely escaped.

  Oh god. The miss. The miss on Stockton. The software should have fired that gun perfectly. The bullet just barely missed Stockton’s head!

  Zarathustra gave them the software. Of course.

  Zara had been so furious that Breece had improvised, had added a bomb to the plan, on top of the gun.

  They’d been meant to miss.

  They’d been played.

  And then Breece started laughing.

  Because Zara – Barnes – might have meant to play them, but he hadn’t meant for Breece to set off that bomb in DC, or the one in Chicago.

  Barnes sure hadn’t meant for Breece and his team to set off a bomb at Westwood Baptist in Houston this morning, assassinating Daniel Chandler – author of the Chandler Act – and the Reverend Josiah Shepherd.

  The laughter k
ept coming. He’d eliminated two of the greatest enemies of the future this morning, human purist fascists, along with hundreds of their dittoheads. He’d set an example in front of the whole nation.

  I pushed the button, he thought. Me! And this Maximilian Barnes has been funding me for years.

  It was rich.

  Faces flashed through Breece’s mind. Faces of men and women he’d known. PLF operatives that had been caught, killed, imprisoned.

  He stopped laughing.

  Barnes. Barnes had set those men and women up.

  More faces. The assassins who’d tried to kill him outside Austin. Who’d found him in the cemetery. Who Breece had killed. They’d begged for their lives.

  Barnes had sent them too.

  Breece’s face turned grim.

  He reached for his slate to scan the documents again, looking for details he could use. The Cause would be in chaos. And Barnes… Barnes had a lot to answer for.

  A message was flashing on his slate.

  ] I can get you to Maximilian Barnes.

  Breece froze. Fear went up his spine. He dropped the slate, his head turning, his eyes scanning the room. The gun was hidden in his bag, there in the closet.

  He turned back, to wipe the slate, and another message flashed on its screen. From an app he didn’t have installed.

  ] I’m not your enemy. If I were, you’d be dead.

  Breece stared at the thing. He should run. Wipe the data, grab the gun, grab the go-bag, sanitize the room, burn this identity, tell his team to do the same.

  But Barnes…

  More messages flashed on the screen.

  ] You’re in room 418 of the Roadside Express in Quincy, MA.

  ] That’s just south of Boston. You checked in yesterday at 3.07pm.

  Breece’s heart lurched.

  ] Your real name is Andrew Marcum.

  His stomach rose up.

  ] If I was law enforcement, there would be police at your door.

  It could all be a trick, Breece thought. A delaying tactic, while forces moved in to take him.

  ] I can get you to Barnes. But there isn’t much time. It must be now.

  He reached forward, touched a panel on the slate, and a keyboard snicked out and into place, the face of the slate coming up at an angle, forming a terminal.

  >> Who are you?

  ] I’m a friend, Breece. I’m someone who’s watched you for a long time.

  ] And I can get you to the man who lied to you all these years.

  ] The man who used you. Who betrayed you and so many others.

  ] But only if we do it my way.

  Breece stared at the screen. Then his fingers moved.

  >> I have conditions of my own.

  Barnes stepped back inside. In the short term, denial was key. The election would be over in less than forty-eight hours. Large swaths of the country had already voted electronically. At this point, there were good odds that nothing could stop a Stockton victory.

  I made that happen, Barnes told himself. Me. With the assassination attempt in DC.

  All he had to do was deny everything. Keep any facts from being confirmed. There would be no evidence. He was wired deep into the system. DHS had learned long ago that in a surveillance state it was vital to reserve the ability to turn a blind eye to certain people at certain times. Standardization of code across Federal, State, and Local levels had made it possible. When DHS gave out billions in Homeland Security grants, they could dictate the terms, could use that money to get the data they wanted, spread the software they wanted far and wide.

  And they had.

  He was one of the few who could make the system turn a blind eye, one of the few remaining who even knew it was possible. And so there was no record of his trip to DC. No traffic camera had preserved any memory of his car that night. No cell tower recalled having contact with his phone on that trip. No gate or elevator or door at ERD remembered his face or his badge for that crucial hour.

  The PLF wasn’t linkable to him. The servers that stored its files never saw his true location or identity when he connected – he always routed through an anonymizing cloud, one of the ones he knew NSA had not effectively compromised. All the rest – Holtzman’s briefcase, the small stockpile of little green pills, the other physical tools – were in a secure storage that had no record he’d ever visited it, and no trace of his prints or DNA.

  It would all be fine. Hold the line. Deny everything. He’d get great lawyers. They’d find flaws in the recording, demonstrate how it could have been faked, maybe put together their own fake recording, showing Elvis killing the man, or Gandhi. That was it.

  He tapped notes to himself on his phone, set an alarm for 6am, then forced himself to sleep.

  He woke before the alarm. 3.33am. Make a wish, some part of him whispered. His mother’s voice. His father would’ve beaten him bloody for having a weak thought like that. The storm sounded fainter outside, dying down by the hour as Zoe spent herself inland.

  An idea had woken him. A thought. Holtzman had recorded that video using Nexus. He’d ignored that in the flood of bad news. Now the magnitude of it floored him. Holtzman had Nexus in his brain? He’d realized the man was off. But really? Nexus?

  Didn’t that put the whole thing in doubt? Maybe Holtzman had just dreamed the whole thing in a drug haze and died of a heart attack.

  He sat up in his bed, turned to bring his feet to the floor, reached for his phone to jot a note, maybe send a memo to one of the White House press staff.

  The sudden light from the phone’s screen illuminated motion, a blur, something coming at him from the side.

  Barnes yelled out, turned, raising a hand to ward off the blow.

  Something bit into his upper arm, a needle.

  He swung out with his other hand, trying to hit the dark form, finding only air.

  “HOUSE RED!” he yelled, his panic phrase, his phrase that should set the alarms blaring, bring the lights up, alert the police and DHS that he had an intruder, activate his home’s own active countermeasures…

  Except that the alarms should already have gone off. The locks should never have let this intruder in.

  “Ooof!” A hard fist slammed into his solar plexus, forcing the air out of him, knocking him back against the headboard in his still dark, still silent house.

  “Lights,” said a voice that wasn’t his, a voice he knew…

  The bedroom came alive with light at the intruder’s command.

  Before him was a blur, a man-shaped distortion against the wall and carpet. The figure shifted and his outline became more clear. Not high-end chameleonware, then. Something cheaper and coarser.

  “I have money,” Barnes said.

  “I don’t want…”

  Barnes pounced in the moment of distraction, hurled himself at the man, his illegally boosted muscles shooting him off the bed in a tackle that would slam the intruder against the wall behind him.

  The blur sidestepped inhumanly fast. Its knee came up. Barnes fell to the floor, curled in a ball, naked, gasping for breath, pain radiating from his core.

  Something pressed against his shoulder. A booted foot. It pushed him onto his back. A blurred hand reached down, and Barnes felt a sting in his other arm as a needle was pulled out. He caught a glimpse of a syringe in that cloaked hand, its stopper fully depressed, the needle bent from where he’d rolled onto it.

  Barnes gasped, struggled to breathe.

  “I teach you the overman,” the figure above him said.

  That voice. That voice.

  “Man is something to be overcome,” the voice went on.

  Oh god. Oh god.

  “What have you done to overcome him?”

  “Breece…” Barnes struggled for air, struggled to force the man’s name out. “Breece… I…”

  He saw Breece’s camouflaged leg shift too late, understood what was happening too late for anything but anticipation of pain.

  And then the man’s booted foot slammed into
Barnes’s naked crotch, with testicle-crushing force.

  “Aaa…” Barnes gasped. His eyes bulged out of his face. His whole body contorted, curling up around the pain, his limbs trembling as he moaned in pain. “Uuuuuuuu…”

  “What have you done to overcome him?” Breece breathed at him from above.

  Barnes sat in his car, dressed in suit and tie, a block from the onramp that would take him to the bridge over the fast and rough waters of the Susquehanna, a prisoner in his own body.

  It had been Nexus in that syringe. Nexus that had enabled someone, some thing, to utterly take control of him. The same force that had hacked into his home, silenced his defenses, to let Breece in, had used the drug to rifle through his mind, taking every secret, every password, every morsel of knowledge about the ERD, the PLF, the DHS, Stockton, everything.

  And now this.

  “Maximilian Barnes,” Breece said from the passenger seat, still a faint blur, “You are guilty of treason against the cause of post-humanity. You’ve betrayed the cause you championed. You’ve knowingly facilitated the imprisonment, torture, and deaths of dozens of activists. You’ve knowingly used lies and deception to create a culture of fear around the world, to limit the rights of individuals and families, to put in place repressive regimes of laws that rob people of freedom over their own minds and bodies. You’ve ordered the torture of children.”

  Breece paused.

  “You’ve ordered the murder of children.”

  Another pause.

  “Maximilian Barnes, I hereby sentence you to death. In your death, you are being granted this one last opportunity to serve the cause. Be grateful. Is there anything you want to say for yourself?”

  Barnes turned and stared at the blur where Breece should be. He was a dead man, already. He knew that. But worse – there was no appeal to stop the damage they’d use him to inflict on the country. No appeal. No plea of “kill me but don’t do this” that would have any result.