Apex

by Ramez Naam

  The Indians were certainly taking this seriously.

  She tried to ignore it, to focus on the kids.

  She watched as they splinted the ankle of a girl named Arinya who’d twisted it in the chaos, as they dealt with minor cuts and abrasions and burns. Off to the side she saw a medic rig a proper sling for Feng’s arm, saw another dealing with Kade.

  Kevin’s face swam in her mind again. Her bullets slammed into him. Shiva’s will controlled her. Controlled her through Kade’s back doors.

  Goddammit! she told herself. Shiva did that. Not Kade.

  She felt her fists clench. Sweat was beading on her forehead. Fight-or-flight. Adrenal response.

  This wasn’t rational. It was physiological. Kade was just a proximate trigger.

  She knew what it meant, knew all about this.

  She had to nip it in the bud now.

  “I need something,” she told a medic. “A beta-adrenaline blocker, a strong one. Or a serotonergic.”

  Stop the near-permanent imprinting. Stop physiological response from amplifying the emotions, from heightening the stress response, from turning these last few hours into a trauma that would last for years.

  The Buddhists and the shrinks agreed. The body was the seat of emotions. Quell the physiological response and you could dampen the psychic pain as well.

  “Are you having a heart attack?” the woman medic said to her, an eyebrow raised.

  “I’m post-traumatic,” Sam said, keeping her voice as level as she could. “It’s setting in. Standard protocol is to stop it now, before…”

  The medic stared at her.

  “Please,” Sam said.

  “Physical trauma only,” the medic said, and closed up her kit.

  Sam’s fists clenched tighter.

  They sealed them up in a large-ish briefing room, with soldiers positioned outside, while Colonel Atwal awaited her orders on what to do with them. Only when Sam complained loudly did the soldiers bring any food and water, or allow bathroom trips, always under the guard of multiple armed soldiers.

  Her heart kept pounding. They weren’t being treated as guests. They weren’t being embraced. They were prisoners here.

  Kevin died again and again at her hands.

  She pushed it away, focused again on the children, held Sarai, held Aroon, held Kit, held all the children to her, wishing she could touch their minds. And shuddering with the horrible memory of killing the man who’d raised her every time she even thought of taking Nexus again.

  We’ve got a plan, she told herself. They want something. They want Kade.

  Stay cool. Stick to the plan. Make the kids safe. I come later.

  After a few hours Colonel Atwal came to them again.

  “My orders have come through,” she told them. “We’re sending you on to Delhi.”

  Kade collapsed into a window seat in exhaustion, pain flaring up from his midsection as he did.

  The aircraft to Delhi was larger, a military passenger jet. With all of them on board, more than half the seats were still empty. It was also Faraday caged, effectively shielding Kade and everyone else in the passenger compartment off from the electromagnetic world outside.

  They were prisoners once again.

  Kade could see Shiva’s private jet sitting on the tarmac as they taxied past it. He had the access codes to that plane, as he did to almost everything of Shiva’s now. He wouldn’t change those access codes. He wouldn’t steal, wouldn’t divert resources from wherever Shiva’s estate or the courts eventually sent them. But for the time being he could reach out to that aircraft, or innumerable other assets of Shiva’s, and they’d respond. If he wasn’t inside this Faraday cage, that was. If the Indians ever allowed him to touch the net again.

  They lifted off into early morning sky. Behind him, in plentiful seats, Kade could feel the children nodding off to sleep after their long ordeal, hear low voices talking, Sam’s voice, speaking in Thai. He could feel Sarai’s mind back there, befuddled, confused, longing. Longing for Sam, for the touch of a mind that was no longer there, no longer linked by Nexus.

  The exhaustion pulled at Kade harder. The grief, the sorrow at all the death. The physical pain of everything he’d been through. He needed to rest, to regroup, to be ready and focused. He closed his eyes.

  Then Feng lowered himself into the seat next to him, his left arm bound up in a proper sling now.

  You think this is going to work? Feng sent. The transmission was tuned for Kade’s brain alone, a tight beam, at minimal power. Even via this method, Feng was taking no chances.

  Kade shook his head mentally. I don’t know, Feng. He sent it back just as carefully. Then he thought better, thought that was too bleak, and tried to be more cheerful. What’s the worst that could happen?

  Feng was silent for a moment. Then: Well… they throw the kids into an orphanage. Torture you, me, and Sam until we tell them everything. Mostly you. Feng paused. Then… they sell us to your American friends?

  Kade turned, surprised, and found Feng grinning at him.

  Then Feng laughed, and laughed, and laughed, a bellowing raucous sound, filling up the plane.

  Kade shook his head, a chuckle coming out of him unbidden, and turned back to the window, to the ever receding blue of the Indian Ocean below, the vast stretch of water they still had to cross to reach the Indian mainland.

  It’ll work, he sent to Feng. Probably.

  Feng shrugged, good humor radiating from his mind.

  “Hey, why no in-flight entertainment system?” the Chinese soldier asked loudly, kicking the seat in front of him. “What kind of lousy plane is this?”

  Kade shook his head, cheered despite himself, and closed his eyes to sleep.

  “Mr Lane,” the man said, smiling coldly, his hand extended to shake Kade’s. “My name is Rakesh Aggarwal. I’m with the Ministry of External Affairs.”

  Kade rose slowly from behind the table as Aggarwal entered the room, his ribs aching in pain as he did. He gestured with his bandaged right hand apologetically, then extended his left hand to meet Aggarwal’s. The man took Kade’s one good hand smoothly in his right. Aggarwal’s hair was grey, close cropped. He wore an American-style business suit over a trim frame.

  Nexus nodes recorded everything for posterity. A memory-augmenting app Kade had loaded with the files he’d downloaded from the net on Shiva’s jet tagged the man before him.

  [Rakesh Aggarwal]

  [Special Secretary, Ministry for External Affairs]

  Special Secretary, Kade thought. A fix-it guy. A cleaner. That could be good. Or very bad.

  The door closed behind Aggarwal, leaving Kade alone with him here, armed guards on the other side, another series of Faraday cages cutting him off from the outside world, Feng and Sam off in their own interview rooms, the children under the temporary care of Thai-speaking social workers.

  Kade cut to the chase. “Mr Aggarwal, I’d like to formally request asylum here in India, for myself, my companions, and the children we brought with us.”

  Aggarwal froze for a moment, then lowered himself into the chair across the table, motioning Kade to the do the same.

  Kade lowered himself back into his own chair, even more slowly than he’d risen, wincing as his ribs flared in pain again.

  “Mr Lane,” Aggarwal started. “You should be aware that India has a mutual extradition agreement with the United States, where, we understand, you are wanted by your government for acts of terrorism.”

  Kade nodded, smiling to hide his fatigue. “Yes. That’s why I’m formally requesting asylum.”

  Aggarwal pursed his lips. “Mr Lane, it is certainly theoretically possible for India to grant political, religious, or humanitarian asylum which may pre-empt extradition or other agreements. However, to do so, you’d need to make a case that your home government was… persecuting you on grounds which we in India find invalid. What case would you make to us?”

  Kade locked eyes with the Special Secretary. “Mr Aggarwal, my govern
ment, the government of the United States, is persecuting me for providing men and women the tools to enhance their own minds and enrich their connections with one another.”

  Aggarwal shook his head slightly, his eyes never leaving Kade’s. “Mr Lane, as you must know, India is a signatory to the Copenhagen Accords, which expressly ban certain forms of human enhancement. What you’re talking about is, by treaty, a crime here in India as well. We can’t grant you asylum on that basis.”

  Kade leaned forward, still staring into the man’s eyes, and put his hands together atop the table, good left atop bandaged right. “But if India pulled out of Copenhagen,” he told the Special Secretary, “then you could grant us asylum.”

  Aggarwal stared at him. The man’s lips parted. His brow furrowed. His eyes narrowed. His look was of such disgust that Kade wondered if he’d miscalculated, if he’d been so wrong.

  “Why would India possibly pull out of the Copenhagen Accords?” Aggarwal asked. “Simply for your convenience, Mr Lane?”

  Kade kept his eyes on the man, pulled himself upright, kept his hands the way they were.

  “In September, news outlets reported that India had a secret program experimenting with Nexus as a tool to accelerate learning in children,” Kade told Aggarwal. He waited a beat. “Mr Aggarwal, I know this to be true. I’ve touched the minds of the students in that program, and of the government-trained, government-employed teachers.”

  The Special Secretary frowned.

  “You’re already on your way out of Copenhagen,” Kade said. “Nexus finally gives you an enhancement tech that’s worth breaking the treaty for, one that’s easy enough to deploy, and brings you large enough economic gains, that the benefits to India outweigh the costs of pissing off the US and Europe and China. You’ve done the math. And now it’s just a matter of time.”

  Guesses, just guesses. They had to be right. Everything depended on them.

  Aggarwal shook his head. “Mr Lane, even if these… baseless allegations of yours were true… what matters is not whether we leave the Copenhagen Accords at some unspecified point in the future. What matters is right now.”

  Kade kept his gaze level. This is what it comes down to, he told himself. Here we go.

  “Mr Aggarwal,” he said, emphasizing his words carefully, “I know the government of India has been working to boost India’s competitiveness since at least… oh… 2024.”

  2024. The year of India’s amazing surge in the Olympics, the year they took home twice as many gold medals as any previous year. Because of Shiva’s secret, highly-illegal biotech enhancements. Enhancements Shiva’s companies had kept on providing all the way through the 2040 summer games in Doha.

  “In fact, I know a great deal that I’m sure the government would hate to see revealed. Most of which happens to be in violation of Copenhagen anyway.”

  He let it hang there, the implicit threat. Aggarwal just stared at him.

  “Mr Aggarwal,” Kade went on. “The last thing I want is to harm India. I believe it’s in your nation’s strategic interest to move forward with Nexus deployment and to leave Copenhagen. I believe your government has already come to that conclusion. So if this is really just a timing issue, perhaps we could speed things up a bit.”

  Kade sat alone after that, after Aggarwal had gone to confer with his superiors, barely masking his contempt. Hours passed.

  The plan was Sam’s in origin. They had to go somewhere. They had to assume that wherever they went, the CIA would know. Nakamura had tracked Kade to Shiva’s home on Apyar Kyun, which meant that the CIA had as well. The firefight and Nakamura’s death would sound alarms. The liftoff of Shiva’s plane and its eventual landing point would hardly go unnoticed.

  Thailand was an option. The Thai had already left Copenhagen, much to the US’s displeasure. The authorities had turned a blind eye to Kade and Feng and Sam after the assault on Ananda’s monastery 6 months ago, for a few days. Long enough for them to slip away. But now? With a senior CIA operative dead? With the US publicly blaming Kade for the PLF’s terrorist attacks, and privately hunting for his back doors? What kind of pressure would the US bring on the Thai to arrest Kade and Sam? Economic sanctions? Seizure of US-held assets?

  And how much harder would it be to slip away with twenty-five children in tow?

  India was different. India was a rising superpower: The third largest economy on the planet. The most populous country in the world. Not a country the US could just push around anymore. And India, according to media reports, had already been caught experimenting with Nexus and other proscribed enhancement technologies. If any nation had both the clout and the inclination to shield them, India was it.

  Sam had originated the plan. Kade had embellished it.

  The war was coming. The war between human and post-human. The US government had invented the Post-human Liberation Front, and then the PLF had slipped its leash and bitten its creators’ hands. They’d turned a bit of staged assassination theater against Stockton into something very close to the real thing, had killed cabinet members, had set off bombs in ERD offices, had assassinated a wildly popular televangelist and a US Senator who also happened to be the frontrunner for Governor of Texas. They’d killed hundreds of innocents in that church in Houston just hours ago, with the cameras rolling.

  They were playing exactly into the hands of their enemies. They were inviting a backlash, a vicious crackdown that would fuel more violence until it all blew up.

  Kade needed to stop that from happening. But he’d thrown away his best weapon for fighting the PLF head on. The back doors were gone. Even now, his virus was out there, replicating, closing all the back doors he and Rangan had coded – and the new ones Shiva had inserted – in every mind it touched. He didn’t trust the power to invade millions of minds to anyone. Not even to himself. And not to anyone who might trick it out of him.

  No. He had to stop this war a different way. Instead of taking on the PLF directly, he had to up his strategy to a higher level.

  In the intersection of Sam’s plan, and in what he’d already seen India doing, and in the nuggets he’d seen in Shiva’s memories – there just might be a way.

  Or perhaps they’d send him back to the US, so the ERD could rip whatever secrets remained out of him, like they had with Rangan, like they’d tried with Ilya…

  Kade closed his eyes, and in the corner of his vision he could see the icon for the script he’d written when he thought Shiva might try to torture the back doors out of him. The script that would end his life. The choice Ilya had made, rather than let them take the back door out of her mind.

  It’s been a good life, Kade thought. Even if this doesn’t work with the Indians – I got Nexus out there. Wats would be happy. Ilya too. And those kids. I was so obsessed with stopping the abuses, but I missed all the beauty. Those kids are going to change the world.

  Kade shook his head at his own past self, at his mistakes, at the way he’d let guilt and anger blind him to the wonder all around.

  I wonder if Rangan made it? He thought

  The sound of the lock turning pulled Kade out of his reverie. His eyes snapped open. Nexus nodes began recording again.

  The door opened. Rakesh Aggarwal stepped into the room. With him came a tall Indian woman, dressed in a sari, all angular features and dark, intense eyes. Kade’s memory augmenting app tried to match her face against the database of thousands of government officials he’d pulled down, and found nothing.

  Who was she then? A spook? A spy?

  Aggarwal pulled the door shut behind him, then met Kade’s gaze, and spoke.

  “Mr Lane, I regret to inform you that our government has received a highest priority request from the government of the United States for your incarceration and extradition. Our treaty obligations compel us to honor this request.”

  Kade closed his eyes. The icon in the corner of his mental vision loomed large.

  10

  Overnight Delivery

  Saturday 2040.11.0
3

  At the Indian Consulate in Shanghai, the more-perfect-than-nature diamondoid data cube was slipped into a Faraday-lined pouch, which itself was then tucked into a second compact Faraday cage, no larger than a purse, for good measure. The resulting bundle was locked inside a tamper-resistant diplomatic case, protected from search and seizure by treaty and international protocol, which was then handcuffed to the wrist of a senior courier. The courier, accompanied by two members of the Consulate’s security force, was driven immediately south and west towards Shanghai’s smaller Hong Qiao Airport.

  With the massive disruption caused by the cyber calamity – the cyber-attack according to Indian intelligence – they would take no chances with the closer but more seriously affected Pudong Airport.

  The black Opal sedan – the vehicle of choice for diplomats and aristocrats throughout Asia– sped across the roads, minimal traffic providing no obstructions, diplomatic immunity rendering it oblivious to local traffic laws.

  At the rear security gate to Hong Qiao, armed guards and imposing barriers brought them to a halt. The driver lowered his window, showed diplomatic papers to unsmiling soldiers with improbably large fully automatic weapons. Tripod mounted cameras and robotic defense systems tracked them. The car beeped, scrolled data across the driver’s display as the airport’s security AIs interrogated it, validating authority. Tense moments passed.

  Then the unsmiling soldiers tersely handed the papers back. Lights turned green, and they drove directly out onto the tarmac, towards the fully fueled, ready-to-fly, diplomatic jet bearing the emblem of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. The courier and the security men exited the sleek black Opal and boarded the Indian jet, the stairs retracting behind them.

  Within minutes they were taxiing down the runway, a flight plan filed for New Delhi, a landing less than six hours away.