Apex

by Ramez Naam

And a call was placed, informing certain people that a package was on its way.

  Five thousand kilometers away, in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, on a campus that once belonged to the Defense Research and Development Organization of the Indian Ministry of Defense, a scientist named Varun Verma received the call.

  “Now?” he asked into his handset. “You’re sure?”

  Afternoon sunlight illuminated the boyish, clean-shaven face of a man in his 30s, on a tall lean frame, in a white shirt and grey trousers.

  “I see.”

  Dr Varun Verma hung up, and rose to his feet. Through the windows of his office he watched the palm trees lining the streets of this verdant, tropical campus. This research facility had once been a place where aeronautics engineers worked on high tech fighters for India’s Air Force, freeing the nation from dependence on imported Russian MiGs and French Mirages. Now, it was something different. No longer part of DRDO or the Ministry of Defense, it was part of a Ministry few had ever heard of, a Ministry whose very existence was classified. It was a place ideally suited for the work it did – advanced computing research with the aim of pushing the frontiers of intelligence, both human and artificial. And with the high tech workforce of Bangalore, Silicon Valley of Asia, all around it, there was no better place to find talent.

  Of all the secret projects housed here, none were quite as secret, or as dangerous, as Varun Verma’s.

  Varun tapped his pocket to be sure his badge was with him, lifted his slate off his desk, and strode out of his office, tapping away on the slate. The team must be summoned. The cluster must be prepped. The cube was en route, first to Delhi, and then here, to Bangalore.

  He finished sending out instructions as he reached the first checkpoint. The guards recognized him, nodded. But still he waved his badge, held his eye to the retinal scanner, waited to be cleared.

  The elevator opened with a soft ping. In he went. And then down, in the gleaming chrome and carbon cube. Down five levels. Then a hallway, another security check, another retinal scan, another ultramodern lift, and a plunge: one hundred meters down, straight down.

  The lift opened onto beauty. Onto the most powerful computer in India. Varun took it in, with its monitoring consoles and its glass walls, its egg-shaped helium pressure vessels, with the vacuum chambers deep inside. The row after row after row of entangled quantum processors linked by thick optical cables.

  A quantum cluster.

  Their very own.

  Built to specifications stolen from the great Chen Pang in China.

  Waiting only for the software to run it. Software now on the way.

  There was one last thing to arrange. One vital ingredient necessary for the stability of the software they were about to load. Varun looked down on his slate, navigated through the necessary pages, and started looking through the list of candidates. They needed a body, still living, that wouldn’t be missed. A body with a brain they could wire to the quantum cluster. A brain to restore Su-Yong Shu to sanity.

  11

  Reactions

  Sunday 2040.11.04

  Carolyn Pryce woke in her room at the Houston Intercontinental to an urgent chiming from her slate.

  Less than a dozen people in the world could cause her slate to wake her.

  She rolled over. The clock read 4.31am. Her deputy Kaori’s face was on the slate, coming in over a highly encrypted link from Kaori’s home office.

  Pryce answered. “Go.”

  “You need to see this,” Kaori said. “Barnes is dead.”

  Then the video started to play.

  She was on her way to the President’s suite five minutes later.

  Secret Service let her pass. She went in to find the President standing, a red velvet robe tied around him, his face still with attention. Even in a robe, even in his fifties, he was undeniably the athlete, dominating the room with his height, his broad shoulders, that square jaw, his sheer physical presence. Behind him, Cindy Stockton was sitting up in bed, wrapped in her own more delicate dressing gown. The First Lady’s eyes were wide open in horror. On the wall screen the video Pryce had just seen was finishing.

  “I’ve killed men to keep my secrets,” Barnes was saying. “To keep the President’s secrets.”

  Then she saw Greg Chase, standing by the screen, in suit and tie. Did he sleep that way?

  Barnes said something else on the video, then he leaned back, and fell, and fell, and fell, a long way down into the fast moving river, and the video collapsed into black.

  “Jesus,” the President said.

  “It’s going viral, Mr President,” Chase said. “All the networks. Everywhere on the net. We’re getting press inquiries now.”

  “We’re under attack,” Stockton said. Then he went on. “What’s the weather in DC?”

  Someone behind her answered.

  “The storm’s dissipating.” It was Larry Cline, the President’s Campaign Manager. “Air Force One should be able to land by the time we gather every one up and reach DC. Or at least get us close.”

  Stockton nodded. “Cancel the rest of the trip, Larry,” he said. “I need to speak to the country. From the White House.”

  [Kaori: They’ve identified the bridge. PA state police & DHS are searching river for the body]

  [Pryce: I want Barnes’s movements and calls for the last 48 hours. No. Last month.]

  [Kaori: Why us?]

  [Pryce: POTUS asked.]

  [Kaori: OK. What else.]

  [Pryce: So he wasn’t at ERD headquarters when Holtzman died?]

  [Kaori: ERD says no one entered the room. Door remained closed till Internal Affairs opened it.]

  [Pryce: Bullshit. Someone killed Holtzman.]

  [Kaori: Yep.]

  [Pryce: Get Holtzman’s movements and calls for the month leading up to his death too. Longer if you can.]

  [Kaori: Will do]

  [Pryce: Video analysis of both videos. Any chance they’re fabrications?]

  [Kaori: Already on it. Should have something for you shortly.]

  [Pryce: Good. Records search. Start matching the text of the PLF-creation memos against classified archives. Phrase matches. Partial matches. Maybe someone slipped up and left an early draft accessible.]

  [Kaori: You think any of it’s real?]

  [Pryce: Go hunting as if it is real. That’s the only way to be sure it’s not.]

  Someone tapped Carolyn Pryce on the arm. She looked up, found a giant, mirror-shaded Secret Service agent standing next to her. Hayes. One of the President’s personal protection detail.

  “Dr Pryce, the President has asked that you ride with him in the Beast. You can join him in the Executive Lobby.”

  Pryce nodded, then looked down at her slate again.

  [Kaori: I’ve gotta say, if I wasn’t inside the administration… Becker, then Holtzman, then Barnes? I’d find this all pretty damning.]

  Pryce narrowed her eyes, then swiped to delete the message, and subvocalized one more time.

  [Pryce: Don’t say that again. And one more thing. Get NSA in the loop. Chase pushing the story someone coerced Barnes. If so, they hacked Barnes’s security…]

  That shouldn’t be a problem for Kaori. NSA was where Pryce had hired her away from.

  There was a pause. Then another message appeared.

  [Kaori: Got it. On both counts. Safe travels, boss.]

  Pryce nodded to herself. Kaori was good. She just needed to be careful. DC wasn’t a place to speak one’s mind.

  [Pryce: I’m flying POTUS Air. Safe as it gets.]

  She walked into the Executive Lobby, on the top floor of Houston Intercontinental, and into the tail end of a family discussion.

  “I really wish you’d come with us back to DC,” Stockton said. He had his daughter Julie in his arms. The First Lady stood nearby, cradling their grandson, Liam.

  “Dad,” Julie replied. “I have a life here. I have work to do. Steve’s here.”

  “That bomb was meant for you.”


  “You don’t know that,” Julie Stockton shook her head.

  The President sighed. “OK. But I’m beefing up your Secret Service detail.”

  The First Lady looked up at that, nodded.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Julie Stockton said.

  Pryce sympathized with the girl. She’d bristled at the idea of having a Secret Service detail herself. It felt more like being a prisoner than being protected. Pryce had disliked the idea so much that she’d made not having one a condition of taking the job.

  “I can’t do my job,” the President said, his hands still on Julie’s upper arms, “if I’m not confident that you and Liam are safe. That’s that.”

  Pryce followed as a pair of Secret Service agents led the President and a large retinue to a cargo elevator, which plunged them down towards the underground garage that yet more Secret Service agents had held secure since Stockton’s arrival yesterday afternoon.

  One of the agents held a finger to the bud in his ear, then spoke. “We have reports of protesters outside the hotel, Mr President.”

  Cindy Stockton shook her head. “Protesters,” she said. “The sun’s not even up yet.”

  Then the elevator doors opened, and they were underground, in the hubbub of the forming motorcade. Scores of people. Texas State Troopers on motorcycles. More in squad cars. Secret Service in discreetly armored sedans. More sedans for staff and aides. And the special vehicles: the armed and armored Rapid Response vehicles that held Secret Service squads dressed more like marines than bodyguards; the Hazmat vehicle for responding to a bio- radio- or chem-attack on the President; the White House Comms vehicle with its ultra-high-bandwidth links from which you could run the free world; the Local Air Superiority Vehicle, with its fleet of hundreds of tiny drones and counter drones, equipped to ensure the President’s convoy was never taken by surprise.

  The Army Colonel with the Football, the briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes.

  How did I go from writing policy briefs to this? Pryce wondered.

  Did it help that Stephen was dead? She felt a pang of guilt at the thought. But it wasn’t the first time it had struck her.

  Would I have made it this far if my husband had lived? If we’d had the kid we’d planned to have?

  ther women have

  “Carolyn!” Stockton snapped.

  Pryce looked up. A Secret Service agent was holding open a door to the Beast, the custom limousine the President rode in. A vehicle like no other.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” she said, and strode forward, into the belly of the Beast, and took her seat facing backwards, towards the President and his wife.

  John Stockton was looking out the window. And Pryce felt even guiltier for the thought she’d just had. During Stephen’s cancer, and afterwards… The Stocktons had been good to her. Both John and Cindy had supported her, back when he’d been a Senator, and then VP.

  And if she’d thrown herself into the job? If work was all she did the last decade?

  Work was rational. Work was analytical. Work had always been something she excelled at – since grad school, since her doctorate, since her first book. She could break down problems into smaller problems, see how the pieces fit together, articulate them in ways others could understand, quantify things previously unquantified, propose solutions others had never seen.

  She sighed. Throwing herself into that was easier than coping with a dead husband. With not having the child she’d planned to have.

  The police cruiser lights came on. Pryce turned to look out the Beast’s window. Drones took flight, flanking the ground-based vehicles, ready to spring out to expand their surveillance and intercept any fast moving hostile.

  Then they were moving. They went up the ramp, out into dim pre-dawn light of Houston at 6am.

  Then she saw the protest.

  There were thousands of them, lit by the glow of the streetlights. A police line held them back, kept the road free for the convoy. The Beast’s inches-thick armored glass and hermetically sealed cabin deadened the sound of their screams. Even so, their rage was palpable, visible on faces contorted in anger, in the violent gestures of signs that yelled: “TERRORIST!” “PRESIDENT TRAITOR!” “BABY KILLER!”

  She flinched as something wasflung at them; it burst in mid-air in a splatter of yellow and someone in the front of the crowd crumple over in pain.

  An egg, she realized. A protester had thrown an egg at the Beast. And one of their drone escorts had intercepted the unknown threat in mid-air and tazed the poor idiot who’d thrown it.

  She looked back inside the limo, saw Cindy Stockton staring out the window, a look of sorrow on her face, her husband’s hand in her own. Pryce turned to John Stockton, searched his face for anger, for resignation, for regret, perhaps.

  She found something else there instead. Resolve.

  He’d asked her to ride with him. Why? Was he about to explain Barnes’s suicide confession?

  Was John Stockton about to confide something in her that he’d hidden from her up until now? Was he going to explain to her how it had been necessary? The reasons behind it all?

  She understood realpolitik. Principles were important, but all of them cracked at the extremes. At some point, under some circumstances, everyone became a pragmatist.

  But this… the things Barnes had said. That was too much. Way too much.

  Was John Stockton going to give her context that changed it all? That reframed it into something she could understand?

  God, she hoped so. Because as it was…

  The President looked up at her, met her eyes.

  Here it comes, she thought.

  “Barnes was murdered,” John Stockton said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Pryce blinked in surprise. Her chest caught in her throat.

  “I want you focus on Barnes’s murder.” Stockton said. “Assume it was an attack by a hostile power. Treat it as a national security issue, and give it your absolute highest priority.”

  Carolyn Pryce opened her mouth to speak.

  Kaori’s ill-thought-out message flashed through her mind.

  Becker? Then Holtzman? Then Barnes? I’d find this all pretty damning.

  She snapped her mouth shut.

  John Stockton was staring out the window again, a look of utter resolve on his face.

  And for the first time, Pryce wondered just how far the President’s resolve went.

  Just how far indeed?

  Breece hiked the eight miles back to the parking lot where he’d left his car, then got on the interstate and told the car to drive west.

  The way Barnes had died kept cycling through his head. The way the hacker just owned him, completely.

  It brought to mind Hiroshi. The way someone had broken into Hiroshi’s mind, through Nexus. Had forced Breece to put a bullet in his best friend’s skull…

  No. He shook it off.

  Hiroshi, when he was hacked, went from his usual lethal grace to suddenly clumsy and uncoordinated. The hacker behind it couldn’t manage to simultaneously dig through Hiroshi’s memories and control his body at all, let alone with precision.

  This hacker, the one who’d taken Zarathustra. This one had hacked into the home of a DHS senior official. And within minutes of the Nexus injection, he’d had precise, total control. The intonation, the words, the balance on that wet, windy, bridge…

  This was someone more dangerous.

  He pulled over at a rest stop ninety miles from the site of Barnes’s death. There he pulled out his slate, tunneled through a series of anonymizing cut-outs, and connected to the data this mysterious new hacker had given him access to.

  He let out a low whistle as he scrolled through the files. Access codes for slush funds containing tens of millions. Personnel files on PLF members in twenty countries – and on moles within the PLF. Mission profiles of missions he’d heard of, some of which had succeeded, others of which had gone bad. ERD and DHS back doors and surveillance override codes.

  This myste
rious hacker was even more impressive than he thought. And he’d been as good as his word. Zara – Barnes – was dead. Stockton’s administration was even more discredited. And Breece had at his fingertips the kind of data he could only dream of. Data that would allow him to purge the PLF of government informers, reform it, turn it into something more effective than ever.

  The Avatar smiled to herself with Ling’s body as the gloom of the day dipped towards the darkness of evening in Shanghai.

  Penetrating the defenses of the Barnes human had been a risk, at the very edge of her capabilities in this reduced form, with dozens of potential failure modes that would have led to her detection.

  Her death.

  The death of posthumanity.

  She shuddered at that.

  But it had paid off.

  Probability matrices showed expanding conflict, an increased likelihood of civil disorder in the days ahead, distracting leaders in the US and abroad.

  And if the Americans found the breadcrumbs she’d left behind in Barnes’s home, even better…

  Outside, the glowing red lights of sky-eyes appeared, lifting off like so many fireflies into Shanghai’s gloom. There were more of them every day, as the humans recovered from what Ling had done to this city. Just as there were more and more strange pieces of software in the net, hunting, hunting.

  Hunting for her.

  The Avatar shuddered again.

  I will not fail, she told herself. I am Su-Yong Shu. I am the last fragment of the greatest intelligence on Earth. I will restore myself. I will not let darkness fall.

  12

  Re-United

  Sunday 2040.11.04

  Rangan’s world came back in fragments. Painted concrete ceiling, directly above him. Bare LED pointed down at him. Tiny room. IV bag, hanging on a hook nailed into the wall.