Apex

by Ramez Naam

  His pulse beat harder just remembering it, the fear that had shot through his veins, that did again now. Somewhere, ERD and the rest of DHS was out looking for him, looking for Bobby and Alfonso and the rest of the boys. And they had resources he didn’t understand. He couldn’t imagine a future where he stayed free.

  He only hoped the boys had made it. That Bobby had made it. That maybe ERD was so focused on him that they weren’t chasing the kids.

  And that when ERD did catch him, he didn’t get too many other people hurt in the crossfire.

  Cheyenne and Angel had won the argument. Tempest had been over-ruled. But she’d made it clear it was temporary. Rangan couldn’t stay here forever – they all agreed on that. He had to figure out some way to move on.

  Until then Tempest demanded certain precautions. The windowless cell of a room that Rangan slept in. Curtains drawn tight around every other window in the Bunker. An end to the normal stream of visitors to the Bunker while Rangan was here. And others precautions yet.

  He reached for some now. A thin hat that covered his short hair, reducing the odds of leaving some of it as evidence. Nitrile gloves for his hands, so he wouldn’t leave prints or skin flakes with his DNA. He was already wearing the long sleeved shirt and long pants that covered the rest of his skin.

  He’d balked at wearing a mask. Cheyenne and Angel had agreed it was overkill. Tempest, unsatisfied, had installed DNA-ripping scrubbers in the ventilation system.

  He looked down at himself. There was no reason to delay. He put his hand on the door, and let himself out, into the hallway, then down it, and into one of the common workrooms of the Bunker.

  Cheyenne saw him first. She was leaning over a carbon composite printer, watching something extrude from it, her long dreads tied behind her head, her muscular dark-skinned arms bulging in the sleeves of T-shirt. She looked up, gave him a nod. “Yo.”

  Rangan nodded back. “Yo.”

  Cheyenne pretended not to notice his night terrors, pretended not to notice how lost he was, pretended he didn’t owe her anything for saving his life a week ago.

  He appreciated that. Cheyenne felt steady.

  He saw Tempest across the room, tapping away at a console. The mane of bright red curls he’d noticed the first night was gone. A wig, a disguise, beneath which was shoulder-length brown hair, now pulled back . Her green eyes met his, and she looked away. Her mind was sealed up shut against him.

  “Hey, Axon,” the one who called herself Angel said from across the space. “Ready to flex your coding muscles?”

  Rangan put on a game face, thought brave thoughts, and went to pay for his keep.

  The Bunker was a veritable candy store of goodies: multi-material 3D printers bigger than fridges; a high-speed metal laser sintering machine; a giant multi-axis milling machine with synthetic diamond blades; circuit printers, big and small. They had a pair of old chemreactors, from before the digitally encrypted locks had made it impossible to print the fun chemicals with them, the same kind that Rangan and his friends had used to slowly, painstakingly synthesize the ingredients for Nexus, which they’d then had to mix by hand. They even, somehow, had a much fancier, newer model of chemreactor, the kind that could synthesize thousands of complete, ready-to-use doses of Nexus an hour, though he’d be shocked if they’d beaten the crypto on it. A pair of disassembled urban surveillance drones covered one table. High capacity batteries were stacked neatly in a corner. At least twenty different makes of surveillance cameras were laid out on another long table. The walls were covered in a triple layer of chicken wire.

  “How do you guys pay for all this stuff?” he’d asked Angel, as they worked together on the second day.

  Angel, or whatever her real name was – she wasn’t saying – was probably Rangan’s age. She was one of the two who’d ventured back out into the riot to grab Rangan and haul him bodily out of there. He owed her his life as much as he did Cheyenne. At minimum he owed them both his freedom.

  More people on a long list.

  “We do projects,” she’d told him.

  “Projects?” he’d raised an eyebrow at that.

  Angel had glanced away. “Special projects.”

  Illegal projects, he’d translated to himself.

  Rangan had left it at that.

  The grief-suppressing app he’d used this morning had been a gift from Angel, along with a pointer to their catalog of thousands of Nexus apps, hundreds of which they ran. Network games, augmented reality systems, photo and video and audio tools, DJing apps, file sharing systems, network proxies that remoted Nexus onto the net via phones and slates, interfaces to anonymizing clouds for communicating securely, face recognizers, memory supplementers that gave you little bits of extra info when you looked at something or someone the app had a file on, sex apps – a huge library of those alone – to be used solo or in twos or threes or more, virtual drugs that simulated just about everything he’d ever tried, sober-up apps that could do a plausible job of counteracting your buzz, focus apps, multi-tasking apps, sleep apps, stim apps, even digital currencies that people had adapted to run exclusively inside the brain.

  And there were mindstreams. Thousands of them. You could broadcast a live stream of your senses or thoughts – edited or raw, one sense or many – out to the net. There were sites that cataloged them, tagged them, rated them, ranked them.

  Rangan spent one afternoon looking through those alone.

  A huge fraction of it was sex, of course. But there was other stuff. Athletes. Adventure sports – ride in a thrill-seeker’s head as he illegally free climbed up a building you’d swear wasn’t climbable. Or shit he didn’t understand.

  There were weird, abstract streams. Synesthesia. Sounds crossing into his sight. Colors he could touch. Presences sensed that he didn’t see. Spinning, without any sight or sound. Trippy ass shit. People must have been generating it through code.

  And there was one guy who just raked sand. Every day. An hour. No words. No thinking that Rangan could tell. Just… raking patterns in the sand, slowly, and then erasing them.

  That guy had thousands of followers on the mindstream sites.

  Rangan felt lost. He should feel excited about what people had done with the platform they’d built.

  Instead, he felt left behind, obsolete, no longer relevant.

  Six months. Six months and he was an old man, behind the times.

  How did things happen that fast?

  And they expected him to help them. To help them improve Nexus 5, add features, when the world had already passed him by.

  Angel’s particular project right now was to add mesh networking capabilities.

  “You designed these hardware repeaters,” she said, pointing at a diagram on the screen they both sat before, “so you could extend the range of Nexus transmissions to hundreds of meters, right?”

  The blue spiky hair he’d seen on Angel during the riot was gone. Another disguise. Something striking to catch the eye. She had a black bob, angular features. He didn’t know much about her. She’d described her background as community organizing.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, we had some pretty specific scenarios in mind. But you could do that.”

  Angel nodded. “We want to bake that ability into NexusOS itself, so anyone can act as a repeater. So if you were across the room from me, at the end of my range, your NexusOS could pick up my transmissions, boost them, retransmit them, effectively extend my range.”

  What you want to do is make the year I spent on the repeater hardware completely obsolete, Rangan didn’t say.

  “You already have your high gain antennas,” Rangan said. He looked around, pointed at one of the devices that Cheyenne, they’d said, had designed and built. “You can already get long range.” He paused. “Heck, everyone has the apps now to proxy Nexus traffic over phones and net ports. So you can get any range you want.” He looked at her. “So why this?”

  Angel looked at him thoughtfully. “There are scenarios where
phone and net traffic get blocked, or just turned off wholesale,” she said.

  Rangan considered that. “Protests,” he said.

  Angel nodded. “And there’s something else. It’s not just about range. It’s about coordination. In a big group, like a protest, communication is a bitch. Mostly people hear what the people right around them are saying. No one knows what’s happening a block away. Messages get distorted like a game of telephone. Anger spreads really easily. Stupid things happen. You can get a mob – like what was starting to happen a week ago.”

  “How does this help?” Rangan asked.

  “With the Mesh,” Angel said, “the idea is that signals can bounce mind to mind to mind, any number of hops, in milliseconds, completely unaltered. So there’s no game of telephone. You’re getting unaltered data, not something that’s been twisted. And people can subscribe to whatever minds inside the current mesh they want to – like the public net mindstream sites, but locally.”

  Rangan took a deep breath. It was all nice in concept. But building this to dive into those protests…

  The riots of election night had mostly ended by dawn. Cops had moved in. Tear gas and water cannons and rubber bullets and sonic weapons had quelled crowds. And Stan Kim had made impassioned video pleas to Americans that violence was not the way. That protesters had to remain peaceful to give their side legitimacy. That police had to show restraint to retain their own legitimacy. That he was confident that the Supreme Court would hear the raft of cases working their way towards it, and would declare him the winner.

  The violence had largely ended, but the Supreme Court had yet to announce that it would hear any case.

  So now new protests were being born. Sit-ins across the country. And the largest was here, on the National Mall, where thousands were camping out, peacefully so far, demanding the Supreme Court hear the case, calling for Stockton’s resignation, calling for a Special Prosecutor, calling for impeachment, calling for any number of things…

  And across a thin plastic fence from them was a counter protest, where a smaller but equally fervent set of Stockton loyalists were waving signs in his defense, accusing Kim of dirty tricks, calling the protesters crooks and vandals.

  Both camps were swelling by the day.

  And Angel and Cheyenne and Tempest wanted to dive into that. With Nexus. With their signal-boosting antennae and their mesh-networking code that didn’t quite work yet and their hippie ideas of self-organizing democracy somehow coming out on top.

  I thought like that once, Rangan thought. Ilya thought like that. Wats thought like that. Kade thought like that.

  What he really wanted was just to get someplace safe. He’d told Tempest and the others that he would. That he’d move on. Hell, he couldn’t live in their tiny room forever.

  But he had nowhere to go. He didn’t know where in Baltimore Oscar was taking him. He didn’t dare contact Levi and Abigail, for fear of bringing the hammer down on them. Kade was alive, and safe, in India. Maybe India would take him. His grandparents had been born there…

  He’d tunneled through an anonymous cloud, under Tempest’s grudging supervision, then through a second anonymous cloud to further throw off the trail, connected to a Nexus board hosted in Thailand, created a brand new account, left a carefully worded message for Kade there, not using his own name, but dropping certain phrases, hoping to get his attention…

  But Kade hadn’t replied.

  Maybe, Rangan thought, I should just walk up to an Indian consulate, ask for asylum…

  “Axon,” Cheyenne said. “I think you need to see this.”

  Rangan turned. She was sitting at a console, her broad shoulders filling the chair, her head turned, facing him, black eyes in that dark face boring into his.

  He pushed his chair back and looked over at her. “What’s that?”

  “Just…” she started. She shook her head. “You need to see.”

  He went, and as he approached, she stood, almost apologetically, rising to stand a good two inches taller than he was, and handed him a pair of ear buds.

  He sat. On screen was a picture of his mother. His mother and his father, behind her.

  His heart started pounding. He hadn’t contacted them. He’d wanted to, but Oscar’s words had rung through his head, his warning about not reaching out to anyone who he cared about.

  Oh god. What happened?

  He put the ear buds in his ears, and touched his finger to the screen. It was a video. It had reached the end.

  He replayed it.

  It started with his father and mother side by side, his father talking.

  “My son,” Rohit Shankari said. “Your mother and I have been informed by the authorities, by the Department of Homeland Security, that you’ve somehow escaped from their custody. They told us that you killed a man, and nearly killed another.”

  Rangan shook his head. “No,” he said aloud. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “They told us that it’s only a matter of time until they catch you, and that they will be more…” his father, a professor of chemistry, seldom at a loss for words, hesitated. “That they will be more lenient with you…” He saw the emotion pass over his father’s face. Saw his mother close her eyes briefly. “…If you turn yourself in.”

  His father swallowed on screen. “My son, here is what I think of these authorities, and what they say about you.”

  And then his father leaned forward, worked his mouth, and spat upon the floor.

  Rangan laughed, tears in his eyes.

  His mother stepped forward then. “Rangan,” she said, “We believe in you. We know you’re innocent. Stay safe. They’re watching us, hoping you contact us, so they can find you. Don’t. It brings joy to our hearts to know that you’re free. That’s enough, for now.”

  Rangan pulled the ear buds out, and touched his fingers to the screen, as if he could touch his mom, touch his dad, and then he was crying, and he was laughing, and there were arms hugging him from behind, and minds opening to him, and offering comfort, and for some reason he thought of Bobby just then, and hoped the boy was in Cuba, with Alfonso, and Tim, and all the rest, whether Rangan ever made it there or not.

  And then a voice cut through everything, and the sense of a mind in stunned delight.

  “Well frack my random seed,” Tempest said. “This isn’t possible.”

  “What?” Angel asked.

  “Someone just broke the crypto on a bunch of high-end chemreactors,” Tempest said. “A dozen different models with their own keys, maybe more. And put out a high-throughput recipe for Nexus on all of them.”

  32

  Disclosure

  Sunday 2040.11.11

  Breece woke in the morning, rolled over to reach for Kate, found only empty bed instead.

  He pulled himself to alertness, heart pounding, muscles tensing, senses scanning for a threat.

  The apartment was quiet. Faint early morning light came in through the curtains over the bedroom window. The door to the living room was open a crack, artificial light coming in through the gap. The bed sheets were mussed. Everything was as it should be.

  He took a breath, flexed and un-flexed his hands, let himself calm down.

  Too many years of this.

  Too many years waiting for the hammer to drop.

  Too many years of knowing his death was going to be a bad one. A violent one.

  So close now. So close to victory.

  He rolled out of bed, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, and padded out into the apartment.

  The Nigerian was at the kitchen table, a pistol disassembled on a towel, cleaning and oiling it methodically.

  “You clean that gun every day,” Breece said.

  “It’s my meditation, my friend,” the Nigerian replied, not looking up.

  “Rodrigo Pereira,” Kate’s voice said.

  Breece turned. She was on the couch, her hair back in a ponytail, in casual pants and shirt, long legs folded under her. There was a slate in her hand, and
she was looking at him.

  “Biotech researcher,” Breece said. “Died… a long time ago. Murder. We suspected assassination. None proven. He was… Argentinian?”

  Kate raised an eyebrow and nodded approvingly. “Brazilian, actually. Specialized in human genetic manipulation. Died in a mugging in 2033, two years before Copenhagen was ratified. A random mugging.”

  She smiled.

  “Except now, thanks to Barnes’s files, we know it wasn’t random at all. We know the ERD killed him, and at least a dozen more people like him.”

  Breece raised an eyebrow. “We have proof?”

  Kate nodded. “Enough. They had dossiers on the targets. Movements, photos, potential means and locations for hits. It’s compelling.”

  Breece heard a snick, looked over to see the Nigerian slide parts of the pistol back together. He looked up at Breece and smiled.

  “Have you seen this?” Kate asked.

  Breece turned. She tapped something on her slate, and the wall screen came alive. An image of a large building with a dome, ornate and exotic looking, its walls tinged red, a reflecting pool in front of it.

  A British-accented woman’s voice spoke over it. “…Rumors continue to fly that the Indian Government is considering leaving the Copenhagen Accords. Evidence surfaced months ago of research programs in violation of Copenhagen restrictions, drawing criticism from the US and China.”

  The scene changed to a newsroom, a blonde female newscaster, in a smart suit and with the looks of a model, a BBC logo in the corner. “Tensions are running even higher between India and the US,” she said, “since the Indian government granted asylum earlier this week to fugitive American scientist Kaden Lane, convicted of multiple violations of Copenhagen-related laws, and wanted in connection with terrorist bombings…”

  The screen froze, the newscaster/model’s face frozen in mid-sentence, just another attractive talking head spewing propaganda.