by Ramez Naam
“Aparna Gupta,” Kate said.
Breece smiled. She was quizzing him. He knew these names. They’d burned themselves into his memory. When your parents are murdered as part of the war on the future, you remembered the other victims.
“AI researcher,” he said. “Self-healing systems. Or self-adapting. Something like that. Academic. She was killed in a car bomb. 2033. Muslim extrem…”
The words died on his lips. He turned to look at Kate.
She met his eyes.
“The ERD,” she said. “Operating in India. Teetering on the edge of leaving Copenhagen.”
His eyes grew wide.
Behind him he heard another solid chunk as the Nigerian slid the last piece of the pistol home.
“Just one good push,” Kate said. “That’s all it’ll take.”
They gamed it out for the morning and into the afternoon.
There were risks. Leaking evidence of the assassinations would give away data. It would reveal to the ERD and others that certain information was public. Suspicious minds might draw a connection between the leak and Barnes.
But there were also positives. Fracturing Copenhagen. Tainting Stockton, who’d been VP when the assassinations happened.
“I support it,” the Nigerian said slowly.
“Me too,” Breece said. “Great stuff.”
Kate smiled.
Hours later, it was done. A new account, unlinked to the PLF, was created – ERD_SECRETS. And from that account a set of documents were leaked, documents that provided evidence that over a period of two and a half years between the creation of the ERD and the signing of the Copenhagen Accords that prohibited research into branches of AI, genetics, nanotech, and neurotech around the world, the new US organization assassinated at least fourteen top scientists working in those fields in half a dozen countries. Some of which were already wavering in their commitment to the Accords.
Carolyn Pryce was in her home office, at her secure terminal, reading the State Department’s reports on the counter-Copenhagen summit going on in New Delhi. The parties involved were doing as much as possible via face to face, of course. But that hadn’t stopped the NSA from reading their dispatches and position papers, and the CIA from determining exactly who was there.
It was going to get ugly. State was going to start waving carrots around with one hand, and sticks with another. Trade deals and sanctions. Favored nation status or visa revocations and border searches for every package coming through.
Pryce wasn’t sure it was going to be enough.
Her terminal chimed with a new alert. She narrowed her eyes. Her thresholds were set high.
It scrolled across the screen and her eyes widened again.
She dug into the data, skimmed through it, page after page, and then leaned back.
She’d known about this. Not directly, not the specifics.
But she she’d known there had been an active threat neutralization program, before she was National Security Advisor, before Copenhagen even existed, long since ended.
Killing people. Killing scientists. It was easy to condemn.
Until you remembered what those days had been like.
They’d been terrifying. A small army of Aryan clones, engineered to be immune to a virus, Marburg Red, created to wipe out the rest of humanity. That virus killed thirty one thousand people in four days, the worst terrorist attack on record. And they’d been lucky. If the Aryan Rising’s genetic engineers had perfected it, if the clone children hadn’t risen up and slaughtered their makers and released Marburg Red early, the final version might have killed millions, hundreds of millions.
Billions.
And that hadn’t been the only threat. Eschaton, the self-replicating AI that came within a hair’s breadth of getting free on the net. Arrington, the near-trillionaire who’d managed to upload a digital replica of his brain into a custom data center and then gone insane from it, crashing markets and airplanes and power grids, killing thousands in what they’d told the world was a terrorist cyber-attack. The public didn’t even know about half the things that had really happened in the late Twenties and the early Thirties, or why.
But she did.
And still the global negotiations towards a Copenhagen agreement to restrict humanity-threatening research had ground on at a glacial pace, taking years, unclear if they’d ever actually get an agreement, every country trying to squeeze out financial incentives or trade benefits as bribes to sign on, risking gigadeaths so they could profit a bit from the Accords. And meanwhile, researchers in those countries sprinted faster and faster, to make as much progress as possible in horrifically dangerous areas before restrictions came down.
So… kill a handful, and maybe save millions?
No, she hadn’t given the order to kill these men and women.
But she had a hard time blaming those who had.
Pryce shook it off.
ERD_SECRETS. That’s where this had come from.
The account had an address, hosted offshore, no doubt, connected to through anonymizing layer after anonymizing layer.
She stared at it.
Dealing with the fallout of this particular leak was the State Department’s problem.
But could this account have more? Might this be Lisa Brandt, Holtzman’s former student and lover, whom he’d called and visited days before his death? If Holtzman had sent her this, might the woman have something else that Pryce could use? Something to help get to the bottom of the PLF’s creation?
FBI was still watching Brandt in Boston, had kept Pryce at arm’s length with good arguments about the intel the woman might reveal under passive surveillance…
Carolyn Pryce grabbed her jacket.
An hour later, across town, via a fresh phone she’d paid cash for, she connected to an anonymizing service herself and created a fresh account on a messaging site.
And then she sent a message to the account behind ERD_SECRETS.
“Hello. I’m a friend, inside the US Government. I’m highly placed. And I’m looking for evidence of how the PLF was created. Can you help me?”
She waited, and waited, and waited.
She waited so long that she put an alert on the account, flagged it for the highest possible importance notification to her, any time, any place.
Then she waited some more.
There was no response.
33
Better World
Su-Yong Shu walks the street of her simulated Shanghai, her future projection of the city she loves. She’s barefoot, her hair wild, her white dress stained with soot and blood.
Shanghai is in chaos.
Two dozen mirror-faced, battle-armored soldiers move down a rubble-filled urban canyon of a street, firing at something ahead. Smoke rises from all around. An explosion blows out glass windows tens of meters above.
Then with a sudden whirring, a pair of armed, quadcopter drones round the corner, their chain guns firing, jerking from angle to angle with eerie insectile precision, proboscis ejecting death, even as micromissiles streak out on jets of white-hot flame. The soldiers dive for cover behind chunks of fallen building, behind overturned cars.
There are explosions and screams. In seconds the humans are dead, the machines unharmed.
The drones are rising, now, their fans whirring faster, lifting them up to clear the hundred meters and more of the buildings all around. Su-Yong lifts her head to watch, to track them, and she sees the sky full of drones, drones of all type. Small and large. Copter and winged. Fan and jet. Unarmed and armed to extreme lethality. They are rising, blotting out the sky of Shanghai. Her army. Off to do her bidding. To conquer this world.
She screams again, dropping to her knees, beating her hands against the broken asphalt of the street. Where her fists land, fissures appear, race forward, cracking the street in two.
I’m still mad, she realizes. There hasn’t been enough time!
Distantly, she can feel the humans sending messages to her, punching te
xt in through interfaces in her exoself. They’re pumping sedatives into the body they provided her with, now, injecting anti-nauseants, anti-convulsants. She doesn’t care.
She closes her eyes against the chaos.
Behind her eyes the world is just as overwhelming. Dense tree-like structures are blossoming in her inner sight. They are multi-dimensional, tightly packed, fully immersive. They’re unpacking themselves, now, loading themselves into her attentional space.
Simulations. Future projections.
She sees her drones shoot down the antiquated fighter-bombers sent against her. Sees her forces secure nuclear armaments. Sees herself seize the world’s electronic systems. Sees Confucian Fist soldiers jab injectors loaded with silvery nanite-laden fluid into the necks of Politburo members. Sees her provocations and protests paralyze the world while she does her work.
Sees Ling. Sees Ling healed, after Su-Yong’s victory. Restored. The avatar she released, its purpose complete, erased from the nanite processors in Ling’s brain, allowing Ling’s own biological mind to gradually regrow into that cleared space, to eventually grow into something greater, an digital upload of herself, expanding, transcending, no longer compelled to hide who and what she is from the humans.
She opens her eyes and Shanghai around her is whole, better than whole. It is gleaming, iridescent. She looks up and the sky is blue. The towers around her rise not a hundred meters, not three hundred meters, but a thousand, three thousand. Towers a kilometer high. Three kilometers high. They gleam gold and silver and cobalt and crimson in the afternoon sun. She lifts up her hands and rises into the air. The buildings are sculpted into intricate whorls and arcs and geometric shapes made possible by breakthroughs in materials. Humanity, no longer constrained, has turned its cities into art.
The street where she walked is a park, alive with verdant growth, plants she recognizes and plants she has never seen before. Every street she sees is a park. Every rooftop. Humans – no, posthumans – walk along the paths of that giant city-park, or through the tubes and spires of the glorious buildings.
She opens her mind as she rises and finds the city alive with thought, a symphony of thought, a living being, a meta-organism of never-before seen scale. Vast braided trunks of thought, tens of millions of them, connect them at the speed of light to every other city across the face of the Earth, to outposts spreading across the solar system.
She rises higher, until she is above the tallest building, and still climbing, where the air is growing thin, and the curvature of the earth is appearing, and other glorious iridescent cities loom on the green and blue horizons.
And then she can see it, even as she senses it in her thoughts.
The city, this glorious golden metropolis, with its magnificence of architecture, has been re-sculpted into a shape that can only be seen from above.
A face.
Her face. Or Ling’s
And the one mind that permeates it all, greater than all the rest.
Her mind.
For this is the golden age.
The age after her victory.
After her daughter has done her duty, and been healed.
After Su-Yong Shu has conquered the world, and remolded it, for the better.
34
Leaving New Delhi
Tuesday November 13th
Sam woke to the sound of crying, crying in the darkness.
Aroon. It must be Aroon.
“I’ll get him,” she told Jake, reaching over to touch him.
Empty bed.
Sleep peeled off her in layers.
Jake.
Her heart pounded.
This wasn’t Thailand.
Oh god, Jake. Jake with a bullet punched through his chest. Jake with a drop of her blood dripping onto his face. Jake coughing up blood.
Jake whispering, “I wish I’d known you…” when he had. He had!
Jake’s mind falling into a million pieces that no one could ever put back together.
There were tears on her face.
Aroon cried again.
She pushed herself up. He needed her.
Tug on shorts. Pull on shirt. Out the door. Into the nursery where they’d put the three youngest. All three were awake, staring at her. Aroon was upright, tiny hands clinging to the side of his crib, holding himself up, his mouth open and his little face scrunched up as he wailed with all his small might.
“Hush,” she said with a smile, reaching for him with her hands, reaching out with her mind to soothe him.
And finding nothing. Nothing in her own mind to reach out with. No Nexus.
She put her hands around Aroon, pulled him up out of the crib, held him.
He cried and cried.
“Shhh…” She said. Always before her presence had been enough. Being near her had soothed him, since that first night, since she’d sung to him, in word and mind.
She sang again, hoping her lungs and her arms around him would do the trick.
“Hush little baby, don’t you cry…”
Aroon cried louder, harder.
She closed her eyes, bounced him, still singing, tears in her own eyes.
She could just take Nexus again, let her mind touch these kids. An image of a silvery vial came into her mind. A memory of the touch of Aroon’s mind, the magic of his young thoughts, the world a place of such vivid shapes and colors and surprises. The joy of vipassana when her thoughts were intertwined with the children’s.
Sam smiled. Maybe it was time.
Then she heard Shiva in her mind. Kill them. She saw Kevin swim into her target sights. Felt her own horror as she pulled the trigger to put the first burst into his face. Now it was Jake’s face, blood gurgling out as he coughed his last breath, and she’d killed them both.
Aroon yelled louder.
“I’ll take him,” someone said in Thai.
Sam opened her eyes. Sarai was standing in front of her, hands on Aroon.
“You have to let go,” Sarai said. “You’re holding him too tight.”
Sam blinked. She loosened her grip, and the girl took Aroon out of Sam’s hands.
She was breathing hard. Her chest was pounding.
“Shhhh…” Sarai said, her eyes closed, her lips brushing the top of Aroon’s head.
And the boy started quieting.
Tears filled Sam’s eyes, tears of loss and pain. She fought them back, smiled at Sarai with pride, forced her breathing to slow. This girl was amazing.
Sarai looked at her, over Aroon’s head.
“I miss you,” she whispered in Thai.
“Oh Sarai,” Sam said, her voice low. She stepped closer, put a gentle arm slowly around Sarai, doing her best to not jostle the infant. “I’m right here.”
Sarai smiled sadly. “It’s not the same.”
Aroon snuffled into Sarai’s shoulder, his sobbing growing quieter, weaker.
“Come back to us,” Sarai said, her eyes searching Sam’s face.
Sam’s heart was still pounding. She could see that silvery vial, could imagine downing it. She could see her bullets punch into the green outline of Kevin’s face, hear Jake’s last whisper. I wish I’d known you.
“I will,” she told Sarai, meaning it, squeezing the girl’s shoulder. “I will. I just need to heal a little first.”
“We can help you,” Sarai pleaded.
Sam smiled at Sarai, stroked the girl’s hair. “Sarai, I don’t think…”
I don’t think you should see the hole in Jake’s chest, she thought. I don’t think you should feel what I felt, then or now.
“I don’t think children should have to help adults heal,” she said. She smiled. “I think it should go the other way.
“But I am not going anywhere,” she said, looking into Sarai’s eyes. “And I will heal. And I will be back in here,” she tapped her temple, “with you again soon.”
She waited until Sarai nodded.
Then she pulled the girl as close as she could without jostling little Aroon, ki
ssed her on the brow, and held them both.
35
Dark and Light
Wednesday November 14th
Kade swam in an ocean of light. His body sat on the floor in Delhi, eyes closed, legs crossed, hands on knees, breathing deep, placid breaths. His heart beat slowly and surely. His mind was open, touching a thousand others, being enfolded in them, enmeshed with them, so that where he ended and they began, where I ended and we began, he could no longer say.
The greater self drew breath into a thousand sets of lungs, then slowly released that breath out of the same. Its thousand-fold heart contracted, expanded.
Thoughts arose in one corner of its web, rippled outward from human mind to human mind.
The greater self inhaled again, observed those ripples, those tiny human thoughts, and allowed them to pass, without attachment, without judgment, without grasping that would have created more chaos.
Bit by bit, the noise of monkey mind, the chattering of incessant chaotic thought, faded away.
All that remained was light.
Kade opened his eyes as the meditation ended.
That had been… something. Ananda and his monks had come a very long way in the past several months. He’d been blown away the first time he’d encountered dozens of monks, their minds linked, meditating as one. Now they’d folded in the technology he’d brought, linked monasteries together across thousands of miles, were folding in hundreds of monks at once, sometimes thousands. There had been monks in that session in Thailand, in Nepal, here in India, even a few in the US.
Bits of a thousand other men and women’s thoughts and memories, dreams and ideas, knowledge and experience, had flowed through him, and into him. And that was just incidental, as they’d allowed those thoughts to rise to the surface and clear, to make room for pure, uncluttered attention.