Apex

by Ramez Naam

  He leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes again, and he could feel a million minds out there. If he chose he could visualize them, a thin layer around the earth, denser in some areas, sparser in others. He had a flight of fancy, a thought of reaching out to them all, multiplexing a message to them, bringing all those minds together at once, into a union orders of magnitude greater than any yet. He’d had the same thought in that dance club in Saigon, high off the music and the dancing and the other joyous minds and Lotus’s amplifier-assisted mental feedback loop of the crowd’s ecstasy back onto itself. He’d wanted every mind in the world to be part of that, just as much as he wanted them all to feel the serenity of vipassana, the loving compassion of metta.

  And now he had better tools to do it with. Shiva’s tools.

  Memories swirled again. Architecture diagrams. Capability maps. Command parameters. Passwords.

  Kade shook his head. Shiva’s, not mine.

  That he laughed out loud at himself. There was no way that reaching out to a million minds would turn into anything but chaos.

  Even with Shiva’s tools to filter and route and connect. A million minds!

  All those minds were running Nexus. A million of them that he had an address for. They weren’t even close to all the Nexus users in the world – just the ones his bots had reached.

  He’d closed the back doors, but he hadn’t thought to disable the bots he’d already unleashed. They were out there, no longer able to spread, no longer able to make root-level changes or peer into people’s thoughts (thank god) but still sending back pings.

  A million minds. What could you do if you could connect a million people together?

  “Kade-ji! Kade-ji!”

  Kade chuckled and rose to his feet.

  If it wasn’t Dr Kade it was Kade-ji around here.

  A hell of a lot different than grad school.

  He opened the door to his room on the top floor. Peered down. It was Nitya, the house manager, at the bottom of the landing.

  “There is news, Kade-ji! Very big news!”

  Next to Nitya was a smiling Lakshmi Dabir.

  She grinned up at Kade. “India is leaving Copenhagen, Kade. The last leak did the trick.”

  Kade felt his own grin grow wider. Well hot damn.

  “And,” Dabir went on. “We’d love to invite you and yours to move to a new and more permanent location. Our research facility in Bangalore. Where we can really get started on this work.”

  Kade closed his eyes, still smiling.

  Maybe this was really going to work.

  36

  What I Want

  Thursday 2040.11.15

  The message arrived on Wednesday, and Aarthi herself first thing on a Thursday morning.

  Sam smiled as one of the guards opened the door to the New Delhi compound, and the woman entered. It had been years. Three of them.

  “Aarthi,” Sam stepped forward and embraced the woman.

  Her old colleague looked cool and professional in khaki pants and a smart matching jacket over a pale blouse. Her black hair was cut short, yet stylishly. Her face had a dusting of makeup.

  Sam felt drab in the ill-fitting clothes a Ministry of External Affairs staffer had found for her. Clothing had been the least of her concerns. Maybe after they moved to the new location in Bangalore.

  “You look good, Samantha,” Aarthi said, standing back, her hands clasped in Sam’s.

  “You’re a damn good liar, Aarthi,” Sam said. “And you look fantastic.”

  “It’s been too long,” Aarthi said. “Since Kashmir.”

  Sam nodded. “Too long.” Five years, it had been, since they’d met on a joint Indian-US mission, tracking a bio-weapon find in the US to Pakistani extremists in Kashmir. The bond had been nearly instant – two women in a male dominated field, both at the start of their careers, both intent on proving their worth, and willing to work twice as hard as anyone to do so.

  “You ready?” Aarthi asked.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Sam replied, and off they went.

  The guards opened the door, let them out onto the grounds. Children were out here, on the large lawn surrounded by the armed and manned outer walls. The Indian government was taking no chances with security.

  Arinya waved shyly at them, and Sam waved back. That girl had been at Shiva’s compound when Sam arrived. She’d come from a remote village in the Thai north, near Chiang Rai. Twenty-two of the twenty-five children Shiva had kidnapped had come from Thailand. Only eight of those had come from Sam’s home. She’d made getting to know the rest a priority. It would have been easier with Nexus, but that would come, she told herself. The children all learned from one another, at any rate. They’d all learned from the children she’d known that Sam was family. She was their family.

  Sam and Aarthi rounded a corner and, speak of the devil, there was her family. Sunisa and Mali, and Kit and Sarai, and Ying and Tada and Kwan as well. Feng was with them. He had them running in circles and falling and rolling. There were smiles on all their faces, and giggles emerging from them.

  No doubt they were all sharing even more, mind to mind.

  Her heart swelled.

  Soon, Sam told herself. I’ll be back. Really back. I’ll be past this.

  She smiled and patted heads and gave hugs. Then she and Aarthi kept on walking.

  The trip to the village took four hours – by car, then helicopter, then car again.

  The place they arrived at was poor, poorer even than Mae Dong, where she’d found the children.

  “We have about a dozen of these pilot programs,” Aarthi said.

  They were seated on a small hillock, watching a class a few dozen meters away. Eighteen children sat outdoors with their slates, divided up into four circles. They varied in age. Each circle seemed to have some older children and some younger, ranging from perhaps six to twelve. A single teacher, a woman in her late twenties, perhaps, went from circle to circle, spending a few minutes with each, before moving on.

  “They all have Nexus?” Sam asked.

  Aarthi nodded. “Nexus 5 plus some modifications our programmers have made,” she said. “We’re experimenting with different ways to use it in education.”

  Sam felt anxious just watching, just being here. She’d been told for so long that this was wrong.

  But then she looked at that teacher, and saw the smile on the woman’s face, saw the excitement and attention on the children’s faces, saw their eyes light up and their heads turn to look at each other even when they hadn’t said a word that she could hear.

  And she could imagine being there with them. And feeling entirely differently about it.

  “How’s it working out?” Sam asked Aarthi.

  Aarthi picked at the grass next to her. Sam wondered idly if she was getting grass stains on those fancy khaki pants.

  “From a technical standpoint,” Aarthi said, “it’s working amazingly well. We’re concerned about safety, of course, but everything looks very good. And the impact is incredible. Groups of children with Nexus learn faster. They have higher retention and faster absorption. Dramatically so. They process problems together. They learn from each other instinctively, unconsciously, without even knowing it. They explain things to each other in ways that go beyond language. If the teacher has Nexus too, and truly understands the material, so much the better.”

  Sam turned to look at her colleague, her friend. “But…”

  Aarthi smiled. “Socially and politically, it’s more complex. All these young people – if we can boost how fast they learn, we know it’s good for them, it’s good for India. They’ll get better jobs. They’ll make more discoveries that benefit everyone. But not all are convinced.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow.

  Aarthi went on. “We thought, at first, that the brightest children would gain the most from Nexus.”

  “Were you right?” Sam asked.

  Aarthi shook her head. “No, actually. They do benefit of course. Quite a lot.
But the largest benefit comes to the children who’ve had the least enrichment in life, who’ve come from the poorest families, especially if they can touch the minds of children who are gifted or who at least have had the benefit of a more intellectually stimulating childhood.”

  Sam chuckled. “So you want to put rich kids and poor kids together.”

  Aarthi smiled ruefully. “It’s even harder than you might imagine. The caste system is still alive and well. Upper caste parents don’t relish the idea that their children might ever link minds with the lower castes.” She sighed. “And lower caste families – who have the most to gain – are among the most superstitious and suspicious of this sort of technology.” Aarthi shook her head. “There’ve been backlashes.”

  Sam shivered. She remembered Thai teens throwing bottles and stones at the house outside Mae Dong. “Sat pralat”, they’d yelled. Monster children. And then there was the horror that had befallen Shiva Prasad’s orphanage in Bihar, here in India.

  Sam looked around, and now more of the layout here made sense. The reinforced fence. The security guards they’d passed, with their weapons, unobtrusive enough to not frighten children, but still there, and at the ready.

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” she said to Aarthi.

  “No,” Aarthi said. “It’s going to be messy. It’s going to take a generation.” She paused. “But it’s going to happen, Samantha. The world changes. We change it.”

  Sam said nothing. They sat on the hillock, watching the teacher and the students.

  “Samantha,” Aarthi said. “I know you care about these things. I know enough about where you grew up.”

  Sam leaned back, put her hands on the hill behind her. “Why am I here, Aarthi?”

  Aarthi turned and looked her in the eye. “We’re rebooting Division Six. The rules are all changing. Our job isn’t going to be to stop advanced technology any more. It’s going to be to channel it in safe ways. Stop abuses and threats, but permit legitimate and careful applications. And also to stop backlashes. Keep people like these students safe.”

  Sam broke Aarthi’s gaze, looked back at the teacher and her four circles, at those happy, intense, completely unselfconscious faces. At that woman, helping them grow, helping them become something more.

  “We want you in on the ground floor, Samantha,” Aarthi went on. “You have the skills. You have first-hand experience that almost no one does. You could put it all to use here.”

  Sam took a deep breath.

  To be back in the job.

  Protecting the little girls. Setting up an organization focused on protecting the innocent instead of focused on killing. In a job that still allowed her to touch the children she loved.

  As soon as she had the balls to take Nexus again, anyway.

  Is that what she wanted?

  She closed her eyes. She felt the appeal. Felt joy at the idea of being useful again.

  Then she opened her eyes. And saw something she wanted even more right in front of her.

  “Aarthi,” she said, “Thank you.” She turned and looked at her friend. “I’ll help you. I don’t think I can be in the field. But I can help you get your new organization off the ground. Temporarily.”

  She paused.

  “Temporarily,” she said again. “Because I think what I really want,” she turned, and gestured with her chin, “is to be like that teacher down there.”

  37

  Love Finds a Way

  Friday 2040.11.16

  Colonel Wang Rongshang, Medical Director of Dachang Military Air Base, closed his eyes in anticipation as the car drove him through the night. It had been far too long since he’d seen his mistress. The duty had been intense since the night Shanghai failed. Soldiers from Dachang had been dispatched. Many had been injured in the rioting. Some killed. It had kept him and his staff busy ever since.

  Now at least, he could escape, escape his into Ma Jie’s arms for a few hours.

  His private car came to a stop, and Wang Rongshang climbed out. No driver tonight. Only software.

  Wang ascended the stairs of the modest building until he reached the third floor. He knocked on Ma Jie’s door, and it opened, and there she was, in a long silken gown that made him hunger for what was beneath.

  “I’ve missed you, my love,” she said.

  Wang smiled and stepped into his lover’s embrace.

  A hundred kilometers away, the Avatar smiled. This, at last, looked like a way to reach her children.

  38

  Minor Anarchy

  Saturday 2040.11.17

  “I wish I was going with you,” Rangan said again.

  “You want to get caught?” Tempest snapped, her face a checkerboard of black and white. “You want to take us all down with you?”

  “Leave off, Tempest,” Cheyenne sighed, hoisting a bag from the floor, her face similarly painted. “Not like you wanna be recog…”

  “Hey!” Tempest interrupted.

  Something flashed between their minds. Rangan caught the bare edge of it. Tempest silencing Cheyenne, before she revealed something.

  Rangan grimaced.

  These three knew almost everything about him.

  He didn’t even know their real names.

  Beggars can’t be choosers, he thought.

  “I just want to see how the mesh works,” he said.

  “You want to make yourself useful?” Tempest asked. “Check what I told you about the chemreactor hack. I don’t trust it.”

  Rangan opened his mouth.

  “The mesh is going to work great,” Angel said from behind him, before he could speak. She patted his arm as she walked by. “Thanks for your help.”

  Rangan closed his mouth and nodded. He’d been able to help a little. He wasn’t quite as horribly rusty as he’d feared. Coding was still coding.

  Angel walked over to the one blank wall, next to Tempest and Cheyenne.

  They were dressed and face-painted as court jesters, costumes that gave them an excuse for the high contrast blocks of white and black across their faces that conveniently threw off most of the cues that facial recognition software looked for. The rest of their costumes were made up of flamboyant patchwork clothes in matching and horribly clashing patterns and colors that went with the face paint; no wigs this time, but tall pointy hats that covered their real hair and conveniently contained the Nexus-boosting antennae they’d built.

  And juggling balls and pins, which in turn necessitated gear bags, which in turn created plenty of space for doses of Nexus. Many, many doses of Nexus.

  “Alright, Axon,” Tempest said. “Camera three.”

  Rangan nodded, stepped back to the table with surveillance cameras, and picked up the one she’d specified.

  “Alright,” he said, as brightly as he could, trying to ignore the obvious tension coming off their minds, to make this a moment of fun, of lightness. “Time for your close-ups!”

  Tempest scowled.

  “Come on,” he said, panning the camera across their faces, “You are undoubtedly the hottest three-person, all-female, DC-based, hacker collective with the goal of bottoms-up neural-software based…”

  Angel laughed at him.

  Cheyenne rolled her eyes.

  Tempest flipped him off.

  The camera display superimposed a grid of vertical and horizontal lines over each woman’s face. Layers of meaning appeared atop the grid immediately. Facial feature recognition. Eyes-nose-mouth. Then second level features appeared – cheekbones, jawlines, chins, brows, hairlines – seemingly at random, thrown off by the alien facial planes added by the strong contrasts of the face pant.

  NO MATCH the face recognition software on the camera said.

  He played it over their faces again, slowly, as they turned and gave him more angles, more facial expressions.

  NO MATCH it repeated.

  He moved the camera over their faces again, as they cranked up and down the lighting, as he zoomed in closer.

  NO MATCH it told
him one more time.

  Rangan looked up at the three women, about to venture out into this protest, these three women who, for reasons of their own, didn’t want to be identified. He could feel the tension coming off of them. They were taking their own risks. They were risking a lot, just to have him here.

  He nodded.

  “You’re good to go.”

  Minutes later they filed out the door, and he was alone.

  Breece rocked his head in time to the chanting, the long, natty hair of this wig moving to the rhythm; the fake scar, the fake tan, the brow and cheek and jaw implants all morphing his face. Signs and banners flew above the crowd of thousands on the National Mall. More every day. More every hour, it seemed. He’d been here for three days, himself, and the ever increasing density was palpable.

  Out of the corner of his eye he watched another Nexus dose handed out. The mules didn’t know that he was out here, had no idea what he looked like. They had simple instructions. Go to a locker. Pick up a backpack or duffel full of vials. Go to the protest. Hand them out. Concentrate on certain areas, particularly the double fence-line, where the anti-Stockton protest was squared off against the pro-Stockton loyalists: just ten feet of empty space and a few dozen cops between them.

  The mules were low level PLF wannabes, most of whom had never seen field experience, eager to show off their skills, maybe earn a real mission.

  Hell, some of them were probably cops or feds. But those could be weeded out later.

  He scanned the crowd. Kate was out there somewhere. Not the Nigerian, though. He was a bit too distinctive with his height. Too easy to remember.

  His tactical contacts told him it was almost time. He reached his hand into his pocket, found the button, waited… waited… and then pressed.