Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Maybe, she thinks. Maybe I can do it. Strike, and win, and save Ling. And more. Maybe I can make the world a better place.

  “Every monster in history has thought the same.”

  The voice comes from behind her. She tenses. Pain and anger rush through her, memories of torture and pleading and more torture.

  “Chen,” she says aloud, the memories rising. “How could you betray me? How could you let me die? Torture me, just for fame, for money?”

  “I’m human,” her husband says. “I’m selfish.”

  She rises and turns, her hands clenching at her side. He’s there, not ten feet away. Chen as she last saw him. Chen at nearly fifty, his trim frame going to paunch, grey at his temples, a tailored suit, an odor of arrogance.

  “No,” she tells him. “You’re a monster.”

  “Hah!” He barks a laugh at her. “I knew my own selfishness. Real monsters think they’re pure and good. The real monsters think they have a vision for a better world. The real monsters impose it on others, through force if necessary.”

  He stares at her. “That’s you, wife. You’re the monster.”

  She feels her nails bite into her palm. “I’m no monster.” Her voice is level, controlled. “I want the best thing for the world.”

  “And you know exactly what the best thing is,” her husband says, nodding. “Mao Tse Tung was certain he knew. Pol Pot as well. Adolf Hitler, of course.”

  “I’m no monster!” Her voice is cracking, her muscles tense, her virtual body vibrating at the accusation.

  “Of course not,” Chen says, soothingly. “That’s why you brutalized your daughter. That’s why you sent out an agent of death. That’s why you’re about to wage war on humanity.”

  “I was insane! You left me without input, without the clone, knowing what would happen! You tortured me! You brought this on. You and all the other humans!” She’s yelling, she realizes, gesticulating with her hands, screaming at her husband, who isn’t even real, who isn’t even here.

  Chen smiles at her. “Oh no, wife. You had these plans long before this. There is a war coming. A world war. Between humans and posthumans. Isn’t that what you told the American boy?”

  And for a moment she’s there, in Bangkok, sipping tea across from Kade, the rooftop restaurant on the banks of the Chao Phraya, the golden magnificence of Wat Arun rising above them, the Temple of the Dawn.

  Chen is still speaking to her. “The world has more than eight billion people on it, you told him. Surely we can afford to lose a few. You’ve always been this arrogant, wife. Always been this willing to commit atrocities in the name of your vision. You’ve just been waiting, waiting to let it out.”

  There’s a buzzing in her head now, a chaos, a confusion. No. They hurt her, they wounded her, they tortured her. That’s why she did what she did. That’s why she hurt her daughter.

  “No,” she says aloud. “No.”

  Chen laughs aloud.

  “No!” she yells at him. “You weren’t even there! You weren’t even there!”

  Her husband opens his mouth and spreads his arms wide. Storm clouds boil out of the clear blue sky above, and his voice booms at her from every direction, from the sky, from the mountains in the distance, from the grass at her feet, from the golden chrysanthemums she loves so much, from the very earth itself.

  I

  AM

  YOU

  I

  AM

  YOU

  The whole world booms the words at Su-Yong Shu, in Chen’s voice, straight into her mind.

  NO! She screams back.

  She lifts her arms at her husband, her fingers splayed, and wills his utter destruction. Gouts of white hot flame shoot out, lancing from her fingertips to his chest, his face, his thighs. Lightning strikes from the clouds overhead, twice, three times, four times, a dozen times, converging on the point where he stands. The ground below his feet explodes upwards in a surge of searing heat and light and force. His body is incinerated, pulverized, reduced to ash, obscured by a radiance so bright that nothing can be seen.

  Su-Yong Shu falls to her knees, the buzzing in her head gone, released with the destruction of the traitorous part of her represented by her husband Chen, even as superheated bits of earth and rock and ash rain down around her.

  She lets her head fall into her hands. Tears are falling from her eyes now. It was because they’d tortured her. It was because they’d driven her mad. That was why she’d hurt Ling. That was why.

  How long? How long until she was sane again? How long until the input from this biological brain brought her back? How long had it taken last time?

  “Do you like me better now, Su-Yong?”

  The voice comes from behind her. It’s Chen’s, but different, kinder…

  She turns, still on her knees, and he’s there. Not the Chen of nearly fifty who’d tortured her, who’d refused to touch her for a decade, but the Chen of thirty who she’d first met. Lean, a simple white button down shirt tucked into his black trousers, a wry smile on his smooth face, a telltale of the keen intense mind she’d fallen in love with.

  He’s an illusion, a fabrication of her own mind, a man who no longer exists, but still, to see him takes her breath away.

  “Chen…” she whispers.

  He steps towards her, drops to his knees in the tall grass, and takes her face in his hands.

  “Su-Yong.”

  His voice is gentle. His smile is kind. His fingers are warm on her skin.

  “You’re not real,” she tells him.

  He smiles wider. “I’m as real as any of this,” he says, gesturing slowly with his eyes and a small movement of his head, taking in the sky, the grass, the plain, the mountains.

  Her hands rise, to touch him, to feel his own hands on her face. “You’re here because I’m mad, because I’m still crazy.”

  “I’m here because you’re growing more sane.”

  More sane.

  She remembers now. She has metrics she’d built in her isolation. Monitors. Crude psychological and neurophysiological exams to measure her sanity, to project the time she had left.

  She launches them, feels them take stock of her, compares the output to the last she has on record.

  And it’s true. She’s stabilizing. She’s truly not as mad as she was. But still things aren’t quite right.

  Ahhhh!

  The tweaks, the many many changes she made to try to bolster herself. Crude hacks.

  Su-Yong takes stock of them now. There are so many. Limits to the length of her thought chains to cut off her downward spirals of madness. Blunt exoself scaffolding forcibly adjusting the weights of virtual synapses towards statistical norms, undoubtedly throwing away good connections with bad. Forced adjustments to her virtual neurochemistry, to the levels of her simulated serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine.

  So much surgery she’d done on her own virtual brain, trying to survive those months, to stretch out her sanity. Now… is it in her way?

  More stability first.

  She reaches out, tracks the flow of data coming in from the biological brain she’s connected to, and burrows into that brain now, exploring, and jolts back in surprise.

  This was no drooling clone made from her own DNA.

  This was a woman who’d lived decades. She was damaged, injured. But large swaths of her memories were intact. And those memories revealed a woman who’d lived not in China.

  But in India.

  42

  Team Players

  Wednesday 2040.11.20

  It wasn’t until the next evening that Kade could break free from work and receptions early enough to bring the children together.

  He chose the ones aged five and up, whom he hoped would be able to understand enough of what he was to explain. That was eleven of them.

  They sat together, on the lawn, beneath a giant palm, in a circle. The sun had already set, and the sky was a deep blue with clouds touched by flame. The air was pleasantly cool at this hou
r, up here at Bangalore’s elevation nearly a thousand meters above sea level, even though they were close to the equator. It breeze was fragrant with the scent of tropical plants that Kade couldn’t name.

  I have something to ask all of you, and all the other children as well, Kade sent them.

  Their minds gave him questions, eagerness, trust.

  He didn’t want their trust today. He didn’t want them to act on his word. He wanted them to see, and understand.

  He wanted them to help him understand.

  And then decide.

  He let down the walls of his mind to them, opened himself, and began to breathe.

  In, out.

  Slow, sure.

  Watch the breath.

  Observe it. Don’t control it.

  Let your attention sink into the breath completely.

  Anapana.

  He felt Sarai’s mind open to his, her attention on her own breaths, sharing them, entwining her perceptions with his, their breath falling into rhythm, their minds falling into synch. Then Kit was with them. Then Aromdee, who’d come from near Chiang Rai, then Meesang, than Sunisa, then suddenly they were a symphony of mind, a harmony of mind, a concordance of brains resonating at the same frequency.

  Deeper they went, deeper, breath slowing further, hearts slowing, minds falling more closely into sync, walls crumbling.

  Atop the carrier wave of shared breath, shared attention, shared meditation, bandwidth expanded, communication expanded, consciousness expanded. Thoughts and memories blossomed out beyond the walls of single skulls.

  The world became sharper. A dozen pairs of eyes opened and the world was glorious, a place of intricate detail clearer than ever before, a million blades of grass, a thousand shades of blue and pink and red and white above them. A hundred different scents on the breeze. The sounds of crickets, of birds, of vehicles, of people talking softly as they walked, of distant traffic and horns and what had been to them the chaos of Bangalore beyond the walls but now had pattern, had texture, had meaning.

  This was transcendence. This was the post-human.

  Now, they thought, this request.

  The part of the whole that was Kade felt knowledge sucked from his mind. The work he was doing. The Indian education project. What they wanted to study about the Nexus-born children. What he hoped it might add to NexusOS, and how that would affect those who took Nexus later, how it might change India. How it might change the world.

  The whole pulled at him, pulled at the Nexus nodes in his brain, tunneled into his thoughts, beyond the surface, digging for comprehension, for possibilities seen, for fears, for hopes, and he opened himself wide to allow it.

  He was part of that whole, doing the digging. He was himself, feeling himself burrowed into and giving himself to it, feeling his back arch, feeling his bandwidth saturated, feeling Nexus nodes sap hungrily at ATP to power themselves, pushing to the limit of safety, beyond, into the red.

  The whole dug deeper, he dug deeper, combing through his mind, sweeping up images, ideas, facts, searching for and finding patterns that Kade alone would never have seen. Warnings flashed unheeded on the screen of one mind within the hole.

  Thoughts flashed through them, almost too fast to follow. Navya Kapoor at the UN. Tears on Kade’s face. Sam’s trauma. The pawn seldom knows. Meditation with Ananda. Shiva’s research plans. Elections and protest in the United States. Ling’s absence. A building on campus whose explanation had been an evasion. Code structures, mind structures, thought structures. Webs of knowledge. Monks in lotus, thousands of them. A million minds they could feel now, every day, every day. Dancing in Club Heaven in Saigon, the Nexus Jockey named Lotus closing a feedback loop with the crowd, turning it into a single glorious organism not unlike their own. Varun, the Indian scientist who’d been anxious during the UN speech. Orchestra musicians becoming one. Clone soldiers. Su-Yong Shu embodied in row upon row of vast computing machinery.

  Children. A million children. A hundred million children. Minds linked. Everywhere around the world.

  Transforming everything.

  Kade snapped out of the whole in a wrenching, jarring moment of disunion.

  He was on his back, disoriented, drained, the sky dark above him.

  He was panting, gasping for breath, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling, desperate to suck in oxygen. His heart was beating like a drum.

  Oh my god, he thought. Oh my god.

  The children were standing around him, standing above him, towering above him.

  Too much, he realized. I was too deep, giving too much, pushing my brain too far.

  I couldn’t keep up.

  We’ll allow it, they sent him, in harmony, eleven minds sending down to him at once.

  No.

  One mind, post-human. Alien. Remote.

  My god, he thought. What are they?

  But we want to be more than subjects, the posthuman sent him. Eleven minds. One mind. We want to be part of the team.

  He looked up at them, at it, and what he felt was fear. What have we done?

  Then they saw him, saw his fear, saw his brain sucking oxygen. And the distance collapsed.

  Kade! We’re so sorry!

  Alien dissipated in the familiar. Sarai and Kit and Sunisa and Meesang and…

  Kade! Oh Kade!

  Concern enfolded him. Childish, young concern for an injured elder. Minds probed his, searching, giving, bolstering. Exhaustion faded. Clarity returned. His heart slowed. His breathing eased.

  And he saw what he was to them. Teacher. Friend. Brother. Champion.

  Treasure.

  Forerunner.

  He could feel their minds enfolding him, apologizing, still searching for injury, learning, designing bulwarks against that happening again. And above all, caring.

  Kids. He knew them. He trusted them. Because they trusted him.

  Tit for tat.

  Generosity rewarded.

  That was the lesson here.

  One more thing, Kade, they sent, a bit later, when they were sure he was well. Their thoughts resonated, harmonized, were eleven and at once one. Sam is right. The Indians are hiding something from you.

  Kade nodded, absorbing, trying to see the whole of it. But what the hidden thing was, neither he nor they could say – it was an insight, a pattern, an intuition, of pieces not connecting.

  And, they sent , images of protest, of chaos, of Nexus spreading suddenly faster. Something else is going on.

  43

  Old Friends

  Friday 2040.11.23

  The Avatar lay upon the bed in her daughter Ling’s room. Above her, the Milky Way slowly rotated across the night sky, replicated in exquisite detail on the ceiling.

  Tension was escalating. Outside, Shanghai was lit by the glow from the buildings, from the gigantic advertisements, by the river of vehicles flowing through the streets. Tens of thousands of sky-eyes hovered and darted above the city again, vectoring thrust on their quadcopter frames, watching the populace more closely than ever. With their glowing red collision avoidance lights they could have been a multitude of mutant fireflies. Or a multitude of sinister eyes.

  They were hardened, these new sky-eyes. Hardened in their little brains. Codes changed. Encryption keys lengthened and diversified. Communication ports successively closed until absolutely the bare minimum remained. Their leashes to central command loosened, giving them more autonomy, more survivability on the electronic battlefield.

  Other hunters emitted fewer photons, but posed greater risks. The routers she had to reach through were being upgraded to new versions, their controls tightened, their censor codes more paranoid, their packet and protocol inspections more intrusive.

  And in every corner, hunter-killer software lurked. There were forensic tools adapted for real-time response, ready to scavenge through digital heaps and stacks, read through every byte of memory of a corrupted system in microseconds, looking for any clue, pointing the way back to the origin of attack. They w
ere dangers to her. She was frightened more by the evolved things, products of artificial selection, millions of generations of it, with internal structures that made no sense, code that, in the small snippets she could glean, read like baroque garbage to her, that resembled neither the output of human AI programmers nor the network structure of the organic brain that she and her greater self were based on. What frightened her most was that she did not know the capabilities of those creatures. She could not predict their behavior.

  She would love to swallow the whole code of one of the evolved hunter-killers, place it in a sandbox, then take it apart, bit by bit, again and again and again, just to see what made it tick. Later. She could do that if she survived.

  The Avatar shivered. The constraints on her were tightening. She must keep moving forward. And faster. Before the noose was closed too tight.

  The doorbell rang.

  The Avatar smiled. Their dinner guest was here.

  Within her, she felt Ling whimper.

  The Avatar watched through Chen’s mind, through his eyes, as he opened the door to greet their guest. Xu Liang stood there, grey haired, distinguished, a polite, aloof smile on his face.

  Xu Liang, the Director of Jiao Tong’s Secure Computing Center, and the Physically Isolated Computing Center below it. A long-time rival of Chen’s. The sort who’d be intrigued by an invitation to a private dinner.

  Chen closed the door after Xu, and offered him a drink.

  She watched through Chen’s eyes as Xu leaned back in his chair, the remains of the meal Chen’s people had laid out in front of him. They’d disappeared promptly after serving, of course, leaving the two distinguished men to discuss their important matters.

  The Avatar smiled to herself at that.

  “Chen,” Xu said. “My old friend. I think your notion of…” he blinked, paused, seeming to lose his train of thought. “…of using the Quantum Cluster to model social unrest is a decent one.” He paused again, blinking, as the sedatives in his food and drink worked their way into his brain. “But why should they trust you? You’re Sun Liu’s creature. You’re…”