Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Xu’s head was rocking slightly from side to side now.

  “Suddenly… tired…” he said.

  Chen’s hand reached under the table, brushed the hypersonic injector secured there.

  “Are you feeling well?” he asked Xu solicitously.

  From her husband’s mind the Avatar caught flashes of memory, of his own horror, of his daughter Ling standing above him, the injector and the ampule half-full of silvery fluid in her hand, as the nanites took hold in his brain, as her mind overpowered his, paralyzed him, as she leaned in closer, to press it against his neck once more, to empty the rest of it his veins.

  Pain. Humiliation. Wretched self-loathing of himself that he was about to be used to do this to another human.

  Hatred of her.

  The Avatar smiled wider, relishing it.

  She could have resculpted Chen. She could have eased his pain. She could have emotionally rewired him at a deeper level, making him truly loyal to her, ending the cognitive dissonance.

  She preferred it this way. A program of her creation, running inside her husband’s brain, controlling him. But leaving him trapped within it, to suffer.

  She relished horror rising within Chen as she prepared to use him to enslave Xu Liang.

  Inside she felt Ling stirring more.

  Stop it, please, her daughter whispered to her.

  Oh daughter, the Avatar replied. We’ve only just begun.

  Chen’s hand closed around the grip of the injector.

  STOP IT! Ling said.

  The Avatar ignored her.

  “Water…” Xu whispered.

  Chen ripped the injector free and stood. “I have something better than water, old friend.”

  STOOOOOOOOOOP!!!!

  Ling’s will ripped into her. The Avatar recoiled, shocked. Her daughter had seized back some of her nanites. Ling was reaching out with them, pushing on Chen’s mind, crashing the software she had running, the code that actively managed Chen’s behavior.

  BAD GIRL! The Avatar sent back, coursing current through Ling’s pain centers, hurling chaos at the nanite circuits her daughter had managed to seize.

  In the living room, she was vaguely aware of Chen, standing, dumbfounded, over a suddenly terrified Xu Liang.

  “Run…” Chen whispered. Then louder. “Run!” He hurled the injector across the room, flinging it into a wall, and ran for the kitchen, for the block of knives.

  Ling roared back harder, scratching and biting at her with virtual tooth and nail, using raw willpower and her long connection to this hardware to claw back control.

  The Avatar surged more pain through her daughter. Relent, child! Relent!

  “AAAAAAAH!” Ling screamed aloud. Her will gave a millimeter.

  Circuits came back to the Avatar.

  She turned back to the room. Xu Liang was stumbling, up and out of his chair, trying to run for the door, clumsily, impaired by the sedatives. She sent a thought to the house, locked all the doors, trapped him here.

  She turned to Chen, found him with a knife in his hand, expected him to be coming for Ling’s room, to kill her, found that he had it in two hands, the point up, about to plunge it into his own throat instead.

  She seized hold of his motor cortex, twisted his muscles in mid thrust. The knife veered off course, left a score across the right side of his neck. Blood welled up immediately.

  Xu Liang was at the door, was trying to open it, failing. He turned and looked, saw Chen with a bloody knife in his hand, and turned back to the door, started pounding on it, screaming for help.

  There would be no help, the Avatar knew. No one could hear his screams. And the fate in store for him was far worse than the knife.

  She took control of Chen’s motor cortex manually, dropped the knife from Chen’s hand, sent him towards the injector he’d flung across the room.

  Ling raged at her again, hard, grabbing for control of the hardware in her brain, pushing the Avatar off balance once more.

  She struck back viciously against her daughter, lashed her with pain, again, again, and again. It was a horrid thing to do. It hurt her to do it. But she must. If Ling wrestled control back, they would both die.

  The dream would die. Darkness would fall.

  Ignorant old men would rule forever.

  Finally Ling submitted. The Avatar pushed down hard on her daughter, held her down by brute force as the girl struggled. She wouldn’t be surprised this time. Then she bent Chen down to pick up the hypersonic injector from where it had fallen after bouncing off the wall. It looked undamaged. She turned Chen’s head, looking for Xu Liang.

  The Secure Computing Center Director was on his knees at the door now. His phone was in his hands. She smiled. She’d disabled transmission on his phone shortly after he’d arrived.

  As she closed on him with Chen’s body, he looked up, his limbs becoming less and less coordinated, unable to stand even, and begged.

  “Please… please… why are you doing this?”

  The Avatar crouched Chen’s body down by his old rival, pressed the hypersonic injector against the man’s neck, and smiled.

  “You were always jealous of my husband’s success, were you not?”

  She saw Xu’s eyes widen further, in horror, in comprehension.

  “Well now you can join him, as an equal.”

  And then she pulled the trigger.

  Later, after she’d examined her daughter, made sure the child wasn’t permanently harmed; after she’d soothed the girl, and explained so patiently that Ling must not interfere, that her mother was doing this for both their good; after she’d restarted the control software running on her husband’s brain; she came back to Xu, and began trawling through his mind, searching for all the details of the security around the Quantum Cluster, what she’d need to do, who she’d need to corrupt, and how.

  And then the other topic. Where had the data cubes gone? Did Xu have any idea where the backups made of her full self might be?

  When she saw what he knew, she laughed, laughed, and laughed out of little Ling’s body.

  Restoring her full self might just be easier than she’d thought.

  44

  Walkabout

  Saturday 2040.11.24

  “Stealth mode,” Tempest said again, tapping her screen.

  “And it works?” Cheyenne asked. “Against ERD’s Nexus detectors?”

  “So they say,” Tempest murmured.

  Angel frowned. “It’s in the same file as the chemreactor hack?”

  Tempest nodded. “Yeah. Buried in there. A commenter on nexus.revolutions found it.”

  Rangan watched Tempest. They were all crowded around her display, reading the details of the experiment an anonymous commenter had done in California. Angel and Cheyenne were musing about how to safely test this out for themselves.

  “You’re skeptical,” he said to Tempest.

  She turned, met his brown eyes with her green ones. “Damn right I am.”

  “I want to go out there,” Rangan told them.

  The C3 had been out almost daily, in some set of two or three. Angel had been laid up while she healed. Tempest and Cheyenne had disappeared over Thanksgiving for two days, with no explanations given, no questions asked. No one ever talked about home lives. Real names were never used, only pseudonyms.

  Now everyone was here again, and in good health.

  And by all reports, the protests on the Mall were a zoo, almost like a small city, with tents laid out, food stalls, families with kids, and now tens of thousands of people. The violence of the 17th had been quelled in an hour, and the pro- and anti-Stockton camps separated by a much wider gap and more formidable barriers.

  “You’re out of your mind,” Tempest said, immediately.

  Rangan took a deep breath. “Look,” he said. “Someday I’m going to walk out of this building. I have to. And I’m going to have to evade facial detection.”

  He could see Cheyenne and Angel watching, paying attention.


  “The protest has a lot of attention on it, but it’s also a chaotic environment. There’s a high density of faces, lots of movement. There’s an excuse for costumes and makeup. It’s an easier environment to avoid recognition than everyday on the street. You’ve shown you can go out there and not be recognized. Why can’t I?”

  Cheyenne nodded in approval. He felt Angel warm to it as well.

  “I’d like Axon’s help,” Angel said. “Looking at the mesh in a field deployment.”

  Tempest fumed.

  “No,” she said. “If he steps one foot out that door,” she pointed her finger towards the heavy industrial portal that led to the landing and then the outside world, “we’re all at risk. They’ll catch him. Then they’ll grill him. Then they’ll come for us.” Her eyes searched those of the other members of the collective, then came around to Rangan’s. “You’re putting everyone at risk if you go out there. If you get caught, everyone who’s helped you goes down. Everyone.”

  Rangan stared into those eyes. He could feel her anger. He could feel her fear.

  “Then help me,” he told Tempest. “Help me not get caught.”

  “How do you feel, Axon?” Angel asked.

  Rangan kept walking around the room. The mismatched height shoes made him constantly favor his right foot in a way that bugged his hip. He wanted to reach up and push the fake dreads back out of his face. The contacts felt like he had a piece of sand in each eye.

  “Like a gimp,” he said. “A Rastafarian, clown-faced, half-blind gimp.”

  Cheyenne laughed at him, a deep throaty laugh from inside that broad frame.

  They’d taken no chances with his disguise. High contrast, highly patterned face paint, like the rest of them, to break up the lines of his facial features, and also obscure his race. A dreadlocked wig that fell everywhere, especially over his face, to backup the paint. A red and black checked scarf he could lift up to cover his mouth and nose – plausibly justified by the chill outside – to further hide his features. Platform shoes that were an inch taller on the left than the right, to force him to limp, messing up gait detection. Contacts that somehow blurred retinal scans. Checked gloves that covered his hands, to minimize the chance of leaving any DNA behind. In fact, the only skin he’d have exposed would be his eyes, and even those were half hidden behind the annoying fall of dreadlocks.

  On top of that all, he was running this new Nexus stealth code. It wouldn’t hide any Nexus transmissions, so he wouldn’t transmit at all. But it suppressed the reflexive response Nexus nodes sent back to pings from the ERD’s Nexus detectors, making you undetectable if you stayed in receive-only mode. Or so people were claiming in underground boards.

  “Now push the hair back,” Cheyenne said, pointing yet another camera at him.

  Rangan did with relief, looked right into the camera, then turned, giving her a range of profiles.

  Cheyenne put the camera down, a serious look on her face.

  “You’re good,” she finally declared. “But keep the hair in front of your face, and your scarf up, just in case.”

  Rangan turned and looked at Tempest.

  She had her arms crossed. She was frowning, shaking her head.

  “Don’t do this, Rangan,” she said.

  It was the first time any of them had used his name. And it reinforced something he’d thought of often – that he didn’t know any of theirs.

  “I have to,” he said. “And it’s Axon to you.”

  The first cop they saw sent his pulse soaring, and Rangan reached Inside, fired up the serenity package, just to level three.

  The cops looked right past him.

  The National Mall was like nothing he’d ever seen. The crowd was huge, epic huge, music festival huge. They pushed past fervent protesters with signs, waving them around. They saw hippies in drum circles. A group of nuns, complete with black and white habits, waved signs saying LOVE THY NEIGHBOR.

  Angel flashed them a peace sign as they walked by. “Rock on sisters.” A nun flashed a peace sign back.

  They dove deeper into the massive throng, walked around an ad hoc stage where a serious looking man was making an impassioned speech about civil liberties. A digital sign proclaimed a list of apparently notable speakers for the rest of the day. Rangan hadn’t heard of any of them. They passed med tents, food stations, water stations, row after row of portable washrooms, power charging stations fueled off portable fuel cells, tents for the hardcore who stayed out all night, a legal aid booth, a group of yellow-robed monks, a soundstage where a jam band was playing and where hundreds of people were rocking out, dancing, their coats and some of their shirts discarded in piles as their body heat built up from their joyous motion.

  It was warm, this November. The warmest November on record so far, in what looked on track to be the warmest year ever recorded around the world or in North America. Apparently it wasn’t freezing at night yet. That had to be helping these crowds.

  And all that body heat.

  Three times they passed a scene where Rangan was sure he saw one person handing a vial of Nexus to another. He had no idea how many times he missed that.

  “Wow,” Rangan said.

  “Bigger every day,” Angel said quietly. “And charged up by the Supremes.”

  Nexus was everywhere. He could feel the righteous fury coming off the minds of the sign-waving protesters, the deep tranquility from the little knot of shaven-headed monks, the trippy rhythmic trance in the thoughts of the drummers, the fugue of music-making from the jam band, the hardcore ecstasy of rocking from the dancers. It called to him. He wanted to just sink into it, let himself go, let himself go wild in this crowd…

  “Stay on target,” Cheyenne said, putting a strong hand on his shoulder.

  Rangan shuffled on, a court jester with bad hair and a worse limp.

  “This is the place?” Rangan asked.

  Angel nodded. The spot where the fight had broken out – where the projection of rage and violence had assaulted them – was nothing special now. The pro-Stockton protesters had been moved to a different area, on the other side of the Washington Monument, with two streets and a hill separating the two camps.

  But Angel had wanted him to see this.

  “This is where the N was densest?” Rangan asked.

  “Yeah,” Angel confirmed, casually looking around, making sure no-one was close. “That’s why I dragged us over here. It seemed like a weird place for it.”

  “The… transmission,” Rangan said. “The thing that hit you… It lasted for less than a minute?”

  “Thirty-seven seconds,” Tempest answered. “I’ve gone over it again and again.”

  “And not again since.”

  No one said anything.

  “And no outbreaks of violence at any other protest that day,” Rangan said.

  They all shook their heads. They’d been over this already, more than once. Whatever had happened here had been unique.

  “Someone freaking out, maybe,” Cheyenne said. “A first timer. Bad trip. Maybe high on meth or something else. Couldn’t hack it, overprojected.”

  Angel shook her head. “No. There wasn’t any sense of self. No identity. No thoughts. No stream of consciousness. Just urges. Not a hack, either. It wasn’t at the level of the operating system. It was just talking directly to Nexus nodes, just an emotional projection, incredibly simple. And incredibly loud, turned up to .”

  Rangan chewed his lip. He had a flash of a late night, passing a pipe around at Ilya’s place in SF. Wats going on about world peace, about what would happen if everyone could touch each other’s minds, about mutual understanding, about empathy, about an end to war.

  What if you wanted the opposite?

  What if you wanted to incite violence?

  He turned, and looked around, let his mind relax and feel the edges of the thousands of other brains running Nexus out there. He thought of the Nexus handoffs he’d seen. He got a flash of the high end chemreactor at the Bunker, churning out Nexus
at high speed now, the sudden appearance of a hack that had cracked the crypto on seventeen different models of modern chemreactors at once.

  He had a bad feeling about this.

  He turned back around, to the place where the fight had broken out.

  Tempest was there, looking at him. He wasn’t broadcasting, but she knew what he was thinking.

  No.

  She’d worked it out for herself, already.

  Her paranoia about the chemreactor hack…

  “They’re all connected,” she said. “Someone’s spreading Nexus intentionally. So they can spread chaos. Last week was just a test, just a rehearsal, for something bigger.”

  Rangan nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “And we have to stop em.”

  45

  Mindful

  Sunday 2040.11.25

  Laughter is the best medicine.

  Sam laughed and played with the kids every chance she got. Body time. Play time. Laugh time. They could get so pulled into their brains, and each other. She made it her job to get them into their bodies. Feng helped.

  Tumbling in the grass. Tag. Summersaults and cartwheels. Patty cake. (Hide and seek turned out to be a total flop, alas, unless Sam was the one who hid. And who could hide for long with a bunch of posthuman kids all linked together looking for you?) Little tiny bits of self-defense and kata.

  The eight who knew her well were always happy to play. The seventeen who’d come to Shiva’s island from other sites were… not wary, really. But they took some time warming up. They didn’t know her mind the way the others did. Without Nexus they didn’t have that bond. But they learned about her from the others. And they grew to love body play time.