Apex

by Ramez Naam

  And at the end, she’d force one or two or three to play her favorite game.

  “What am I thinking?”

  They’d be sitting cross-legged. They’d chat about something. She’d stop. Would alter her body language.

  “What am I thinking?”

  Could they still interact with a human they weren’t linked with? Could they find connections that weren’t obvious on the surface? Or would she grow to feel less and less real without the direct presence in their minds?

  They surprised her. They did well. Sometimes, when they were in groups, scarily well.

  Sunday night, Sarai asked if she could stay up later than the others, for just a little bit. She was the oldest. Sam gave her permission. Just one hour. They took a walk, through the campus, between the trees, under the stars. Sam took Sarai’s hand in hers. The air smelled of jasmine. It was pleasantly cool, a benefit of Bangalore’s elevation.

  “What am I thinking?” Sarai asked.

  Sam laughed and looked at the girl.

  “You’re thinking that turnabout is fair play.”

  “I miss Jake,” Sarai said.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Sam pulled her closer.

  “What do you do when you’re sad that he’s gone?” Sarai asked.

  Sam’s heart ached.

  “Sometimes…” she said. “I cry. Sometimes I meditate. Or I run.” She paused. “It takes time. The heart heals, like anything else.”

  She turned Sarai towards her, looked her in the eyes. “And other times, when I miss Jake, I remember that I only have you in my life because of him.” She looked up at the stars. “And that he’d be so happy about the things that have happened. That you’re safe. That the world is a better place for kids who are special.”

  They walked again.

  As they returned home, to the former base commander’s home converted to their use, Sarai spoke. “I think it’ll be easier when you’re back.”

  That night, as Sam drifted off to bed, she wondered if she was selfish for not taking the Nexus again yet.

  Maybe I’m ready. Maybe I’d help the kids more than I’d hurt them.

  She woke hours later in a panic attack, Jake dying in her arms again.

  Her heart was pounding. Her chest was heaving. Her skin was lathered in sweat. Her sheets were soaked.

  "You'd be happy" she told his ghost. "You'd be so happy. Thank you."

  Then she forced herself up, to the floor, forced herself into a cross-legged seated position, forced herself to her other therapy.

  Anapana: observe the breath. Observe the thoughts rising. Still the mind.

  Then vipassana: observe the body, go deeper, watch the without judgment as the mind works, as it stills. Tranquility grows as insight arrives.

  Then metta: the meditation of loving-kindness.

  Let the compassion rise. Let the loving-kindness rise. Recognize that the source is infinite. Direct the flow outward. Outward towards Jake, who’d given her so much love, who’d mentored and cared for these children, who’d shared those precious months with her. Towards Kevin, who’d saved her, who’d mentored her. Towards her parents, who deserved so much better than what they got. Towards a long list of people who’d been there for her, or whom she’d harmed, or simply known.

  Towards Kade and Rangan and Ilya and Su-Yong Shu who’d made this thing, Nexus, that would let her connect with these children again. Someday.

  And finally towards herself, flawed, but healing, and growing, and doing the best she could.

  At the end of it all, she felt washed clean, rinsed out by the loving-kindness.

  I'm not ready yet, she told herself. Not yet. But I'll get there.

  She walked into her new office later that morning, past the security checkpoints and the palm scanner and the retinal scanner and all the rest.

  Her office-mate was there, waiting for her, one arm in a sling.

  “Morning, Feng,” Sam said.

  Feng swiveled his chair and grinned at her. “Good morning, co-worker Samantha!”

  In his good hand was a steaming mug of tea emblazoned with the words “ASK ME ABOUT HUMAN CLONING”.

  Sam laughed.

  Feng laughed in response, bouncing up and down in his chair like a little boy, utterly delighted, green tea sloshing out of his mug and all over him.

  Sam shook her head and kept laughing.

  Feng saw the tea spilling everywhere, and that just made him laugh harder, uncontrollably hard, bouncing even more, the mug shaking up and down vociferously.

  Steaming hot green tea splashed everywhere.

  Sam laughed harder, hands rising to her face, seriously worried she couldn’t breathe she was laughing so hard.

  Feng threw back his head, howling uproariously with delight, utterly unphased by the scalding hot liquid.

  Sam collapsed into her own chair, hands clenched around her belly, aching with laughter.

  Oh, Feng.

  Eventually, there was no more tea in the mug. Feng went to get towels, and Sam surveyed the office.

  They were officially external advisors. Consultants on Division Six’s refactoring. She wasn’t actually sure to what extent the Indians expected them to add value, and to what extent this was simply a way to keep them close, and under observation. But it sure was a nice office.

  And she really couldn’t beat the company.

  Sam looked over, at where Feng had returned and was trying to mop up the mess he’d made. She suppressed a chortle. She crossed to the window instead.

  “Never allowed to laugh when I was being trained,” Feng said. “Very serious childhood! Guess I’m not so coordinated that way,”

  “Mhmmm,” Sam said, grinning. “Or you did that on purpose.”

  “Me?” Feng sounded hurt. “Never!”

  They were up on the third floor. From here, the view took in one of the many green open spaces of the research campus. And in fact, if she slid as far as she could to one edge of the window…

  Sam smiled to herself.

  Yes. From one side, she had a partial view of the building she was most interested in.

  The building she knew the least about.

  The building where that fellow she’d noticed the night of the reception worked. That fellow who’d acted nervous. That fellow who’d left early.

  From here, she could just barely see the building where Varun Verma worked.

  And she’d be keeping an eye on it.

  Yes she would.

  46

  Escalating Tensions

  Monday 2040.11.26

  Carolyn Pryce watched and listened as Admiral Stanley McWilliams, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stood to give his portion of the briefing on the situation with China.

  Alan Keyes, the Director of the CIA, had already given his part. And it was maddening, full of conjecture, gaps in the data, internal inconsistencies. The President had grilled Keyes on them.

  Pryce had read all the reports already. Who was Bo Jintao? Was the State Security Minister really the man in charge of the country now? No, some reports said, Bao Zhuang was still Party General Secretary, still President of the state. That’s exactly what the Chinese Ambassador had told SecState last week.

  Ignore that, other reports said, Bo Jintao was now Chairman of the Party Security Committee and suddenly Premier of the State Council. He was suddenly the number two man in the country, politically, but also retained his control of the police and now had control of the military, something almost unprecedented. And his rivals, like Sun Liu, were on the outs. Bao Zhuang had been the moderate, the neutral in those disputes between the pro-democracy, pro-advanced technology progressives on the one side, and the pro-Copenhagen, pro-control reactionaries on the other.

  Now the progressives were suddenly off to ‘spend more time with their families.’ Under house arrest was closer to the truth, from what CIA was able to discern.

  She stared at the pictures of the various Politburo members arranged across one side of the Situation Room. Whic
h of these factions, which of these men, had ordered the attack on Barnes? And why? Just to distract the US? It still didn’t make any sense. Could it have been someone else inside China? A rogue unit inside their military or intelligence establishment? Could NSA be mistaken entirely? It wasn’t unknown.

  Whoever was behind it, it had caused a very quiet, but very significant reaction. NSA had upped its monitoring of Chinese traffic going through NAES, the North American Electronic Shield firewall that protected the US and Canada. They’d installed passive traps for the hack used against Barnes’s home, and other known Chinese hacks, on thousands of pieces of hardware, so it could be detected in real-time if it were ever used again. NSA was upping its efforts to crack communications of Politburo members, and especially Bo Jintao.

  And real, physical hardware was moving. Pryce tuned back in as McWilliams showed them, his voice carrying the somber note of a soldier who knows just how horrible his weapons are, just how terrible their use would be.

  On the giant map that was the wallscreen, the Third and Seventh fleets were quietly re-orienting themselves, white and black streaks moving across an open blue sea. More than a thousand drone and human-piloted aircraft, a hundred robotic combat vessels, another fifty legacy combat ships, half a dozen carrier task forces, and almost a hundred thousand soldiers between the US and Asia had received new orders. Orders that placed them in a capacity to absorb, respond to, or pre-empt any further Chinese provocation. Miles overhead, almost a hundred satellites had had their missions slightly altered. NRO monitoring satellites had increased their surveillance of Chinese military installations. Stealthed hunter-killer birds were slowly, ever-so-slowly adjusting their orbits to put them in position to take out Chinese satellites should it ever be required. And the JAVELIN birds, codeword-classified space-to-ground weapons platforms, were running through tests of software that should never, ever be used.

  Never.

  Damn Miles Jameson for ever approving their launch.

  Damn him and his people for not answering her calls now.

  And then there were the nukes. The Third and Seventh fleets had their share of tactical warheads. The air wings based in South Korea were going on alert, ready to use weapons stationed there nominally to deter their North Korean neighbors. And below the waves, a dozen robotic nuclear missile submarines, stealthy, nearly undetectable things, were passing ever closer to China’s shore, their mix of nuclear-tipped ballistic and cruise missiles able to put as many as a thousand warheads down on the Chinese mainland with just minutes of warning.

  What a nightmare.

  Carolyn Pryce looked at the President, watched him as he watched McWilliams, and then shook her head. She wanted to just call her Chinese counterpart and ask “What the hell were you thinking?” But that would give away Intel. All of this, all these maneuvers, could be attributed to the coup, if they were even noticed at all.

  CIA needed to dig deeper. NSA needed to intercept more. They needed to know what was really going on.

  Assuming, that was, that the Chinese really had hacked Barnes’s home. She needed to talk to Lisa Brandt. She needed to know what the woman knew. But FBI and ERD were still watching Holtzman’s former student and lover from afar, still hoping she’d lead them to some additional clues that way.

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs finished his presentation on a somber note. “Upping our deterrence level increases the risk of misunderstanding and accidental conflict. Any conflict here has the risk of escalating rapidly to unthinkable levels. I and my command staff are in contact with our peers on the other side to reduce that risk. My main request is that civilian leadership do the same. The more we rattle our sabers, the more we have to have lines of communication open.”

  “Thank you, Admiral McWilliams,” Pryce said. She meant it.

  Never trust a soldier who’s eager to go to war. That was going into her memoir. This soldier wasn’t. And that’s why she trusted him.

  Then the grilling started.

  It was later in the day, waiting outside the Oval Office, when the President emerged with two other members of his Cabinet, that Pryce heard the exchange she’d remember later.

  Sam Cruz, the Attorney General, was speaking as they came out. “..protests growing every day, Mr President. And this protest on the Mall, it’s illegal. No permits. Clear sign of Nexus being used. And there’s been violence. We ought to clear them out.”

  “You know we can’t do that without a backlash, Sam,” Stockton answered. “They’re saying I stole the Presidency, and worse. Any crack down on dissent, and it only goes downhill from there. Fast.”

  “I agree, Mr President,” Greg Chase said. “It’s to your advantage to leave the protests alone. And if things get out of hand as they did on election night, that validates you. The more rope we give the protesters, the better.”

  And then Chase noticed her, and looked over, and looked away.

  47

  Briefing - Not Consummated

  SUPREME COURT TO HEAR VOTERS’ RIGHTS CASES, DECIDE ELECTION

  Tuesday, 9.07am, Washington DC

  American News Network

  The Supreme Court announced today that it would hear lawsuits filed in thirty-seven states by voters who cast early ballots for John Stockton, but later attempted to change their votes to Stanley Kim. The move to hear the cases, without any announcement of when a decision will be made, leaves the Capitol paralyzed with deep uncertainty over who will be inaugurated as the next President in January.

  Should the Court find a right to change an early vote, some analysts predict chaos. The Kim campaign claims the result would be a clear victory for the Senator from California.

  The case rests on an obscure fifty-three-year-old Supreme Court ruling, Foster v Love, where the Court ruled that while early voting was constitutional and allowed by law, votes were only collected in advance, and were not consummated until election day. The plaintiffs in this case are assisted by attorneys from the Kim campaign and the ACLU. Citing the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Foster v Love, they argue that every voter has the right to change their vote until election day. Especially in cases where important new information about the election has come to light.

  The Stockton campaign…

  48

  The Dinner Party

  Wednesday 2040.11.28

  The Avatar watched on the house monitors as the pounding and clawing at the doors grew weaker and more listless. She watched as the guests succumbed, one by one, to the drugs in their food and drink, as the last useless phones slipped from limp fingers.

  Only then did she instruct the house to slide open the door to Chen’s room, where Chen and Xu Liang had sealed themselves up while the drugs took hold on their guests.

  Eight of Xu’s most senior staff. Key people at the Secure Computing Center and the PICC below it. Now they were all slumped across the great open space of this exclusive Shanghai loft.

  Proceed, she instructed. She felt Ling struggling beneath her and kept a tight grip on the girl. There would be no mistakes, this time.

  As she watched, Chen and Xu went from guest to guest with their hypersonic injectors, pressing the flat tips against jugulars, injecting the high pressure stream of nanites directly into the bloodstream, swapping ampules.

  Xu did it happily, love and loyalty for her emoting from his brain. She’d been kind to him, had done deep reconditioning work, had software running to ease the cognitive dissonance. He’d done her no wrong.

  Chen went from guest to guest in horror.

  Ling struggled harder as she felt it. NO!

  The Avatar clenched down hard against Ling. The girl should not be so strong. She shouldn’t be able to resist at all. No human would have been.

  But no human would have had so much nanotechnology already in her brain.

  No human would have lived with it for so long.

  Ling was unique. Ling could resist her in ways that no other creature could.

  Be still
, daughter, she willed to Ling. It will be over soon. Then you can have your body back, and so much more.

  Soon the staff were going through calibration phase, hallucinating, their minds opening to her as they came alive on radio frequencies.

  The Avatar took stock of what she had, trawled their memories for useful tidbits.

  Then she started the process of rewiring circuits in their minds, neutrally reconditioning them, making them hers. Scientists and technicians were complex, delicate minds. These would require sophisticated rational-emotional resculpting to switch their loyalties while leaving their full range of intellectual faculties – the faculties she needed them for – available for use.

  And then there would be tasks to assign.

  There were supplies to gather. She was critically low on nanites now. She needed access to a chemreactor, needed feedstocks, needed more injectors for the next phases.

  There was the infiltration to prepare for: alarms to undermine, systems to weaken, network ports to open, bits of hardware to subtly sabotage.

  And there were other humans to “recruit” to the team, of course.

  The Avatar smiled. What a splendid dinner party, she thought. The best I’ve thrown in years. I think I’ll host another.

  Ling waited until the monster had retreated into one of its periodic states of hibernation. It had to sleep, or repair itself, or maintain itself, or whatever it did. And for those little bits of time, Ling had her body back.