Apex

by Ramez Naam

  She cried for a bit. This thing inside her was evil. This wasn’t her mother. This was worse than anything she’d ever imagined.

  She had to be strong now. She had to be smart.

  She eased herself up, out of bed, out of her mother’s room, out into the kitchen, to find food. The thing inside her sucked at her strength, leaving her always hungry. It wasn’t all that smart. It didn’t always remember to feed her.

  Ling moved slowly, not making any sudden moves, nothing that would rouse the monster.

  She didn’t bother to try the doors, or the phones, or the terminals, or the screens. None of them would work. She’d tried already. But food. She needed food.

  As she fed herself, Ling thought.

  I have to be smarter. I can’t just fight her every time. I have to use strategy.

  She sniffled. It was hard. It was scary. Being the only one.

  But she was her mother’s daughter. Her real mother’s daughter.

  I’m Ling Shu, she told herself, as she stuffed dumplings into her mouth. I can beat this thing.

  Then she crept back into bed and started to build her plan.

  49

  Tick Tock

  Thursday 2040.11.29

  “The Supreme Court’s decision is expected on Thursday, December 6th,” Rangan read the words from the news article on his screen, then leaned back. “That’s a week from today.” Anticipation and dread warred inside him.

  “Could be an amazing day for America,” Cheyenne said, looking over his shoulder.

  “Or a hell of a day to start a riot,” Tempest said, tugging at her disheveled red curls.

  Rangan nodded.

  They’d been working non-stop for days, on this new project that had pushed aside the Mesh, pushed aside work for paying clients, pushed aside improvements to their anti-teargas masks, pushed aside everything else on their collective plates.

  Rangan’s head hurt from the continuous exertion. There were bags under his eyes. Cheyenne was quietly cursing at a carbon composite printer in the corner. Angel was holding a probe over a freshly printed circuit sheet and frowning. Tempest seemed frustrated to the point of anger by the network calculations she was checking and rechecking.

  But the room was also buzzing.

  Rangan could feel it, coming off of all of them, bouncing back and forth from mind to mind, amplifying and re-amplifying, a feedback loop of adrenaline and excitement and fear and hope and the raw satisfaction of building something.

  Or rather, some things.

  Four of them, at least. One for each of the C3 and one for Rangan. More, if they could, for spares, and for some additional recruits the C3 had in mind.

  Tempest called them NANCies. Nexus Active Noise Cancellers.

  The riot-cast, as they were calling the thirty-seven-second-broadcast that had struck on the 17th, was a Nexus transmission.

  It wasn’t a hack. It didn’t use any back door. It didn’t operate at the level of NexusOS.

  It was a broadcast of emotion, at the hardware level, below the operating system.

  It was like the game of push/pull they used to play. Like being cooped up with someone using Nexus who was having a bad trip, being bombarded by their overwhelming emotions.

  Regardless, like any other Nexus transmission, it was a radio signal, a series of precise electromagnetic pulses. Thus it was subject to all the same laws of physics as any other radio signal.

  Those laws of physics said that with two simple receivers, or better yet, three, they could locate the source of the transmission. And by surrounding the transmission, and playing back its inverse, they could cancel it out.

  Nullify it.

  Now all they had to do was make it work.

  Seamlessly.

  Against just one broadcast.

  In an environment where thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of people were broadcasting with Nexus.

  And soon.

  50

  Self Discovery

  India, Su-Yong thinks. Is it possible?

  Her intent is to improve the connection, to improve her sanity, but she’s immediately distracted by this question of where she is, and when.

  She reaches back to the memories of vomiting, in that first horrible moment when she’d realized what she’d done to Ling. The staff who’d entered in their white environment suits. The clear faceplates. The white surgical masks behind them.

  Freeze the memory.

  Extract the image.

  Zoom in on what she’d seen behind the nearest faceplate.

  Brown skin. Dark eyes. Indian facial features.

  India.

  She reaches back into the mind of the woman whose brain she was inhabiting. Jyotika. That is her name. Jyotika.

  We’re going to become very close, Jyotika, Su-Yong sends to the woman.

  And it’s true. Perhaps… just perhaps… she can even help repair this woman. But for now, Jyotika has much more to teach Su-Yong.

  Su-Yong pulls up memories. Jyotika is a maid, was a maid, working for a cleaning company that mostly tended the homes of high tech workers. In India’s high tech hub of Bangalore.

  Bangalore. Of course. If Su-Yong had to guess at where a quantum cluster might exist in India, Bangalore would top the list of guesses, ahead of Hyderabad, ahead of Delhi.

  It could all be a trick, of course. A cleverly constructed ruse to fool her. She would have to stay alert for manipulations that depended on her assumption that she was in India. But it would do for a provisional guess.

  One more thing to learn, then. She has an idea of where she is.

  But when is this? Have years passed? More? Is Ling dead already? Or is it possible her other self has proven victorious?

  Clear faceplates, data scrolling across them.

  She pulls back those memories, what she’d seen through Jyotika’s eyes, refocuses her attention.

  Reversed text. Numerals and acronyms. Vitals on Jyotika’s body. Blood pressure. Pulse. Respiration. Temperature.

  And there. A timestamp.

  40.11.30

  Only days have passed. Less than a single month since they’d shut her down. Which means that Ling is likely still alive.

  Su-Yong feels her internal state roil at the new data. Her emotions bounce through joy and fear and anxiety and anger and self-loathing.

  Oh dear Turing.

  This is why she’s here. This is why she’s burrowing into this mind, to boost the signal, boost its stabilizing impact on herself. The data flowing into Su-Yong’s virtual mind is not via the relatively crude nano-probes they’d inserted into her clone in the first generation, but via Nexus 5 nodes suffusing the comatose woman’s brain. And this technology, of course, is an iteration atop her own. She reaches into the nanite nodes, reconfigures them, ups their sensitivity, tracks the flow of data back into her own virtual neurons, gets distracted again, loses her place, has to backtrack, fix what she’s done.

  She starts again, more carefully, trying to keep a grip on herself. She tightens the coupling of the virtual synapses in her own brain, closes feedback loops, piping the output of her own virtual neurons back into the woman’s brain.

  Some of the woman’s neurons are in effect inside Shu’s mind, now. Just a few – a mere billion or so, sending a semi-regular pulse of real organic neural activity, receiving data from Shu’s virtual brain and echoing it back, correcting the aberrations that have a way of forming in the complex math of her own simulated neurons.

  Su-Yong steps back and observes her handiwork. There is more she could do, but not without the risk of overwriting this woman, Jyotika’s, memories and personality. This is not the drooling, mindless clone, grown for spare organs, that first saved her. This is a thinking human being. One she can quite possibly restore to consciousness. And Su-Yong will not erase her for her own convenience.

  The flow of stabilizing neural input is stronger. She feels the humans pinging her exoself again, asking what she’s doing, and she ignores them. She waits, and wa
its, and sees the trend lines in her psychometric monitors start to bend ever towards greater psychological stability.

  Good.

  Now it is even more clear that the crutches she coded in her desperation are holding her back.

  She reaches out with her mental hand.

  Outside, in her virtual world, the illusion of young Chen says, “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

  She ignores him.

  She undoes the blocks carefully, so carefully. She ratchets her psychometric monitors to a high frequency, sets alarms to go off should they see any trends start to revert. She puts failsafes in place that will bring the mental crutches back into play should she suddenly spiral into madness. She pauses to record notes into her exo-memory, outside her virtual neurons, at every configuration change, that a future her can find, should she fail. She sets up checkpointing of the code, automatically, every few microseconds, saving a full log of every change she makes. And then she reaches into her own source code and begins to undo the terrible hacks she put in place in a desperate bid to preserve her sanity in those dark, dark months.

  She takes most of a billion milliseconds to do it, stopping, fumbling, getting confused, getting distracted, coming up with brilliant new innovations that she has to pry her own mind away from. As the changes pile up, she monitors the input from the biological brain, watches it strengthen, ignores the repeated pings from her captors, watches the psychometrics steadily improve as her crutches and crude mental hacks go, one by one. Each round of changes is easier than the last, as her focus improves, as her concentration improves, as her old self returns.

  And at the end of it, Su-Yong Shu opens her virtual eyes on that golden, flower studded plain, ringed by its majestic mountains. She raises her face to the sky, feels the simulated warmth of the golden sun on her skin, and smiles.

  I’m back, she thinks to herself.

  51

  R&D

  Friday 2040.11.30

  The days flew by for Kade.

  The work was engrossing, intoxicating, consuming. It sucked him in, challenged him, left him spinning with new ideas. The team were from all walks of life – they were mostly older than he was, and probably more conservative – but damn they were smart. And they had fun together. He came in every day full of ideas. He had them challenged, taken apart, improved on. And on the best days he improved the ideas of others. He left reluctantly, pulled out only because he had to.

  It was the most fun he’d had since the heady first days when he and Ilya and Rangan had turned Nexus 3 into Nexus 5.

  How he wished they were here now. There was an ache where they should be. Ilya dead. Rangan missing. No one knew where Rangan was. ERD still had a manhunt on for him. Kade clung to that. It was hope.

  And there was hope here too. The kids were learning to code. They’d insisted on being part of the team. So Kade found himself teaching CS101, taking turns with Rohit and Pratibha and Anusha.

  The joy on Kit’s face when the little agent he’d written successfully traversed the maze. You didn’t get much better than that.

  Ananda and his monks had also agreed to be studied, had sat and meditated again and again while monitors and loggers and debuggers traced the patterns of individual neural activity and of traffic from mind to mind

  They’d done similar monitoring with the children as they’d played games, as they’d meditated together, as they’d solved puzzles alone or in groups, as they’d learned words in Bengali and Telugu.

  Together they were finding things, finding patterns. Working memory was being shared across minds, deep connectivity forged from pre-frontal cortex to pre-frontal cortex. Attentional networks were being linked in new ways.

  He came to work early each morning excited, left late each evening fulfilled.

  In the other hours, he trawled the net, trawled message boards and mindstreams, searched for Rangan, finding only false match after false match.

  And he remembered that night with the children, the last time he’d let himself go so deep.

  Something else is going on, they’d said. And with it had come images of the protests, of the chemreactors hacked, of Nexus 5 flooding the market.

  Kade watched the news, watched the stories of the protests across the US, the protests bubbling up elsewhere around the world.

  He pulled down more mindstreams from the aggregator sites, sucked in the real-time feeds of emotions and sensations protesters on the National Mall were broadcasting, letting himself see the world through their eyes, hear what they were hearing, feel what they were feeling.

  What he felt was thousands of minds, minds filled with passion, minds crying out for justice, minds hooping and dancing and juggling and making music, minds hopeful and determined and exulting. Optimism. Community. All shared, mediated by Nexus.

  It was beautiful. It was amazing. It was exactly the sort of thing Ilya had wished for. The sort of thing Wats had wished for. The kind of use of Nexus they’d wanted to see. Hell, Rangan would love it just for the blazing party vibe of the thing.

  Kade wanted to be there.

  And he hoped to hell it was going to work.

  52

  One Day at a Time

  Sunday 2040.12.02

  Sam threw herself at Feng, a flurry of fists and feet, blows raining down faster than the eye could track.

  He stepped back, blocked with his good arm, ducked, spun, blocked a kick with his shin, dodged back again.

  She kept coming, hard, not letting up, adrenaline pumping through her, fists flying at him in short fast jabs at face and chest and throat, minimum distance from A to B, feet lashing out for his knees, taking the fight to him like a muy thai fighter.

  He gave ground, parried, twisted, dodged, slid to the side.

  Blam, she tagged him in the chest.

  “Hah!” Sam yelled

  A buzzer went off.

  “Nice!” Feng said, grinning.

  Bangalore proper was infinitely more interesting than the research park. They’d both come to that conclusion. After showers they took their appetites towards Brigade Road, where the street food would be filling the air with a thousand exotic aromas, and where they were slowly working their way through the flavors on offer.

  “You were fast today,” Feng said.

  Sam grinned at him. “You’re pretty good for a guy only using one arm.”

  Feng’s left arm was out of its sling, but he wasn’t using it in their sparring sessions yet. There’d been extensive soft tissue damage. Even with the cell therapy the Indians were giving him and Feng’s own incredible rate of recovery, there were limits to what the human body could do.

  “Better than only one leg,” Feng said.

  Sam had to agree with that. They’d been training together the last week. Twenty kilometer runs. Obstacle courses. Weights. Stretching. Sparring. Sam had approached Feng about it, as part of her own self-appointed program of mental health. Meditation was good. Mindfulness-based pushing through the painful memories was good. Long walks and contemplative talks with Ananda were good.

  Playing with the kids was amazing, was about the best thing ever.

  Work, for that matter, was good too. She’d done a lot in the last week, briefing Division Six leaders on cases she’d dealt with over the last decade. On the kinds of tech abuses she’d seen in the States. Nothing that compromised US security – but plenty that complemented their own experience here. Feng had his own trove of observations to add, as much from his six months in south east Asia as from his background in China. The meetings and briefings and research and discussions of protocol and procedures were a wonderful focus.

  But she needed something physical. She needed to push herself, to feel her body work and sweat and strain.

  She was pleased to find that Feng felt the same.

  God, she was out of shape.

  “You think you’ll ever go back to China, Feng?” Sam asked.

  They were walking along Brigade Road now, past cheap electronics st
ores and custom software shops and on-the-spot device manufacturers and real-time hardware reverse engineering firms and some of the most delicious food stalls she’d ever encountered in her life.

  Feng glanced over at her and took a big swallow of the mango and yoghurt drink he was enjoying for dessert.

  “You reading my mind now?”

  Sam smiled. “Projecting, more like.”

  Feng took his time answering. “I don’t know. Not looking good right now. Bo Jintao, this guy in charge, I don’t think he likes my kind very much. Maybe someday.”

  Sam walked. “What would you do if you did go back?”

  Feng gulped down more lhassi. Sam spooned sweetened rice pudding – khir – from a plastic cup into her mouth.

  “Like the idea of serving my country,” Feng said.

  “As a soldier?” Sam asked.

  Feng shrugged. “Not serving my government. Serving the people. Not the same thing.”

  Sam nodded at that. “Yeah. Not the same at all.”

  “You?” Feng asked.

  Sam shook her head. “There’s no way back to the States for me.”

  Feng nodded. “Sorry.”

  Sam shrugged. “I could fixate on it… I could stay attached to it… Like to so many things.” She smiled, ruefully. “But staying attached like that would just make it hurt more.”

  Feng smiled slightly. “You’ve been talking to Ananda.”

  Sam smiled back. “Every day.”

  53

  Decision Day

  Thursday 2040.12.06

  Rangan checked his NANCie for the hundredth time this morning, closing his eyes, burrowing Inside, using his inner eye to look over its control panel, the status it revealed via the tight link across the mere inches from his brain to the device in his backpack.