Apex

by Ramez Naam

  He was halfway to 7th when an impenetrable press of bodies forced him to turn towards one of the major stages. A jam band had been playing here the first time he’d come, their minds interlinked with Nexus. A hundred people had been dancing, totally blissed out, their egos dissolved, all hippy union with each other and the band.

  Now rage seethed from all around it, as they hoisted a burning, life-size Stockton puppet from its neck. At the nearest corner of the stage, a man had a fuel cell pulled up, was using it to fill glass bottles with whatever it burned, had amassed quite a collection. Another man next to him stuffed one with a rag, stood tall with it in his hand, pointed up, way up. Rangan followed the man’s finger for an instant, saw one of the aerostats, and abruptly covered his face, brought his gaze back down.

  Oh no, Rangan thought. Oh fucking no.

  The thrower had the Molotov lit now, had it cocked way back for a good throw up at the hovering Homeland Security blimp.

  Something struck the thrower from above. Projectile or projectiles, Rangan would never be sure. But they toppled him backwards, driving the man’s upper body straight down. Rangan saw it happen in slow motion, started to turn but it was too late; the lit Molotov was suddenly crashing backwards, down into the pile of filled and half-filled fuel bottles.

  “Geeeeeeeeet doooooooooown!”

  He tried to yell, but it came out in slow motion.

  The explosion was a searing shock of heat, then a roar that knocked him from his feet. The world was spinning again. There was a ringing in his ears, and above that there were screams.

  Rangan tried to look around, found someone atop him, shoved his way free, onto one knee on the ground. There was smoke everywhere. People were down. The stage was listing over, one corner of it gone, the rest on fire. A man was upright, stumbling around, aflame. Others were on their knees or on the ground, burning. His own eyes were on fire. He coughed, his lungs burning. He brought his hands to his face, searching for his goggles, for his mask. They weren’t there. He turned, looking for them on the ground. Instead he saw a line of riot police advancing.

  Oh shit, he thought.

  Rangan forced himself up. His lungs hurt, he could barely see through the smoke and the stinging in his eyes. He had to get to Angel. Move east. Move south. Move. Move. Move. He stumbled, crawled, stood, fell, stood. He remembered his scarf, pulled it up over his nose and mouth. He tried to yell out to the others with his mind, heard nothing back, and then he realized his hat was gone too. The hat with the hidden antenna that boosted his range. Shit.

  He felt something change then, and he turned, looked. Through the smoke he saw a deeper yellow: Saffron robes, a shaved head, moving in the opposite direction. He felt the hate push back, felt something else touch him, a touch of that tranquility.

  Then in a disorienting flash everything changed. He was outside the crowd, outside the Mall, looking down onto a hundred thousand people, not as individuals, but as a whole, a single being, a single mind.

  Like Ilya would have seen it, he realized.

  For that instant his own mind was clear, at peace. And in that clarity, the mind he looked down on…

  That mind of a hundred thousand people was mentally ill. Insane. Drugged or diseased. Raging with a sickness.

  Something else passed through him then. A feeling of being recognized.

  Then it was gone – the perspective, the clarity, the peace.He was back in his body, the hate pressing in on him, the smoke all around him, screams and the sound of clashes, and the acrid sting of teargas. There were no yellow robes.

  Did I fucking hallucinate that? Rangan wondered.

  He coughed and turned, stumbled on towards 7th Street. He was almost there when a figure loomed out of the smoke. Rangan moved to go around him, but the man moved too, and then a fist rammed the breath out of him. Rangan doubled over in pain and shock. Then something swept his feet out from under him. He landed on his back, slamming his spine into the backpack containing the NANCie below him, in more pain, gasping. Then there was a hand on his throat, a bearded, scarred face inches from his own, dreadlocks falling around him, intense blue eyes staring down into his.

  The man whispered hoarsely at him, “Who are you, compadre? And how are you causing the interference?”

  The voice was rough, husky.

  Rangan stared up at the man. This was the one. This was the one behind the hate, the rage, the amplification of the riot.

  Then he felt his assailant’s hand close tighter around his throat.

  “Who?” the man repeated. “And how?”

  Then something slammed into the man above Rangan, knocking him away in a rolling blur of black and white checks and jester bells.

  Rangan rolled to the side, coughing, his eyes burning, filled with tears.

  Yards away from him, Cheyenne was on top of the scarred and bearded man, her muscled arms around his neck in a headlock.

  Rangan pushed himself up to one knee.

  That’s him, he sent to Cheyenne. He’s the one behind…

  The scarred man reached back with one arm and flipped Cheyenne over his back, sending her flying through the air. Other people around them yelled in fear.

  Rangan felt fear surge through him. He pushed up to standing, wobbling on his feet. He saw the scarred man come up to standing now.

  Except the dreadlocks were askew. The beard and scar were half ripped off. They were fake, a disguise, like Rangan’s.

  Rangan tried to turn, but his feet tangled on something, and suddenly he was down on the ground. He rolled, and he was facing up, and the man with the scar that wasn’t a scar and the beard that wasn’t a beard was standing above him, something in his hand, pointed down at Rangan, a roll of paper.

  No. A gun, wrapped in a roll of paper.

  “Last chance,” the man said. “Who are you?” The scar was half off, dangling from the top. Beneath it, Rangan saw there was another face.

  He opened his mouth, to say something, to stay alive.

  The blur came out of nowhere, hugely muscled limbs atop a torso moving like a locomotive. But this time the man moved faster, spun, did something. Rangan heard a crack. Then he saw the man, with Cheyenne’s arm trapped, lifted up to bear her bodyweight, and twisted in an unnatural angle.

  Cheyenne screamed.

  The man dropped her to the ground.

  She kept screaming.

  Rangan was crawling backwards as the man turned, took another step towards him.

  “Three,” The man said. “Two.”

  “I’m…” Rangan started.

  “That’s enough,” another voice said.

  Rangan looked over, and there was another figure there, a woman, blond, tan, in an oversized overcoat, just paces away. She held one arm towards the man above him, the overly long sleeve covering her hand and whatever was in it.

  “This isn’t any of your business,” the man said. He was looking at the woman now, not at Rangan. In profile from this side, the dreadlock wig was askew, the beard was gone, revealing the man’s jawline.

  “Safety the gun,” she said. “Then put it on the ground, still covered.”

  Cheyenne was groaning beyond them, writhing in pain at whatever he’d done to her arm. Smoke filled the air. Rangan coughed, his eyes burning.

  “You won’t shoot,” the man replied.

  “You know I will,” the blond woman said.

  “Fine,” the man above Rangan said. There was a click, and then the man crouched down, placed a bundle at Rangan’s feet, and rose again.

  “Now the transmitter,” the woman said.

  The man shrugged. He reached his hand into a pocket, and very slowly pulled it out, a flat black rectangle he held in two fingers. He gestured with it at the woman. “You see what happened here? You see how they fought? You see how they were about to just walk away?”

  “I see how many people you killed. People who agreed with you. Give it to me.”

  People who agreed with you, Rangan thought. Who the fuck wer
e these people?

  The man who’d almost killed him tossed the transmitter at the woman’s feet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’s done is done.”

  “You, on the ground,” the woman said. “Get your friend and get out of here.”

  Oh fuck yes, Rangan thought.

  Rangan half-carried Cheyenne through a world gone haywire, looking for Angel and Tempest. There were flames everywhere. Signs were burning. Stages were burning. Trees were burning. Buildings were burning. The tear gas and the acrid smoke from the fires were filling his lungs. Tears and snot were running from his inflamed face. Sirens were wailing. Molotovs were still hurling through the air. The sound of clashes between police and rioters came from all directions, the sounds of truncheons being brought down onto bone, of rubber bullets slamming into bodies, of the rage-filled screams of tens of thousands of humans gone mad, ripping at the better armed and trained police forces trying to quell their eruption. Above it all, Cheyenne’s pain was overwhelming across their Nexus link, her right arm and shoulder sending out waves and waves of agony. They passed people lying prone on the ground, and Rangan just hoped they weren’t dead.

  Then the hate flipped off, like a switch. He almost missed a step, even buffered as he was by his NANCie, then caught himself and Cheyenne. She’d turned it off. Whoever that woman was.

  Cheyenne groaned in pain. More smoke rose into the sky. More screams came from somewhere off to his left, mixed with the dull crack of breaking bones. A crash and whoosh came as another Molotov struck home somewhere else. Rangan coughed again, and harder, as the burning penetrated deeper into his lungs.

  That woman had turned off the hate machine.

  But it was too little, too late.

  54

  Contact

  Thursday 2040.12.06

  It was Rangan? Kade sent. You’re sure of it.

  Yes, Bo Tat, the monk replied. I’ve touched your thoughts when we merge in metta, I know to whom you send loving compassion, I’ve felt the feel of your friend’s mind. It is

  Rangan. In the middle of all that.

  Well where else would he be, dumbass? Kade asked himself. Where have you always been?

  How long ago was this? Kade sent.

  Perhaps ten minutes ago, the monk replied. I would have reached out to you sooner, but it was all we could do to push back a bit of the tide of suffering all around us, and see a few to safety.

  You did the right thing, Kade assured the man. Now, please. Show me everything you saw and sensed about my friend.

  The monk did.

  And then Kade started searching.

  Rangan held Cheyenne up, stumbling forward through the chaos. Smoke rose, filling his lungs, driving him to cough. Cheyenne groaned in pain. Someone ran into them, running to or from a skirmish with the police, and Cheyenne toppled to the ground, dragging Rangan with her. They hit hard and she screamed in pain as her bad arm impacted below her.

  Her pain washed out over him. Oh fuck, oh Jesus.

  He reached out with his mind, groping blindly all around him, searching, searching for Angel or Tempest.

  Nothing. There were hundreds of minds around him, people running by in every direction, but none were his friends.

  “Come on, Cheyenne,” he said, pushing up to one knee, taking her good arm over his shoulder. “Not far now. Not far.”

  Kade tunneled his NexusOS to computing clouds he’d hoped not to use, invoked passwords he’d hoped never to need.

  Now, he hoped they still worked.

  Shiva Prasad’s passwords, passwords he’d taken from the man’s mind, just before…

  No, Sam, don’t do this. He tried to do the…

  Before Sam blew Shiva Prasad’s brains out all over the rooftop of the man’s fortress mansion on Apyar Kyun. Before she splattered Shiva’s brains over Kade’s face.

  Authentication layers accepted the passwords.

  [Welcome Shiva Prasad]

  Shiva’s research had overlapped with the work Kade was doing now. The billionaire had been fascinated by the Nexus-born children, fascinated by their collective intelligence, their ability to solve inordinately complex problems. He’d dreamt of integrating them into a far larger network, connecting millions of human minds, every Nexus user on the planet, a posthuman intelligence that would stagger anything that had come before it.

  With Shiva himself in the driver’s seat. Controlling the individual minds. Directing them. Sifting through data coming back through them. All enabled by Kade’s back doors.

  The back doors were gone, closed forever.

  But the tools Shiva’s team had built still existed. They could be used to sift data voluntarily released.

  Kade fired off requests from Shiva’s cloud to every mindstream aggregator he knew of, issuing searches for every publicly shared mindstream in the DC area, all data from the last ten minutes up to present. Hundreds of streams came back, annotated with tags. He re-queried on the top tags, got hundreds more, then piped the whole set into the neural data sifter Shiva’s engineers had built, fed it the patterns he was looking for: Rangan’s face as the monk had seen it, in wig and makeup; the unique signature of Rangan’s mind; Rangan’s voice; Rangan’s name.

  Execute.

  His mind started moving forward, thinking about the other tools he could use…

  Hits came back.

  Four streams had matches on Rangan’s costumed face in the last ten minutes.

  Two had touched his mind in that time.

  One had touched Rangan’s mind just an instant ago.

  Kade fired up the stream immediately.

  He was suddenly in the midst of chaos, coughing, despite the bandana around his face. His eyes burning despite his goggles, yellow and black smoke all around him, people running everywhere. There were minds bombarding his, angry minds, yelling, the sounds of fighting. Fire.

  He didn’t see Rangan out of this person’s eyes. He didn’t feel Rangan’s mind. He couldn’t turn their head. He was just a passenger.

  He popped out of the stream, looked at its metadata.

  Please, he thought. Please have a contact address.

  It did.

  He reached out to the mind.

  My name’s Kaden Lane, he sent, with every bit of urgency he could. I’m one of the inventors of Nexus 5. And I could really, really use a favor right now.

  “Come on, Cheyenne,” Rangan said, pushing up to one knee. “Not far now. Not far.”

  Rangan!

  He nearly dropped Cheyenne in shock.

  Kade?

  He looked to his left, didn’t see his friend, looked to the right, not there either.

  Holy shit, Rangan, it’s you!

  He turned back to the left, saw what was maybe a fourteen year-old girl in front of him, dressed for a riot or a rave, a black and pink handkerchief over her mouth and nose, giant iridescent bug-eyed goggles covering her eyes. The girl came closer and crouched before him. He saw his own crazy clown face reflected in fun-house distorted insanity in those oversized lenses.

  Kade?

  Jesus, Rangan, what happened?

  Cheyenne groaned. “What the fuck?”

  Someone tried to kill me, he sent to the teen girl with Kade’s mind. The guy who launched the hate broadcast.

  What? Kade sounded appalled. Show me.

  Rangan opened his mind, flashed the memory up and out at his friend, the man looming out of the smoke, then Rangan on his back, the man’s face an inch a way. Cheyenne’s attack, the disguise ripped half-free, the mystery woman who’d saved them and turned off the hate.

  Oh god, Kade sent. Dread came off him in waves. I know who that is.

  You do? Rangan sent.

  You’ve gotta get out of here, Kade replied. That guy goes by Breece. He’s PLF. He was behind the Houston bombing. And Chicago. And the assassination attempt on Stockton.

  Rangan felt everything go cold

  Here’s how you can contact me, Kade sent. A net address followed.
I have to give this girl her body back. And see if I can talk her into heading someplace safer.

  Rangan nodded. Here’s my address, he replied.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Cheyenne asked aloud. She was up on one knee now herself. Rangan could feel her arm throbbing with pain across the link. “Who is this? What are you two talking about?”

  Rangan looked at her. “Cheyenne,” he said. “Meet my good buddy Kade.” He shook his head. “And now we’ve gotta get the fuck out of here.”

  John Stockton watched as the giant wall screen flipped through scenes of the riot on the Mall. There had been other protests, other riots, many of them bad. New York. LA. Detroit. But this… He shook his head.

  The sun was setting over DC, now. The fire trucks had arrived. The flames on the Mall and the buildings around it were out. All but a few hundred of the most hard-core rioters had been forced out, and those that remained wouldn’t last long. Capitol Police and DHS had formed a perimeter around the entire Mall. No new protest would be allowed to start there.

  Stockton shook his head.

  Thousands of arrests.

  Hundreds dead.

  Dozens of cops dead, and hundreds wounded.

  Greg Chase spoke from behind him.

  “This hour’s polling numbers are in, Mr President,” his Press Secretary said. “Still rising. Between the Supreme Court legitimizing you and the protesters illegitimizing themselves, it’s been a good day.”

  Stockton shook his head again.

  “No,” he said. “It hasn’t.”

  Carolyn Pryce flipped through riot imagery in her office, then leaned back, and rubbed her eyes.

  What a disaster. How had things gone so wrong?