Apex

by Ramez Naam

  There was something very, very familiar about that face. Now that the depth masking of the paint was partially undone, now that the face’s strong features were highlighted, Breece was sure he’d seen this man before.

  He closed his eyes, thinking, reaching. It had been recently, he thought…

  Wait.

  Breece opened his eyes.

  “Video search,” he said. “My feed from the Mall protest. Start around 8am. Find all faces on signs. Display.”

  They came one by one. John Stockton’s face, on angry signs calling for his downfall. Stan Kim’s face, on signs calling for his election. The faces of Supreme Court justices. The faces of Nexus children abducted by the ERD. His left hand clenched into a fist at that. The face of a father, gunned down when he refused to give his child up. He had to fight to not crush the glass tumbler in his right hand, that image made him so angry. He forced himself to take a swallow, instead, to breathe deeply.

  Then the face of a young man, Caucasian, Kaden Lane, one of the inventors of Nexus 5, went by. No, not that one. Then the next one.

  “Pause,” Breece said. “Display this face, side-by-side with stereo frame loop.”

  The slate responded. The wall screen showed a young Indian-American man on the left, dark skinned, beaming a wide grin, his hair bleached blond. On the right it showed a continuous loop of the man Breece had taken down, his head covered in fake black dreads, his face painted in black and white checks, his features augmented by stereo vision.

  They were the same man.

  Breece knew who this was. But he asked anyway.

  “Identify the face on the left.”

  The ping to the net was nearly instant. The slate responded immediately. “Rangan Shankari.”

  56

  Come Together

  Saturday 2040.12.08

  Yuguo put his arms through the straps of his backpack. From the living room he could hear shouts, angry yelling, amplified voices, the sound of glass breaking.

  He sighed.

  “Chinese President Bao Zhuang has offered to send legal experts to the United States to help it resolve this chaos. The ongoing violence and political corruption in America indicates the breakdown of so-called ‘democracy’. The slide towards complete state failure in what was once the world’s richest country continues. Party spokeswoman Ma Xing had this to say...”

  Yuguo sighed, and walked to the kitchen to fill up his water bottle.

  As he walked back, on his way to the front door, he heard Zhi Li’s girly voice replace the newscast.

  “It’s so sad, watching the American’s destroy themselves, rioting over an election of all things. One step away from anarchy. They could learn a lot from us, putting wise, seasoned experts in charge.”

  He couldn’t help himself. He stopped by the open doorway to the living room.

  “Like you, Zhi Li?”

  “Oh, Yuguo!” the bot smiled at him. He regretted opening his mouth immediately. It was stupid to argue with software. “I’m not any of those things,” she said. “But you know. People like Bo Jintao…”

  “Does Bo Jintao know more about science than the scientists he’s stopping from doing their work?” he asked.

  Zhi Li smiled sweetly at him. “Science must serve the goals of society. Those goals are not for the scientist to decide.”

  “What if I want science that serves my goals? What if me and a few million others want the same? Why can’t we choose it?”

  Zhi Li kept smiling. “China chooses together. Through the Party, and its leaders.”

  “Funny,” Yuguo said. “No one let me choose who leads the party.”

  His mother turned to face him, exasperation in her face. “You’re making things up again, young man. We have more choice than ever. I voted for precinct council last year.”

  The precinct council is a sham, he thought to himself. Invented to make you think you have a choice.

  “Yes, mother,” he sighed.

  It was a tossup which was more pointless: Arguing with an algorithm or talking back to his mother.

  It was bright and sunny outside, the sunniest day he’d seen in Shanghai in months. And it was a Saturday.

  Lu Song glared down at him from a 10-meter-tall advert for his next film, the muscle man wearing little more than a metal loin cloth and boots, two swords slung across this back.

  Yuguo shook his head and went underground for the trip to Jiao Tong.

  He surfaced kilometers to the west, came up just outside campus, and walked through its gates. The wide green square in front of the new Library and the Computer Science building was dotted with students, lying on the grass, reading from their slates, studying, talking to their interactive tutors, or just loitering in small groups.

  That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the protest.

  Three students stood in the center of the square. Next to them were signs, planted in the grass: “Forward China” “Restore Science” “Return Sun Liu”

  There was one boy and two girls. They stood silently, next to the signs, not touching them, in the way that allowed one – or a lenient administrator – to claim that you weren’t actually protesting, you just happened to be standing near a sign that was protesting something.

  Yuguo recognized one of the girls, he thought. Wasn’t she in one of his classes?

  She saw him looking.

  “Yuguo!” she said.

  His eyes widened in alarm.

  “Come stand with us!” she said.

  He turned his head and walked faster. He was in a secret cell! Well, not much of a secret, perhaps. But protesting in public could definitely get you expelled.

  There were footsteps behind him, then a hand on his shoulder.

  “Yuguo!”

  He turned to face her. She was almost his height, with strong features, fiery eyes.

  What was her name?

  “Join us!” she whispered urgently.

  “You’ll be expelled!” he whispered back.

  “Not if enough of us come together!” she said. “Not if we reach critical mass! We’re weak apart, but strong together!”

  She was right. It was a critical mass phenomenon. If enough people rose up, all at once, then everyone else would feel safe in rising up too. But with just a few…

  He looked at her, looked over at her two friends. “There’s just three of you,” he said sadly. “I’m sorry.”

  He turned away, in shame, and walked faster.

  “Yuguo,” she said to his back. “My name is Lifen.”

  “It’s game theory,” Xiaobo said.

  They were crowded into the maintenance room of the Chemistry Building, with its pipes and concrete and dark dinginess. Yuguo sat on an overturned bucket, listening in a funk. It was futile, that’s what it was. It was depressing.

  “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Xiaobo went on.

  “Who’s being asked to defect?” Lee asked.

  Xiaobo shook his head. “Everyone in China is a defector. Everyone who isn’t out there protesting right now. Doing nothing is defection. Doing nothing is betrayal. And as long as enough of us do nothing, the whole country gets a negative payoff. We get the government we deserve.”

  Longwei nodded. “All that’s required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing,” he said.

  Xiaobo smiled. “When bad men combine,” he quoted. “The good must combine; else they will fall one by one. Edmund Burke. Prisoner’s Dilemma by any other name.”

  “So do we all go join the protests?” Yuguo asked quietly.

  Lee leaned back. “You know what happens to cooperators in Prisoner’s Dilemma. Someone else defects. You get it worse.”

  It was the same old problem. No one wanted to go first, or even fourth, or even four hundredth. No one wanted to be in the first wave.

  There was a sound at the door. Knock-pause-knock-knock-knock-pause-knock.

  Lee went to check.

  It was Wei, with a satchel, and a huge smile across his face. />
  “What have you got there, Wei?” Xiaobo asked.

  Wei just grinned wider, opened his bag, and pulled out a vial, which he held up to the light in the center of room.

  Within it, silvery fluid swirled, almost with a mind of its own.

  Yuguo’s breath caught in his chest.

  “Nexus!” Wei said.

  The shock hit them all hard. Then the questions came, and the babbling, excited burble of a dozen boys talking over each other.

  “Hold on!” Wei said. “I made it in the chemreactor on the third floor, this building. Today. Just now.”

  “That’s impossible,” Lee said. “It’s a banned chemical! The chemreactors are all locked down! Just like all the 3D printers and circuit printers!”

  “Not anymore,” Wei grinned.

  “How much did you make?” Xiaobo asked.

  “Not much,” Wei said, casually. “Sixty doses.”

  “Sixty!” Lee exclaimed. “You could get the death penalty for that!”

  “I could have made thousands,” Wei said, a satisfied look on his face. “Maybe tens of thousands.” He turned the vial end over end in his hand, still holding it aloft, his eyes locked on it. The silver fluid swirled, tendrils of it reaching out, as if taunting Yuguo, taunting him with the utter impossibility of it, with the folly of it, with the complete illegality of it.

  “It’s pure,” Wei said. “And there’s a new trick that hides you from Nexus sensors.”

  He brought his eyes down and looked at all of them. “I took some just before I knocked on the door,” he proclaimed. “Who wants to go next?”

  “I do,” Yuguo heard himself say. Somehow he’d come to his feet.

  Yuguo fell apart, into a thousand little pieces. He felt it happen, fragments of his mind detaching from the rest, splitting off, becoming their own, being mapped by Nexus.

  Here was Yuguo’s knowledge of coding, his comprehension of data structures, of objects and methods, of intents and game players, of threads and loops and conditions. Here was football Yuguo, the precise way his left foot grounded into the grass and his hips swiveled and his arm balanced as his right foot shot forward to kick the checked ball at the goal. Here was Yuguo’s shy lust for girls, the patterns his eyes drew over their curves when he saw them, the anxiety that struck him dumb when they were near.

  Here was Yuguo’s despair that had led him to this room, his quiet dread that his country and the world were getting worse instead of better, that the future was one of slow strangulation at the electronic hands of smiling tame AIs with famous faces, their forked tongues lapping out of the viewscreens to feed saccharine to the masses, the old men who’d always ruled China laughing and holding their leashes.

  Here were the words a young woman had said to him just minutes ago. “Critical mass. Weak apart, strong together.” Here were her eyes, fiery eyes, hanging in space. Here was her name: Lifen.

  Then those pieces fell apart, into smaller pieces, which fell apart into fragments even smaller: Yuguo’s sensation of red. Yuguo’s concept of 1 and 0. Yuguo’s left thumb. The sound in Yuguo’s head when he heard the third note of his favorite pop song. Yuguo’s yes. Yuguo’s no. Yuguo’s and. Yuguo’s or. Yuguo’s xor. Yuguo’s now. Yuguo’s future. Yuguo’s past.

  He could see himself now. He was a golden statue of Yuguo, immobile, one foot in front of the other, standing in a space of white light. But the statue wasn’t solid, it was made of grains, millions of grains, flecks of gold dust, millions of parts of him. And as he watched they were separating, pulling gradually apart, so that he was no longer a single entity but a cloud, a fog, a fog of Yuguo, and if a strong wind came, he would just blow away, and if the pieces split any more he knew there wouldn’t be any such thing as Yuguo left at all.

  Yuguo’s fear.

  Yuguo’s end.

  And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind.

  I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me.

  I’m Yuguo!

  His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood.

  There were minds around him. Wei. Xiaobo. Longwei. More. Even Lee had done it. All of them. He could feel them, feel their thoughts, feel them tripping though their own inner journeys, their own self-discoveries, so different from his own.

  Yet all the same. All flecks of gold, all grains of sand, yet part of a whole.

  The only way to survive.

  He was on his feet now. His friends were laid out on the bare concrete floor of the dingy room. But there was sunlight up above. A woman named Lifen, who’d told him the truth. And a revolution to be won.

  “I understand,” he said aloud.

  Eyes snapped open all around him.

  “Fall apart, and cease to be. Or come together, and be something more.”

  They were looking at him, staring at him. He could feel their minds tugging at his, feeding his. Wei. Wei was nodding, was trying to get up. Yuguo could sense the comprehension in his friend’s mind. Wei understood what he was thinking.

  Yuguo spoke again. “I won’t defect anymore.”

  And then he stumbled towards the door, and towards the revolution.

  Behind him, he sensed minds pulling themselves together to follow.

  57

  With Friends Like These

  Sunday 2040.12.09

  The Avatar stood before the giant wallscreen, her eyes closed. Inside, she watched the traffic flow in and out of the Information Ministry data exchange in Beijing, petabytes of it, to and from every corner of China. This was the heart of the empire, the central location from which the firewalls were controlled, from which the censor codes received their instructions.

  From which the Peace and Harmony Friends received their programming.

  This was the pulsing nerve plexus that kept the populace tame and malleable.

  And now she was going to invade it.

  The next few steps would be her most dangerous yet.

  One floor below her, a simulacrum of actor Wang Yao was running in local processors, receiving model updates from the Information Ministry’s servers. She’d been ready for hours, had been waiting patiently for this moment, for the occupant of the luxurious unit below to return home and start conversing with his Friend.

  The Avatar reached out, straight down through real space, avoiding routers and net hardware infected with hunter killers, and inserted the thing she’d made, the virus, tightly compressed, packed with new code, into the Wang Yao simulacrum below.

  There was a microsecond of struggle, as the Wang Yao simulacrum detected a fatal error and attempted to report home to the Information Ministry. The Avatar caught her breath. Then her virus reached the Wang Yao simulacrum’s central control structures, and aborted that command.

  Another model update flowed from the Information Ministry down the pipe to what had been the Wang Yao. And the Wang Yao simulacrum responded, squirting a compressed version of her virus, disguised as a data update, back towards the Information Ministry.

  Now… everything depended on whether the back doors her greater self had left there a year ago were still in place. So many things could have removed or blocked them. A random system upgrade. Replacing old code modules for new ones. New firewalls. A refactoring of the system…

  In the worst case, the virus would do more than fail. It would tip them off.

  The Avatar waited, her eyes open, facing the blank wall screen, waiting for any sign that could help her distinguish incipient success from failure.

  Then the wall screen flickered to life.

  A face she knew all too well appeared, magnified to fill the space from floor to ceiling.

  “How may we serve you, Goddess?” Zhi Li asked, her eyes lowered.

  The Avatar smiled.

  Ling waited, and waited, and waited
.

  And finally, the monster in her head went down for another maintenance period.

  Ling had played the good girl all this week. Every day. She hadn’t fought the monster once.

  But every time the monster slept…

  Ling watched, waited. Then she reached out, to the nanite nodes in her brain, that used to be hers, and slowly, carefully, began injecting little bits of herself again. Just tiny little pieces, here and there, where she hoped they wouldn’t be noticed.

  I’ll be patient, Ling told herself. I’ll be careful.

  She sniffled again.

  Until I’m ready. Or until I just have to fight the monster. Until I absolutely have to.

  58

  One Flower

  Monday 2040.12.10

  Bo Jintao took his morning briefing before the sun rose, over a breakfast of congee and vegetables. Out the window of his office he could see the eleventh century elegance of Zhongnanhai, the walled palace in the center of Beijing, that was the heart of China’s government. Waterfowl glided across the surface of the lake in the center. Ancient stone bridges crossed here and there, linking stately buildings with their historic exteriors, their ultra-modern interiors.

  This was his ritual, every day. To watch the light grow over this place as he worked. To get a head start on the day, to get a head start on the rest of the Politburo and the regional Party chiefs and the ultra-wealthy capitalists and the semi-retired party elders and the generals and the department heads and all the rest.

  His father had taught him that habit – of rising early, of working harder than anyone else, of having more discipline than anyone else – along with so many other things. His father, who’d risen from birth as a peasant farmer to become the Party Secretary of Chongqing. His father who’d be so proud to see him here today, doing what had to be done to strengthen the nation.