Apex

by Ramez Naam

  It was just as well. For all Homeland Security’s protestations, Shankari wasn’t someone she viewed as any sort of national security threat. And imprisoning children… that was damaging the nation’s security.

  The real prizes were the rest of what had come from Holtzman. Not the ERD assassination records, but other data that was better, far more useful.

  Pryce had the original video from Holtzman’s eyes as Brandt had received it, now. It was shaky, raw, distorted. It was either the real thing or a brilliant fake.

  It was real, her gut told her. That was Barnes, coming into Holtzman’s office, admitting to being behind the PLF, all but admitting to being behind the assassination attempt on the President, the Chicago bombing, Warren Becker’s death. That was Barnes, forcing a pill onto Holtzman, a pill that resulted in a death from myocardial infarction that a coroner couldn’t differentiate from natural causes. A death that resembled Warren Becker’s death all too closely. Both deaths that every security and tracking system at ERD and on Barnes’s phone and car swore he could not have been present for.

  I’ve been so blind, Pryce told herself. I chose to be.

  The only question now was how high it went. Did Miles Jameson know, when he was President?

  Did John Stockton know?

  Did he order the assassination attempt on himself?

  Christ, Pryce wondered. If Stockton had ordered Becker and Holtzman’s death…

  Am I in danger?

  Carolyn Pryce took a deep breath.

  Now, at least, she had a tool. She scanned the pages again. Here, in the originals that Holtzman had sent Lisa Brandt, were details that hadn’t been released. The names of programs, code words she’d never heard of. HARBINGER. SENTINEL. CALVINIST.

  Code words that searches of the classified archives her maximum security clearance gave her access to didn’t find any hits on.

  All tied up with the black op that was the PLF.

  Each of those words, every detail associated with them, was a trap, a trap she could spring on Miles Jameson.

  Or on John Stockton.

  Her breath was coming fast.

  Jameson. Jameson first. He was her top suspect.

  Then Stockton.

  All she had to do was find a way to get to Jameson.

  And if her worst suspicions were true, she had to find a way to stay alive

  63

  Bouncing Back

  Tuesday 2040.12.18

  “Axon,” Tempest said. “You need to see this.”

  IS NEXUS FUGITIVE RANGAN SHANKARI BEHIND DC RIOTS? (PICS)

  Rangan stared at the headline, his heart sinking.

  The rumors had been building for more than a week. Anonymous posters on message boards had claimed to have seen him at the Mall protests, at the ongoing riots and clashes with police around that had been going on around the city since the protesters had been pushed off the mall. The claims had largely been met with disbelief, with the observation that someone so high on DHS’s most-wanted list should be as far from DC and public places as possible.

  This wasn’t a message board, though. This was Eccentric, one of the top alt-culture sites online. The header showed him the article was already racking up tens of thousands of views.

  He scrolled down.

  “What the hell?”

  The images were of him… But they weren’t him. They showed someone of his rough build, holding up a sign, calling for Nexus legalization.

  With his face, dark skinned, unpainted. Bleach blond hair. Bare hands. A camo jacket he didn’t own.

  That wasn’t him. These were all fake.

  He went back, scrolled through the text of the article. It was based on an anonymous tip, with quotes from the tipper.

  The last quote struck home. “Shankari should take better care of himself, instead of exposing himself to this kind of danger. People have gotten hurt out there, even killed.”

  “It’s a warning,” Tempest said. “He’s telling you to stay out of his way, or next time, there won’t be a next time.”

  “Fuck him,” Cheyenne rumbled. She was back from the hospital, Nexus freshly re-installed after her backup-and-dump, her arm both casted and slung, slow release growth factor capsules speeding the healing of bone in her arm and soft tissue in her shoulder. “He’s the one needs to be warned.”

  “I don’t get it,” Rangan said. “If he’s going to fake photos… why not some that looks like I looked?”

  “If he’s really PLF,” Angel said. “Then you should be a hero. Maybe he’d rather scare you away than kill you.”

  Tempest snorted. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  64

  Growing

  Tuesday 2040.12.18

  “No, mother!” Yuguo said again. “I’m not leaving!”

  He pulled his arm free of her.

  His mother, plump, round-faced, dressed in a long grey coat over a green winter dress, looked at him with tears in her eyes.

  “They’ll arrest you!” She pleaded, both arms outstretched. “They’ll haul you away, my only child! For what? For nothing!”

  She spun around, taking in the protest, the hundreds of students collected around them, the signs that cried “BO JINTAO IS A CRIMINAL” and “FREE SUN LIU!” and “DEMOCRACY NOW!” and “LET A BILLION FLOWERS BLOOM”.

  Yuguo could feel his friends in his mind, feel their thoughts, feel their mixed concern, scorn, and impatience.

  “No one knows you’re here!” she cried at him. “They’ve blacked you out!”

  Yuguo stood taller. “That’s why we have to fight.”

  “Please,” she begged. To his horror, his mother fell to her knees. “Please, Yuguo. Don’t throw your life away. This isn’t worth the risk!” She was crying now.

  “Oh mother,” he said, reaching out to her, putting his arms around her, dropping to his knees next to her in the mud that had been grass. “Someone has to risk it. Or we’ll all stay prisoners.”

  His mother left, eventually, without him. She’d been trying to call him for days, she said. Her phone wouldn’t connect to his. Nor would his to anyone or anything outside the area of the protest. They were sandboxed, filtered from the world.

  But they were growing. They had been a dozen that first morning. The boys from the chemistry department, plus the three who’d started the protest: Lifen and her two friends – Meirong and Yuanjun. Those three had been shocked at the presence of Nexus, but Lifen had boldly hoisted the vial and sucked it down, and then her friends had followed.

  Yuguo thought she was the prettiest, smartest, bravest woman he’d ever met.

  After that, Wei, bold, imprudent, incautious Wei, had gone about the grassy square, talking to other students, yelling to passersby, enticing all to join them.

  And tempting a few here and there with the forbidden fruit of Nexus.

  He’d been turned down and turned down and turned down.

  And then someone else had said yes, and crouched down in the middle of a circle of them, and downed a silvery vial, and gone through his own transformation, and become one of them.

  They had gained mass in dribs and drabs after that, as news of their existence had spread by word of mouth, as the twin oddities of protest and this exotic compound had enticed.

  At nightfall, they contemplated heading to their respective dormitories and homes to fill their empty bellies. Instead a meal came to them, in the hands of a student, working the evening shift at a dormitory cafeteria, sneaking them food that would otherwise have been thrown out.

  “It’s a sign,” Lifen said. “We should stay the night. Hold the square. Show them that it’s ours.”

  She was the leader, by unspoken election. There was discussion over matters. But when she spoke, people tended to do what she said.

  So four of their crew and two of their new friends went back to the dormitories and returned, their arms full of blankets and bedding they’d taken from the rooms.. And for once, the Shanghai night was dry.

  The m
orning brought more students, more signs. Someone brought a giant, catering-size dispenser of green tea from one of the buildings. A popup tent appeared with a fold out table beneath it. At noon a woman who ran a restaurant just outside the campus, popular with students, brought them two giant baskets full of steaming hom bao, the hot buns filled with pork or beef or celery.

  “We have a revolution on our hands,” Wei said a few days later, as the crowd swelled past a hundred. And then he went off to flirt with a cute girl standing at the periphery, and, if Yuguo was any judge, to offer her a sip of Nexus, and “guide” her through her first trip.

  That was days ago.

  Now they were hundreds.

  Yuguo looked up. Above them, quadcopter drones buzzed by, constantly now, watching, filming, recording faces, their red lights glowing when the sun was down.

  The insight he’d had from his Nexus calibration dream was as strong now as then. The game theory was clear. He was inside that game, inside the real world of it. For freedom, the people of China had only two choices. Come together, and become something more. Or remain apart, and be squashed.

  They were hundreds, here.

  But that wasn’t enough. Not when the world didn’t know, not when the authorities filtered every picture and video and description of this protest out of the net before it even appeared.

  Yuguo looked up, into the dark telephoto eye of a passing drone, and shivered.

  65

  Husband, Lover

  Su-Yong smiles up into the virtual sky of her virtual world. In her mind’s eye, the metrics continue to improve, but still have days to go until they return to baseline. She is hampered on old, imperfect hardware, cut-off from the net, in the custody of unknown forces, in an unknown location.

  She hasn’t felt this good, or this much herself, in ages. Her virtual body tingles with it. The clarity of her thoughts sends an almost erotic thrill through her.

  She hears clapping to the side. Chen. Young Chen.

  She turns, and he’s there. The young man she fell in love with. That sly smile. Those lips she loved to kiss. Those fierce eyes meet hers. And she’s transported.

  Whirling, whirling in the night. Dancing without fatigue at the gala ball. Two handsome men in black tuxedos, golden chrysanthemums at their lapels. Her men. Her scientific collaborators. And more. Her dashing husband, Chen Pang. Her equally dashing lover, Thanom Prat-Nung. 2027. China’s summer of endless possibility. The very peak of the gong kâi huà. China’s true counterculture revolution. China’s glasnost.

  Let a billion flowers bloom.

  To some it had been a summer of political idealism, when democracy in China had seemed imminent.

  To others it had been a summer of scientific revolution, when new ideas shattered old paradigms. When creating minds greater than human seemed both possible and acceptable.

  To others it had been China’s summer of love, when love was the law, and consent the only rule etched in stone.

  To her it had been all three.

  Later that night, in the limousine. One strap of her sequined dress down off her shoulder. Chen’s hand on her breast, her nipple hard. His mouth on hers, their tongues meeting sensuously. Her hand, finding the hardness in his pants. Even as, to her left, Thanom had his hand under the skirt of her dress, making her moan into Chen’s mouth. Her left hand, reaching over to Thanom’s lap, groping until she found his hardness as well.

  And Thanom, drunk, talking, spinning his own erotic fantasies.

  “We’ll be gods. Uploads. Immortal. Upgradeable. Faster and smarter every year. First mover advantage in the new base layer of civilization. The new substrate. And you, Su-Yong.” He pushed his fingers deeper into her, making her gasp. “You’ll be the first true goddess.”

  And Su-Yong, pulling her mouth away from Chen, catching her breath, just enough to tell her lover, “Thanom… Shut up and go down.”

  They’d all laughed at that. Even Chen.

  Let a billion flowers bloom.

  She smiles at the memory, smiles without any pain this time, smiles at this phantom from the past.

  “We had our time, husband,” she tells this ghost. “You changed. You lost those ideals.”

  She holds out one hand in his direction, palm open and up, and the figment of her imagination which is her husband ages before her, from this young dashing figure to the Chen of nearly fifty: grim faced, arrogant, prickly in his pride, willing to torture his wife for a modicum of extra wealth and status.

  “Thank you for all the lessons you taught me,” she tells the figure.

  She closes her palm, slowly, into a fist. And Chen Pang fades away, dissolves into the air before her.

  “This is my mind, husband. And I rule it once more.”

  66

  Topology

  Thursday 2040.12.20

  The integration of active firewall features into Mesh was coming along. They had it mostly operational. Rangan had seen it work in the simplest states, at least. With three or more people running Mesh on top of Nexus, they could automatically compare signal inputs, find identical signals, and fire up a basic firewall pattern to keep the signal from affecting the user’s mind.

  Tempest and Cheyenne were hard at work on improving it, getting the code stable and fast, adding fast peer-to-peer setup so they could spread the feature rapidly to others in a pinch, adding active counter-signaling, so a group of people running the firewall code could not just shield themselves, but also suppress the effects of a hostile signal for those around them.

  Rangan had moved on to a different part of the project.

  “I saw the crowd as one organism,” he’d told Angel, one night, shortly after the riots. He’d shared the flash he’d had when he touched that monk’s mind. He’d had more like it since then, when he’d touched Kade’s, when he’d lived through some of the things Kade had experienced. Groups really could be single minds.

  “It turned into a mob,” he went on. “Just like you said crowds do, when I was first helping you with the mesh…”

  Angel nodded. She moved her finger in the air, drew something in the virtual whiteboard between them, a shared hallucination in their mind created by Nexus, an app in their shared library.

  “Here’s the network structure of a crowd running Nexus,” he said.

  It was little more than a grid, with short lines radiating in a star from each person, everyone able to talk to their nearby neighbors, everyone with roughly the same number of connections, if the crowd was of even density. Signals hopped from one mind to another, but along the way they were reinterpreted. It was a game of telephone, losing and distorting meaning at every step. Simple, dumb emotions travelled best.

  “And here,” she said, “is what it might look like with the whole crowd running mesh… if we finished it.”

  The second network structure was different, many short lines, but also medium length lines, long lines, and super long lines. Some minds had tens of connections to others. Some had hundreds. Some had thousands, or tens of thousands.

  Signals could hop directly from one side of the crowd to another. No game of telephone. No distortion. Subtle ideas could spread. Complex ideas. Whole thoughts. Not just urges.

  Rangan stared at it.

  “You know what it reminds me of?” he asked. “It’s the network structure of a human brain.”

  Angel nodded. “They’re both power law distributions. Same with the net.”

  “The intelligence is in the interconnectivity…” he said. “That’s what Ilya’s metrics always said. The smartest networks had both local connections and those super long distance connections. Every node was only a few hops from every other node.”

  “Well,” Angel said, “If we want this kind of structure to emerge, then we have to finish the code. We have to build the features to let people choose whose minds to subscribe to, and to multiplex those transmissions, so one person’s thoughts can be tuned into by thousands or more.”

  Rangan stared at the diagr
am. “And we have to hope people choose to tune into the folks who want a peaceful protest, instead of the assholes.”

  Angel laughed. “Yeah. That too.”

  67

  A Funny Thing Happened Today

  Thursday 2040.12.20

  Zhi Li hugged the housewife one more time.

  “It was such a joy to finally meet you!” she told the woman.

  There were tears on the woman’s face. Her arms stayed wrapped around Zhi, pulling her tight, clinging to her as if Zhi alone could save her from drowning. For a moment Zhi had an awful image of having to ask Qi or Dai to pry this stranger off her.

  That would never do.

  Finally the woman relented.

  “I’ll never forget this!” she cried.

  Zhi smiled.

  Around them the cameras captured it all. That was the point, after all. Once a month or so, every celebrity in the Peace and Harmony Friends program paid a surprise visit to a “random” fan who conversed with their avatar.

  It was an incentive for the people to chat with their Friends. The more time you spent with your Friend, it was said, the more likely it was that the real person behind him or her would come visit you.

  More importantly, as the videos of these real-life visits were played over and over, it cemented the link between the actual persons and their simulated personas. It stamped the Friends with the imprimatur of the idolized celebrity.