Apex

by Ramez Naam

  What struck her more was what she couldn’t find.

  Varun Verma. He existed. There was a record for him. It was almost plausible. A bio. A few scientific publications. A classified-but-accessible-to-her summary of his work in quantum computing.

  But it wasn’t enough. She’d been an agent in the ERD. She knew what a top scientist looked like. This wasn’t it. This had been heavily redacted. With no indication that there was another file that codeword access or greater privileges would reveal.

  And the building he worked in? The Advanced Computational Sciences building?

  It was a shell. A front. Three floors. Half a dozen projects. Twenty staff.

  Bullshit. She’d taken lunch out under the trees. She’d watched five times that many people go in and out of that building. She’d walked casually by, making sure to have a destination that put her on a course that required a close pass. She’d seen the ten centimeter thick armored glass that made up the façade. Glass too thick to shoot through. A pretty building. Nearly impenetrable.

  She kept her eyes open, got a glance at a power distribution schematic for the campus during a routine fire drill. The power lines drawn to that building were thicker than those to all the rest of the buildings here combined. Oh, something was going on there. Something important.

  She searched back in time, scraping away layers of digital sediment for the electronic spoor that all projects unwittingly leave. She dug into old DRDO records, into public records filed with the City of Bangalore, construction permits, requisitions. Further, into publicly available satellite imagery from the years of the campus’s construction.

  What was that in the high-res images from space? She zoomed in, zoomed again. Heavy excavation equipment? Deep bore tunnelers? The kind you’d use to dig a deep vertical shaft?

  There was no mention of any of that, in any file on the building. Not that much in the way of files existed. The construction permits didn’t exist. The requisitions didn’t exist. The blueprints didn’t exist. The floor plans she downloaded, memorized, but didn’t trust.

  She heard Kevin’s words, advice on sleuthing. She closed her eyes. She could hear his voice, feel his presence, as if he was standing at her elbow, looking over her shoulder, close enough to touch.

  It hurt, but less than it would have a month ago. Less than it would have even a week ago. She was almost there.

  Sometimes, the Nakamura who wasn’t here said, things are evident by their very absence.

  She had to smile, despite the pain. Such a typical Kevin thing to say. Always with the enigmatic turn of phrase. But he had a way of being right.

  The very absence of anything interesting listed about the Advanced Computational Sciences Building and Varun Verma made them very interesting indeed.

  Sam reached over into the box she’d brought from her quarters, pulled out the small potted plant. She put it gently on the window sill, off into the far corner.

  Until the tiny camera inside, the camera she’d bought on Brigade Road with money Division Six had paid her, was lined up with the entrance to the Advanced Computational Sciences Building.

  She pulled out the anonymous phone she’d bought to go with it, pulled up the image from the camera, and adjusted the plant until it was just right. The monitoring and facial recognition software was already loaded.

  She hit the buttons on the phone in sequence.

  Monitor.

  Record.

  Alert.

  74

  Let’s Do This

  Monday 2041.01.07

  Rangan read through the messages in front of him one more time.

  They were all from him. Or would be.

  Once they were sent, there was no going back.

  The collaborative firewall was working. The Mesh was working. Kade had weighed in, given Rangan insights from his work with Nexus children and Buddhist monks. Angel and Cheyenne had made those real. Mesh would be a mesh network, but more. A group using it would be able to form a high-gain transmitter, a high-gain receiver, boosting their collective ability to send and hear others in the way that the more intuitive collectives Kade worked with did.

  But the real goal was to stop the violence.

  Decision Day, as people were calling the Mall riot, had been the worst outbreak of violence yet, but it wasn’t the last. There were standing protests everywhere now, scattered groups of hundreds or thousands. And across the net there was a rallying cry for another surge of protest on Inauguration Day. Culminating in a Million (Transhu)Man March on DC.

  January 21st. Two weeks from now.

  Mesh had a chance to suppress the violence, if enough people were running the new code.

  How do you get enough people to run the new code?

  You have a hero ask them. A celebrity. Rangan wasn’t much of a celebrity. But the Eccentric article claiming he was in DC had been seen millions of times, now. His music was suddenly enjoying its greatest ever popularity. Somewhere, some bank account of his, seized by the ERD, was collecting royalties he’d never see. There were fan clubs talking about him.

  There were masks of his face. There were people out there in those protests, wearing his face. He watched footage and he’d see himself, dozens of himself.

  The old him. Bleached blonde. Crazy grin. Cocky as all hell. The him that had never failed. That had never done anything for anyone but himself.

  Rangan shook his head.

  There was a pit where his stomach should be. This was going to come back to bite him. He knew it. It was going to be bad. Really, really bad.

  “OK,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  Angel nodded. Cheyenne held her left hand up, and Rangan high fived her.

  “Let’s frack this guy’s plans up, yo,” she said.

  Tempest shook her head. “You all are crazy,” she said.

  Then she went off, with her copy of the messages, to log in from an anonymous location, and send an open letter in Rangan Shankari’s name to the net, via the incredibly well-trafficked site, Eccentric.

  And Rangan sat down, tunneled through layers and layers of anonymizing crypto services to hide his trail, and prepared to check their changes into all the most popular Nexus code repositories.

  In his name.

  75

  The Clearing of Jiao Tong

  Tuesday 2041.01.08

  “You are ordered to clear the square! This is your final warning!”

  Yuguo tensed as the police blared the message again. Around him he felt fear and resolve war in the minds that remained.

  “Hold!” Lifen yelled, standing tall atop a wooden table someone had dragged into the square, a white-shirted hero in the Shanghai night, one of her fists thrust high into the air, illuminated by the police spotlights. “This is our square!”

  Her eyes glittered in the bright white beams. Her face was alive, animated with passion as she exhorted the students to hold fast. In her mind, victory beckoned. Victory where they rose up, came together, rose together.

  Yuguo had never seen anyone so beautiful. He’d never met anyone so beautiful inside or out.

  He’d never been so terrified.

  Twenty four hours ago the police had come, in their metal shields and their mirrored helmets that obscured their faces, with their bludgeons and gas guns and water cannons. Rows and rows of them, hundreds of police, maybe as many as there were protesters, completely surrounding the square.

  The orders to leave had come, amplified, reinforced with promises of lenience for all who departed, threats of jail for all who remained.

  Twenty four hours.

  Half their numbers were gone now.

  And the deadline was up.

  Dread filled the cavern where Yuguo’s heart had been. Come together and be something more. Or remain apart and be shattered.

  Wei leapt up onto the table next to Lifen. “They cannot break us!” He cried. Patriotic fervor leapt forth from their minds.

  Xiaobo, leapt onto the table next to them, waving a “FREE
SUN LIU” sign. Other signs called out for scientific freedom, for an end to net censorship, for more election rights, or showed hand-painted flowers by the dozens, when there should have been billions.

  No, Yuguo wanted to tell them. No.

  They were too few. Shanghai had not come together. It had remained apart.

  The night air shattered with the sound of explosions.

  Projectiles whistled through the air.

  Something struck Xiaobo as Yuguo watched, sent him flying off the wooden table, crashing into students arrayed behind him, the FREE SUN LIU sign tumbling loose to strike someone in the head.

  A strangled cry cut the night. Someone’s horror bombarded his mind.

  Yuguo realized it was his own voice, his own thoughts.

  A canister whistled, crashed into Lifen’s midsection, folded her in two, knocked her body back. Her pain struck Yuguo full force, and he heard himself cry out again.

  Wei fell even as he watched.

  People crashed into Yuguo, panic rising from the crowd, flinging itself directly into his brain. He staggered on his feet, then fell to his knees as another body slammed into his. There was a canister in the mud, yellow gas rising from it. His lungs were on fire. His face was burning. He was coughing uncontrollably, his lungs spasming.

  He tried to crawl in Lifen’s direction. A leg slammed into his shoulder, shoving him around. Another smashed into his face. He fell into the mud, reeling. When he rose to his knees, it was chaos. He was disoriented. Which way was he facing?

  Through the forest of legs he saw booted feet, metal shields. Smoke. There were screams, thuds.

  Where was Lifen? He couldn’t feel her mind. He couldn’t see anything.

  “Run!” he heard. “Help!” Minds were crying out in pain and fear. All was chaos.

  Someone pulled him to his feet. A bloody face loomed in front of his, a demon, the mind a nightmare of fear. It was Xiaobo!

  “Run!” Xiaobo told him. “Run!”

  Yuguo turned, and ran. Ahead of him a mirror-masked, black-armored riot policeman dragged a struggling female student by the hair as she flailed at him with the remains of a FREE SUN LIU sign. Yuguo turned and dodged another way, looking for an opening, a path out of the nightmare. All around him he saw riot police slamming into the students, their long shadows thrown in the harsh lights of the spotlights. He saw phones held up above the crowd, recording video that would never be seen. He saw signs being beaten down, a billion flowers – no, a mere few hundred flowers – being trampled into the mud. Overhead, the police drones circled, their red lights glowing with menace.

  Shanghai hadn’t come together.

  And now they were shattered.

  “The protests have all been cleared, Premier,” Gao Yang said.

  Bo Jintao looked up from his reports on the American Navy’s provocations, on what looked like preparations for war.

  “Go on,” he told his aide.

  “Protests cleared in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Xi’an, and Dalian,” Gao said. “State security police encountered no difficulty. Minimal force was used. A token number of arrests were made. Interrogations are beginning now. No sign of coordination between protests. Some indication of drug use among protesters. Information containment is so far perfect.”

  “Good,” Bo Jintao said. “But we remain alert,” he cautioned Gao. “People will still hear stories. The public response in the first twenty-four hours – that’ll tell us what we need to know.”

  Gao Yang nodded.

  Bo brought his eyes back to aggressive actions of the Americans.

  The Avatar watched as files were uploaded, scanned, and filtered. Censor codes deployed at network edges and chat and video service hubs ran the models fed to them by the Information Ministry on incoming chats and images and videos. Rules based modules found time tags and geo-codes for events on the Do Not Publish list. Video and image recognition modules found telltales of protesters, of police action, of near riot conditions, of text on signs. Linguistic analysis found banned phrases, mention of suppressed persons, anti-state sentiments, even attacks on upper leadership and the integrity of the State and the Party themselves.

  Videos disappeared before ever reaching their destinations. Chunks of text fell into the void. Images dropped out. Accounts and phones were flagged for seditious activity, notes fired back to the Information Ministry and State Security Ministry servers for appendage to citizen files.

  The Avatar marveled at it, the machinery of human bondage, the software of memetic suppression, the mechanism of mass ignorance, one of the companion pieces to the simulated Friends who planted the ideas the old men wanted to see spread.

  So much effort, she thought to herself, humans spend on lobotomizing themselves.

  Then she reached out to her agents within the vast edifice, whispered to them a tiny update to their models, and scattered the faintest of false trails across the net.

  76

  Thin Ice

  Tuesday 2041.01.08

  Pryce waited as the imagery came up on the screen, as Miles Jameson’s Montana ranch came into view of the NRO satellite she’d re-tasked.

  There was going to be hell to pay for this.

  “This is a really bad idea, boss,” Kaori said, her voice low, urgent. “Why don’t you take this to the Attorney General?”

  Pryce shook her head. Sam Cruz was deep in the President’s camp. There was no hope there.

  “No, Kaori. You heard me. You have a copy. If anything happens, you take everything to Stan Kim.”

  Kaori pursed her lips at that. “If anything happens to you, that is.” She sounded unhappy. “You’re not a field agent, boss.”

  Pryce ignored that and concentrated on the screen. There it was. She zoomed in the image.

  Snow. Sprawling complex. Three buildings. Six, seven vehicles in sight. Any number in the garages.

  Field ops succeeded or failed based on intelligence and planning. That’s what it really came down to.

  “Tell me again how we know he’s in there.” Pryce said.

  Kaori ticked the data points off on her fingers. “One, the Secret Service roster shows his detail is there presently. All of them. Two, NSA shows his phone there. Three, NSA shows the phones of his aides are there. Four, satellite data shows no evidence of him leaving. He’s in a wheelchair. It’s pretty obvious when he comes and goes. He hasn’t left for weeks.”

  Pryce nodded. “Time he got a visitor, then.”

  Pryce stared out at the windows of the charter plane as it came down towards the airport outside of Billings, Montana. The state was blanketed in white, smothered in snow, illuminated by early morning glow, even as the rest of the country went through the mildest winter on record.

  Warm air carries more moisture, she remembered an officer lecturing in one of the Pentagon briefings on climate-driven conflict. Sucks it away from some places, concentrates it in others. We’re seeing more dry winter days and more blizzards. More droughts and more super-storms.

  She shook her head. That was a problem for her day job.

  Right now…

  Right now her problem was to unravel a mystery.

  To spring a trap on a President. On two Presidents.

  And then to stay alive.

  Planning. Superior planning. Superior intelligence. The element of surprise.

  She had all of those. She’d thought the plan through backwards and forwards, gamed it out in dozens of different scenarios.

  So why was there a knot in her stomach?

  Maybe I should have taken that Secret Service detail after all, she thought.

  The car was waiting for her on the tarmac, as she’d requested, a sleek silver all-wheel sedan under a uniformly grey sky. The flight crew helped her load the gear bags she’d brought into the trunk. Pryce thanked them, re-confirmed her next booking with them, and then was off.

  The drive from Billings to Miles Jameson’s ranch took five hours, across icy, treacherous roads, with high wind
s gusting across them. More than once the car decided to stop and shelter until conditions improved. Each time she urged it on. Vehicular traffic was light, to say the least.

  She could have chosen a closer airfield to land in, but she hadn’t.

  She could have rented the car under a false name, but she hadn’t.

  The trap had to be baited. The bait had to be dangled long enough for the predator to pounce.

  And the bait was her.

  She didn’t know when Jameson’s Secret Service first became aware of her. Ten miles back, when she’d taken the road that led to just four ranches, of which Jameson’s was one? Twenty miles back, when she’d driven through the one horse town on the way here? Further back? As far back as Billings? She hoped not. That would not bode well for her plans.

  One way or another, they were waiting for her at the gate to Jameson’s sprawling ranch. Two large black SUVs sat there, behind the gate, windows tinted, their door and body panels bulging in ways that spoke of armor reinforcement. In front of the gate stood two tall, broad shouldered men in mirrored glasses and heavy black coats with SECRET SERVICE loudly emblazoned in red. Large automatic weapons were openly held in their gloved hands, pointed down.

  The house was somewhere back there, more than a mile away, well out of sight.

  One held up a hand towards her, palm out. The Tesla was stopping itself already.

  The agent who’d held his hand out walked towards her, towards the driver’s side. The other stood there, immobile, impassive, blocking her way.

  These are Secret Service agents, Pryce told herself. They’re loyal. These are the ones I can trust.

  Staring at the guns in the hands of the massively muscled men with their lethal fourth generation enhancements, it sounded hollow.