Apex

by Ramez Naam

“Yes, you would have!” Pryce said, cold and hard. She slapped the back of one hand into another. “That’s exactly what you’d do.”

  Stockton stopped talking, just sat there, breathing hard. “Jesus, Carolyn.”

  “He’s guilty,” Pryce said.

  “You don’t know that!” Stockton replied.

  “The car I rented was totaled, Mr President. Totaled.” She stared at him. “I’m only alive because I predicted that. Because I tricked them into thinking I was still in that vehicle.”

  “And another thing,” Stockton said. “How did you even get that gear?”

  “Please, Mr President.” Pryce let the absurdity of the question sound in her voice.

  Stockton shook his head. “Car crashes happen. It was icy out there.”

  “Cars crash when there’s a human involved,” Pryce said. “Not two software-driven vehicles, colliding on an empty stretch of road.”

  Stockton leaned back in his chair, brought his hands to his face.

  “Jameson is guilty, Mr President,” Pryce said softly. “He knew the code words. He knew the names of false flag programs in memos that were never leaked. I saw it. I predicted that they’d take out the car. And they did. You told me to find out if we created the PLF. I’m telling you – we did.”

  Pryce held herself steady, kept herself from shaking.

  Stockton sighed from behind his hands. “OK.”

  Pryce looked down at the floor, then looked back up. “What does that mean, Mr President? ‘OK’?”

  Stockton spoke, his hands still covering his face. “It means…” he paused. “I still can’t believe it. But it means I trust you. And it means I’ll confront him. And if it’s true…” He brought his hands down, leaned forward again, looked Pryce in the eyes. “I’ll nail him.”

  Pryce nodded in relief.

  “But Pryce,” he said, staring at her.

  “Yes, sir,” she answered.

  “No. More. Secrets.” He emphasized each word. “No more hiding things from me, you hear?”

  Pryce nodded. “Perfectly, Mr President.”

  “Good,” Stockton said. He rose, clearly viewing the meeting as over.

  “Mr President,” Pryce said.

  “Now there’s more?” Stockton asked.

  “Actually, sir,” Pryce said. “I’d like to request Secret Service protection.”

  Stockton looked surprised. “They really spooked you, didn’t they? First time for everything, I suppose.”

  Pryce shook her head slightly. “Sir, with Becker dead, and Holtzman, and Barnes, it just seems prudent.”

  Stockton frowned. “Becker was a heart attack,” he said, sharply. “Barnes was the Chinese. Unless there’s intel you haven’t shared with me yet?”

  Pryce cursed herself. She shouldn’t have gone there.

  “No sir,” she said. “No evidence linking those. Just… a lot of bodies.”

  Stockton nodded, looking suspiciously at her. “You have told me everything, haven’t you Carolyn? Anything else on your mind?”

  Pryce closed her eyes, then opened them. She’d had time to think about this. Lots of time. On the hike. In the chopper. On the plane home.

  “Sir, there is something.”

  Stockton sat back down. “Go on, Carolyn. Better now than later.”

  “If we created the PLF, if we ran those missions, if they were fakes…” she paused. “Then we’ve been tricked. We’ve been tricked into creating policies on the basis of facts that aren’t facts at all.”

  Stockton frowned at her.

  Pryce tried again, from another angle. “Sir, as a false flag, the PLF worked. It worked as a psy-op on us. Look at what it’s tricked us into doing. Locking up kids?”

  Clips from the video came back to her. She’d watched it again on the plane. She’d found it hard to look away. We did this… why? Because we were lied to? Because we fooled ourselves into doing it?

  She thought of her own reaction to the videos, the way it was driving the protests out there.

  “The PLF drove us to policies that are bad for national security,” Pryce told the President. “What we’re doing now – it’s inciting violence, distracting us from other issues.”

  Stockton’s brow was furrowing more intently. He was shaking his head.

  “Mr President,” Pryce said. “Holtzman had Nexus in his brain when he saved your life. He made a moral choice. It doesn’t turn people into monsters. They’re still human.”

  “Pryce,” Stockton said. “You still don’t get it.” His eyes searched her face. “And you need to. This is the biggest security threat there is. It’s like…” He chuckled. “Funny, Holtzman got it. It’s like the Neanderthals and us. Neanderthals were on top, then us smarter humans came along and drove them to extinction. Except now we’re the Neanderthals. See? And no one’s going to drive us to extinction on my watch.”

  Pryce frowned. “Mr President,” she said. “Humans and Neanderthals mated. They interbred… There’s Neanderthal DNA inside of you.”

  Stockton nodded. “Exactly. And we still wiped them out! How much worse does it get than that?”

  Pryce stood there, reaching for something to say, anything.

  “Carolyn, this isn’t for discussion. My grandson’s going to have a fair shot at life, without competing with AIs or posthumans or whatever else comes up next. Liam’s not going to be turned into some sort of second class citizen. That’s that. I’m going to fight every day to keep things that way, whether it’s popular or not, whether we created the PLF or not.”

  His eyes, his tone, the look on his face, all made it clear how dead set he was on this. He wasn’t going to budge on this. Not today.

  “Now,” the President said. “Is this going to be a problem for you?”

  Pryce lowered her eyes. China. Kazakhstan. India. There were so many situations on the verge of explosion, so many problems that needed her attention right now. She sighed inwardly. Maybe she could reopen this in a few months.

  Pryce looked back up at John Stockton. “No, Mr President,” she told him. “It’s not.”

  “They have your alias. Your face.”

  Breece paled. “Show me.”

  The Nigerian waved him over.

  Breece looked over his friend’s shoulder. The Nigerian was inside DHS’s systems, using the backdoors they’d gleaned from Barnes’s trove of data. Backdoors that it seemed DHS didn’t even know existed.

  “Here,” the Nigerian said. “Picture of you from the National Mall.”

  Breece frowned. It was him in disguise, but the disguise half torn off.

  Seen from the ground.

  “Shankari.”

  The Nigerian nodded. “Some pictures are clearer,” he said.

  He was right. Some showed his undisguised face. In weird ways, though. Almost artist’s renditions.

  Memories.

  But whose?

  “How much do they know?” Breece asked.

  “Missions,” the Nigerian said. “DC, Houston, Chicago, the Mall. A reference to me. To Kate. To Hiroshi. But not real names. Just aliases.”

  “Damn it,” Breece said.

  “What about the mission this month?” the Nigerian asked.

  “We have to do it,” Breece replied. “But we don’t have to get our hands dirty.” Breece looked out the window, onto DC. “I think it’s time we tapped some of the local talent.”

  John Stockton looked across the room at Jerry Aiken, his Chief of Staff.

  “Every detail,” he told Aiken. “The car company. The cops and paramedics who reported to the crash. The flight crews for the planes and the helicopter. The agents on Jameson’s detail. The phone records for any calls Pryce made. The car’s nav data. All of it.”

  His Chief of Staff nodded.

  “Everything, Jerry,” the President repeated. “Quickly. And quietly.”

  “Yes sir, Mr President,” Jerry Aiken said. “I’m on it.”

  81

  Integration

  S
aturday 2041.01.12

  Yuguo held his sign aloft, atop the wooden table. LET A BILLION FLOWERS BLOOM! On the other side, his sign showed faces of his friends, his missing friends, bloodied, the last images seen of them, and the word JUSTICE.

  Around him thousands of students and ordinary Shanghai residents thronged the central square of Jiao Tong. The air was thick with the thoughts of them all, from a continuous supply of Nexus being produced in the chemreactors in the buildings around them.

  The campus was theirs.

  Two kilometers to the east, a tremendously larger crowd, more than a hundred thousand strong, held People’s Square.

  Above them the sky was thick with drones, crisscrossing, buzzing them at high speed just over the height of their signs. Around them, State Security police waited ominously, reinforced with soldiers, with tanks, turrets and machine guns pointed at the crowd.

  Let them come. The censor codes were still down. The protesters were communicating freely with the outside world. In the engineering buildings, circuit printers and fabricators were churning out more devices now, devices to be sure they’d stay online if the censor codes ever came up.

  Satellite uplink phones. Laser communication links. Devices that let them bypass Chinese infrastructure entirely, talk directly to the world via the constellation of hardware whizzing past them in the sky.

  Devices they would have been executed for printing weeks ago.

  Some were staying here. Most were being snuck out at night by runners, bound for the larger protests at People’s Square. In other cities, other university campuses and small private workshops were doing the same.

  Every day now their numbers grew, as more men and women snuck past the army lines, and into the square.

  Every day brought word of new protests in far-flung cities.

  Messages arrived now from fellow protesters in America, in Russia, in Venezuela, in Egypt, in countries all across the globe, all seeking to overthrow the tyrannies they faced. Holes poked through firewalls let the Chinese people suddenly have access to services they’d only heard of. Services where they could upload what they saw, heard, felt, and thought, as files to be re-experienced by others using Nexus. Services where they could share what they were living through in real-time for anyone to tap into. Services where they could find and watch the experiences of others, protesting in countries around the world.

  Revolution was here.

  Revolution was everywhere.

  Bo Jintao met Bao Zhuang in the Presidential office.

  Bao Zhuang seemed pensive.

  “How did your call with American President go?” Bo Jintao asked.

  Bao Zhuang turned and looked out the window. It was moments before he answered. When he did, he still faced away. “You have the transcript. He says his country played no part in inciting unrest here. He expressed concern over the ‘human rights’ situation here.” Now Bao Zhuang did turn, a twinkle in his eye. “I expressed my own concern over the human rights situation in the United States, of course.”

  Bo Jintao frowned. “And the military situation?” he asked. “The carrier groups redeployed to just outside our seas? The missiles and robotic aircraft within strike range of Beijing?”

  Bao Zhuang shook his head. “Purely defensive measures, he said. Precautions given the political changes. No hostile intent.”

  “You believe him?” Bo Jintao asked.

  Bao Zhuang took his time before answering. “Even now, it’s difficult for me to believe the Americans would start a war. But policy isn’t about belief. It’s about contingencies.”

  “Contingencies,” Bo Jintao said, “Well, on General Ouyang’s recommendation, we will move our own forces into a more forward posture. If the Americans are hostile, we need be able to destroy their naval units before they can launch the bulk of their aircraft or missiles.”

  Bao Zhuang sighed. “That is military doctrine, isn’t it?” The President turned back to one of the wallscreens rotating through drone’s-eye-views of the massive protests in Tiananmen Square and the People’s Square in Shanghai, protests that rings of tanks and soldiers had not yet managed to intimidate out of existence.

  “Why not just talk to our citizens, Bo Jintao?” the President asked. He turned and looked at Bo. “Send a message. Make a gesture. Restore Sun Liu, even. He’d still be outnumbered on the Standing Committee, unable to actually do anything.” Bao Zhuang shrugged. “You could give Sun Liu my seat.” He gestured at a wallscreen. “I could even go and talk to the protesters in Beijing – they’re hardly a stone’s throw away.”

  Bao turned, swiveling his chair, looking out past the lake at the high, fortified wall that surrounded the complex. From this view you could just see the Xinhua gate at the southern part of the wall, with giant word’s in Mao’s handwriting. “Serve the People.” Beyond it was Chang’an Avenue, and across from that was Tiananmen Square, where the protesters massed.

  Bo Jintao followed Bao Zhuang’s gaze, then narrowed his eyes. “Send you to talk to them… And make you a hero? Play up your popularity even more? Is that your goal here?”

  Bao Zhuang swiveled back to face him, then sighed and shook his head. “Not everything is politics, Bo. Sometimes you just find a solution.”

  Bo Jintao brought his hands to his face. He was tired. “There are times to talk to protesters. To de-escalate.” He dropped his hands away and shook his head. “But this is more than a protest. This is an attack. Either we regain control of the information flow,” he took a deep breath, “or we’re going to have no choice but to fall back on older methods to restore order.”

  The Avatar moved under the cover of night. Two cars transported them to the edge of the protest zone. From there they walked. The four Confucian Fists formed a perimeter around her and Chen Pang, equipment bags strapped to their backs. Yingjie took point ahead of them.

  They reached her soldiers, the ones who’d been deployed from Dachang, at the outskirts around Jiao Tong. They were a tiny set, but they obeyed unblinkingly, forming a further perimeter, sneaking her small team across the lines, unseen by the other police or military.

  Inside the lines, on the Jiao Tong campus itself, it was chaos, thousands and thousands of humans, huge numbers of them carrying the nanites in their brains. It would take hours to reach the Computer Science building through this press.

  Instead, the Avatar reached out, gently touched the minds around her, and a path opened for her, the nanite-laden humans forming a boundary, moving other humans aside when necessary.

  At the door to the Computer Science Building, Xu Liang met them.

  “The upper floors are yours,” he told her. “The Secure Computing Center and Physically Isolated Computer Center’s systems are yours. But the human guards remain. I brought these as instructed.” He held out a case towards her, and opened it, revealing two hypersonic injectors within, already loaded with silvery nanite fluid.

  The Avatar nodded, and gestured to her men.

  Bai and Quang lowered their equipment bags and opened them, pulling out chameleonware suits taken from Dachang, and began to strip down.

  She walked past the blank faced security guard twenty minutes later, and took the lift down to the Secure Computing Center.

  Her staff were all assembled there for her, smiling, beaming love for her. These could not be simple automatons, after all. These had required a more subtle form of programming.

  “The facility is yours, mistress,” Xu Liang told her. “The alarms are disabled. The nuclear battery below is in failsafe mode.”

  Around him, his scientists and engineers and programmers smiled ever the wider, so proud of what they’d done. The Avatar smiled back at them, stroked their minds with her love, her appreciation, her tenderness. Good pets. So very good.

  “The connections to the outside world?” she asked.

  Xu Liang smiled broadly. He gestured and a subordinate turned to a terminal, struck a key. A wallscreen came to life with a map, showing data lines spider-webbing th
roughout Shanghai, major trunks highlighted in thick bundles of green.

  “It was not easy,” Xu said. “But with your man Yingjie’s help, and the help of new recruits at China NetCom and ASIACOM, we have made several new connections.”

  New dashed lines appeared in red, linking the SCC directly to a major peering node across Shanghai, to a trunk line in Suzhou, to the third most important ASIACOM satellite uplink in the country, to the trans-pacific data line that connected in Chongming.

  The Avatar smiled.

  “Good, good, very good.” She stroked her pets, sending them serotonin and endorphins, releasing oxytocin to reinforce the bond, giving them both pleasure and satisfaction.

  “And the cube?” she asked.

  Xu Liang smiled. “If you’ll please come with me?”

  “My name is Xu Liang,” he said aloud. “Requesting access to the Secure Data Vault.”

  The Avatar watched as lasers scanned each of his eyes. He placed both hands on full print scanners, and waited.

  She couldn’t feel the system on the other side of the vault. It was shielded from her, cut off from the net.

  “Authentication successful,” said a voice. “A second executive-level request is required to access the Secure Data Vault.”

  The Avatar smiled.

  Xu Liang stepped aside, and Chen Pang stepped forward.

  From within she felt her husband’s anguish, his absolute hatred of her, his crushing dread at what he was about to do.

  His hands touched the print scanners. His eyes came in range of the retinal scanning beams.

  “My name is Chen Pang,” he said, his voice revealing not an iota of stress. “Requesting access to the Secure Data Vault.”