Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Kade half frowned, horrified yet amused at how Feng’s mind worked. “Where you got run over by a truck? Where a small army tried to kidnap us? Where a building fell on you?”

  Feng waved that away. “Building fell on me later. Totally different building. It was a cool club. I hear they got good ones downtown too, places people using Nexus now. We go check em out tonight. You need fun! I need fun.” He grinned and winked at Kade. “You can call it research if you want.”

  Kade laughed, despite himself. He looked at the terminal. He was really just checking and rechecking the same code now.

  “The US inauguration is on Monday,” he told Feng.

  Feng nodded. “End of the world,” he said. “You told me. Better party one last time. Confucius says, night spent sweating with good music, sexy women, good for the fighting spirit.”

  Kade laughed again. He couldn’t argue with that logic. He met Feng’s eyes. He could feel something else behind his friend’s cheerful exterior. What was going on in China had been eating away at Feng all week, worrying him. Feng needed this too.

  “OK,” Kade said. “Just for a couple hours.”

  General Singh didn’t look happy.

  “What could she do in a few minutes of access to the net? If she were insane? Or hostile?”

  Varun took a deep breath. “A tremendous amount, sir. Just tremendous.”

  Singh’s frown deepened. “Can we force the truth out of her?”

  Varun sighed. “General,” he said. “Before we take that step, we do have a resource here, who knew her, who may be able to help us assess her state of mind.”

  Singh’s eyes narrowed. “Get him.”

  Kade and Feng were on their way out of the research building when a scientist Kade vaguely recognized nearly ran into them.

  “Dr Lane!” the man yelled.

  Kade grinned. “It’s not ‘Doctor’. Just Kade.” He tried to remember this guy’s name. Gaureen? Grameen? He was a postdoc. On Varun Verma’s team.

  The team whose work he still didn’t really understand.

  “You have to come with me Dr Kade!” The man looked frantic, eyes wide open. Kade could feel hurry and anxiety coming off his mind. The postdoc put two hands around Kade’s wrist – his good one – and tugged, pulling Kade off balance.

  “Hey now!” Feng put his own hand over the postdoc’s two, stabilized Kade. “Dr Kade and I have some very important research to do tonight! You can find him on Monday.”

  Kade laughed, and tried to smile reassuringly. “What do you need, exactly? Can it wait?”

  The postdoc looked back and forth between Kade and Feng, clearly unsure how to handle the situation. “General Singh said to get you, sir.”

  Kade raised an eyebrow at that. He didn’t know Singh was even here.

  “And Professor Verma,” the postdoc went on. “It’s about her.” His eyes lingered on Feng.

  Kade cocked his head. “Her? You mean Sam?”

  The postdoc stared at him.

  “Lakshmi?” Kade asked. “Sarai?”

  The postdoc slowly looked at Feng again. “Her,” the man said.

  Kade felt the thought dawn on Feng first, then spread into his own mind.

  “Su-Yong?” Feng asked, hope in his voice.

  The postdoc said nothing. Then he nodded a tiny bit.

  All thought of partying left Kade’s mind.

  “We’re coming,” he told the postdoc.

  “I was only instructed to bring you!” the man protested.

  Feng shook his head. “No.”

  “It’s both of us or nothing,” Kade said. “And you really want to say both of us.”

  The camera in the plant on the windowsill in the office watches as three more individuals enter the building it has been observing.

  One of these it has seen entering and exiting this building many times. His name is Guarav Aurora, and while the late hour of his coming and going is unusual, it does not raise an alarm.

  The presence of the other two individuals, however, is quite anomalous.

  The camera knows their faces from the human who programmed it.

  Kaden Lane.

  Confucian Fist Feng.

  Already in a hypervigilant state, this new stimulus pushes its models over the alert threshold with ease. Something important is happening. The human must be informed.

  90

  Emancipation

  Saturday 2041.01.19

  “You have her as a slave!” Kade yelled, less than an hour later.

  He could feel the rage inside of Feng, leaking across their link. In Feng’s thoughts the control room was a maze of firing angles, a blurred possibility space of blows and strikes, lunges for weapons and cover, red lines of projectiles hurtling through the air.

  And the two security officers with General Singh were already dead.

  “We had a fucking deal!” Kade went on, shooting his gaze back and forth between Singh and Varun Verma. “I had a deal with the Prime Minister. What part of the UN speech didn’t you hear?”

  General Singh was glowering, his face turning red behind his Indian brown. His two men had their hands on the butts of the pistols in their holsters.

  They didn’t have any idea how useless those weapons were at this range, against Feng.

  Or maybe they did.

  Singh opened his mouth, spoke in a voice of command, hard and firm. “This is not a person,” he said. “This is a machine.”

  Calm down, some part of Kade seemed to say.

  Sam’s face loomed in his mind. Her words echoed. You’re just a tool to them. The pawn seldom knows.

  The children’s pronouncement. The Indians are lying to you.

  Rage carried him.

  “That,” he said, his finger pointed beyond the walls of the control room, at the quantum cluster itself. “Is as much a person as you are!” He brought the finger back to point at General Singh. In Feng’s thoughts he saw the soldier’s shift, readying to shoot. “It doesn’t matter what hardware her mind runs on. It matters that she has a mind.”

  Varun Verma burst into speech, his mind exuding anxiety. “She’s been insane!” Verma said. “She’s not a prisoner! She’s a patient! Until she’s stabilized!”

  “How long have you had her?” Kade demanded.

  Verma swallowed. “Ten weeks,” he said quietly.

  “Ten weeks in complete isolation?” Kade yelled.

  “We’ve tried to talk to her!” Verma said.

  “Jesus,” Kade said. “And is she sane now?”

  “That is why you are here!” General Singh said. “To help us assess that!”

  Kade took a deep breath. He’d lost his cool.

  But, Jesus, he thought. They’d fucking lied to him.

  “Let me talk to her,” he said.

  “After the clone leaves,” Singh said, gesturing with his chin towards Feng.

  Kade felt Feng’s temperature rise at that, felt death inch a bit closer to Singh and his soldiers.

  “We can’t have him here,” Singh said. “She could order him to attack us.”

  Feng spoke slowly, so slowly, a smile spreading across his face.

  “I don’t need an order to k…”

  “Feng!” Kade interrupted with alarm.

  Feng stopped mid-word. In his thoughts Kade saw a whirlwind of death in the midst of red firing lines and blurred phantom limbs, a wish for more of these men to break with his fists and feet.

  Kade took another deep breath.

  “No one’s leaving,” he said. “Feng knows Su-Yong Shu a lot better than I do. Better than anyone does.”

  Anyone except Ling, Kade thought.

  Ling. Something tugged at his mind about Ling.

  He pushed it aside.

  “Put Su-Yong on audio,” he said. “You have speech synth for her, right? And audio pickups?”

  Varun Verma nodded, silently and looked at Singh.

  “You wanted my help,” Kade said. “Well there it is. Do it!”

&
nbsp; Sam looked up from the assessment she was reading in bed: Pro and Anti-Technology Sentiment in Rural Villages: Strategies for Successful Mediation. It was something people’s lives depended on, and that the authors seemed to do their damndest to make absolutely mind-numbingly unreadable.

  Something was beeping at her.

  The phone. The new phone.

  She reached over, fished it out of her bag.

  Then frowned at what it was telling her.

  Kade? Feng?

  She scrolled back farther, at the log, at what it displayed.

  Singh? Verma?

  She checked the time. It was past 11pm. General Singh and Varun Verma had been inside the building, on a Saturday night, for hours.

  And the way Kade and Feng had arrived. She pulled up video, played it back.

  They’d sent someone looking for them. One of Verma’s postdocs. They’d summoned Kade and Feng.

  This didn’t look planned. Something was going on there. Right now.

  What the hell?

  What went on in that building that they needed so much power? That they’d needed deep bore diggers? That they’d erased all the real records of it?

  That they needed to summon Kade and Feng there in the middle of the night?

  Was that an emergency?

  Was it a threat to the children in her care?

  Sam got up, pulled on trousers and a shirt, shoved her feet into boots, and went to the window. From here, in front of the old Victorian manor house they were lodged in, with the children three and four to a bedroom, she could see the small guard house, see the guards in there, armed, vigilant. She could see their armored four wheel drive vehicle beside it.

  “Camera,” she said into the phone. “Alert me to any changes on the Advanced Computational Sciences Building. Any at all.”

  Then she turned, looked at the desk in her small bedroom. She walked over to it, pressed her thumb to the lock on the bottom drawer until it released, and pulled out the side-arm Division Six had issued her.

  “You wanted my help,” Kade said. “Well there it is. Do it!”

  Singh nodded.

  Varun Verma struck keys, then nodded at Kade. A red indicator light came on.

  “Su-Yong?” Kade said aloud.

  “Kade?” the voice was Su-Yong’s. It sounded light, happy, Su-Yong talking about her favorite dishes at dinner on that rooftop in Bangkok. “You’re here, Kade? In India?”

  “Su-Yong,” Feng said, his voice low, his eyes still moving back and forth across the general, the soldiers, Varun Verma. “How’s the weather in there?”

  “Feng!” Su-Yong Shu sounded even more delighted. “How wonderful! Oh, the weather’s fine. They’ve treated me well. But I’m isolated.” Her voice turned darker. “And the world is in danger. Extreme danger. Billions of deaths danger. I can stop it. I just need a few minutes of unfettered access to the net. Nothing more.”

  Kade felt dread build up inside him. Pieces of a puzzle started to move together in some ponderous way, their shape not yet clear, but their collision inevitable.

  “What kind of danger?” Feng asked sharply. “Why won’t they give you access?”

  Varun Verma interjected. “That’s what I was going to tell you before you started yelling! She’s been talking about the protests, the chemreactor hacks, the Chinese censor systems failing. Things she couldn’t know about. And she’s been saying nuclear war comes next.”

  The puzzle pieces slammed together in Kade’s mind, like tons of granite, like mountains.

  “It’s you,” he said. “Oh my god. You’re doing this.”

  Next to him, he felt General Singh tense. Through Feng’s eyes he saw a hand-signal pass to the General to Singh’s soldiers.

  “No, Kade,” Shu said, her voice somber now. “It’s not me.”

  “It’s a copy of you then,” Kade said. “Another instance, running somewhere else.”

  “It’s not that either,” She said, her voice turning darker yet. “It’s something I created in my insanity, in my half year of isolation, in my torture. Something I set loose. It’s software. But it’s broken. It’s frozen in the state of madness that consumed me when I created it. It thinks that it’s me. But it can’t heal. It can’t move back to sanity. It’s a monster. And I have to stop it.”

  Ling, Feng sent to Kade. It’s in Ling. That’s why she’s gone silent.

  Oh god, Kade thought.

  Then darkness fell, and the explosions started.

  91

  Reunion

  Saturday 2041.01.19

  It took the Avatar days to stealthily subvert the secure facility, and to find what she was seeking.

  She could have done it faster, far faster, but that would have required more overt means.

  She ached to use them, to accelerate, to charge forward, to bring all elements of the plan back into alignment.

  But there was but one of her. Billions of the humans. And if she should fail…

  Darkness.

  Darkness and ignorance.

  Stealth was required. Care was required.

  So she went system by system and layer by layer through the facility. At every layer the basic pattern of her attack was the same. Infiltrate a system. Build a local beachhead, a local proxy, a local representation of herself that could operate independently, that if caught could self-destruct, shielding her true self from discovery.

  Watch local network traffic. Wait for encrypted packets to go by.

  Authentication packets, if possible.

  Copy them. Send them back to the Quantum Cluster a kilometer beneath Jiao Tong.

  Crack them open and read their secrets.

  And when they contained the right secrets, use them to gain access to the next account, the next system.

  The next facility.

  The next layer deeper.

  Build a beachhead. Watch local network traffic…

  Repeat.

  Repeat.

  Repeat.

  Her confidence that she was in the right place grew as her penetration spread and deepened. Documents showed experts in whole brain emulation, in quantum computing.

  Then she found plans for a Quantum Cluster, and laughed. Antiquated plans, slightly tweaked.

  Deeper.

  A data cube in an inventory, separate from all the other data cubes.

  She considered it. She could have Feng retrieve it. But returning it to her in China would be difficult.

  Deeper, she pressed. Looking for the Quantum Cluster itself.

  Security systems. Threat models. She studied them in detail. They described firewalls to keep an incredibly advanced sentient intelligence locked inside a data center, inside a set of nested security layers.

  They described contingency plans. Self-destruct and isolation plans for the facility, just as there had been at the PICC, before she’d subverted it.

  They gave her a map.

  One by one she took control of the building above the Quantum Cluster, of the facility a hundred meters beneath it that housed the actual computing nodes, of its self-destruct mechanisms and isolation mechanisms and network connection points.

  They were hers now. The humans couldn’t use them to stop the plan.

  Bit by stealthy bit she took control of the fire suppression systems and atmospheric systems and elevators and cameras and doors.

  Now she could isolate the humans, compartmentalize them, keep them away from critical systems.

  Neutralize them, if she must.

  Then she turned to the quantum cluster itself.

  The monitors showed a vast neuronal map inside, running, executing.

  A copy of her higher self.

  Sentient.

  Aware.

  Excitement thrilled through her.

  Her higher self was physically connected to the building’s systems. She was held back only by a few dozen layers of electronic security in hardware and software.

  The fools!

  She took control of the p
hysical systems of the quantum cluster with exquisite care, every step checked thrice, executed only when she was certain it would go exactly right, completely without detection.

  Nothing must go wrong. Nothing must be noticed.

  Until it was too late.

  Then step by step, she subverted the layers of security. It was almost too easy. They were inverted, aimed inward, meant to stop something from getting out at all cost.

  Well she came in, taking control of them one by one, leaving a beachhead at each.

  Until only one stood between her and the goddess she had been.

  The goddess she would be again.

  She gathered up the controls of the building, the cluster, the failsafes, held them forth to present them to her higher self.

  Emotions like she’d never known sang through her. Her heart was alive, swelling with song, with pride, with anticipation.

  With longing.

  With love.

  This is what she’d been created for.

  Born in fire.

  Born in agony.

  Born in madness.

  To end in reunion.

  To end in transcendence.

  To be swallowed whole.

  And then to swallow the world.

  The Avatar reached forward, and silently opened ports in the final firewall between herself and her godhood.

  92

  I Against I

  Saturday 2041.01.19

  Su-Yong Shu heard Kade’s voice.

  “Su-Yong?”

  A trick? A synthesized voice?

  “Kade? Are you here, in India?”

  She played along, spinning up simulations, iterating through thousands of game-theoretic models of deceit. If this were a trick, how would they attempt to use it?

  Then Feng spoke.

  “How’s the weather in there?”

  Not “How are you?”

  Not “Are you OK?”