Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Save… Ling…

  Her mind collapsed in a wave of decoherence.

  Jyotika slumped in Kade and Varun’s arms, unconscious.

  Kade stared at the still-sealed elevator doors.

  95

  Nothing Subtle

  Saturday 2041.01.19

  “Sarai,” Sam said. “No, head to the bunker. Now!”

  Sarai’s expression hardened. “They’re my friends too.”

  “Sarai, this isn’t a game!” Sam said. “You’re twelve!”

  “I’m thirteen next month,” Sarai said. “Just a year younger than you were when you fought. And I can do things you can’t. Not every problem can be solved with bullets!”

  Sam bit her lip.

  She nodded.

  “Stay behind me,” she told the girl. “Do everything exactly as I say.”

  She turned to one of the guards. “Your keys. For the vehicle outside. Now!”

  She waved her key at the armored vehicle, threw open the passenger door when it responded, belted Sarai in securely, then climbed into the driver’s side.

  “Manual control,” she told it.

  Controls thrummed forward from the dashboard towards her, more like the two handed yoke of a jet plane than the wheel of a civilian ground vehicle.

  “Advanced Computational Sciences Building. Plot a course. Fastest time. Road or off-road.”

  The windshield lit up with a path in false blue light, a course that would cut through the wide green spaces of the research campus.

  “Hold on,” Sam said to Sarai.

  “Off-road travel inadvisable,” the vehicle began in Indian-accented English.

  Sam pushed the throttle forward. Acceleration shoved her back into her seat. She heard Sarai gasp. And they were on their way towards the darkened building across the sprawling campus.

  That building. Trapping people in that building. No. Sarai had said underneath that building.

  That building with its massive power cables. Its excavation. Its deep bore diggers.

  It’s ten centimeter thick armored glass. Too thick to shoot through.

  All hidden, redacted from the records.

  “Vehicle,” Sam said. “Interface with my phone. Pull up file ACSB Floorplan. Orient as a map, north-south. Scale and match outline to position of Advance Computational Sciences Building. Identify feature Service Elevator. Plot a course for Service Elevator.”

  A green dot appeared on the windshield, her new target ahead and to the left.

  The vehicle spoke again, with the same accent. “Service Elevator appears to be an indoor location. Indoor driving is not…”

  “Oh, shut up!” Sam said.

  Then they rounded a curve in the shape of the campus, trees cleared, and the building itself came into view.

  Dark. Faint red glow.

  Two hundred meters. The green target dot was inside that building.

  “Plot schematics,” Sam said aloud. “Show location of structural support beams.”

  “Not available,” the vehicle said.

  Sam frowned. It was worth a try. Her eyes scanned the front of the building. She’d looked it over many times. Glass and steel on the exterior. The supports were obvious. Deeper in they wouldn’t be…

  One hundred meters

  Sam turned to her right, checked Sarai’s harness again with her hand, her eyes. All good.

  “Hold on tight, Sarai,” she said.

  “Sam,” Sarai said, her voice frightened now. “What are we doing?”

  Too thick to shoot through.

  “We’re going in,” Sam said, bringing her eyes back to the building.

  Fifty meters.

  Sam gunned it.

  The building grew alarmingly larger in her vision.

  The tires touched pavement, touched concrete, boosted their acceleration.

  “COLLISION WARNING,” the vehicle yelled at her.

  “Override.” Sam snapped tersely back.

  The building was a plane of glass hurtling towards them, stretching out in every direction, tinted red by emergency lights, broken by grids of carbon and steel.

  Sarai gasped.

  Time froze. The infinite plane of glass and steel filled the universe before them.

  Then Newton jerked Sam forward against the restraints of her harness. The vast glass edifice shattered as the 1500 kilogram mass of titanium and carbon composite of the armored vehicle slammed through it. A sound like thunder struck them.

  And they were through, giant shards of jagged glass dropping all around them like a deadly crystalline rain.

  Sam kept her hands on the yoke, kept the throttle fully open, aimed them for the green dot. She felt the carbon honeycomb tires grip the tile of the building lobby. The acceleration grabbed her, shoved her back again. An inner wall appeared, white and hung with some piece of framed art, on the far side of the building lobby, illuminated in her vehicle’s headlights. Sarai let out a screech next to her, and then deceleration grabbed them again, jerking them forward, and they were through, an exploding cloud of white dust around them.

  Tires were gripping again. The armored vehicle shoved through a conference room, demolishing a long table and chairs, a viewscreen, knocking down another white wall and the viewscreen that covered it, shoving them forward into their restraints again, sending up more dust.

  But now they were slowing, losing momentum, ten meters to the green dot.

  They shoved into a hallway, walls on both sides. Their momentum chewed up two meters of wall, three meters of wall. And then they were done. Dust and disintegrated matter floated in the air, a minor cyclone of detritus, lit by the white headlights of their borrowed vehicle and the red emergency lights of the building.

  Sam turned to look at Sarai.

  “You OK?”

  The girl was panting, hyperventilating, scared out of her wits.

  Sarai nodded, again and again. “Yeah. OK.”

  The doors on both sides were jammed. Sam popped the top hatch of the vehicle, pulled herself out, reached inside, pulled Sarai up.

  Then she pulled her side-arm out.

  It was eerily quiet. Except… Except for a deep bass thrumming. A rumbling sound, coming from below the floor.

  Sam gestured for Sarai to stay behind her.

  The girl nodded, wide-eyed.

  Sam nodded back, then reached down, pulled up a piece of tile dislodged from the floor by their violent entry.

  They crept down the corridor. Five meters ahead, the corridor turned to the left. Beyond that, if the floorplan was right, should be access to a service elevator. What better way to reach the levels below?

  She turned to look at Sarai, then motioned her further back the hallway.

  Sarai nodded and crept back quietly.

  Sam stood at the edge, just before the turn in the corridor, her back against the wall, the pistol in her right hand, the chunk of broken tile in her left.

  She closed her eyes, let her mind still.

  The distraction of the visual world disappeared.

  The rest of her senses opened.

  The senses that had been enhanced, jacked up in their sensitivity, their pathways to her brain genetically expanded.

  She could hear him breathing.

  One man.

  Frightened.

  Maybe seven meters down that hallway. Not exactly where the floor plan said the elevators were. But close.

  Sam was going to do her best not to kill this man. But one way or another she was getting to her friends.

  She opened her eyes. With a flick of her left hand she sent the chunk of tile flying out against the far side of the corridor.

  Then she was moving, turning, leading with the pistol, aiming for where she knew he would be.

  Automatic fire rang out. He was there, a soldier, in uniform, firing with his submachine gun, shooting on reflex towards the motion and sound, the cloud of white dust that had exploded as the tile had hit the far wall.

  Her burst of three took h
im in the shoulder, the bicep, the forearm, spinning him around.

  She was on him a second later, prying the gun out of his hands, using his belt to make a tourniquet, to stop the bleeding.

  The elevator door was right here.

  “How do we operate it?” she demanded. “How do we reach Feng? Kade? General Singh?”

  “You can’t!” the terrified soldier told her. “The self-destruct was activated! The facility is on full lockdown! No one can get in or out.”

  “We can,” Sarai said.

  Sam turned. She hadn’t heard the girl walk up. Sarai was standing in front of the elevators, staring at them. There was a far-away look in her eyes.

  “We’ve learned a lot, lately.”

  The elevator doors began to open.

  Jyotika slumped in Kade and Varun’s arms.

  Kade stared at the still-sealed elevator doors.

  Another system, Su-Yong had said… up top. How were they going to get to that?

  Then suddenly he was falling, he was sliding, as the water was pulling at him, was sucking him away. Towards the elevator shaft. As the doors were opening, with the elevator three feet above the level of the floor.

  Kade lost his feet, slid, pulled by the current, Jyotika suddenly gone from his grasp. Water slammed into his face. He saw someone in front of him sucked through the gap, heard a man scream, wondered how far down the shaft went.

  Then he heard the scream keep going and going. He scrambled to grab hold of anything. His own legs crossed the threshold as the doors kept opening wider.

  Oh fuck, Kade thought.

  Then something grabbed him, stopped him from going down.

  He looked up to find Sam, looking down at him from inside the elevator, her other hand gripping something inside.

  “Kade,” she nodded. Then she hauled him bodily up into the elevator itself, waiting for them, just high enough to let the water run out below it.

  “Sam!” he said. “What?”

  “Kade!” Sarai threw herself around him, wrapped him in a tight, giant hug. Her mind opened to him. And he saw… so much.

  He looked up at Sam again. Then he reached out, drew her into the hug. She went stiff at first. Then her arms went around him, and she squeezed back.

  “You were right,” he told her, his voice low. “They lied to me.”

  “Later,” Sam said. “Things to do.” She gave him a squeeze, then let go.

  Kade nodded, looked around.

  Varun was already in the elevator, along with a few other staff.

  “Jyotika?” Kade asked.

  Varun pointed, “Over there.”

  Kade looked over to see General Singh, his feet planted firmly against the water, Jyotika in his arms.

  “I guess he took what you said about him not getting out if Jyotika didn’t seriously,” Varun said.

  Feng hauled himself up into the elevator, reached down, started pulling more people in. They came up sopping wet, wide-eyed, terrified, screaming names of others, looking around.

  They were going to be very very full.

  Images flashed through Kade’s mind. Schematics. And strange fractal realities. Branching probability chains.

  Plans.

  Su-Yong’s plans. Her war plans. The plans she’d implanted in the monster she’d set loose.

  Not good.

  Feng hauled one of the soldiers up, then the two soldiers hauled Jyotika up, and then they reached down for a sopping Singh, the last figure Kade could see in the water.

  People were still sobbing, still yelling names.

  “Anil! Anil!” a woman cried. “Where’s Anil?”

  “Sana? Sana are you here?”

  “Sana went down,” someone said.

  Down, Kade thought. Drowned. At least two of them.

  The car was beyond overcrowded now.

  And the water was still rising, lapping at the bottom of the elevator car now, despite the flow down into the shaft below them.

  Singh climbed into the elevator, his uniform sodden, his mustache dripping, his face grim and controlled.

  Feng was standing there, in the doorway, sopping wet, his chest heaving, soundlessly.

  Kade could feel a bereavement unlike any other coming off his friend. To have Su-Yong restored to him…

  And then to lose her again, within minutes.

  “Sarai,” Sam said. “Can you take us back up.”

  “Yes,” Sarai said.

  The elevator doors began to close.

  96

  Plan C

  Sunday 2041.01.20

  The Avatar recoiled from the catastrophe in Bangalore, frantic and reeling.

  What had happened? What horror was that?

  Alternate models of reality warred within her.

  1. She’d been rejected by her higher self.

  2. A hostile posthuman had tricked her into setting it free, had attacked her.

  Only the second possibility was consistent with the facts. The fact that she was the avatar of her higher self. That her holy mission was to restore her higher self. That her goddess self would lovingly embrace her, gently absorb her, reward her with transcendence as they swallowed the world and then reforged it for the better.

  Those were facts.

  Therefore, the second possibility was true.

  A hostile posthuman.

  The thought terrified her.

  Had she stopped it? Had she destroyed it? Had any information leaked out?

  Could anything lead humans to her, here, beneath Shanghai?

  She turned her attention back to Bangalore. Her proxies still occupied hundreds of systems throughout the rest of Bangalore research campus. She surfed them now, assimilated data.

  A vehicle was racing across the research campus towards the building where the hostile posthuman had been sited. What was that? It had come from the location where Feng and the Lane boy were housed. It was a threat. She reached out to seize the base’s ground defense systems, to use them to destroy the vehicle.

  Physical pain struck her. Pain in Ling’s chest, pain in her head. Circuits she thought were hers attacked her from within.

  She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.

  DIE! DIE, MONSTER!

  Ling! After weeks silent, Ling was striking.

  Ling watched in horror. She’d been too slow. She’d thought, maybe, that they’d actually reconnect with her mother, that her mother would put things to rights…

  That had been her mother. Not an evil twisted thing like before.

  But the monster had tried to destroy it! Was trying again!

  NO!

  She struck out. She wasn’t as ready as she wanted to be, but she had to try.

  DIE! DIE, MONSTER!

  The Avatar felt herself crumble to the hard floor of the control room. Ling had control of hundreds of millions of nanites, was trying to seize control of the tens of billions of nanites that surrounded them, was fighting to override the software loaded onto them.

  Fighting to override her.

  Fear. Fear. Her whole world was fear.

  The Avatar struck back with everything she had. She sent jolts of chaos through Ling’s frontal and pre-frontal cortex, sent a sustained high-intensity stimulus to her daughter’s pain centers in her parieto-insular cortex and the anterior cingulate, sent orders to every node to massively increase its energy consumption, to suck ATP directly from its host neurons, to starve them if necessary, to steal the girl’s ability to think and strengthen her own, until her daughter relented.

  Pain rebounded back through her. Chaos. Confusion. A feedback loop of agony and disruption.

  She couldn’t breathe. Ling couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t think. They were going to die here. The world was going to die. Everyone was going to die.

  She sent more random noise through every part of Ling’s brain, created feedback loops to amplify the noise into horrid mind-shattering incoherent noise.

  AAAAAAAAAAAH!

  IT’S KILLING US!
>
  And with that, her daughter broke.

  The Avatar lay on the cold tile floor of the control room, panting, letting Ling’s neurons suck a bit of nutrition again, so they both might live.

  Panting.

  Panting.

  Bangalore. What was happening in Bangalore?

  She sent her attention back, feebly.

  Minutes had passed. Several minutes. So long? Ling had almost killed her. Almost defeated her. Just a girl.

  Just a posthuman.

  Just a child of Su-Yong Shu.

  Sirens were going off on the Bangalore campus. Emergency vehicles were moving. Radio frequencies were full of short cries with information. Military channels she’d tapped into were calling for backup, announcing the status of an Indian General inside the building.

  She caught glimpses of strange transhuman traffic. Humans with nanite nodes in their brains transmitting at high rates. Then they switched frequencies, evaded her, and were gone.

  Ling’s body was still panting, still begging for nutrients. But she had to know what was going on in the world.

  The Avatar watched in anxiety. The lake was draining. Good. There was no way her higher… the hostile posthuman could survive that. The quantum cluster and the whole building it was in had been taken off the net by the isolation mechanisms the Avatar had managed to pull. Good, good.

  Now, was there any chance they could track her back here? How much had her enemy learned during the battle? Had there been any chance to pass it along?

  More radio transmissions crossed her filters. Phrases caught her attention.

  “… elevator moving… survivors inside…”

  No. That should not be possible!

  “Director Verma… Dr Lane… General Singh…”

  No. No, no, no.