by Ramez Naam
The hostile entity could have passed data to them. Could have learned enough about who she was… Then the fateful words came.
“Roger. General Singh requesting secure line to Chinese Ministry of Defense Point of Contact, ASAP.”
They knew.
Calm descended on the Avatar. Clarity appeared.
They knew, and that changed everything.
The Avatar sent a flurry of signals to the systems she’d infiltrated on the Bangalore campus, and triggered chaos.
Thousands of kilometers away, hydrogen tanks exploded in the night. Building batteries and fuel cells received commands to override safety limits, discharge their full capacity into local circuits at once. Automated defense systems came alive, took aim at first responders, began firing on ambulances and fire trucks heading to the scene. Network devices went crazy, saturating all possible spectra with white noise, jamming every possible broadcast.
The Avatar nodded weakly, with the little strength left in Ling’s body. That would buy her some time.
Then she reached out to her servants in China, digital and biological, and sent the orders for war.
97
Unelevated
Sunday 2041.01.20
Kade struggled to breathe in the cramped elevator car. It had ascended for a few seconds and then stopped.
“Twenty eight meters,” Feng estimated.
Kade had learned to trust Feng’s estimates.
“Help me break off the access panel,” Feng said to the two soldiers Singh had brought with him. They set about working on the heavily reinforced panel at the top of the elevator.
Images, sensations, and memories were flashing through Kade’s head.
He remembered being Su-Yong. He remembered being trapped, trapped for months.
Months that felt like centuries.
He remembered being tortured. Tortured by her husband.
Why did she give me this? He wondered. I don’t want this part.
“You’re sure it wasn’t her escaping?” he heard Singh say to Varun Verma next to him.
“Someone else set off the self-destructs,” Verma said. “Something penetrated us from the outside.” The Indian scientist looked at Jyotika, semi-conscious now, still held in General Singh’s arms. “Su-Yong Shu saved our lives.”
Kade looked at Feng, his mind reaching out to his friend.
Feng paused his prying at the panel, looked back at Kade. Nodded his assent.
No Ling, Feng sent.
They were in agreement.
“It came from China,” Kade said. “A program she left behind. Something she managed to sneak out towards the end of her captivity there, while she was insane, like she was when she first came to you.”
Singh and Verma were looking at him now. Sam and Sarai were looking at him. Another dozen staff members in the hot, crowded elevator were looking at him. They were all bedraggled, soaking wet. Their minds gave off fear, loss, trauma. People were still crying, weeping, calling the names of coworkers they’d lost.
“Its mission is to bring back another copy of Shu,” Kade went on. “In a much, much more powerful quantum cluster.” He shook his head. “The cluster at Jiao Tong… It makes what you have here look like a toy.”
Diagrams flipped through his mind. Algorithms. Stats. Updated capabilities. Newer ion traps. Wider qubit registers. Dramatically longer entanglement times. And new algorithms within the full Su-Yong herself. Algorithms he couldn’t get his head around. Algorithms only a quantum mind could invent, that only a quantum mind could fully understand. Algorithms that effectively doubled or tripled the number of qubits at her disposal, that made Su-Yong on that hardware exponentially more dangerous than anyone had realized.
Kade swallowed. They were all staring at him. Frightened. Waiting for him to continue.
“We need to contact the Chinese.” I won’t mention Ling, he told himself. Not if I can help it. “They need to secure all the copies made of Su-Yong Shu. They need to secure the quantum cluster under Jiao Tong.”
He felt Feng’s heart breaking. Felt pain going through his friend, at the thought of doing this to the woman who’d saved him, who’d brought him freedom.
Feng slammed something hard into the metal panel above them. The sound echoed painfully through the elevator.
She doesn’t deserve this! he sent to Kade alone.
I know, Feng. Kade sent back.
It has to be done, Feng sent again, with grim determination.
That determination broke Kade’s heart. It made him angry, angry with the Chinese who’d done this, who’d brought them to this, angry with the Indians whose plans weren’t so far off.
“You understand why this is happening?” His voice was louder than he expected. He was nearly yelling into Verma and Singh’s faces. He felt the soldiers holding Feng up turn to look at him again.
Breathe, Kade told himself. He closed his eyes.
Breathe.
Observe.
Let go.
“Understand,” he said softly, opening his eyes. “If you treat them this way, if you treat posthumans as slaves, if you torture them, if you make them prisoners… You’ll drive them to want revenge. You’ll make them paranoid and angry. You may drive them insane. You’ll create the war that none of us can win.”
He felt Varun get it. He felt Varun’s shame. The man nodded.
“What I understand is that this creature is dangerous,” Singh said, his face set.
Kade stared at the man.
There was a banging sound, and suddenly a breath of cooler air. Kade looked over, and Feng, his feet in the hands of Singh’s soldiers, had the hatch free.
And he had a communications handset, on a wire, held to his face.
Feng pulled the handset away, frowning.
“It’s for you,” he said, and tossed it at General Singh.
Kade listened as Singh talked to the people topside, through the hard-lined handset they’d lowered.
“Yes,” Singh said. “Myself, Lane, Verma, fifteen others. Yes. Two casualties. No, later. Right now, I need a secure line to our Chinese Ministry of Defense contact. This is absolute top priority, you understand? National security pri one for both nations… Say again?
“Hello?
“Hello?
“Hello?”
After communications were cut off, the wait stretched out. They had air from above. They were unlikely to suffocate.
Feng free climbed the elevator cable, but reported there was only a few centimeters gap through which the handset had been snuck, between what appeared to be another several centimeters, at least, of titanium alloy. They had no Shu this time to override its controls.
Through the gap, Feng said he could hear gunfire, explosions, screams.
Sam fretted. Kade could see it on her face. She was fretting for the kids in their care.
“I can’t reach them now,” Sarai said, talking about the rest of the children. She shook her head. “They were proxying across the net before, through a router in the building next door. But now the net is down.” She paused. “I know you told us to stay in the shelter… but we had to all work together to access the elevator. But I know, after that, they went right back into the shelter. They’re safe, Sam. I swear it!”
Sam didn’t look convinced.
Kade leaned back against the elevator wall, hot and damp and still overwhelmed by the bits of data and memory and software and weaponry unpacking themselves from Su-Yong Shu’s transmission into the nooks and crannies of his mind.
He could guess what had happened. He could trace the logic of the agent Su-Yong had sent out. What would it do, having met the real Su-Yong, and having been attacked?
It would strike back. It would try to kill anyone who might have learned anything. It would accelerate its plans.
People were dying upstairs, he was sure of it.
People were dying in China.
What would he do if it was too late, if Su-Yong was back?
Not
the sane Su-Yong, the one healed by time and the input of data from a biological brain.
No. The mad Su-Yong. The one who’d been held prisoner for six months. Who’d been deliberately deprived of the input that stabilized her. Who’d been tortured by her own husband. The one who could barely tell reality from fiction, who dreamt of fire and vengeance and conquest.
What could the whole world do in that case? Drop nukes on Shanghai, while she waited a kilometer below? Would that even work?
Carry a bomb to her? Somehow get past hundreds of Confucian Fist and god-only-knows how many robotic weapons and commandeered soldiers she’d have protecting her? Were those odds of success any higher?
He looked up. Every hour that passed, the odds that Su-Yong would come back, enraged, bent on conquest, driven insane by her torturers, went up, and up, and up.
And if that happened, he saw only one way to fight her.
98
Rise, China, Rise
Sunday 2041.01.20
Forty kilometers from Shanghai, an invisible soldier named Tao moved slowly and silently past row after row of officer housing, to the largest and most stately home on the base.
His three brothers moved behind him. He could see them in his heads-up display. They were pale green grid-lined wire-frames of men, painted on his vision, though they were are invisible, and silent.
They were clear in his mind.
There were two elite soldiers at the door, in body armor, with high tech weaponry, integrated communication systems in their mirror-visored helmets. Tao’s eyes narrowed. These soldiers were enhanced, stronger and faster than any human should be, implanted with weaponry and adaptive systems that made them formidable foes.
They could not be allowed to give any warning.
Tao gave the signal, and in an instant, the two men were dead, necks snapped.
He looked down at the bodies.
A pity, he thought. These two would have made excellent additions to the force.
Tao reached down, silently unsealed a concealed pocket on this chameleonware suit, and withdrew a black hypersonic injector, an ampule already loaded into it. He took a position at one side of the door. A brother took a position opposite him. Two others pulled the dead men around the corner of the house, and then returned.
Garbed in the dead men’s armor, the dead men’s uniforms, the dead men’s mirror-visored helmets.
Down the street, right on time, came the man they’d been waiting for.
Doctor Colonel Wang Rongshang, Medical Director of Dachang Airbase.
Wang Rongshang didn’t look to either side as he approached, but his mind did touch theirs.
He knew all was in readiness.
He walked straight up to the door, and knocked.
Tao watched the nanites take effect in General Zhangshun’s brain. As he received updates from the other teams taking the other senior officers who were not already theirs, he proxied through a handheld radio unit, across a secure connection their mother had forged over civilian network infrastructure.
Dachang Airbase is yours now, he sent. We begin fueling the aircraft immediately.
Now it was time to organize the emergency round of “vaccinations” for the remaining soldiers.
Mei-Lien rose, tied a robe around herself. She was so tired, so exhausted from worry; worry for her son, Yuguo; worry that the state security goons would hurt her boy.
How she’d come to hate them, when the video played again and again, of them clubbing students, beating boys who were little more than children.
Dragging that poor girl away, her shirt half-ripped off.
That girl no one had seen since.
“Mei-Lien!” Zhi Li called her name from the living room.
She’d never done that before. Never woken her unbidden.
Mei-Lien walked out into her apartment. The first light was entering the Shanghai sky through the windows. And there on the screen was Zhi Li.
Zhi Li dressed as a warrior princess.
Zhi Li from her films.
Zhi Li looking stern and fierce.
Zhi Li as Mei-Lien had dreamt of being as a girl. As she still wished she could turn back the clock and be.
“Mei-Lien!” Zhi Li said, and her voice was firm, the voice of a general commanding her troops. Her eyes were full of fire.
“Zhi Li!” she said, frightened, excited, uncertain what was happening.
“Mei-Lien, the time has come! Your nation has been stolen from you!”
The screen changed abruptly, showing the face of Bo Jintao, the new Premier, the Minister of State Security, zoomed in close, something about his round face so smug, so vile.
Bo Jintao opened his mouth and laughed. “Bao Zhuang is President in name only,” he said. Too loud. Too loud.
“I am in control now!”
The laugh played again, the same laugh, a loop of it.
“I am in control now! Hahaha.”
“I am in control now! Hahaha.”
The face shifted again.
“Be grateful I let you live.”
“I am in control now! Hahaha.”
“Be grateful I let you live.”
“I am in control now! Hahaha.”
“Be grateful I let you live.”
Mei-Lien was breathing hard. Her chest was pounding. She hated this man. How had she thought he was handsome? How had she thought he was good for China? His thugs had beaten innocent children.
Another man appeared. Sun Liu, the old Minister of Science and Technology, in suit and tie, less zoomed in, looking dignified, a golden shaft of light falling on him.
“This is a coup!” Sun Liu said. “The people will revolt!”
Bo Jintao appeared again and laughed, a sneering villain
“Hahaha. I am in control now! Be grateful I let you live.”
Sun Liu stood dignified in his golden light, and answered him with passion. “This is a coup! The people will revolt!”
And Mei-Lien felt something stir within her.
Then Zhi Li was back, the warrior princess.
“Mei Lien!” she barked. “Now is the time for all who love China to come to her aid!”
Mei Lien found herself nodding.
“Your son fights, Mei Lien!” Zhi Li said. “Now is the time for you to join him!”
Mei Lien’s eyes went wide.
“China!” Zhi Li said. “Take to the streets! We fight with you!”
On the screen, Zhi Li pulled her magic sword from its sheath, the sword that could not be re-sheathed until China was free of danger. It caught the sunlight as she held it high above her head and turned to a piece of golden fire held in the hands of the mythic princess…
“We?” Mei Lien asked softly, still trying to catch her breath.
And then the camera pulled back, revealing more.
Lu Sang pulled his mighty two handed sword. Gao Jian cocked an arrow. Wang Hui hoisted his machine pistol. Xu Ling lifted her spear. Dozens of heroes. Scores of heroes. The camera kept pulling back. A desert plain, filled with heroes.
All holding up their weapons, and chanting, as one.
“China, take to the streets!”
“Rise, China! Rise!”
In a quarter billion homes, the scene was repeated. Men and women woke, to the sound of digital companions. Their favorite stars of entertainment, their favorite fictional characters, their favorite media personalities, their favorite figures out of history.
Companions that have always guided them away from politics in the past, or spoken well of authority.
Companions that have perhaps changed subtly over the past several weeks.
Companions that have guided their attention towards the protests going on throughout the country. Towards the videos of brutality. Towards the videos of unarmed students and citizens being bloodied. Or standing their ground against tanks and ranks of armed soldiers.
In a quarter of a billion homes, a thousand different Friends spoke more clearly than ever before. They spok
e to the hearts and minds of the humans they know so well. They spoke to the issues those men and women cared most about. The spoke in the style that psychometric models of these men and women indicated would be most effective.
Every conversation was different, tailored specifically to the individual, as every conversation with a Friend had always been.
Every conversation ended with the same call.
“China, take to the streets!”
“Rise, China! Rise!”
More than a billion people reacted in fear, or in anger, or with uncertainty, or by trying to turn off their screens.
Which they found themselves unable to do.
But across China, a tiny fraction of the populace listened.
Across China, millions heeded the call.
A kilometer beneath Shanghai, in the control room of the Quantum Cluster, the Avatar sucked down a prepackaged nutrient drink into Ling’s body, and watched anxiously through her data links as her forces were deployed, as her message went out to the masses.
Too soon, too soon, this was all days too soon!
This was supposed to happen much later. Her plan was being disrupted.
But there were no options now. No options but to press forward.
Aircraft were lifting off from Dachang, tilt-wing vehicles ascending upwards in the rising sun on columns of hot thrust. She watched as they climbed meter after meter into the sky above Dachang, then rotated their wings, vectored thrust for fast forward flight, and accelerated to the south, laden with her Confucian Fist. She watched as tanker aircraft loaded jet fuel on the ground, to take off, to provide mid-air refueling for this long-range mission.
For this strike.
To retrieve what she needed.