by Ramez Naam
How she loved this man.
Zhi Li turned back to Qi and Dai.
“Boys,” she said. Then she changed her mind. “Qi, Dai, look at me.” They turned, surprised, after everything, all their loyalty, and looked at her.
Zhi Li pursed her lips. “Gentleman,” she said. “I’m about to do something unwise. If you want to opt out, you’re free to go. I won’t hold it against you.”
They turned and looked at each other, and shrugged.
“Your unwise decisions have always turned out pretty well in the past,” Qi said.
“We’re with you now,” Dai finished.
Zhi Li grinned.
“The same goes for you, Keylani,” she told her secretary. “But first, help me find a costume! And a sword!”
“We’re cut off.” Gao Yang said.
Bo Jintao tried to pull up the aerial view of the protests again.
NO DATA.
NO DATA.
His brow furrowed.
He tapped keys, tried to use the terminal to contact General Ouyang .
NO CONNECTION.
His face grew red.
He tried Deputy Minister Ho at the Ministry of State Security.
NO CONNECTION.
“What the hell is going on?” he exploded.
“It’s everything, Premier!” Gao said. “All the systems are down. It’s an electronic attack. And the flow of people into the streets has increased. Hundreds of thousands are marching for Tiananmen Square!”
Bo Jintao paled. He was here, in Zhongnanhai, in the heart of China, the complex where the Politburo Standing Committee ruled the nation from, the imperial park started by Emperor Zhangzong, almost a thousand years ago…
But also almost immediately adjacent to Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
With just a single wall and the garrison here, and the troops already hard pressed to contain the existing protesters in Tiananmen Square.
“Send for reinforcements,” he said. “More tanks. Helicopters. Everything.”
“Premier?” Gao said. “I have no communications.”
“The soldiers on guard duty here,” Bo Jintao said. “Grab one. See if their radios work. If not, send one to their base. Have them run if they have to. NOW!”
101
Reinforcements
Sunday 2041.01.20
“Yuguo!” a voice pulled him out of sleep. “Yuguo! Wake up!”
Yuguo rolled over, scrambled to unzip the door of the tent, found a face he knew as well as his own staring at him.
“Mother?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Zhi Li told me to come!”
Yuguo watched the videos again and again, his mind reeling.
Any star you could name, someone had uploaded a video of him or her exhorting the people to take to the streets, to fight the coup.
It was incredible. The state had lost control of their tame digital pets. The perfect tools for pacification had been turned into tools for fomenting revolution.
Someone had hacked them.
Yuguo wanted to shake that guy’s hand. That was a real Chinese hero.
And all around him he could see the results. As he sat atop one of the sets of tables assembled in the center of the square, he could see people pouring in. They were climbing fences, climbing buildings, going anywhere the soldiers weren’t. The numbers here were swelling. And the images online showed much, much more. The streets of Shanghai were flooded with men and women. People’s Square was overflowing. In Beijing, it was much the same…
“Yuguo,” someone said. “There’s more you should see…”
Yuguo turned. Jian handed him a slate, one of the new, censor-free, satellite-linked slates they’d been fabbing in the Electrical Engineering building. On it were diagrams. Schematics. And downloads.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“Weapons,” Jian said softly. “Electronic weapons. Some we can load on our phones and slates. Some we can build.”
Yuguo blinked. “Electronic weapons?”
Jian nodded, and turned his head, pointing with his chin at the rows of tanks and armored vehicles.
“For killing those,” he said. “And they came with a warning. That we’re going to need them soon. Very, very soon.”
Yuguo swallowed. Whoever was hacking all this data knew things. And they’d been consistently on the side of the protesters. He had to trust that.
He stood up atop the table, and yelled.
“Everybody!”
Everybody!
“There are some new apps we all need to install. Jian’s going to post them now. Go check them out and learn to use them.”
Then he turned to Jian, and spoke more quietly. “Let’s get those schematics over to the engineering building. And tell them whatever they need, just to ask. We need to build those things, fast.”
Then he started reaching out to his peers, in People’s Square; at Tsinghua University, in Beijing; at Tiananmen Square, where the country’s largest protest was.
They all had to be ready.
102
Strike Team
Sunday 2041.01.20
Tao kept his body loose inside the troop carrier jump jet as they streaked south by south-west along the coast.
His brothers leaned back into their seats, eyes closed, minds relaxed, rehearsing the mission in silence.
The human pilot was not so sanguine. Tao could feel the man’s tension across the link the nanites had forged. They were flying across densely monitored airspace. Their military transponder and Identify Friend/Foe systems were active, announcing their location, announcing them as loyal Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force vehicles.
That was far safer, it had been determined, than any attempt at subterfuge.
But it meant constant challenges.
Civilian air traffic control from Shanghai’s Hong Qiao airport pinged them almost immediately after takeoff. More pinged them as their flight progressed. Those were easy to deal with. These two craft were military, after all.
Harder were the military installations.
Air defense radar picked them up as they flew over Zhejiang, prodded them for their mission and authorization.
They pushed even harder over Fujian, in the paranoid Air Defense space across the strait from Taiwan, where everyone drilled, and drilled again incessantly.
“Classified Mission, authorized by General Zhangshun Wang, 16th Regiment PLAAF, Dachang,” their pilot insisted again and again.
“We have no contact with Dachang!” the air defense controller replied.
The humans were isolated, confused. They were frightened.
Tao coached the pilot.
“Everyone is cut off. Now stop wasting my time so we can fix that.”
And then he refused to say any more.
Fujian let them through.
Their two strike planes refueled in mid-air just short of Guangzhou, sucking off the fueling hoses the longer range tanker dangled behind it, while Air Defense controllers grilled them again and again.
“You can see our flight numbers,” the pilot replied. “You can see we’re with 16th Regiment out of Dachang. Everything else is classified. Take it up with your commander.”
Thirty minutes later, they were coming in hot – vectoring thrust downward as they hovered over the lawn of a beach-side mansion on Hainan Island, the side of the plane opening, brothers jumping out on fast ropes – as civilian air traffic control screamed at them.
Wu Jiabao paced nervously.
Around him, half a dozen of his men had weapons out and loaded. More were upstairs, in the outer parts of the house, in sniping positions.
Not enough. They needed reinforcements. Needed them badly.
He’d woken to the video. Woken to find out that his charge, his prisoner, was suddenly famous again, was suddenly being put forward as some sort of heroic challenger to the Prime Minister.
He looked over at the couch. The former Minister of S
cience and Technology, Sun Liu, sat there, a prisoner in his own home, his wife and three children next to him. He’d barely said a word. None of them had. They just sat there, fully dressed, staring at the paintings on the walls.
Wu Jiabao had taken away all of their devices as soon as he’d seen the video, as soon as he’d understood the scope of what was happening. Everyone? Everywhere?
Best that Sun Liu not know what was going on.
Best that he not get any heroic ideas.
Get the family. Drag them all down here into the most secure room in the house. As decadent a security room as he’d ever seen, furnished with a bar and a giant entertainment set and a suite of bedrooms.
Fucking asshole politicians.
Goddammit. What was going on in the world? Why were his communications down?
He’d done the best he could with civilian comms, sent messages and calls to people he knew the personal addresses of, demanding backup.
His radio crackled. That still worked, at least.
“VTOL troop carriers, Lieutenant. Two of them. Coming in fast.”
Wu Jiabao tensed. Friend or foe? Reinforcements or assailants?
“Have you hailed them?” he asked into radio.
“Roger. No response,” came the reply.
He held the radio to his mouth. Everything might depend on this. “Safeties off. Put a bead on those planes. I want to know who comes out. But no shooting unless I give the word.”
He pulled the radio away from his mouth, took his finger off the transmit button.
“Roger,” came the reply, from a half dozen voices.
Then a moment later. “I’ve got ropes. Men hot roping out of vehicle one!”
Shit. That meant assault!
Wu Jiabao pulled the radio back up.
“Oh my god,” it crackled. “They’re all…”
“Fire!” he yelled into his radio.
The sound of gunfire answered him.
And groans.
Screams.
“Status!” he yelled.
Silence.
“Status!” he repeated.
Silence.
“Chief,” one of his men said.
Wu Jiabao looked over. The man was studying the house monitors. And there, on them, he could see armed men moving through the home.
Armed men with identical faces.
Wu Jiabao swallowed.
“Flank the door,” he ordered. “Take cover behind the bar. Prepare to repel.”
Then he walked over to the couch, hauled the scrawny politician up by his lapel, put a gun to his head, and put the man between him and the door.
His wife and family screamed.
“Run into the bedroom!” he yelled at them.
Sun Liu struggled, and Wu Jiabao clubbed him with the gun.
“I need you alive,” he told the man. “But I’m willing to blow your nuts off.”
That stilled him.
Wu turned to the house monitors, just in time to see a monitor show one of the invaders point a gun at it.
And then it went dark.
More than half of them were dark now.
He watched as they came closer, bit by bit, penetrating into the house.
Destroying every camera they came to.
Until they were right outside the door.
He waited, in view of them, his pistol pressed to Sun Liu’s temple. He felt his men shift, become anxious, felt the anxiety rise, felt it rise further.
Why weren’t they coming in?
BOOOOOM.
With a shuddering explosion, the door blasted inward. Wu staggered on his feet, felt Sun Liu try to get free. He jerked the man brutally, righted himself, brought the gun back to the man’s head.
A figure appeared in the doorway.
His men opened fire.
The figure was gone, not there anymore.
His men kept firing.
Clips went dry.
Then men in white were inside the room, firing back.
And suddenly all was still.
And everywhere he turned, he saw his men were dead.
“Don’t come any closer!” Wu said, staring at the clone who’d come in first. The man had an assault rifle pointed forty-five degrees down, mostly at the floor. “Stop right there! Back away or I’ll blow his…”
Wu never saw the gun shift in Tao’s hand, or the explosion of muzzle fire that put a three-bullet volley directly into his brain.
Tao stepped up to the dead soldier’s body, leaned down, safetied the man’s pistol, then pried it out of his hand.
Sun Liu was shaking on the floor. From a doorway came the sound of crying and weeping.
Tao stared down at the dead soldier.
Every soldier knew death could come. When it did, it would likely come at the hands of someone like them. All soldiers were brothers, doing a job or fighting for a cause, putting their lives on the line for someone or something besides themselves. Death was part of that job. So was killing. There was no mystery there.
Still, it was the people in charge who he’d prefer to take the lives of.
Sun Liu was still shaking. “What… What’s going on?” he said. “Who sent you?”
Tao smiled at the man in as reassuring a manner as he could, even as Daofeng came up with the hypersonic injector.
“Minister Sun,” Tao said. “Welcome to the revolution.”
103
On Set
Sunday 2041.01.20
Zhi Li kept the hood pulled over her head as her eyes scanned the protest site. Lu Song squeezed her hand, a hat tugged down low over his famous face.
The protest was a throng, an insane intensity of people, thousands of them waving signs, chanting, fired up. It was the density and passion of a concert, of a festival. But unleashed. Unrestrained by the usual rules.
It was like nothing Zhi Li had ever seen in China.
And this was just the small one. This was just Jiao Tong.
They’d aimed for the main protest in People’s Square, but the city was so full of people that driving became impossible kilometers back. Jiao Tong was closer.
And this was where it had started.
No one had recognized them yet. She was grateful. They’d hidden their faces to avoid being recognized by police, by soldiers. But now she wasn’t even sure she wanted to be recognized.
She’d come here in a moment of passion, seeing that digital version of herself inciting the masses, she’d suddenly imagined herself a hero, a leader of the revolution, guiding the people to justice.
She’d done that so many times in film, since she was just a child. She knew the lines. She’d read the scripts. She’d had her close-ups.
She’d defeated evil every time.
But this…
All around her, details showed her the reality.
Medical tents being set up. First aid supplies laid out.
Makeshift gas masks handed out. Not nearly enough. Bandanas and scarves being collected, distributed. Cheap goggles where they could.
Sticks and pipes in people’s hands. Sports racquets. Makeshift weapons and waste-bin-lid shields and home-made armor.
The constant buzzing of the drones overhead. Hundreds of them zooming by just above the signs.
The barricades, of broken furniture, bricks, machinery, all piled up to form a barrier.
A barrier against the army beyond it. The ranks and ranks of soldiers. With guns, and long heavy batons, and metal shields and mirrored helmets. And behind them, tanks and tank-like things, massive turrets pointing this way.
This was no movie.
“Nexus?” she heard a male voice say.
Something brushed her. She looked down, saw a hand, holding a silvery vial.
Qi’s hand snaked out from beside her, grabbed the wrist, twisted it away from her.
There was squeal of pain. The vial dropped to the ground.
“Qi!” she said. “Let go. It’s OK.”
She looked up. There was a boy in fr
ont of her, perhaps 18, 19, holding his wrist, rubbing it, a look of betrayal and annoyance on his face.
Then his eyes met hers and they grew wide.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Zhi Li felt resignation hit her. She smiled at the boy.
“We’re here to help,” she said. “Who’s in charge here?”
104
The Sooner, The Better
Sunday 2041.01.20
Sun Liu’s eyes went wide as the world expanded within him, as the nanites attached to his neurons, as new inputs entered his brain, made their way into his consciousness.
So vast. So vast.
He could feel the minds of the men around him.
He could feel the pieces of his own mind, coming together. Feel the software within the nanomachinery studying him, learning him, flashing huge swaths of his life before his eyes at once.
So amazing.
I’m a scientist, he thought. Why didn’t I ever do this before?
And then she was there.
And hell opened up, hell beyond anything he’d ever imagined possible.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, SUN LIU. The voice was the voice of a thousand dark angels, a thousand folk demons from his mother’s superstitions. All true. All true.
He saw himself through her eyes. Things she could not know. He saw himself warning Chen Pang, warning him about the car bomb, warning him the reactionaries were going to kill him and his wife, warning Chen Pang, but not warning Su-Yong Shu!
Condemning her and her unborn son to death!
No, he wanted to say. You’re dead. You’re dead. So many times over you’re dead. You can’t hurt me.
But he was inside her mind, as she was inside his. He was burning, pinned in the back of that limousine, watching Yang Wei die, feeling the unborn son inside himself die, feeling skin blacken and burn.