Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Captain Garud replied, his voice annoyed. “What do you suggest then?”

  “We surrender,” Kade said softly.

  Feng rose from his prone position and stepped forward, to the edge of the roof.

  “Stop!” Garud yelled across the link.

  Feng stepped again, and dropped out of sight.

  “What are you doing?” Garud yelled again, outrage in his voice.

  Feng reappeared a moment later, down below them, at ground level, his chameleonware deactivated, the hood pulled off his head, walking past the abandoned army lines, towards the mass of protesters in the square.

  Garud raised his rifle. “Stop!” he transmitted again. “That’s an order. I will shoot you.”

  “No,” Sam said. “You won’t.” Her voice was resigned.

  Kade looked over, found her crouched above Captain Garud, her pistol drawn, jammed into the back of his helmet.

  “Put down the gun, Samantha!” Aarthi said.

  She was up on her feet, her own rifle pointed at Sam.

  Kade turned back to watch Feng.

  “Put away your guns,” he transmitted. “All of you. If you shoot, we all die. This is the only way.”

  Bai pushed through the crowds, rushing, dodging, until he came to a throng of his brothers.

  And there, in the middle. There he was.

  The prodigal.

  “Feng!” Bai said.

  Feng stopped in mid-sentence, turned, grinned.

  “Bai!”

  They rushed towards each other, embraced. They’d spent quite a bit of time together those last two years, when Feng drove Su-Yong, while Bai was assigned to drive her husband.

  “We thought you were dead, Feng! We thought the Americans killed you in Thailand!”

  He could feel Feng’s mind. This was him, undoubtedly, not like that pale imitation of Su-Yong down below. This was the real Feng.

  Feng feigned the look of one insulted. “What?” He said, his tone outraged. “Just a few helicopters, some explosions, one international incident, and you think I’m dead?”

  Laughter rippled from the brothers gathered round.

  Same old Feng. Bai grinned. So many dead. But this one regained.

  “Did Su-Yong send for you?” Bai asked. Then his smile faded. His tone grew more serious. “Brother, there are some things you should know.”

  Feng’s smile dropped also. His mind grew focused. “I know, Bai,” he said quietly. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “We?” Bai asked.

  Sun Liu watched the scene outside from a third floor window of the now-deserted Computer Science Building. More and more of the Confucian Fist were gathering in a single location. And there was some other force. Some force that had arrived in stealth gear, and were now de-activating it. Armed men and women, not Chinese.

  What was going on?

  Then he felt something rise through him. The evil thing. The dead woman come back to life. She invaded his mind, seized his senses, looked out through his eyes into the world. Her mind stretched out through the nanotechnology infused in his brain, surfing the thoughts of the clones down below, listening to what they were thinking.

  And what she heard…

  Sun Liu gasped at the rage she felt, as it coursed through his own mind and body.

  The creature that had enslaved him was not amused.

  “How far is she in the process?” Feng asked.

  Kade and Sam were with them now, chameleonware deactivated, hoods off. The Indians were here, chameleonware down also, but hoods still up, minds masked behind them, their faraday lining a shield against neural attacks.

  As if that would stop Su-Yong.

  Tao spoke. “Hours. Possibly minutes. We delivered the backup cube this morning. It could be any time.”

  Feng felt Kade’s mental intake of breath. It was down to the wire.

  “We have to move fast, then,” Feng said. “The insanity must be stopped, brothers.” He looked around. He could feel their minds. He could feel their understanding, snippets of their experience. They’d seen it, little bits of it. “If she’s restored, in those first few moments, hours, days… she’d be even more insane than the fragment you’ve seen inside of Ling.”

  Feng paused. “And much more powerful.” He looked around at all of them, meeting eyes of his brothers, the men he’d known his entire life. Bai. Tao. Peng. Liwei. Quang. Li-Jiang. Lao.

  “I love Su-Yong,” Feng said. “We all do. The insanity must be stopped.”

  “And you can do this?” It was Bai, his head turned, addressing Kade.

  Feng turned also, watched his friend.

  Kade said nothing for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Not alone,” he said. “I’m only human. But together? All of us?” He nodded slowly. “We have a chance.”

  Feng turned back to his brothers, watched as they looked at each other, as Bai and Tao and Peng and all the rest exchanged thoughts.

  And then he felt their minds reach out to him. Reach out to him and to Kade.

  Show us. Bai sent. Show us everything.

  Kade opened himself to Feng’s brothers, let them see it all.

  Su-Yong’s death at Ananda’s monastery. His responsibility for it. The Indian copy of Shu. The way they’d trapped her. How she’d reacted. Her battle with the warped fragment she’d stuffed in Ling’s mind in her insanity.

  The plans she’d shown him. The plans forged in madness. The plans for conquest.

  His fears for the outcome. For the world’s response. For the consequences should she fail or succeed.

  The tools the sane Su-Yong had given him and Feng.

  The way she’d renounced her hate, renounced the path she’d started down in the midst of torture and delirium.

  The pleas she’d sent them with.

  Save Ling. Save the world.

  And most of all. What they could hope to do. The thin strand of hope that extended into the future, that broke the cycle, that didn’t lead to war between human and posthuman.

  They pulled back from him, pulled back from what they’d seen from Feng.

  Kade opened his eyes and found a massive crowd of identical faces, a throng of them in a circle around him. Faces just like Feng’s.

  He shivered, remembering how alien the idea of these clones had seemed just a year ago.

  Now… Now they felt like old friends.

  He felt a wave go through them, a wave of consensus. They’d seen it. They’d seen the truth of insanity themselves. This plan, with all its risks, made sense to them.

  Scores of weapons came up, pointed inwards.

  “Drop your weapons,” a hundred voices said.

  The Avatar reached out through Sun Liu’s mind, through equipment the SCC staff had installed in the Computer Science building.

  That was the Lane boy. The transhuman who’d brought her to this state. And Feng, her favorite. Her Fist were conspiring with them.

  They were conspiring against her.

  Rage rose through her. These were her children. These were her blessed. These were the ones she’d given everything for. This was the boy she’d sacrificed a body for!

  She proxied through Sun Liu. She amplified his signal via the repeaters around her.

  And then she reached out to her errant children, to impose discipline.

  “Drop your weapons!” came the chorus from the Confucian Fist. “Remove your hoods!”

  “Do it,” Kade said. “If you cloak, they’ll kill you.”

  The Indian Commandos were frozen, their guns pointed down, outnumbered by the Confucian Fist. No one moved.

  Then one by one they dropped their guns, reached up, peeled off their hoods.

  “You’ve betrayed us!” Captain Garud yelled aloud, looking at Kade, his face livid.

  “You brought backpack nukes,” Kade said coldly. “Don’t deny it.”

  “Damn you!” Garud said. “That thing down there is a threat!” He pointed a finger down, through the earth. “We have to destroy i
t! We can detonate the devices down below and eliminate the threat with no other casualties!”

  Kade stared at the man. “What would that tell the next one?” He asked.

  Garud yelled back. “That’s not the point!”

  Confucian Fist were moving forward now, separating the commandos, removing their gear, fastening restraints around them.

  Kade shook his head. “It would be tomorrow, Captain. Prisoner’s dilemma is always iterated in the real world. Defection is a sound strategy when you’re playing against defectors.”

  Garud just stared at him.

  Kade tried again. “Posthumans are coming, Captain Garud. There’ll be one after this. And another. And another. And more after that. Humans drove this woman crazy. You nuke her for it? The next posthuman will decide to nuke you first. You want them to treat you well? Then give them a reason. Treat them well.”

  Garud leaned forward, a Confucian Fist holding his hands behind his back, and spat at the ground.

  Then something epic descended on all their minds, something huge, something raving, something utterly without mercy.

  Bai groaned and fell to his knees. He could feel her pushing into his mind, feel it pushing into his mind, pushing into his brothers’ minds. The thing he’d thought was Su-Yong.

  No.

  It put its mental fist around his will and squeezed, crushed, making way for its will. He felt it reach in and impose its order, its discipline, its desires on him.

  He’d thought he’d been a slave before, degraded by pain, controlled by the virtual lash.

  No.

  He’d been free. Infinitely free compared to this.

  Bai pushed back up to one knee, his hand on his weapon, his eyes alive and searching for his targets.

  His soul dying as he fought with every ounce of his being against the invader.

  And lost.

  This was slavery.

  This was hell.

  Kade felt the attack as Su-Yong’s mad program attempted to impose its will on them all.

  Weapons came alive inside him. Information constructs Su-Yong had passed on unfolded within him, expanded like origami into new shapes, vast and intricate.

  His mind became a weapon.

  Beside him he felt Feng’s mind unfold into complementary structures.

  Viral weapons lanced from both of them, synergistic things, expanding into nearby minds, replicating, hunting out parts of her errant monster’s mind, creations that bore her errant monster’s telltale signature, carving them up, slicing them into billions of tiny fragments, forensically dissecting them, analyzing their contents and structure, following them back to where they originated from.

  He felt minds around him snap free as the viral weapons sliced through tendrils of the monster’s thought. He felt the monster itself recoil, reel itself back, fleeing this unexpected attack, leaving behind telltales of its mental state, of its plans, of what it knew and intended.

  The viral copies in the minds all around them shot tendrils out to each other, linked up, formed a compound structure, a new, larger entity, with a wider scope, a higher gain, a greater sensitivity, a higher signal strength.

  Up above, in the building. There was the monster’s proximal route.

  They shot copies of the virus by the million at the mind there.

  Firewalls and hastily invoked anti-virals shot them down, scrambled the viral structures on the wire before they could penetrate, destroyed millions.

  A handful got through, snuck into the human mind in the chaos, found it fertile, began replicating again, carrying Kade/Feng into it, into the mind of this man called Sun Liu.

  They felt the monster recoil again, felt it reach out, grab hold of parts of the man’s mind, seize vital centers to scramble them, to wipe this mind clean, to reduce it to a vegetable, to kill him if it could.

  They sliced viciously at the trunk of the tendril connecting the monster to this mind, sliced through process after process, closed ports wholesale, replicated viral code into crucial occupied memory, fast, faster.

  The human screamed!

  And then the monster was gone.

  The last wisps of her in this mind dying.

  The human on his knees.

  The Avatar shrank back in fear.

  The hostile posthuman! It had sent them here! They were aligned against her!

  And they were reading her thoughts.

  So close. She was so close.

  They would come this way. There were things they couldn’t be allowed to discover.

  She reached into the Secure Computing Center. There she found Xu Liang, found Li-hua, found all the other staff she’d turned. How they loved her. How they worshipped her. Like puppy dogs. Just her presence in their minds brought them such immediate joy, set their little human tails to wagging.

  She stroked them, stroked them one last time.

  You know too much, my dears. She sent. The elevator’s on its way up to you… but there isn’t time. They’ll reach you first.

  Her little pets sat at their terminals, their faces flush, their chests rising and falling, so gratified by her presence, by her mental touch.

  Still not understanding.

  Goodbye, the Avatar sent them.

  Then she reached into their worshipping minds and stopped their hearts, one by one, as their adoration turned to confusion, to betrayal, to horror.

  Sun Liu lay on the cold tile of the Computer Science Building.

  Free. He was free. The dead woman was gone from his mind.

  He forced himself up onto his feet. He stumbled down the hallway, down stairs, down another flight, down another.

  And then out into the square.

  “Sun Liu?” he heard someone say.

  He turned, and it was no one he knew. Just some student, some student holding a sign. A sign with his name on it.

  “Sun Liu!” someone else said. He turned. Another student, with a sign demanding democracy.

  And then his name was being taken up, all around him.

  “Sun Liu. Sun Liu. Sun Liu! SUN LIU!”

  Sam watched, her assault rifle in her hands, safety off, nerves ratcheting up, as the Confucian Fist and the Indian commandos dropped to their knees, as Kade and Feng went eerily silent.

  If I have to, I will, she told herself. If I have to, I will.

  Then Feng’s eyes opened. Kade’s eyes opened. They were soft, human. Confucian Fist started rising to their knees. Indian commandos groaned.

  Sam sighed in relief.

  “The Capitol,” Kade said. He was speaking into the air, speaking to himself. “In Sun Liu’s mind… DC… the Capitol.”

  Sam cocked her head forward, trying to make sense of what he was saying.

  Then a different sound registered with her, at the very edge of her heightened senses.

  Her head turned, reflexively. Then she saw Fists turn their heads.

  That sound. That whump whump whump.

  “INCOMING!” Sam yelled.

  Choppers.

  Kade ran for the building, one arm over Bai’s shoulder. Sam and Feng ran with them, hauling heavy bags of gear. Another Fist named Liwei brought up the rear. In his mind he could feel the other Confucian Fist spreading out, taking positions as Army choppers moved in, urging the students and protesters to what safety they could find.

  He heard a rumble overhead and from Bai’s mind he knew what it was.

  Jets. Jets from Dachang.

  What would happen now was anyone’s guess.

  They came in through a side door to the Computer Science Building, close to the elevator down to the SCC.

  He felt something unfold from Feng’s mind, felt through Feng that the elevator was disabled, felt the software Su-Yong had loaded into them streak out into it, cut through the simple locks.

  Make it theirs.

  The doors opened. The five of them rushed in. Sam and Feng tossed their gear bags in. They and Bai and Liwei lifted weapons up.

  Down.

  Th
e doors opened again, three levels later.

  Onto a scene of death.

  Bodies were slumped everywhere, sprawled across consoles, across tables, across the floor.

  They walked through the Secure Computing Center, to the massive, house-sized doors at the far end. The doors to the elevator. The elevator that went down.

  Everywhere on this floor it was the same.

  Dead men and women. No blood. Not a mark on them.

  “She did this,” Bai said, looking to his right and left, stepping over the last bodies before the elevator.

  Liwei frowned.

  “It did this,” Kade corrected.

  “Can we cut off access to the outside world?” Sam asked.

  Bai shook his head, looked at the massive doors before them. “They’ve been tunneling for weeks. Since November. Making new connections to all sorts of networks. The systems in this room are just for show now.”

  “Can we cut the cables?” Sam asked. “They must run up the tunnel.”

  Bai shrugged. “It’s a kilometer straight down. No lights. It just takes a cable a millimeter across. It’ll be shielded if it’s in the main tunnel, hidden and protected. There’s a second tunnel for the counterweights as well. For all we know it’s not even in that one – they had time to lase new tunnels, just millimeters wide.” Bai turned and gestured to the bodies they’d stepped over. “These people knew.”

  Kade shook his head. Madness.

  “We go to her,” he said, studying the massive elevator doors. “We go down the rabbit hole.”

  119

  DEFCON

  Monday 2041.01.20

  Colonel Cheung Baili watched as the time ticked away. Nearly midnight.

  The deadline was coming fast. Around him his officers sat at their posts, hunched over consoles, ready to do their duty, ready to do what they’d trained to do.