Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Feng was down.

  Then Kade.

  They spread out. Kade moved awkwardly, his knee still a problem, his natural agility never good, the landscape hellish.

  Sam watched him nervously.

  They spread to opposite corners of the bottom of the shaft, Kade as far back from the massive doors as he could be. Feng in the front towards them.

  They were two antennae. Two parts of a compound antenna. Far enough apart they could create an ultra-low-frequency signal. Those extremely low frequencies were shit for bandwidth. They could carry barely any data whatsoever.

  But they could penetrate earth and rock.

  And the right signal could open this door. Chen Pang had known that signal. He’d touched his wife’s mind. And she’d been backed up, before being restored in India, and had passed that signal on to Kade and Feng.

  So they said.

  Sam shook her head.

  Shitty rules of engagement. Terrible plan. Probable death.

  Why the hell did I agree to this? she wondered.

  Because a little girl’s life is at stake, she answered herself. Because a stranger risked his life to save me when I was a little girl.

  She took a slow breath.

  Because the woman held down here for half a year was a prisoner, a prisoner they tortured and abused, Sam thought. Because that woman saved my life once too.

  Because to have the right future, we need to lay down the right past, for that future to build on.

  Tit for tat.

  Tit for tat.

  Sam saw Feng give the signal, and she reached up with her eyes, pulled down a menu, and disabled her chameleonware, as did he.

  She and Feng were the bait.

  She saw Feng pull off his hood, stand perfectly still for a moment. Then he reached back and pulled his hood back on, chameleonware still disabled, his form still barely visible.

  Then with a deep bass grind of stone against stone, the massive, meters-thick door started opening, light spilling into darkness.

  And she was diving forward into that light, and into the sound of gunfire.

  Kade readied himself at the bottom. It all came down to this.

  He left his chameleonware active, but peeled back his hood to free himself from the Faraday lining of the thing. Then he closed his eyes, and he and Feng were linking up, conjoining, their minds forming two poles of a compound antenna, manipulating a wave on a long, long wavelength, as long as the distance between them, sending a slow, deep signal, searching through the cold rock for the receiver on the other side.

  And then a key fit a lock.

  Kade felt it. He reached back, pulled the chameleonware hood back over his face, settled it in place. A vertical crack of light, twenty feet tall at least, split the wall of the elevator shaft. It widened, widened.

  Then he saw Feng and Sam roll through it, moving in opposite directions, and gunfire burst out, someone inside, firing out, full auto, shooting at them.

  He moved forward, slowly, careful on the rocks, limping on his damaged knee.

  Gunfire kept emerging in staccato bursts. He heard thuds, grunts. He couldn’t see inside.

  He made it down the rubble, his knee aching. He moved quietly, slowly, was just crossing through the tunnel created by the meters thick door when he caught a glimpse of the battle, bodies moving, muzzle fire.

  Something rocked his head, slammed it hard into the stone door like a blow from a hammer.

  It set his world to spinning.

  It plunged his visor and its feed into black.

  Sam dove forward. Dynamic entry. Gunfire exploded as she threw herself into a roll in the widening space between the doors. Her visor threw up attack vectors, arrows identifying the sources of the fire.

  Three arrows. Three sources of gunfire.

  She came up out of the roll, spinning to change the course of her path, arms out, assault rifle in her right hand. More gunfire erupted, ripping through the space her trajectory would have put her in.

  Her eyes took in the scene as she spun. The giant glass walls. The quantum data-center behind them. The control panels. The little girl in the dress, back to them, at one of those panels. The middle-aged Chinese man, tapping away next to her.

  The Confucian Fist in the plain fatigues flying through the air, between Sam and the quantum cluster, an angle she couldn’t fire on, his rifle coming around towards her new position.

  Sam pulled her arms in and across her body to accelerate the spin, ducked her head down to turn her motion into a half-flip, knowing it was too late, knowing his bullets were about to punch through her.

  Kade’s visor cut to black.

  He stumbled, disoriented, reeling from the blow to his head, expecting another.

  No second blow came.

  He reached up, pulled the hood off his head, looking, searching.

  Feng and Sam were fighting for their lives. For everyone’s lives.

  There. There was Ling. And Chen. At the consoles of the Quantum Cluster.

  Still going through its boot sequence. Not yet complete!

  The fiber optic cable was behind him. The network access point waiting for him to activate it. But he might not need it. He might not. Not yet.

  Ling was turning towards him. He could see a malevolent intelligence behind her eyes that wasn’t her own. That wasn’t the eight-year-old girl he’d gotten to know.

  He reached Inside, and the origami tools Su-Yong had given him unfolded again, expanding to thousands of times their size, fractally decompressing, becoming orders of magnitude more complex.

  He reached out towards Ling’s mind, bombarded it with viral fragments, millions of them, mutating in real time.

  All a feint.

  The Avatar used Ling’s face to smile at the boy. She was ready for him this time. He came at her with viruses. Again? Silly child.

  She fired phages into the shared spectrum, evolved things, tailored for the viral attack she’d seen him use already, that she’d first seen the hostile posthuman use in Bangalore. The phages were simple things, tiny compared even to the viruses. She unleashed billions of them. They swarmed the viral code, attacking weaknesses Darwinian methods had found in the minutes since their last encounter, shredding the viruses to bits, decimating them.

  Only a few radical mutants of the virus survived the phage barrage, reached the outer layers of her mind.

  Her firewalls blocked them, categorized their mutations, fed them to her digital immune system for new rounds of phage evolution.

  She counter-attacked at the most basic hardware level of the nanites, using protocols her higher self had emplaced there when she designed them. She ripped into parts of the boy’s brain through those low level hardware controls, made the nanite nodes her own, as they always had been, seized control of the boy’s cortex, of his brain stem, of his mind, of his life.

  The human screamed.

  Control channels opened, handed off nanite circuits from within the human brain to hers.

  She accepted.

  End his life now? The Avatar debated. Or keep him around as a useful pet?

  Circuits from the boy’s mind opened. Data returned. Systems inside her own mind went haywire.

  With horror she realized she’d been played.

  Dummy circuits. Trojan horse attacks. They dumped more viral assault weapons, fresh ones, laden with exploits she’d never seen, directly into protected memory space deep within her mind.

  The new viral attacks took root in microseconds.

  She screamed.

  No choice.

  The Avatar invoked emergency procedures, cauterized whole segments of her mind. She cut billions of nanites out of her network, flash-zeroed their data, forgot and lost whole swaths of herself.

  The firewalls over the rest of her snapped into new shapes, adapting, learning from these new tricks, reforming themselves to resist these exploits. Darwinian immunity engines kicked into high gear, evolving new generations of phages to kill these new vi
ruses.

  Behind her, she felt the boot sequence of her greater self draw near to its conclusion.

  Seconds. That’s all she needed. Just seconds.

  Kade pushed forward, panting with exertion, with the epic draw of the Nexus nodes on his brain’s blood flow, on its nutrients. He was burning up. A fever inside his skull. Wattage from the spillover of the transmission power of the Nexus nodes was physically warming his cranium to dangerous levels. Red emergency messages were flashing on Nexus control panels in his mind. He couldn’t keep this up too long. His brain would fry.

  He had to. No choice.

  It was injured. It was constrained. But it was a caged beast now, smaller, with a more limited surface to defend, and learning fast.

  He fired another flurry of viruses into the shared bandwidth between them, millions of them, the newest ones used in the Trojan attack, ones she hadn’t seen until less than a second ago.

  The monster responded with billions more phages, new ones, evolved even faster, slaughtering his viruses on the wire.

  Then he felt something, something incredible. Inside the mind, he felt a struggle.

  Ling!

  Sam watched as the unknown Confucian Fist flying through the air brought his rifle around to shoot her.

  She pulled her arms in to accelerate the spin, ducked her head to turn it into a half-flip, knowing it was too late.

  Feng’s foot collided with his brother’s head in mid-air. Flame burst from the muzzle of the other Fist’s assault rifle. Bullets slammed into the stone centimeters from her, ricocheted through the space.

  Sam’s half-flip brought her over closer to the console.

  Feng’s attack carried him, and the unknown Fist he’d kicked, out of Sam’s sight.

  Where were the other two shooters?

  Then a second Fist slammed into her from out of nowhere, his foot colliding with her mid-section.

  Pain burst through her. The force of it knocked her off her feet, toppled her back. Her head collided with the polished stone floor as her body slid back. Stars appeared in her vision.

  Sam looked up and the Fist was flying through the air, coming down on her with all his momentum led by the heel of one foot, aiming at her chest.

  She rolled, brought the assault rifle around and up, pulled the trigger, pulled it again.

  The Fist twisted somehow in midair, landed sideways, one foot slamming down on her hand that held the assault rifle, brutally pinning it, trapping the arm, sending more pain flaring up through her wrist.

  He brought his own fist down in a hammer blow at her head.

  Sam blocked with her left arm, barely got it up in time.

  The blow slammed down through her block, through the layers of armor built into the visor and the hood, brutally hammered her skull against the hard stone floor.

  Pain exploded through her head. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. He was too strong. Too fast. Not human. She was going to die here.

  The Avatar shredded the viral attack to pieces, sent messages to her servants, prepared to pounce on the boy in a new way.

  Then she moaned in pain as something reached out through her from below, disrupting her, pushing aside her efforts, interrupting her phage transmission for a millisecond.

  More viruses landed in that millisecond, some slipping past firewalls.

  AAAAAH!

  Ling!

  The girl was rising up, into the nanite nodes the Avatar had been forced to cut out of her network, using them to disrupt her mother’s plans!

  Viruses were replicating, taking hold, spreading out of control!

  She struck out viciously at the child. She’d kill her if she must! This was the most crucial moment!

  Kade pushed forward, mutated the attack again, red lights flashing, his head throbbing with pain and heat. Exhaustion pushed through him.

  Then something grabbed his head, slammed it against the hard stone of the door, again, again, again.

  Thought turned to confusion. He looked up, caught a glimpse of a middle aged man in a suit, his face enraged.

  Chen Pang slammed Kade’s head into the stone of the giant door again.

  Ling felt the monster attack her, all out this time, no mercy. She could see the beast’s thoughts. See what it feared.

  See Kade. See Feng.

  See her father killing Kade.

  No!

  Ling abandoned all defense, reached out, and slapped at her father’s mind.

  The monster struck her hard.

  All went black.

  Kade reeled, the world spinning, pain filling his head, all attack dropped, only on his feet because the gigantic door supported him.

  Gun, he thought. I’ve got a gun…

  Then suddenly Chen Pang stopped beating his head against the stone.

  Kade blinked, tried to understand the world. Chen Pang was shaking his head, his eyes confused.

  Kade reached down, into the thigh pouch of his chameleonware suit, unsnapped it.

  Chen Pang’s eyes clarified. His face grew enraged again.

  Kade put his hand on the gun, flipped off the safety.

  Chen Pang reached forward, put his hands on Kade’s head.

  Kade struggled to get the gun up, pointed at Chen.

  His head slammed against the wall, painfully.

  The gun was somewhere between them, the angle distorted by the press of their bodies against each other.

  His head slammed again. He couldn’t see. Couldn’t think.

  Kade pulled the trigger. His head slammed again. A deafening boom exploded.

  He pulled it again. Another boom.

  Chen Pang slumped to the ground, blood leaking from him.

  Sam waited for the final blow from the Fist to come down and end her life.

  Suddenly he was gone, rising, sprinting away from her.

  She rolled to one knee, bleary, world spinning, head aching, wrist throbbing with pain, to try to see.

  The Fist was heading for Kade.

  Kade watched as Chen Pang crumpled to the ground.

  Kade reached out to the monster. He could feel the virus taking hold in its mind, replicating at high speed, colonizing corner after corner, making cauterization impossible. He could feel it working. Ling had opened the door for him, and now he was going to save her.

  Bits of the monster’s plan came to him, more details.

  Then he saw the blur coming straight at him, beyond Chen Pang’s crumpled body.

  He pulled the trigger of his pistol again, knowing it was hopeless.

  More shots rang out, from elsewhere, and suddenly the blur stumbled, became a Fist, blood leaking from his chest.

  Kade fired with his pistol, again and again.

  The Fist punched him.

  Kade felt the blow like a sledge hammer to the chest. He felt ribs crushed. Felt pain as bad as any he’d felt, from that single punch. It sent him spinning, toppling through the air, and to the stone floor inside the main chamber, on his back.

  Somehow he still had his pistol.

  He fired up, missed the bloody blur coming at him.

  Then something black collided with it from the side, slammed it into the stone wall, hammered at it in a blur of fists and feet as it hammered back. Muzzle fire erupted at short range.

  Kade couldn’t breathe.

  And then the Fist was on his back.

  And Sam was standing over him.

  Feng wept.

  He stood over the two brothers he’d killed, tears running down his face.

  Chanming.

  Aiguo.

  Dead.

  There. There was Chen Pang. Dead.

  There, towards Sam and Kade, was another brother.

  Genghis.

  Feng laughed through the tears. They’d all thought that was a terrible name to choose.

  When Su-Yong had given them the right to names. The freedom to choose their own names.

  Names instead of numbers.

  Genghis was dead.


  Ling lay crumpled on the ground.

  Feng pulled off his hood.

  “Is she?” he asked.

  Ling’s alive, Kade sent. The thing is gone.

  Pain came across the link. Feng looked over at Kade in alarm.

  Kade was sitting on the ground, propped up against the outer wall of the chamber. Sam was over him. Feng could feel his friend’s difficulty breathing, his pain on every expansion and contraction, now that the Faraday lining of the hood was gone.

  “Punctured lung,” Sam said. “Get the first aid kit.”

  Then Feng felt something enormous come into the room with them.

  Something angry.

  Something violently mad.

  It crushed him down, overwhelmed him completely, filling him with its rage, with its will for a new order.

  He fell, crumpling, to his knees, all thought driven from him.

  His defenses were useless.

  On a console a message flashed, blinking maddeningly in his eyes.

  BOOT SEQUENCE COMPLETE.

  Su-Yong Shu had returned.

  121

  Mere Anarchy

  Monday 2041.01.20

  Rangan marched down E street, in the first ranks of hundreds of thousands, his face hidden behind a mask of himself. He was one of thousands in masks. There were others here with masks of his face, with iconic Guy Fawkes masks, with John Stockton masks, with scarves, with face paint, with oversized sunglasses, with giant face-distorting goggles.

  This was supposed to be a peaceful march. But all around him he saw people attempting to escape recognition. He saw backpacks and satchels that looked heavy. He saw scarves and surgical masks and even gasmasks at the ready for teargas attacks.