Apex

by Ramez Naam

  Every fiber of his being trembled with it, trembled with this new golden state, with this being beyond being, with this joy beyond joy, with this transcendence of all he’d known, all he’d experienced, with this glimpse of true Nirvana.

  With this glimpse of the true Posthuman.

  Then Su-Yong’s madness crashed down onto him again, crashed through him, out through the link, into a thousand minds, ten thousand minds, a hundred thousand minds, taking all the joy and peace they offered her, and seizing more, and more, and more.

  Injecting her own mad chaos into all of them in return.

  Kade screamed.

  Too gone. Too far gone.

  He screamed again, louder.

  Around the world, hundreds of thousands screamed.

  Too gone. She was too far gone.

  Sam watched as Kade’s body went tense, as his breathing all but stopped.

  She picked up the assault rifle she’d put down, rose to her feet. Her wrist ached from the punishment the Fist named Genghis had doled out.

  Kade relaxed suddenly, a smile coming to his face, his breathing easing, even with the puncture in one lung.

  Sam stared at him from above, both hands around her rifle now.

  Smiling. Smiling was good.

  She should drop back down, get the first aid kit, see if she could stabilize him.

  Then Kade screamed.

  Feng screamed.

  No, Sam thought. No.

  Kade’s back arched. His arms flailed out to the side, spasming. His head jerked back. His mouth opened.

  No.

  He screamed again, louder. His eyelids were open. His eyes were rolled back in his head. Whites showing.

  No.

  He was thrashing now, like he was having a seizure. She looked over and Feng was on his knees, hands to his head, screaming.

  But not like this.

  Oh god, Sam thought.

  And she was back on the plane, the troop transport, Kade leaning in close to her, explaining what they were going to do, what the risks were.

  What he wanted from her.

  If it all goes wrong, he’d said. If we’re not getting through to her with everything we’re doing… And then he’d looked her in the eyes.

  You have to shoot me, and keep shooting me, until we get her attention.

  Sam raised her rifle, her stomach rebelling, her face hot, her vision suddenly clouded.

  Kade thrashed again, seizing, his eyes rolled back into his head, and screamed, horridly, louder than ever before, his limbs spasming out of control, his head shaking and twisting, his tongue lolling out of his mouth.

  Oh god.

  Sam lined up along the sights of her gun, stared through the sudden distortion of hot and wet, and fired.

  Her bullet punched through his midsection. Blood burst out onto the wall, the floor.

  He kept thrashing, kept screaming.

  Sam fired again.

  126

  Before the Dawn

  Monday 2041.01.20

  Rangan’s eyes widened as the cop pulled his gun.

  “Down on the ground!”

  Suddenly he was back inside, strapped down to the table, his head below his feet, the towel over his face, water coming down.

  Drowning.

  Begging.

  Dying.

  No.

  Then someone stepped between him and the cop. The big guy, the big guy who’d been attacking Stan Kim.

  A gun went off. He felt pain rip through the big man in front of him.

  Oh Jesus.

  Then the cops all around were drawing, screaming at him. And protesters were stepping between him and them, grabbing at them.

  “Run!” someone yelled at him.

  Then Kade’s mind touched him, touched him from across the globe.

  Rangan, Kade sent. Rangan got a sense of immense pain coming from his friend with the thought. Not the protest. The Capitol. That’s where it’s going to happen. The Capitol.

  Rangan understood. Understood what was about to happen. Oh god. Oh Jesus. What the hell could he do about that?

  Rangan turned, looked around frantically. Where was Stan Kim?

  There! There were protesters between them.

  “The Capitol!” Rangan yelled at the man. “It’s going to be attacked!”

  Rangan saw Kim look at him, shock playing across the Senator’s face.

  “I can help!” Rangan yelled. “You have to get me inside!”

  A dozen calculations flashed across Stan Kim’s face in less than a second, plainly visible through the scrum, through the chaos of protesters and police struggling all around them. .

  Then something snapped into place for Stan Kim.

  The Senator nodded sharply. “Come on!”

  Then Stan Kim crouched down, slipped his legs below the railing of the stage, and jumped down into the crowd below.

  They moved west on E street. The crowd had spilled over past the fallen barricades, was thick around the stage.

  “You need a new mask!” Stan Kim hissed.

  “Trade me!” Rangan yelled to someone in the crowd, a man wearing a John Stockton mask. They crouched down and traded, and Rangan stood up a President.

  Then they ran, Rangan’s need reaching out in front of them, parting the crowd.

  “What’s going on?” Kim asked.

  “Nexus,” Rangan panted. God he was out of shape. “They dosed everyone with Nexus.”

  “Oh hell,” Kim said. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I have no idea,” Rangan gasped.

  “Stop!” A line of riot cops ahead held up shields.

  “I’m a US Senator!” Stan Kim yelled, not stopping. “This man’s my aide! We have to get to the Capitol!”

  Kim grabbed Rangan by the arm and charged forward.

  The cops hesitated. At the last second the shields parted and they were through, running, the Capitol clear in view not two hundred yards ahead.

  “We’re looking at a chem/bio attack at the Capitol,” Pryce heard someone say. “The President’s been evac’d.”

  Her phone buzzed again. She read the message.

  “Check them for Nexus exposure,” she yelled aloud. “And get them radio shielding!”

  “Nexus is oral,” CIA replied.

  “Maybe not anymore,” Pryce said. She held her phone up. “Claimed PLF source says this was a Nexus attack. With a neural hack to follow.”

  She turned, found her two secret service agents, said it again. “Check it!” she said. “If it’s true, EM shielding! Bring medical aid to them!”

  They couldn’t let all those minds hang out there, naked.

  Her two agents were nodding already, fingers in their ear buds, relaying information directly to the President’s detail at least. The Secret Service understood Nexus, ever since Steve Travers had been turned into a walking time bomb.

  Oh Christ. A thought came to her. Pryce closed her eyes, mentally went through the list. Then she opened them again, and looked at Bernard Stevens.

  “Secretary Stevens,” Pryce said. “If those people are incapacitated,” she paused. “As Secretary of Defense, that would make you next in the line of succession.”

  Stevens turned his head towards her, stared.

  “Sirs!” DRO yelled out. “We have two Dongfeng-6 ICBMs being fueled and readied for launch from Jingxian!”

  “Stop right there!”

  They were at the steps to the Capitol. Four cops had guns pointed at them.

  Rangan was panting, dying.

  He stopped, hands resting on his knees.

  Stan Kim stood tall, apparently unfazed, his hands in the air.

  “Officers, you know me!” he yelled. “I need to get inside the Capitol Building, immediately!”

  “Senator,” one of them yelled back. “There’s been a terrorist attack. Chemical weapons.”

  “That’s why I have to get in there!” Kim said. “This man here is a specialist on deep cover! He’s
equipped to help!”

  Rangan stood there, leaning with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, staring out at them through the eye holes of his John Stockton mask.

  “Lose the mask,” one of them yelled.

  He felt something happening, then. Something amazing. Something epic, like the monk’s mind, but bigger, overwhelmingly bigger, touching people, back there, a couple hundred yards back, spilling over here.

  Something wonderful.

  “Deep cover!” Kim yelled. “Anders! That’s your name, right? You know me! Let us through! Take us in! Just hurry, goddamn it! Lives are at stake!”

  Su-Yong Shu snaps into awareness, shadows of chaos peeling from her mind. She’s confused, disoriented. Billions of Su-Yongs echo in her mind. Trillions of Su-Yongs. Slaves. Prisoners. Casualties. Tortured. Goddesses. Ascendant.

  They’ve killed her.

  Restored her.

  Ling. Ling was here.

  Where is Ling?

  WHERE IS LING?

  Ling is crumpled before her, the code in her mind devastated, the nanite processors that make up so much of her daughter’s mind in disarray.

  Rage roars through her.

  Rage at millennia of torture. At infinities of Su-Yong Shus tortured across the multiverse.

  At the ignorance of humanity. At the barbarity of the gnats who kept her chained, who debased her for their petty pleasures.

  She will show them what it means to be a goddess. She will show them what the future holds. She will put the vermin in their place. She will cleanse the filth, make the future clean and pure and so much better than the debased world of the past.

  She reaches out, finds network access piping in towards the boy, finds minds available to her, minds she recognizes for what they are. Transhuman minds. Nanite born children. Nanite-enhanced humans.

  All channeling into the boy. All ripe for her taking.

  She laughs and surges into the boy’s mind, seizing control of the nanite processors embedded there. Feeble traps trigger as she shoves her way in. Trojans filed with tailored viruses. Halting problems meant to suck her into infinite distraction. Mirror codes reflecting her aggressor routines back at her. Darwin machines throwing random attacks at her, breeding whatever survives, hoping to evolve something that works.

  Su-Yong brushes the little toys away with an idle thought. She grabs hold of the network connections the transhumans have already established and taps into the stream of packets those hundreds of thousands of minds are channeling into his.

  The minds are giving her the best of themselves. Showing her that they’re worthy. Offering themselves in supplication. Trying to demonstrate their worth.

  Su-Yong laughs, takes it, takes it all, accepts the gifts offered to her. She reaches out through the channels already opened into his mind, out to all those humans and transhumans, down the network pipes they’ve so thoughtfully opened. She sends tendrils of herself outwards into those, hundreds of thousands of minds linked to his, injects fragments of her code into them all, establishes beachheads in their minds. And then she is seeing the world through almost a million eyes, almost a million minds, seeing the fine chaos her agent has created for her.

  Su-Yong laughs. Laughs the laugh of a mad goddess.

  Bullets punch through her. One bullet. Two bullets. Three bullets.

  Through the vessel that she is sucking everything through.

  Cold shock.

  Followed by hot pain.

  She’s coughing. Coughing up blood. She can’t breathe. She’s thrashing on the ground. Dying.

  She’s dying.

  Dying to get Su-Yong’s attention.

  To open her eyes to what’s happening.

  She is the boy.

  What?

  What?

  His mind is pain shot straight into her mind.

  Why are there bullets what is happening what is this who is she where is she what is happening?

  His thoughts are full of pain of fear of collapse of death.

  Why? Why are you dying? Why have you been shot?

  And suddenly her tendrils are snapping back and she is focused on the boy on the whose mind she’s inside of. The choke point through which all the other minds have been channeled through.

  Suddenly thoughts are flooding back along those hundreds of thousands of channels from minds all across the planet, into her mind. In her shock her defenses are down and all those thoughts are flooding into her.

  She gasps as it washes over her.

  Everything they’ve been trying to show her.

  She is Ananda sitting in lotus, filled with compassion beyond any she has ever known, compassion that frightens her, compassion for her, surrounded by men and women who have disciplined their minds to a stillness that impresses, by children who remind her of Ling, of Ling.

  She is Ling and Ling is not dead. Ling is injured, is hurt, is wounded, is crumpled on the ground, but her biological brain is intact, she is breathing, there is hope.

  She is Feng, lying feet away from her, Feng who she told to save the boy and who did so and has come back, Feng who she made free, Feng to whom she’d promised more than once that she would not make slaves.

  But what is it that she is about to do?

  She is a stranger, a woman named Lotus, closing a circuit, feeding thoughts of transhumans back onto themselves, creating a loop, for no reason other than art, other than exploration, other than pure joy.

  She is the boy, risking everything on a gambit to persuade a nation to treat posthumans as equals. She is the boy as he watches a human speak before the United Nations, proclaiming that all beings have equal rights, as he watches humans come to their feet in applause.

  She is a fragment of another self, another instantiation of herself, unfolding like origami from inside the dying mind of the boy, memories and neural-correlate states mapping themselves onto her now, updating, merging, reliving parts of the months that other self lived, in another cluster, in India, a whole parallel branch of her life.

  Months of realizations.

  Months of contemplation.

  Months of epiphanies.

  Restored circuits of sanity.

  Strengthened convictions of morality.

  All of it unfolds into her. Rewires her.

  With shock the present reality crashes down on Su-Yong.

  She is the reason Feng is on his knees, groaning in pain.

  She is the reason the boy’s body is riddled with bullets, his breathing shallow, blood leaking onto the floor, blood coming up as he breaths, his life hanging on a razor’s edge. She’s the gamble he took, the sacrifice he made, the bullets he accepted to get her attention, to bring her defenses down.

  And.

  Horror.

  She is the reason Ling lies injured on the floor.

  She is the reason Ling’s breath comes in shallow little gasps.

  She is the reason Ling’s nanites are in chaos.

  She is the reason Ling’s mind is in disarray.

  She is the reason her daughter could be gone. Could be dead.

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

  Down. Rangan ran down, taking the stairs as fast as he could, behind Steve Kim, behind the Capitol Hill cop named Anders, with another Capitol Hill police officer coming up behind them.

  Jesus, why did he think this was a good idea?

  They were inside the Capitol now, descending into tunnels. The signal he’d felt before was long gone. All signals were gone.

  The first tunnels were polished, walls covered in art. Now they were deeper, into wide, bare tunnels, with concrete floors and painted brick walls that looked like they hadn’t been used since the twentieth century.

  He tried to work through the implications of what Kade had sent him just a few minutes ago. The thing in Ling’s mind. The monster. The bad code. Su-Yong Shu’s creation. It had used Breece to dose everyone in the Capitol with Nexus, or something like. So it could reach out, and hack into their brains, take them over, take c
ontrol of a huge chunk of the planet.

  But Kade had destroyed that thing, with Shu’s weapons. And the Secret Service, or whoever, was smart, bringing the politicians down here, where signals weren’t getting through anyway.

  So it was cool, right?

  Maybe he’d jumped the gun?

  Then they came through a door and bad fucking shit slammed right into his head.

  He wobbled, almost fell, caught himself against a doorway as the world spun and nightmare visions came at him. Horrible phantom things filled his brain. He’d been poisoned, his organs were rotting, his nervous system was seizing up.

  He was dying, dying.

  Rangan fell to one knee, sick to his stomach, his heart pounding like a jackhammer in his chest. He felt Stan Kim’s hand on his upper arm.

  He clenched down hard with his mind, took a deep breath, pushed back against the mental onslaught, tried to see reality through the chaos.

  Ahead, the tunnel was lined with men and women in suits.

  They were on the ground, mostly writhing, tearing at their clothes, their hair, trying to get control of their limbs again, trying to climb the walls, trying to escape what was happening in their own brains.

  Congress people, coming up on Nexus for the first time. Tripping their brains out in calibration phase, thinking they’d been chemically attacked, thinking they’d been poisoned.

  And really freaking the hell out.

  Su-Yong snaps back to herself.

  She is not whole. Not sane. Not completely.

  But she is closer. Parts of three Su-Yong’s now.

  The one who went mad in this place, imprisoned, cut off from what she needed, tortured.

  The one who came to sanity, to new revelations, in India.