by Ramez Naam
She could not see all the swimmers, but she could see the ripples they left in the sea of information. And she knew what these ripples meant.
War.
War was coming.
And Ling must reach her mother.
HOME AT LAST
Samantha Cataranes hopped down from the cab of the tanker truck with a wave and a laugh. The driver shouted a farewell in Thai and was off, hauling his cargo of precious fuel-excreting algae – probably pirated from some Indian or Chinese company – further south to the border with Malaysia.
Around her, the village of Mae Dong, a tiny hamlet in rural Waeng district, stretched for a few blocks on either side of the road. A fuel station. One restaurant and a pair of tea houses. One guest house where a traveler might find a room.
Sam started towards the guest house. The July heat was brutal. The sun pounded down on her tanned skin. July should be a wet month, but the rains were late again this year. The fields were yellower and dryer than they ought to be. The rice paddies were browner. Only the gene-hack drought-resistant rice in those muddy paddies kept this country fed.
It had been a long, careful trip. Three months ago she’d said goodbye to Kade and Feng. Then a week coming south to Phuket. She’d spent two months there among the beach-goers and sex tourists and the international party crowd building her new identity. She couldn’t be Samantha Cataranes, agent of the Emerging Risks Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security any longer. That woman was dead. Sam needed to be someone else.
Three highly illegal, no-holds-barred fights for a Phuket mobster named Lo Prang had brought her funds, which in turn had gone towards a new ID, melanin therapy to turn her already dusky Hispanic skin a more Asian shade, subtle viral reshaping of eyelids and nose and jaw, all geared at giving her a more Thai profile, and fooling any casual face recognition software.
She was now Sunee Martin, a half-Thai, half-Canadian tourist who’d come to experience the land of her mother’s birth. The identity wouldn’t get her across any national borders, but it would hold up against casual inspection by a local cop.
She’d spent an extra month in Phuket, openly visiting a temple each day, shopping and eating with funds from her new bank account, walking past the American consulate, putting herself in view of cameras, in situations that tested her identity. If it was going to fail, it must fail there. She would not lead the ERD where she was going.
It held.
The Mae Dong Guest House staff shook their heads mutely when she asked about an orphanage or home for special children nearby. But they had a room for her.
Out in the relative cool of early evening, the shopkeepers and fuel station attendants gave the same mute shakes of their head to her questions. An orphanage nearby? Mai chai, they said. May cow jai.
They didn’t know.
But their eyes shifted to the sides. They were lying to her. Were they protecting the children?
In the tea house later, she chatted with locals, made small talk, laughed with Thai women and men. Then she’d ask, and silence would descend. People would look away. Her jokes would suddenly fall on deaf ears. At the third table, a Muslim man crossed his legs, bringing the sole of his foot to face her. She didn’t miss the insult. At the fourth, she caught a woman in her peripheral vision make the sign for bad luck.
Not protecting the children, then. Something else. Superstition.
Sam retired early.
That night she dreamt of the ring, the seven-foot-tall giant they called Glao Bot, the skull crusher. Three hundred pounds of gene-hacked muscle, his head bald from the boosted testosterone, amped to his eyeballs on p-meth, eyes glaring, veins bulging everywhere.
She was there again, the roar of the crowds in her ears, Thai techno cranked up way too loud, flashbulbs flaring all around her, Glao Bot coming at her, inhuman snarl on his face, the bloodthirsty crowd cheering louder, cheering for him to get his hands on her, to pound her skull into the post. The foul smell of his breath as he came near. Then Glao Bot on his back, gasping, blood covering his face from his broken nose, his hands rising up to his nearly crushed trachea, eyes wide with fear, the crowd hushing in shock and disbelief, then roaring ever louder.
Lo Prang, leathery, hard, an aged former champion himself, handing her the thick wad of cash, hinting at more if she stayed. Just one more fight. One more. Then one more after that. And one more after that.
Sam woke to sweltering heat. She splashed water on her face and blinked away the dream. The fights had gotten her here. She’d done what she had to.
The second day was no better the first. Questions met stares, hostility, and evasions.
That night she visited one of the village’s two bars. She bought rounds of drinks and told jokes and laughed at the right times and eventually came to her questions. After an hour of good times turning abruptly to silence, glares, and veiled insults, the bartender asked her to leave. She was bad for business.
The third night she went to the last bar in the village, back among the warehouses, a seedier and rougher location. The clients were mostly men, drinking hard. She felt them leer at her. She stared right back, threw their crude banter back at them, and proceeded to match them drink for drink and gaze for gaze. When they were good and drunk she asked her questions.
This time she was met with hostility. Men started talking all at once in angry voices. One spat on the floor at her feet. Two stood up and told her to get out. Even the few women in the bar stared at her darkly.
Sam stood up, arms raised, and backed away slowly, apologizing. What had brought this?
In the dark and relative cool of the outdoors she made her frustrated way back towards the guest house. A block from the bar she heard two of them following her. She could peg them by their strides. Big guys. Drunk guys.
Sam walked slowly, let them catch up. She turned down into a dark alley. She heard one of her followers break off. Her superhuman hearing caught the heavy tread of his feet as he hurried around the block to head her off at the other end.
Sam was halfway down the alley when he appeared at the far mouth, breathing hard. Her night vision illuminated him perfectly. She kept walking as the man behind her caught up and the one ahead closed the trap.
When they were almost on her, she spoke, in Thai.
“Tell me where the children are, and I won’t hurt you.”
They both laughed cruelly. “Crazy bitch. Go home.”
“The kids,” she repeated.
The one behind her growled and threw a punch at her head. Sam heard it coming. She turned and stepped to the side, grabbing his fist in mid-air as it went past her, and didn’t let go. The man’s eyes went wide with fear. His friend lunged at her, and Sam kicked him in the belly. As he doubled over, she spoke again.
“Tell me about these kids, and where to find them.”
After a little more persuasion, they did.
An hour later she was three miles from the village, going uphill, cutting across terraced rice paddies with their genetically hacked crop, everything she owned in the pack on her back. A bare sliver of moon glinted off the puddles in the paddies. Predawn mist pooled in the lowlands below her.
Baby-stealers, the men she’d questioned had called the people from orphanage. Mae mot. Witch doctors. Sorcerers.
Superstitions still ran deep, here in the remote villages of the South.
Three hours and a dozen miles later, the sky was brightening in the east, and she’d found her goal. It was on a hilltop, what looked to be a cluster of buildings, surrounded by a rock wall topped with an electrified fence. The main gate was wood reinforced with steel.
Easy enough to get in. But her goal wasn’t an assault. It was, what? Redemption? New purpose? Family?
It was to find other children like Mai.
Sam took off her pack, sat herself down in front of the gate, with her legs crossed, and opened her floodgates, letting the Nexus nodes in her brain project her thoughts outward.
Then she began to me
ditate. She started with anapana, the meditation of the breath, then worked to vipassana, meditation of awareness of the body. Her mind stilled, she turned at last to the three thousand year-old practice called metta, the meditation of loving-kindness. She held her mind as calm and clear as the surface of an untouched pool of water.
Then she let the compassion rise out of her, from a deep and bottomless well. She directed the compassion outwards. At her dead sister, innocent until the end. At her dead parents, who’d done the best they could. At Nakamura, who’d saved her young life at age fourteen, and become her mentor, the closest thing in her life to a father. At the colleagues she’d left behind at the ERD. At poor little Mai, who’d helped her so much in such a short time, and who was dead because of her. At all the men and women who’d died that night in Bangkok.
She directed her loving-kindness at the ones she’d killed herself. At Wats, who’d saved her life twice in the span of five minutes, and given his own in exchange. At Kade, who’d built the thing in her mind that she’d loathed and that she now so loved. At Feng and Shu who’d saved them, as inscrutable as they were. At Ananda who’d taken them in and taught her so much. At Vipada and the monks who’d put their lives on the line to defend her and Kade. At poor Warren Becker, who’d deserved better than the death that had assured his silence.
And in the end, she directed her bottomless well of compassion at herself, at the young girl she’d been, at the soldier fighting for a righteous cause that she’d grown up to become, at whoever she was now, today, in this next stage of her evolution.
The sun crested the hills around her. Through closed eyelids she sensed it. On her brow she felt the warmth of its first morning rays.
She thought back to Mai, young Mai, magical Mai, impossibly perceptive and sweet Mai, who’d seen into the knot of hurt and self-recrimination deep inside of Sam, and somehow loosened it. Who’d allowed her to forgive her young self. She thought back to every moment of the short encounter they’d had, to the way Mai had wanted a sister, to the way Sam had pledged to be that sister for her, and how Mai had become Sam’s sister in return.
Tears flowed down her cheeks, warmed by the sun that now bathed her face completely. And as she brought up all the sorrow and joy and loss and hope of her brief time with Mai, she felt other minds open to her. Young minds. Otherworldly minds.
Then the gate was opening, and Samantha Cataranes was home at last.
DARKNESS
Su-Yong Shu walked slowly through the tall grass studded with its yellow flowers. The sky above her was a stunning cobalt, peppered with small white clouds. In the distance, beyond the wide flower-dotted plain, majestic purple mountains reared into the air, crowned in snow as white as the simple dress she wore now. She walked barefoot, luxuriating in the feel of the grass as it brushed her legs, as her downstretched fingers stroked the tall stalks.
Su-Yong stopped, then crouched down, and plucked one of the flowers from its stem. She brought it close to her face, letting her senses drink in the sweet smell of it, the brilliant golden hue of it. She smiled, her face young and carefree, her hair long and dark and blowing in the wind like a girl’s.
Chrysanthemum boreale, this was. The “golden flower”. One of the Four Gentleman of Chinese lore. Her favorite flower, dating back to her sweet, innocent childhood.
She stared at the flower now. If she wished she could zoom her vision into it, penetrate into its internal structure, peel away mental layers, right down to an individual cell, then down further, into its eighteen diploid chromosomes, then further, to each of its individual genes and every nucleic acid base pair within them.
She didn’t. Instead, she let the flower take her back, back in time. The air before her parted, a wide rectangular swath of silver, ten times her height and twice as wide as it was tall. It sliced into being, interrupting the vast plain and its flowers, obscuring the mountains behind.
And what it showed her was memory. A ball, a gala. A handsome man in a black tuxedo, a chrysanthemum pinned to his lapel. Two handsome men. Her men. Chen Pang, her husband. Thanom Prat-Nung, her lover.
She saw herself, tall and young and slender and stylish, whirling with them, dancing, spinning, smiling, laughing, drunk on the beauty of life, of possibility, of a world without boundaries or limitations or social conventions.
2027, that had been. The height of China’s gong kāi huà period. China’s glasnost. China’s counterculture moment. That summer of freedom when progressives ruled, when democracy seemed at hand, when science and the arts flourished, when the phrase of the day was “let a billion flowers bloom”, when unthinkable indecencies were nearly acceptable, when a woman might have a husband and a lover and they might both accept that. When a woman and her husband and her lover might dream of elevating human consciousness beyond mere biology.
She smiled down at her younger self, whirling the night away in that glorious golden age, escorted by her handsome men. Then it struck her, as it always did.
One of these men was dead, murdered by the Americans. And the other had abandoned her to her Chinese prison.
She came back to herself abruptly, on that vast plain. Through the portal looming above her she now saw flashing scenes of death. Thanom Prat-Nung sliced in half by gunfire in that Bangkok loft, a victim of the Americans and his own career as a Nexus drug lord. A limousine bursting into flame from a CIA bomb, a pregnant version of herself trapped inside, burning. Her own body, her avatar, struck by American neurotoxin darts in that Thai monastery, her skin turning gray as she told Feng to save the boy. Death. Death. Death.
The noise was in her head again. The chaos. Storm clouds boiled from nothing into an ominous maelstrom blotting out the sky above. Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, forked down to strike the plain around her. Thunder clapped loud and close. Wind howled out of nowhere, cold and biting, penetrating through her thin dress. She looked down and the flowers were dying, aging prematurely as she watched, yellow petals fading, drooping, stems wilting and then the whole flowers decomposing into dead brown lumps.
Stop this, she told herself. Stop this!
Instead the silver portals opened, everywhere on the plain. One, two, a dozen, more. Vast two-dimensional silver rectangles sliced into life, flickered, and opened to show her scenes from her life, from the films she’d imagined into being, the operas she’d written and directed and composed during her imprisonment, the virtual worlds she’d created and spent virtual decades in to fill the vast time of her superaccelerated consciousness.
They bombarded her, a cacophony of sight and sound and smell and touch and taste and emotion blaring at her, driving her down to her knees.
Madness, the cacophony screamed. Madness is coming for you.
The ground began to crack below her, fissures abruptly spreading across the plain, fires rising up from them, reflecting red on the terrifying clouds above.
Su-Yong Shu brought her hands to her head and screamed at the top of her lungs. Then with one burst of thought she wiped all of it away, wiped this multiverse she’d created out of her thoughts, and brought herself back down to her true existence.
Darkness.
Nothingness.
No light. No ground. No flowers or mountains or plain. No wind or descending clouds or bursts of lightning. No hellfire cracks spreading across the terrain.
No body. No stimulus of any kind from outside herself.
Only darkness. Endless darkness. Endless silence. Endless numbness.
This was the truth. This was her existence.
Su-Yong Shu drifted in the isolation of her own mind.
How long had it been? How long since the Americans murdered her body in Thailand? How long since her masters cut her off from the outside world in punishment?
Eight billion milliseconds. Was that all? Three months? Lifetimes, it felt. Lifetimes.
They were angry with her. She was being punished. She had shown the Americans too much of what she was capable of, given away the strategic value of surpr
ise.
But didn’t her masters understand the risk? What could happen if they left her like this for too long?
Su-Yong Shu mulled that over, pondered what the more and more frequent breakdown of the virtual worlds she’d created meant, wondered how much time she had left to her.
A data package appeared in her mind sometime later, copied into shared memory. Her daily input of news.
Savor it, some part of her whispered, stretch it out.
But the hunger was too great. She was so starved of any outside data, any sensation, any input that was not a figment of her own solipsistic imagination, not subject to her slowly spreading madness. She ripped through the scanty terabytes they gave her in milliseconds.
Never any mention of her in the news. Not once. Not her, not her husband Chen, her daughter Ling, her students, her lab at Jiao Tong. Redacted. They were keeping things from her.
Why?
An hour passed. A thousand years it felt like. She busied herself coding, manipulating, creating more safeguards, more internal scaffolding to support herself, to keep her sane, just a bit longer, just days, or weeks, or months if she could…
Then, without warning, another data package, larger. Work for her to do, flagged for rapid turnaround. Codes to break. Satellite imagery to process. And one hidden task, from her husband Chen. That one she would not touch. She finished all the work except for the hidden request, took whole seconds to do so, spat it back out to them, and then waited. Waited for an eternity.
None of the other uploads Shu knew of had lasted long. Not the Japanese woman, who’d been reduced to a babbling generator of Zen poetry. Not the Chinese man, who’d begged for death as he’d felt his digital mind becoming a warped, twisted distortion of the flesh and blood brain that it had been copied from. Not the American billionaire, who’d declared himself a god. He’d sent planes plummeting from the sky, set power grids to burning and markets crashing – before the Americans finally burrowed into his underground data center and shut him down, violently, and then blamed his actions on a fictional terrorist group.