Crux

by Ramez Naam

  Oh, Kade, Ilya’s voice said in his mind. You almost killed him.

  He’s still alive, Kade replied.

  You got lucky, she said. He could have died.

  He killed you! Kade shouted at the voice in his head.

  He didn’t. He showed you. He didn’t want me to die.

  He’s responsible, Kade shot back angrily. He’s one of them. Your blood’s on his hands. Wats’ blood. A lot more than that.

  And you get to decide that? she asked him. You’re the judge now? Are you wiser than all humanity, Kade? Are you?

  Yes. If I have to be.

  Then Ananda was in his thoughts. A memory of the monk.

  When you suffer, Ananda had told him, When you rage. When you weep. When you crave. That is when you must still your mind.

  Dammit! Kade raged. He slammed his good fist against the floor.

  But Ananda was right. He had to be cool now. He had to think. Had to use this chance to get Rangan free.

  Kade closed his eyes, folded his hands into his lap, took a few steadying breaths of anapana, then a few more, then a few more after that.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Layers of rage and grief peeled off him like an onion. Tears rolled down his face.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  He opened his eyes again minutes later. The anger was still there. The loss was still there. But he was calmer now, he could think.

  Breathe.

  Holtzmann was Kade’s best chance to get Rangan free. He couldn’t squander that.

  Kade checked the time. It was not quite 2am on the East Coast. He had some time before Holtzmann would be missed.

  He had time, time to use the tools he’d taken from all those monsters he’d stopped, and employ them for his purposes – to free Rangan.

  Kade tunneled back into Holtzmann’s mind. With a handful of commands he pulled up the coercion tools he’d done his best to exterminate, set them to hovering in his mental space, overlaid atop representations of Holtzman’s mind and brain. Then he grabbed one, and set to work sculpting the man into a slave, a slave who would do Kade’s bidding.

  Holtzmann woke slowly. He was back in his office chair. Everything seemed orderly.

  I’m alive, he realized.

  4.19am, the clock told him. Hours had passed.

  Then he felt it. The knot in his stomach. The ache in his chest. The overwhelming compulsion. He would free Rangan Shankari.

  37

  PREPARATIONS

  Saturday October 27th

  Breece woke before dawn, Ava wrapped in his arms. They’d made love with a quiet urgency the night before, their eyes burrowing into one another’s. Intensely bonded even despite the lack of Nexus.

  He held her for a while, listening to her breathing. Then it was time.

  They gathered in the kitchen. Ava briefed them on the mule, on the planned pickup today. Hiroshi reviewed the changes to the Nexus code they’d be using. The Nigerian prepped them on the weapon.

  And Breece went over the targets with them one more time.

  Daniel Chandler, former Democratic senator from South Carolina, architect of the bill that had created the ERD and banned whole swaths of scientific inquiry and human enhancement, had returned to his childhood home of Houston. After re-establishing residence, he’d launched his campaign to become the first Democratic Governor of Texas in a generation. And he was winning. Chandler could point at the events of the last few months, then point back at the law that bore his name – the Chandler Act – and show that he’d always been a leader in fighting transhuman technologies and those who would use them.

  One week from today, on Saturday November 3rd, three days before the election, Chandler would appear at a special Houston prayer breakfast, broadcast live to the state and the nation.

  His host would be the Reverend Josiah Shepherd, the man who’d told the country that God would reward those who sent geneticists and fertility doctors to hell. The man whose followers had murdered Breece’s parents.

  Well, if there was a hell, Breece was going to send both men there, first class.

  Taking lives was serious business. Every person they killed had the potential to live forever. Breece refused to do that lightly.

  “Wives?” he asked.

  “They chose their husbands,” Ava replied. “Guilty.”

  “Supporters?” Breece went on.

  “They’re material supporters of Chandler’s war on science,” Hiroshi said. “Guilty.”

  “Security?”

  “Soldiers,” the Nigerian said. “They chose which side to fight for.”

  “Press?”

  There was a pause this time.

  “What’s the risk?” Ava wanted to know.

  “How far back will they be from the stage?” Hiroshi asked.

  They debated it for some time, then opted to scale the weapon down. They left it easily large enough to take out their primary targets, but small enough that the danger to news media should be small.

  Finally Breece came to the last check. “Children?”

  “Seats are five thousand dollars a pop,” Hiroshi said. “Shouldn’t be any kids there.”

  “We can’t rule that out,” Breece said.

  “They’re being raised by the enemy,” the Nigerian said. “They’ll grow up as the enemy.”

  “Not all of them,” Breece said.

  “It’s an acceptable risk,” Ava added. “They’ve killed more than enough of ours.”

  Breece looked at her, and she held his eyes. He thought of her own trauma, the nightmares that still woke her, her own baby dead in her arms.

  Breece nodded. “Acceptable risk.”

  They gathered at the garage, then spent the next two hours rigging up the shielding. They unrolled fine mesh panels, adhered the panels to every surface, connected each to its neighbors, tested, found holes in the shielding, fixed connections, and repeated until they were done. In the end they had a Faraday cage that would keep any electromagnetic signals inside the garage from leaking out. They rolled out a thick carpet to protect the mesh on the floor, and then it was time for the next phase.

  Ava led this one, driving alone in a nondescript car with borrowed plates. Breece and the Nigerian followed discreetly, three cars back, ready to provide backup.

  They parked in the outdoor lot on the east side of the Houston Sands Mall, and waited for their target to arrive for her weekly hair appointment.

  The white Cadillac pulled into the lot eighteen minutes later. It parked and Mrs Miranda Shepherd, wife of the Reverend Josiah Shepherd, stepped out.

  Ava was out of her own car now, in a white blouse and black slacks, her dark hair blowing in the wind. A huge Texan smile was on her face.

  Miranda Shepherd closed her car door behind her, and moved towards the mall. Through his car window, Breece watched as Ava hailed her. He saw Shepherd turn, Ava close the distance between them, that huge smile still on her face.

  Shepherd listened, then smiled and nodded herself. She turned, pointing out towards the highway, gesturing with her hands, giving directions to a lost young lady.

  All the while, the aerosolized DWITY variant was pumping out of Ava’s blouse, making its way into Miranda Shepherd’s lungs, then via her bloodstream to Shepherd’s brain. Within a few seconds, Shepherd was wobbling slightly, woozy now, susceptible to suggestions.

  He saw Ava reach out and take the befuddled woman’s hand. The micro-injector on Ava’s thumb would have just pumped more DWITY into Miranda Shepherd’s bloodstream. The televangelist’s wife looked confused now, her eyes glassy and blank. Ava smiled, talked soothingly, then she led Miranda Shepherd by the hand, back to the nondescript car with false plates, and drove away with her.

  The Nigerian started up their own car, led them to the spot where Ava had been parked. Breece opened the door, reached down, and picked up Miranda Shepherd’s phone in his gloved hand.

  As the Nigerian drove, Breece placed the voice
modulator over the phone’s mic, and dialed the hair salon. He spoke, and a software model trained on dozens of hours of recordings of Miranda Shepherd transformed his voice into a feminine Texas drawl.

  “Betsy? Hi. It’s Miranda,” Breece said in Shepherd’s voice. “I’m sorry, darlin’, but I have to cancel my appointment this mornin’. No, can’t come in next week, we have the prayer breakfast. But I’ll be back in two weeks. OK, thank ya, Betsy!”

  He clicked off the phone, then dropped it into a shielded bag.

  The Nigerian drove them on, towards the garage and the reprogramming of Mrs Miranda Shepherd.

  38

  INFORMATION EXTRACTION

  Saturday October 27th

  Shanghai suffered. Riots broke out. Hungry looters smashed windows in grocery stores and food distribution centers. Murders happened in the streets. Criminal gangs roamed free. Underworld lords enforced brutal order in small isolated pockets. Half the city still lacked power. Subway tunnels remained flooded. Sewage water still choked some streets. Fires burned in now-abandoned buildings. Soldiers patrolled the filthy streets, shooting the looters and rioters they found.

  Elsewhere, China herself changed and the hardliners seized power. Chen laughed bitterly at himself. His daughter had done this, had handed the hardliners this opportunity. His monstrous daughter, in trying to save her mother’s life, had doomed her.

  And worse, of course. Much worse. Scientific projects were being shelved “for review”. The net censors were back in force, tighter than he’d ever seen them. He read of the “terrorist cells” being raided and he recognized some of the names. Intellectuals. Dissidents. Those who’d dared to question the state, to propose modest reforms, or directions that differed from those the hardliners wanted.

  Shanghai had swung his country hard back in the reactionary direction.

  Chen numbed himself to it. Only one thing mattered. When would the Secure Computer Center be back online? When could he get back to that quantum abomination and wring one last secret out of her?

  There was no guilt left now. The thing that thought it was his wife would be dead soon in any case. They’d back it up in case of some future value, some way to extract the tens of billions of yuan that had been spent on it. But he doubted that backup would ever be restored. No. Let it live just a tiny bit longer, just long enough to give him the equivalence theorem.

  What a last gift that would be. If the equivalence theorem existed – and it must, or why else would she have hinted at it – then any conventional computing algorithm could be incredibly accelerated via a quantum process. Quantum computing would go from a specialized technique for solving certain problems – cryptography and database searches and optimizations – to a tool that could speed up everything by billions of times, trillions of times.

  And he, Chen Pang, the “discoverer” of the equivalence theorem…

  He’d be famous, of course. A Nobelist. The greatest mind in computing since Turing. A multi-billionaire from the commercial spinoffs. One of the richest and most powerful men alive. Even in a hardliner’s China, he would be untouchable, among the elite of the elite.

  No, he told himself. Not just for me. For the world, for the benefit to mankind.

  Chen nodded soberly. Yes, that was why he would do this. Not just for his own glory. But to benefit his fellow man.

  All he had to do was inflict a little pain on the insane ghost of his dead wife. It was really no conflict at all.

  After three days, the SCC was ready. Chen smiled and summoned his driver.

  Today he would break her. Today he would break it. Today he would make history.

  Ling waited until the apartment told her that her father had left, then reached out with her thoughts and opened the door to her mother’s room. Cautiously she limped out into the flat. A livid bruise still covered her face from where her father had struck her. Her arms sported burns from the scalding tea his blow had spilled over her.

  She’d lived like this, like a scavenger, since that day. She’d kept the door to her mother’s chamber locked, then snuck out when her father was asleep, and only then after she told the apartment to lock him in his own room so he couldn’t hit her again.

  Shanghai’s net limped gradually back towards full functionality. It was sweet to swim in data once more, but she was forced to be more careful now. There were strange programs out there, evolved things, AIs she’d never seen before. All looking for the source of the attack on Shanghai. She avoided them as best she could, sending her thoughts out into the wider net with only the utmost caution.

  In the kitchen now, she scavenged food from the flat’s pantry and refrigerator, took them back with her to mother’s room. There was a tiny freezer in mother’s room, of course, hidden behind a panel in the wall. But it held other supplies. Injectors and ampules of silvery fluid laden with nanodevices to suffuse the brain. Not food. Better, but not a replacement. Ling left it alone.

  Someday, she thought, I’ll live on pure data.

  Outside, she could see Shanghai with her own eyes. These few blocks glowed, an island of light, surrounded by a vast sea of darkness, punctuated by the dull, chaotic red of open flame. Ling stared at that darkness, at what she’d done to Shanghai, then she turned, looked closer, at the giant visage across the street. Zhi Li smiled at her, pursed her inhumanly perfect lips, winked one electronically sculpted eye, held up some product to tempt the humans with.

  Down below, the wet streets were empty. The giant actress pushed her wares, but no one was there to see.

  Ling turned her back on the city, sealed the door to her mother’s room again, ate her food, and searched the net for any way to burrow her thoughts below Jiao Tong University and to her mother.

  39

  WHERE IT ENDS

  Saturday October 27th

  Kade lay in the narrow bed in the room he shared with Feng. He was shaking. Rangan tortured. Ilya dead. Dead. All a waste. A fucking waste. They didn’t even know the codes to the Nexus back doors! Kade had changed those back door codes, changed them in Ananda’s monastery, just hours before American soldiers had invaded and he’d been forced to release Nexus 5 into the wild.

  Oh God, Ilya. Rangan.

  And what he himself had just done… It was slowly sinking into him. Turning Holtzmann into a slave. Almost killing the man.

  You’re losing control, Ilya’s voice whispered in his ear. You’re turning into a monster.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Feng found him there, an hour later.

  Kade opened his mind to his friend, showed him what had happened, showed him that Ilya was dead, showed him what he’d done to Holtzmann.

  Feng sat with him, absorbed, listened as Kade spilled it out. And finally Feng spoke.

  “I’m sorry, Kade,” he said. “Sorry your friend is dead. I’m glad you’re worried about what you did. But sometimes no good option.”

  Kade shook his head. “I can’t let that happen again, Feng. A million people running Nexus. I have all this power. I can’t lose my head, can’t lose control.”

  Feng spoke softly. “Maybe too much power. Too much control. Trust people, that’s what Ananda told you, yeah? Maybe you should let go, close the back door.”

  Ananda. Kade remembered. Are you wiser than all humanity? Ananda had asked him.

  No.

  He closed his eyes, and in his mind’s eye the icon for the script was there, the bot that would close the back door. It hovered in the upper left of his virtual workspace. All he had to do was invoke it, and he’d close off that hole he’d left for himself, forever.

  Then another memory flashed through his mind, a blinking light, wires, then chaos, and death.

  War is coming, Shu had said.

  Kade opened his eyes, looked into Feng’s. “But if I do that, Feng, who’s going to stop the PLF? Who’s going to stop them from starting a war?”

  Feng broke the eye contact, looked down at his hands.

  Kade spoke again. �
��Sometimes, there’s no good option.”

  Kade wanted to stay in, lick his wounds, see if he could turn up any additional leads on the PLF. But Feng insisted that Kade get out, do something to reset his thoughts.

  So they went down to club Heaven hours later. It was Hell Night when they arrived. The Saturday before Halloween. A night of demons.

  The door girl looked them over skeptically in their lack of costumes, but she took their money, stamped their wrists, and let them in. The bouncer glowered like the night before.

  It was early still, just barely evening, and the club was sparsely populated. The music was downtempo, quiet enough to talk over. The dance floor was empty, the stage where the DJ and NJ and go-go dancers would be later tonight held a few racks of equipment and nothing else.

  They took a seat at the bar. Kade wasn’t hungry, wasn’t thirsty. Even after the meditation and the hours coding, the shock of the day still coursed through him. Feng ordered drinks for them both, made Kade down one as he watched, then ordered food as well.

  Kade felt the drink mellow him. Felt the food restore him. He had to stay strong right now. He had to stop the PLF from killing again. He had to avert that war between human and posthuman. He had to stay steady to do that. Later, there’d be a time to collapse, to process Ilya’s death and his near murder of Holtzmann and everything else. For now, he had a job to do.

  So he focused on eating, on watching his breath, on remembering the good things he’d seen happening around the world with Nexus. Tried to maintain his mental balance.

  The club filled in slowly. Minds brushed Kade’s. Some he’d felt the night before. Some were new.

  Before long the club was crowded, people all dressed up, drinking, talking, laughing, waiting for the DJ to go on. The shirtless Vietnamese boy was here again, and through him Kade could feel the same banker’s mind in London, riding this boy, spending his afternoon in London on the town in Saigon instead. He caught sight of the brunette from the restaurant too, through a gap in the crowd. She was peering at him from across the room. Then bodies shifted and she was obscured from his view.