Ramez Naam - Apex

“Fire!” he yelled into his radio.

The sound of gunfire answered him.

And groans.

Screams.

“Status!” he yelled.

Silence.

“Status!” he repeated.

Silence.

“Chief,” one of his men said.

Wu Jiabao looked over. The man was studying the house monitors. And there, on them, he could see armed men moving through the home.

Armed men with identical faces.

Wu Jiabao swallowed.

“Flank the door,” he ordered. “Take cover behind the bar. Prepare to repel.”

Then he walked over to the couch, hauled the scrawny politician up by his lapel, put a gun to his head, and put the man between him and the door.

His wife and family screamed.

“Run into the bedroom!” Liu yelled at them.

Sun Liu struggled, and Wu Jiabao clubbed him with the gun.

“I need you alive,” he told the man. “But I’m willing to blow your nuts off.”

That stilled him.

Wu turned to the house monitors, just in time to see a monitor show one of the invaders point a gun at it.

And then it went dark.

More than half of them were dark now.

He watched as they came closer, bit by bit, penetrating the house.

Destroying every camera they came to.

Until they were right outside the door.

He waited, in view of them, his pistol pressed to Sun Liu’s temple. He felt his men shift, become anxious, felt the anxiety rise, felt it rise further.

Why weren’t they coming in?

BOOOOOM.

With a shuddering explosion, the door blasted inward. Wu staggered on his feet, felt Sun Liu try to get free. He jerked the man brutally, righted himself, brought the gun back to the man’s head.

A figure appeared in the doorway.

His men opened fire.

The figure was gone, not there anymore.

His men kept firing.

Clips went dry.

Then men in white were inside the room, firing back.

And suddenly all was still.

And everywhere he turned, he saw his men were dead.

“Don’t come any closer!” Wu said, staring at the clone who’d come in first. The man had an assault rifle pointed forty-five degrees down, mostly at the floor. “Stop right there! Back away or I’ll blow his–”

Wu never saw the gun shift in Tao’s hand, or the explosion of muzzle fire that put a three-bullet volley directly into his brain.

Tao stepped up to the dead soldier’s body, leaned down, safetied the man’s pistol, then pried it out of his hand.

Sun Liu was shaking on the floor. From a doorway came the sound of crying and weeping.

Tao stared down at the dead soldier.

Every soldier knew death could come. When it did, it would likely come at the hands of someone like them. All soldiers were brothers, doing a job or fighting for a cause, putting their lives on the line for someone or something besides themselves. Death was part of that job. So was killing. There was no mystery there.

Still, it was the people in charge who he’d prefer to take the lives of.

Sun Liu was still shaking. “What… What’s going on?” he said. “Who sent you?”

Tao smiled at the man in as reassuring a manner as he could, even as Daofeng came up with the hypersonic injector.

“Minister Sun,” Tao said. “Welcome to the revolution.”

103

On Set

Sunday 2041.01.20

Zhi Li kept the hood pulled over her head as her eyes scanned the protest site. Lu Song squeezed her hand, a hat tugged down low over his famous face.

The protest was a throng, an insane intensity of people, thousands of them waving signs, chanting, fired up. It was the density and passion of a concert, of a festival. But unleashed. Unrestrained by the usual rules.

It was like nothing Zhi Li had ever seen in China.

And this was just the small one. This was just Jiao Tong.

They’d aimed for the main protest in People’s Square, but the city was so full of people that driving became impossible kilometers back. Jiao Tong was closer.

And this was where it had started.

No one had recognized them yet. She was grateful. They’d hidden their faces to avoid being recognized by police, by soldiers. But now she wasn’t even sure she wanted to be recognized.

She’d come here in a moment of passion, seeing that digital version of herself inciting the masses, she’d suddenly imagined herself a hero, a leader of the revolution, guiding the people to justice.

She’d done that so many times in film, since she was just a child. She knew the lines. She’d read the scripts. She’d had her close-ups.

She’d defeated evil every time.

But this…

All around her, details showed her the reality.

Medical tents being set up. First aid supplies laid out.

Makeshift gas masks handed out. Not nearly enough. Bandanas and scarves being collected, distributed. Cheap goggles where they could.

Sticks and pipes in people’s hands. Sports racquets. Makeshift weapons and waste-bin-lid shields and home-made armor.

The constant buzzing of the drones overhead. Hundreds of them zooming by just above the signs.

The barricades, of broken furniture, bricks, machinery, all piled up to form a barrier.

A barrier against the army beyond it. The ranks and ranks of soldiers. With guns, and long heavy batons, and metal shields and mirrored helmets. And behind them, tanks and tank-like things, massive turrets pointing this way.

This was no movie.

“Nexus?” she heard a male voice say.

Something brushed her. She looked down, saw a hand, holding a silvery vial.

Qi’s hand snaked out from beside her, grabbed the wrist, twisted it away from her.

There was squeal of pain. The vial dropped to the ground.

“Qi!” she said. “Let go. It’s OK.”

She looked up. There was a boy in front of her, perhaps eighteen, nineteen, holding his wrist, rubbing it, a look of betrayal and annoyance on his face.

Then his eyes met hers and they grew wide.

“Holy shit,” he said.

Zhi Li felt resignation hit her. She smiled at the boy.

“We’re here to help,” she said. “Who’s in charge here?”

104

The Sooner, The Better

Sunday 2041.01.20

Sun Liu’s eyes went wide as the world expanded within him, as the nanites attached to his neurons, as new inputs entered his brain, made their way into his consciousness.

So vast. So vast.

He could feel the minds of the men around him.

He could feel the pieces of his own mind, coming together. Feel the software within the nanomachinery studying him, learning him, flashing huge swaths of his life before his eyes at once.

So amazing.

I’m a scientist, he thought. Why didn’t I ever do this before?

And then she was there.

And hell opened up, hell beyond anything he’d ever imagined possible.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, SUN LIU . The voice was the voice of a thousand dark angels, a thousand folk demons from his mother’s superstitions. All true. All true.

He saw himself through her eyes. Things she could not know. He saw himself warning Chen Pang, warning him about the car bomb, warning him the reactionaries were going to kill him and his wife, warning Chen Pang, but not warning Su-Yong Shu!

Condemning her and her unborn son to death!

No, he wanted to say. You’re dead. You’re dead. So many times over you’re dead. You can’t hurt me.

But he was inside her mind, as she was inside his. He was burning, pinned in the back of that limousine, watching Yang Wei die, feeling the unborn son inside himself die, feeling skin blacken and burn.

I KNOW YOU LET CHEN TORTURE ME , the demoness shouted into his mind. TORTURE ME FOR YOUR PETTY GAIN.