Ramez Naam - Apex

The PLF wasn’t linkable to him. The servers that stored its files never saw his true location or identity when he connected – he always routed through an anonymizing cloud, one of the ones he knew NSA had not effectively compromised. All the rest – Holtzman’s briefcase, the small stockpile of little green pills, the other physical tools – were in a secure storage that had no record he’d ever visited it, and no trace of his prints or DNA.

It would all be fine. Hold the line. Deny everything. He’d get great lawyers. They’d find flaws in the recording, demonstrate how it could have been faked, maybe put together their own fake recording, showing Elvis killing the man, or Gandhi. That was it.

He tapped notes to himself on his phone, set an alarm for 6am, then forced himself to sleep.

He woke before the alarm. 3.33am. Make a wish, some part of him whispered. His mother’s voice. His father would’ve beaten him bloody for having a weak thought like that. The storm sounded fainter outside, dying down by the hour as Zoe spent herself inland.

An idea had woken him. A thought. Holtzman had recorded that video using Nexus. He’d ignored that in the flood of bad news. Now the magnitude of it floored him. Holtzman had Nexus in his brain? He’d realized the man was off. But really? Nexus?

Didn’t that put the whole thing in doubt? Maybe Holtzman had just dreamed the whole thing in a drug haze and died of a heart attack.

He sat up in his bed, turned to bring his feet to the floor, reached for his phone to jot a note, maybe send a memo to one of the White House press staff.

The sudden light from the phone’s screen illuminated motion, a blur, something coming at him from the side.

Barnes yelled out, turned, raising a hand to ward off the blow.

Something bit into his upper arm, a needle.

He swung out with his other hand, trying to hit the dark form, finding only air.

“HOUSE RED!” he yelled, his panic phrase, his phrase that should set the alarms blaring, bring the lights up, alert the police and DHS that he had an intruder, activate his home’s own active countermeasures…

Except that the alarms should already have gone off. The locks should never have let this intruder in.

“Ooof!” A hard fist slammed into his solar plexus, forcing the air out of him, knocking him back against the headboard in his still dark, still silent house.

“Lights,” said a voice that wasn’t his, a voice he knew…

The bedroom came alive with light at the intruder’s command.

Before him was a blur, a man-shaped distortion against the wall and carpet. The figure shifted and his outline became more clear. Not high-end chameleonware, then. Something cheaper and coarser.

“I have money,” Barnes said.

“I don’t want…”

Barnes pounced in the moment of distraction, hurled himself at the man, his illegally boosted muscles shooting him off the bed in a tackle that would slam the intruder against the wall behind him.

The blur sidestepped inhumanly fast. Its knee came up. Barnes fell to the floor, curled in a ball, naked, gasping for breath, pain radiating from his core.

Something pressed against his shoulder. A booted foot. It pushed him onto his back. A blurred hand reached down, and Barnes felt a sting in his other arm as a needle was pulled out. He caught a glimpse of a syringe in that cloaked hand, its stopper fully depressed, the needle bent from where he’d rolled onto it.

Barnes gasped, struggled to breathe.

“I teach you the overman,” the figure above him said.

That voice. That voice.

“Man is something to be overcome,” the voice went on.

Oh god. Oh god.

“What have you done to overcome him?”

“Breece…” Barnes struggled for air, struggled to force the man’s name out. “Breece… I…”

He saw Breece’s camouflaged leg shift too late, understood what was happening too late for anything but anticipation of pain.

And then the man’s booted foot slammed into Barnes’s naked crotch, with testicle-crushing force.

“Aaa…” Barnes gasped. His eyes bulged out of his face. His whole body contorted, curling up around the pain, his limbs trembling as he moaned. “Uuuuuuuu…”

“What have you done to overcome him?” Breece breathed at him from above.

Barnes sat in his car, dressed in suit and tie, a block from the onramp that would take him to the bridge over the fast and rough waters of the Susquehanna, a prisoner in his own body.

It had been Nexus in that syringe. Nexus that had enabled someone, some thing, to utterly take control of him. The same force that had hacked into his home, silenced his defenses, to let Breece in, had used the drug to rifle through his mind, taking every secret, every password, every morsel of knowledge about the ERD, the PLF, the DHS, Stockton, everything.

And now this.

“Maximilian Barnes,” Breece said from the passenger seat, still a faint blur. “You are guilty of treason against the cause of posthumanity. You’ve betrayed the cause you championed. You’ve knowingly facilitated the imprisonment, torture, and deaths of dozens of activists. You’ve knowingly used lies and deception to create a culture of fear around the world, to limit the rights of individuals and families, to put in place repressive regimes of laws that rob people of freedom over their own minds and bodies. You’ve ordered the torture of children.”

Breece paused.

“You’ve ordered the murder of children.”

Another pause.

“Maximilian Barnes, I hereby sentence you to death. In your death, you are being granted this one last opportunity to serve the cause. Be grateful. Is there anything you want to say for yourself?”

Barnes turned and stared at the blur where Breece should be. He was a dead man, already. He knew that. But worse – there was no appeal to stop the damage they’d use him to inflict on the country. No appeal. No plea of “kill me but don’t do this” that would have any result.

“You won’t win,” Barnes told the man. “It’s too late for that. There’s too much hate. You made sure of that yourself. Humanity’s going to hunt down every last one of your kind, and exterminate you.”

The shadow laughed. “It’s our kind, Max. I saw those muscles.” A cloaked hand reached out and squeezed Barnes’s upper arm. “You should’ve learned to use them in a fight, though.”

The blurry figure opened the door and stepped out. The door closed behind him.

A force took control of Barnes’s muscles, used them to take manual control of the car, and drove onto the bridge. At the halfway point, against his will, he stopped, stepped out of the car, fighting it every step of the way, stepped up onto the railing in the wind, and raised his phone, the camera pointed at himself.

In the wind and rain, Barnes was sure he’d slip into the fast rushing waters below. He hoped he’d slip. He strained at his muscles, tried to push his legs out from underneath him, to jerk his arms, to kill himself without giving his enemies this victory

But the intelligence that held him kept his body steady.

Barnes struggled, vainly, as some malevolent force used his thumb to activate the camera, and started speaking, loudly and clearly, with his voice.

No. No. No!

“My name is Maximilian Barnes,” his own voice yelled into the camera. A status indicator showed that it was streaming successfully to the net.

“For the last few months I have served as Acting Director of the Emerging Risks Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security,” Barnes’s voice went on.

He pushed at the thing controlling him, fought to unclench his hand, to drop the phone, tried to bite his tongue, to topple himself backwards, even just to wink one eye! To let people know it wasn’t real!