Ramez Naam - Apex

Two planes, Kade thought. So if one gets shot down, the other can do the job. With what’s in those cases.

Kade looked at the box again.

Their plan doesn’t depend on my way working, he thought. It doesn’t depend on me living at all.

I have to live, he told himself. My way has to work.

“Launch!”

The voice buzzed in Kade’s ear. Displays in his mind, proxied from the wing itself, went green.

And then he was falling, out into the utter black through the bomb bay in the stomach of the great stealth flying wing.

His stomach dropped. He was weightless for an instant. Then the wing he was fastened to bit into thin air and suddenly the straps were gripping him, holding him up, prone, staring down into the abyss. The cold hit him. Even in the body heat-retaining chameleonware suit, the air was frigid. The wind pressed against his helmet, against his thighs, his hands down at his sides, against every surface that faced them.

The wing painted graphics in his mind’s eye. Trajectories, a box ahead of him, leading to distant light. And numbers.

15,840 meters above the ground. No, not above the ground: above the dark East China Sea. Down there, he could see black water everywhere, spotted with flecks of cloud, white in his light-amplified artificial vision.

One hundred and eighty-six kilometers per hour. Fast enough that any collision would kill him.

Minus fifty-six degrees Celsius. Cold enough to freeze skin right off.

He strained to look ahead. The entire visor of his helmet was light sensitive, a massive compound photoreceptor, thousands of times larger than his own retinas, it picked up the world, amplified it for him, fed it directly into his mind via military interfaces the Indians had built atop Nexus.

He looked for the others, the ones who’d dropped ahead of him. Looked for Feng, looked for Sam, looked even for that liar, Aarthi.

But they weren’t there. They were stealthed, chameleonware active, radio silent, Faraday-caged inside their chameleonware suits, even laser links between commandos too much a risk of detection during the insertion phase.

He was alone. Alone six kilometers above the ocean, and doing something completely insane.

His heart was pounding. His breath was coming fast. He could hear the oxygen bottle hissing, hissing as he sucked at it.

Kade closed his eyes, hit the button on his mental interface to silence the external input.

Breathe.

Slow.

Observe.

Break the link between sensation and reaction.

Breathe into the gap between them.

Blind reaction is attachment.

Blind reaction is slavery.

Freedom exists in the gap.

Choice exists in the gap.

I exist in the gap.

Let go of attachment to my fear, he told himself. Let go of attachment to myself.

Let go of attachment to my life.

That’s the secret to living.

He opened his eyes, reactivated the feed of data from the visor and the wing directly into his mind.

The world came alive around him.

He breathed into it, took it in, observed it without fear.

Down below, the dark sea, the flecks of white clouds above. He was five or ten times higher than those clouds, carried not by jet engines but by carbon fiber wings. His heart ached with it this time, not in fear, but in beauty.

Ahead, to the southwest, the darkness gave way to lights.

The outlying islands beyond Shanghai.

Huanghai, his visor labeled one. Chongming Dao. Heng Sha. Changzing Dao.

Their lights, like toys, a faint glow so many kilometers below and kilometers ahead, rising up through the sky, through layers of clouds.

Beyond them, Shanghai itself, a vast sprawl of light, a city of forty million people, the “Capital of Asia”, the City of Lights. It glowed brighter than anything else on the horizon, glowed in white and blue and red and green, skyscrapers in all their décor sending up multicolored lights to blare against the sky or the passing clouds. It was a festival seen in the distance. It was a luminescent circus on the horizon.

Kade breathed it in, breathed it all in.

More to remember. More to pass on. More to play forward.

He turned his head to the left, to the south-east and the light entering the sky, out over the open water. Dawn was still more than an hour away, but up here, kilometers up, the light was coming. And it was gorgeous, so gorgeous, bringing the first hints of pink and red to clouds far out on the horizon, turning the sky from black to deep blue.

This was amazing. So amazing.

He wished Rangan was here to experience this. Or Ilya. Ilya would love this. He wished he could talk to Feng, Feng who must be somewhere nearby.

What would Feng say?

Feng would make a joke.

Kade grinned to himself, tried to think like Feng.

Confucius say, man who wants to fly, better have wings.

Kade grinned wider.

I’ve got wings, Feng, he thought to himself. I can fly.

And then he laughed.

He laughed and laughed, and sucked it all up, all the glory of the stars above, of the sea, of the coming dawn to his left, of the vast city ahead, as he soared forward.

The air thickened and warmed. Speed dropped. Altitude dropped. Minutes passed. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes.

They passed the first islands. Then water. Then they were over land.

No one shot them.

Amazingly, no one shot them.

Shanghai proper was below, neon lights shining, dappled by cloud and morning mist.

The heart of the city was ahead now, a landmark on their way to Jiao Tong.

He could see the giant, rainbow-hued skyscrapers of the Pudong approaching, their tops still half a klick below him. They swam in mist, the towers disappearing into cloud, surging back up again above them, sculptures in neon and steel and carbon fiber, alive in every color, in shapes of needles and orbs and minarets, in delicate arcs and corkscrew spires and tapered rectangles. Even in the rising light of the almost dawn, brilliant signs in reds and blues and greens shouted out the names and shapes of brands. Faces and figures moved below him as he zoomed by, blown up to superhuman size on the sides of buildings.

Kade caught his breath, entranced. This city was amazing. It was beyond description. It made San Francisco look old and dull. Made Bangkok look tawdry and poor. Shanghai was huge, vibrant, modern. A place he’d love to know on other terms.

The suit flew into mist, obscuring his view.

Then he was out of the mist.

And there were black shapes, black shapes in the air ahead of him. Black shapes everywhere.

Red lights lit up in his mind’s eye. Collision alarms sounded. He felt the wing take evasive action, felt it jolt control surfaces in an attempt to change his course at high speed.

Birds, he realized. Birds rising into the dawn.

Then he saw something plow through them, a nearly invisible blur moving at incredible speed. The blur flickered, became a man, a wing, tumbling, spinning, out of control.

Then he was in the flock, the alarms blaring in his head, the red lights flashing in his eyes.

And then the collisions started.

109

Boot Time

Monday 2041.01.20

Tao moved in a crouch, wrapped in chameleonware, the datacube secured in a stealthed pouch, his team with him, Sun Liu in the center.

Griffon One had put them down at Dachang. It would have been so much faster to bring it straight to Jiao Tong, but there was no way to escape detection, no way to land that sort of craft in an urban environment while hiding its downthrust, masking its heat output, muting the sound of its engines.

Not from hostile troops just a few hundred meters away.

And the last thing they wanted to do prematurely was alert the military that there was anything special about Jiao Tong, that it was anything more than another university with another protest. Let them focus their efforts on the much larger protest in People’s Square in Shanghai; on the politically explosive protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, nestled just south of the ancient capital of the Forbidden City and not much more than a stone’s throw from the modern halls of power in Zhongnanhai.