Ramez Naam - Apex

“I love Su-Yong,” Feng said. “We all do. The insanity must be stopped.”

“And you can do this?” It was Bai, his head turned, addressing Kade.

Feng turned also, watched his friend.

Kade said nothing for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Not alone,” he said. “I’m only human. But together? All of us?” He nodded slowly. “We have a chance.”

Feng turned back to his brothers, watched as they looked at each other, as Bai and Tao and Peng and all the rest exchanged thoughts.

And then he felt their minds reach out to him. Reach out to him and to Kade.

Show us,Bai sent. Show us everything.

Kade opened himself to Feng’s brothers, let them see it all.

Su-Yong’s death at Ananda’s monastery. His responsibility for it. The Indian copy of Shu. The way they’d trapped her. How she’d reacted. Her battle with the warped fragment she’d stuffed in Ling’s mind in her insanity.

The plans she’d shown him. The plans forged in madness. The plans for conquest.

His fears for the outcome. For the world’s response. For the consequences should she fail or succeed.

The tools the sane Su-Yong had given him and Feng.

The way she’d renounced her hate, renounced the path she’d started down in the midst of torture and delirium.

The pleas she’d sent them with.

Save Ling. Save the world.

And most of all. What they could hope to do. The thin strand of hope that extended into the future, that broke the cycle, that didn’t lead to war between human and posthuman.

They pulled back from him, pulled back from what they’d seen from Feng.

Kade opened his eyes and found a massive crowd of identical faces, a throng of them in a circle around him. Faces just like Feng’s.

He shivered, remembering how alien the idea of these clones had seemed just a year ago.

Now… Now they felt like old friends.

He felt a wave go through them, a wave of consensus. They’d seen it. They’d seen the truth of insanity themselves. This plan, with all its risks, made sense to them.

Scores of weapons came up, pointed inwards.

“Drop your weapons,” a hundred voices said.

The Avatar reached out through Sun Liu’s mind, through equipment the SCC staff had installed in the Computer Science building.

That was the Lane boy. The transhuman who’d brought her to this state. And Feng, her favorite. Her Fist were conspiring with them.

They were conspiring against her.

Rage rose through her. These were her children. These were her blessed. These were the ones she’d given everything for. This was the boy she’d sacrificed a body for!

She proxied through Sun Liu. She amplified his signal via the repeaters around her.

And then she reached out to her errant children, to impose discipline.

“Drop your weapons!” came the chorus from the Confucian Fist. “Remove your hoods!”

“Do it,” Kade said. “If you cloak, they’ll kill you.”

The Indian Commandos were frozen, their guns pointed down, outnumbered by the Confucian Fist. No one moved.

Then one by one they dropped their guns, reached up, peeled off their hoods.

“You’ve betrayed us!” Captain Garud yelled aloud, looking at Kade, his face livid.

“You brought backpack nukes,” Kade said coldly. “Don’t deny it.”

“Damn you!” Garud said. “That thing down there is a threat!” He pointed a finger down, through the earth. “We have to destroy it! We can detonate the devices down below and eliminate the threat with no other casualties!”

Kade stared at the man. “What would that tell the next one?” he asked.

Garud yelled back. “That’s not the point!”

Confucian Fist were moving forward now, separating the commandos, removing their gear, fastening restraints around them.

Kade shook his head. “It would be tomorrow, Captain. Prisoner’s dilemma is always iterated in the real world. Defection is a sound strategy when you’re playing against defectors.”

Garud just stared at him.

Kade tried again. “Posthumans are coming, Captain Garud. There’ll be one after this. And another. And another. And more after that. Humans drove this woman crazy . You nuke her for it? The next posthuman will decide to nuke you first. You want them to treat you well? Then give them a reason. Treat them well.”

Garud leaned forward, a Confucian Fist holding his hands behind his back, and spat at the ground.

Then something epic descended on all their minds, something huge, something raving, something utterly without mercy.

Bai groaned and fell to his knees. He could feel her pushing into his mind, feel it pushing into his mind, pushing into his brothers’ minds. The thing he’d thought was Su-Yong.

No.

It put its mental fist around his will and squeezed, crushed, making way for its will. He felt it reach in and impose its order, its discipline, its desires on him.

He’d thought he’d been a slave before, degraded by pain, controlled by the virtual lash.

No.

He’d been free. Infinitely free compared to this.

Bai pushed back up to one knee, his hand on his weapon, his eyes alive and searching for his targets.

His soul dying as he fought with every ounce of his being against the invader.

And lost.

This was slavery.

This was hell.

Kade felt the attack as Su-Yong’s mad program attempted to impose its will on them all.

Weapons came alive inside him. Information constructs Su-Yong had passed on unfolded within him, expanded like origami into new shapes, vast and intricate.

His mind became a weapon.

Beside him he felt Feng’s mind unfold into complementary structures.

Viral weapons lanced from both of them, synergistic things, expanding into nearby minds, replicating, hunting out parts of her errant monster’s mind, creations that bore her errant monster’s telltale signature, carving them up, slicing them into billions of tiny fragments, forensically dissecting them, analyzing their contents and structure, following them back to where they originated from.

He felt minds around him snap free as the viral weapons sliced through tendrils of the monster’s thought. He felt the monster itself recoil, reel itself back, fleeing this unexpected attack, leaving behind telltales of its mental state, of its plans, of what it knew and intended.

The viral copies in the minds all around them shot tendrils out to each other, linked up, formed a compound structure, a new, larger entity, with a wider scope, a higher gain, a greater sensitivity, a higher signal strength.

Up above, in the building. There was the monster’s proximal route.

They shot copies of the virus by the million at the mind there.

Firewalls and hastily invoked anti-virals shot them down, scrambled the viral structures on the wire before they could penetrate, destroyed millions.

A handful got through, snuck into the human mind in the chaos, found it fertile, began replicating again, carrying Kade/Feng into it, into the mind of this man called Sun Liu.

They felt the monster recoil again, felt it reach out, grab hold of parts of the man’s mind, seize vital centers to scramble them, to wipe this mind clean, to reduce it to a vegetable, to kill him if it could.

They sliced viciously at the trunk of the tendril connecting the monster to this mind, sliced through process after process, closed ports wholesale, replicated viral code into crucial occupied memory, fast, faster.

The human screamed!

And then the monster was gone.

The last wisps of her in this mind dying.

The human on his knees.

The Avatar shrank back in fear.

The hostile posthuman! It had sent them here! They were aligned against her!