Ramez Naam - Apex

Because a little girl’s life is at stake, she answered herself. Because a stranger risked his life to save me when I was a little girl.

She took a slow breath.

Because the woman held down here for half a year was a prisoner, a prisoner they tortured and abused, Sam thought. Because that woman saved my life once too.

Because to have the right future, we need to lay down the right past, for that future to build on.

Tit for tat.

Tit for tat.

Sam saw Feng give the signal, and she reached up with her eyes, pulled down a menu, and disabled her chameleonware, as did he.

She and Feng were the bait.

She saw Feng pull off his hood, stand perfectly still for a moment. Then he reached back and pulled his hood back on, chameleonware still disabled, his form still barely visible.

Then with a deep bass grind of stone against stone, the massive, meters-thick door started opening, light spilling into darkness.

And she was diving forward into that light, and into the sound of gunfire.

Kade readied himself at the bottom. It all came down to this.

He left his chameleonware active, but peeled back his hood to free himself from the Faraday lining of the thing. Then he closed his eyes, and he and Feng were linking up, conjoining, their minds forming two poles of a compound antenna, manipulating a wave on a long, long wavelength, as long as the distance between them, sending a slow, deep signal, searching through the cold rock for the receiver on the other side.

And then a key fit a lock.

Kade felt it. He reached back, pulled the chameleonware hood back over his face, settled it in place. A vertical crack of light, twenty feet tall at least, split the wall of the elevator shaft. It widened, widened.

Then he saw Feng and Sam roll through it, moving in opposite directions, and gunfire burst out, someone inside, firing out, full auto, shooting at them.

He moved forward, slowly, careful on the rocks, limping on his damaged knee.

Gunfire kept emerging in staccato bursts. He heard thuds, grunts. He couldn’t see inside.

He made it down the rubble, his knee aching. He moved quietly, slowly, was just crossing through the tunnel created by the meters-thick door when he caught a glimpse of the battle, bodies moving, muzzle fire.

Something rocked his head, slammed it hard into the stone door like a blow from a hammer.

It set his world to spinning.

It plunged his visor and its feed into black.

Sam dove forward. Dynamic entry. Gunfire exploded as she threw herself into a roll in the widening space between the doors. Her visor threw up attack vectors, arrows identifying the sources of the fire.

Three arrows. Three sources of gunfire.

She came up out of the roll, spinning to change the course of her path, arms out, assault rifle in her right hand. More gunfire erupted, ripping through the space her trajectory would have put her in.

Her eyes took in the scene as she spun. The giant glass walls. The quantum data-center behind them. The control panels. The little girl in the dress, back to them, at one of those panels. The middle-aged Chinese man, tapping away next to her.

The Confucian Fist in the plain fatigues flying through the air, between Sam and the quantum cluster, an angle she couldn’t fire on, his rifle coming around towards her new position.

Sam pulled her arms in and across her body to accelerate the spin, ducked her head down to turn her motion into a half-flip, knowing it was too late, knowing his bullets were about to punch through her.

Kade’s visor cut to black.

He stumbled, disoriented, reeling from the blow to his head, expecting another.

No second blow came.

He reached up, pulled the hood off his head, looking, searching.

Feng and Sam were fighting for their lives. For everyone’s lives.

There. There was Ling. And Chen. At the consoles of the quantum cluster.

Still going through its boot sequence. Not yet complete!

The fiber optic cable was behind him. The network access point waiting for him to activate it. But he might not need it. He might not. Not yet.

Ling was turning towards him. He could see a malevolent intelligence behind her eyes that wasn’t her own. That wasn’t the eight year-old girl he’d gotten to know.

He reached Inside, and the origami tools Su-Yong had given him unfolded again, expanding to thousands of times their size, fractally decompressing, becoming orders of magnitude more complex.

He reached out towards Ling’s mind, bombarded it with viral fragments, millions of them, mutating in real time.

All a feint.

The Avatar used Ling’s face to smile at the boy. She was ready for him this time. He came at her with viruses. Again? Silly child.

She fired phages into the shared spectrum, evolved things, tailored for the viral attack she’d seen him use already, that she’d first seen the hostile posthuman use in Bangalore. The phages were simple things, tiny compared even to the viruses. She unleashed billions of them. They swarmed the viral code, attacking weaknesses Darwinian methods had found in the minutes since their last encounter, shredding the viruses to bits, decimating them.

Only a few radical mutants of the virus survived the phage barrage, reached the outer layers of her mind.

Her firewalls blocked them, categorized their mutations, fed them to her digital immune system for new rounds of phage evolution.

She counter-attacked at the most basic hardware level of the nanites, using protocols her higher self had emplaced there when she designed them. She ripped into parts of the boy’s brain through those low level hardware controls, made the nanite nodes her own, as they always had been, seized control of the boy’s cortex, of his brain stem, of his mind, of his life.

The human screamed.

Control channels opened, handed off nanite circuits from within the human brain to hers.

She accepted.

End his life now? the Avatar debated. Or keep him around as a useful pet?

Circuits from the boy’s mind opened. Data returned. Systems inside her own mind went haywire.

With horror she realized she’d been played.

Dummy circuits. Trojan horse attacks. They dumped more viral assault weapons, fresh ones, laden with exploits she’d never seen, directly into protected memory space deep within her mind.

The new viral attacks took root in microseconds.

She screamed.

No choice.

The Avatar invoked emergency procedures, cauterized whole segments of her mind. She cut billions of nanites out of her network, flash-zeroed their data, forgot and lost whole swaths of herself.

The firewalls over the rest of her snapped into new shapes, adapting, learning from these new tricks, reforming themselves to resist these exploits. Darwinian immunity engines kicked into high gear, evolving new generations of phages to kill these new viruses.

Behind her, she felt the boot sequence of her greater self draw near to its conclusion.

Seconds. That’s all she needed. Just seconds.

Kade pushed forward, panting with exertion, with the epic draw of the Nexus nodes on his brain’s blood flow, on its nutrients. He was burning up. A fever inside his skull. Wattage from the spillover of the transmission power of the Nexus nodes was physically warming his cranium to dangerous levels. Red emergency messages were flashing on Nexus control panels in his mind. He couldn’t keep this up too long. His brain would fry.

He had to. No choice.

It was injured. It was constrained. But it was a caged beast now, smaller, with a more limited surface to defend, and learning fast.

He fired another flurry of viruses into the shared bandwidth between them, millions of them, the newest ones used in the Trojan attack, ones she hadn’t seen until less than a second ago.