Ramez Naam - Apex

Oh, Jesus, Rangan thought.

We just have to get their attention, Angel had said.

Rangan turned back to Stan Kim. “You have a mic?”

Kim shook his head, warily, and pointed. “Just stand on the X.”

An X, made of tape, on the wood of the stage.

Rangan stepped onto it. He turned and faced the crowd. And then he could see the camera drones hovering out there, picking him up. He could see the cunningly hidden directional mics aimed to pick up his voice.

Rangan took a deep breath.

He reached out through the mesh. He could feel the firewalls active, feel the active countermeasures fighting. It was doing some good. They were restraining some of the violence.

But not enough. Not nearly enough.

Rangan lifted up his hands, and yelled, for the cameras, for the microphones, in his ridiculous Rangan Shankari mask.

“Listen to me!” he cried. “Someone’s messing with your heads!”

Holy frack, Axon,Angel sent. Is that you on the screens?

Chaos came through. He could tell she was in the thick of it.

He felt Angel’s attention. Tempest’s. Cheyenne was struggling, somewhere, with someone.

Across the mass of minds, he felt barely a flicker of change.

“There are people around you who aren’t angry!” Rangan yelled. “Tune into them!”

Nothing. Hardly any flicker, hardly any change. People barely noticed he was here.

“Thank you,” Stan Kim said from behind him. Rangan felt a hand land on his arm. “Let me try.”

Rangan moved to the side in a daze. Stan Kim stepped back onto the X, his hand outreached.

“Everyone!” the senator said. “This is not the way! You need to–”

A lit Molotov cocktail rose from the crowd hurled straight at them.

“Shit!” Rangan yelled. He grabbed Kim, threw them both to the floor of the stage.

The cocktail kept flying, shattered into flame on the next block of E street behind them.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Rangan said.

And then, before he could stop himself, he rose, and did what he knew he had to.

“My name,” he yelled, “is Rangan Shankari!”

He felt a flicker of something from the minds down there.

“I am DJ Axon! I helped invent Nexus 5.”

More attention. People were tuning in, looking.

Then Rangan reached up, and pulled the mask off his face, up onto the top of his head.

The crowd gasped. He felt it ripple from mind to mind, a stutter that paused the violence in all but the most intense locations.

“And someone is fucking with your heads!”

Carolyn Pryce’s phone buzzed again. The three short sharp buzzes of highest priority.

She looked down from the global calamity all around her, to the message.

[ERD_SECRETS: We’re PLF. The files we leaked are from Barnes’s personal data. That’s how I know. Events in China and the world are your proof. You must relay this upwards. China did not take offensive action against the US.]

She shook her head, and snapped out a new message.

[Not good enough. Give me something concrete!]

Breece narrowed his eyes at the screen.

Shankari.

He turned to the Nigerian. “Get a shooter in position.”

The Nigerian looked back at him for a moment. “There’s added risk,” he said. “We can let this go. We’ve distracted them. What does it matter?”

Breece slammed his palm onto the table. “It matters!” he yelled.

Then he closed his eyes, and continued, more softly. “Just do it, please.”

“You’re being hacked!” Rangan yelled. “That’s why you’re suddenly so angry! Tune in to the people who aren’t angry! Get close to them! They have an app for you! Install it, everyone!”

There was a commotion below. Rangan looked down, saw armed riot police crash through the wall of mesh-running volunteers at the bottom of the stairs, saw one run full-tilt at him, a truncheon raised.

“Away from the senator!” the cop yelled.

Oh shit, Rangan thought.

Then suddenly Stan Kim was in front of him, an arm outraised.

“This man’s with me, officers!”

“Senator!” one of them yelled. “We’ll get you out of here!”

“I’m staying here!” Kim yelled back. “We’ve got work to do.”

Rangan breathed again. In the corner of his mind’s eye, a counter was moving, it was scrolling, incrementing fast, the last digits changing in a blur.

They’d started the day with a little over fifty-three thousand people running mesh in this protest, out of six or seven hundred thousand people in total.

Now they were at one hundred and twenty thousand and still climbing.

Rangan tapped Stan Kim on the shoulder. Kim turned to look at him.

“You’re blocking my camera, Senator,” Rangan said with a smile.

Kim leaned in close to him. “Kid, you wanna see daylight after today?” he whispered. His eyes searched Rangan’s. “Put that mask back on.”

Then the senator stepped back, out of the line of the cameras, a smile playing at his lips, not even close to reaching his eyes.

Rangan swallowed hard, pulled the mask down over his face, suddenly aware of all the police. And also aware that a majority of those one hundred and twenty thousand… no, wait… one hundred and twenty-five thousand people were tuning in to him over the mesh.

He stood up straight, raised his arms, and told them with word and thought.

“We can do this!” he told them, hope and optimism beaming out. “There’s a tipping point ahead! Keep bringing more people in, and we can cancel out the attack.”

There was still so much hate out there. They were still a minority, growing fast but still there were four people not running mesh for every one person who was…

Then he felt another mind touch his. A mind he’d brushed in passing that day on the National Mall. The day everything went to shit.

He looked down and there was a bald man in orange robes climbing the stairs, threading his way between the imposing riot police, smiling slightly, his mind giving off tranquility.

This, this is what the crowd needed.

Rangan gestured and the monk came onto the stage without a word.

Rangan reached out and touched his mind to offer him mesh, found that the monk was already running it, and smiled.

“Listen to this man,” Rangan said into the cameras, into the minds of those following him. “He has what we need.”

And then he redirected those minds to the monk, and watched and felt as peace rippled out, as it flowed out of a hundred thousand minds, into all of those around them.

As peace flowed out of them like water, to meet the more numerous hot flames of anger.

Kate looked at the message on her terminal.

[Insider: Not good enough. Give me something concrete!]

Then she looked up at the wallscreen. At the chaos. At what Breece had done. At what he’d done to his own people.

He hadn’t listened at all.

“Damn you,” she whispered. “I loved you.”

Then she typed out the message.

[ERD_ SECRETS: The man who killed Barnes goes by the alias “Breece”. His real name is Andrew Marcum. He was behind DC, Chicago, and Houston. He’s in DC now. His current location and full bio follow.]

“Shooter’s in position,” the Nigerian said. “We’ll only get one shot before they triangulate.”

“Take it,” Breece replied.

Rangan watched the numbers climb.

Two hundred and sixty-three thousand. Two hundred and sixty-seven thousand. More than a third of the crowd running mesh, running firewalls cutting off the hate, broadcasting active countermeasures all around them!

They were doing it. Out there, he could see violence subsiding with his own eyes. They were approaching a tipping point.