Ramez Naam - Apex

They saw her turn, saw her look at them, and she saw something coil up inside them.

“The Capitol!” she yelled across the room. “The President! Something’s about to happen!”

She saw fingers go to ear buds, lips start moving as they hit the radio to their command, the fastest way to reach the President’s detail.

Then she was turning, looking for the screen showing the inauguration. There. There was John Stockton, at the bottom of the House Chamber, talking, passion on his face.

A bogus threat, Pryce thought. Just a bogus threat. Come on. Come on.

John Stockton took the podium to address the assembled audience.

To address America.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he started. “Abraham Lincoln said those words. They’re as true now as they were then.”

His eyes searched the crowd. Some Democrats had chosen not to be here today. He had to accept that. He had to reach out to the whole country, regardless.

“A nation divided is a weakened nation. In America, we’ve been divided. Our trust has been undermined, dividing us.”

He lingered on those members of the opposing party who had come, today, rather than boycott his inauguration. He met their eyes as he spoke.

“This isn’t an accident. We’ve been attacked. Our trust has been intentionally weakened. It’s been undermined by those who want to divide us and conquer us. That attack has been successful. And if we remain so divided as we are now,” Stockton shook his head. “We cannot stand.”

He turned his head again, scanning right to left, taking in everyone he could. “Let me say what all of us should be willing to say. I trust the intentions of every American, until and unless they prove differently. I trust that we all want a better life for ourselves, our neighbors, our children.”

He raised a hand, took in the crowd gathered here. “I trust that every member of Congress wants what’s best for this nation as a whole. We may differ on what best means . We may differ on how to get there .” He paused. “But I trust that you come to this place with the most sincere convictions, as I do.

“In the first hundred days of my next administration, I’m going to do everything in my power to increase our mutual trust. I’m going to do everything in my power to explain to you, America, the roots of my convictions. I’m going to do that by being more transparent with you than ever before. We’ve faced grave threats over the last decade and more. Many of them Americans and the world don’t know about, or don’t know the full details of. We’re going to share those details.”

Stockton scanned again, looking, making eye contact with the men and women here, letting the cameras fend for themselves. “When you see those details, when you see that evidence, when you see the things we faced down, and beat, sometimes by the skin of our teeth, then I think you’ll reach many of the conclusions that I reached. You’ll share many of the convictions that I have. And you’ll see that the hard decisions that we’ve made, and that we have to continue to make, are made with the best of intentions for this nation, for our neighbors, for our loved ones…”

His eyes found Cindy in the front row.

“For our children.”

And there was Julie next to Cindy, beaming up at him.

“For our grandchildren,” he said, and Liam was looking up at him, standing up in Julie’s lap, his eyes wide open, his mouth hanging open.

Stockton smiled, and looked back up at the crowd.

“And for all the generations to come!”

He took a breath. Time to move on to jobs and taxes.

In a secure room beneath the warren of tunnels that connected the buildings of Capitol Hill, behind a door that proclaimed FIRE PROTECTION EQUIPMENT – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, a piece of code came alive.

Dozens of electronic sensors suddenly lit up with digital inputs of heat and smoke.

There was a fire.

It must be suppressed.

Fire suppression systems went live.

Electronically-controlled solenoids moved. Valves turned.

Banks of man-tall, high-pressure tanks released their contents into specially designed pipes. Electronic valve control routed the liquid, rapidly expanding into gas, to fire suppression nozzles at the location of the fire.

The United States Capitol Building, House Chamber.

Time to move on to jobs and taxes, John Stockton thought.

Then a storm hit. A hurricane blasted him in the face, full of stinging rain. There was a roaring in his ears, a high pitched whistle somewhere above it. The air went cloudy, roiled by incredible turbulence. He’d closed his eyes reflexively, without even knowing it, flinching back from whatever was happening. Those eyes were burning now. There was a taste of metal in his mouth. More burning in his lungs.

Alarms were going off. Fire alarms.

“MR PRESIDENT!” Someone had his arm. Secret Service. “THIS WAY!”

“My family!” he yelled.

“WE’VE GOT THEM!”

“Dad!” It was Julie’s voice. He tried to open his eyes but he couldn’t see. He reached out and found his daughter, grabbed her hand. He heard crying. Liam’s cries.

“WE’VE GOT TO RUN!” the Secret Service man said.

Stockton held on to his daughter and ran.

“Incident at the Capitol! Fire detected!”

“Christ,” the Secretary of Defense said.

Pryce looked over at the screen, her heart pounding. She couldn’t see anything, just distortion, just clouds of moving air.

“That’s the fire suppression gas,” an analyst said from one of the scores of consoles, tension in her voice. “It should clear shortly.”

“Massive network event in China!” NSA yelled. “We have something off-the-scales going on. Origin Shanghai. Network requests saturating all the pipes in and out. Exabyte bombardment of our systems. NAES firewall is crumbling.”

“That’s it,” Secretary Stevens said. “This is a Chinese attack. Set DEFCON 2. Prepare to take out those missile launchers.”

“Wait!” Pryce said. “We don’t know that! That could have been PLF!” She held her phone up towards them.

“Gas is clearing, sirs,” a voice said.

Pryce looked at the screen, prepared to see fire, dead men and women, horror like that day in DC…

She saw a mob, alive, on their feet, pressing for the too few exits.

No fire.

No bodies.

What the hell?

She turned her phone back to her, and typed a message out frantically.

[What the hell was that?]

124

Ultimate Recourse

Monday 2041.01.20

Zhi Li screamed as the explosion hurled her through the air. Then she was down. Then she looked over and saw Yuguo.

She screamed again, louder.

“Lu Song!” she yelled. She reached out for his mind. “Lu Song!”

“Zhi!” he yelled.

Yuguo was screaming now, screaming with his lungs, with his mind.

“Help me, Lu Song!” Zhi yelled. “We have to get him inside!”

She pushed up to her feet, grabbed one arm. Lu Song was there, and he grabbed the other, and they started dragging, dragging Yuguo towards the Computer Science Building.

What was left of him.

Yuguo’s legs were gone below the knees.

Yuguo screamed, and she pulled faster. There were explosions up above, aircraft fighting aircraft. There were explosions down here. The sounds of machine gun fire. Of rockets or shells. She saw Confucian Fist moving, barely perceived blurs. She saw soldiers in armor – heavy looking, insectile armor – fighting back.

Not dying.

Aaah!

Then they were at the building.

They were inside. For all the good it did them.

“Yuguo!” someone screamed.