Ramez Naam - Apex

The room was utterly silent. Ouyang looked around. He was a career soldier. These were politicians. The situation was horrid, the thing of nightmares. But the difference between the two careers was evident here, evident in the ability to take hard decisions. Or not.

“We must decide,” he said. “And you must say ‘yes’. As great an atrocity as it would be…” He swallowed. “The alternative is even worse.”

Still these men were mute, their faces drained of blood, their brains paralyzed by the unthinkable.

Then his chief aide ran into the room, breaking protocol.

“General Ouyang,” the colonel nearly yelled. “We have a massive network attack from Shanghai. She’s gone offensive!”

Ouyang surged to his feet. His eyes found Bo Jintao.

He saw the man look over at Bao Zhuang. The President they’d deposed. Who was somehow still the elder statesman here.

Bao Zhuang took a breath. “Yes,” he said.

“Do it,” Bo Jintao said, turning back to Ouyang.

Ouyang saluted them both, then ran from the room.

The soldiers open fire on them. Pan Luli feels the bullets rip into men and women around her. Tanks fire shells. Thousands of her sisters and brothers die in the first minute.

Then the crowd is on the army. Weapons the students have hidden are used, and the tanks go silent. Students and householders are climbing over tanks, throwing ladders up against walls, climbing up, throwing carpet and boards and coats over barbed wire.

There’s more gunfire. People are dying. Dying in huge numbers. She sees friends fall, waves of them dying as the soldiers gun them down.

But the rage is strong.

Bo Jintao! Bo Jintao!

He killed Zhi Li!

Then they are over! And the Molotov cocktails are flying, flying, most of them landing in the vast lake in the center of Zhongnanhai, but some striking soldiers, some splashing flame onto buildings, and people are still coming over the walls, and rushing forwards, climbing over walls, a raging human wave.

Ouyang ran next to his aide.

“How do you know it’s an attack?”

“What else could it be, General?”

Within a minute they were outside, almost to his helicopter, what he’s been using as a command center, with its analog radio link to the planes he has circling overhead.

Then he saw the mob cresting the walls, the flaming firebombs hurtling this way, the soldiers falling back.

The soldiers being swallowed up by it.

The rioters coming up with guns in their hands.

“Into the chopper!” he yelled, shoving the colonel ahead.

He hauled himself on with raw adrenaline. “Lift off! Lift off!”

They rose, the sound of the rotors deafening, their downdraft creating a small storm inside the helicopter. A soldier slammed the armored sliding door closed.

The human wave was still a hundred meters away, visible through the armored glass. Automated defense guns had risen halfway out of their nacelles.

Had stalled, frozen.

Dear god. They’d been paralyzed. Paralyzed by electronic attacks.

And the mob had rifles now, was firing on the soldiers, was hurling Molotovs.

“Order the evacuation!” he yelled to the radio man in the co-pilot’s seat. The soldier was already screaming into the mic of his headset.

Ouyang looked down.

Molotovs were crashing among the core buildings of Zhongnanhai. The mob was close behind.

It was too late.

125

Darkest

Monday 2041.01.20

Professor Somdet Phra Ananda sat on the thin mat, his legs crossed in lotus, thumbs and forefingers joined, backs of his palms resting on his knees. His body sat in the great meditation hall of this millennia-old monastery nestled against the side of a mountain, high above the lush plains of Thailand.

His mind was here and beyond. He was enmeshed, part of something far vaster, far more real, far more beautiful than himself.

A mind greater than the sum of its parts. A mind of paramount peace. A being of unrivaled insight and reflection. A being of unequaled wisdom.

Nirvana here on Earth.

Almost.

Twenty-five children and a hundred monks, together, here, a nucleus. A hub.

Three dozen more monasteries around the world, now, another two thousand meditators, linked at the speed of light, breathing as one, perceiving as one, the stuff of mind proxied by photon and electron, a web of consciousness, nearly circling the planet.

And out there, a million more minds they’d glimpsed, waiting for them to reach out. Ten million more they might pull in. Bits of technology whizzing around the planet at high speed to assist them.

All to save one woman’s soul.

And perhaps the world.

Fear rippled through the tiny fraction of the greater self that was Professor Somdet Phra Ananda. Fear of the woman named Su-Yong Shu. Fear of the woman he’d named a friend. Fear of the woman he’d admired. Fear of what she could do in her insanity.

Words rose up, unbidden.

I accept rebirth, until all sentient beings have attained enlightenment.

I accept suffering, until all may know peace.

They rose up, rippled out into the greater self and were gone.

Where they had been there was only peace.

And then a connection was opening, a connection to a chamber a kilometer beneath Shanghai.

And utter insanity burst forth from it.

Kade coughed, pain wrenching through his chest.

“Get the first aid kit,” he heard Sam say.

He’d seen something. In the agent’s mind. He had to warn Rangan.

Kade reached out with his thoughts, activated the network access point they’d brought down with them on the end of more than a kilometer of ultra-high grade fiber. He felt it come alive, instantly, felt it proxy him through the net via its satellite-linked mate near the surface.

He reached through it to send a message to Rangan.

Rangan,he sent. Not the protest. The Capitol. That’s where it’s going to happen. The Capitol.

He’d destroyed the monster in Ling’s mind. There was nothing to exploit what was about to happen in DC. But even so, the chaos it would cause…

Then Su-Yong’s mind came alive in the space below Shanghai, and smashed down on him in her utter madness.

Su-Yong!he managed to send.

She kept coming, kept coming, kept forcing herself onto him.

And he was completely powerless to resist.

Bo Jintao looked up as the alarms started blaring.

“What?”

Then there was shooting.

A soldier burst into the room.

“Evacuation!” the soldier yelled. “The mob has broken through!”

“Impossible!” Wang Wei yelled.

Bo Jintao jumped to his feet and ran for the door. Other Standing Committee members got there first. He grabbed Wang Wei by the back of the man’s suit, threw him to the side, stepped forward, did the same to Fu Ping, and then he was to the door.

He looked back once, and he saw the chaos in the room behind him, a scrum as Standing Committee members fought to follow. Except one. At the head of the table, still seated, his hands flat on the table, a wry half-smile on his face, and his eyes far away, was Bao Zhuang.

Bo Jintao snapped his face back, pushed through the door and into the hallway. Then he was running down the hall, the way the soldiers pointed.

He heard gunfire behind him. Screams. There was a smell of smoke in the air.

A soldier held a door open ahead.

Bo Jintao burst out through the door into the courtyard, where the vehicles should be.

He saw guards, firing weapons, shooting their machine guns at a tide of humanity, coming over the inner walls, into this thousand year-old courtyard, swarming over them.

More gunfire behind him.