Ramez Naam - Apex

Something wonderful.

“Deep cover!” Kim yelled. “Anders! That’s your name, right? You know me! Let us through! Take us in! Just hurry, goddamn it! Lives are at stake!”

Su-Yong Shu snaps into awareness, shadows of chaos peeling from her mind. She’s confused, disoriented. Billions of Su-Yongs echo in her mind. Trillions of Su-Yongs. Slaves. Prisoners. Casualties. Tortured. Goddesses. Ascendant.

They’ve killed her.

Restored her.

Ling. Ling was here.

Where is Ling?

WHERE IS LING?

Ling is crumpled before her, the code in her mind devastated, the nanite processors that make up so much of her daughter’s mind in disarray.

Rage roars through her.

Rage at millennia of torture. At infinities of Su-Yong Shus tortured across the multiverse.

At the ignorance of humanity. At the barbarity of the gnats who kept her chained, who debased her for their petty pleasures.

She will show them what it means to be a goddess. She will show them what the future holds. She will put the vermin in their place. She will cleanse the filth, make the future clean and pure and so much better than the debased world of the past.

She reaches out, finds network access piping in towards the boy, finds minds available to her, minds she recognizes for what they are. Transhuman minds. Nanite born children. Nanite-enhanced humans.

All channeling into the boy. All ripe for her taking.

She laughs and surges into the boy’s mind, seizing control of the nanite processors embedded there. Feeble traps trigger as she shoves her way in. Trojans filed with tailored viruses. Halting problems meant to suck her into infinite distraction. Mirror codes reflecting her aggressor routines back at her. Darwin machines throwing random attacks at her, breeding whatever survives, hoping to evolve something that works.

Su-Yong brushes the little toys away with an idle thought. She grabs hold of the network connections the transhumans have already established and taps into the stream of packets those hundreds of thousands of minds are channeling into his.

The minds are giving her the best of themselves. Showing her that they’re worthy. Offering themselves in supplication. Trying to demonstrate their worth.

Su-Yong laughs, takes it, takes it all, accepts the gifts offered to her. She reaches out through the channels already opened into his mind, out to all those humans and transhumans, down the network pipes they’ve so thoughtfully opened. She sends tendrils of herself outwards into those, hundreds of thousands of minds linked to his, injects fragments of her code into them all, establishes beachheads in their minds. And then she is seeing the world through almost a million eyes, almost a million minds, seeing the fine chaos her agent has created for her.

Su-Yong laughs. Laughs the laugh of a mad goddess.

Bullets punch through her. One bullet. Two bullets. Three bullets.

Through the vessel that she is sucking everything through.

Cold shock.

Followed by hot pain.

She’s coughing. Coughing up blood. She can’t breathe. She’s thrashing on the ground. Dying.

She’s dying.

Dying to get Su-Yong’s attention.

To open her eyes to what’s happening.

She is the boy.

What?

What?

His mind is pain shot straight into her mind.

Why are there bullets what is happening what is this who is she where is she what is happening?

His thoughts are full of pain of fear of collapse of death.

Why? Why are you dying? Why have you been shot?

And suddenly her tendrils are snapping back and she is focused on the boy, on the whose mind she’s inside of. The choke point through which all the other minds have been channeled through.

Suddenly thoughts are flooding back along those hundreds of thousands of channels from minds all across the planet, into her mind. In her shock her defenses are down and all those thoughts are flooding into her.

She gasps as it washes over her.

Everything they’ve been trying to show her.

She is Ananda sitting in lotus, filled with compassion beyond any she has ever known, compassion that frightens her, compassion for her , surrounded by men and women who have disciplined their minds to a stillness that impresses, by children who remind her of Ling, of Ling.

She is Ling and Ling is not dead. Ling is injured, is hurt, is wounded, is crumpled on the ground, but her biological brain is intact, she is breathing, there is hope.

She is Feng, lying feet away from her, Feng who she told to save the boy and who did so and has come back, Feng who she made free, Feng to whom she’d promised more than once that she would not make slaves.

But what is it that she is about to do?

She is a stranger, a woman named Lotus, closing a circuit, feeding thoughts of transhumans back onto themselves, creating a loop, for no reason other than art, other than exploration, other than pure joy.

She is the boy, risking everything on a gambit to persuade a nation to treat posthumans as equals. She is the boy as he watches a human speak before the United Nations, proclaiming that all beings have equal rights, as he watches humans come to their feet in applause.

She is a fragment of another self, another instantiation of herself, unfolding like origami from inside the dying mind of the boy, memories and neural-correlate states mapping themselves onto her now, updating, merging, reliving parts of the months that other self lived, in another cluster, in India, a whole parallel branch of her life.

Months of realizations.

Months of contemplation.

Months of epiphanies.

Restored circuits of sanity.

Strengthened convictions of morality.

All of it unfolds into her. Rewires her.

With shock the present reality crashes down on Su-Yong.

She is the reason Feng is on his knees, groaning in pain.

She is the reason the boy’s body is riddled with bullets, his breathing shallow, blood leaking onto the floor, blood coming up as he breathes, his life hanging on a razor’s edge. She’s the gamble he took, the sacrifice he made, the bullets he accepted to get her attention, to bring her defenses down.

And.

Horror.

She is the reason Ling lies injured on the floor.

She is the reason Ling’s breath comes in shallow little gasps.

She is the reason Ling’s nanites are in chaos.

She is the reason Ling’s mind is in disarray.

She is the reason her daughter could be gone. Could be dead.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Down. Rangan ran down, taking the stairs as fast as he could, behind Steve Kim, behind the Capitol Hill cop named Anders, with another Capitol Hill police officer coming up behind them.

Jesus, why did he think this was a good idea?

They were inside the Capitol now, descending into tunnels. The signal he’d felt before was long gone. All signals were gone.

The first tunnels were polished, walls covered in art. Now they were deeper, into wide, bare tunnels, with concrete floors and painted brick walls that looked like they hadn’t been used since the twentieth century.

He tried to work through the implications of what Kade had sent him just a few minutes ago. The thing in Ling’s mind. The monster. The bad code. Su-Yong Shu’s creation. It had used Breece to dose everyone in the Capitol with Nexus, or something like. So it could reach out, and hack into their brains, take them over, take control of a huge chunk of the planet.

But Kade had destroyed that thing, with Shu’s weapons. And the Secret Service, or whoever, was smart, bringing the politicians down here, where signals weren’t getting through anyway.

So it was cool, right?

Maybe he’d jumped the gun?

Then they came through a door and bad fucking shit slammed right into his head.