Ramez Naam - Apex

Going to be OK.

We’re going to be OK.

Deep breath.

The water was more than peace.

It had been… what?

Love?

Compassion.

That’s what.

He summoned it from that memory, let it wash out of him now.

White compassion.

White like snow.

White like fluffy clouds.

Soft white.

Soothing white. Cotton ball white.

Brushing the mind. Comforting. Understanding. Soaking up the confusion.

Turning it to peace.

The music was still playing from the app in his mind.

Bubble Tea .

Nova Bliss .

Cloud Giant .

Apoptosis .

Lovely downtempo track after lovely downtempo track.

The tracks brought back memories. Memories of other parties, other events. Memories of one party in particular. One eventful party, where he’d played Apoptosis by Buddha Fugue.

Ilya loved that song.

The relentless chaotic pressure of madness subsided. He felt threads of joy, threads of beauty, of people experiencing how gorgeous Nexus could be, how amazing the calibration phase hallucinations could be, the glory of self-discovery.

He picked the threads up, grabbed them, rebroadcast them out, amplified through the high-gain antenna he wore.

NJ, he realized. I’m acting like an NJ. A Nexus Jockey, weaving together thoughts.

He felt minds hear that thought. Felt minds touch his, felt minds realize that he wasn’t wearing a mask, felt minds realize who he was.

He took a deep breath and pushed on. He was doing what had to be done. If this was the last thing he did as a free man, so be it.

They’d gone past some tipping point without him noticing, he saw now. The people around him were coming up, many struggling still, fighting or crying or raging, but more easing into it or finding wonder, many confused, but at least as many of them understanding, now. More of them realizing they were still alive, they hadn’t been chemically attacked, hadn’t been biologically attacked, not really.

They’d been drugged.

They’d been enhanced.

They’d been connected to one another.

Whether they liked it or not.

He could feel some of them roaming his mind. He let them see who he was, what he knew about Nexus, about how to center themselves, how to have a positive experience. He pushed aside any thoughts that might lead to anyone who’d helped him.

He could feel more of them connecting to each other now. He could feel emotions and ideas and memories and abstractions flitting from person to person, feel them intermeshing, chaotically, out of anyone’s control, unpredictably, tripping hard on each other, looking deep into each other, or shying away, fleeing from showing themselves, or fleeing from seeing each other.

People stumbled to their feet as he watched. They were moving around, now, self-organizing, finding each other, their colleagues, their political allies, finding the friends they wanted to connect with, sobbing together, or talking, connecting, planning.

They were helping each other, too. The ones who were coping were reaching out to the ones who were still having a bad time, soothing them.

Stan Kim reappeared, plopped down on the ground next to Rangan, tripping, smiling.

And Rangan understood now why the man had been touching so many of his colleagues. Ballsy, when they’d all been tripping so hard. Rangan shook his head.

Rangan could feel insanely diverse calibration trips all around him. Oceans and forests. Fantasy lands. Choose Your Own Adventure stories. Childhood replays. Body hallucinations. Abstractions. Death and rebirth experiences. A woman in a power suit just a few steps from him, with her back to the wall, whose face he was sure he’d seen before, had gone to a super-vividly realized heaven, had met her own personal God. She still had her eyes closed, was still holding on to that memory of towering Archangels with their flaming swords and the Lord on his throne too bright to see and the glowing cubic city of New Jerusalem that she’d been carried up to.

Heaven seemed pretty damn cool, Rangan had to admit.

There were dozens of paramedics down here now, going from person to person, checking pulse and heart rate, administering tests. Rangan saw men and women in suits point at him. He saw the paramedics give out pills more than once to people who were highly agitated.

Sedatives.

There were dozens of Capitol Police down here now too. Rangan let his eyes drift over them. How long before they hauled him away? Not long, he figured.

A man in a suit lumbered down the hallway, stumbling through people, a tall man, in his fifties, maybe, a familiar face, he came straight up to Rangan and Rangan shied back.

Stan Kim came to his feet beside Rangan, a little unsteady.

“Help me!” the new man said, his eyes wild, his face leaning in way too close to Rangan’s. “I can’t have this in my head. Get it out of me!”

Rangan held up his hands, let the music fade.

“OK,” he said. “You can purge it. I’ll show you how.”

Rangan opened his thoughts, reached out to the man, showed him how to bring up a command prompt inside Nexus OS, felt the man get it, felt the command prompt come up.

Now, [nexus purge],Rangan sent.

Then he saw the message flash across the man’s mind.

ACCESS DENIED.

Oh shit.

This wasn’t the same version as the standard Nexus. This wasn’t the same as the version that had gone out to millions of people with the chemreactor hack. Those were normal. Those could be purged.

But the one they’d dosed the Capitol with…

The man’s eyes went wild. His hands went up and he lunged forward, grabbing Rangan around the throat, slamming him against the wall.

Rangan gurgled in surprise. He felt shock rise up from minds all around.

“Foster!” Stan Kim yelled.

“He’s stuck this in our brains!” the man strangling Rangan yelled. “We can’t get it out!”

Then the woman Rangan had seen, the one who’d gone to heaven, was on her feet, next to him.

Her hand smacked the man strangling Rangan across the face, hard.

And suddenly Rangan was free, gasping, hands rising to his throat.

The familiar-looking woman stared at the man who’d been strangling Rangan, saying nothing. And Rangan could feel in her mind who she was now.

Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security.

Christ.

“This man is a terrorist!” Foster said.

“You’re confused, Senator Foster,” Engels said. “It’s probably the drugs.”

She turned to Rangan. “It’s time you left.”

129

Final Sacrifice

Tuesday 2041.01.21

Feng struggled back to his feet, panting. He could feel the minds everywhere, the connection, like the things he’d felt with the monks, the things he’d felt on the dance floor, but so much bigger.

Su-Yong was sane again. Or closer.

Ling. Ling was crumpled, but breathing.

Kade. Oh no, Kade.

Then Su-Yong spoke.

“Nuclear attack,” her loudspeakers said. “Shanghai is about to be vaporized.”

He felt it come into his mind, the knowledge of what was coming, the two ICBMs, minutes away from their launch deadlines, cut off entirely from the net.

Ten million tons of TNT equivalent.

Five hundred Hiroshimas.

Feng saw the first explosion through Su-Yong’s mind.

The first fireball would rip out of the night sky, blazing from nothing to a temperature of more than fifty million degrees Celsius.

In the first hundredth of a second it would expand to more than two kilometers across, instantly vaporizing cars, trees, people, buildings.