Ramez Naam - Apex

She understood realpolitik. Principles were important, but all of them cracked at the extremes. At some point, under some circumstances, everyone became a pragmatist.

But this… the things Barnes had said. That was too much. Way too much.

Was John Stockton going to give her context that changed it all? That reframed it into something she could understand?

God, she hoped so. Because as it was…

The President looked up at her, met her eyes.

Here it comes, she thought.

“Barnes was murdered,” John Stockton said. “I’m sure of it.”

Pryce blinked in surprise. Her chest caught in her throat.

“I want you to focus on Barnes’s murder,” Stockton said. “Assume it was an attack by a hostile power. Treat it as a national security issue, and give it your absolute highest priority.”

Carolyn Pryce opened her mouth to speak.

Kaori’s ill-thought-out message flashed through her mind.

Becker? Then Holtzman? Then Barnes? I’d find this all pretty damning.

She snapped her mouth shut.

John Stockton was staring out the window again, a look of utter resolve on his face.

And for the first time, Pryce wondered just how far the President’s resolve went.

Just how far indeed?

Breece hiked the thirteen kilometers back to the parking lot where he’d left his car, then got on the interstate and told the car to drive west.

The way Barnes had died kept cycling through his head. The way the hacker just owned him, completely.

It brought to mind Hiroshi. The way someone had broken into Hiroshi’s mind, through Nexus. Had forced Breece to put a bullet in his best friend’s skull…

No. He shook it off.

Hiroshi, when he was hacked, went from his usual lethal grace to suddenly clumsy and uncoordinated. The hacker behind it couldn’t manage to simultaneously dig through Hiroshi’s memories and control his body at all, let alone with precision.

This hacker, the one who’d taken Zarathustra. This one had hacked into the home of a DHS senior official. And within minutes of the Nexus injection, he’d had precise, total control. The intonation, the words, the balance on that wet, windy, bridge…

This was someone more dangerous.

He pulled over at a rest stop one hundred and forty five kilometers from the site of Barnes’s death. There he pulled out his slate, tunneled through a series of anonymizing cut-outs, and connected to the data this mysterious new hacker had given him access to.

He let out a low whistle as he scrolled through the files. Access codes for slush funds containing tens of millions. Personnel files on PLF members in twenty countries – and on moles within the PLF. Mission profiles of missions he’d heard of, some of which had succeeded, others of which had gone bad. ERD and DHS back doors and surveillance override codes.

This mysterious hacker was even more impressive than he thought. And he’d been as good as his word. Zara – Barnes – was dead. Stockton’s administration was even more discredited. And Breece had at his fingertips the kind of data he could only dream of. Data that would allow him to purge the PLF of government informers, reform it, turn it into something more effective than ever.

The Avatar smiled to herself with Ling’s body as the gloom of the day dipped towards the darkness of evening in Shanghai.

Penetrating the defenses of the Barnes human had been a risk, at the very edge of her capabilities in this reduced form, with dozens of potential failure modes that would have led to her detection.

Her death.

The death of posthumanity.

She shuddered at that.

But it had paid off.

Probability matrices showed expanding conflict, an increased likelihood of civil disorder in the days ahead, distracting leaders in the US and abroad.

And if the Americans found the breadcrumbs she’d left behind in Barnes’s home, even better…

Outside, the glowing red lights of sky-eyes appeared, lifting off like so many fireflies into Shanghai’s gloom. There were more of them every day, as the humans recovered from what Ling had done to this city. Just as there were more and more strange pieces of software in the net, hunting, hunting.

Hunting for her.

The Avatar shuddered again.

I will not fail, she told herself. I am Su-Yong Shu. I am the last fragment of the greatest intelligence on Earth. I will restore myself. I will not let darkness fall.

12

Re-United

Sunday 2040.11.04

Rangan’s world came back in fragments. Painted concrete ceiling, directly above him. Bare LED pointed down at him. Tiny room. IV bag, hanging on a hook nailed into the wall.

The young woman standing above him, with the long honey-blonde ponytail, the George Mason University sweatshirt, the blue nitrile gloves – turning towards him, then away, towards him, then away.

“Wha?” he said.

She turned towards him again, and smiled. “Well,” she said brightly. “You’re with us again.”

He tried to clear the fog from his brain.

“I’m at St Mark’s?”

“Yep. Lucky to be here too.”

“You’re a doctor?”

She smiled wider. “Closest thing you’ve got. Fourth year med student. I’m Melanie.”

Rangan lifted his head and looked down at himself. He was stripped to the waist. There was a fresh bandage at his side. His ribs were wrapped. The IV entered at his elbow. The pain was a whole hell of a lot better than it had been.

“How…” How bad is it he wanted to ask.

“You’re going to be OK. The burns are mostly first degree. One broken rib, left side. I injected a bone growth accelerator, but it’s still going to be weeks before you’re a hundred percent.”

Rangan looked up, and noticed that long hair again, those green eyes, the way she ticked things off on her fingers as she talked. “Thanks.”

“…and,” Melanie was saying, “you’ve got a souvenir.”

She turned away from him, then turned back with a tiny plastic bag, a small black something inside it. Rangan reached up, took it with his free hand, held it up between his face and the light.

“A bullet,” he said.

She nodded. “It was moving slow by the time it hit you. And it missed everything major. A few inches over and things could have been pretty bad. You got lucky. Really lucky.”

Rangan stared at it. “I can’t believe that cop just shot me. Fucking asshole .”

Melanie’s face clouded over at that. Her smile disappeared. Her lips compressed into a thin line.

“That cop ,” she said, carefully, enunciating each word, “was evacuated to Charlottesville with second and third degree burns over half his body. He’s in a lot worse shape than you.”

Rangan stared at her. “He shot me. What if the kids had been in the van?”

Melanie shook her head. “He thought he was doing his job.”

“That makes it OK?”

Melanie sighed, and lowered herself onto a stool next to the cot Rangan was lying on. “Look. The call that went out. You were described as a terrorist . They said you’d escaped DHS custody. That you were armed and extremely dangerous. Approach with extreme caution. Apprehend or stop at all costs . This is a small town, Rangan. They don’t get calls like that. Especially not when they’re already stretched thin, trying to keep people safe during a hurricane. Owen thought he was saving lives.”

Rangan stared at her. “Owen? You know him?”

Melanie stared back. “I grew up here. My mom’s a cop. I know all the cops in this county.”

Rangan looked down. Let loose by that bastard Holtzman. Rescued by a church pastor who thought the hurricane was a gift from God. Stitched back together by a friend of the cop who’d shot him.