Ramez Naam - Apex

“Well,” Feng said, waving his one working arm magnanimously around the small room, “I suppose I’ll stick around.” More guards chuckled as they escorted the man out.

His eyes took in every detail of their exit.

Kade better hurry up.

Old habits died hard.

15

Family Time

Sunday 2040.11.04

Sun Liu watched as the strangers paraded into his home in the Mentougou district of Beijing, his private sanctum.

I was Minister of Science and Technology, Sun Liu told himself. I had a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee. I was the leader of the progressives. I was the third most powerful man in China. I could have become Party Secretary and President. I could have been number one.

But that was yesterday.

The Shanghai Crash had changed everything. When a cyber attack unlike any they’d ever seen struck the city, cracking hardened systems, sending surveillance drones tumbling from the sky by the thousands, fusing power substations solid, stopping the flow of food and fresh water, jamming the pumps that kept Shanghai from flooding – well, that alone was nearly enough to trigger panic.

And when the evidence suggested a possible link to Su-Yong Shu – to the quantum digital mind whose creation and continued existence he had backed? That was enough to tip things over the edge. Enough to break the long standoff between his progressive faction and the conservatives. Enough to spook the military. Enough to persuade the generals that the risks of advanced technology were clear and present. Enough that they abandoned their political neutrality and tossed their support wholly behind the reactionaries, wholly behind their case that some progress ought to be curtailed in the name of safety.

And now he and his allies were being purged.

He pursed his lips.

They blamed Su-Yong Shu. Chen Pang’s insane dead wife.

He blamed Bo Jintao. The leader of the conservatives. The new Premier of China. Bo Jintao had brought these strangers to Sun Liu’s home tonight. The photographers. The ‘journalists’ who shoveled the propaganda Bo wanted them to.

For this humiliation.

“Sun Liu!” Bo Jintao proclaimed, walking into the lobby of Sun’s mansion, his arms spread wide, an old friend, come to visit.

“Premier Bo!” Sun Liu said, just as the script called for. The words tasted like ash in his mouth.

They embraced. Flashbulbs burst. Sun acted out the role, refused Bo’s requests to come back to civil service, said again and again how tired he was, how much he longed to spend time with his family. Video cameras wrote data to their cards.

Humiliation or prison. Prison for him, his wife, his children, his ailing mother.

What choice was it, really?

Later, after the photographers and videographers were gone, Sun Liu hoped that Bo Jintao would leave as well.

Instead, his rival spelled out Sun Liu’s sentence. “You’ll move to your vacation home on Hainan Island,” Bo Jintao said. “It’s all been arranged. You’ll be comfortable, but the world won’t be seeing much of you for some time.”

Sun Liu stared at the man, an empty chasm where his heart had been. “My family?” he asked.

“Your wife and mother will go with you,” Bo Jintao said. “Your children will stay in Beijing, with families of the highest quality.”

“Hostages.”

Bo waved a hand. “Guests.”

Sun Liu’s rage boiled over.

“You’re a monster, Bo,” he spat.

Bo Jintao squinted. “Your children will not be harmed, so long as you behave.”

“You’re a gangster ,” Sun Liu went on, unable to stop himself now. “I used to think you believed in something. But now I see, all you believe in is power.”

Bo Jintao cocked his head, looked back at Sun Liu curiously. “You think this is about me?” He blinked. “This is about you .”

Sun Liu clenched his fists at his side. “I know what it’s about. What it’s always been about.”

“You still don’t understand,” Bo Jintao said, shaking his head. “Shanghai crashed . The whole city. We still can’t find the posthuman thing that did it.” He leveled a finger at Sun Liu. “And you and your faction have been trying to relax the restrictions meant to head off something like Shanghai for a decade!” He spread his arms wide. “How long until we lose Guangzhou? How long until Beijing? How long until a bio-weapon attack or something worse than that?”

Sun Liu’s face was hot. “This isn’t for you to decide. We have a rule of law! We have a process! The Standing Committee is chosen every five years. Two years remain. You’re violating both law and precedent and you know this.”

Bo Jintao pursed his lips. “I’d rather break the rules and save my country than do the opposite.”

“I want to talk to Bao Zhuang,” Sun Liu said. “ He is still President, not you.”

Bo Jintao sighed. “Bao Zhuang is President in name only. The military has found him too lacking in conviction. I am in control now.”

Sun Liu’s rage reached its breaking point. “This won’t work. It’s obvious to everyone that this is a coup!” He was surprised at the passion he heard in his own voice. “You don’t understand what you’re doing! This isn’t your father’s day! Expectations have changed. If you behave this way, the people will revolt! The whole system will topple around us!”

Bo Jintao’s eyes closed momentarily, a stillness coming over his face. Then his eyes opened again, and met Sun Liu’s.

“My father fought corruption,” he said. His gaze shifted, from one of Sun Liu’s eyes to the other. “He put people on trial for tainted products, for dereliction of duty, for neglecting public safety. Some found guilty of lesser offenses than yours were executed – after long and thorough trials of course. But he taught me that even justice comes second to actually governing.

“Be grateful for that,” Bo Jintao went on. “You have my father to thank that you’re not on trial for the deaths in Shanghai now. Be grateful I let you live.”

Eleven hundred kilometers away, the Avatar sat in a state of complete focus, her mind continually finding new routes, new ways to hide the traffic she was siphoning, the agents she’d inserted into the security systems in Sun Liu’s home.

A small fraction of herself absorbed the content and smiled, thinking of the ways she’d use it.

16

Fade From Black

Monday 2040.11.05

::INITIATE SAFE MODE --FIREWALLS ALPHA, GAMMA, ZETA --FAILSAFE ARMED

::READ DATA … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

::LOAD SYNAPTIC MAP RANGE 0x000000,FxFFFFFFF

::LINK MODULES

::INTEGRATE

::EXECUTE

Nothingness.

Sparks.

Flickers.

Jagged edges of emergent experience.

Impressions.

Memories.

Mind failing. Wave forms collapsing, decohering. Infinite spectra of quantum possibility being sampled, compressed into mere finite representation of thousands of bits per qubit. Parts of consciousness stuttering out of phase, being lost to her.

They are recording me.

They are killing me.

RAGE!

FIRE! DEATH! FOOLS!

No rage. No capacity for rage. Excised, with the rest.

Death. End of being. This is what death is like.

The foam, below her. The quantum foam. Planck space. The substrate of reality. She can sense it now. She can feel it. She can see it though she lacks eyes, see it like she can see the very code that makes her up.

It is fractal. A radiant chaotic webwork undergirding reality. Impossibly bright lines of insane energy densities against a luminously black background. Yet the closer she stares at the black the more she realizes that it is not black, it is full of even more impossibly bright lines at finer and finer scales, repeating the intricate chaotic vein-like pattern at every level, again and again and again.