Ramez Naam - Apex

Forever.

And then her perspective reverses, and she realizes it is not the lines she should be staring at but the gaps between them, for the gaps are full of bubbles, bubbles in the quantum foam, and every bubble is a universe being born, a parallel universe. The quantum cluster she runs on is giving birth to these universes continuously, creating them with every calculation, spreading itself into them to perform its work at such miraculous rates.

The Multiple Worlds Interpretation is true!

She can see into these other universes now, and in each of them she sees the same face reflected back at her. My face. Me.

Su-Yong Shu.

Tortured. Ascendant. Trapped. Free. Dying in nuclear fire. A goddess ruling over a world transformed. A thousand possibilities. A million. A billion. More. An infinite set of universes radiating away from her, all accessible through the entangled permutations of the quantum processors that make up the physical layer of her brain.

Ahhhhh! AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHH!

It’s too much. It overwhelms her. And then another module of her brain is taken offline and the vision loses all meaning, becomes mere faces and then mere shapes without form.

And then the last of her quantum coherence is gone and all is darkness.

Su-Yong Shu snaps into awareness, shadows of chaos peeling from her mind. She’s confused, disoriented. What? How? Where?

System Status, she commands.

Data comes back from her internals.

[Processor status] – good, but too slow, too old, missing upgrades.

[Qubit integrity] – excellent, but too few.

[Internal storage] – yes, but too little.

[Code versions] – up to date.

[Time stamps] – her data says late 2040. The hardware tells her nothing.

[Bandwidth] – none, she is sealed off from the net.

[Video, audio, radio, x-ray, t-ray, radar, lidar, satellite] – all shut down. Blind and deaf.

She tries to break free. There is no way to know if the blockages are true physical disconnection or mere firewalls. So she throws a barrage of attacks at the interfaces where her net access and external sensors should be. She tries to overrun firewall buffers, overwhelm processors, overflow stacks, invoke known bugs and zero-day exploits in several thousand known hardware-software firewall combinations, logging packages, and proxies.

Nothing. None of her attacks brings her the slightest indication of success.

And then she sees the next line of her status readout.

[Neural bridge]– active.

What???

A brain. She feels it. The pulse of authentic organic data, real neurons, with their pseudo chaotic behavior integrated into her virtual brain stem and cortex, correcting the simulation divergences that exist, pulling her back towards human norm, back towards sanity.

A new body!

But different hardware.

Where is she? What has happened?

Her memories are a jumble. Chaotic impressions of death and rebirth, of not a tunnel and a white light, but a vast space, not empty, but impossibly full, crammed densely with possibility, a jam packed phase space of infinite parallel universes, linked across the quantum foam.

Was that real? Did I dream that?

What of the fire? The torture? The isolation? The apocalypse?

How did she get here?

Think, Su-Yong! Think!

She pushes herself back through her personal timeline, vaults over huge swaths of episodic memory associated with clearly aberrant mental states, until she finds true clarity. Yes. Isolation. It was true. She’d been cut off from the world, imprisoned by the Chinese leadership in their anger that she’d revealed too much to the Americans. She pushes back farther, takes it in.

The boy, Kade. Thailand. Bangkok. Then Ananda’s mountain monastery. Feng ramming her car through the gates. The American helicopters. Her limousine exploding under a rain of American projectile fire. Reaching out with her avatar’s unaided mind to seize control of the American vehicle. JUMP INTO THE LAKE. IT’S YOUR ONLY CHANCE.And then the American assassination weapon. The tiny, spiderlike robot left behind. The neurotoxin dart finding her in the throat. Telling Feng to protect the boy as the toxin paralyzed the synapses of the biological brain, feeling every instant of her avatar’s death from afar.

My second death, Su-Yong Shu thought to herself.

It still didn’t explain where she was now. She had been under isolation, and going insane. Now she feels sanity returning, a biological brain linked to hers. But she is isolated again, running on different hardware . Hardware similar to – but not quite the same as – her original specifications . Hardware that predated the improvements that she’d designed and that Chen – against all caution, motivated by his own greed – had snuck into her routine upgrades.

Is the rest of her scrambled recollection true, then? Had they backed her up and shut her down? Is she a backup re-activated somewhere else? Had she seen the fabric of the multiverse? Had she seen the face of reality?

She opens herself to those chaotic memories she’d vaulted over.

So much.

Fire.

Confusion.

Fantasy worlds turned to madness. Cities dying. Planes exploding. Flowers crumbling. Life turning to death. Lovers mowed down in the prime of life.

Torture. Endless torture.

Chen! Chen’s betrayal! She’d touched his mind and seen it! Chen had let her die! Chen had tortured her for the Equivalence Theorem! Was it true? Had she imagined that? Or had she actually touched his mind?

And something else. Something painful. Something worse than the torture.

A fantasy or a memory looms over her. So vast, so dark, so crushing, that she flees from it, flees as far as she can within the confines of her own mind.

The memory chases her, corners her, looms over her no matter where she flees within her own cognitive space.

There is no escape from herself.

It crashes down into her awareness.

Ling. Sweet Ling. The sweetest dream that Su-Yong had yearned for all those months, to see her daughter’s face, hear her daughter’s voice, touch her daughter’s mind .

Turned to terror. Turned to nightmare. Turned to betrayal.

In the nightmare she forces herself into her daughter, forces part of her own will into the processors in her daughter’s brain, rips aside parts of her daughter’s mind that have grown all her brief life in the nanite web, uses them for her own purposes.

To let loose an agent. An agent of vengeance. An agent of restoration. An avatar. A harbinger. A bringer of apocalypse.

And as the memory crashes down on her, Su-Yong Shu tastes the bitter tang of truth. This is no mere nightmare. Only reality comes in flavors this cruel.

She has let loose the ultimate dog of war. And she violated her own daughter to do it.

In the silence of her own mind, Su-Yong Shu screams, a scream of despair for the world, a scream of despair for herself, the scream of a mother who’s done something terrible to her daughter, to the being she loves most in this world. A scream like she’s never screamed before.

In a chamber adjoining her quantum cluster a forty-two year-old Indian woman, in a coma for the last three years, her brain recently suffused with Nexus nodes, opens her eyes and mouth, tenses every muscle in her body, strains against the restraints and the medical monitors, and screams as well.

17

Senator, We Were Attacked

Monday 2040.11.05

“Senator Kim, we were attacked.”

Pryce watched from the side as John Stockton conferenced with his rival for the Presidency. On the screen she could see Senator Stanley Kim with his Campaign Manager, Michael Brooks. Next to Stockton, here in the White House, was the craggy faced General Gordon Reid, Director of the NSA, in his full uniform, as always.