Ramez Naam - Apex

Then the sirens came. WAWAWAWAWAWAWA.

He looked up and there were spinning lights out there in the distance, over the heads of the crowd, many of whom were now on their knees. Spinning lights in the direction they’d been driving. Spinning lights in the direction they’d come from. Buildings in the other two directions.

“YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY,” boomed across the crowd. “YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS. ALL WHO DO NOT DISPERSE WILL BE ARRESTED.”

Disperse? How could they disperse? They were penned in by the cops and the buildings.

He pushed himself up to one knee. God, he hurt. A stranger in a mask – maybe one of the men who’d rolled their car – was on the ground, groaning. A piece of wood lay nearby, maybe part of a sign, just beyond his outstretched hand. Rangan grabbed the board from the ground, used it like a cane to come to standing.

He looked up and, not twenty feet away, a protester had a brick in his hand, cocked back to throw, and then it was flying through the air, towards the flashing lights.

“Oh shit,” Rangan heard himself say.

Then the rubber bullets – he hoped they were rubber – converged on the protester, picked him up and threw him back.

There was a crash and a change in one of the siren tones as the brick made lucky contact with the top of a police cruiser, and then the air was thick with projectiles flying back in towards the protest – canisters, thick ones, spraying gas, tear gas – and within seconds Rangan’s eyes were burning and he was coughing and the coughs were wracking his broken ribs and oh holy fucking god he didn’t know what to do anymore.

He dropped back to one knee, half blind, barely able to breathe, barely able to think. Next to him he saw a flicker of red in a protester’s hand. A bottle, a rag stuffed in one end like a wick. The rag came alive with flame, and the man hurled it towards the police lines.

Oh my fucking god, Rangan thought.

Around him he saw more Molotov cocktails lit and hurled into the sky at the police vehicles, saw more tear gas canisters land, the clouds of gas grow thicker.

Gas, he thought, fucking gas.

The protesters around him had bandanas, he saw. He ripped off his tee shirt, leaving himself bare-chested in the night, and tied it around his nose and mouth and let the rest hang down.

Maybe, he thought, that’ll help.

Then more gas wafted into his lungs and made him hack and hack and hack.

Maybe not.

A phalanx of riot police in armor, with tall transparent shields, anonymizing reflective masks, and long electrified truncheons, marched forward out of the smoke. He crouched lower at the corner of the overturned car and watched as they reached a smattering of disorganized protesters, and brought their truncheons down viciously, again, and again, long after their targets were prone.

A riot cop turned and looked right at him, and Rangan hid his face, and cowered, and just hoped he looked as miserable and harmless as he was.

Holy fuck, he thought, how the hell am I going to get out of here?

Something tickled at his mind.

A thought.

Someone else’s thought.

Someone else’s mind .

And then it was gone.

He turned, searching.

Tear gas ripped a cough from him, bringing agony to his ribs.

Oh god, he realized. I’m so fucking out of practice.

He closed his eyes.

Please, please, please.

Open. Max sensitivity. Directional search.

Please, please, please.

An explosion boomed somewhere, close enough that he felt heat against his face.

Someone screamed, and he heard the sickening crunch of bones breaking, and then the gurgling end of the scream. An image of a police truncheon crushing a protestor’s skull came unbidden into his mind.

Please, please, please.

Tears were rolling down his face, from the tear gas, or for Oscar, or because he was well and truly fucked.

THERE.

THERE, MOTHERFUCKER.

A mind.

Two minds! Maybe more.

They were that way, to his left, inside the building, moving, talking to each other, not to Rangan. He was picking up their leakage. They were just barely at the limit of his range, honestly they should be beyond his range, way beyond his range, and they were moving far faster than he could right now.

He threw everything he had into one mental yell of longing at them.

HELP!!!!!

He sent them a sense of himself, hurt, nearly blind from the tear gas, wanted by the cops, trapped by the police lines, needing them.

PLEASE!!!!

He felt them hesitate. They stopped moving. Data flowed fast and fierce between them, disagreement, argument.

Then they were moving back towards him. One stopped inside one of the buildings, and two of them dashed out. They were dressed in drab colors, with industrial-looking boots on their feet; round black goggles over their eyes; respirators whose vents moved back and forth over their mouths and noses; and headbands with what seemed to be antennae, among other things, projecting from them. A mass of black dreadlocks sprawled out above one headband. Short, spiky blue locks projected above the other.

They each got under an arm and took some of his weight. The one with black dreadlocks was solidly built, muscular. The other was shorter than he was, and slighter of build.

A teenager?

MOVE, ASSHOLE!the big one sent him.

Rangan grunted, put everything he had into hauling forward, and suddenly they were moving at something close to a jog. Another explosion went off behind them. Another scream. Another sound of broken bone.

Off to the side Rangan caught a glimpse of more police vehicles arriving. Armored vehicles now, not just ordinary cruisers. Another tear gas canister erupted before them, obscuring the view and forcing corrosive gas into his eyes and lungs. Rangan coughed, stumbled, but by then they were almost to the building, and then they were pushing in through the shattered glass that was once a store front, and he thought surely they could stop here, but instead they kept moving, kept penetrating deeper into the shop, and then through a door, and out of the shop, and into a darkened inner hallway, and then through another door, and into an elevator that took them down.

The elevator opened into a cellar, and then his two saviors dragged him out to where the third, dressed a lot like them, was waiting. Rangan could definitely feel all three of them now.

The two holding him slowly lowered him to the concrete floor, and Rangan caught himself on his knees, still gasping.

“Thank you,” he said, when he could catch his breath.

The third figure, the one who hadn’t come out to him, shorter than he was, with a mass of red curls above his headband, reached forward and stuck a small rectangular object against the side of Rangan’s neck.

The redheaded figure reached up with his other hand, lifted his goggles and lowered his respirator, revealing not a he, but a she.

“Alright, asshole,” she said. “Who the fuck are you?”

Rangan stared up in surprise.

The big guy with the black dreads lifted his own goggles and lowered his own respirator, and it wasn’t a guy at all. That was undeniably a she, not a he. Then Rangan’s female savior reached forward, grabbed Rangan’s shirt-slash-bandana, and tugged it off of him in one quick motion.

“Don’t you know anything, Tempest?” the one with the black dreads said. “This is the masterfrackin Axon.”

Thousands of kilometers away, in an exclusive tower above the Pudong, the Avatar stood Ling’s body at the window. Ling’s eyes looked out over the wonder of Shanghai, out across the gap to the next tower over, and the enormous twenty-story visage of the doe-eyed, porcelain-skinned actress, Zhi Li. The faux-goddess. Bah.