Ramez Naam - Apex

He had to do it now. Now in the few minutes before the Indians had him. Now before anyone else could try to take this from him, could try to stop him.

The doubt struck him again, a memory of failure. Flames erupting through a church in Houston. Just hours ago, the Post Human Liberation Front – more specifically, a PLF terrorist cell led by a man called Breece – had killed nearly a thousand people in Houston, at a prayer breakfast for Daniel Chandler, author of the Chandler Act, and front-runner in the race for Governor of Texas.

They’d used Nexus to do it, to take control of an innocent woman’s mind and plant the bomb. Just like they’d used Nexus to set off a bomb in Chicago. Like they’d used Nexus to try to assassinate President John Stockton in DC three months ago.

Kade had gotten there too late, every time.

It was all going to go up in flames. Every one of the PLF’s bombings and murders was going to fuel the cycle of intolerance and hatred and crackdowns and abuses and terrorist actions to stop the crackdowns until it was a full blown war. If Kade closed the back door in Nexus, he’d lose the weapon he’d been using to try to find Breece, to try to stop the PLF, to stop them from igniting the war.

Kade opened his eyes, saw Sarai looking down at Aroon, felt their contact as she soothed the infant, and his mind was clear. These children were the future. Generations would be born with Nexus 5 in their brains. Thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, maybe millions of them. He wouldn’t let these wonderful children be born with that sort of vulnerability. Wouldn’t let their beauty be corrupted.

They’d have to stop the war a different way. A better way.

Kade closed his eyes, let his breath deepen, let it consume him, let it become the all of his attention, until there was nothing else, until he was his breath, until his breath was him, his mind radiating it with all his being, all his heart. And then the children were with him, first Sarai, then Kit, then one by one the rest, letting go of their fear, sinking into this whole, so easily, so readily, and he was all of them, and they were all him; together they were vast: all breath, all consciousness, all pure intelligence, all light apprehending itself, a new pinnacle of awareness, and together they transcended mere flesh and bone and doubt and pain.

Then Kade clicked the icon before him and the virus raced up to the satellites above and out to the world to close his back doors forever.

3

Sleight of Mind

Saturday 2040.11.03

Qiu Li-hua waited outside the elevator doors, just past the armed guards and the scanners, and listened to the slow grind as the giant machine slowly climbed its way up through the kilometer of bedrock. The all-important equipment bag was at her feet, with the only electronic equipment they’d be allowed to bring in or out. The post-docs and technicians were arranged respectfully behind her.

I’m Senior Researcher Qiu , after all, she thought. Top aide to the great Chen Pang. Though I should be Professor Qiu. Distinguished Professor Qiu.

She’d have that professorship already, tenure certainly, perhaps a departmental chair even, if Chen Pang hadn’t blocked her, hadn’t hoarded the discoveries coming out of Su-Yong Shu’s mind for his own, hadn’t refused to share the glory, even after all she’d done for him.

Chen Pang, the greatest mind in quantum computing, Li-hua thought scornfully. A fraud.

Oh, he had been once. He’d designed the cluster Su-Yong Shu’s mind ran on. But all his discoveries of the past several years? Well, it was clear to Li-hua who really produced those insights, even if no one else seemed to have made the connection.

Su-Yong Shu had long since eclipsed her husband, or any other human for that matter. The great Professor Chen was little more than front man.

Now they’d shut Shu down. Chen’s star would fade. And Li-hua’s would rise. Fast.

The Shanghai Crash had done it. That was the reason they were shutting Su-Yong Shu down, even if no one wanted to say it.

Two weeks ago, everything in Shanghai had failed. Power had failed. Water had failed. Subways and trains had failed. Self-driving cars – completely autonomous things that should be fully independent from the outside world – had failed. Automated food and goods delivery trucks had failed. The sewer pumps that kept Shanghai from flooding over had failed. People had died. They’d drowned in basements and subway cars as filthy water rose up over their heads.

Li-hua shuddered.

Even surveillance had failed. Red-lit surveillance drones with their quadcopter frames had simply stopped flying, had fallen out of the very skies, had crashed to the streets like broken toys.

How that must terrify the people in charge.

There were riots. There were soldiers, shooting people. Shanghai teetered on the edge those first few days before order was restored.

A “cascading systems failure” they called it, “shoddy western code”. Some junior deputy assistant sub-minister’s aide was arrested for laxness in management of civic systems.

Yet here they were. About to deactivate the most advanced electronic entity she knew of on the planet.

And in politics, in Beijing? Well, the Politburo had suddenly had a rather sweeping change in membership, hadn’t it?

Was there a connection between all those things? Oh no… Of course not.

A deep bass clang announced the arrival of the giant elevator car. The grinding halted. And then massive doors parted, revealing Chen and that strange, strange child of his, smiling oddly up at her. Why had he brought her here?

“Honored Professor,” Li-hua started.

“Li-hua,” Chen said. “Complete the backups and initiate the shutdown. I’ll await your report.” Chen strode toward the guards, his odd little daughter in tow, and presented himself to be scanned.

So Chen wasn’t going to participate? Too much for him to see his golden goose slaughtered, perhaps. All the better.

“Come, then,” Li-hua said to the team behind her. She walked for the elevator. The guards had already cleared them, verifying that they had no electronics whatsoever. The only data that would leave here today would be in Li-hua’s equipment bag, in one of the three snapshots of Shu’s brain sent to secure locations for safe keeping.

She drilled the team one last time as the great elevator descended its kilometer-long shaft. Backing up a quantum computer was a tricky business. The no-clone theorem stipulated that it was technically impossible. No quantum state could be copied with precision. They would be taking only an approximate recording. To do so they’d be collapsing waveforms, forcing qubits suspended in an indeterminate mathematical superposition of 1s and 0s to become quite determinate indeed, to suddenly decide one way or the other.

It would be a death of sorts to Su-Yong Shu, an end to her consciousness, even as an approximation of her state was written to a form of storage that she could one day be – approximately – resurrected from.

Yet they must take great care. The wrong step could trigger a catastrophic cascade of decoherence, prematurely collapsing waveforms in an avalanche across her simulated mind, destroying information before they could capture it.

Li-hua wasn’t going to allow that to happen. Nor would her team. They’d do it right – for her, if not for Chen.

This was her domain. In the outside world she wasn’t special. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t famous. She wasn’t from an important family. (Of course, those three traits were highly correlated, now weren’t they? Hmmm.)

But she was intelligent in the extreme. She was fair to subordinates. And she worked hard – far harder than the world famous Distinguished Professor Chen. The team might be in awe of him, might worship him, might crave his favor. But they were loyal to her .