Ramez Naam - Apex

Until then Tempest demanded certain precautions. The windowless cell of a room that Rangan slept in. Curtains drawn tight around every other window in the Bunker. An end to the normal stream of visitors to the Bunker while Rangan was here. And other precautions yet.

He reached for some now. A thin hat that covered his short hair, reducing the odds of leaving some of it as evidence. Nitrile gloves for his hands, so he wouldn’t leave prints or skin flakes with his DNA. He was already wearing the long sleeved shirt and long pants that covered the rest of his skin.

He’d balked at wearing a mask. Cheyenne and Angel had agreed it was overkill. Tempest, unsatisfied, had installed DNA-ripping scrubbers in the ventilation system.

He looked down at himself. There was no reason to delay. He put his hand on the door, and let himself out, into the hallway, then down it, and into one of the common workrooms of the Bunker.

Cheyenne saw him first. She was leaning over a carbon composite printer, watching something extrude from it, her long dreads tied behind her head, her muscular dark-skinned arms bulging in the sleeves of a tee shirt. She looked up, gave him a nod. “Yo.”

Rangan nodded back. “Yo.”

Cheyenne pretended not to notice his night terrors, pretended not to notice how lost he was, pretended he didn’t owe her anything for saving his life a week ago.

He appreciated that. Cheyenne felt steady.

He saw Tempest across the room, tapping away at a console. The mane of bright red curls he’d noticed the first night was gone. A wig, a disguise, beneath which was shoulder-length brown hair, now pulled back. Her green eyes met his, and she looked away. Her mind was sealed up shut against him.

“Hey, Axon,” the one who called herself Angel said from across the space. “Ready to flex your coding muscles?”

Rangan put on a game face, thought brave thoughts, and went to pay for his keep.

The Bunker was a veritable candy store of goodies: multi-material 3D printers bigger than fridges; a high-speed metal laser sintering machine; a giant multi-axis milling machine with synthetic diamond blades; circuit printers, big and small. They had a pair of old chemreactors, from before the digitally encrypted locks had made it impossible to print the fun chemicals with them, the same kind that Rangan and his friends had used to slowly, painstakingly synthesize the ingredients for Nexus, which they’d then had to mix by hand. They even, somehow, had a much fancier, newer model of chemreactor, the kind that could synthesize thousands of complete, ready-to-use doses of Nexus an hour, though he’d be shocked if they’d beaten the crypto on it. A pair of disassembled urban surveillance drones covered one table. High capacity batteries were stacked neatly in a corner. At least twenty different makes of surveillance cameras were laid out on another long table. The walls were covered in a triple layer of chicken wire.

“How do you guys pay for all this stuff?” he’d asked Angel, as they worked together on the second day.

Angel, or whatever her real name was – she wasn’t saying – was probably Rangan’s age. She was one of the two who’d ventured back out into the riot to grab Rangan and haul him bodily out of there. He owed her his life as much as he did Cheyenne. At minimum he owed them both his freedom.

More people on a long list.

“We do projects,” she’d told him.

“Projects?” He’d raised an eyebrow at that.

Angel had glanced away. “Special projects.”

Illegal projects, he’d translated to himself.

Rangan had left it at that.

The grief-suppressing app he’d used this morning had been a gift from Angel, along with a pointer to their catalog of thousands of Nexus apps, hundreds of which they ran. Network games, augmented reality systems, photo and video and audio tools, DJing apps, file sharing systems, network proxies that remoted Nexus onto the net via phones and slates, interfaces to anonymizing clouds for communicating securely, face recognizers, memory supplementers that gave you little bits of extra info when you looked at something or someone the app had a file on, sex apps – a huge library of those alone – to be used solo or in twos or threes or more, virtual drugs that simulated just about everything he’d ever tried, sober-up apps that could do a plausible job of counteracting your buzz, focus apps, multi-tasking apps, sleep apps, stim apps, even digital currencies that people had adapted to run exclusively inside the brain.

And there were mindstreams. Thousands of them. You could broadcast a live stream of your senses or thoughts – edited or raw, one sense or many – out to the net. There were sites that cataloged them, tagged them, rated them, ranked them.

Rangan spent one afternoon looking through those alone.

A huge fraction of it was sex, of course. But there was other stuff. Athletes. Adventure sports – ride in a thrill-seeker’s head as he illegally free climbed up a building you’d swear wasn’t climbable. Or shit he didn’t understand.

There were weird, abstract streams. Synesthesia. Sounds crossing into his sight. Colors he could touch. Presences sensed that he didn’t see. Spinning, without any sight or sound. Trippy ass shit. People must have been generating it through code.

And there was one guy who just raked sand. Every day. An hour. No words. No thinking that Rangan could tell. Just… raking patterns in the sand, slowly, and then erasing them.

That guy had thousands of followers on the mindstream sites.

Rangan felt lost. He should feel excited about what people had done with the platform they’d built.

Instead, he felt left behind, obsolete, no longer relevant.

Six months. Six months and he was an old man, behind the times.

How did things happen that fast?

And they expected him to help them. To help them improve Nexus 5, add features, when the world had already passed him by.

Angel’s particular project right now was to add mesh networking capabilities.

“You designed these hardware repeaters,” she said, pointing at a diagram on the screen they both sat before, “so you could extend the range of Nexus transmissions to hundreds of meters, right?”

The blue spiky hair he’d seen on Angel during the riot was gone. Another disguise. Something striking to catch the eye. She had a black bob, angular features. He didn’t know much about her. She’d described her background as community organizing.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, we had some pretty specific scenarios in mind. But you could do that.”

Angel nodded. “We want to bake that ability into NexusOS itself, so anyone can act as a repeater. So if you were across the room from me, at the end of my range, your NexusOS could pick up my transmissions, boost them, retransmit them, effectively extend my range.”

What you want to do is make the year I spent on the repeater hardware completely obsolete, Rangan didn’t say.

“You already have your high gain antennas,” Rangan said. He looked around, pointed at one of the devices that Cheyenne, they’d said, had designed and built. “You can already get long range.” He paused. “Heck, everyone has the apps now to proxy Nexus traffic over phones and net ports. So you can get any range you want.” He looked at her. “So why this?”

Angel looked at him thoughtfully. “There are scenarios where phone and net traffic get blocked, or just turned off wholesale,” she said.

Rangan considered that. “Protests,” he said.

Angel nodded. “And there’s something else. It’s not just about range. It’s about coordination. In a big group, like a protest, communication is a bitch. Mostly people hear what the people right around them are saying. No one knows what’s happening a block away. Messages get distorted like a game of telephone. Anger spreads really easily. Stupid things happen. You can get a mob – like what was starting to happen a week ago.”