Ramez Naam - Apex

“How does this help?” Rangan asked.

“With the mesh,” Angel said, “the idea is that signals can bounce mind to mind to mind, any number of hops, in milliseconds, completely unaltered. So there’s no game of telephone. You’re getting unaltered data, not something that’s been twisted. And people can subscribe to whatever minds inside the current mesh they want to – like the public net mindstream sites, but locally.”

Rangan took a deep breath. It was all nice in concept. But building this to dive into those protests…

The riots of election night had mostly ended by dawn. Cops had moved in. Tear gas and water cannons and rubber bullets and sonic weapons had quelled crowds. And Stan Kim had made impassioned video pleas to Americans that violence was not the way. That protesters had to remain peaceful to give their side legitimacy. That police had to show restraint to retain their own legitimacy. That he was confident that the Supreme Court would hear the raft of cases working their way towards it, and would declare him the winner.

The violence had largely ended, but the Supreme Court had yet to announce that it would hear any case.

So now new protests were being born. Sit-ins across the country. And the largest was here, on the National Mall, where thousands were camping out, peacefully so far, demanding the Supreme Court hear the case, calling for Stockton’s resignation, calling for a Special Prosecutor, calling for impeachment, calling for any number of things…

And across a thin plastic fence from them was a counter protest, where a smaller but equally fervent set of Stockton loyalists were waving signs in his defense, accusing Kim of dirty tricks, calling the protesters crooks and vandals.

Both camps were swelling by the day.

And Angel and Cheyenne and Tempest wanted to dive into that. With Nexus. With their signal-boosting antennae and their mesh-networking code that didn’t quite work yet and their hippie ideas of self-organizing democracy somehow coming out on top.

I thought like that once, Rangan thought. Ilya thought like that. Wats thought like that. Kade thought like that.

What he really wanted was just to get someplace safe. He’d told Tempest and the others that he would. That he’d move on. Hell, he couldn’t live in their tiny room forever.

But he had nowhere to go. He didn’t know where in Baltimore Oscar was taking him. He didn’t dare contact Levi and Abigail, for fear of bringing the hammer down on them. Kade was alive, and safe, in India. Maybe India would take him. His grandparents had been born there…

He’d tunneled through an anonymous cloud, under Tempest’s grudging supervision, then through a second anonymous cloud to further throw off the trail, connected to a Nexus board hosted in Thailand, created a brand new account, left a carefully worded message for Kade there, not using his own name, but dropping certain phrases, hoping to get his attention…

But Kade hadn’t replied.

Maybe, Rangan thought, I should just walk up to an Indian consulate, ask for asylum…

“Axon,” Cheyenne said. “I think you need to see this.”

Rangan turned. She was sitting at a console, her broad shoulders filling the chair, her head turned, facing him, black eyes in that dark face boring into his.

He pushed his chair back and looked over at her. “What’s that?”

“Just…” she started. She shook her head. “You need to see.”

He went, and as he approached, she stood, almost apologetically, rising to stand a good two inches taller than he was, and handed him a pair of ear buds.

He sat. On screen was a picture of his mother. His mother and his father, behind her.

His heart started pounding. He hadn’t contacted them. He’d wanted to, but Oscar’s words had rung through his head, his warning about not reaching out to anyone who he cared about.

Oh god. What happened?

He put the ear buds in his ears, and touched his finger to the screen. It was a video. It had reached the end.

He replayed it.

It started with his father and mother side by side, his father talking.

“My son,” Rohit Shankari said. “Your mother and I have been informed by the authorities, by the Department of Homeland Security, that you’ve somehow escaped from their custody. They told us that you killed a man, and nearly killed another.”

Rangan shook his head. “No,” he said aloud. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

“They told us that it’s only a matter of time until they catch you, and that they will be more…” his father, a professor of chemistry, seldom at a loss for words, hesitated. “That they will be more lenient with you…” He saw the emotion pass over his father’s face. Saw his mother close her eyes briefly. “… if you turn yourself in.”

His father swallowed on screen. “My son, here is what I think of these authorities, and what they say about you.”

And then his father leaned forward, worked his mouth, and spat upon the floor.

Rangan laughed, tears in his eyes.

His mother stepped forward then. “Rangan,” she said, “we believe in you. We know you’re innocent. Stay safe. They’re watching us, hoping you contact us, so they can find you. Don’t. It brings joy to our hearts to know that you’re free. That’s enough, for now.”

Rangan pulled the ear buds out, and touched his fingers to the screen, as if he could touch his mom, touch his dad, and then he was crying, and he was laughing, and there were arms hugging him from behind, and minds opening to him, and offering comfort, and for some reason he thought of Bobby just then, and hoped the boy was in Cuba, with Alfonso, and Tim, and all the rest, whether Rangan ever made it there or not.

And then a voice cut through everything, and the sense of a mind in stunned delight.

“Well frack my random seed,” Tempest said. “This isn’t possible.”

“What?” Angel asked.

“Someone just broke the crypto on a bunch of high-end chemreactors,” Tempest said. “A dozen different models with their own keys, maybe more. And put out a high-throughput recipe for Nexus on all of them.”

32

Disclosure

Sunday 2040.11.11

Breece woke in the morning, rolled over to reach for Kate, found only empty bed instead.

He pulled himself to alertness, heart pounding, muscles tensing, senses scanning for a threat.

The apartment was quiet. Faint early morning light came in through the curtains over the bedroom window. The door to the living room was open a crack, artificial light coming in through the gap. The bed sheets were mussed. Everything was as it should be.

He took a breath, flexed and unflexed his hands, let himself calm down.

Too many years of this.

Too many years waiting for the hammer to drop.

Too many years of knowing his death was going to be a bad one. A violent one.

So close now. So close to victory.

He rolled out of bed, pulled on shorts and a tee shirt, and padded out into the apartment.

The Nigerian was at the kitchen table, a pistol disassembled on a towel, cleaning and oiling it methodically.

“You clean that gun every day,” Breece said.

“It’s my meditation, my friend,” the Nigerian replied, not looking up.

“Rodrigo Pereira,” Kate’s voice said.

Breece turned. She was on the couch, her hair back in a ponytail, in casual pants and shirt, long legs folded under her. There was a slate in her hand, and she was looking at him.

“Biotech researcher,” Breece said. “Died… a long time ago. Murder. We suspected assassination. None proven. He was… Argentinian?”

Kate raised an eyebrow and nodded approvingly. “Brazilian, actually. Specialized in human genetic manipulation. Died in a mugging in 2033, two years before Copenhagen was ratified. A random mugging.”