Ramez Naam - Apex

She smiled.

“Except now, thanks to Barnes’s files, we know it wasn’t random at all. We know the ERD killed him, and at least a dozen more people like him.”

Breece raised an eyebrow. “We have proof?”

Kate nodded. “Enough. They had dossiers on the targets. Movements, photos, potential means and locations for hits. It’s compelling.”

Breece heard a snick, looked over to see the Nigerian slide parts of the pistol back together. He looked up at Breece and smiled.

“Have you seen this?” Kate asked.

Breece turned. She tapped something on her slate, and the wall screen came alive. An image of a large building with a dome, ornate and exotic looking, its walls tinged red, a reflecting pool in front of it.

A British-accented woman’s voice spoke over it. “…Rumors continue to fly that the Indian government is considering leaving the Copenhagen Accords. Evidence surfaced months ago of research programs in violation of Copenhagen restrictions, drawing criticism from the US and China.”

The scene changed to a newsroom, a blonde female newscaster, in a smart suit and with the looks of a model, a BBC logo in the corner. “Tensions are running even higher between India and the US,” she said, “since the Indian government granted asylum earlier this week to fugitive American scientist Kaden Lane, convicted of multiple violations of Copenhagen-related laws, and wanted in connection with terrorist bombings…”

The screen froze, the newscaster/model’s face frozen in mid-sentence, just another attractive talking head spewing propaganda.

“Aparna Gupta,” Kate said.

Breece smiled. She was quizzing him. He knew these names. They’d burned themselves into his memory. When your parents are murdered as part of the war on the future, you remembered the other victims.

“AI researcher,” he said. “Self-healing systems. Or self-adapting. Something like that. Academic. She was killed in a car bomb. 2033. Muslim extrem…”

The words died on his lips. He turned to look at Kate.

She met his eyes.

“The ERD,” she said. “Operating in India. Teetering on the edge of leaving Copenhagen.”

His eyes grew wide.

Behind him he heard another solid chunk as the Nigerian slid the last piece of the pistol home.

“Just one good push,” Kate said. “That’s all it’ll take.”

They gamed it out for the morning and into the afternoon.

There were risks. Leaking evidence of the assassinations would give away data. It would reveal to the ERD and others that certain information was public. Suspicious minds might draw a connection between the leak and Barnes.

But there were also positives. Fracturing Copenhagen. Tainting Stockton, who’d been VP when the assassinations happened.

“I support it,” the Nigerian said slowly.

“Me too,” Breece said. “Great stuff.”

Kate smiled.

Hours later, it was done. A new account, unlinked to the PLF, was created – ERD_SECRETS. And from that account a set of documents were leaked, documents that provided evidence that over a period of two and a half years between the creation of the ERD and the signing of the Copenhagen Accords that prohibited research into branches of AI, genetics, nanotech, and neurotech around the world, the new US organization assassinated at least fourteen top scientists working in those fields in half a dozen countries. Some of which were already wavering in their commitment to the Accords.

Carolyn Pryce was in her home office, at her secure terminal, reading the State Department’s reports on the counter-Copenhagen summit going on in New Delhi. The parties involved were doing as much as possible via face to face, of course. But that hadn’t stopped the NSA from reading their dispatches and position papers, and the CIA from determining exactly who was there.

It was going to get ugly. State was going to start waving carrots around with one hand, and sticks with another. Trade deals and sanctions. Favored nation status or visa revocations and border searches for every package coming through.

Pryce wasn’t sure it was going to be enough.

Her terminal chimed with a new alert. She narrowed her eyes. Her thresholds were set high.

It scrolled across the screen and her eyes widened again.

She dug into the data, skimmed through it, page after page, and then leaned back.

She’d known about this. Not directly, not the specifics.

But she’d known there had been an active threat neutralization program, before she was National Security Advisor, before Copenhagen even existed, long since ended.

Killing people. Killing scientists . It was easy to condemn.

Until you remembered what those days had been like.

They’d been terrifying. A small army of Aryan clones, engineered to be immune to a virus, Marburg Red, created to wipe out the rest of humanity. That virus killed thirty-one thousand people in four days, the worst terrorist attack on record. And they’d been lucky. If the Aryan Rising’s genetic engineers had perfected it, if the clone children hadn’t risen up and slaughtered their makers and released Marburg Red early, the final version might have killed millions, hundreds of millions.

Billions.

And that hadn’t been the only threat. Eschaton, the self-replicating AI that came within a hair’s breadth of getting free on the net. Arrington, the near-trillionaire who’d managed to upload a digital replica of his brain into a custom data center and then gone insane from it, crashing markets and airplanes and power grids, killing thousands in what they’d told the world was a terrorist cyber-attack. The public didn’t even know about half the things that had really happened in the late Twenties and the early Thirties, or why.

But she did.

And still the global negotiations towards a Copenhagen agreement to restrict humanity-threatening research had ground on at a glacial pace, taking years, unclear if they’d ever actually get an agreement, every country trying to squeeze out financial incentives or trade benefits as bribes to sign on, risking gigadeaths so they could profit a bit from the Accords. And meanwhile, researchers in those countries sprinted faster and faster, to make as much progress as possible in horrifically dangerous areas before restrictions came down.

So… kill a handful, and maybe save millions?

No, she hadn’t given the order to kill these men and women.

But she had a hard time blaming those who had.

Pryce shook it off.

ERD_SECRETS. That’s where this had come from.

The account had an address, hosted offshore, no doubt, connected through anonymizing layer after anonymizing layer.

She stared at it.

Dealing with the fallout of this particular leak was the State Department’s problem.

But could this account have more? Might this be Lisa Brandt, Holtzman’s former student and lover, whom he’d called and visited days before his death? If Holtzman had sent her this, might the woman have something else that Pryce could use? Something to help get to the bottom of the PLF’s creation?

FBI was still watching Brandt in Boston, had kept Pryce at arm’s length with good arguments about the intel the woman might reveal under passive surveillance…

Carolyn Pryce grabbed her jacket.

An hour later, across town, via a fresh phone she’d paid cash for, she connected to an anonymizing service herself and created a fresh account on a messaging site.

And then she sent a message to the account behind ERD_SECRETS.

“Hello. I’m a friend, inside the US government. I’m highly placed. And I’m looking for evidence of how the PLF was created. Can you help me?”

She waited, and waited, and waited.

She waited so long that she put an alert on the account, flagged it for the highest possible importance notification to her, any time, any place.