Ramez Naam - Apex

Then she waited some more.

There was no response.

33

Better World

Su-Yong Shu walks the street of her simulated Shanghai, her future projection of the city she loves. She’s barefoot, her hair wild, her white dress stained with soot and blood.

Shanghai is in chaos.

Two dozen mirror-faced, battle-armored soldiers move down a rubble-filled urban canyon of a street, firing at something ahead. Smoke rises from all around. An explosion blows out glass windows tens of meters above.

Then with a sudden whirring, a pair of armed, quadcopter drones round the corner, their chain guns firing, jerking from angle to angle with eerie insectile precision, proboscis ejecting death, even as micromissiles streak out on jets of white-hot flame. The soldiers dive for cover behind chunks of fallen building, behind overturned cars.

There are explosions and screams. In seconds the humans are dead, the machines unharmed.

The drones are rising, now, their fans whirring faster, lifting them up to clear the hundred meters and more of the buildings all around. Su-Yong lifts her head to watch, to track them, and she sees the sky full of drones, drones of all type. Small and large. Copter and winged. Fan and jet. Unarmed and armed to extreme lethality. They are rising, blotting out the sky of Shanghai. Her army. Off to do her bidding. To conquer this world.

She screams again, dropping to her knees, beating her hands against the broken asphalt of the street. Where her fists land, fissures appear, race forward, cracking the street in two.

I’m still mad, she realizes. There hasn’t been enough time!

Distantly, she can feel the humans sending messages to her, punching text in through interfaces in her exoself. They’re pumping sedatives into the body they provided her with, now, injecting anti-nauseants, anti-convulsants. She doesn’t care.

She closes her eyes against the chaos.

Behind her eyes the world is just as overwhelming. Dense tree-like structures are blossoming in her inner sight. They are multi-dimensional, tightly packed, fully immersive. They’re unpacking themselves, now, loading themselves into her attentional space.

Simulations. Future projections.

She sees her drones shoot down the antiquated fighter-bombers sent against her. Sees her forces secure nuclear armaments. Sees herself seize the world’s electronic systems. Sees Confucian Fist soldiers jab injectors loaded with silvery nanite-laden fluid into the necks of Politburo members. Sees her provocations and protests paralyze the world while she does her work.

Sees Ling. Sees Ling healed, after Su-Yong’s victory. Restored. The avatar she released, its purpose complete, erased from the nanite processors in Ling’s brain, allowing Ling’s own biological mind to gradually regrow into that cleared space, to eventually grow into something greater, an digital upload of herself, expanding, transcending, no longer compelled to hide who and what she is from the humans.

She opens her eyes and Shanghai around her is whole, better than whole. It is gleaming, iridescent. She looks up and the sky is blue. The towers around her rise not a hundred meters, not three hundred meters, but a thousand, three thousand. Towers a kilometer high. Three kilometers high. They gleam gold and silver and cobalt and crimson in the afternoon sun. She lifts up her hands and rises into the air. The buildings are sculpted into intricate whorls and arcs and geometric shapes made possible by breakthroughs in materials. Humanity, no longer constrained, has turned its cities into art.

The street where she walked is a park, alive with verdant growth, plants she recognizes and plants she has never seen before. Every street she sees is a park. Every rooftop. Humans – no, posthumans – walk along the paths of that giant city-park, or through the tubes and spires of the glorious buildings.

She opens her mind as she rises and finds the city alive with thought, a symphony of thought, a living being, a meta-organism of never-before seen scale. Vast braided trunks of thought, tens of millions of them, connect them at the speed of light to every other city across the face of the Earth, to outposts spreading across the solar system.

She rises higher, until she is above the tallest building, and still climbing, where the air is growing thin, and the curvature of the earth is appearing, and other glorious iridescent cities loom on the green and blue horizons.

And then she can see it, even as she senses it in her thoughts.

The city, this glorious golden metropolis, with its magnificence of architecture, has been re-sculpted into a shape that can only be seen from above.

A face.

Her face. Or Ling’s.

And the one mind that permeates it all, greater than all the rest.

Her mind.

For this is the golden age.

The age after her victory.

After her daughter has done her duty, and been healed.

After Su-Yong Shu has conquered the world, and remolded it, for the better.

34

Leaving New Delhi

Tuesday 2040.11.13

Sam woke to the sound of crying, crying in the darkness.

Aroon. It must be Aroon.

“I’ll get him,” she told Jake, reaching over to touch him.

Empty bed.

Sleep peeled off her in layers.

Jake.

Her heart pounded.

This wasn’t Thailand.

Oh god, Jake. Jake with a bullet punched through his chest. Jake with a drop of her blood dripping onto his face. Jake coughing up blood.

Jake whispering, “I wish I’d known you…” when he had. He had!

Jake’s mind falling into a million pieces that no one could ever put back together.

There were tears on her face.

Aroon cried again.

She pushed herself up. He needed her.

Tug on shorts. Pull on shirt. Out the door. Into the nursery where they’d put the three youngest. All three were awake, staring at her. Aroon was upright, tiny hands clinging to the side of his crib, holding himself up, his mouth open and his little face scrunched up as he wailed with all his small might.

“Hush,” she said with a smile, reaching for him with her hands, reaching out with her mind to soothe him.

And finding nothing. Nothing in her own mind to reach out with. No Nexus.

She put her hands around Aroon, pulled him up out of the crib, held him.

He cried and cried.

“Shhh…” she said. Always before her presence had been enough. Being near her had soothed him, since that first night, since she’d sung to him, in word and mind.

She sang again, hoping her lungs and her arms around him would do the trick.

“Hush little baby, don’t you cry…”

Aroon cried louder, harder.

She closed her eyes, bounced him, still singing, tears in her own eyes.

She could just take Nexus again, let her mind touch these kids. An image of a silvery vial came into her mind. A memory of the touch of Aroon’s mind, the magic of his young thoughts, the world a place of such vivid shapes and colors and surprises. The joy of vipassana when her thoughts were intertwined with the children’s.

Sam smiled. Maybe it was time.

Then she heard Shiva in her mind. Kill them. She saw Kevin swim into her target sights. Felt her own horror as she pulled the trigger to put the first burst into his face. Now it was Jake’s face, blood gurgling out as he coughed his last breath, and she’d killed them both.

Aroon yelled louder.

“I’ll take him,” someone said in Thai.

Sam opened her eyes. Sarai was standing in front of her, hands on Aroon.

“You have to let go,” Sarai said. “You’re holding him too tight.”

Sam blinked. She loosened her grip, and the girl took Aroon out of Sam’s hands.