Ramez Naam - Apex

She was breathing hard. Her chest was pounding.

“Shhhh…” Sarai said, her eyes closed, her lips brushing the top of Aroon’s head.

And the boy started quieting.

Tears filled Sam’s eyes, tears of loss and pain. She fought them back, smiled at Sarai with pride, forced her breathing to slow. This girl was amazing.

Sarai looked at her, over Aroon’s head.

“I miss you,” she whispered in Thai.

“Oh Sarai,” Sam said, her voice low. She stepped closer, put a gentle arm slowly around Sarai, doing her best to not jostle the infant. “I’m right here.”

Sarai smiled sadly. “It’s not the same.”

Aroon snuffled into Sarai’s shoulder, his sobbing growing quieter, weaker.

“Come back to us,” Sarai said, her eyes searching Sam’s face.

Sam’s heart was still pounding. She could see that silvery vial, could imagine downing it. She could see her bullets punch into the green outline of Kevin’s face, hear Jake’s last whisper. I wish I’d known you.

“I will,” she told Sarai, meaning it, squeezing the girl’s shoulder. “I will. I just need to heal a little first.”

“We can help you,” Sarai pleaded.

Sam smiled at Sarai, stroked the girl’s hair. “Sarai, I don’t think…”

I don’t think you should see the hole in Jake’s chest, she thought. I don’t think you should feel what I felt, then or now.

“I don’t think children should have to help adults heal,” she said. She smiled. “I think it should go the other way.

“But I am not going anywhere,” she said, looking into Sarai’s eyes. “And I will heal. And I will be back in here,” she tapped her temple, “with you again soon.”

She waited until Sarai nodded.

Then she pulled the girl as close as she could without jostling little Aroon, kissed her on the brow, and held them both.

35

Dark and Light

Wednesday 2040.11.14

Kade swam in an ocean of light. His body sat on the floor in Delhi, eyes closed, legs crossed, hands on knees, breathing deep, placid breaths. His heart beat slowly and surely. His mind was open, touching a thousand others, being enfolded in them, enmeshed with them, so that where he ended and they began, where I ended and we began, he could no longer say.

The greater self drew breath into a thousand sets of lungs, then slowly released that breath out of the same. Its thousand-fold heart contracted, expanded.

Thoughts arose in one corner of its web, rippled outward from human mind to human mind.

The greater self inhaled again, observed those ripples, those tiny human thoughts, and allowed them to pass, without attachment, without judgment, without grasping that would have created more chaos.

Bit by bit, the noise of monkey mind, the chattering of incessant chaotic thought, faded away.

All that remained was light.

Kade opened his eyes as the meditation ended.

That had been… something. Ananda and his monks had come a very long way in the past several months. He’d been blown away the first time he’d encountered dozens of monks, their minds linked, meditating as one. Now they’d folded in the technology he’d brought, linked monasteries together across thousands of kilometers, were folding in hundreds of monks at once, sometimes thousands. There had been monks in that session in Thailand, in Nepal, here in India, even a few in the US.

Bits of a thousand other men and women’s thoughts and memories, dreams and ideas, knowledge and experience, had flowed through him, and into him. And that was just incidental, as they’d allowed those thoughts to rise to the surface and clear, to make room for pure, uncluttered attention.

He leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes again, and he could feel a million minds out there. If he chose he could visualize them, a thin layer around the earth, denser in some areas, sparser in others. He had a flight of fancy, a thought of reaching out to them all, multiplexing a message to them, bringing all those minds together at once, into a union orders of magnitude greater than any yet. He’d had the same thought in that dance club in Saigon, high off the music and the dancing and the other joyous minds and Lotus’s amplifier-assisted mental feedback loop of the crowd’s ecstasy back onto itself. He’d wanted every mind in the world to be part of that, just as much as he wanted them all to feel the serenity of vipassana , the loving compassion of metta .

And now he had better tools to do it with. Shiva’s tools.

Memories swirled again. Architecture diagrams. Capability maps. Command parameters. Passwords.

Kade shook his head. Shiva’s, not mine.

That he laughed out loud at himself. There was no way that reaching out to a million minds would turn into anything but chaos.

Even with Shiva’s tools to filter and route and connect. A million minds!

All those minds were running Nexus. A million of them that he had an address for. They weren’t even close to all the Nexus users in the world – just the ones his bots had reached.

He’d closed the back doors, but he hadn’t thought to disable the bots he’d already unleashed. They were out there, no longer able to spread, no longer able to make root-level changes or peer into people’s thoughts (thank god) but still sending back pings.

A million minds. What could you do if you could connect a million people together?

“Kade-ji! Kade-ji!”

Kade chuckled and rose to his feet.

If it wasn’t Dr Kade it was Kade - ji around here.

A hell of a lot different than grad school.

He opened the door to his room on the top floor. Peered down. It was Nitya, the house manager, at the bottom of the landing.

“There is news, Kade-ji! Very big news!”

Next to Nitya was a smiling Lakshmi Dabir.

She grinned up at Kade. “India is leaving Copenhagen, Kade. The last leak did the trick.”

Kade felt his own grin grow wider. Well hot damn.

“And,” Dabir went on, “we’d love to invite you and yours to move to a new and more permanent location. Our research facility in Bangalore. Where we can really get started on this work.”

Kade closed his eyes, still smiling.

Maybe this was really going to work.

36

What I Want

Thursday 2040.11.15

The message arrived on Wednesday, and Aarthi herself first thing on a Thursday morning.

Sam smiled as one of the guards opened the door to the New Delhi compound, and the woman entered. It had been years. Three of them.

“Aarthi.” Sam stepped forward and embraced the woman.

Her old colleague looked cool and professional in khaki pants and a smart matching jacket over a pale blouse. Her black hair was cut short, yet stylishly. Her face had a dusting of makeup.

Sam felt drab in the ill-fitting clothes a Ministry of External Affairs staffer had found for her. Clothing had been the least of her concerns. Maybe after they moved to the new location in Bangalore.

“You look good, Samantha,” Aarthi said, standing back, her hands clasped in Sam’s.

“You’re a damn good liar, Aarthi,” Sam said. “And you look fantastic. ”

“It’s been too long,” Aarthi said. “Since Kashmir.”

Sam nodded. “Too long.” Five years, it had been, since they’d met on a joint Indian-US mission, tracking a bio-weapon find in the US to Pakistani extremists in Kashmir. The bond had been nearly instant – two women in a male dominated field, both at the start of their careers, both intent on proving their worth, and willing to work twice as hard as anyone to do so.

“You ready?” Aarthi asked.