Ramez Naam - Apex

She raised a hand, cut him off.

“What I won’t do,” Kate said, her eyes locked with his, “is use force, or coercion, against people who are fundamentally on our side . Who are the same as us. ”

The Nigerian went frosty at that. “They’re not the same as us. They’re sheep, most of them, letting it happen to them. We’re wolves, taking the risks, taking on the fight that they won’t.”

Breece raised his hand to forestall his friend, to stop him from triggering Kate further.

Kate sliced her hand through the air in frustration. “Don’t start with that fucking separatist sheep and wolves bullshit with me, Akindele!”

“You may not call me that name.” The Nigerian started to stand.

“Whoa, whoa!” Breece held out both hands, placatingly. “Easy, both of you.”

Kate turned to him. “Cancel the op.”

The Nigerian sat back into his chair. “You’re turning soft, Catherine,” he said. “Like I’ve never seen you before.”

Breece looked at his friend. “Shut it for a minute, OK?”

He turned back to Kate. She was still staring at him.

“This separatist bullshit isn’t right,” she said. “Everyone has the potential to upgrade. We’ve been arguing it for years. But we’ve never attacked people on our side.”

Breece sucked in a deep breath, let it out again. “It’s not an attack,” he said. “It’s an encouragement. We’re pushing them to fight for their rights.”

Kate scowled.

Breece went on. “Kate, if you want to sit this one out… No problem at all. You’ve done plenty for the cause. You’ve more than earned a break.”

Kate’s frown deepened. “I don’t want to sit this out. We cancel the op. Let the protesters go their own way. You saw what we did out there. Those people lost their minds. That’s offensive action , and that’s for use against our enemies .”

Breece shook his head silently.

Kate leaned back. “What happened to unanimity for ops?”

Breece looked down at the surface of the table. “This is our chance.” He looked back up at Kate. “I know it rankles. I wish we didn’t need it. But it’s a little nudge. It’s temporary. It gets them fighting for their rights, the way they should be. And that little, temporary nudge drives a huge positive change, that expands their freedoms, that benefits them and millions of other people. Maybe hundreds of millions.” He paused for breath. He’d been raising his voice he realized. Kate was looking at him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. God what he’d give for some Nexus in their brains right now. “Kate,” he went on, his voice calm now. “You’re right. This might be grey. But there’s so much upside. I’m willing to cross a few lines to do that much good. We won’t get a shot like this again anytime soon.”

“Breece…” Kate said, her voice low and steady. “Don’t do this. Don’t change like this.”

“Nothing’s changing.” He leaned towards her, reaching out one hand across the table for hers, trying to touch her, trying to make her see. “We’re so close to what we’ve wanted…”

“I thought we wanted to lift people up,” she said. She didn’t take his hand. “You can’t do that by betraying your allies. Cancel the op.”

Breece stared into her eyes, beseeching.

“I can’t, Kate. The opportunity’s too big.”

“Damn it,” she cursed.

Kate jerked up out of her seat.

Breece pulled back in alarm, his chest pounding.

She strode out of the kitchen, not looking back.

“Kate!” he yelled.

She disappeared from sight. He heard her go into the room they shared, heard footsteps, heard the front door open. Then heard it slam shut.

Across the table, the Nigerian breathed hard, his hands clenching and unclenching.

39

Progress

Monday 2040.11.18

Kade met his new team on Monday, in Bangalore. The Indian government had moved Kade, Feng, Sam, and the children over the weekend, from surprisingly calm Delhi to chaotically raucous Bangalore. Ananda and a group of five monks, done with the summit, had been allowed to come with them. After five hours of flying, it had taken three hours on the roads in an armored bus, flanked by police, to make their way through a traffic melee of cars, scooters, rickshaws, mobile restaurants, and suicidally brave pedestrians. At one point a twelve foot tall animatronic Hindu god on wheels passed them, and turned its head to stare at Kade with its third eye set in its blue-skinned god-droid head.

Kade stared back.

The eye blinked.

The children loved it, their minds taking in everything, shooting observations to each other thick and fast, faster than Kade could follow, giggling, laughing, drawing insights and recognizing patterns he never would have noticed.

Now, at last, they were in an oasis of calm, a wide, green, secure research campus run by some secretive sub-ministry of the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology, walled off from the rest of Bangalore, with housing in a cluster of colonial-era homes surrounded by palm trees.

And it was time for Kade to go to work.

Lakshmi Dabir gave him a tour of the campus, sketching out what happened in various buildings, though she seemed rather evasive on one or two. Then she led him to the building where he’d be working, a hypermodern glass and carbon structure set among the lush trees, and he met the men and women he’d be working with.

The names came thick and fast. Srini, Gopal, Pratibha, Rohit, Amit, Ashanti, Girish, Deepak, the other Amit, the other Rohit, and Anusha.

And those were just the team leads.

The overall project was under the direction of Lakshmi Dabir herself.

Kade’s job, as she explained it to the team leads, was to be a technical advisor. Which was as poorly defined a role as he’d ever heard.

Kade smiled at these men and women around him as Dabir talked. The coders had all built more software than he had. The neuroscientists had years more experience than he did. There were nanoscientists and biomaterial specialists and medical ethicists and educational neuropsychologists. They were all running Nexus. Everyone was putting up a front of polite enthusiasm. Beneath that he felt a whole range – from resentment, to curiosity, to outright awe.

Well, this’ll be interesting, he thought.

Kade kept smiling, kept trying to project humility and a desire to learn.

When in doubt, someone had told him, try to add value.

The next several hours were an awesome blur of technical achievements that dispelled any doubt in Kade’s mind.

This was a rock star team.

They gave him a tour of the work they’d done over the last few months. Their idea of a tour was linking up via Nexus to the experts in the area, and plunging him right into demos and direct neural assimilation of their project plans, architectures, experimental results, and code structures.

There was too much. Waaaaay too much. It was like drinking from a fire hose. If the hose was the diameter of the moon.

Kade fucking loved it.

Pri 1 was education. They had plenty of other goals down the road: use Nexus to boost productivity in engineering and the sciences, to help in mental health, and so on. But from the PM down the message was clear: their job was to make India’s students – child and adult, able to learn faster.

And they were building a heck of a platform. On the research side they’d coded tools for analyzing communication, learning, and retention. They were building adaptive systems that used Nexus to see right away when a lesson wasn’t getting through, or wasn’t going to be retained, diagnose why, or just repeat it. They had libraries of mental lessons, curated first-hand memories that kids could absorb, live through. And for the coders themselves they were beefing up the developer tools – better environments, better debuggers, virtual whiteboards and shared coding spaces.