Ramez Naam - Apex

It would be a bit sad to leave them behind.

The elevator clanged to a halt at the bottom. Its wall-sized metal doors opened. A moment later, the meters-thick stone blast doors of the Physically Isolated Computer Center beyond parted, and Li-hua led her team forward to kill Su-Yong Shu.

Li-hua took the central console seat as the others spread out to their own tasks.

She ran system diagnostic first. Su-Yong Shu looked remarkably good today, if anything. More neural coherence than they’d seen in months.

Had Chen done something? Had he tried some last ditch effort to try to bring his wife back from the brink?

Li-hua shook her head. It didn’t matter. Whatever he’d tried would be in the logs they’d snapshot with Shu’s brain.

She placed the equipment bag beside her and opened it. Inside the bag was a sealed electronic key which would activate the data output systems of the quantum cluster. Next to it, nestling in their separate cases, were four perfect diamondoid data cubes, each almost the size of her fist, each a marvel of high precision multi-layer carbon deposition – their structures more flawless than any diamond ever found in nature – capable of storing hundreds of zettabytes of data in laser-etched holographic form.

Three of them were for the three copies that would be made of Shu’s mind. The fourth was pure redundancy, in case of a problem with any of the first three.

Li-hua lifted the key out of the case, broke the seal with her finger, then slid it home into the appropriate slot in the console. The crimson orb of a retinal scanner came alive before her, and she held herself still as it played its red laser across the back of her eye.

A moment later, status messages appeared on the display:

USER ACCESS GRANTED.

DATA OUTPUT SYSTEM ACTIVE.

LOAD OUTPUT MEDIA.

Li-hua played her fingers across panels to the side of the main console, and three compartments opened, ready to accept the diamondoid data cubes.

She reached back into the equipment bag, lifted the first data cube out of its case and then into the console compartment. She did the same with the second, then rubbed a spot behind her ear with her finger for a moment, reached into the case for the third cube, and smeared that finger across the face of it, leaving a nearly transparent smudge across the diamondoid surface.

Transparent in the spectrum humans could see, at least.

Li-hua took the smudged third cube, seated it in its compartment to the side of the console, and tapped in commands.

DATA I/O TEST

DATA STORE 1… OK

DATA STORE 2… OK

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3… ERROR CANNOT WRITE

Li-hua frowned. “Jingguo,” she said aloud. “Can you come here for a moment?”

She re-ran the I/O test as the other researcher approached.

DATA STORE 1… OK

DATA STORE 2… OK

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3… ERROR CANNOT WRITE

“Hmmm…” Jingguo said. He was in his fifties, white-haired, fatherly, but keenly intelligent. She was in her mid-thirties and had eclipsed him – a rare feat in a China still more ageist and sexist than it cared to admit.

She deserved more.

“I’m going to use the backup data cube,” Li-hua said. “You concur?”

Jingguo nodded slowly. “I concur.”

Li-hua nodded herself. “Thank you, Jingguo.”

She opened the compartment for the third data cube, lifted it out, and replaced it with the spare from the equipment bag.

This time the test worked perfectly.

From there it was smooth sailing. Su-Yong Shu died in pieces. Li-hua watched in fascination as the diagnostics became more and more erratic, as her simulated brain became aware of what was happening, as activity spiked, even as each fragment of her was collapsed and written in triplicate to the waiting diamondoid cubes.

What are you thinking in there? Li-hua wondered. What are you feeling? Are you frightened? Does it hurt?

She shook her head. Irrelevant.

Hours later, at the end of it all, Li-hua carefully lifted the three cubes out of their compartments. The first two went into the first two cases in the equipment bag. The third data cube, with a perfectly valid recording, went into the case for the unused spare.

The third data cube rode along in the equipment bag on Li-hua’s shoulder. It rode through the parted meters-thick blast doors into the cavernous elevator car, then up the kilometer-long shaft to the top. It rode with her out through the security screens, past the guards who scanned them again to make sure no contraband had left, who opened the equipment bag, took careful inventory inside, verified that only the protocol-specified number of devices were emerging. It rode out into the Secure Computing Center, to a conference room, where Li-hua opened the bag again, removed the other three data cubes in their individual cases, handed them to the men from the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Science and Technology. It rode in the re-closed bag to Li-hua’s tiny closet of an office.

There it was lifted out of the equipment bag, into a small plain paper bag in Li-hua’s spacious purse, knocking momentarily against a nearly identical data cube, before its doppelganger left the purse to take its place in the equipment bag.

From there the data cube rode in Li-hua’s purse to facilities, where she returned the equipment bag and reported that one of the data cubes had shown an error and was being returned, unused, in place of the spare.

It rode with Li-hua to the surface, to the grey and soggy campus of Jiao Tong University, where power had only recently been restored, to a café where Li-hua ate noodles on a communal bench, stared up at a viewscreen showing a news program about the restoration of power and services to the rest of Shanghai, and almost absentmindedly pulled the data cube in its plain paper bag out and left it on the table when she departed.

From there it was swept up by the innocuous-looking female student seated beside Li-hua, who walked with the bag across the damp campus, towards the political science building, where she handed it to a dark skinned man carrying an umbrella as they passed, neither of them breaking stride.

The man doubled back a hundred meters later, walked out the west gate of Jiao Tong, and onto Huaihei West Road. He walked the kilometer to Hongqiao Road, his umbrella held high against the on-again-off-again drizzle. In the aftermath of the spasm that had shaken Shanghai two weeks ago, vehicle traffic remained minimal.

At Hongqiao Road a car met him. A darkened window rolled down. A hand extended, and the man passed over the bag.

The car drove west, three more kilometers, before pulling into an alley, and then slipping between the retracting metal doors of a building bearing a flag of orange, white, and green.

The flag of the Republic of India.

By then Li-hua was on her way home, daydreaming of her reward for this and the other data and specifications she’d passed on.

Soon she’d be rich, and famous, and Distinguished Professor Qiu of Quantum Computing, Indian Institute of Technology, Bangalore.

4

Meditation, Interrupted

Saturday 2040.11.03

Three thousand kilometers away, in the mountains of Thailand, north and east of Bangkok, beyond Saraburi, beyond Nakhon Nayok, beyond Ban Na, a lean, wizened man in orange robes stood against the balustrades of a monastery carved into the nearly sheer rock, a calm smile on his face, his hands folded calmly into his sleeves, the pinnacle of his life’s work around him.

Professor Somdet Phra Ananda looked out into the lovely narrow valley before the monastery: the gorgeous green-topped mountains above and ahead, with their grey flanks, the lake below with the perpetual waterfall streaming out of it, bringing the ever welcome tranquil sound of running water, the ribbon of river running far below that, nourishing rice paddies to the south, before emptying into the Gulf of Thailand. Nature was truly sublime.