Ramez Naam - Apex

“If Kevin Nakamura were here now…” she paused. Kevin. Oh, Kevin. “He’d want you to understand. The Indians? You’re still just a tool to them. You, me, Feng, the kids. We’re pawns. They’ll use us. They’ll sacrifice us if it furthers their goals.” She stared hard into his eyes. “Don’t forget that.”

Kade shook his head, closing off to her. “I don’t think it’s that simple. We’re using each other. That’s what cooperation means.”

Was I ever this naïve? Sam wondered. I guess I was once. When I had a family, when I had a normal life.

“Kade,” she said. “You may think it’s symmetric, you may think you know how they’re using you, but in this game, the pawn seldom knows what the king has planned. Remember that. The pawn seldom knows.”

41

Monster

Su-Yong Shu stares down at her own face, sculpted out of the cityscape of Shanghai, in this future she dreams of, this posthuman future, where she has cleared away the obstacles to enhancing the human mind, where she has ended the incessant war and stupidity, where she has replaced mere capitalism with a new economics born of quantum game theory, where she has ended poverty, where she has broken the iron laws of death and biology and scarcity that have ruled humanity for so long, where she has unleashed an intelligence explosion like nothing since the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens .

Where victory has given her back her daughter.

Her mind is spinning. The world is spinning below her. The landscape is transforming. The lines of her face are no longer buildings, but the trajectories of virtual particles. The blacks of her eyes are bubbles in the quantum foam. Shanghai is a lens into other universes.

Mad. I’m still mad.

She splits the air with a silver portal, steps through into another virtual world, a safer world, a grounding world, with its wide grassy plain ringed by the massive purple mountains.

She is in the white dress again, barefoot. The tall grass is soft against her feet. The golden chrysanthemum boreale , her favorite flowers since youth, are in bloom, dotting the plain with brilliant yellow, filling the air with their sweet perfume. The sun is perfectly warm against her skin, the sky a deep deep blue, the sun directly overhead. The mountains are glorious giants, capped in white, ringing her in majesty, comfort, and hints of adventure.

She drops to her knees, cups a flower in her hands, inhales its scent.

Could it work? she wonders.

She inhales again, savoring the sweetness, the sun on her back, the grass below her knees.

Maybe, she thinks. Maybe I can do it. Strike, and win, and save Ling. And more. Maybe I can make the world a better place.

“Every monster in history has thought the same.”

The voice comes from behind her. She tenses. Pain and anger rush through her, memories of torture and pleading and more torture.

“Chen,” she says aloud, the memories rising. “How could you betray me? How could you let me die? Torture me, just for fame, for money?”

“I’m human,” her husband says. “I’m selfish.”

She rises and turns, her hands clenching at her side. He’s there, not ten feet away. Chen as she last saw him. Chen at nearly fifty, his trim frame going to paunch, grey at his temples, a tailored suit, an odor of arrogance.

“No,” she tells him. “You’re a monster.”

“Hah!” He barks a laugh at her. “I knew my own selfishness. Real monsters think they’re pure and good. The real monsters think they have a vision for a better world . The real monsters impose it on others, through force if necessary.”

He stares at her. “That’s you, wife. You’re the monster.”

She feels her nails bite into her palm. “I’m no monster.” Her voice is level, controlled. “I want the best thing for the world.”

“And you know exactly what the best thing is,” her husband says, nodding. “Mao Tse Tung was certain he knew. Pol Pot as well. Adolf Hitler, of course.”

“I’m no monster!” Her voice is cracking, her muscles tense, her virtual body vibrating at the accusation.

“Of course not,” Chen says, soothingly. “ That’s why you brutalized your daughter. That’s why you sent out an agent of death. That’s why you’re about to wage war on humanity.”

“I was insane! You left me without input, without the clone, knowing what would happen! You tortured me! You brought this on. You and all the other humans!” She’s yelling, she realizes, gesticulating with her hands, screaming at her husband, who isn’t even real, who isn’t even here.

Chen smiles at her. “Oh no, wife. You had these plans long before this. There is a war coming. A world war. Between humans and posthumans. Isn’t that what you told the American boy?”

And for a moment she’s there, in Bangkok, sipping tea across from Kade, the rooftop restaurant on the banks of the Chao Phraya, the golden magnificence of Wat Arun rising above them, the Temple of the Dawn.

Chen is still speaking to her. “ The world has more than eight billion people on it , you told him. Surely we can afford to lose a few . You’ve always been this arrogant, wife. Always been this willing to commit atrocities in the name of your vision. You’ve just been waiting, waiting to let it out.”

There’s a buzzing in her head now, a chaos, a confusion. No. They hurt her, they wounded her, they tortured her. That’s why she did what she did. That’s why she hurt her daughter.

“No,” she says aloud. “No.”

Chen laughs aloud.

“No!” she yells at him. “You weren’t even there! You weren’t even there!”

Her husband opens his mouth and spreads his arms wide. Storm clouds boil out of the clear blue sky above, and his voice booms at her from every direction, from the sky, from the mountains in the distance, from the grass at her feet, from the golden chrysanthemums she loves so much, from the very earth itself.

I

AM

YOU

I

AM

YOU

The whole world booms the words at Su-Yong Shu, in Chen’s voice, straight into her mind.

NO!she screams back.

She lifts her arms at her husband, her fingers splayed, and wills his utter destruction. Gouts of white hot flame shoot out, lancing from her fingertips to his chest, his face, his thighs. Lightning strikes from the clouds overhead, twice, three times, four times, a dozen times, converging on the point where he stands. The ground below his feet explodes upwards in a surge of searing heat and light and force. His body is incinerated, pulverized, reduced to ash, obscured by a radiance so bright that nothing can be seen.

Su-Yong Shu falls to her knees, the buzzing in her head gone, released with the destruction of the traitorous part of her represented by her husband Chen, even as superheated bits of earth and rock and ash rain down around her.

She lets her head fall into her hands. Tears are falling from her eyes now. It was because they’d tortured her. It was because they’d driven her mad. That was why she’d hurt Ling. That was why.

How long? How long until she was sane again? How long until the input from this biological brain brought her back? How long had it taken last time?

“Do you like me better now, Su-Yong?”

The voice comes from behind her. It’s Chen’s, but different, kinder…

She turns, still on her knees, and he’s there. Not the Chen of nearly fifty who’d tortured her, who’d refused to touch her for a decade, but the Chen of thirty who she’d first met. Lean, a simple white button down shirt tucked into his black trousers, a wry smile on his smooth face, a telltale of the keen intense mind she’d fallen in love with.