Ramez Naam - Apex

He’s an illusion, a fabrication of her own mind, a man who no longer exists, but still, to see him takes her breath away.

“Chen…” she whispers.

He steps towards her, drops to his knees in the tall grass, and takes her face in his hands.

“Su-Yong.”

His voice is gentle. His smile is kind. His fingers are warm on her skin.

“You’re not real,” she tells him.

He smiles wider. “I’m as real as any of this,” he says, gesturing slowly with his eyes and a small movement of his head, taking in the sky, the grass, the plain, the mountains.

Her hands rise, to touch him, to feel his own hands on her face. “You’re here because I’m mad, because I’m still crazy.”

“I’m here because you’re growing more sane.”

More sane.

She remembers now. She has metrics she’d built in her isolation. Monitors. Crude psychological and neurophysiological exams to measure her sanity, to project the time she had left.

She launches them, feels them take stock of her, compares the output to the last she has on record.

And it’s true. She’s stabilizing. She’s truly not as mad as she was. But still things aren’t quite right.

Ahhhh!

The tweaks, the many many changes she made to try to bolster herself. Crude hacks.

Su-Yong takes stock of them now. There are so many. Limits to the length of her thought chains to cut off her downward spirals of madness. Blunt exoself scaffolding forcibly adjusting the weights of virtual synapses towards statistical norms, undoubtedly throwing away good connections with bad. Forced adjustments to her virtual neurochemistry, to the levels of her simulated serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine.

So much surgery she’d done on her own virtual brain, trying to survive those months, to stretch out her sanity. Now… is it in her way?

More stability first.

She reaches out, tracks the flow of data coming in from the biological brain she’s connected to, and burrows into that brain now, exploring, and jolts back in surprise.

This was no drooling clone made from her own DNA.

This was a woman who’d lived decades. She was damaged, injured. But large swaths of her memories were intact. And those memories revealed a woman who’d lived not in China.

But in India.

42

Team Players

Wednesday 2040.11.20

It wasn’t until the next evening that Kade could break free from work and receptions early enough to bring the children together.

He chose the ones aged five and up, whom he hoped would be able to understand enough of what he was to explain. That was eleven of them.

They sat together, on the lawn, beneath a giant palm, in a circle. The sun had already set, and the sky was a deep blue with clouds touched by flame. The air was pleasantly cool at this hour, up here at Bangalore’s elevation nearly a thousand meters above sea level, even though they were close to the equator. Its breeze was fragrant with the scent of tropical plants that Kade couldn’t name.

I have something to ask all of you, and all the other children as well , Kade sent them.

Their minds gave him questions, eagerness, trust.

He didn’t want their trust today. He didn’t want them to act on his word. He wanted them to see, and understand.

He wanted them to help him understand.

And then decide.

He let down the walls of his mind to them, opened himself, and began to breathe.

In, out.

Slow, sure.

Watch the breath.

Observe it. Don’t control it.

Let your attention sink into the breath completely.

Anapana.

He felt Sarai’s mind open to his, her attention on her own breaths, sharing them, entwining her perceptions with his, their breath falling into rhythm, their minds falling into synch. Then Kit was with them. Then Aromdee, who’d come from near Chiang Rai, then Meesang, than Sunisa, then suddenly they were a symphony of mind, a harmony of mind, a concordance of brains resonating at the same frequency.

Deeper they went, deeper, breath slowing further, hearts slowing, minds falling more closely into sync, walls crumbling.

Atop the carrier wave of shared breath, shared attention, shared meditation, bandwidth expanded, communication expanded, consciousness expanded. Thoughts and memories blossomed out beyond the walls of single skulls.

The world became sharper. A dozen pairs of eyes opened and the world was glorious, a place of intricate detail clearer than ever before, a million blades of grass, a thousand shades of blue and pink and red and white above them. A hundred different scents on the breeze. The sounds of crickets, of birds, of vehicles, of people talking softly as they walked, of distant traffic and horns and what had been to them the chaos of Bangalore beyond the walls but now had pattern, had texture, had meaning.

This was transcendence. This was the posthuman.

Now , they thought, this request .

The part of the whole that was Kade felt knowledge sucked from his mind. The work he was doing. The Indian education project. What they wanted to study about the Nexus-born children. What he hoped it might add to NexusOS, and how that would affect those who took Nexus later, how it might change India. How it might change the world.

The whole pulled at him, pulled at the Nexus nodes in his brain, tunneled into his thoughts, beyond the surface, digging for comprehension, for possibilities seen, for fears, for hopes, and he opened himself wide to allow it.

He was part of that whole, doing the digging. He was himself, feeling himself burrowed into and giving himself to it, feeling his back arch, feeling his bandwidth saturated, feeling Nexus nodes sap hungrily at ATP to power themselves, pushing to the limit of safety, beyond, into the red.

The whole dug deeper, he dug deeper, combing through his mind, sweeping up images, ideas, facts, searching for and finding patterns that Kade alone would never have seen. Warnings flashed unheeded on the screen of one mind within the hole.

Thoughts flashed through them, almost too fast to follow. Navya Kapoor at the UN. Tears on Kade’s face. Sam’s trauma. The pawn seldom knows. Meditation with Ananda. Shiva’s research plans. Elections and protest in the United States. Ling’s absence. A building on campus whose explanation had been an evasion. Code structures, mind structures, thought structures. Webs of knowledge. Monks in lotus, thousands of them. A million minds they could feel now, every day, every day. Dancing in Club Heaven in Saigon, the Nexus Jockey named Lotus closing a feedback loop with the crowd, turning it into a single glorious organism not unlike their own. Varun, the Indian scientist who’d been anxious during the UN speech. Orchestra musicians becoming one. Clone soldiers. Su-Yong Shu embodied in row upon row of vast computing machinery.

Children. A million children. A hundred million children. Minds linked. Everywhere around the world.

Transforming everything.

Kade snapped out of the whole in a wrenching, jarring moment of disunion.

He was on his back, disoriented, drained, the sky dark above him.

He was panting, gasping for breath, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling, desperate to suck in oxygen. His heart was beating like a drum.

Oh my god, he thought. Oh my god.

The children were standing around him, standing above him, towering above him.

Too much, he realized. I was too deep, giving too much, pushing my brain too far.

I couldn’t keep up.

We’ll allow it , they sent him, in harmony, eleven minds sending down to him at once.

No.

One mind, posthuman. Alien. Remote.