Ramez Naam - Apex

My god, he thought. What are they?

But we want to be more than subjects , the posthuman sent him. Eleven minds. One mind. We want to be part of the team.

He looked up at them, at it, and what he felt was fear. What have we done?

Then they saw him, saw his fear, saw his brain sucking oxygen. And the distance collapsed.

Kade! We’re so sorry!

Alien dissipated in the familiar. Sarai and Kit and Sunisa and Meesang and…

Kade! Oh Kade!

Concern enfolded him. Childish, young concern for an injured elder. Minds probed his, searching, giving, bolstering. Exhaustion faded. Clarity returned. His heart slowed. His breathing eased.

And he saw what he was to them. Teacher. Friend. Brother. Champion.

Treasure.

Forerunner.

He could feel their minds enfolding him, apologizing, still searching for injury, learning, designing bulwarks against that happening again. And above all, caring.

Kids. He knew them. He trusted them. Because they trusted him.

Tit for tat.

Generosity rewarded.

That was the lesson here.

One more thing, Kade,they sent, a bit later, when they were sure he was well. Their thoughts resonated, harmonized, were eleven and at once one . Sam is right. The Indians are hiding something from you.

Kade nodded, absorbing, trying to see the whole of it. But what the hidden thing was, neither he nor they could say – it was an insight, a pattern, an intuition, of pieces not connecting.

And,they sent, images of protest, of chaos, of Nexus spreading suddenly faster. Something else is going on.

43

Old Friends

Friday 2040.11.23

The Avatar lay upon the bed in her daughter Ling’s room. Above her, the Milky Way slowly rotated across the night sky, replicated in exquisite detail on the ceiling.

Tension was escalating. Outside, Shanghai was lit by the glow from the buildings, from the gigantic advertisements, by the river of vehicles flowing through the streets. Tens of thousands of sky-eyes hovered and darted above the city again, vectoring thrust on their quadcopter frames, watching the populace more closely than ever. With their glowing red collision avoidance lights they could have been a multitude of mutant fireflies. Or a multitude of sinister eyes.

They were hardened, these new sky-eyes. Hardened in their little brains. Codes changed. Encryption keys lengthened and diversified. Communication ports successively closed until absolutely the bare minimum remained. Their leashes to central command loosened, giving them more autonomy, more survivability on the electronic battlefield.

Other hunters emitted fewer photons, but posed greater risks. The routers she had to reach through were being upgraded to new versions, their controls tightened, their censor codes more paranoid, their packet and protocol inspections more intrusive.

And in every corner, hunter-killer software lurked. There were forensic tools adapted for real-time response, ready to scavenge through digital heaps and stacks, read through every byte of memory of a corrupted system in microseconds, looking for any clue, pointing the way back to the origin of attack. They were dangers to her. She was frightened more by the evolved things, products of artificial selection, millions of generations of it, with internal structures that made no sense, code that, in the small snippets she could glean, read like baroque garbage to her, that resembled neither the output of human AI programmers nor the network structure of the organic brain that she and her greater self were based on. What frightened her most was that she did not know the capabilities of those creatures. She could not predict their behavior.

She would love to swallow the whole code of one of the evolved hunter-killers, place it in a sandbox, then take it apart, bit by bit, again and again and again, just to see what made it tick. Later. She could do that if she survived.

The Avatar shivered. The constraints on her were tightening. She must keep moving forward. And faster. Before the noose was closed too tight.

The doorbell rang.

The Avatar smiled. Their dinner guest was here.

Within her, she felt Ling whimper.

The Avatar watched through Chen’s mind, through his eyes, as he opened the door to greet their guest. Xu Liang stood there, grey haired, distinguished, a polite, aloof smile on his face.

Xu Liang, the Director of Jiao Tong’s Secure Computing Center, and the Physically Isolated Computing Center below it. A long-time rival of Chen’s. The sort who’d be intrigued by an invitation to a private dinner.

Chen closed the door after Xu, and offered him a drink.

She watched through Chen’s eyes as Xu leaned back in his chair, the remains of the meal Chen’s people had laid out in front of him. They’d disappeared promptly after serving, of course, leaving the two distinguished men to discuss their important matters.

The Avatar smiled to herself at that.

“Chen,” Xu said. “My old friend. I think your notion of…” he blinked, paused, seeming to lose his train of thought. “…of using the quantum cluster to model social unrest is a decent one.” He paused again, blinking, as the sedatives in his food and drink worked their way into his brain. “But why should they trust you ? You’re Sun Liu’s creature. You’re…”

Xu’s head was rocking slightly from side to side now.

“Suddenly… tired…” he said.

Chen’s hand reached under the table, brushed the hypersonic injector secured there.

“Are you feeling well?” he asked Xu solicitously.

From her husband’s mind the Avatar caught flashes of memory, of his own horror, of his daughter Ling standing above him, the injector and the ampule half-full of silvery fluid in her hand, as the nanites took hold in his brain, as her mind overpowered his, paralyzed him, as she leaned in closer, to press it against his neck once more, to empty the rest of it his veins.

Pain. Humiliation. Wretched self-loathing of himself that he was about to be used to do this to another human.

Hatred of her.

The Avatar smiled wider, relishing it.

She could have resculpted Chen. She could have eased his pain. She could have emotionally rewired him at a deeper level, making him truly loyal to her, ending the cognitive dissonance.

She preferred it this way. A program of her creation, running inside her husband’s brain, controlling him. But leaving him trapped within it, to suffer.

She relished horror rising within Chen as she prepared to use him to enslave Xu Liang.

Inside she felt Ling stirring more.

Stop it, please,her daughter whispered to her.

Oh daughter,the Avatar replied. We’ve only just begun.

Chen’s hand closed around the grip of the injector.

STOP IT!Ling said.

The Avatar ignored her.

“Water…” Xu whispered.

Chen ripped the injector free and stood. “I have something better than water, old friend.”

STOOOOOOOOOOP!!!!

Ling’s will ripped into her. The Avatar recoiled, shocked. Her daughter had seized back some of her nanites. Ling was reaching out with them, pushing on Chen’s mind, crashing the software she had running, the code that actively managed Chen’s behavior.

BAD GIRL!the Avatar sent back, coursing current through Ling’s pain centers, hurling chaos at the nanite circuits her daughter had managed to seize.

In the living room, she was vaguely aware of Chen, standing, dumbfounded, over a suddenly terrified Xu Liang.