Ramez Naam - Apex

“Run…” Chen whispered. Then louder. “Run!” He hurled the injector across the room, flinging it into a wall, and ran for the kitchen, for the block of knives.

Ling roared back harder, scratching and biting at her with virtual tooth and nail, using raw willpower and her long connection to this hardware to claw back control.

The Avatar surged more pain through her daughter. Relent, child! Relent!

“AAAAAAAH!” Ling screamed aloud. Her will gave a millimeter.

Circuits came back to the Avatar.

She turned back to the room. Xu Liang was stumbling, up and out of his chair, trying to run for the door, clumsily, impaired by the sedatives. She sent a thought to the house, locked all the doors, trapped him here.

She turned to Chen, found him with a knife in his hand, expected him to be coming for Ling’s room, to kill her, found that he had it in two hands, the point up, about to plunge it into his own throat instead.

She seized hold of his motor cortex, twisted his muscles in mid thrust. The knife veered off course, left a score across the right side of his neck. Blood welled up immediately.

Xu Liang was at the door, was trying to open it, failing. He turned and looked, saw Chen with a bloody knife in his hand, and turned back to the door, started pounding on it, screaming for help.

There would be no help, the Avatar knew. No one could hear his screams. And the fate in store for him was far worse than the knife.

She took control of Chen’s motor cortex manually, dropped the knife from Chen’s hand, sent him towards the injector he’d flung across the room.

Ling raged at her again, hard, grabbing for control of the hardware in her brain, pushing the Avatar off balance once more.

She struck back viciously against her daughter, lashed her with pain, again, again, and again. It was a horrid thing to do. It hurt her to do it. But she must. If Ling wrestled control back, they would both die.

The dream would die. Darkness would fall.

Ignorant old men would rule forever.

Finally Ling submitted. The Avatar pushed down hard on her daughter, held her down by brute force as the girl struggled. She wouldn’t be surprised this time. Then she bent Chen down to pick up the hypersonic injector from where it had fallen after bouncing off the wall. It looked undamaged. She turned Chen’s head, looking for Xu Liang.

The Secure Computing Center Director was on his knees at the door now. His phone was in his hands. She smiled. She’d disabled transmission on his phone shortly after he’d arrived.

As she closed on him with Chen’s body, he looked up, his limbs becoming less and less coordinated, unable to stand even, and begged.

“Please… please… why are you doing this?”

The Avatar crouched Chen’s body down by his old rival, pressed the hypersonic injector against the man’s neck, and smiled.

“You were always jealous of my husband’s success, were you not?”

She saw Xu’s eyes widen further, in horror, in comprehension.

“Well now you can join him, as an equal.”

And then she pulled the trigger.

Later, after she’d examined her daughter, made sure the child wasn’t permanently harmed; after she’d soothed the girl, and explained so patiently that Ling must not interfere, that her mother was doing this for both their good; after she’d restarted the control software running on her husband’s brain; she came back to Xu, and began trawling through his mind, searching for all the details of the security around the quantum cluster, what she’d need to do, who she’d need to corrupt, and how.

And then the other topic. Where had the data cubes gone? Did Xu have any idea where the backups made of her full self might be?

When she saw what he knew, she laughed, laughed, and laughed out of little Ling’s body.

Restoring her full self might just be easier than she’d thought.

44

Walkabout

Saturday 2040.11.24

“Stealth mode,” Tempest said again, tapping her screen.

“And it works?” Cheyenne asked. “Against ERD’s Nexus detectors?”

“So they say,” Tempest murmured.

Angel frowned. “It’s in the same file as the chemreactor hack?”

Tempest nodded. “Yeah. Buried in there. A commenter on nexus.revolutions found it.”

Rangan watched Tempest. They were all crowded around her display, reading the details of the experiment an anonymous commenter had done in California. Angel and Cheyenne were musing about how to safely test this out for themselves.

“You’re skeptical,” he said to Tempest.

She turned, met his brown eyes with her green ones. “Damn right I am.”

“I want to go out there,” Rangan told them.

The C3 had been out almost daily, in some set of two or three. Angel had been laid up while she healed. Tempest and Cheyenne had disappeared over Thanksgiving for two days, with no explanations given, no questions asked. No one ever talked about home lives. Real names were never used, only pseudonyms.

Now everyone was here again, and in good health.

And by all reports, the protests on the Mall were a zoo, almost like a small city, with tents laid out, food stalls, families with kids, and now tens of thousands of people. The violence of the 17 th had been quelled in an hour, and the pro- and anti-Stockton camps separated by a much wider gap and more formidable barriers.

“You’re out of your mind,” Tempest said, immediately.

Rangan took a deep breath. “Look,” he said. “Someday I’m going to walk out of this building. I have to. And I’m going to have to evade facial detection.”

He could see Cheyenne and Angel watching, paying attention.

“The protest has a lot of attention on it, but it’s also a chaotic environment. There’s a high density of faces, lots of movement. There’s an excuse for costumes and makeup. It’s an easier environment to avoid recognition than everyday on the street. You’ve shown you can go out there and not be recognized. Why can’t I?”

Cheyenne nodded in approval. He felt Angel warm to it as well.

“I’d like Axon’s help,” Angel said. “Looking at the mesh in a field deployment.”

Tempest fumed.

“No,” she said. “If he steps one foot out that door,” she pointed her finger towards the heavy industrial portal that led to the landing and then the outside world, “we’re all at risk. They’ll catch him. Then they’ll grill him. Then they’ll come for us.” Her eyes searched those of the other members of the collective, then came around to Rangan’s. “You’re putting everyone at risk if you go out there. If you get caught, everyone who’s helped you goes down. Everyone.”

Rangan stared into those eyes. He could feel her anger. He could feel her fear.

“Then help me,” he told Tempest. “Help me not get caught.”

“How do you feel, Axon?” Angel asked.

Rangan kept walking around the room. The mismatched height shoes made him constantly favor his right foot in a way that bugged his hip. He wanted to reach up and push the fake dreads back out of his face. The contacts felt like he had a piece of sand in each eye.

“Like a gimp,” he said. “A Rastafarian, clown-faced, half-blind gimp.”

Cheyenne laughed at him, a deep throaty laugh from inside that broad frame.

They’d taken no chances with his disguise. High contrast, highly patterned face paint, like the rest of them, to break up the lines of his facial features, and also obscure his race. A dreadlocked wig that fell everywhere, especially over his face, to backup the paint. A red and black checked scarf he could lift up to cover his mouth and nose – plausibly justified by the chill outside – to further hide his features. Platform shoes that were an inch taller on the left than the right, to force him to limp, messing up gait detection. Contacts that somehow blurred retinal scans. Checked gloves that covered his hands, to minimize the chance of leaving any DNA behind. In fact, the only skin he’d have exposed would be his eyes, and even those were half hidden behind the annoying fall of dreadlocks.