Ramez Naam - Apex

And real, physical hardware was moving. Pryce tuned back in as McWilliams showed them, his voice carrying the somber note of a soldier who knows just how horrible his weapons are, just how terrible their use would be.

On the giant map that was the wallscreen, the Third and Seventh fleets were quietly re-orienting themselves, white and black streaks moving across an open blue sea. More than a thousand drone and human-piloted aircraft, a hundred robotic combat vessels, another fifty legacy combat ships, half a dozen carrier task forces, and almost a hundred thousand soldiers between the US and Asia had received new orders. Orders that placed them in a capacity to absorb, respond to, or pre-empt any further Chinese provocation. Miles overhead, almost a hundred satellites had had their missions slightly altered. NRO monitoring satellites had increased their surveillance of Chinese military installations. Stealthed hunter-killer birds were slowly, ever-so-slowly adjusting their orbits to put them in position to take out Chinese satellites should it ever be required. And the JAVELIN birds, codeword-classified space-to-ground weapons platforms, were running through tests of software that should never, ever be used.

Never.

Damn Miles Jameson for ever approving their launch.

Damn him and his people for not answering her calls now.

And then there were the nukes. The Third and Seventh fleets had their share of tactical warheads. The air wings based in South Korea were going on alert, ready to use weapons stationed there nominally to deter their North Korean neighbors. And below the waves, a dozen robotic nuclear missile submarines, stealthy, nearly undetectable things, were passing ever closer to China’s shore, their mix of nuclear-tipped ballistic and cruise missiles able to put as many as a thousand warheads down on the Chinese mainland with just minutes of warning.

What a nightmare.

Carolyn Pryce looked at the President, watched him as he watched McWilliams, and then shook her head. She wanted to just call her Chinese counterpart and ask “What the hell were you thinking?” But that would give away Intel. All of this, all these maneuvers, could be attributed to the coup, if they were even noticed at all.

CIA needed to dig deeper. NSA needed to intercept more. They needed to know what was really going on.

Assuming, that was, that the Chinese really had hacked Barnes’s home. She needed to talk to Lisa Brandt. She needed to know what the woman knew. But FBI and ERD were still watching Holtzman’s former student and lover from afar, still hoping she’d lead them to some additional clues that way.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs finished his presentation on a somber note. “Upping our deterrence level increases the risk of misunderstanding and accidental conflict. Any conflict here has the risk of escalating rapidly to unthinkable levels. I and my command staff are in contact with our peers on the other side to reduce that risk. My main request is that civilian leadership do the same. The more we rattle our sabers, the more we have to have lines of communication open.”.

“Thank you, Admiral McWilliams,” Pryce said. She meant it.

Never trust a soldier who’s eager to go to war. That was going into her memoir. This soldier wasn’t. And that’s why she trusted him.

Then the grilling started.

It was later in the day, waiting outside the Oval Office, when the President emerged with two other members of his Cabinet, that Pryce heard the exchange she’d remember later.

Sam Cruz, the Attorney General, was speaking as they came out. “…protests growing every day , Mr President. And this protest on the Mall, it’s illegal. No permits. Clear sign of Nexus being used. And there’s been violence. We ought to clear them out.”

“You know we can’t do that without a backlash, Sam,” Stockton answered. “They’re saying I stole the Presidency, and worse. Any crack down on dissent, and it only goes downhill from there. Fast.”

“I agree, Mr President,” Greg Chase said. “It’s to your advantage to leave the protests alone. And if things get out of hand as they did on election night, that validates you. The more rope we give the protesters, the better.”

And then Chase noticed her, and looked over, and looked away.

47

Briefing – Not Consummated

SUPREME COURT TO HEAR VOTERS’ RIGHTS CASES, DECIDE ELECTION

Tuesday, 9.07am, Washington DC

American News Network

The Supreme Court announced today that it would hear lawsuits filed in thirty-seven states by voters who cast early ballots for John Stockton, but later attempted to change their votes to Stanley Kim. The move to hear the cases, without any announcement of when a decision will be made, leaves the Capitol paralyzed with deep uncertainty over who will be inaugurated as the next President in January.

Should the Court find a right to change an early vote, some analysts predict chaos. The Kim campaign claims the result would be a clear victory for the senator from California.

The case rests on an obscure fifty-three year-old Supreme Court ruling, Foster v Love , where the Court ruled that while early voting was constitutional and allowed by law, votes were only collected in advance, and were not consummated until election day. The plaintiffs in this case are assisted by attorneys from the Kim campaign and the ACLU. Citing the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Foster v Love , they argue that every voter has the right to change their vote until election day. Especially in cases where important new information about the election has come to light.

The Stockton campaign…

48

The Dinner Party

Wednesday 2040.11.28

The Avatar watched on the house monitors as the pounding and clawing at the doors grew weaker and more listless. She watched as the guests succumbed, one by one, to the drugs in their food and drink, as the last useless phones slipped from limp fingers.

Only then did she instruct the house to slide open the door to Chen’s room, where Chen and Xu Liang had sealed themselves up while the drugs took hold on their guests.

Eight of Xu’s most senior staff. Key people at the Secure Computing Center and the PICC below it. Now they were all slumped across the great open space of this exclusive Shanghai loft.

Proceed,she instructed. She felt Ling struggling beneath her and kept a tight grip on the girl. There would be no mistakes, this time.

As she watched, Chen and Xu went from guest to guest with their hypersonic injectors, pressing the flat tips against jugulars, injecting the high pressure stream of nanites directly into the bloodstream, swapping ampules.

Xu did it happily, love and loyalty for her emoting from his brain. She’d been kind to him, had done deep reconditioning work, had software running to ease the cognitive dissonance. He’d done her no wrong.

Chen went from guest to guest in horror.

Ling struggled harder as she felt it. NO!

The Avatar clenched down hard against Ling. The girl should not be so strong. She shouldn’t be able to resist at all. No human would have been.

But no human would have had so much nanotechnology already in her brain.

No human would have lived with it for so long.

Ling was unique. Ling could resist her in ways that no other creature could.

Be still, daughter,she willed to Ling. It will be over soon. Then you can have your body back, and so much more.

Soon the staff were going through calibration phase, hallucinating, their minds opening to her as they came alive on radio frequencies.