Ramez Naam - Apex

The Avatar took stock of what she had, trawled their memories for useful tidbits.

Then she started the process of rewiring circuits in their minds, neutrally reconditioning them, making them hers. Scientists and technicians were complex, delicate minds. These would require sophisticated rational-emotional resculpting to switch their loyalties while leaving their full range of intellectual faculties – the faculties she needed them for – available for use.

And then there would be tasks to assign.

There were supplies to gather. She was critically low on nanites now. She needed access to a chemreactor, needed feedstocks, needed more injectors for the next phases.

There was the infiltration to prepare for: alarms to undermine, systems to weaken, network ports to open, bits of hardware to subtly sabotage.

And there were other humans to “recruit” to the team, of course.

The Avatar smiled. What a splendid dinner party, she thought. The best I’ve thrown in years. I think I’ll host another.

Ling waited until the monster had retreated into one of its periodic states of hibernation. It had to sleep, or repair itself, or maintain itself, or whatever it did. And for those little bits of time, Ling had her body back.

She cried for a bit. This thing inside her was evil. This wasn’t her mother. This was worse than anything she’d ever imagined.

She had to be strong now. She had to be smart.

She eased herself up, out of bed, out of her mother’s room, out into the kitchen, to find food. The thing inside her sucked at her strength, leaving her always hungry. It wasn’t all that smart. It didn’t always remember to feed her.

Ling moved slowly, not making any sudden moves, nothing that would rouse the monster.

She didn’t bother to try the doors, or the phones, or the terminals, or the screens. None of them would work. She’d tried already. But food. She needed food.

As she fed herself, Ling thought.

I have to be smarter. I can’t just fight her every time. I have to use strategy.

She sniffled. It was hard. It was scary. Being the only one.

But she was her mother’s daughter. Her real mother’s daughter.

I’m Ling Shu, she told herself, as she stuffed dumplings into her mouth. I can beat this thing.

Then she crept back into bed and started to build her plan.

49

Tick Tock

Thursday 2040.11.29

“The Supreme Court’s decision is expected on Thursday, December 6 th ,” Rangan read the words from the news article on his screen, then leaned back. “That’s a week from today.” Anticipation and dread warred inside him.

“Could be an amazing day for America,” Cheyenne said, looking over his shoulder.

“Or a hell of a day to start a riot,” Tempest said, tugging at her disheveled red curls.

Rangan nodded.

They’d been working non-stop for days, on this new project that had pushed aside the mesh, pushed aside work for paying clients, pushed aside improvements to their anti-tear gas masks, pushed aside everything else on their collective plates.

Rangan’s head hurt from the continuous exertion. There were bags under his eyes. Cheyenne was quietly cursing at a carbon composite printer in the corner. Angel was holding a probe over a freshly printed circuit sheet and frowning. Tempest seemed frustrated to the point of anger by the network calculations she was checking and rechecking.

But the room was also buzzing.

Rangan could feel it, coming off all of them, bouncing back and forth from mind to mind, amplifying and re-amplifying, a feedback loop of adrenaline and excitement and fear and hope and the raw satisfaction of building something.

Or rather, some things .

Four of them, at least. One for each of the C3 and one for Rangan. More, if they could, for spares, and for some additional recruits the C3 had in mind.

Tempest called them NANCies. Nexus Active Noise Cancellers.

The riot-cast, as they were calling the thirty-seven-second-broadcast that had struck on the 17 th , was a Nexus transmission.

It wasn’t a hack. It didn’t use any back door. It didn’t operate at the level of NexusOS.

It was a broadcast of emotion, at the hardware level, below the operating system.

It was like the game of push/pull they used to play. Like being cooped up with someone using Nexus who was having a bad trip, being bombarded by their overwhelming emotions.

Regardless, like any other Nexus transmission, it was a radio signal, a series of precise electromagnetic pulses. Thus it was subject to all the same laws of physics as any other radio signal.

Those laws of physics said that with two simple receivers, or better yet, three, they could locate the source of the transmission. And by surrounding the transmission, and playing back its inverse , they could cancel it out.

Nullify it.

Now all they had to do was make it work.

Seamlessly.

Against just one broadcast.

In an environment where thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of people were broadcasting with Nexus.

And soon.

50

Self Discovery

India, Su-Yong thinks. Is it possible?

Her intent is to improve the connection, to improve her sanity, but she’s immediately distracted by this question of where she is, and when.

She reaches back to the memories of vomiting, in that first horrible moment when she’d realized what she’d done to Ling. The staff who’d entered in their white environment suits. The clear faceplates. The white surgical masks behind them.

Freeze the memory.

Extract the image.

Zoom in on what she’d seen behind the nearest faceplate.

Brown skin. Dark eyes. Indian facial features.

India.

She reaches back into the mind of the woman whose brain she was inhabiting. Jyotika. That is her name. Jyotika .

We’re going to become very close, Jyotika,Su-Yong sends to the woman.

And it’s true. Perhaps… just perhaps… she can even help repair this woman. But for now, Jyotika has much more to teach Su-Yong.

Su-Yong pulls up memories. Jyotika is a maid, was a maid, working for a cleaning company that mostly tended the homes of high tech workers. In India’s high tech hub of Bangalore.

Bangalore. Of course. If Su-Yong had to guess at where a quantum cluster might exist in India, Bangalore would top the list of guesses, ahead of Hyderabad, ahead of Delhi.

It could all be a trick, of course. A cleverly constructed ruse to fool her. She would have to stay alert for manipulations that depended on her assumption that she was in India. But it would do for a provisional guess.

One more thing to learn, then. She has an idea of where she is.

But when is this? Have years passed? More? Is Ling dead already? Or is it possible her other self has proven victorious?

Clear faceplates, data scrolling across them.

She pulls back those memories, what she’d seen through Jyotika’s eyes, refocuses her attention.

Reversed text. Numerals and acronyms. Vitals on Jyotika’s body. Blood pressure. Pulse. Respiration. Temperature.

And there. A timestamp.

40.11.30

Only days have passed. Less than a single month since they’d shut her down. Which means that Ling is likely still alive.

Su-Yong feels her internal state roil at the new data. Her emotions bounce through joy and fear and anxiety and anger and self-loathing.

Oh dear Turing.

This is why she’s here. This is why she’s burrowing into this mind, to boost the signal, boost its stabilizing impact on herself. The data flowing into Su-Yong’s virtual mind is not via the relatively crude nano-probes they’d inserted into her clone in the first generation, but via Nexus 5 nodes suffusing the comatose woman’s brain. And this technology, of course, is an iteration atop her own. She reaches into the nanite nodes, reconfigures them, ups their sensitivity, tracks the flow of data back into her own virtual neurons, gets distracted again, loses her place, has to backtrack, fix what she’s done.