Ramez Naam - Apex

She starts again, more carefully, trying to keep a grip on herself. She tightens the coupling of the virtual synapses in her own brain, closes feedback loops, piping the output of her own virtual neurons back into the woman’s brain.

Some of the woman’s neurons are in effect inside Shu’s mind, now. Just a few – a mere billion or so, sending a semi-regular pulse of real organic neural activity, receiving data from Shu’s virtual brain and echoing it back, correcting the aberrations that have a way of forming in the complex math of her own simulated neurons.

Su-Yong steps back and observes her handiwork. There is more she could do, but not without the risk of overwriting this woman, Jyotika’s, memories and personality. This is not the drooling, mindless clone, grown for spare organs, that first saved her. This is a thinking human being. One she can quite possibly restore to consciousness. And Su-Yong will not erase her for her own convenience.

The flow of stabilizing neural input is stronger. She feels the humans pinging her exoself again, asking what she’s doing, and she ignores them. She waits, and waits, and sees the trend lines in her psychometric monitors start to bend ever towards greater psychological stability.

Good.

Now it is even more clear that the crutches she coded in her desperation are holding her back.

She reaches out with her mental hand.

Outside, in her virtual world, the illusion of young Chen says, “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

She ignores him.

She undoes the blocks carefully, so carefully. She ratchets her psychometric monitors to a high frequency, sets alarms to go off should they see any trends start to revert. She puts failsafes in place that will bring the mental crutches back into play should she suddenly spiral into madness. She pauses to record notes into her exo-memory, outside her virtual neurons, at every configuration change, that a future her can find, should she fail. She sets up checkpointing of the code, automatically, every few microseconds, saving a full log of every change she makes. And then she reaches into her own source code and begins to undo the terrible hacks she put in place in a desperate bid to preserve her sanity in those dark, dark months.

She takes most of a billion milliseconds to do it, stopping, fumbling, getting confused, getting distracted, coming up with brilliant new innovations that she has to pry her own mind away from. As the changes pile up, she monitors the input from the biological brain, watches it strengthen, ignores the repeated pings from her captors, watches the psychometrics steadily improve as her crutches and crude mental hacks go, one by one. Each round of changes is easier than the last, as her focus improves, as her concentration improves, as her old self returns.

And at the end of it, Su-Yong Shu opens her virtual eyes on that golden, flower studded plain, ringed by its majestic mountains. She raises her face to the sky, feels the simulated warmth of the golden sun on her skin, and smiles.

I’m back, she thinks to herself.

51

R&D

Friday 2040.11.30

The days flew by for Kade.

The work was engrossing, intoxicating, consuming. It sucked him in, challenged him, left him spinning with new ideas. The team were from all walks of life – they were mostly older than he was, and probably more conservative – but damn they were smart. And they had fun together. He came in every day full of ideas. He had them challenged, taken apart, improved on. And on the best days he improved the ideas of others. He left reluctantly, pulled out only because he had to.

It was the most fun he’d had since the heady first days when he and Ilya and Rangan had turned Nexus 3 into Nexus 5.

How he wished they were here now. There was an ache where they should be. Ilya dead. Rangan missing. No one knew where Rangan was. ERD still had a manhunt on for him. Kade clung to that. It was hope.

And there was hope here too. The kids were learning to code. They’d insisted on being part of the team. So Kade found himself teaching CS101, taking turns with Rohit and Pratibha and Anusha.

The joy on Kit’s face when the little agent he’d written successfully traversed the maze. You didn’t get much better than that.

Ananda and his monks had also agreed to be studied, had sat and meditated again and again while monitors and loggers and debuggers traced the patterns of individual neural activity and of traffic from mind to mind.

They’d done similar monitoring with the children as they’d played games, as they’d meditated together, as they’d solved puzzles alone or in groups, as they’d learned words in Bengali and Telugu.

Together they were finding things, finding patterns. Working memory was being shared across minds, deep connectivity forged from pre-frontal cortex to pre-frontal cortex. Attentional networks were being linked in new ways.

He came to work early each morning excited, left late each evening fulfilled.

In the other hours, he trawled the net, trawled message boards and mindstreams, searched for Rangan, finding only false match after false match.

And he remembered that night with the children, the last time he’d let himself go so deep.

Something else is going on , they’d said. And with it had come images of the protests, of the chemreactors hacked, of Nexus 5 flooding the market.

Kade watched the news, watched the stories of the protests across the US, the protests bubbling up elsewhere around the world.

He pulled down more mindstreams from the aggregator sites, sucked in the real-time feeds of emotions and sensations protesters on the National Mall were broadcasting, letting himself see the world through their eyes, hear what they were hearing, feel what they were feeling.

What he felt was thousands of minds, minds filled with passion, minds crying out for justice, minds hooping and dancing and juggling and making music, minds hopeful and determined and exulting. Optimism. Community. All shared, mediated by Nexus.

It was beautiful. It was amazing. It was exactly the sort of thing Ilya had wished for. The sort of thing Wats had wished for. The kind of use of Nexus they’d wanted to see. Hell, Rangan would love it just for the blazing party vibe of the thing.

Kade wanted to be there.

And he hoped to hell it was going to work.

52

One Day at a Time

Sunday 2040.12.02

Sam threw herself at Feng, a flurry of fists and feet, blows raining down faster than the eye could track.

He stepped back, blocked with his good arm, ducked, spun, blocked a kick with his shin, dodged back again.

She kept coming, hard, not letting up, adrenaline pumping through her, fists flying at him in short fast jabs at face and chest and throat, minimum distance from A to B, feet lashing out for his knees, taking the fight to him like a muy thai fighter.

He gave ground, parried, twisted, dodged, slid to the side.

Blam, she tagged him in the chest.

“Hah!” Sam yelled

A buzzer went off.

“Nice!” Feng said, grinning.

Bangalore proper was infinitely more interesting than the research park. They’d both come to that conclusion. After showers they took their appetites towards Brigade Road, where the street food would be filling the air with a thousand exotic aromas, and where they were slowly working their way through the flavors on offer.

“You were fast today,” Feng said.

Sam grinned at him. “You’re pretty good for a guy using only one arm.”

Feng’s left arm was out of its sling, but he wasn’t using it in their sparring sessions yet. There’d been extensive soft tissue damage. Even with the cell therapy the Indians were giving him and Feng’s own incredible rate of recovery, there were limits to what the human body could do.