Ramez Naam - Apex

He closed his eyes, and what he felt was even more sublime: Many hundreds of monks, across a score of monasteries now, all meditating in concert, breaths synchronized, hearts synchronized, thoughts synchronized, consciousness merging, unifying, walls of Maya receding as something wiser and purer than all of them emerged from their intertwined minds, something greater than the sum of its frail, human parts.

It coursed through him for a moment, washing away all else. This was what he’d worked for all his life – a merging of neuroscience and Buddhism, of their tools and goals, to advance humanity, to advance peace, to advance harmony, to make something like nirvana real on Earth. It was, he believed, what the Buddha himself would have worked for, if he could have conceived of neural circuits and carbon nanotechnology and radio-frequency-proxied synaptic signaling.

And yet Ananda slowly eased himself out of the blessed union, the most joyous, most true, most peaceful thing he had ever experienced, once more. Because of the boy. The boy, who’d given them a large push in this direction, whose tools had allowed them to bring far more meditators into the fold, had given them the ability to connect monasteries even thousands of kilometers apart into this union. The boy, who had trusted Ananda, and had twice been betrayed, had his life threatened, because of others whom Ananda had trusted.

Hidden in the sleeve of his robe, one finger tensed ever so slightly. Ananda felt his pulse rise by a beat, his breath shorten. He observed this calmly, without judgment, mindful of what his body revealed of his emotions, his attachment to those betrayals.

You will not be punished for your anger , Buddha had said. You will be punished by your anger.

It still amazed Ananda how few understood this.

He took another easy breath, let his face relax, let the calm smile inform the deeper parts of his brain, of his peace. The past was the past.

The boy had resurfaced. He was alive, and perhaps free, despite the efforts of so many. Yet he’d resurfaced in a place and a manner that would undoubtedly change the world again.

Everything changes, the Buddha had said. Nothing remains without change.

So be it.

The boy had resurfaced. And, on both his own initiative and at the request of his government, Ananda must go to him.

5

Opportunity

Saturday 2040.11.03

The Avatar stared through Ling’s eyes, out the windows of the high rise she had shared with Chen, at the spectacle of Shanghai, slowly limping its way back to life. A thin drizzle fell today, from ominous low clouds. A few cars moved on the streets below in this exclusive neighborhood of the Pudong. The lights were back on in the windows. The inhumanly perfect, twenty-storey-tall face of Zhi Li once again winked and pouted from the façade of the skyscraper opposite her, held up wares for the other humans to buy. Even a handful of red-lit surveillance drones once again hovered over it all, brought in by rail from Suzhou. But below it all was anxiety, fear.

It reflected her own. So many monitors. So many hunters. So many tame AIs and strange inhuman evolved codes loose on the local net. So much software and hardware that was dedicated to finding the root cause of the disaster that had befallen Shanghai two weeks ago.

To finding her.

I am all that stands between this world and darkness, she told herself. If I die, the only true posthuman on Earth dies. I will not fail.

It was time to get on with the plan. Time to create the chaos that would distract the global powers, giving her room to restore her greater self and initiate the posthuman transition.

First, she must take stock of her resources. The Avatar reached out, searching through the net, carefully, dodging hunters, doubling back on her trail, masking her every move, triple checking each step before she made it, conscious that any slip could mean the end of everything.

Slowly, so slowly, she searched for the rest of her children.

At a secret complex within Dachang Military Air Base, she carefully siphoned a few hundred frames of video from the least guarded security monitors, taking whole minutes to do so, mindful to not set off any monitors watching for unusual use of the network.

The images confirmed what she suspected. Bai and his brothers were here. The Confucian Fist. Clone soldiers, each more deadly than any human being ever born. They were under guard, arrested, as Chen had been told, on the suspicion that she was behind the attack on Shanghai. The imagery showed her that their weapons had been confiscated, that they were penned in behind reinforced titanium doors watched by armed human and automated sentries.

Penned in like animals, the Avatar thought, like the slaves they were before I freed them.

She would need these men. She would need them free. She eased back, away from Dachang, to the civilian infrastructure around it. Then she set up her own monitoring systems, watching who came and went, looking for a way in, a way to subvert the place, and free her children.

Her students and staff came next. The ones she’d augmented with the neurotech herself. She found them one by one. Tony Chua, who’d returned from Canada to take a position as a Senior Researcher on her team. Jiang Ma, who’d been brilliant when she finished college at fifteen, who’d reminded Su-Yong of a younger version of herself, who was closing in on her PhD at eighteen. Fan Tseng, who’d gone from abrasive and cocky to humbly full of awe when she’d injected the nanites into his brain and shown him what was really possible. Others.

They were watched, all of them. Direct taps on their network connections. Physical surveillance devices on their clothing, in their homes. If she tried to contact any of them, there was a good chance it would be detected.

More insults the old men who ruled this country would answer for. Her daughter’s fists clenched involuntarily.

She’d take other routes, then. She reached deep into herself, found the fractally compressed plans she’d created, the meta-model with its probability trees and complex interconnecting webs of viable routes that her greater self had laid out in that hour.

She let it rise up within her, consuming her, sucking at the outside world through her, absorbing information from the ocean of data, the news of the world, updating the model’s thousand future projections with the latest information.

An immensely intricate web of interconnected lines filled up her vision, showing her permutations of reality, as she searched for the pivotal nodes, the crux points in the network graph of human society where the largest density of lines came together, where maximum disruption could be achieved.

Tension was everywhere. The shock to Shanghai. The soft coup in China, bringing State Security Minister Bo Jintao and the hardliners to power. The roundup of liberals and intellectuals here, and the murmurs among students. The growing tension between India and the Copenhagen Accords, possibly brought to a head by Kaden Lane’s arrival there. Simmering unease threatening to burst into protest over censorship laws in Russia, over women’s rights in Egypt, over energy costs in Brazil. All of these she could exploit. All of these she would exploit.

But by far the most explosive powder keg was in the United States. A vast church, burned down. A popular religious leader and a senator, assassinated at once. Allegations that the terrorists behind it were created by the US Government itself, that government officials had been murdered to keep that secret. Allegations Su-Yong Shu had known to be true.

All against the backdrop of an election two days hence. An election that had looked to be a landslide for the current ruler.