Ramez Naam - Apex

Thursday 2040.12.06

It was Rangan?Kade sent. You’re sure of it.

Yes, Bo Tat,the monk replied. I’ve touched your thoughts when we merge in metta , I know to whom you send loving compassion, I’ve felt the feel of your friend’s mind. It is

Rangan. In the middle of all that.

Well where else would he be, dumbass? Kade asked himself. Where have you always been?

How long ago was this?Kade sent.

Perhaps ten minutes ago,the monk replied. I would have reached out to you sooner, but it was all we could do to push back a bit of the tide of suffering all around us, and see a few to safety.

You did the right thing,Kade assured the man . Now, please. Show me everything you saw and sensed about my friend.

The monk did.

And then Kade started searching.

Rangan held Cheyenne up, stumbling forward through the chaos. Smoke rose, filling his lungs, driving him to cough. Cheyenne groaned in pain. Someone ran into them, running to or from a skirmish with the police, and Cheyenne toppled to the ground, dragging Rangan with her. They hit hard and she screamed in pain as her bad arm impacted below her.

Her pain washed out over him. Oh fuck, oh Jesus.

He reached out with his mind, groping blindly all around him, searching, searching for Angel or Tempest.

Nothing. There were hundreds of minds around him, people running by in every direction, but none were his friends.

“Come on, Cheyenne,” he said, pushing up to one knee, taking her good arm over his shoulder. “Not far now. Not far.”

Kade tunneled his NexusOS to computing clouds he’d hoped not to use, invoked passwords he’d hoped never to need.

Now, he hoped they still worked.

Shiva Prasad’s passwords, passwords he’d taken from the man’s mind, just before…

No, Sam, don’t do this. He tried to do the…

Before Sam blew Shiva Prasad’s brains out all over the rooftop of the man’s fortress mansion on Apyar Kyun. Before she splattered Shiva’s brains over Kade’s face.

Authentication layers accepted the passwords.

[Welcome Shiva Prasad]

Shiva’s research had overlapped with the work Kade was doing now. The billionaire had been fascinated by the Nexus-born children, fascinated by their collective intelligence, their ability to solve inordinately complex problems. He’d dreamt of integrating them into a far larger network, connecting millions of human minds, every Nexus user on the planet, a posthuman intelligence that would stagger anything that had come before it.

With Shiva himself in the driver’s seat. Controlling the individual minds. Directing them. Sifting through data coming back through them. All enabled by Kade’s back doors.

The back doors were gone, closed forever.

But the tools Shiva’s team had built still existed. They could be used to sift data voluntarily released.

Kade fired off requests from Shiva’s cloud to every mindstream aggregator he knew of, issuing searches for every publicly shared mindstream in the DC area, all data from the last ten minutes up to present. Hundreds of streams came back, annotated with tags. He re-queried on the top tags, got hundreds more, then piped the whole set into the neural data sifter Shiva’s engineers had built, fed it the patterns he was looking for: Rangan’s face as the monk had seen it, in wig and makeup; the unique signature of Rangan’s mind; Rangan’s voice; Rangan’s name.

Execute.

His mind started moving forward, thinking about the other tools he could use…

Hits came back.

Four streams had matches on Rangan’s costumed face in the last ten minutes.

Two had touched his mind in that time.

One had touched Rangan’s mind just an instant ago.

Kade fired up the stream immediately.

He was suddenly in the midst of chaos, coughing, despite the bandana around his face. His eyes burning despite his goggles, yellow and black smoke all around him, people running everywhere. There were minds bombarding his, angry minds, yelling, the sounds of fighting. Fire.

He didn’t see Rangan out of this person’s eyes. He didn’t feel Rangan’s mind. He couldn’t turn their head. He was just a passenger.

He popped out of the stream, looked at its metadata.

Please, he thought. Please have a contact address.

It did.

He reached out to the mind.

My name’s Kaden Lane,he sent, with every bit of urgency he could . I’m one of the inventors of Nexus 5. And I could really, really use a favor right now.

“Come on, Cheyenne,” Rangan said, pushing up to one knee. “Not far now. Not far.”

Rangan!

He nearly dropped Cheyenne in shock.

Kade?

He looked to his left, didn’t see his friend, looked to the right, not there either.

Holy shit, Rangan, it’s you!

He turned back to the left, saw what was maybe a fourteen year-old girl in front of him, dressed for a riot or a rave, a black and pink handkerchief over her mouth and nose, giant iridescent bug-eyed goggles covering her eyes. The girl came closer and crouched before him. He saw his own crazy clown face reflected in fun-house distorted insanity in those oversized lenses.

Kade?

Jesus, Rangan, what happened?

Cheyenne groaned. “What the fuck?”

Someone tried to kill me,he sent to the teen girl with Kade’s mind. The guy who launched the hate broadcast.

What?Kade sounded appalled. Show me.

Rangan opened his mind, flashed the memory up and out at his friend, the man looming out of the smoke, then Rangan on his back, the man’s face an inch away. Cheyenne’s attack, the disguise ripped half-free, the mystery woman who’d saved them and turned off the hate.

Oh god,Kade sent. Dread came off him in waves. I know who that is.

You do?Rangan sent.

You’ve gotta get out of here,Kade replied. That guy goes by Breece. He’s PLF. He was behind the Houston bombing. And Chicago. And the assassination attempt on Stockton.

Rangan felt everything go cold

Here’s how you can contact me,Kade sent. A net address followed . I have to give this girl her body back. And see if I can talk her into heading someplace safer.

Rangan nodded. Here’s my address,he replied.

“What the hell’s going on?” Cheyenne asked aloud. She was up on one knee now herself. Rangan could feel her arm throbbing with pain across the link. “Who is this? What are you two talking about?”

Rangan looked at her. “Cheyenne,” he said. “Meet my good buddy Kade.” He shook his head. “And now we’ve gotta get the fuck out of here.”

John Stockton watched as the giant wall screen flipped through scenes of the riot on the Mall. There had been other protests, other riots, many of them bad. New York. LA. Detroit. But this… He shook his head.

The sun was setting over DC, now. The fire trucks had arrived. The flames on the Mall and the buildings around it were out. All but a few hundred of the most hard-core rioters had been forced out, and those that remained wouldn’t last long. Capitol Police and DHS had formed a perimeter around the entire Mall. No new protest would be allowed to start there.

Stockton shook his head.

Thousands of arrests.

Hundreds dead.

Dozens of cops dead, and hundreds wounded.

Greg Chase spoke from behind him.