Ramez Naam - Apex

Was she planning to kill me? Breece wondered. He shook his head and got up to pour himself another drink.

The last identity he’d been using was burned now, but he had others. He’d spent the last few hours spinning one of them up, securing replacements for the equipment he’d been forced to leave behind at the old flat, remotely wiping the data he had there.

And warning the Nigerian.

Breece was safe, at the moment. Now he wanted to know who he’d been dealing with out there. Who had tried to stop his op?

He sank back into the chair with his fresh drink, then blinked, used his eyes to navigate menus painted in his field of view by his tactical contacts, paired them with the slate next to the chair, started downloading video and audio they’d captured to the device.

He’d been nose to nose with one of his opponents. He pulled up that one’s face now, moved it from the slate to the wall screen, blown up ten times larger than life.

Dark eyes. Face paint in black and white. Were those strong contrast lines meant to confuse facial recognition?

He took the image, and a sample of others he had of this man, and fired them off to a facial recognition service.

As he’d feared, there were no high-confidence matches. The low confidence matches numbered in the millions. He downloaded the data set, with biographical information, just in case. He could analyze that later. But another approach presented itself now.

What he was looking at right now, after all, was just a single, flat frame. But Breece had been recording from both tactical contacts.

“Load stereo vision,” Breece said to his slate. “Augment this face. Loop all frames.”

His slate obeyed, found the matching frames.

Now the face’s features grew more distinct, as image processing algorithms used the stereo vision to amplify depth, bringing the sharp nose and chin forward, enhancing the large lips, highlighting the cheekbones, indenting the area around the eyes. The face came alive, jogging towards him through the smoke, reacting in pain and fear as Breece clenched a hand around his throat. And then again, showing fear, opening his 3D mouth to speak, as Breece stood above him, his gun pointed down at the man.

There was something very, very familiar about that face. Now that the depth masking of the paint was partially undone, now that the face’s strong features were highlighted, Breece was sure he’d seen this man before.

He closed his eyes, thinking, reaching. It had been recently, he thought…

Wait.

Breece opened his eyes.

“Video search,” he said. “My feed from the Mall protest. Start around 8am. Find all faces on signs. Display.”

They came one by one. John Stockton’s face, on angry signs calling for his downfall. Stan Kim’s face, on signs calling for his election. The faces of Supreme Court justices. The faces of Nexus children abducted by the ERD. His left hand clenched into a fist at that. The face of a father, gunned down when he refused to give his child up. He had to fight to not crush the glass tumbler in his right hand, that image made him so angry. He forced himself to take a swallow, instead, to breathe deeply.

Then the face of a young man, Caucasian, Kaden Lane, one of the inventors of Nexus 5, went by. No, not that one. Then the next one.

“Pause,” Breece said. “Display this face, side-by-side with stereo frame loop.”

The slate responded. The wall screen showed a young Indian-American man on the left, dark skinned, beaming a wide grin, his hair bleached blond. On the right it showed a continuous loop of the man Breece had taken down, his head covered in fake black dreads, his face painted in black and white checks, his features augmented by stereo vision.

They were the same man.

Breece knew who this was. But he asked anyway.

“Identify the face on the left.”

The ping to the net was nearly instant. The slate responded immediately. “Rangan Shankari.”

56

Come Together

Saturday 2040.12.08

Yuguo put his arms through the straps of his backpack. From the living room he could hear shouts, angry yelling, amplified voices, the sound of glass breaking.

He sighed.

“Chinese President Bao Zhuang has offered to send legal experts to the United States to help it resolve this chaos. The ongoing violence and political corruption in America indicates the breakdown of so-called ‘democracy’. The slide towards complete state failure in what was once the world’s richest country continues. Party spokeswoman Ma Xing had this to say...”

Yuguo sighed, and walked to the kitchen to fill up his water bottle.

As he walked back, on his way to the front door, he heard Zhi Li’s girly voice replace the newscast.

“It’s so sad, watching the Americans destroy themselves, rioting over an election of all things. One step away from anarchy. They could learn a lot from us, putting wise, seasoned experts in charge.”

He couldn’t help himself. He stopped by the open doorway to the living room.

“Like you, Zhi Li?”

“Oh, Yuguo!” The bot smiled at him. He regretted opening his mouth immediately. It was stupid to argue with software. “I’m not any of those things,” she said. “But you know. People like Bo Jintao…”

“Does Bo Jintao know more about science than the scientists he’s stopping from doing their work?” he asked.

Zhi Li smiled sweetly at him. “Science must serve the goals of society. Those goals are not for the scientist to decide.”

“What if I want science that serves my goals? What if me and a few million others want the same? Why can’t we choose it?”

Zhi Li kept smiling. “China chooses together. Through the Party, and its leaders.”

“Funny,” Yuguo said. “No one let me choose who leads the Party.”

His mother turned to face him, exasperation in her face. “You’re making things up again, young man. We have more choice than ever. I voted for precinct council last year.”

The precinct council is a sham, he thought to himself. Invented to make you think you have a choice.

“Yes, mother,” he sighed.

It was a toss-up which was more pointless: Arguing with an algorithm or talking back to his mother.

It was bright and sunny outside, the sunniest day he’d seen in Shanghai in months. And it was a Saturday.

Lu Song glared down at him from a ten-meter-tall advert for his next film, the muscle man wearing little more than a metal loin cloth and boots, two swords slung across this back.

Yuguo shook his head and went underground for the trip to Jiao Tong.

He surfaced kilometers to the west, came up just outside campus, and walked through its gates. The wide green square in front of the new Library and the Computer Science building was dotted with students, lying on the grass, reading from their slates, studying, talking to their interactive tutors, or just loitering in small groups.

That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the protest.

Three students stood in the center of the square. Next to them were signs, planted in the grass: “Forward China” “Restore Science” “Return Sun Liu”.

There was one boy and two girls. They stood silently, next to the signs, not touching them, in the way that allowed one – or a lenient administrator – to claim that you weren’t actually protesting, you just happened to be standing near a sign that was protesting something.

Yuguo recognized one of the girls, he thought. Wasn’t she in one of his classes?

She saw him looking.

“Yuguo!” she said.

His eyes widened in alarm.

“Come stand with us!” she said.

He turned his head and walked faster. He was in a secret cell! Well, not much of a secret, perhaps. But protesting in public could definitely get you expelled.