Ramez Naam - Apex

There were footsteps behind him, then a hand on his shoulder.

“Yuguo!”

He turned to face her. She was almost his height, with strong features, fiery eyes.

What was her name?

“Join us!” she whispered urgently.

“You’ll be expelled!” he whispered back.

“Not if enough of us come together,” she said. “Not if we reach critical mass! We’re weak apart, but strong together!”

She was right. It was a critical mass phenomenon. If enough people rose up, all at once, then everyone else would feel safe in rising up too. But with just a few…

He looked at her, looked over at her two friends. “There’s just three of you,” he said sadly. “I’m sorry.”

He turned away, in shame, and walked faster.

“Yuguo,” she said to his back. “My name is Lifen.”

“It’s game theory,” Xiaobo said.

They were crowded into the maintenance room of the Chemistry Building, with its pipes and concrete and dark dinginess. Yuguo sat on an overturned bucket, listening in a funk. It was futile, that’s what it was. It was depressing.

“Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Xiaobo went on.

“Who’s being asked to defect?” Lee asked.

Xiaobo shook his head. “Everyone in China is a defector. Everyone who isn’t out there protesting right now. Doing nothing is defection. Doing nothing is betrayal. And as long as enough of us do nothing, the whole country gets a negative payoff. We get the government we deserve.”

Longwei nodded. “All that’s required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing,” he said.

Xiaobo smiled. “ When bad men combine ,” he quoted. “ The good must combine; else they will fall one by one. Edmund Burke. Prisoner’s Dilemma by any other name.”

“So do we all go join the protests?” Yuguo asked quietly.

Lee leaned back. “You know what happens to cooperators in Prisoner’s Dilemma. Someone else defects. You get it worse.”

It was the same old problem. No one wanted to go first, or even fourth, or even four hundredth. No one wanted to be in the first wave.

There was a sound at the door. Knock-pause-knock-knock-knock-pause-knock.

Lee went to check.

It was Wei, with a satchel, and a huge smile across his face.

“What have you got there, Wei?” Xiaobo asked.

Wei just grinned wider, opened his bag, and pulled out a vial, which he held up to the light in the center of room.

Within it, silvery fluid swirled, almost with a mind of its own.

Yuguo’s breath caught in his chest.

“Nexus!” Wei said.

The shock hit them all hard. Then the questions came, and the babbling, excited burble of a dozen boys talking over each other.

“Hold on!” Wei said. “I made it in the chemreactor on the third floor, this building. Today . Just now.”

“That’s impossible,” Lee said. “It’s a banned chemical! The chemreactors are all locked down! Just like all the 3D printers and circuit printers!”

“Not anymore,” Wei grinned.

“How much did you make?” Xiaobo asked.

“Not much,” Wei said, casually. “Sixty doses.”

“Sixty!” Lee exclaimed. “You could get the death penalty for that!”

“I could have made thousands,” Wei said, a satisfied look on his face. “Maybe tens of thousands.” He turned the vial end over end in his hand, still holding it aloft, his eyes locked on it. The silver fluid swirled, tendrils of it reaching out, as if taunting Yuguo, taunting him with the utter impossibility of it, with the folly of it, with the complete illegality of it.

“It’s pure,” Wei said. “And there’s a new trick that hides you from Nexus sensors.”

He brought his eyes down and looked at all of them. “I took some just before I knocked on the door,” he proclaimed. “Who wants to go next?”

“I do,” Yuguo heard himself say. Somehow he’d come to his feet.

Yuguo fell apart, into a thousand little pieces. He felt it happen, fragments of his mind detaching from the rest, splitting off, becoming their own, being mapped by Nexus.

Here was Yuguo’s knowledge of coding, his comprehension of data structures, of objects and methods, of intents and game players, of threads and loops and conditions. Here was football Yuguo, the precise way his left foot grounded into the grass and his hips swiveled and his arm balanced as his right foot shot forward to kick the checked ball at the goal. Here was Yuguo’s shy lust for girls, the patterns his eyes drew over their curves when he saw them, the anxiety that struck him dumb when they were near.

Here was Yuguo’s despair that had led him to this room, his quiet dread that his country and the world were getting worse instead of better, that the future was one of slow strangulation at the electronic hands of smiling tame AIs with famous faces, their forked tongues lapping out of the viewscreens to feed saccharine to the masses, the old men who’d always ruled China laughing and holding their leashes.

Here were the words a young woman had said to him just minutes ago. “Critical mass. Weak apart, strong together.” Here were her eyes, fiery eyes, hanging in space. Here was her name: Lifen.

Then those pieces fell apart, into smaller pieces, which fell apart into fragments even smaller: Yuguo’s sensation of red. Yuguo’s concept of 1 and 0. Yuguo’s left thumb. The sound in Yuguo’s head when he heard the third note of his favorite pop song. Yuguo’s yes. Yuguo’s no. Yuguo’s and. Yuguo’s or. Yuguo’s xor. Yuguo’s now. Yuguo’s future. Yuguo’s past.

He could see himself now. He was a golden statue of Yuguo, immobile, one foot in front of the other, standing in a space of white light. But the statue wasn’t solid, it was made of grains, millions of grains, flecks of gold dust, millions of parts of him. And as he watched they were separating, pulling gradually apart, so that he was no longer a single entity but a cloud, a fog, a fog of Yuguo, and if a strong wind came, he would just blow away, and if the pieces split any more he knew there wouldn’t be any such thing as Yuguo left at all.

Yuguo’s fear.

Yuguo’s end.

And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind.

I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me.

I’m Yuguo!

His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood.

There were minds around him. Wei. Xiaobo. Longwei. More. Even Lee had done it. All of them. He could feel them, feel their thoughts, feel them tripping through their own inner journeys, their own self-discoveries, so different from his own.

Yet all the same. All flecks of gold, all grains of sand, yet part of a whole.

The only way to survive.

He was on his feet now. His friends were laid out on the bare concrete floor of the dingy room. But there was sunlight up above. A woman named Lifen, who’d told him the truth. And a revolution to be won.

“I understand,” he said aloud.

Eyes snapped open all around him.

“Fall apart, and cease to be. Or come together, and be something more.”

They were looking at him, staring at him. He could feel their minds tugging at his, feeding his. Wei. Wei was nodding, was trying to get up. Yuguo could sense the comprehension in his friend’s mind. Wei understood what he was thinking.

Yuguo spoke again. “I won’t defect anymore.”

And then he stumbled towards the door, and towards the revolution.

Behind him, he sensed minds pulling themselves together to follow.