Ramez Naam - Apex

57

With Friends Like These

Sunday 2040.12.09

The Avatar stood before the giant wallscreen, her eyes closed. Inside, she watched the traffic flow in and out of the Information Ministry data exchange in Beijing, petabytes of it, to and from every corner of China. This was the heart of the empire, the central location from which the firewalls were controlled, from which the censor codes received their instructions.

From which the Peace and Harmony Friends received their programming.

This was the pulsing nerve plexus that kept the populace tame and malleable.

And now she was going to invade it.

The next few steps would be her most dangerous yet.

One floor below her, a simulacrum of actor Wang Yao was running in local processors, receiving model updates from the Information Ministry’s servers. She’d been ready for hours, had been waiting patiently for this moment, for the occupant of the luxurious unit below to return home and start conversing with his Friend.

The Avatar reached out, straight down through real space, avoiding routers and net hardware infected with hunter killers, and inserted the thing she’d made, the virus, tightly compressed, packed with new code, into the Wang Yao simulacrum below.

There was a microsecond of struggle, as the Wang Yao simulacrum detected a fatal error and attempted to report home to the Information Ministry. The Avatar caught her breath. Then her virus reached the Wang Yao simulacrum’s central control structures, and aborted that command.

Another model update flowed from the Information Ministry down the pipe to what had been the Wang Yao. And the Wang Yao simulacrum responded, squirting a compressed version of her virus, disguised as a data update, back towards the Information Ministry.

Now… everything depended on whether the back doors her greater self had left there a year ago were still in place. So many things could have removed or blocked them. A random system upgrade. Replacing old code modules for new ones. New firewalls. A refactoring of the system…

In the worst case, the virus would do more than fail. It would tip them off.

The Avatar waited, her eyes open, facing the blank wall screen, waiting for any sign that could help her distinguish incipient success from failure.

Then the wall screen flickered to life.

A face she knew all too well appeared, magnified to fill the space from floor to ceiling.

“How may we serve you, Goddess?” Zhi Li asked, her eyes lowered.

The Avatar smiled.

Ling waited, and waited, and waited.

And finally, the monster in her head went down for another maintenance period.

Ling had played the good girl all this week. Every day. She hadn’t fought the monster once.

But every time the monster slept…

Ling watched, waited. Then she reached out, to the nanite nodes in her brain, that used to be hers, and slowly, carefully, began injecting little bits of herself again. Just tiny little pieces, here and there, where she hoped they wouldn’t be noticed.

I’ll be patient, Ling told herself. I’ll be careful.

She sniffled again.

Until I’m ready. Or until I just have to fight the monster. Until I absolutely have to.

58

One Flower

Monday 2040.12.10

Bo Jintao took his morning briefing before the sun rose, over a breakfast of congee and vegetables. Out the window of his office he could see the eleventh century elegance of Zhongnanhai, the walled palace in the center of Beijing, that was the heart of China’s government. Waterfowl glided across the surface of the lake in the center. Ancient stone bridges crossed here and there, linking stately buildings with their historic exteriors, their ultra-modern interiors.

This was his ritual, every day. To watch the light grow over this place as he worked. To get a head start on the day, to get a head start on the rest of the Politburo and the regional Party chiefs and the ultra-wealthy capitalists and the semi-retired Party elders and the generals and the department heads and all the rest.

His father had taught him that habit – of rising early, of working harder than anyone else, of having more discipline than anyone else – along with so many other things. His father, who’d risen from birth as a peasant farmer to become the Party Secretary of Chongqing. His father who’d be so proud to see him here today, doing what had to be done to strengthen the nation.

Bo could hear his father’s words. “Hard work guarantees you nothing. But laziness assures failure. Work hard, or you have only yourself to blame.”

“… small student-led protests in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou,” his aide, Gao Yang, was saying, from behind him. “Mostly on university campuses. Protesting the new research restrictions, the arrests of dissidents, and the removal of Sun Liu. State Security is seeking your guidance as to response.”

Bo Jintao turned to face Gao.

The display showed images. Posters. Crowds. Small ones, really. Just dozens of people, scores, perhaps.

He caught a glimpse of a Billion Flowers sign among the others and shook his head just a fraction. So many problems to deal with. The population shrinking, crippling the supply of labor, even as the elderly expanded. The massive growth of deserts in the west, swallowing up once fertile areas, as water tables collapsed. India’s expansionist streak, its military buildup and the ring of foes it was trying to build around China with its network of so-called “unaligned states”. The Arctic bubbling methane from the trillions of tons frozen at the bottom, even as China led the push to decarbonize the world economy, those bubbles warning of an irreversibly hellish tipping point that could be just a few years away, or decades, or safely beyond the point where the planet would start cooling once again. And above all, the threat of the exponential: that one of the millions of well-funded fools flirting with doomsday technologies would go too far, letting off a virus or a nanite or an AI that could replicate and end or enslave them all.

And these naïve pups out there, in this most dangerous moment in history, wanted to replace the sanity of a few wise, steady leaders with the anarchy of more than a billion voices shouting at one another, heaving the nation to-and-fro like a vast mob.

Madness.

Bo Jintao shook his head and brought his attention back to Gao Yang.

“Are all the protests this small?” he asked.

“None are larger than a hundred, Premier,” Gao said. “Deputy State Security Minister Ho says they could be dispersed in minutes.”

Bo Jintao spooned up more congee to give himself time to think. He had to set aside his emotions. Protests were destabilizing things. Not to be desired. The masses were neither mentally nor dispositionally equipped to decide the path of the nation. That was certain. But dealing with them was a delicate matter, as he’d learned.

“Information containment?” he asked.

“We’re filtering,” Gao replied. “High success. News is spreading by word of mouth, however.”

Bo Jintao nodded. He leaned back and regarded Gao.

“Do you know about the Nanpo incident? 2023?”

Gao narrowed his eyes.

“That is… censored.”

Bo Jintao chuckled. “Tell me, then. You have my permission.”

Gao Yang gave a small nod.

“An illegal protest. A few thousand, I believe. It was cleared. Video of police clearing the protesters spread, angering locals. The protest grew to tens of thousands, until the army had to be called in. There were a few… injuries.”

“Deaths,” Bo Jintao said. “One hundred and thirty-eight of them. Because the police chief mismanaged the situation.” He looked hard at Gao. “I was the police chief.”