Ramez Naam - Apex

Gao nodded a fraction.

So he had known that as well, Bo Jintao thought. Interesting. No filter is perfect.

“Premier,” Gao said. “Our censors are much more advanced today. No video would spread.”

Bo Jintao turned to look out the window, at the lake and the ducks, the serenity of this place, at the heart of the nation.

He’d dealt with so many protests over his career. Protests over particles in the air or pollutants in the water or soil turning to dust. Protests over corruption. Over villages being moved to make way for highways and dams and resorts. And over silly, stupid things – myths and falsehoods and rumors.

There were times to clear the squares. There were times to listen, to make the protesters feel heard. There were times to speak to them directly.

And there were times to simply ignore them.

Bo Jintao turned back to Gao Yang.

“Striking will only feed energy to the protests. Let’s see if they die off by themselves. Tell Deputy Minister Ho to keep them contained. For now.”

59

Lisa, Lisa

Wednesday 2040.12.12

It was a Wednesday when they took Lisa Brandt.

She was walking, on her way from her flat to the train stop, and from there to Cambridge, to her office at Harvard, when the black sedan pulled onto the sidewalk in front of her, cutting her off.

She turned, startled, found that another had pulled onto the sidewalk behind her, its electric motors giving away no noise to alert her.

She reached into her purse for her phone. But by then the men in black suits had her, were wrestling her into the back of one of the sedans.

“Homeland Security,” one of them whispered into her ear.

They blindfolded her, took away her purse, her rings, her bracelet, her shoes. They pried open her mouth and shone a flashlight inside it, then searched through her hair, patted her down brusquely and invasively under her clothes. Whether they were looking for communication devices or weapons or suicide pills or something else she had no idea. She resisted, had her hands pushed away and held down by one agent while the other continued the invasive frisk. She felt violated.

She was terrified.

When it was over she demanded access to her lawyer, was told she wasn’t under arrest. She demanded her phone, was given a simple no.

She’d been right, then. There wouldn’t be any time to enter the panic code. Wouldn’t be any time to alert the network that she was burned.

It should have been a comfort that she’d told them she was burned weeks ago, as soon as she’d realized Martin Holtzman was dead. That passing on his data was the last act she could ever take for the network.

It was no comfort at all.

Images of Alice kept running through her head. Alice as she’d seen her this morning, in her white bathrobe, her hair disheveled, little Dilan suckling at her breast.

And Dilan. Dilan who was so small, so vulnerable.

Dilan with Nexus in his brain.

Dilan too young for them to coach him to remove it.

Dilan who’d gestated with it. Who might not even be able to thrive without it in his system any more.

Why did I do it? she wondered. Why’d I put my family at risk?

They marched her through hallways, still blindfolded, through a door. She was pushed into a chair.

And then the blindfold was removed.

Sitting across from her, on the other side of a desk, was a well put-together African American woman. Shoulder-length dark hair. A dark business jacket over a maroon blouse. She looked like a business executive.

But Lisa Brandt knew who she was.

“Professor Brandt,” Carolyn Pryce said.

“I want to talk to my lawyer.”

“You’re not under arrest.”

Lisa made to stand up.

A strong hand grabbed her shoulder from behind, pushed her forcefully back into her chair.

“Not under arrest, eh?” she said, anger creeping into her voice.

“You could be,” Pryce said, her tone growing harder. “Your wife could be. Your son could be in non-human internment, indefinitely . Would you prefer that?”

Lisa felt it like a knife, like a dagger sliding up into her heart. They’d do that? Of course they would. They were monsters. Her face contorted.

“How do you sleep at night?” she asked Pryce. “How do you look at yourself in the mirror?”

Pryce leaned forward.

“You received a package of information from Martin Holtzman. Maybe more than one. Memos. Documents. Don’t bother denying it. I want that information. I want the originals. All of them, exactly as you received them.”

Lisa narrowed her eyes. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting at all. This wasn’t about the underground railroad. “Why?”

“Because,” Pryce said, “I want to know if it’s true.”

“That’s it,” Brandt said. “That’s all of it.”

Pryce nodded as the specialist used the passwords and addresses Brandt had given them to download the files directly onto Pryce’s personal slate. It was as Kaori had speculated. The originals were images, off-center, slightly askew, uncropped. And there were images here, pages of memos, parts of Becker’s diary, that hadn’t been released.

Pryce would use those.

“Good,” she said, watching as the specialist physically disabled the network on the slate as Pryce had instructed.

“I’ve done my part,” Brandt said. “I can go now?”

Pryce looked at the woman. Brandt put on a brave face, but there was a quaver in her voice. The woman wasn’t a threat, so far as Pryce could see. And God knew there was no reason to put her infant son in federal custody. But they still had to be sure.

“Soon,” Pryce said. “With any luck, you’ll be on your way home within hours.” She gestured to the men waiting outside. The men in white lab coats. The door opened.

Brandt looked around, confused, then frightened as the technicians put their hands on her, started to pull her away. “You said if I cooperated I could go!”

Pryce nodded. “I did. But first we have to make sure you told us the truth. I believe you’re quite familiar with Nexus, Dr Brandt?”

Brandt’s face turned to horror.

“Well,” Pryce said, “now you get to try a slightly modified version.”

60

Yingjie

Wednesday 2040.12.12

The Avatar watched carefully as Chen finished the preparations for the trap. She forced him to check each step, again, and again. Nothing could go wrong.

The equipment she’d requested from her new staff had arrived this morning. The metal box. The pressurized cylinders, filled with the molecular recipe she’d specified, one her greater self had designed out of curiosity but never deployed. Would it work as expected?

It will work, she told herself again. The only question is how fast.

That too, would be informative. A test, for a much larger deployment of this new molecular recipe. A much larger deployment with much larger consequences.

So much was going well. The censors were hers, ready to let through the information she wanted. The Peace and Harmony Friends were hers, selectively dropping hints, changing the narrative, priming the populace for the revelations and events to come.

But she was still so vulnerable, trapped in this tiny body.

And she was watched by a potential assassin – Chen’s driver Yingjie.

If only Chen still had a Confucian Fist driver, like Bai. Things would be so much easier, then. She’d have a tremendous resource available to her. Better yet to still have Feng. But the Confucian Fist clones had all been relieved of duty, after Ling’s attack on Shanghai. The old men weren’t complete fools. They suspected Su-Yong, and they suspected the Fist were loyal to her. So they were confined to barracks, and replaced by augmented Marines. And her path to free them was not yet open.