Ramez Naam - Apex

“Oh mother,” he said, reaching out to her, putting his arms around her, dropping to his knees next to her in the mud that had been grass. “Someone has to risk it. Or we’ll all stay prisoners.”

His mother left, eventually, without him. She’d been trying to call him for days, she said. Her phone wouldn’t connect to his. Nor would his to anyone or anything outside the area of the protest. They were sandboxed, filtered from the world.

But they were growing. They had been a dozen that first morning. The boys from the chemistry department, plus the three who’d started the protest: Lifen and her two friends – Meirong and Yuanjun. Those three had been shocked at the presence of Nexus, but Lifen had boldly hoisted the vial and sucked it down, and then her friends had followed.

Yuguo thought she was the prettiest, smartest, bravest woman he’d ever met.

After that, Wei, bold, imprudent, incautious Wei, had gone about the grassy square, talking to other students, yelling to passersby, enticing all to join them.

And tempting a few here and there with the forbidden fruit of Nexus.

He’d been turned down and turned down and turned down.

And then someone else had said yes, and crouched down in the middle of a circle of them, and downed a silvery vial, and gone through his own transformation, and become one of them.

They had gained mass in dribs and drabs after that, as news of their existence had spread by word of mouth, as the twin oddities of protest and this exotic compound had enticed.

At nightfall, they contemplated heading to their respective dormitories and homes to fill their empty bellies. Instead a meal came to them, in the hands of a student, working the evening shift at a dormitory cafeteria, sneaking them food that would otherwise have been thrown out.

“It’s a sign,” Lifen said. “We should stay the night. Hold the square. Show them that it’s ours.”

She was the leader, by unspoken election. There was discussion over matters. But when she spoke, people tended to do what she said.

So four of their crew and two of their new friends went back to the dormitories and returned, their arms full of blankets and bedding they’d taken from the rooms.. And for once, the Shanghai night was dry.

The morning brought more students, more signs. Someone brought a giant, catering-size dispenser of green tea from one of the buildings. A popup tent appeared with a fold out table beneath it. At noon a woman who ran a restaurant just outside the campus, popular with students, brought them two giant baskets full of steaming hom bao , the hot buns filled with pork or beef or celery.

“We have a revolution on our hands,” Wei said a few days later, as the crowd swelled past a hundred. And then he went off to flirt with a cute girl standing at the periphery, and, if Yuguo was any judge, to offer her a sip of Nexus, and “guide” her through her first trip.

That was days ago.

Now they were hundreds.

Yuguo looked up. Above them, quadcopter drones buzzed by, constantly now, watching, filming, recording faces, their red lights glowing when the sun was down.

The insight he’d had from his Nexus calibration dream was as strong now as then. The game theory was clear. He was inside that game, inside the real world of it. For freedom, the people of China had only two choices. Come together, and become something more. Or remain apart, and be squashed.

They were hundreds, here.

But that wasn’t enough. Not when the world didn’t know, not when the authorities filtered every picture and video and description of this protest out of the net before it even appeared.

Yuguo looked up, into the dark telephoto eye of a passing drone, and shivered.

65

Husband, Lover

Su-Yong smiles up into the virtual sky of her virtual world. In her mind’s eye, the metrics continue to improve, but still have days to go until they return to baseline. She is hampered on old, imperfect hardware, cut-off from the net, in the custody of unknown forces, in an unknown location.

She hasn’t felt this good, or this much herself, in ages. Her virtual body tingles with it. The clarity of her thoughts sends an almost erotic thrill through her.

She hears clapping to the side. Chen. Young Chen.

She turns, and he’s there. The young man she fell in love with. That sly smile. Those lips she loved to kiss. Those fierce eyes meet hers. And she’s transported.

Whirling, whirling in the night. Dancing without fatigue at the gala ball. Two handsome men in black tuxedos, golden chrysanthemums at their lapels. Her men. Her scientific collaborators. And more. Her dashing husband, Chen Pang. Her equally dashing lover, Thanom Prat-Nung. 2027. China’s summer of endless possibility. The very peak of the gong kāi huà . China’s true counterculture revolution. China’s glasnost .

Let a billion flowers bloom.

To some it had been a summer of political idealism, when democracy in China had seemed imminent.

To others it had been a summer of scientific revolution, when new ideas shattered old paradigms. When creating minds greater than human seemed both possible and acceptable.

To others it had been China’s summer of love, when love was the law, and consent the only rule etched in stone.

To her it had been all three.

Later that night, in the limousine. One strap of her sequined dress down off her shoulder. Chen’s hand on her breast, her nipple hard. His mouth on hers, their tongues meeting sensuously. Her hand, finding the hardness in his pants. Even as, to her left, Thanom had his hand under the skirt of her dress, making her moan into Chen’s mouth. Her left hand, reaching over to Thanom’s lap, groping until she found his hardness as well.

And Thanom, drunk, talking, spinning his own erotic fantasies.

“We’ll be gods. Uploads. Immortal. Upgradeable. Faster and smarter every year. First mover advantage in the new base layer of civilization. The new substrate. And you, Su-Yong.” He pushed his fingers deeper into her, making her gasp. “You’ll be the first true goddess.”

And Su-Yong, pulling her mouth away from Chen, catching her breath, just enough to tell her lover, “Thanom… Shut up and go down.”

They’d all laughed at that. Even Chen.

Let a billion flowers bloom.

She smiles at the memory, smiles without any pain this time, smiles at this phantom from the past.

“We had our time, husband,” she tells this ghost. “You changed. You lost those ideals.”

She holds out one hand in his direction, palm open and up, and the figment of her imagination which is her husband ages before her, from this young dashing figure to the Chen of nearly fifty: grim faced, arrogant, prickly in his pride, willing to torture his wife for a modicum of extra wealth and status.

“Thank you for all the lessons you taught me,” she tells the figure.

She closes her palm, slowly, into a fist. And Chen Pang fades away, dissolves into the air before her.

“This is my mind, husband. And I rule it once more.”

66

Topology

Thursday 2040.12.20

The integration of active firewall features into mesh was coming along. They had it mostly operational. Rangan had seen it work in the simplest states, at least. With three or more people running mesh on top of Nexus, they could automatically compare signal inputs, find identical signals, and fire up a basic firewall pattern to keep the signal from affecting the user’s mind.

Tempest and Cheyenne were hard at work on improving it, getting the code stable and fast, adding fast peer-to-peer setup so they could spread the feature rapidly to others in a pinch, adding active counter-signaling, so a group of people running the firewall code could not just shield themselves, but also suppress the effects of a hostile signal for those around them.