Ramez Naam - Apex

Rangan had moved on to a different part of the project.

“I saw the crowd as one organism,” he’d told Angel, one night, shortly after the riots. He’d shared the flash he’d had when he touched that monk’s mind. He’d had more like it since then, when he’d touched Kade’s, when he’d lived through some of the things Kade had experienced. Groups really could be single minds.

“It turned into a mob,” he went on. “Just like you said crowds do, when I was first helping you with the mesh…”

Angel nodded. She moved her finger in the air, drew something in the virtual whiteboard between them, a shared hallucination in their mind created by Nexus, an app in their shared library.

“Here’s the network structure of a crowd running Nexus,” he said.

It was little more than a grid, with short lines radiating in a star from each person, everyone able to talk to their nearby neighbors, everyone with roughly the same number of connections, if the crowd was of even density. Signals hopped from one mind to another, but along the way they were reinterpreted. It was a game of telephone, losing and distorting meaning at every step. Simple, dumb emotions traveled best.

“And here,” she said, “is what it might look like with the whole crowd running mesh… if we finished it.”

The second network structure was different, many short lines, but also medium length lines, long lines, and super long lines. Some minds had tens of connections to others. Some had hundreds. Some had thousands, or tens of thousands.

Signals could hop directly from one side of the crowd to another. No game of telephone. No distortion. Subtle ideas could spread. Complex ideas. Whole thoughts. Not just urges.

Rangan stared at it.

“You know what it reminds me of?” he asked. “It’s the network structure of a human brain.”

Angel nodded. “They’re both power law distributions. Same with the net.”

“The intelligence is in the interconnectivity…” he said. “That’s what Ilya’s metrics always said. The smartest networks had both local connections and those super long distance connections. Every node was only a few hops from every other node.”

“Well,” Angel said, “if we want this kind of structure to emerge, then we have to finish the code. We have to build the features to let people choose whose minds to subscribe to, and to multiplex those transmissions, so one person’s thoughts can be tuned into by thousands or more.”

Rangan stared at the diagram. “And we have to hope people choose to tune into the folks who want a peaceful protest, instead of the assholes.”

Angel laughed. “Yeah. That too.”

67

A Funny Thing Happened Today

Thursday 2040.12.20

Zhi Li hugged the housewife one more time.

“It was such a joy to finally meet you!” she told the woman.

There were tears on the woman’s face. Her arms stayed wrapped around Zhi, pulling her tight, clinging to her as if Zhi alone could save her from drowning. For a moment Zhi had an awful image of having to ask Qi or Dai to pry this stranger off her.

That would never do.

Finally the woman relented.

“I’ll never forget this!” she cried.

Zhi smiled.

Around them the cameras captured it all. That was the point, after all. Once a month or so, every celebrity in the Peace and Harmony Friends program paid a surprise visit to a “random” fan who conversed with their avatar.

It was an incentive for the people to chat with their Friends. The more time you spent with your Friend, it was said, the more likely it was that the real person behind him or her would come visit you.

More importantly, as the videos of these real-life visits were played over and over, it cemented the link between the actual persons and their simulated personas. It stamped the Friends with the imprimatur of the idolized celebrity.

Zhi had never relished these visits. At the best, she’d found them a necessary hassle, a frequently awkward task that paid for itself in continued fame and fortune.

Now she wondered if it wasn’t much much worse than that.

She smiled broadly and waved again, backing away from the woman’s house on the outskirts of Chengdu, before turning, and skipping off to her limousine.

Her secretary Keylani was waiting for her inside the limo.

“Keylani,” Zhi said. “You have the transcript of this woman’s dialogue with my simulacrum?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Of course she would. The transcripts were given to the stars, only of the people they were sent to visit, so they could perform more impressively in those conversations, heighten the illusion of actual intimacy.

Zhi looked out the window as the car started driving, Qi and Dai in the front again.

She thought back to what the woman had said. Something about Sun Liu, and how concerned she was about his health, and how kind Zhi Li was to care about him.

We could use a good man like that in office again.

It gave her a chill. Sun Liu was a non-person now. The former Minister of Science and Technology had publicly given his blessing to Bo Jintao, refused all the requests to return to the Politburo, and then simply vanished from the media. He’d been used and then purged. For all Zhi knew, the man was dead.

Why would this bored woman say something about him? Why would she insinuate that Zhi was a supporter of the fallen progressive?

Why would the Information Ministry use her simulacrum to say positive things about him?

She felt a chill of fear.

It was a trap. It must be. Bo Jintao was dangling bait before her, taunting her to say something imprudent.

Something that would be the end of her.

Her stomach knotted up, an image of Bo Jintao looming above her, reminding her to behave responsibly .

The memory of calls and messages the next day, of projects delayed, budgets cut.

The threat was still hanging over her. Another misstep…

“Did you need something from the transcript, ma’am?” Keylani asked.

Zhi Li brought one hand to her brow, felt perspiration there.

“Yes, Keylani. Would you search for conversations about…”

Not Sun Liu’s name, of course. Her queries would be watched. That name would raise alarms.

“Yes, ma’am?”

Zhi Li took a deep breath. “Conversations about health, Keylani,” she told her secretary. “Prepare an extract for me. All such conversations, for the last month. Sorted most recent to oldest. I’ll read them on the plane back to Shanghai.”

Not one of the conversations in the transcript mentioned Sun Liu.

She closed her eyes, imagined herself as the heroine she’d played in Rise of Qi’an , tried to find that woman’s courage, claim it for herself.

She landed in Shanghai hours later, and spent the night at Lu Song’s penthouse in the Pudong.

His chef made them a delectable dinner.

“Lu,” Zhi asked. “You did your Friend home visit last week, yes?”

Lu nodded in the affirmative, a soup dumpling in his mouth.

“Did you notice anything unusual?”

“Hah!” he said. “Didn’t I tell you about it? Fat, middle aged fellow in Xi’an, but he has this giant collection of swords all around his apartment. Every wall is covered in swords! And he actually knows how to use them! I’m talking about–”

“Lu,” she interrupted him. “I meant more… did it sound like your simulacrum had said anything… unusual to this fan?”

Lu frowned.

“I’m an action star. I don’t think the Lu Song-bots say much that’s complicated. It’d be out of character.”

Zhi told him about her own experience.

“Maybe she got that idea from someone else,” her lover said. “And was just confused. Just thought it was from your Friend.”