Ramez Naam - Apex

Zhi nodded. Maybe that was it.

Lu’s staff cleared the dinner away and then disappeared.

Zhi and Lu made love on the luxuriant mink rug in the middle of his living room, the curtains of the windows peeled away entirely, so Lu could see the giant face of her on the skyscraper across the street as he pleasured the flesh and blood reality here with him.

How she did indulge her lover.

After, as they lay naked, side by side, covered in sweat, the breath slowly coming back to them, Lu spoke again.

“My guy did say something weird,” her lover said. “He talked about fighting for freedom. He talked about taking up arms against oppressors. About how right I was about that.”

Zhi suddenly felt that chill again. She rolled on her side, to face him.

“I thought,” Lu said, “that he was trying to quote my lines from Riders of the Gobi , and just messing them up.” He shook his head. “But now I’m not so sure.”

68

Exfiltration

Friday 2040.12.21

Colonel Wang Rongshang ascended the stairs to his mistress Ma Jie’s flat, a smile on his face. Thoughts of surgery and medical responsibilities to the soldiers of Dachang were fleeing.

Ma Jie’s touch, her smile, her voice. They could chase any toil away.

He knocked at her door. It opened, and there she was, looking as radiant as ever. There was something in the smile. Something… wicked almost. Something he seldom saw.

Anticipation stirred within him.

“Come in, my love,” she beckoned him.

Wang Rongshang entered, closing the door behind him.

Then a strong hand clamped itself over his mouth.

He lashed back, reflexively, with an elbow to where the torso would be, hit something like steel. He kicked backwards, low and hard, to snap a man’s knee. His foot met empty air.

Something cold pressed itself against his neck, followed by the sting and hiss of a hypersonic injection.

He thrashed again, tried to scream, found it stifled by the hand over his mouth.

The injector fell at his feet, an ampule still loaded in it, empty now, but with a residue of something silvery, metallic.

Two strong arms gripped him, arms far stronger than his own.

Ma Jie watched him with eyes that were fascinated and without pity.

What was in that ampule? What sort of drug or poison was silvery and metallic?

Then he felt it entering his brain, felt Ma Jie’s thoughts brushing his own, and he knew.

For good and ill, he knew.

What followed was beyond Wang Rongshang’s wildest dreams, beyond his worst nightmares.

The Avatar nodded in satisfaction. Yingjie was an excellent tool. Soldiers were so easy to use. They were already accustomed to command. She’d had to use primitive methods to stop Yingjie from killing Chen the first day, simply reaching into his motor cortex to disrupt his motion. But once the nanites had all taken hold she’d been able to reach in, resculpt existing cognitive structures, redirect his well-developed notions of loyalty so they all pointed solidly at her; install certain cognitive behavioral packages that could monitor his thoughts, redirect them in the ways she needed.

He’d done his work quite well since then. And now that he’d captured Wang Rongshang she had an asset ideally placed within Dachang. An asset that could administer drugs. Her drugs. Loaded with her software, to invade loyalty structures and resculpt them. To make her the command authority for Dachang Air Base.

The Avatar turned her attention to Dr Colonel Wang Rongshang and began to program him with what she needed done. To take key parts of the base. To free a few of her children. To liberate her Confucian Fist.

Ling spied on the monster’s thoughts from within.

The Confucian Fist? Her big brothers.

A tiny sliver of hope rose inside her.

She squashed it as fast as she could, before the monster had a chance to notice it.

69

Unsettling Suspicions

Saturday 2040.12.22

Kade sat alone in the darkened building, his mind flipping through news, images, and videos coming in from around the world.

Los Angeles.

Kiev.

Cairo.

Athens.

Moscow.

Caracas.

Mexico City.

Lagos.

Madrid.

London.

Sao Paolo.

Nairobi.

Jakarta.

Mumbai.

Baghdad.

Protests. Demonstrations. Riots.

In all of them.

The disturbances glowed on a map of the world. More than a hundred cities in all.

Protests against Stockton in the US. Protests for women’s rights in the Arab world. Protests against the use of Nexus here in India. Riots over energy and food prices in Jakarta and Lagos and Karachi. Demonstrations over corruption in Athens. Pro-democracy marchers clashing with police day after day in Moscow. Sectarian and ethnic clashes in Baghdad.

The reasons were all different.

But the outbreak of global anger against authority was remarkable.

Rage was contagious. Courage was contagious. Outrage was contagious. This had happened before. It would happen again.

That’s what the talking heads said.

He wasn’t so sure.

A screen inside his mind flashed, asking for his attention.

Kade flipped over to it. His analysis had completed.

He’d used Shiva’s tools again. He’d fed them all the most popular Nexus real-time feeds and shared memories of the past week from the most popular mind-to-mind sharing hubs. What were people sharing? What were people looking at? What were they using Nexus to communicate and consume?

Analyze for content type. Weight by number of views. Slice and dice by region.

And he’d done the same for the most popular shared memories from a week in October, from before the chemreactor break, from before the near quadrupling of the Nexus user base that had happened in the last two months, from one million minds to four million.

Compare and contrast.

He pulled up the visualizations.

It was a more rapid switch than he’d expected.

Two months ago, sex had topped the list. After that had come athletic feats and recreation, a host of first hand experiences of beautiful places and events, music, humor, and even some actual transfer of knowledge from mind to mind.

Now… Now it was rage, or outrage, that dominated. Scenes from protests, from clashes with police and the military, of witnessed brutality, even sometimes of brutality done to authority figures, topped the list. Sex had been pushed to number two.

Do I have the causality wrong? he wondered. This doesn’t prove that someone’s using Nexus to create chaos.

But then he thought again of the chemreactor hack, released just in time to fuel high quantities of Nexus to the protests in the US. He thought of Breece, and the Nexus-based chaos he’d wreaked on the National Mall.

Rangan had shown him memories of the trial run for that. Breece or someone had tested that attack on a small level, before taking it to a higher scale.

What if the National Mall was itself a test for a higher scale attack?

Something else is going on,the group mind of the children had said.

He pulled up the global map again, the hot spots scattered across so much of it.

What if the National Mall was a test run for a global attack?

Kade grimaced, and turned back to the even more paranoid tools he was building.

Tools that integrated Shiva’s systems, and more.

Tools designed for battle.

Tools designed for war.

70

Call of Duty

Saturday 2041.01.05

Bai’s fist whipped out at Quang’s temple in a blur, faster than any human could react. His clone brother darted to the side, a ferocious grin on his face, on Bai’s face, on all their faces, a low kick snapping at Bai’s knee. Bai lifted his leg, took the kick on his shin, turned the backfist into a grab for Quang’s short hair, jabbed forward with his other hand in a rigid finger strike at his brother’s plexus. Quang turned his kick into a half-spin, sliding out of Bai’s way, then coming at him with a vicious fist to the head.