Ramez Naam - Apex

Varun Verma. He existed. There was a record for him. It was almost plausible. A bio. A few scientific publications. A classified-but-accessible-to-her summary of his work in quantum computing.

But it wasn’t enough. She’d been an agent in the ERD. She knew what a top scientist looked like. This wasn’t it. This had been heavily redacted. With no indication that there was another file that codeword access or greater privileges would reveal.

And the building he worked in? The Advanced Computational Sciences building?

It was a shell. A front. Three floors. Half a dozen projects. Twenty staff.

Bullshit. She’d taken lunch out under the trees. She’d watched five times that many people go in and out of that building. She’d walked casually by, making sure to have a destination that put her on a course that required a close pass. She’d seen the ten centimeter thick armored glass that made up the façade. Glass too thick to shoot through. A pretty building. Nearly impenetrable.

She kept her eyes open, got a glance at a power distribution schematic for the campus during a routine fire drill. The power lines drawn to that building were thicker than those to all the rest of the buildings here combined. Oh, something was going on there. Something important.

She searched back in time, scraping away layers of digital sediment for the electronic spoor that all projects unwittingly leave. She dug into old DRDO records, into public records filed with the City of Bangalore, construction permits, requisitions. Further, into publicly available satellite imagery from the years of the campus’s construction.

What was that in the high-res images from space? She zoomed in, zoomed again. Heavy excavation equipment? Deep bore tunnelers? The kind you’d use to dig a deep vertical shaft?

There was no mention of any of that, in any file on the building. Not that much in the way of files existed. The construction permits didn’t exist. The requisitions didn’t exist. The blueprints didn’t exist. The floor plans she downloaded, memorized, but didn’t trust.

She heard Kevin’s words, advice on sleuthing. She closed her eyes. She could hear his voice, feel his presence, as if he was standing at her elbow, looking over her shoulder, close enough to touch.

It hurt, but less than it would have a month ago. Less than it would have even a week ago. She was almost there.

Sometimes, the Nakamura who wasn’t here said, things are evident by their very absence.

She had to smile, despite the pain. Such a typical Kevin thing to say. Always with the enigmatic turn of phrase. But he had a way of being right.

The very absence of anything interesting listed about the Advanced Computational Sciences Building and Varun Verma made them very interesting indeed.

Sam reached over into the box she’d brought from her quarters, pulled out the small potted plant. She put it gently on the window sill, off into the far corner.

Until the tiny camera inside, the camera she’d bought on Brigade Road with money Division Six had paid her, was lined up with the entrance to the Advanced Computational Sciences Building.

She pulled out the anonymous phone she’d bought to go with it, pulled up the image from the camera, and adjusted the plant until it was just right. The monitoring and facial recognition software was already loaded.

She hit the buttons on the phone in sequence.

Monitor.

Record.

Alert.

74

Let’s Do This

Monday 2041.01.07

Rangan read through the messages in front of him one more time.

They were all from him. Or would be.

Once they were sent, there was no going back.

The collaborative firewall was working. The mesh was working. Kade had weighed in, given Rangan insights from his work with Nexus children and Buddhist monks. Angel and Cheyenne had made those real. Mesh would be a mesh network, but more. A group using it would be able to form a high-gain transmitter, a high-gain receiver, boosting their collective ability to send and hear others in the way that the more intuitive collectives Kade worked with did.

But the real goal was to stop the violence.

Decision Day, as people were calling the Mall riot, had been the worst outbreak of violence yet, but it wasn’t the last. There were standing protests everywhere now, scattered groups of hundreds or thousands. And across the net there was a rallying cry for another surge of protest on Inauguration Day. Culminating in a Million (Transhu)Man March on DC.

January 21 st . Two weeks from now.

Mesh had a chance to suppress the violence, if enough people were running the new code.

How do you get enough people to run the new code?

You have a hero ask them. A celebrity. Rangan wasn’t much of a celebrity. But the Eccentric article claiming he was in DC had been seen millions of times, now. His music was suddenly enjoying its greatest ever popularity. Somewhere, some bank account of his, seized by the ERD, was collecting royalties he’d never see. There were fan clubs talking about him.

There were masks of his face. There were people out there in those protests, wearing his face. He watched footage and he’d see himself, dozens of himself.

The old him. Bleached blond. Crazy grin. Cocky as all hell. The him that had never failed. That had never done anything for anyone but himself.

Rangan shook his head.

There was a pit where his stomach should be. This was going to come back to bite him. He knew it. It was going to be bad. Really, really bad.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Angel nodded. Cheyenne held her left hand up, and Rangan high fived her.

“Let’s frack this guy’s plans up, yo,” she said.

Tempest shook her head. “You all are crazy,” she said.

Then she went off, with her copy of the messages, to log in from an anonymous location, and send an open letter in Rangan Shankari’s name to the net, via the incredibly well-trafficked site, Eccentric.

And Rangan sat down, tunneled through layers and layers of anonymizing crypto services to hide his trail, and prepared to check their changes into all the most popular Nexus code repositories.

In his name.

75

The Clearing of Jiao Tong

Tuesday 2041.01.08

“You are ordered to clear the square! This is your final warning!”

Yuguo tensed as the police blared the message again. Around him he felt fear and resolve war in the minds that remained.

“Hold!” Lifen yelled, standing tall atop a wooden table someone had dragged into the square, a white-shirted hero in the Shanghai night, one of her fists thrust high into the air, illuminated by the police spotlights. “This is our square!”

Her eyes glittered in the bright white beams. Her face was alive, animated with passion as she exhorted the students to hold fast. In her mind, victory beckoned. Victory where they rose up, came together, rose together.

Yuguo had never seen anyone so beautiful. He’d never met anyone so beautiful inside or out.

He’d never been so terrified.

Twenty-four hours ago the police had come, with their metal shields and their mirrored helmets that obscured their faces, with their bludgeons and gas guns and water cannons. Rows and rows of them, hundreds of police, maybe as many as there were protesters, completely surrounding the square.

The orders to leave had come, amplified, reinforced with promises of lenience for all who departed, threats of jail for all who remained.

Twenty-four hours.

Half their numbers were gone now.

And the deadline was up.

Dread filled the cavern where Yuguo’s heart had been. Come together and be something more. Or remain apart and be shattered.