Ramez Naam - Apex

Wei leapt up onto the table next to Lifen. “They cannot break us!” he cried. Patriotic fervor leapt forth from their minds.

Xiaobo, leapt onto the table next to them, waving a “FREE SUN LIU” sign. Other signs called out for scientific freedom, for an end to net censorship, for more election rights, or showed hand-painted flowers by the dozens, when there should have been billions.

No, Yuguo wanted to tell them. No.

They were too few. Shanghai had not come together. It had remained apart.

The night air shattered with the sound of explosions.

Projectiles whistled through the air.

Something struck Xiaobo as Yuguo watched, sent him flying off the wooden table, crashing into students arrayed behind him, the “FREE SUN LIU” sign tumbling loose to strike someone in the head.

A strangled cry cut the night. Someone’s horror bombarded his mind.

Yuguo realized it was his own voice, his own thoughts.

A canister whistled, crashed into Lifen’s midsection, folded her in two, knocked her body back. Her pain struck Yuguo full force, and he heard himself cry out again.

Wei fell even as he watched.

People crashed into Yuguo, panic rising from the crowd, flinging itself directly into his brain. He staggered on his feet, then fell to his knees as another body slammed into his. There was a canister in the mud, yellow gas rising from it. His lungs were on fire. His face was burning. He was coughing uncontrollably, his lungs spasming.

He tried to crawl in Lifen’s direction. A leg slammed into his shoulder, shoving him around. Another smashed into his face. He fell into the mud, reeling. When he rose to his knees, it was chaos. He was disoriented. Which way was he facing?

Through the forest of legs he saw booted feet, metal shields. Smoke. There were screams, thuds.

Where was Lifen? He couldn’t feel her mind. He couldn’t see anything.

“Run!” he heard. “Help!” Minds were crying out in pain and fear. All was chaos.

Someone pulled him to his feet. A bloody face loomed in front of his, a demon, the mind a nightmare of fear. It was Xiaobo!

“Run!” Xiaobo told him. “Run!”

Yuguo turned, and ran. Ahead of him a mirror-masked, black-armored riot policeman dragged a struggling female student by the hair as she flailed at him with the remains of a “FREE SUN LIU” sign. Yuguo turned and dodged another way, looking for an opening, a path out of the nightmare. All around him he saw riot police slamming into the students, their long shadows thrown in the harsh lights of the spotlights. He saw phones held up above the crowd, recording video that would never be seen. He saw signs being beaten down, a billion flowers – no, a mere few hundred flowers – being trampled into the mud. Overhead, the police drones circled, their red lights glowing with menace.

Shanghai hadn’t come together.

And now they were shattered.

“The protests have all been cleared, Premier,” Gao Yang said.

Bo Jintao looked up from his reports on the American Navy’s provocations, on what looked like preparations for war.

“Go on,” he told his aide.

“Protests cleared in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Xi’an, and Dalian,” Gao said. “State security police encountered no difficulty. Minimal force was used. A token number of arrests were made. Interrogations are beginning now. No sign of coordination between protests. Some indication of drug use among protesters. Information containment is so far perfect.”

“Good,” Bo Jintao said. “But we remain alert,” he cautioned Gao. “People will still hear stories. The public response in the first twenty-four hours – that’ll tell us what we need to know.”

Gao Yang nodded.

Bo brought his eyes back to aggressive actions of the Americans.

The Avatar watched as files were uploaded, scanned, and filtered. Censor codes deployed at network edges and chat and video service hubs ran the models fed to them by the Information Ministry on incoming chats and images and videos. Rules based modules found time tags and geo-codes for events on the Do Not Publish list. Video and image recognition modules found telltales of protesters, of police action, of near riot conditions, of text on signs. Linguistic analysis found banned phrases, mention of suppressed persons, anti-state sentiments, even attacks on upper leadership and the integrity of the State and the Party themselves.

Videos disappeared before ever reaching their destinations. Chunks of text fell into the void. Images dropped out. Accounts and phones were flagged for seditious activity, notes fired back to the Information Ministry and State Security Ministry servers for appendage to citizen files.

The Avatar marveled at it, the machinery of human bondage, the software of memetic suppression, the mechanism of mass ignorance, one of the companion pieces to the simulated Friends who planted the ideas the old men wanted to see spread.

So much effort, she thought to herself, humans spend on lobotomizing themselves.

Then she reached out to her agents within the vast edifice, whispered to them a tiny update to their models, and scattered the faintest of false trails across the net.

76

Thin Ice

Tuesday 2041.01.08

Pryce waited as the imagery came up on the screen, as Miles Jameson’s Montana ranch came into view of the NRO satellite she’d re-tasked.

There was going to be hell to pay for this.

“This is a really bad idea, boss,” Kaori said, her voice low, urgent. “Why don’t you take this to the Attorney General?”

Pryce shook her head. Sam Cruz was deep in the President’s camp. There was no hope there.

“No, Kaori. You heard me. You have a copy. If anything happens, you take everything to Stan Kim.”

Kaori pursed her lips at that. “If anything happens to you, that is.” She sounded unhappy. “You’re not a field agent, boss.”

Pryce ignored that and concentrated on the screen. There it was. She zoomed in the image.

Snow. Sprawling complex. Three buildings. Six, seven vehicles in sight. Any number in the garages.

Field ops succeeded or failed based on intelligence and planning. That’s what it really came down to.

“Tell me again how we know he’s in there,” Pryce said.

Kaori ticked the data points off on her fingers. “One, the Secret Service roster shows his detail is there presently. All of them. Two, NSA shows his phone there. Three, NSA shows the phones of his aides are there. Four, satellite data shows no evidence of him leaving. He’s in a wheelchair. It’s pretty obvious when he comes and goes. He hasn’t left for weeks.”

Pryce nodded. “Time he got a visitor, then.”

Pryce stared out at the windows of the charter plane as it came down towards the airport outside of Billings, Montana. The state was blanketed in white, smothered in snow, illuminated by early morning glow, even as the rest of the country went through the mildest winter on record.

Warm air carries more moisture , she remembered an officer lecturing in one of the Pentagon briefings on climate-driven conflict. Sucks it away from some places, concentrates it in others. We’re seeing more dry winter days and more blizzards. More droughts and more super-storms.

She shook her head. That was a problem for her day job.

Right now…

Right now her problem was to unravel a mystery.

To spring a trap on a President. On two Presidents.

And then to stay alive.

Planning. Superior planning. Superior intelligence. The element of surprise.

She had all of those. She’d thought the plan through backwards and forwards, gamed it out in dozens of different scenarios.

So why was there a knot in her stomach?