Ramez Naam - Apex

I deal in lives and deaths in my job, she thought. But this is the first time that it’s been my life on the line. Or my death.

Then later, as the airfield of Bozeman appeared below her, and the entirely different plane, with a different aircrew, chartered under yet another name, came into view, did she think:

They’ve tried to kill me. Like they killed Becker. And Holtzman. They’ll probably try again.

77

What Videos?

Tuesday 2041.01.08

Yuguo limped tiredly from the subway stop to their residential tower. It was past midnight now. His clothes were caked in mud. His face and lungs still burned from gas, as much as he’d tried to rinse it out with water. One eye was circled in an ugly black bruise from where a boot had met his head as he’d tried to make his way free. A cut above his brow throbbed. Tears still fell, from the remnants of the gas, from the utter failure.

He’d made it out, crawling, kicking, running, stumbling, in a press of near strangers. They’d run past the armored, mirror-faced riot police, run through campus, run and run and run until he’d fallen over coughing, gasping, unable to breathe.

Alone.

Where was Xiaobo? Wei? Lee? Lifen? Longwei? Had they escaped? There was no answer on their phones. No response on any service online. He had to just hope, as he trudged slowly towards home, past the accusing stares and the cold indifference of the strangers of Shanghai.

You didn’t come, he stared back at them. We did what we could. It wasn’t enough.

He scraped mud off his shoes outside their building and let himself in with their code. The lobby was empty. The lift took him straight up to their floor. At the door to the apartment he could hear turmoil coming from within. Shouts. Police? He tensed.

No.

Or rather yes. Police voices. Certainly.

Dozens of them. And protesters, by the hundreds.

Impossible.

Curiosity overcame fear.

Yuguo punched in his code. The door opened.

“Yuguo?” His mother’s voice carried from the living room. She ran out into the hallway in a dressing gown. The sound of yells and screams, ordered commands and clashes followed her.

“Mother…” he started.

Then she had her arms wrapped around him.

“Yuguo!” she cried. “I was so frightened. I saw the videos! I kept watching, looking for your face, to see if you’d been taken.”

“Mother,” he said, softly, his arms wrapping around her in response, soothing her, some amazement striking a calm deep into him, some tiny sliver of hope blossoming through the despair. “What videos?”

Yuguo watched them again and again. Dozens of minutes of video. Signs waving, denouncing the coup, calling for Sun Liu’s reinstatement, calling for democracy, calling for a Billion Flowers, calling for Bo Jintao’s arrest. Police charging, beating protesters, beating them after they were down and helpless, dragging them away.

Xiaobo, beaten bloody, kicked mercilessly into unconsciousness, dragged by one foot, face down in the mud. Wei, shot at close range with what Yuguo hoped was a rubber bullet, then gone from the screen. Lifen, the woman who’d inspired him, who’d told him that they were weak apart or strong together, unconscious, being dragged off by an armored State Security thug, her shirt half ripped off her body, another mirror-helmeted riot police man following behind them.

Yuguo felt tears falling down his face. Sorrow and remorse and rage.

He should have been up there. He should have leapt onto that table. For all he’d said about coming together, about someone needing to be first… he’d kept his head down when the police had come.

He slammed a fist into his palm.

“You’re alive, Yuguo,” his mother said. “I’m so thankful! We’re so fortunate.”

He turned to the discussion boards. They were alive with buzz. The video was everywhere, millions of views. There were other videos, he saw now. Videos from Beijing, from Hong Kong, from Guangzhou, from everywhere … More signs, stating the truth for once. More evidence of brutality, of repression.

And thousands of threads, tens of thousands of threads, hundreds of thousands of messages, at least. People talking openly of their anger, of their anger that the police would beat students this way, their anger over being censored their whole lives, their anger over having no control.

People talking openly of how shocked they were that their messages and videos were getting through. That the censors weren’t working.

The conversation had evolved over time, he saw. As people realized that something had changed. That they could talk. They became emboldened. He saw people talking openly of things they’d never spoken of before.

That the police were part of the Ministry of State Security. That the man who controlled them now controlled China. That he was responsible. And his name was Bo Jintao.

That the police could beat a few hundred students. But that they couldn’t beat a billion Chinese citizens.

There were people talking openly of the coup.

Of bringing back the Billion Flowers.

Of democracy.

Of striking back harder, in larger numbers, with more organized protests, tomorrow.

Of revolution.

“Mother,” Yuguo said. “I’m not sure how this happened… but I think we’re winning.”

Zhi Li stood at the wall-to-wall window of Lu Song’s penthouse flat in the Pudong, staring out and down into the lights of Shanghai at night.

Across from her, her own gigantic face winked and smiled at the river of humanity, watching over all of Shanghai like a goddess.

Or a demon.

“We should join them,” she said aloud, pulling the bed sheet more snugly around her naked form. “The protesters, tomorrow.”

The videos had been shocking, raw. She’d seen such things when she traveled outside of China. Not here. She wanted to be there, fighting against Bo Jintao.

Lu Song came up behind her, still nude himself, and wrapped his strong arms around her.

How she loved when he held her.

“He’d kill us, my love,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

She looked down at the streets, hundreds of meters below them, then looked back up at the digital representation of herself, twenty stories high, on the skyscraper opposite her, a more perfect version of herself, more beautiful than she or any human woman could ever be, flawless, un-aging.

Unthinking.

“They look to me,” she told her lover. “You said it yourself. Millions of them talk to me every day. What kind of person am I if I don’t go to them? If I don’t fight for what’s right?” She twisted to look up and back at Lu. “What kind of people are we ?”

Lu pursed his lips, held her more tightly. “You’re a living person, my love,” he said, squeezing her again. “Remember what Bo Jintao said. He could kill you, kill us. And he’d still have that screen over there.” Lu gestured with his chin, and Zhi turned to look at the digital her again.

“He’d still have his simulacra of us,” Lu went on. “Give him a reason to kill you, and you’ll be under his control forever.”

Zhi slammed her palm against the glass in frustration, hating the face she saw across the street now more than ever before.

“Impostor,” she cursed aloud at the thing with her face.

78

Viral

Wednesday 2041.01.09

Bo Jintao sat at the emergency meeting of the State Security Committee. The giant wall screens showed the massive, still growing protests in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Tens of thousands of protesters in the larger cities. Approaching a hundred thousand in some.