Ramez Naam - Apex

Stockton spoke, his hands still covering his face. “It means…” he paused. “I still can’t believe it. But it means I trust you. And it means I’ll confront him. And if it’s true…” He brought his hands down, leaned forward again, looked Pryce in the eyes. “I’ll nail him.”

Pryce nodded in relief.

“But, Pryce,” he said, staring at her.

“Yes, sir,” she answered.

“No. More. Secrets.” He emphasized each word. “No more hiding things from me, you hear?”

Pryce nodded. “Perfectly, Mr President.”

“Good,” Stockton said. He rose, clearly viewing the meeting as over.

“Mr President,” Pryce said.

“Now there’s more?” Stockton asked.

“Actually, sir,” Pryce said. “I’d like to request Secret Service protection.”

Stockton looked surprised. “They really spooked you, didn’t they? First time for everything, I suppose.”

Pryce shook her head slightly. “Sir, with Becker dead, and Holtzman, and Barnes, it just seems prudent.”

Stockton frowned. “Becker was a heart attack,” he said, sharply. “Barnes was the Chinese. Unless there’s intel you haven’t shared with me yet?”

Pryce cursed herself. She shouldn’t have gone there.

“No, sir,” she said. “No evidence linking those. Just… a lot of bodies.”

Stockton nodded, looking suspiciously at her. “You have told me everything, haven’t you, Carolyn? Anything else on your mind?”

Pryce closed her eyes, then opened them. She’d had time to think about this. Lots of time. On the hike. In the chopper. On the plane home.

“Sir, there is something.”

Stockton sat back down. “Go on, Carolyn. Better now than later.”

“If we created the PLF, if we ran those missions, if they were fakes …” she paused. “Then we’ve been tricked. We’ve been tricked into creating policies on the basis of facts that aren’t facts at all.”

Stockton frowned at her.

Pryce tried again, from another angle. “Sir, as a false flag, the PLF worked . It worked as a psy-op on us . Look at what it’s tricked us into doing. Locking up kids?”

Clips from the video came back to her. She’d watched it again on the plane. She’d found it hard to look away. We did this… why? Because we were lied to? Because we fooled ourselves into doing it?

She thought of her own reaction to the videos, the way it was driving the protests out there.

“The PLF drove us to policies that are bad for national security,” Pryce told the President. “What we’re doing now – it’s inciting violence, distracting us from other issues.”

Stockton’s brow was furrowing more intently. He was shaking his head.

“Mr President,” Pryce said. “Holtzman had Nexus in his brain when he saved your life. He made a moral choice. It doesn’t turn people into monsters. They’re still human.”

“Pryce,” Stockton said. “You still don’t get it.” His eyes searched her face. “And you need to. This is the biggest security threat there is. It’s like…” He chuckled. “Funny, Holtzman got it. It’s like the Neanderthals and us. Neanderthals were on top, then us smarter humans came along and drove them to extinction. Except now we’re the Neanderthals. See? And no one’s going to drive us to extinction on my watch.”

Pryce frowned. “Mr President,” she said. “Humans and Neanderthals mated. They interbred… There’s Neanderthal DNA inside of you .”

Stockton nodded. “Exactly. And we still wiped them out! How much worse does it get than that?”

Pryce stood there, reaching for something to say, anything.

“Carolyn, this isn’t for discussion. My grandson’s going to have a fair shot at life, without competing with AIs or posthumans or whatever else comes up next. Liam’s not going to be turned into some sort of second class citizen. That’s that. I’m going to fight every day to keep things that way, whether it’s popular or not, whether we created the PLF or not.”

His eyes, his tone, the look on his face, all made it clear how dead set he was on this. He wasn’t going to budge on this. Not today.

“Now,” the President said. “Is this going to be a problem for you?”

Pryce lowered her eyes. China. Kazakhstan. India. There were so many situations on the verge of explosion, so many problems that needed her attention right now. She sighed inwardly. Maybe she could reopen this in a few months.

Pryce looked back up at John Stockton. “No, Mr President,” she told him. “It’s not.”

“They have your alias. Your face.”

Breece paled. “Show me.”

The Nigerian waved him over.

Breece looked over his friend’s shoulder. The Nigerian was inside DHS’s systems, using the backdoors they’d gleaned from Barnes’s trove of data. Backdoors that it seemed DHS didn’t even know existed.

“Here,” the Nigerian said. “Picture of you from the National Mall.”

Breece frowned. It was him in disguise, but the disguise half torn off.

Seen from the ground.

“Shankari.”

The Nigerian nodded. “Some pictures are clearer,” he said.

He was right. Some showed his undisguised face. In weird ways, though. Almost artist’s renditions.

Memories.

But whose?

“How much do they know?” Breece asked.

“Missions,” the Nigerian said. “DC, Houston, Chicago, the Mall. A reference to me. To Kate. To Hiroshi. But not real names. Just aliases.”

“Damn it,” Breece said.

“What about the mission this month?” the Nigerian asked.

“We have to do it,” Breece replied. “But we don’t have to get our hands dirty.” Breece looked out the window, onto DC. “I think it’s time we tapped some of the local talent.”

John Stockton looked across the room at Jerry Aiken, his Chief of Staff.

“Every detail,” he told Aiken. “The car company. The cops and paramedics who reported to the crash. The flight crews for the planes and the helicopter. The agents on Jameson’s detail. The phone records for any calls Pryce made. The car’s nav data. All of it.”

His Chief of Staff nodded.

“Everything, Jerry,” the President repeated. “Quickly. And quietly .”

“Yes sir, Mr President,” Jerry Aiken said. “I’m on it.”

81

Integration

Saturday 2041.01.12

Yuguo held his sign aloft, atop the wooden table. LET A BILLION FLOWERS BLOOM! On the other side, his sign showed faces of his friends, his missing friends, bloodied, the last images seen of them, and the word JUSTICE.

Around him thousands of students and ordinary Shanghai residents thronged the central square of Jiao Tong. The air was thick with the thoughts of them all, from a continuous supply of Nexus being produced in the chemreactors in the buildings around them.

The campus was theirs.

Two kilometers to the east, a tremendously larger crowd, more than a hundred thousand strong, held People’s Square.

Above them the sky was thick with drones, crisscrossing, buzzing them at high speed just over the height of their signs. Around them, State Security police waited ominously, reinforced with soldiers, with tanks, turrets and machine guns pointed at the crowd.

Let them come. The censor codes were still down. The protesters were communicating freely with the outside world. In the engineering buildings, circuit printers and fabricators were churning out more devices now, devices to be sure they’d stay online if the censor codes ever came up.

Satellite uplink phones. Laser communication links. Devices that let them bypass Chinese infrastructure entirely, talk directly to the world via the constellation of hardware whizzing past them in the sky.