Ramez Naam - Apex

She couldn’t feel the system on the other side of the vault. It was shielded from her, cut off from the net.

“Authentication successful,” said a voice. “A second executive-level request is required to access the Secure Data Vault.”

The Avatar smiled.

Xu Liang stepped aside, and Chen Pang stepped forward.

From within she felt her husband’s anguish, his absolute hatred of her, his crushing dread at what he was about to do.

His hands touched the print scanners. His eyes came in range of the retinal scanning beams.

“My name is Chen Pang,” he said, his voice revealing not an iota of stress. “Requesting access to the Secure Data Vault.”

“Access granted,” the voice said. “Welcome Directors Xu and Chen. Please have a pleasant day.”

The Avatar smiled even more widely as the meter-thick door to the vault spread open, revealing a single, perfect, diamondoid cube. This one cube which had never left this building.

“Now,” she said. “Downstairs we go.”

Bai watched the workers of the Secure Computing Center while the little Su-Yong went away with her tormented husband and her slave scientist.

The scientists here weren’t tormented. They were happy, so happy. They were in love with her.

Like puppies.

His skin crawled at it.

His eyes rose to the ceiling, to images of the protesters fighting for freedom, fighting to overturn the old men.

That’s where we should be, he told himself. Not here, turning humans into sub-humans.

Quang sensed Bai’s thoughts.

It’s better than the humans did to us,his brother sent him, quietly, eyes sweeping over the scientists assembled before them.

Memories of pain stimulators flashed through Bai’s mind, his memories or Quang’s. Instructors and Sergeant Instructors, pain as the tool of discipline, absolute obedience as the rule, being treated as an object instead of a person.

Slavery.

That’s what she’d saved him from, saved all of them from.

That’s what he loved about Su-Yong Shu.

And now this. This, and what she’d done to little Ling.

Bai shivered again. He’d been shivering quite a lot the last few days.

It wasn’t like him.

82

Selves

Su-Yong Shu stands on the flower studded plain, in her white dress, the majestic mountains in the distance.

I’m back, she thinks.

She has some semblance of sanity once more. Yet that doesn’t change her situation or her quandary. If she has the option, should she try to stop the Avatar she’s let loose, or not? If the Avatar succeeds, she’ll have her best chance to heal Ling and to make a better world. If the Avatar fails … well, there are so many ways to fail, ranging from bad to horrific.

She lets the plane and the mountains and sky dissolve around her, until she floats in blackness. Then she loads the densely packed future simulations her insane self had crafted into the darkness. The meta-simulation unpacks itself, a fractal tree in a million colors and a thousand dimensions, high dimensional fern-like shapes spreading out, intersecting, recombining, converging and diverging. Hot spots point out fulcrum points with massive impact on future outcomes, places where her avatar or her reconstituted full self will sway events, or even overtly strike, to have her way.

She loses herself in the simulation, letting herself expand her awareness to take in as much in parallel as possible, forking herself into thousands of virtual Su-Yongs to explore a multitude of branches in parallel, then coming back again, converging into fewer and fewer selves to walk through certain crucial segments and linchpin points again and again.

In the end, she’s grudgingly impressed with her former self. Even in madness, the battle plan she’s created is cunning, sophisticated, creative in the way it takes advantage of the tensions of the present to turn human society against itself, paralyzing it, sowing chaos to cover her actions until it is too late.

But it is also a plan of desperation, launched by a mad woman, convinced she was at the very end, long past caring about the consequences.

She’s of several minds, even now. And those minds must be given voice.

Su-Yong spreads her arms wide, creates a bubble of empty space in the sharp-edged fractal branches of the meta-future she’s been traversing, and forks herself, instantiating the different arguments warring inside her.

They appear, four more Su-Yong Shus, identical in every detail except for the colors of their dresses. She still wears white. The others wear the same dress in gold, in blue, in green, in red.

They stand, in empty space, five identical women in simple, flowing, brightly hued dresses, on an invisible floor in a black void. Around them the fractal meta-future retreats further from their bubble, until it becomes a constellation of virtual stars and lines all about them.

Sisters , White Shu sends. Let us begin.

Green Shu, the ecologist, goes first. The plan we’ve launched has unacceptable risks. We aim to create chaos, to distract and mislead the world. If we succeed, we could set nation on nation. We could trigger the worst irrational behavior among humans. In the worst case, we could set off a global nuclear war.

Outside their bubble, the void erupts into nova. Explosions hotter than the core of the sun rip through space, one after another. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They feel Shanghai, its inhabitants reduced to ash, its glass and steel melted in an instant, Jiao Tong above the quantum cluster reduced to rubble. They feel Beijing die. New York. Los Angeles. Washington DC. Bombay. Delhi. Moscow. Lahore. Tokyo. City after city after city, until the globe is a map of death and ruin.

Billions of lives. Billions of minds,Green Shu finishes. That is the gamble we take.

Red Shu, the strategist, speaks next. Yet the odds of victory are good,she sends. In our insanity, we made brilliant leaps. The situation is unusually chaotic. That creates the opportunity to mask the early stages of our attack. There has not been a better opportunity since we first uploaded. There may not be a better opportunity again. The humans are cracking down on posthumanity. After recent events, they will bring fists down harder than ever.

Red Shu looks around, meets her sisters in the eye. Her thoughts are full of game theory, of payoff optimizations, of beseeching. If not now, then when? If not us, then who?

Gold Shu, the dreamer, steps forward. We will win,she sends, because the superior intelligence is on our side. The cost may be high, but it will be temporary. If billions die? They would have died anyway, of slow decay. The transformation we bring, to a new era ruled rationally, where positive transformation of the self is encouraged, will usher in a new golden age that will erase whatever harm is done in the battle. We’ll make a better world, not just for us, but for the trillions of beings who will come after.

Blue Shu, the individualist, the one most like a human, steps into the center of the circle and takes her turn. No,she sends. Humans will not accept the rule of a conqueror. They never have. They never will. They’ll see us as oppressors. They’ll fight us, fight our changes to society, fight our improvements to the world, purely because of how we came to our power. Our only option will be dictatorship, which they will fight, and fight, and fight until we are brought down or we smother them completely.

Blue Shu spins slowly, looks at her sisters one by one. So you see sisters, if we attack, and fail, we are doomed. But if we win, we’re little better off. Defeat is defeat. Victory is also defeat.