Ramez Naam - Apex

Monday 2041.01.14

The Avatar searched for the data cube Li-hua had stolen.

The woman’s memories had contacts, names, times, places.

But the easiest way was to start at the beginning. Handoff had occurred the afternoon of Saturday November 3 rd , just hours after her greater self had died.

The Avatar accessed non-classified traffic routing databases, Jiao Tong egress and ingress logs, air and train travel databases.

All of these her higher self had opened wide and back-doored long ago.

Answers came to the fore. On a day with almost no traffic, when Shanghai was slowly, painfully dragging itself back to health after Ling’s angry blow… On such a day, a diplomatic vehicle from the Indian Consulate stood out.

The vehicle had left the Consulate, driven towards Jiao Tong, exited the flow of traffic momentarily, then re-entered it, and driven back to the Indian Consulate.

A pickup.

Two hours later, traffic routing showed another diplomatic car leaving the Consulate of India in Shanghai, driving to Hong Qiao Airport.

Air travel information showed a diplomatic flight departing Hong Qiao minutes later. A flight plan booked for New Delhi. Public records showed the plane landing. From there too many options presented themselves. The cube could have gone anywhere.

She had her suspicions, though.

The Avatar turned her attention to Bangalore, to the former DRDO campus, where Feng and Ananda and the Lane boy were now. She knew this place. Her higher self had known of it, had studied it. A campus where India conducted research into advanced AI, into autonomous software, into neural enhancement.

Into the posthuman.

What were the odds?

She searched for an open network connection on the campus, found one in a civilian phone, eased tendrils of herself into it, and began searching.

She found hundreds of run of the mill systems, secured in ordinary ways.

And beyond them she found locked doors. Highly secure systems. High levels of encryption. Systems she could reach out and tear to shreds. But that she couldn’t quietly penetrate.

Not like this.

She turned back to the data she’d sucked out of Li-hua’s mind. Her promised professorship was at IIT Bangalore, just a few kilometers from the DRDO campus.

Her contacts, the ones who’d approached her at conferences, who’d suggested “information sharing”, “possible advancement”, who’d turned her into a spy. Who were they?

The Avatar studied them, read their CVs, read their publications.

IIT Bangalore, mostly. But when she broadened out, searching through their co-authors, through their webs of publications, their contact addresses, she found Indian Ministry of Defense, Indian Ministry of Science and Technology.

She found the Bangalore research campus.

The Avatar stared at the locked cryptographic doors she’d found. She needed heavier ammunition for these.

She took the house-sized elevator back down through a kilometer of bedrock to the Physically Isolated Computing Center. Titanium alloy elevator doors slid open. Meters-thick inner blast doors slowly opened after them, revealing the glory of the quantum cluster.

It sat idle now. Idle, in theory, because the protests above had placed it in full lockdown. All the monitoring systems claimed it was in that state.

In truth, it was waiting. Waiting for a copy of her higher self.

The Avatar stepped forward in Ling’s body, until she touched the decimeter-thick glass separating her from the computing chamber, with its egg-shaped containment chambers filled with liquid helium, and within that, smaller containment chambers in hard vacuum, thousands of times colder than the cold of interstellar space, where quantum states could exist, entangled, unjostled, and make cosmic computations possible.

She placed her palm on the glass. I’m not my full self, the Avatar thought. I don’t have all my abilities. I don’t have my higher algorithms that can double or treble the effectiveness of this hardware.

But I can use a quantum cluster to run a search. Or to break a code.

The Avatar began loading software for intrusion into the quantum cluster. Then she flipped switches, opened the firewalls wide, linked her mind to the world’s most powerful crypto-breaking device.

And turned her thoughts back to the secure research facility in Bangalore.

86

Controlled Release

Wednesday 2041.01.16

Greg Chase leaned back in his office chair in the West Wing, watching the sentiment analysis scroll by, sampling the top images and videos of the week, the headlines.

Terrible. It was just terrible.

Relatives of some of the dead in Houston attempting to file suit against the President, denouncing him angrily, claiming he was pulling the PLF’s strings.

Anne Holtzman and Claire Becker issuing a joint video from somewhere in Europe, saying in the strongest terms that John Stockton ordered the deaths of their husbands, that he was behind the assassination attempt on himself in DC, that it was all a sham, that he killed seventy men and women just to take the lead in the race.

Speeches on the House and Senate floor from the opposition, calling angrily for an Independent Prosecutor to investigate Barnes’s final confession, the Holtzman video, the leaked memos.

Mothers protesting outside of ERD facilities around the country, waving signs, claiming children were being held prisoner inside, being experimented on in attempts to “cure” them of Nexus against their will.

State houses advancing bills to cut off power and water to any ERD facility suspected of housing children inside.

Hundreds of thousands massing for another march on DC during the inauguration on Monday.

The inauguration they’d decided to move indoors into the Capitol Building, out of plain fear of civil disturbance.

It was a hell of a time to be Press Secretary.

Dammit, Chase thought. It’s still heading to shit.

Those few days in December had been good. The Supreme Court ruling had given Stockton legitimacy. The violence of the protesters had torn down theirs.

But when that spasm passed… the core issues remained.

America still believed the lies.

We have the proof, Chase thought. We know Barnes was coerced. We know the Chinese hacked his defenses.

Damn it all to hell, Chase thought. We’ve got to discredit these lies.

He waited until the day was over, until well past 7pm.

Only then, as his car drove him home, did he reach into his glove box, and pull out a fresh phone, bought with cash, never before used.

He logged the phone on to an anonymizing cloud, let it route its signals through layers of obfuscating cryptography, anonymizing its trail.

Then he punched in a number from memory.

For Brad Mitchell, American News Network Special Correspondent, Washington DC.

87

Breaking

CHINA BEHIND DEATH OF WHITE HOUSE ACCUSER, SOURCES SAY

Friday 6.03am, Washington DC

American News Network

The home security of Maximilian Barnes, the White House aide who accused President John Stockton of creating and directing the PLF terrorist organization, was penetrated by a Chinese cyber-attack in the hours before his death, say highly-placed sources.

Defense and intelligence officials believe Barnes, the Acting Director of the ERD branch of Homeland Security, was coerced by Chinese government operatives into making false accusations. The attack was kept secret until now, they say, because American cyber-defense officials wanted to hide their ability to detect such attacks from their Chinese opponents.

The attack may help explain US troop movements and a rise in tensions with China that began shortly…