Ramez Naam - Apex

“Goddammit,” Stockton said. “Find out who leaked this!”

General Gordon Reid nodded. “We will, Mr President.”

The woman who called herself Kate finished her prep work for the day. The flurry of electronic messages and electronic transfers and data wipes that would initiate at her command was ready. She closed up her terminal, put it away in her go-bag with the guns and the false passports and matching disguises and everything else.

Then the story played on the wall screen.

What?

China?

She stopped, stared at it, played the story again.

Breece had killed Barnes, with the help of his mysterious hacker.

Could his hacker be a Chinese government agent? A whole intelligence agency? It would explain the incredible capabilities.

Then she thought about what was going on in China, about the chemreactor hacks, about the explosion of Nexus, about how Breece was using it to spread chaos here, about the huge protests there, also apparently sodden with Nexus.

No. Kate shook her head. Whoever was helping Breece wasn’t on the side of the Chinese government.

The story was wrong. And if the American government believed it…

Kate frowned, and thought back to a message she’d ignored.

A message she’d assumed was a trap.

What if it wasn’t?

Kate pulled out her terminal and started searching for that message, and that address. Just in case.

Sometimes there was an advantage to keeping a line of communication open with one’s enemies.

Breece stared at the anonymous message on his screen. It had arrived just this morning.

I know your plans for Monday. Do not attack your allies. Do not repeat Decision Day. Everyone else is fair game. This is your last warning.

He grimaced at it. Kate. Fucking Kate.

God that still hurt.

“Everything OK?” the Nigerian asked.

“Just fine,” Breece said.

DELETE

88

Risk Management

Saturday 2041.01.19

In the window sill of a third floor office on the former DRDO campus outside of Bangalore, a cheap, tiny camera sits, secreted in a plant, staring endlessly at a building. It watches as people come. It watches as people go. It tags them, records the times of their ingress and egress, their faces and gaits, the combinations they travel in, the urgencies with which they move on each visit.

For days it watches. The large majority of visitors to the building are the same, day in, day out. Most of those have faces that, even at this range, it can match against the database it has been loaded with.

Nothing rises to the level of noteworthiness that would warrant a realtime alert to its master.

Then, on the thirteenth day of its surveillance, something noteworthy does happen. A first-time visitor arrives, in the early evening, in the company of Varun Verma, a Priority 1 Monitoring Target, and two other men. Under the glow of the outdoor LEDs, the man’s face is clearly recognizable.

General Rajan Singh.

The camera’s crude decision-making software runs through its models. Excitation ramps up. It fires up additional image analysis coprocessing, despite the drain on batteries that have not been charged in a day, may not be charged again until Monday. Its alerting module reaches eighty-seven percent of the threshold needed to send a message to its upstream human.

No. Not quite. But something interesting may be happening. It will be vigilant. It will see if more transpires.

“She’s insisting that there’s a huge danger,” Varun summarized for General Singh. “Billions of deaths. She’s been eerily right on all of her other predictions.”

They were in the control room of India’s first quantum cluster. Varun; General Singh with his broad frame and his thick, black Bollywood mustache; and Singh’s two armed bodyguards.

The soldiers made Varun nervous.

“But she won’t say what’s driving this danger?” Singh asked. “What will cause this nuclear exchange?”

Varun shook his head. “No. Only that she can stop it. That with just a few minutes of access to the net, she can neutralize the threat. And that we can close the firewall after that.”

General Singh looked dubious.

“Do you believe her?”

Varun paused. He’d asked himself that every day. “I don’t know what to believe, General.”

“Is she sane?” Singh asked.

Varun pursed his lips. “Her neural patterns suggest so… but,” he shrugged. “We can’t really be sure.”

Singh didn’t seem to like that answer.

89

Totally Different Building

Saturday 2041.01.19

“We’re going dancing,” Feng announced.

Kade looked up from his terminal. “I really can’t, Feng.”

“All you do is work!” Feng said. “Work, work, work! Time to have a good time!” He grinned widely. “Remember that place in Saigon? Club Heaven? Club Hell? A good time!”

Kade half frowned, horrified yet amused at how Feng’s mind worked. “Where you got run over by a truck? Where a small army tried to kidnap us? Where a building fell on you?”

Feng waved that away. “Building fell on me later. Totally different building . It was a cool club. I hear they got good ones downtown too, places people using Nexus know. We go check ’em out tonight. You need fun! I need fun.” He grinned and winked at Kade. “You can call it research if you want.”

Kade laughed, despite himself. He looked at the terminal. He was really just checking and rechecking the same code now.

“The US inauguration is on Monday,” he told Feng.

Feng nodded. “End of the world,” he said. “You told me. Better party one last time. Confucius says, night spent sweating with good music, sexy women, good for the fighting spirit.”

Kade laughed again. He couldn’t argue with that logic. He met Feng’s eyes. He could feel something else behind his friend’s cheerful exterior. What was going on in China had been eating away at Feng all week, worrying him. Feng needed this too.

“OK,” Kade said. “Just for a couple hours.”

General Singh didn’t look happy.

“What could she do in a few minutes of access to the net? If she were insane? Or hostile?”

Varun took a deep breath. “A tremendous amount, sir. Just tremendous.”

Singh’s frown deepened. “Can we force the truth out of her?”

Varun sighed. “General,” he said. “Before we take that step, we do have a resource here, who knew her, who may be able to help us assess her state of mind.”

Singh’s eyes narrowed. “Get him.”

Kade and Feng were on their way out of the research building when a scientist Kade vaguely recognized nearly ran into them.

“Dr Lane!” the man yelled.

Kade grinned. “It’s not ‘Doctor’. Just Kade.” He tried to remember this guy’s name. Gaureen? Grameen? He was a postdoc. On Varun Verma’s team.

The team whose work he still didn’t really understand.

“You have to come with me, Dr Kade!” The man looked frantic, eyes wide open. Kade could feel hurry and anxiety coming off his mind. The postdoc put two hands around Kade’s wrist – his good one – and tugged, pulling Kade off balance.

“Hey now!” Feng put his own hand over the postdoc’s two, stabilized Kade. “Dr Kade and I have some very important research to do tonight! You can find him on Monday.”

Kade laughed, and tried to smile reassuringly. “What do you need, exactly? Can it wait?”

The postdoc looked back and forth between Kade and Feng, clearly unsure how to handle the situation. “General Singh said to get you, sir.”

Kade raised an eyebrow at that. He didn’t know Singh was even here.