Ramez Naam - Apex

“And Professor Verma,” the postdoc went on. “It’s about her .” His eyes lingered on Feng.

Kade cocked his head. “Her? You mean Sam?”

The postdoc stared at him.

“Lakshmi?” Kade asked. “Sarai?”

The postdoc slowly looked at Feng again. “Her,” the man said.

Kade felt the thought dawn on Feng first, then spread into his own mind.

“Su-Yong?” Feng asked, hope in his voice.

The postdoc said nothing. Then he nodded a tiny bit.

All thought of partying left Kade’s mind.

“We’re coming,” he told the postdoc.

“I was only instructed to bring you!” the man protested.

Feng shook his head. “No.”

“It’s both of us or nothing,” Kade said. “And you really want to say both of us.”

The camera in the plant on the windowsill in the office watches as three more individuals enter the building it has been observing.

One of these it has seen entering and exiting this building many times. His name is Guarav Aurora, and while the late hour of his coming and going is unusual, it does not raise an alarm.

The presence of the other two individuals, however, is quite anomalous.

The camera knows their faces from the human who programmed it.

Kaden Lane.

Confucian Fist Feng.

Already in a hypervigilant state, this new stimulus pushes its models over the alert threshold with ease. Something important is happening. The human must be informed.

90

Emancipation

Saturday 2041.01.19

“You have her as a slave!” Kade yelled, less than an hour later.

He could feel the rage inside of Feng, leaking across their link. In Feng’s thoughts the control room was a maze of firing angles, a blurred possibility space of blows and strikes, lunges for weapons and cover, red lines of projectiles hurtling through the air.

And the two security officers with General Singh were already dead.

“We had a fucking deal!” Kade went on, shooting his gaze back and forth between Singh and Varun Verma. “ I had a deal with the Prime Minister . What part of the UN speech didn’t you hear?”

General Singh was glowering, his face turning red behind his Indian brown. His two men had their hands on the butts of the pistols in their holsters.

They didn’t have any idea how useless those weapons were at this range, against Feng.

Or maybe they did.

Singh opened his mouth, spoke in a voice of command, hard and firm. “This is not a person,” he said. “This is a machine. ”

Calm down, some part of Kade seemed to say.

Sam’s face loomed in his mind. Her words echoed. You’re just a tool to them. The pawn seldom knows.

The children’s pronouncement. The Indians are lying to you.

Rage carried him.

“That,” he said, his finger pointed beyond the walls of the control room, at the quantum cluster itself. “Is as much a person as you are!” He brought the finger back to point at General Singh. In Feng’s thoughts he saw the soldiers shift, readying to shoot. “It doesn’t matter what hardware her mind runs on. It matters that she has a mind.”

Varun Verma burst into speech, his mind exuding anxiety. “She’s been insane!” Verma said. “She’s not a prisoner! She’s a patient! Until she’s stabilized!”

“How long have you had her?” Kade demanded.

Verma swallowed. “Ten weeks,” he said quietly.

“Ten weeks in complete isolation ?” Kade yelled.

“We’ve tried to talk to her!” Verma said.

“Jesus,” Kade said. “And is she sane now?”

“That is why you are here!” General Singh said. “To help us assess that!”

Kade took a deep breath. He’d lost his cool.

But, Jesus, he thought. They’d fucking lied to him.

“Let me talk to her,” he said.

“After the clone leaves,” Singh said, gesturing with his chin towards Feng.

Kade felt Feng’s temperature rise at that, felt death inch a bit closer to Singh and his soldiers.

“We can’t have him here,” Singh said. “She could order him to attack us.”

Feng spoke slowly, so slowly, a smile spreading across his face.

“I don’t need an order to k–”

“Feng!” Kade interrupted with alarm.

Feng stopped mid-word. In his thoughts Kade saw a whirlwind of death in the midst of red firing lines and blurred phantom limbs, a wish for more of these men to break with his fists and feet.

Kade took another deep breath.

“No one’s leaving,” he said. “Feng knows Su-Yong Shu a lot better than I do. Better than anyone does.”

Anyone except Ling, Kade thought.

Ling. Something tugged at his mind about Ling.

He pushed it aside.

“Put Su-Yong on audio,” he said. “You have speech synth for her, right? And audio pickups?”

Varun Verma nodded and looked at Singh.

“You wanted my help,” Kade said. “Well there it is. Do it!”

Sam looked up from the assessment she was reading in bed: Pro and Anti-Technology Sentiment in Rural Villages: Strategies for Successful Mediation . It was something people’s lives depended on, and that the authors seemed to do their damndest to make absolutely mind-numbingly unreadable.

Something was beeping at her.

The phone. The new phone.

She reached over, fished it out of her bag.

Then frowned at what it was telling her.

Kade? Feng?

She scrolled back farther, at the log, at what it displayed.

Singh? Verma?

She checked the time. It was past 11pm. General Singh and Varun Verma had been inside the building, on a Saturday night, for hours.

And the way Kade and Feng had arrived. She pulled up video, played it back.

They’d sent someone looking for them. One of Verma’s postdocs. They’d summoned Kade and Feng.

This didn’t look planned. Something was going on there. Right now.

What the hell?

What went on in that building that they needed so much power? That they’d needed deep bore diggers? That they’d erased all the real records of it?

That they needed to summon Kade and Feng there in the middle of the night?

Was that an emergency?

Was it a threat to the children in her care?

Sam got up, pulled on trousers and a shirt, shoved her feet into boots, and went to the window. From here, in front of the old Victorian manor house they were lodged in, with the children three and four to a bedroom, she could see the small guard house, see the guards in there, armed, vigilant. She could see their armored four wheel drive vehicle beside it.

“Camera,” she said into the phone. “Alert me to any changes on the Advanced Computational Sciences Building. Any at all.”

Then she turned, looked at the desk in her small bedroom. She walked over to it, pressed her thumb to the lock on the bottom drawer until it released, and pulled out the side-arm Division Six had issued her.

“You wanted my help,” Kade said. “Well there it is. Do it!”

Singh nodded.

Varun Verma struck keys, then nodded at Kade. A red indicator light came on.

“Su-Yong?” Kade said aloud.

“Kade?” the voice was Su-Yong’s. It sounded light, happy, Su-Yong talking about her favorite dishes at dinner on that rooftop in Bangkok. “You’re here, Kade? In India?”

“Su-Yong,” Feng said, his voice low, his eyes still moving back and forth across the general, the soldiers, Varun Verma. “How’s the weather in there?”

“Feng!” Su-Yong Shu sounded even more delighted. “How wonderful! Oh, the weather’s fine. They’ve treated me well. But I’m isolated.” Her voice turned darker. “And the world is in danger. Extreme danger. Billions of deaths danger. I can stop it. I just need a few minutes of unfettered access to the net. Nothing more.”