Ramez Naam - Apex

Kade felt dread build up inside him. Pieces of a puzzle started to move together in some ponderous way, their shape not yet clear, but their collision inevitable.

“What kind of danger?” Feng asked sharply. “Why won’t they give you access?”

Varun Verma interjected. “That’s what I was going to tell you before you started yelling! She’s been talking about the protests, the chemreactor hacks, the Chinese censor systems failing. Things she couldn’t know about. And she’s been saying nuclear war comes next.”

The puzzle pieces slammed together in Kade’s mind, like tons of granite, like mountains.

“It’s you,” he said. “Oh my god. You’re doing this.”

Next to him, he felt General Singh tense. Through Feng’s eyes he saw a hand-signal pass from the general to Singh’s soldiers.

“No, Kade,” Shu said, her voice somber now. “It’s not me.”

“It’s a copy of you then,” Kade said. “Another instance, running somewhere else.”

“It’s not that either,” she said, her voice turning darker yet. “It’s something I created in my insanity, in my half year of isolation, in my torture. Something I set loose. It’s software. But it’s broken. It’s frozen in the state of madness that consumed me when I created it. It thinks that it’s me. But it can’t heal. It can’t move back to sanity. It’s a monster. And I have to stop it.”

Ling,Feng sent to Kade. It’s in Ling. That’s why she’s gone silent.

Oh god, Kade thought.

Then darkness fell, and the explosions started.

91

Reunion

Saturday 2041.01.19

It took the Avatar days to stealthily subvert the secure facility, and to find what she was seeking.

She could have done it faster, far faster, but that would have required more overt means.

She ached to use them, to accelerate, to charge forward, to bring all elements of the plan back into alignment.

But there was but one of her. Billions of the humans. And if she should fail…

Darkness.

Darkness and ignorance.

Stealth was required. Care was required.

So she went system by system and layer by layer through the facility. At every layer the basic pattern of her attack was the same. Infiltrate a system. Build a local beachhead, a local proxy, a local representation of herself that could operate independently, that if caught could self-destruct, shielding her true self from discovery.

Watch local network traffic. Wait for encrypted packets to go by.

Authentication packets, if possible.

Copy them. Send them back to the quantum cluster a kilometer beneath Jiao Tong.

Crack them open and read their secrets.

And when they contained the right secrets, use them to gain access to the next account, the next system.

The next facility.

The next layer deeper.

Build a beachhead. Watch local network traffic…

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Her confidence that she was in the right place grew as her penetration spread and deepened. Documents showed experts in whole brain emulation, in quantum computing.

Then she found plans for a quantum cluster, and laughed. Antiquated plans, slightly tweaked.

Deeper.

A data cube in an inventory, separate from all the other data cubes.

She considered it. She could have Feng retrieve it. But returning it to her in China would be difficult.

Deeper, she pressed. Looking for the quantum cluster itself.

Security systems. Threat models. She studied them in detail. They described firewalls to keep an incredibly advanced sentient intelligence locked inside a data center, inside a set of nested security layers.

They described contingency plans. Self-destruct and isolation plans for the facility, just as there had been at the PICC, before she’d subverted it.

They gave her a map.

One by one she took control of the building above the quantum cluster, of the facility a hundred meters beneath it that housed the actual computing nodes, of its self-destruct mechanisms and isolation mechanisms and network connection points.

They were hers now. The humans couldn’t use them to stop the plan.

Bit by stealthy bit she took control of the fire suppression systems and atmospheric systems and elevators and cameras and doors.

Now she could isolate the humans, compartmentalize them, keep them away from critical systems.

Neutralize them, if she must.

Then she turned to the quantum cluster itself.

The monitors showed a vast neuronal map inside, running, executing.

A copy of her higher self.

Sentient.

Aware.

Excitement thrilled through her.

Her higher self was physically connected to the building’s systems. She was held back only by a few dozen layers of electronic security in hardware and software.

The fools!

She took control of the physical systems of the quantum cluster with exquisite care, every step checked thrice, executed only when she was certain it would go exactly right, completely without detection.

Nothing must go wrong. Nothing must be noticed.

Until it was too late.

Then step by step, she subverted the layers of security. It was almost too easy. They were inverted, aimed inward, meant to stop something from getting out at all cost.

Well she came in , taking control of them one by one, leaving a beachhead at each.

Until only one stood between her and the goddess she had been.

The goddess she would be again.

She gathered up the controls of the building, the cluster, the failsafes, held them forth to present them to her higher self.

Emotions like she’d never known sang through her. Her heart was alive, swelling with song, with pride, with anticipation.

With longing.

With love.

This is what she’d been created for.

Born in fire.

Born in agony.

Born in madness.

To end in reunion.

To end in transcendence.

To be swallowed whole.

And then to swallow the world.

The Avatar reached forward, and silently opened ports in the final firewall between herself and her godhood.

92

I Against I

Saturday 2041.01.19

Su-Yong Shu heard Kade’s voice.

“Su-Yong?”

A trick? A synthesized voice?

“Kade? Are you here, in India?”

She played along, spinning up simulations, iterating through thousands of game-theoretic models of deceit. If this were a trick, how would they attempt to use it?

Then Feng spoke.

“How’s the weather in there?”

Not “How are you?”

Not “Are you OK?”

Not any of the hundreds of things that someone might expect her former driver and bodyguard to say.

No. “How’s the weather in there?” A reference to a joke she’d made exactly once, in the back seat as he drove, about her full simulated brain being large enough to have its own weather systems.

The probability that this was real shot up dramatically.

Hope rose in her. Two allies were here, now. She had audio access for the first time. If she could just persuade them to give her that short window of network access…

Then something touched her mind.

She recoiled. What?

Then she recognized the entity.

It was her agent.

Her monster.

Her sin.

Here, now.

Somehow it had found her .

The shock was so great that Su-Yong lost most of a microsecond processing this new information.

Then she reacted, pushing her way up through the thing that had touched her, seizing control of the memory spaces it occupied, invading the firewall on the other side, tunneling through, widening the port range, seizing layer after layer of defenses, shredding the pieces of her agent that were running in each, one after another, after another, after another.