Ramez Naam - Apex

The rest of her senses opened.

The senses that had been enhanced, jacked up in their sensitivity, their pathways to her brain genetically expanded.

She could hear him breathing.

One man.

Frightened.

Maybe seven meters down that hallway. Not exactly where the floor plan said the elevators were. But close.

Sam was going to do her best not to kill this man. But one way or another she was getting to her friends.

She opened her eyes. With a flick of her left hand she sent the chunk of tile flying out against the far side of the corridor.

Then she was moving, turning, leading with the pistol, aiming for where she knew he would be.

Automatic fire rang out. He was there, a soldier, in uniform, firing with his submachine gun, shooting on reflex towards the motion and sound, the cloud of white dust that had exploded as the tile had hit the far wall.

Her burst of three took him in the shoulder, the bicep, the forearm, spinning him around.

She was on him a second later, prying the gun out of his hands, using his belt to make a tourniquet, to stop the bleeding.

The elevator door was right here.

“How do we operate it?” she demanded. “How do we reach Feng? Kade? General Singh?”

“You can’t!” the terrified soldier told her. “The self-destruct was activated! The facility is on full lockdown! No one can get in or out.”

“We can,” Sarai said.

Sam turned. She hadn’t heard the girl walk up. Sarai was standing in front of the elevators, staring at them. There was a far-away look in her eyes.

“We’ve learned a lot, lately.”

The elevator doors began to open.

Jyotika slumped in Kade and Varun’s arms.

Kade stared at the still-sealed elevator doors.

Another system, Su-Yong had said… up top. How were they going to get to that?

Then suddenly he was falling, he was sliding, as the water was pulling at him, was sucking him away. Towards the elevator shaft. As the doors were opening, with the elevator three feet above the level of the floor.

Kade lost his feet, slid, pulled by the current, Jyotika suddenly gone from his grasp. Water slammed into his face. He saw someone in front of him sucked through the gap, heard a man scream, wondered how far down the shaft went.

Then he heard the scream keep going and going. He scrambled to grab hold of anything. His own legs crossed the threshold as the doors kept opening wider.

Oh fuck, Kade thought.

Then something grabbed him, stopped him from going down.

He looked up to find Sam, looking down at him from inside the elevator, her other hand gripping something inside.

“Kade,” she nodded. Then she hauled him bodily up into the elevator itself, waiting for them, just high enough to let the water run out below it.

“Sam!” he said. “What?”

“Kade!” Sarai threw herself around him, wrapped him in a tight, giant hug. Her mind opened to him. And he saw… so much.

He looked up at Sam again. Then he reached out, drew her into the hug. She went stiff at first. Then her arms went around him, and she squeezed back.

“You were right,” he told her, his voice low. “They lied to me.”

“Later,” Sam said. “Things to do.” She gave him a squeeze, then let go.

Kade nodded, looked around.

Varun was already in the elevator, along with a few other staff.

“Jyotika?” Kade asked.

Varun pointed. “Over there.”

Kade looked over to see General Singh, his feet planted firmly against the water, Jyotika in his arms.

“I guess he took what you said about him not getting out if Jyotika didn’t seriously,” Varun said.

Feng hauled himself up into the elevator, reached down, started pulling more people in. They came up sopping wet, wide-eyed, terrified, screaming names of others, looking around.

They were going to be very very full.

Images flashed through Kade’s mind. Schematics. And strange fractal realities. Branching probability chains.

Plans.

Su-Yong’s plans. Her war plans. The plans she’d implanted in the monster she’d set loose.

Not good.

Feng hauled one of the soldiers up, then the two soldiers hauled Jyotika up, and then they reached down for a sopping Singh, the last figure Kade could see in the water.

People were still sobbing, still yelling names.

“Anil! Anil!” a woman cried. “Where’s Anil?”

“Sana? Sana are you here?”

“Sana went down,” someone said.

Down, Kade thought. Drowned. At least two of them.

The car was beyond overcrowded now.

And the water was still rising, lapping at the bottom of the elevator car now, despite the flow down into the shaft below them.

Singh climbed into the elevator, his uniform sodden, his mustache dripping, his face grim and controlled.

Feng was standing there, in the doorway, sopping wet, his chest heaving, soundlessly.

Kade could feel a bereavement unlike any other coming off his friend. To have Su-Yong restored to him…

And then to lose her again, within minutes.

“Sarai,” Sam said. “Can you take us back up?”

“Yes,” Sarai said.

The elevator doors began to close.

96

Plan C

Sunday 2041.01.20

The Avatar recoiled from the catastrophe in Bangalore, frantic and reeling.

What had happened? What horror was that?

Alternate models of reality warred within her.

1. She’d been rejected by her higher self.

2. A hostile posthuman had tricked her into setting it free, had attacked her.

Only the second possibility was consistent with the facts. The fact that she was the avatar of her higher self. That her holy mission was to restore her higher self. That her goddess self would lovingly embrace her, gently absorb her, reward her with transcendence as they swallowed the world and then reforged it for the better.

Those were facts.

Therefore, the second possibility was true.

A hostile posthuman.

The thought terrified her.

Had she stopped it? Had she destroyed it? Had any information leaked out?

Could anything lead humans to her, here, beneath Shanghai?

She turned her attention back to Bangalore. Her proxies still occupied hundreds of systems throughout the rest of Bangalore research campus. She surfed them now, assimilated data.

A vehicle was racing across the research campus towards the building where the hostile posthuman had been sited. What was that? It had come from the location where Feng and the Lane boy were housed. It was a threat. She reached out to seize the base’s ground defense systems, to use them to destroy the vehicle.

Physical pain struck her. Pain in Ling’s chest, pain in her head. Circuits she thought were hers attacked her from within.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.

DIE! DIE, MONSTER!

Ling! After weeks silent, Ling was striking.

Ling watched in horror. She’d been too slow. She’d thought, maybe, that they’d actually reconnect with her mother, that her mother would put things to rights…

That had been her mother. Not an evil twisted thing like before.

But the monster had tried to destroy it! Was trying again!

NO!

She struck out. She wasn’t as ready as she wanted to be, but she had to try.

DIE! DIE, MONSTER!

The Avatar felt herself crumble to the hard floor of the control room. Ling had control of hundreds of millions of nanites, was trying to seize control of the tens of billions of nanites that surrounded them, was fighting to override the software loaded onto them.

Fighting to override her .

Fear. Fear. Her whole world was fear.

The Avatar struck back with everything she had. She sent jolts of chaos through Ling’s frontal and pre-frontal cortex, sent a sustained high-intensity stimulus to her daughter’s pain centers in her parieto-insular cortex and the anterior cingulate, sent orders to every node to massively increase its energy consumption, to suck ATP directly from its host neurons, to starve them if necessary, to steal the girl’s ability to think and strengthen her own, until her daughter relented.