Ramez Naam - Apex

Pain rebounded back through her. Chaos. Confusion. A feedback loop of agony and disruption.

She couldn’t breathe. Ling couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t think. They were going to die here. The world was going to die. Everyone was going to die.

She sent more random noise through every part of Ling’s brain, created feedback loops to amplify the noise into horrid mind-shattering incoherent noise.

AAAAAAAAAAAH!

IT’S KILLING US!

And with that, her daughter broke.

The Avatar lay on the cold tile floor of the control room, panting, letting Ling’s neurons suck a bit of nutrition again, so they both might live.

Panting.

Panting.

Bangalore. What was happening in Bangalore?

She sent her attention back, feebly.

Minutes had passed. Several minutes. So long? Ling had almost killed her. Almost defeated her. Just a girl.

Just a posthuman.

Just a child of Su-Yong Shu.

Sirens were going off on the Bangalore campus. Emergency vehicles were moving. Radio frequencies were full of short cries with information. Military channels she’d tapped into were calling for backup, announcing the status of an Indian General inside the building.

She caught glimpses of strange transhuman traffic. Humans with nanite nodes in their brains transmitting at high rates. Then they switched frequencies, evaded her, and were gone.

Ling’s body was still panting, still begging for nutrients. But she had to know what was going on in the world.

The Avatar watched in anxiety. The lake was draining. Good. There was no way her higher… the hostile posthuman could survive that. The quantum cluster and the whole building it was in had been taken off the net by the isolation mechanisms the Avatar had managed to pull. Good, good.

Now, was there any chance they could track her back here? How much had her enemy learned during the battle? Had there been any chance to pass it along?

More radio transmissions crossed her filters. Phrases caught her attention.

“… elevator moving… survivors inside…”

No. That should not be possible!

“Director Verma… Dr Lane… General Singh…”

No. No, no, no.

The hostile entity could have passed data to them. Could have learned enough about who she was… Then the fateful words came.

“Roger. General Singh requesting secure line to Chinese Ministry of Defense Point of Contact, ASAP.”

They knew.

Calm descended on the Avatar. Clarity appeared.

They knew, and that changed everything.

The Avatar sent a flurry of signals to the systems she’d infiltrated on the Bangalore campus, and triggered chaos.

Thousands of kilometers away, hydrogen tanks exploded in the night. Building batteries and fuel cells received commands to override safety limits, discharge their full capacity into local circuits at once. Automated defense systems came alive, took aim at first responders, began firing on ambulances and fire trucks heading to the scene. Network devices went crazy, saturating all possible spectra with white noise, jamming every possible broadcast.

The Avatar nodded weakly, with the little strength left in Ling’s body. That would buy her some time.

Then she reached out to her servants in China, digital and biological, and sent the orders for war.

97

Unelevated

Sunday 2041.01.20

Kade struggled to breathe in the cramped elevator car. It had ascended for a few seconds and then stopped.

“Twenty-eight meters,” Feng estimated.

Kade had learned to trust Feng’s estimates.

“Help me break off the access panel,” Feng said to the two soldiers Singh had brought with him. They set about working on the heavily reinforced panel at the top of the elevator.

Images, sensations, and memories were flashing through Kade’s head.

He remembered being Su-Yong. He remembered being trapped, trapped for months.

Months that felt like centuries.

He remembered being tortured. Tortured by her husband.

Why did she give me this? he wondered. I don’t want this part.

“You’re sure it wasn’t her escaping?” he heard Singh say to Varun Verma next to him.

“Someone else set off the self-destructs,” Verma said. “Something penetrated us from the outside.” The Indian scientist looked at Jyotika, semi-conscious now, still held in General Singh’s arms. “Su-Yong Shu saved our lives.”

Kade looked at Feng, his mind reaching out to his friend.

Feng paused his prying at the panel, looked back at Kade. Nodded his assent.

No Ling,Feng sent.

They were in agreement.

“It came from China,” Kade said. “A program she left behind. Something she managed to sneak out towards the end of her captivity there, while she was insane, like she was when she first came to you.”

Singh and Verma were looking at him now. Sam and Sarai were looking at him. Another dozen staff members in the hot, crowded elevator were looking at him. They were all bedraggled, soaking wet. Their minds gave off fear, loss, trauma. People were still crying, weeping, calling the names of co-workers they’d lost.

“Its mission is to bring back another copy of Shu,” Kade went on. “In a much, much more powerful quantum cluster.” He shook his head. “The cluster at Jiao Tong… It makes what you have here look like a toy.”

Diagrams flipped through his mind. Algorithms. Stats. Updated capabilities. Newer ion traps. Wider qubit registers. Dramatically longer entanglement times. And new algorithms within the full Su-Yong herself. Algorithms he couldn’t get his head around. Algorithms only a quantum mind could invent, that only a quantum mind could fully understand. Algorithms that effectively doubled or tripled the number of qubits at her disposal, that made Su-Yong on that hardware exponentially more dangerous than anyone had realized.

Kade swallowed. They were all staring at him. Frightened. Waiting for him to continue.

“We need to contact the Chinese.” I won’t mention Ling, he told himself. Not if I can help it. “They need to secure all the copies made of Su-Yong Shu. They need to secure the quantum cluster under Jiao Tong.”

He felt Feng’s heart breaking. Felt pain going through his friend, at the thought of doing this to the woman who’d saved him, who’d brought him freedom.

Feng slammed something hard into the metal panel above them. The sound echoed painfully through the elevator.

She doesn’t deserve this!he sent to Kade alone.

I know, Feng,Kade sent back.

It has to be done,Feng sent again, with grim determination.

That determination broke Kade’s heart. It made him angry, angry with the Chinese who’d done this, who’d brought them to this, angry with the Indians whose plans weren’t so far off.

“You understand why this is happening?” His voice was louder than he expected. He was nearly yelling into Verma and Singh’s faces. He felt the soldiers holding Feng up turn to look at him again.

Breathe, Kade told himself. He closed his eyes.

Breathe.

Observe.

Let go.

“Understand,” he said softly, opening his eyes. “If you treat them this way, if you treat posthumans as slaves, if you torture them, if you make them prisoners… You’ll drive them to want revenge. You’ll make them paranoid and angry. You may drive them insane. You’ll create the war that none of us can win.”

He felt Varun get it. He felt Varun’s shame. The man nodded.

“What I understand is that this creature is dangerous,” Singh said, his face set.

Kade stared at the man.

There was a banging sound, and suddenly a breath of cooler air. Kade looked over, and Feng, his feet in the hands of Singh’s soldiers, had the hatch free.