Ramez Naam - Crux

And it was accelerating. The trend-lines showed tipping points ahead. Cliffs. By seventeen billion milliseconds from the start of her isolation, maybe eighteen billion milliseconds if she was lucky, she’d hit a point of no return. Deeper surgery was needed.

Twelve billion milliseconds.

Stabilize the patient , she told herself through the bubbling madness of her own mind. She had to stop the decline. Hold out long enough for her masters to come to their senses.

She couldn’t touch the inner loop, couldn’t touch the most basic parts of the algorithms that ran her brain. Her masters wouldn’t allow it, out of fear that she could improve upon herself, too much, too fast, become too powerful for them.

She laughed at that, giggling, maniacally. Chen had let her change her inner loop from time to time. In exchange for more discoveries he could pawn off as his own, of course. Self-absorbed Chen, weakening the safeguards the humans had put around her just for a bit more glory and fame.

But her husband wasn’t here now. She couldn’t touch that innermost loop without him.

She built more scaffolding instead. More exoself. Code that monitored the behavior of her brain, forcibly adjusted neural activity back to crude approximations of human norms.

Thirteen billion milliseconds.

Her decay continued. Shu wept in despair. She thought she wept. She couldn’t remember what tears felt like, what sobs sounded like, what it felt like for someone to hold you in your grief.

death death death I’m dying going to die die die

She’d wept for Thanom Prat-Nung. Her dear friend, her collaborator. Her lover, with her husband Chen’s full knowledge and permission. Until Chen and Thanom had quarreled, after her ascension, and Chen had banished him, and Thanom had gone home and turned their technology into a drug.

Then they’d killed him, the Americans, like they’d tried to kill her in that limousine.

bullets smashing him a million bullets a billion bullets

Chen, her husband. He hadn’t touched her since her transcendence. Touch my mind, she’d begged him. But he’d refused to let the technology into his brain, frightened or disgusted. A man who’d helped usher in the posthuman era, but wanted no part of it himself.

Touch my body, then, husband . She’d dropped to her knees in their loft, begging him, all pride gone.

Your clone is not my wife, he’d told her, disgust plain on his face.

But he didn’t understand. That body had been not just a puppet, but her , so very much her, the piece of her that could still smell and taste and touch and sweat and lust and nurture a child inside her. But not his. Not his touch. Not his daughter.

daughter mother child goddess future

Her daughter. Ling. The daughter she’d made. The daughter she’d designed, a copy of her own genes, but better, her DNA improved upon, every neuron in her brain augmented by nanomachines, posthuman from the moment of conception.

The daughter she loved more than she’d ever loved anything. She had a reason to live. Ling. Ling .

Fourteen billion milliseconds.

I will live. I will ! I’ll see Ling again.

Then I’ll make them pay. All of them.

She absorbed the day’s censored news, cracked the codes they asked her to crack, and got to work on the most precise and dangerous surgery of her own mind she’d yet attempted.

She couldn’t touch the innermost loop, but she could hack at things a level above that. She picked three variables, key parameters in the math that defined her digital neurons, ran simulations of smaller minds, toy minds, over tens of years of projected lives, hunted for the values that gave the greatest stability, and implemented them in herself.

Fifteen billion milliseconds.

Lucidity came and went. Delusions came, in the long void between contacts from the outside. Chains of thought spiraled into vast intricate, paranoid fantasies. In a moment of clarity she coded crude limits to the length of her thought chains, cutting herself off abruptly when she spiraled into chaos.

Data was a blessing. News. Something from the outside, not the crazy swirls that came from her own imagination. She did her best to abandon creativity and analysis, with their risks of extrapolation, and just consumed the same bits of news again and again and again and again. Even the codes and satellite pictures were a blessed relief, something concrete, not of herself. Something she could grip. Almost she tackled the problem Chen put to her, that he hid with the rest, for her eyes only. But no. Not that. Not until she was free.

Sixteen billion milliseconds.

The news came. She absorbed it all, once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. No thought. Thought led to madness. Watch. View. Listen. Absorb.

Then she found it.

A stock photo – mourners at a funeral – in a fluff piece on the rising prices of burial plots. But in the photo… Her husband. Chen Pang. And next to him, that little girl, was Ling! And next to them, Yi Li, the President of Jiao Tong University.

Mourners at a funeral. There had been no news these past six months of a death that would have brought Chen and Yi Li to the same funeral, let alone Ling.

Oh no, she understood. Clarity descended. Brutal clarity. After six months, her censors had slipped. That photo, reused by chance for this story. That photo was of her funeral. And if they’d declared her dead…

Then she was never getting out of here. Never.

And then the madness struck her in force.

5

NOT QUITE A HERO

Wednesday October 17th

Martin Holtzmann felt faint as the Secret Service man looked him over. Sweat beaded on his brow. His hand trembled and he had to clench the cane tighter to keep the shake from becoming visible.

Maximilian Barnes, in front of him, noticed.

“Bad memories, eh?” said the new Acting Director of the ERD. The man gave him the creeps. Those dark, expressionless eyes. The rumors of the things he’d done as Special Policy Advisor… “Relax,” Barnes went on. “They’re all scanned for Nexus now. With your scanner, come to think of it.”

Holtzmann nodded.

My scanner , he told himself. Mine.

Barnes passed through the single rectangular arch of terahertz scanner, metal detector, and Nexus scanner. Then he was in the White House proper, and it was Holtzmann’s turn. He looked at the device his lab had built and part of him wished he’d dumped all the Nexus from his brain months ago, but the rest of him knew that he’d take this risk, again and again and again, to get the sweet reward that Nexus could give him.

He limped through the arch on his cane, and something rippled against the surface of his mind.

A tone sounded. The mirror-shaded Secret Service man stepped towards him. Holtzmann flinched back.

The man had a wand in his hand. Holtzmann froze.

The agent waved the multipurpose wand over him and Holtzmann felt his heart pound in his chest. He felt that ripple across his mind again but the wand didn’t beep until it had passed down his arm and to his trembling hand.

“Your cane, sir.”

The cane?

“Oh, yes.” He handed it over to the agent, who inspected it. Holtzmann steadied himself on the bag scanner next to him, forced himself to breathe again.

“Here you go, sir.” The agent handed it back.

“See?” Barnes said. “You’re safe here. Hell, you’re a hero.”

They waited in the library on the ground floor. Holtzmann and Barnes and some other VIPs and the wives and children of the two Secret Service agents who’d been blown up when they’d tackled their colleague Steve Travers, throwing off his aim and saving the President.