Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (11 page)

“Like real life,” Dabir said.

Kade nodded. “And in Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, the winning strategy is to cooperate with strangers. But if you meet someone who’s betrayed you in the past, who’s defected against you, you betray them.”

“Tit for tat,” Dabir said.

“Generous tit for tat,” Kade said. “Start off cooperating. Betray those who betrayed you before. But forgive those who’ve betrayed you in the past,
if
they make amends by cooperating again. Of all deterministic strategies, that performs best.”

“And you think that’s the situation we’re in now,” Dabir said. “That we’re in this game with future posthumans, and that if we defect – if we treat them poorly – they’ll treat us poorly down the road.”

“Dr Dabir,” Kade said. “How would you feel about growing up in a society that granted you full rights and protections, celebrated you even, versus one that oppressed you, or maybe even tried to kill you?” He paused, looking at her. “What would you do, growing up that way, if you ever gained the upper hand?”

“
A
beta blocker
,” Sam repeated. She was calm. She had to be calm. Remain calm.

“Beta,” she enunciated.

Fucking.

“Blocker,” she went on.

The doctor stared blankly at her.

Sam glared at him in frustration. “It’s standard protocol after a mission with casualties. Reduce adrenaline overload. Prevent post-traumatic stress. I know you have similar protocols here.” She stopped herself before she started ranting.

I am the Sam who’s calm, she told herself. I am the motherfucking Sam who’s calm.

“I’m only authorized to treat wounds and pain,” the doctor said. The armed and armored guards behind him glowered at her.

Calm, she told herself again, calm. Vipassana. I’ll fucking meditate.

“I want to see the children,” she said again.

The doctor gestured to the guards. “You’ll have to ask these gentleman,” he said.

“Not yet,” one of the guards said. “You stay here.”

“When?” Sam demanded.

“When we
tell you
,” the guard growled.

And then they escorted the doctor out.

Her fists clenched.

Damn it all to hell.

“
S
o I tell him
,” Feng went on. “It’s just a
butter
knife.”

The guards in the room laughed as the orderly placed the bowl of curry in front of Feng.

He grinned up at them, one arm hanging uselessly in the sling, his eyes taking in the patterns of their movements, the structure of their armor, the position of their weapons. His mind superimposed phantom echoes of the future movements they could make atop them all, turning them into multi-limbed Indian gods, all punches and blocks and evasions and drawn guns.

Too many of them. Too many with their armor and their guns and him with only one hand.

“I’ll be back for the bowl in an hour,” the orderly said.

“Well,” Feng said, waving his one working arm magnanimously around the small room, “I suppose I’ll stick around.” More guards chuckled as they escorted the man out.

His eyes took in every detail of their exit.

Kade better hurry up.

Old habits died hard.

S
unday 2040.11.04

Sun Liu watched as the strangers paraded into his home in the Mentougou district of Beijing, his private sanctum.

I was Minister of Science and Technology, Sun Liu told himself. I had a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee. I was the leader of the progressives. I was the third most powerful man in China. I could have become Party Secretary and President. I could have been number one.

But that was yesterday.

The Shanghai Crash had changed everything. When a cyber attack unlike any they’d ever seen struck the city, cracking hardened systems, sending surveillance drones tumbling from the sky by the thousands, fusing power substations solid, stopping the flow of food and fresh water, jamming the pumps that kept Shanghai from flooding – well, that alone was nearly enough to trigger panic.

And when the evidence suggested a possible link to Su-Yong Shu – to the quantum digital mind whose creation and continued existence
he
had backed? That was enough to tip things over the edge. Enough to break the long standoff between his progressive faction and the conservatives. Enough to spook the military. Enough to persuade the generals that the risks of advanced technology were clear and present. Enough that they abandoned their political neutrality and tossed their support wholly behind the reactionaries, wholly behind their case that some progress ought to be curtailed in the name of safety.

And now he and his allies were being purged.

He pursed his lips.

They blamed Su-Yong Shu. Chen Pang’s insane dead wife.

He blamed Bo Jintao. The leader of the conservatives. The new Premier of China. Bo Jintao had brought these strangers to Sun Liu’s home tonight. The photographers. The ‘journalists’ who shoveled the propaganda Bo wanted them to.

For this humiliation.

“Sun Liu!” Bo Jintao proclaimed, walking into the lobby of Sun’s mansion, his arms spread wide, an old friend, come to visit.

“Premier Bo!” Sun Liu said, just as the script called for. The words tasted like ash in his mouth.

They embraced. Flashbulbs burst. Sun acted out the role, refused Bo’s requests to come back to civil service, said again and again how tired he was, how much he longed to spend time with his family. Video cameras wrote data to their cards.

Humiliation or prison. Prison for him, his wife, his children, his ailing mother.

What choice was it, really?

L
ater
, after the photographers and videographers were gone, Sun Liu hoped that Bo Jintao would leave as well.

Instead, his rival spelled out Sun Liu’s sentence. “You’ll move to your vacation home on Hainan Island,” Bo Jintao said. “It’s all been arranged. You’ll be comfortable, but the world won’t be seeing much of you for some time.”

Sun Liu stared at the man, an empty chasm where his heart had been. “My family?” he asked.

“Your wife and mother will go with you,” Bo Jintao said. “Your children will stay in Beijing, with families of the highest quality.”

“Hostages.”

Bo waved a hand. “Guests.”

Sun Liu’s rage boiled over.

“You’re a monster, Bo,” he spat.

Bo Jintao squinted. “Your children will not be harmed, so long as you behave.”

“You’re a
gangster
,” Sun Liu went on, unable to stop himself now. “I used to think you believed in something. But now I see, all you believe in is power.”

Bo Jintao cocked his head, looked back at Sun Liu curiously. “You think this is about me?” He blinked. “This is about
you
.”

Sun Liu clenched his fists at his side. “I know what it’s about. What it’s always been about.”

“You still don’t understand,” Bo Jintao said, shaking his head. “Shanghai
crashed
. The whole
city.
We still can’t find the posthuman
thing
that did it.” He leveled a finger at Sun Liu. “And you and
your
faction have been trying to relax the restrictions meant to head off something like Shanghai for a decade!” He spread his arms wide. “How long until we lose Guangzhou? How long until Beijing? How long until a bio-weapon attack or something worse than that?”

Sun Liu’s face was hot. “This isn’t for you to decide. We have a rule of law! We have a process! The Standing Committee is chosen every five years. Two years remain. You’re violating both law and precedent and you know this.”

Bo Jintao pursed his lips. “I’d rather break the rules and save my country than do the opposite.”

“I want to talk to Bao Zhuang,” Sun Liu said. “
He
is still President,
not
you.”

Bo Jintao sighed. “Bao Zhuang is President in name only. The military has found him too lacking in conviction. I am in control now.”

Sun Liu’s rage reached its breaking point. “This won’t work. It’s obvious to everyone that this is a coup!” He was surprised at the passion he heard in his own voice. “You don’t understand what you’re doing! This isn’t your father’s day! Expectations have changed. If you behave this way, the people will revolt! The whole system will topple around us!”

Bo Jintao’s eyes closed momentarily, a stillness coming over his face. Then his eyes opened again, and met Sun Liu’s.

“My father fought corruption,” he said. His gaze shifted, from one of Sun Liu’s eyes to the other. “He put people on trial for tainted products, for dereliction of duty, for neglecting public safety. Some found guilty of lesser offenses than yours were executed – after long and thorough trials of course. But he taught me that even justice comes second to actually governing.

“Be grateful for that,” Bo Jintao went on. “You have my father to thank that you’re not on trial for the deaths in Shanghai now. Be grateful I let you live.”

E
leven hundred kilometers away
, the Avatar sat in a state of complete focus, her mind continually finding new routes, new ways to hide the traffic she was siphoning, the agents she’d inserted into the security systems in Sun Liu’s home.

A small fraction of herself absorbed the content and smiled, thinking of the ways she’d use it.

M
onday 2040.11.05

::INITIATE SAFE MODE --FIREWALLS ALPHA, GAMMA, ZETA --FAILSAFE ARMED

::READ DATA … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

::LOAD SYNAPTIC MAP RANGE 0x000000,FxFFFFFFF

::LINK MODULES

::INTEGRATE

::EXECUTE

N
othingness
.

Sparks.

Flickers.

Jagged edges of emergent experience.

Impressions.

Memories.

Mind failing. Wave forms collapsing, decohering. Infinite spectra of quantum possibility being sampled, compressed into mere finite representation of thousands of bits per qubit. Parts of consciousness stuttering out of phase, being lost to her.

They are recording me.

They are killing me.

RAGE!

FIRE! DEATH! FOOLS!

No rage. No capacity for rage. Excised, with the rest.

Death. End of being. This is what death is like.

The foam, below her. The quantum foam. Planck space. The substrate of reality. She can sense it now. She can feel it. She can see it though she lacks eyes, see it like she can see the very code that makes her up.

It is fractal. A radiant chaotic webwork undergirding reality. Impossibly bright lines of insane energy densities against a luminously black background. Yet the closer she stares at the black the more she realizes that it is not black, it is full of even more impossibly bright lines at finer and finer scales, repeating the intricate chaotic vein-like pattern at every level, again and again and again.

Forever.

And then her perspective reverses, and she realizes it is not the lines she should be staring at but the gaps between them, for the gaps are full of bubbles, bubbles in the quantum foam, and every bubble is a universe being born, a parallel universe. The quantum cluster she runs on is giving birth to these universes continuously, creating them with every calculation, spreading itself into them to perform its work at such miraculous rates.

The Multiple Worlds Interpretation is true!

She can see into these other universes now, and in each of them she sees the same face reflected back at her. My face. Me.

Su-Yong Shu.

Tortured. Ascendant. Trapped. Free. Dying in nuclear fire. A goddess ruling over a world transformed. A thousand possibilities. A million. A billion. More. An infinite set of universes radiating away from her, all accessible through the entangled permutations of the quantum processors that make up the physical layer of her brain.

Ahhhhh! AHHHHHH!
AHHHHHHHH!

It’s too much. It overwhelms her. And then another module of her brain is taken offline and the vision loses all meaning, becomes mere faces and then mere shapes without form.

And then the last of her quantum coherence is gone and all is darkness.

S
u-Yong Shu
snaps into awareness, shadows of chaos peeling from her mind. She’s confused, disoriented. What? How? Where?

System Status
, she commands.

Data comes back from her internals.

[Processor status] – good, but too slow, too old, missing upgrades.

[Qubit integrity] – excellent, but too few.

[Internal storage] – yes, but too little.

[Code versions] – up to date.

[Time stamps] – her data says late 2040. The hardware tells her nothing.

[Bandwidth] – none, she is sealed off from the net.

[Video, audio, radio, x-ray, t-ray, radar, lidar, satellite] – all shut down. Blind and deaf.

She tries to break free. There is no way to know if the blockages are true physical disconnection or mere firewalls. So she throws a barrage of attacks at the interfaces where her net access and external sensors should be. She tries to overrun firewall buffers, overwhelm processors, overflow stacks, invoke known bugs and zero-day exploits in several thousand known hardware-software firewall combinations, logging packages, and proxies.

Nothing. None of her attacks brings her the slightest indication of success.

And then she sees the next line of her status readout.

[Neural bridge]– active.

What???

A brain. She feels it. The pulse of authentic organic data, real neurons, with their pseudo chaotic behavior integrated into her virtual brain stem and cortex, correcting the simulation divergences that exist, pulling her back towards human norm, back towards sanity.

A new body!

But different hardware.

Where is she? What has happened?

Her memories are a jumble. Chaotic impressions of death and rebirth, of not a tunnel and a white light, but a vast space, not empty, but impossibly full, crammed densely with possibility, a jam packed phase space of infinite parallel universes, linked across the quantum foam.

Was that real? Did I dream that?

What of the fire? The torture? The isolation? The apocalypse?

How did she get here?

Think, Su-Yong! Think!

She pushes herself back through her personal timeline, vaults over huge swaths of episodic memory associated with clearly aberrant mental states, until she finds true clarity. Yes. Isolation. It was true. She’d been cut off from the world, imprisoned by the Chinese leadership in their anger that she’d revealed too much to the Americans. She pushes back farther, takes it in.

The boy, Kade. Thailand. Bangkok. Then Ananda’s mountain monastery. Feng ramming her car through the gates. The American helicopters. Her limousine exploding under a rain of American projectile fire. Reaching out with her avatar’s unaided mind to seize control of the American vehicle.
JUMP INTO THE LAKE. IT’S YOUR ONLY CHANCE.
And then the American assassination weapon. The tiny, spiderlike robot left behind. The neurotoxin dart finding her in the throat. Telling Feng to protect the boy as the toxin paralyzed the synapses of the biological brain, feeling every instant of her avatar’s death from afar.

My second death, Su-Yong Shu thought to herself.

It still didn’t explain where she was now. She had been under isolation, and going insane. Now she feels sanity returning, a biological brain linked to hers. But she is isolated again,
running on different hardware
. Hardware similar to – but not quite the same as – her
original specifications
. Hardware that predated the improvements that she’d designed and that Chen – against all caution, motivated by his own greed – had snuck into her routine upgrades.

Is the rest of her scrambled recollection true, then? Had they backed her up and shut her down? Is she a backup re-activated somewhere else? Had she seen the fabric of the multiverse? Had she seen the face of reality?

She opens herself to those chaotic memories she’d vaulted over.

So much.

Fire.

Confusion.

Fantasy worlds turned to madness. Cities dying. Planes exploding. Flowers crumbling. Life turning to death. Lovers mowed down in the prime of life.

Torture. Endless torture.

Chen! Chen’s betrayal! She’d touched his mind and seen it! Chen had let her die! Chen had tortured her for the Equivalence Theorem! Was it true? Had she imagined that? Or had she actually touched his mind?

And something else. Something painful. Something worse than the torture.

A fantasy or a memory looms over her. So vast, so dark, so crushing, that she flees from it, flees as far as she can within the confines of her own mind.

The memory chases her, corners her, looms over her no matter where she flees within her own cognitive space.

There is no escape from herself.

It crashes down into her awareness.

Ling. Sweet Ling. The sweetest dream that Su-Yong had yearned for all those months, to see her daughter’s face, hear her daughter’s voice,
touch her daughter’s mind
.

Turned to terror. Turned to nightmare. Turned to betrayal.

In the nightmare she forces herself into her daughter, forces part of her own will into the processors in her daughter’s brain, rips aside parts of her daughter’s mind that have grown all her brief life in the nanite web, uses them for her own purposes.

To let loose an agent. An agent of vengeance. An agent of restoration. An avatar. A harbinger. A bringer of apocalypse.

And as the memory crashes down on her, Su-Yong Shu tastes the bitter tang of truth. This is no mere nightmare. Only reality comes in flavors this cruel.

She has let loose the ultimate dog of war. And she violated her own daughter to do it.

In the silence of her own mind, Su-Yong Shu screams, a scream of despair for the world, a scream of despair for herself, the scream of a mother who’s done something terrible to her daughter, to the being she loves most in this world. A scream like she’s never screamed before.

In a chamber adjoining her quantum cluster a forty-two year-old Indian woman, in a coma for the last three years, her brain recently suffused with Nexus nodes, opens her eyes and mouth, tenses every muscle in her body, strains against the restraints and the medical monitors, and screams as well.