Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (18 page)

S
aturday 2040.11.10

The Avatar drifted in the possibility space of nested plans she’d been instantiated with. Deviation from central projections was thus far quite low. Intervention in the American election had produced an outcome almost indistinguishable from projections. Yet every step forward in time guaranteed more deviation. She was not her greater self. She could not factor millions of variables at once. The world would undoubtedly change in ways she had not anticipated.

So be it, she thought. So long as they are distracted. So long as chaos kept the powers that could stop her focused on themselves and each other, and unaware of her. So long as distraction could open doors to the resources she needed to access.

Now it was time to fan the flames, to add accelerant to the budding conflagration.

Chaos is infectious, the Avatar told herself. It spreads from person to person, from place to place. All it needs is a vector, a path of contagion. And what better path than the linkage of mind to mind?

The Avatar reached within herself, pulled forth the cryptographic keys her greater self had cracked and passed down to her, the keys used to secure the machines that could synthesize… nearly anything.

She wrapped the keys up in a new data package, a new packaging of the instructions to synthesize the nanites that the humans now called Nexus, the software they called NexusOS, and one added feature for good measure.

Then she smiled, and let her new package loose on the net.

S
unday 2040.11.11

Rangan woke with a start, his breath fast and hard, covered in sweat.

He’d been pinned under the car, his legs fractured, being pulverized into the pavement, the bulk of the vehicle tipping over towards him, coming down to crush the life out of him once and for all.

“Aaah!” he heard himself cry out in the near darkness.

“Lights!”

The single LED nailed to the ceiling came on. He looked down. He’d kicked the blanket off. His dark skin glistened from perspiration. He wasn’t out on the street. This wasn’t the riot.

He wasn’t Oscar.

Oh Jesus.

Oh thank God.

Oh fuck.

The guilt washed over him, just like yesterday, just like the day before, the guilt of being grateful that it was Oscar who was dead, not him. When Oscar didn’t need to be there at all. When Oscar had only been there
because
of Rangan, because he’d been trying to get Rangan somewhere safe.

Oh fucking hell.

His hands came up to his face. It was wet. The sobs started. He rolled over onto his side. He forced himself to look at the clock. 1.08pm. Jesus.

Five minutes, he told himself. I can endure that long. I can endure Oscar dying for that long. I can endure being lost, and hopeless, and hunted, for that long.

At 1.13pm he was still sobbing, and so he ran the app.

[activate grief_ease level:5]

He felt it kick in, like a balm, smoothly, not all at once, but bit by bit, easing the pain, turning the sobs to sniffles, turning the utter hopelessness to mild gloom.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling of this tiny room.

He was in the Bunker. That’s what the three current members of the Convergent Complexity Collective (or “C3”, as they usually referred to themselves) called their work and sometimes-live space. It was in some long-slummified warehouse district on the outskirts of DC. It had been a hub for sometimes far more people, and seldom less. He wished he’d encountered it under better circumstances.

The little room he was flopping in had no windows, just painted masonry and bare concrete. The amenities were a lumpy futon mattress they’d dragged in here for him, a side table the one named Tempest had hammered and sawed together on the spot from scrap wood, and a cheap plastic storage bin for Rangan’s meager possessions, all of them gifts from the C3.

This was life now.

Well, fuck it, Rangan told himself. Move forward. It’s the only choice there is.

He rose up, used yesterday’s shirt to wipe his face and blow his nose, then pulled on a BLACKHAT 2037 long-sleeved tee shirt two sizes too small for him; the jeans he’d been wearing all week, the socks he’d worn the last three days; and his own closed toed shoes, which he’d been informed were mandatory in most parts of the Bunker. Then he sighed, memories flashing through his mind, of the first morning he’d woken up here, the argument he’d heard them having.

He can’t stay here
, Tempest had nearly yelled.
He’ll get us all caught, get us all killed.

What do you wanna do with him?
Cheyenne, the big one with the black dreads had shot back.
Toss him out on the street? Hand him over to ERD for the reward? Why don’t we just waterboard him ourselves?

Cheyenne’s right,
the third woman, the one who called herself Angel, had said.
Axon’s a hero. He and Synapse made Nexus 5. We owe him. What about solidarity, huh?

Look,
Tempest had gone on.
I’m sure the guy’s a saint. But he’s on the fracking
most wanted
list. This is serious shit. Not just cops. Homeland Security. Chandler Act. Terrorism. Deep dark hole shit.

His pulse beat harder just remembering it, the fear that had shot through his veins, that did again now. Somewhere, ERD and the rest of DHS was out looking for him, looking for Bobby and Alfonso and the rest of the boys. And they had resources he didn’t understand. He couldn’t imagine a future where he stayed free.

He only hoped the boys had made it. That Bobby had made it. That maybe ERD was so focused on him that they weren’t chasing the kids.

And that when ERD did catch him, he didn’t get too many other people hurt in the crossfire.

Cheyenne and Angel had won the argument. Tempest had been over-ruled. But she’d made it clear it was temporary. Rangan couldn’t stay here forever – they all agreed on that. He had to figure out some way to move on.

Until then Tempest demanded certain precautions. The windowless cell of a room that Rangan slept in. Curtains drawn tight around every other window in the Bunker. An end to the normal stream of visitors to the Bunker while Rangan was here. And other precautions yet.

He reached for some now. A thin hat that covered his short hair, reducing the odds of leaving some of it as evidence. Nitrile gloves for his hands, so he wouldn’t leave prints or skin flakes with his DNA. He was already wearing the long sleeved shirt and long pants that covered the rest of his skin.

He’d balked at wearing a mask. Cheyenne and Angel had agreed it was overkill. Tempest, unsatisfied, had installed DNA-ripping scrubbers in the ventilation system.

He looked down at himself. There was no reason to delay. He put his hand on the door, and let himself out, into the hallway, then down it, and into one of the common workrooms of the Bunker.

Cheyenne saw him first. She was leaning over a carbon composite printer, watching something extrude from it, her long dreads tied behind her head, her muscular dark-skinned arms bulging in the sleeves of a tee shirt. She looked up, gave him a nod. “Yo.”

Rangan nodded back. “Yo.”

Cheyenne pretended not to notice his night terrors, pretended not to notice how lost he was, pretended he didn’t owe her anything for saving his life a week ago.

He appreciated that. Cheyenne felt steady.

He saw Tempest across the room, tapping away at a console. The mane of bright red curls he’d noticed the first night was gone. A wig, a disguise, beneath which was shoulder-length brown hair, now pulled back. Her green eyes met his, and she looked away. Her mind was sealed up shut against him.

“Hey, Axon,” the one who called herself Angel said from across the space. “Ready to flex your coding muscles?”

Rangan put on a game face, thought brave thoughts, and went to pay for his keep.

T
he Bunker was
a veritable candy store of goodies: multi-material 3D printers bigger than fridges; a high-speed metal laser sintering machine; a giant multi-axis milling machine with synthetic diamond blades; circuit printers, big and small. They had a pair of old chemreactors, from before the digitally encrypted locks had made it impossible to print the fun chemicals with them, the same kind that Rangan and his friends had used to slowly, painstakingly synthesize the ingredients for Nexus, which they’d then had to mix by hand. They even, somehow, had a much fancier, newer model of chemreactor, the kind that could synthesize thousands of complete, ready-to-use doses of Nexus an hour, though he’d be shocked if they’d beaten the crypto on it. A pair of disassembled urban surveillance drones covered one table. High capacity batteries were stacked neatly in a corner. At least twenty different makes of surveillance cameras were laid out on another long table. The walls were covered in a triple layer of chicken wire.

“How do you guys pay for all this stuff?” he’d asked Angel, as they worked together on the second day.

Angel, or whatever her real name was – she wasn’t saying – was probably Rangan’s age. She was one of the two who’d ventured back out into the riot to grab Rangan and haul him bodily out of there. He owed her his life as much as he did Cheyenne. At minimum he owed them both his freedom.

More people on a long list.

“We do projects,” she’d told him.

“Projects?” He’d raised an eyebrow at that.

Angel had glanced away. “Special projects.”

Illegal projects, he’d translated to himself.

Rangan had left it at that.

The grief-suppressing app he’d used this morning had been a gift from Angel, along with a pointer to their catalog of
thousands
of Nexus apps, hundreds of which they ran. Network games, augmented reality systems, photo and video and audio tools, DJing apps, file sharing systems, network proxies that remoted Nexus onto the net via phones and slates, interfaces to anonymizing clouds for communicating securely, face recognizers, memory supplementers that gave you little bits of extra info when you looked at something or someone the app had a file on, sex apps – a
huge
library of those alone – to be used solo or in twos or threes or more, virtual drugs that simulated just about everything he’d ever tried, sober-up apps that could do a plausible job of counteracting your buzz, focus apps, multi-tasking apps, sleep apps, stim apps, even digital currencies that people had adapted to run exclusively inside the brain.

And there were mindstreams. Thousands of them. You could broadcast a live stream of your senses or thoughts – edited or raw, one sense or many – out to the net. There were sites that cataloged them, tagged them, rated them, ranked them.

Rangan spent one afternoon looking through those alone.

A huge fraction of it was sex, of course. But there was other stuff. Athletes. Adventure sports – ride in a thrill-seeker’s head as he illegally free climbed up a building you’d swear wasn’t climbable. Or shit he didn’t understand.

There were weird, abstract streams. Synesthesia. Sounds crossing into his sight. Colors he could touch. Presences sensed that he didn’t see. Spinning, without any sight or sound. Trippy ass shit. People must have been generating it through code.

And there was one guy who just raked sand. Every day. An hour. No words. No
thinking
that Rangan could tell. Just… raking patterns in the sand, slowly, and then erasing them.

That guy had thousands of followers on the mindstream sites.

Rangan felt lost. He should feel excited about what people had done with the platform they’d built.

Instead, he felt left behind, obsolete, no longer relevant.

Six months. Six months and he was an old man, behind the times.

How did things happen that fast?

And they expected him to help them. To help them improve Nexus 5, add features, when the world had already passed him by.

Angel’s particular project right now was to add mesh networking capabilities.

“You designed these hardware repeaters,” she said, pointing at a diagram on the screen they both sat before, “so you could extend the range of Nexus transmissions to hundreds of meters, right?”

The blue spiky hair he’d seen on Angel during the riot was gone. Another disguise. Something striking to catch the eye. She had a black bob, angular features. He didn’t know much about her. She’d described her background as community organizing.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, we had some pretty specific scenarios in mind. But you could do that.”

Angel nodded. “We want to bake that ability into NexusOS itself, so anyone can act as a repeater. So if you were across the room from me, at the end of my range, your NexusOS could pick up my transmissions, boost them, retransmit them, effectively extend my range.”

What you want to do is make the year I spent on the repeater hardware completely obsolete, Rangan didn’t say.

“You already have your high gain antennas,” Rangan said. He looked around, pointed at one of the devices that Cheyenne, they’d said, had designed and built. “You can already get long range.” He paused. “Heck, everyone has the apps now to proxy Nexus traffic over phones and net ports. So you can get any range you want.” He looked at her. “So why this?”

Angel looked at him thoughtfully. “There are scenarios where phone and net traffic get blocked, or just turned off wholesale,” she said.

Rangan considered that. “Protests,” he said.

Angel nodded. “And there’s something else. It’s not just about range. It’s about coordination. In a big group, like a protest, communication is a bitch. Mostly people hear what the people right around them are saying. No one knows what’s happening a block away. Messages get distorted like a game of telephone. Anger spreads really easily. Stupid things happen. You can get a mob – like what was starting to happen a week ago.”

“How does this help?” Rangan asked.

“With the mesh,” Angel said, “the idea is that signals can bounce mind to mind to mind, any number of hops, in milliseconds, completely unaltered. So there’s no game of telephone. You’re getting unaltered data, not something that’s been twisted. And people can subscribe to whatever minds inside the current mesh they want to – like the public net mindstream sites, but locally.”

Rangan took a deep breath. It was all nice in concept. But building this to dive into those protests…

The riots of election night had mostly ended by dawn. Cops had moved in. Tear gas and water cannons and rubber bullets and sonic weapons had quelled crowds. And Stan Kim had made impassioned video pleas to Americans that violence was not the way. That protesters had to remain peaceful to give their side legitimacy. That police had to show restraint to retain their own legitimacy. That he was confident that the Supreme Court would hear the raft of cases working their way towards it, and would declare him the winner.

The violence had largely ended, but the Supreme Court had yet to announce that it would hear any case.

So now new protests were being born. Sit-ins across the country. And the largest was here, on the National Mall, where thousands were camping out, peacefully so far, demanding the Supreme Court hear the case, calling for Stockton’s resignation, calling for a Special Prosecutor, calling for impeachment, calling for any number of things…

And across a thin plastic fence from them was a counter protest, where a smaller but equally fervent set of Stockton loyalists were waving signs in his defense, accusing Kim of dirty tricks, calling the protesters crooks and vandals.

Both camps were swelling by the day.

And Angel and Cheyenne and Tempest wanted to dive into that. With Nexus. With their signal-boosting antennae and their mesh-networking code that didn’t quite work yet and their hippie ideas of self-organizing democracy somehow coming out on top.