Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (23 page)

Oh Jake.

She raised her glass of ice water, toasted the moment, clinked glasses with those around her.

Yet she was who she was. And so some part of her never stopped watching, never stopped taking stock.

And so she noticed when a man twitched, not far from Kade, at something the Indian Ambassador said. Youngish. Clean shaven. His smile looked pained, forced.

She noticed that another man, in uniform, was watching the crowd even more intently than she was, a smile on his lips, but cold calculation in his eyes: General Singh.

And she noticed that the youngish man who’d twitched made an early, nervous exit from the event.

Sam memorized his face for later.

Then she did her very best to enjoy the night.

For the children.

And for Jake.

T
uesday 2040.11.19

Sam listened as Kade passed on what the Indians wanted. To study how the children used Nexus. And to look for any signs that Nexus had harmed them. To try to spot the risks of deploying it to millions of Indian children.

He had a million things to say, as usual.

She had one question.

“Is there any risk to our kids in this?”

Kade looked her in the eye. He was tense around her. She could see it in the way he sat with his body closed off. The way he froze up. Anger, too. She couldn’t blame him for either.

His very presence sent her pulse shooting up. Sent memories
her bullets smashing into the outline of Kevin’s face, his body tumbling out into the night
cascading through her brain.

“I’ll approve every step,” Kade said. “I won’t allow anything that’s invasive.”

Sam nodded. “OK then.”

She stood to go.

Kade blinked in surprise. “That’s it?”

She cocked her head. “You got what you wanted, right?”

She turned to leave.

“Sam,” he called after her. “The kids would love it if you took Nexus again, if they could…”

Blood bubbled up through the wound in Jake’s chest. “I wish I’d known you,” he said. His mind collapsed into chaos and then nothing.

She stopped in the doorway, her fists clenched, breathing hard. She turned.

Kade was standing, looking at her, like she was broken.

“I will. I’m going to. Just not yet.”

“There are other drugs,” Kade started. “That can help with traum–”

“I don’t want your fucking help,” Sam snapped.

He flinched, visibly.

Sam closed her eyes.

“Shit,” she said.

“I just…” Kade started again.

Sam held up her hands. “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

Kade was shaking his head. “
I’m
sorry,” he said.

“Stop,” Sam said. “Let me finish. I tense up when I see you. I’ve got a bad case of PTSD. I’ve got some serious hell to go through.” She looked him in the eye. “And it isn’t just about you.”

Kade was looking at her.

“I’m through with killing, Kade.”

She saw the shock go across his face.

“Do you remember Lee? Head of our security squad in Bangkok? Ordinary guy, doing his job, maybe saved both of
our
lives?”

Kade swallowed. “Wats killed him. Not you.”

“I’ve killed plenty,” Sam said. “Some who deserved to die. Shiva did.”

She saw him want to object. She raised a hand to forestall it. “Plenty of them
didn’t
deserve to die. Lee’s men in Bangkok. The marines at Ananda’s monastery, though I tried like hell not to kill any of them.”

“They would have killed
me
,” Kade said. “Or taken me to a deep dark hole…”

Sam shook her head. “I’m through making the choice of who deserves to live and die. It takes too much out of you. I want to build something. I want to nurture things.”

She saw him draw a breath. She kept going. Things needed to be said.

“Sometimes, though, I
do
blame you, Kade,” she said. “I blame you to
hell
for putting that back door in there.”

Kill them all
, Shiva Prasad whispered in her brain. She was sweating. She was trembling. Kade was trembling in front of her.

“But…” she forced herself to press on, shaking her head. “I don’t know that I would have done a damn thing different.”

She looked down, looked at her own hands, clenched and unclenched them. She’d wanted that back door. She’d wanted to rip open the brain of the soldier who’d killed Jake, wanted to learn every goddamn thing he knew.

Move past that. Back to the thread.

She looked back up at Kade.

“I’m
glad
Nexus exists,” she said. “I’m
glad
you put it out there. Even after everything. I think the world’s better this way.” She swallowed. “What happened to me was evil. But evil’s always happened, long before Nexus. There’s good now too. The damage is in my head. I’ll beat it.”

Kade smiled sadly. He spoke softly, gently. “Why don’t you accept some medical help with that?”

Sam nodded. “At this stage, after the trauma has set in. The protocols here are memory malleability drugs plus psychotherapy. I’d be letting one of their shrinks into my head, in a situation where they could literally rewire me.” She shook her head. “I can beat it on my own. It’ll take longer. But I can.”

Kade shook his head. “Why, Sam? Why not let them help you?”

Sam laughed. “Because I don’t trust them, Kade. I’m grateful, but I don’t trust them.”

Kade frowned, searching for the right words. Looking for some way to tell her she was being paranoid.

He didn’t get it. He didn’t really know the level this game was played at.

“If Kevin Nakamura were here now…” she paused.
Kevin. Oh, Kevin.
“He’d want you to understand. The Indians? You’re still just a tool to them. You, me, Feng, the kids. We’re pawns. They’ll use us. They’ll sacrifice us if it furthers their goals.” She stared hard into his eyes. “Don’t forget that.”

Kade shook his head, closing off to her. “I don’t think it’s that simple. We’re using each other. That’s what cooperation means.”

Was I ever this naïve? Sam wondered. I guess I was once. When I had a family, when I had a normal life.

“Kade,” she said. “You may think it’s symmetric, you may think you know how they’re using you, but in this game, the pawn seldom knows what the king has planned. Remember that. The pawn seldom knows.”

S
u-Yong Shu
stares down at her own face, sculpted out of the cityscape of Shanghai, in this future she dreams of, this posthuman future, where she has cleared away the obstacles to enhancing the human mind, where she has ended the incessant war and stupidity, where she has replaced mere capitalism with a new economics born of quantum game theory, where she has ended poverty, where she has broken the iron laws of death and biology and scarcity that have ruled humanity for so long, where she has unleashed an intelligence explosion like nothing since the dawn of
homo sapiens sapiens
.

Where victory has given her back her daughter.

Her mind is spinning. The world is spinning below her. The landscape is transforming. The lines of her face are no longer buildings, but the trajectories of virtual particles. The blacks of her eyes are bubbles in the quantum foam. Shanghai is a lens into other universes.

Mad. I’m still mad.

She splits the air with a silver portal, steps through into another virtual world, a safer world, a grounding world, with its wide grassy plain ringed by the massive purple mountains.

She is in the white dress again, barefoot. The tall grass is soft against her feet. The golden
chrysanthemum boreale
, her favorite flowers since youth, are in bloom, dotting the plain with brilliant yellow, filling the air with their sweet perfume. The sun is perfectly warm against her skin, the sky a deep deep blue, the sun directly overhead. The mountains are glorious giants, capped in white, ringing her in majesty, comfort, and hints of adventure.

She drops to her knees, cups a flower in her hands, inhales its scent.

Could it work? she wonders.

She inhales again, savoring the sweetness, the sun on her back, the grass below her knees.

Maybe, she thinks. Maybe I can do it. Strike, and win, and save Ling. And more. Maybe I can make the world a better place.

“Every monster in history has thought the same.”

The voice comes from behind her. She tenses. Pain and anger rush through her, memories of torture and pleading and more torture.

“Chen,” she says aloud, the memories rising. “How could you betray me? How could you let me die? Torture me, just for fame, for money?”

“I’m human,” her husband says. “I’m selfish.”

She rises and turns, her hands clenching at her side. He’s there, not ten feet away. Chen as she last saw him. Chen at nearly fifty, his trim frame going to paunch, grey at his temples, a tailored suit, an odor of arrogance.

“No,” she tells him. “You’re a monster.”

“Hah!” He barks a laugh at her. “I knew my own selfishness. Real monsters think they’re pure and good. The real monsters think they have
a vision for a better world
. The real monsters impose it on others, through force if necessary.”

He stares at her. “That’s you, wife. You’re the monster.”

She feels her nails bite into her palm. “I’m no monster.” Her voice is level, controlled. “I want the best thing for the world.”

“And you know
exactly
what the best thing is,” her husband says, nodding. “Mao Tse Tung was certain he knew. Pol Pot as well. Adolf Hitler, of course.”

“I’m no monster!” Her voice is cracking, her muscles tense, her virtual body vibrating at the accusation.

“Of course not,” Chen says, soothingly. “
That’s
why you brutalized your daughter.
That’s
why you sent out an agent of death.
That’s
why you’re about to wage war on humanity.”

“I was insane! You left me without input, without the clone,
knowing
what would happen! You
tortured
me!
You
brought this on. You and all the other humans!” She’s yelling, she realizes, gesticulating with her hands, screaming at her husband, who isn’t even real, who isn’t even here.

Chen smiles at her. “Oh no, wife. You had these plans long before this.
There is a war coming. A world war. Between humans and posthumans.
Isn’t that what you told the American boy?”

And for a moment she’s there, in Bangkok, sipping tea across from Kade, the rooftop restaurant on the banks of the Chao Phraya, the golden magnificence of Wat Arun rising above them, the Temple of the Dawn.

Chen is still speaking to her. “
The world has more than eight billion people on it
, you told him.
Surely we can afford to lose a few
. You’ve always been this arrogant, wife. Always been this willing to commit atrocities in the name of your vision. You’ve just been waiting, waiting to let it out.”

There’s a buzzing in her head now, a chaos, a confusion. No. They hurt her,
they
wounded her,
they
tortured her. That’s why she did what she did. That’s why she hurt her daughter.

“No,” she says aloud. “No.”

Chen laughs aloud.

“No!” she yells at him. “You weren’t even there! You weren’t even there!”

Her husband opens his mouth and spreads his arms wide. Storm clouds boil out of the clear blue sky above, and his voice booms at her from every direction, from the sky, from the mountains in the distance, from the grass at her feet, from the golden chrysanthemums she loves so much, from the very earth itself.

I

AM

YOU

I

AM

YOU

T
he whole world
booms the words at Su-Yong Shu, in Chen’s voice, straight into her mind.

NO!
she screams back.

She lifts her arms at her husband, her fingers splayed, and wills his utter destruction. Gouts of white hot flame shoot out, lancing from her fingertips to his chest, his face, his thighs. Lightning strikes from the clouds overhead, twice, three times, four times, a dozen times, converging on the point where he stands. The ground below his feet explodes upwards in a surge of searing heat and light and force. His body is incinerated, pulverized, reduced to ash, obscured by a radiance so bright that nothing can be seen.

Su-Yong Shu falls to her knees, the buzzing in her head gone, released with the destruction of the traitorous part of her represented by her husband Chen, even as superheated bits of earth and rock and ash rain down around her.

She lets her head fall into her hands. Tears are falling from her eyes now. It was because they’d tortured her. It was because they’d driven her mad. That was why she’d hurt Ling. That was why.

How long? How long until she was sane again? How long until the input from this biological brain brought her back? How long had it taken last time?

“Do you like me better now, Su-Yong?”

The voice comes from behind her. It’s Chen’s, but different, kinder…

She turns, still on her knees, and he’s there. Not the Chen of nearly fifty who’d tortured her, who’d refused to touch her for a decade, but the Chen of thirty who she’d first met. Lean, a simple white button down shirt tucked into his black trousers, a wry smile on his smooth face, a telltale of the keen intense mind she’d fallen in love with.

He’s an illusion, a fabrication of her own mind, a man who no longer exists, but still, to see him takes her breath away.

“Chen…” she whispers.

He steps towards her, drops to his knees in the tall grass, and takes her face in his hands.

“Su-Yong.”

His voice is gentle. His smile is kind. His fingers are warm on her skin.

“You’re not real,” she tells him.

He smiles wider. “I’m as real as any of this,” he says, gesturing slowly with his eyes and a small movement of his head, taking in the sky, the grass, the plain, the mountains.

Her hands rise, to touch him, to feel his own hands on her face. “You’re here because I’m mad, because I’m still crazy.”

“I’m here because you’re growing more sane.”

More sane.

She remembers now. She has metrics she’d built in her isolation. Monitors. Crude psychological and neurophysiological exams to measure her sanity, to project the time she had left.

She launches them, feels them take stock of her, compares the output to the last she has on record.

And it’s true. She’s stabilizing. She’s truly not as mad as she was. But still things aren’t quite right.

Ahhhh!

The tweaks, the many many changes she made to try to bolster herself. Crude hacks.

Su-Yong takes stock of them now. There are so many. Limits to the length of her thought chains to cut off her downward spirals of madness. Blunt exoself scaffolding forcibly adjusting the weights of virtual synapses towards statistical norms, undoubtedly throwing away good connections with bad. Forced adjustments to her virtual neurochemistry, to the levels of her simulated serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine.

So much surgery she’d done on her own virtual brain, trying to survive those months, to stretch out her sanity. Now… is it in her way?

More stability first.

She reaches out, tracks the flow of data coming in from the biological brain she’s connected to, and burrows into that brain now, exploring, and jolts back in surprise.

This was no drooling clone made from her own DNA.

This was a woman who’d lived decades. She was damaged, injured. But large swaths of her memories were intact. And those memories revealed a woman who’d lived not in China.

But in India.