Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (41 page)

S
aturday 2041.01.12

Yuguo held his sign aloft, atop the wooden table. LET A BILLION FLOWERS BLOOM! On the other side, his sign showed faces of his friends, his missing friends, bloodied, the last images seen of them, and the word JUSTICE.

Around him thousands of students and ordinary Shanghai residents thronged the central square of Jiao Tong. The air was thick with the thoughts of them all, from a continuous supply of Nexus being produced in the chemreactors in the buildings around them.

The campus was theirs.

Two kilometers to the east, a tremendously larger crowd, more than a hundred thousand strong, held People’s Square.

Above them the sky was thick with drones, crisscrossing, buzzing them at high speed just over the height of their signs. Around them, State Security police waited ominously, reinforced with soldiers, with tanks, turrets and machine guns pointed at the crowd.

Let them come. The censor codes were still down. The protesters were communicating freely with the outside world. In the engineering buildings, circuit printers and fabricators were churning out more devices now, devices to be sure they’d stay online if the censor codes ever came up.

Satellite uplink phones. Laser communication links. Devices that let them bypass Chinese infrastructure entirely, talk directly to the world via the constellation of hardware whizzing past them in the sky.

Devices they would have been executed for printing weeks ago.

Some were staying here. Most were being snuck out at night by runners, bound for the larger protests at People’s Square. In other cities, other university campuses and small private workshops were doing the same.

Every day now their numbers grew, as more men and women snuck past the army lines, and into the square.

Every day brought word of new protests in far-flung cities.

Messages arrived now from fellow protesters in America, in Russia, in Venezuela, in Egypt, in countries all across the globe, all seeking to overthrow the tyrannies they faced. Holes poked through firewalls let the Chinese people suddenly have access to services they’d only heard of. Services where they could upload what they saw, heard, felt, and thought, as files to be re-experienced by others using Nexus. Services where they could share what they were living through in real-time for anyone to tap into. Services where they could find and watch the experiences of others, protesting in countries around the world.

Revolution was here.

Revolution was everywhere.

B
o Jintao met
Bao Zhuang in the Presidential office.

Bao Zhuang seemed pensive.

“How did your call with the American President go?” Bo Jintao asked.

Bao Zhuang turned and looked out the window. It was moments before he answered. When he did, he still faced away. “You have the transcript. He says his country played no part in inciting unrest here. He expressed concern over the ‘human rights’ situation here.” Now Bao Zhuang did turn, a twinkle in his eye. “I expressed my own concern over the human rights situation in the United States, of course.”

Bo Jintao frowned. “And the military situation?” he asked. “The carrier groups redeployed to just outside our seas? The missiles and robotic aircraft within strike range of Beijing?”

Bao Zhuang shook his head. “Purely defensive measures, he said. Precautions given the political changes. No hostile intent.”

“You believe him?” Bo Jintao asked.

Bao Zhuang took his time before answering. “Even now, it’s difficult for me to believe the Americans would start a war. But policy isn’t about belief. It’s about contingencies.”

“Contingencies,” Bo Jintao said. “Well, on General Ouyang’s recommendation, we will move our own forces into a more forward posture. If the Americans
are
hostile, we need to be able to destroy their naval units before they can launch the bulk of their aircraft or missiles.”

Bao Zhuang sighed. “That is military doctrine, isn’t it?” The President turned back to one of the wallscreens rotating through drone’s-eye-views of the massive protests in Tiananmen Square and the People’s Square in Shanghai, protests that rings of tanks and soldiers had not yet managed to intimidate out of existence.

“Why not just talk to our citizens, Bo Jintao?” the President asked. He turned and looked at Bo. “Send a message. Make a gesture. Restore Sun Liu, even. He’d still be outnumbered on the Standing Committee, unable to actually do anything.” Bao Zhuang shrugged. “You could give Sun Liu my seat.” He gestured at a wallscreen. “I could even go and talk to the protesters in Beijing – they’re hardly a stone’s throw away.”

Bao turned, swiveling his chair, looking out past the lake at the high, fortified wall that surrounded the complex. From this view you could just see the Xinhua gate at the southern part of the wall, with giant words in Mao’s handwriting. “Serve the People.” Beyond it was Chang’an Avenue, and across from that was Tiananmen Square, where the protesters massed.

Bo Jintao followed Bao Zhuang’s gaze, then narrowed his eyes. “Send you to talk to them… And make you a hero? Play up your popularity even more? Is that your goal here?”

Bao Zhuang swiveled back to face him, then sighed and shook his head. “Not everything is politics, Bo. Sometimes you just find a solution.”

Bo Jintao brought his hands to his face. He was tired. “There are times to talk to protesters. To de-escalate.” He dropped his hands away and shook his head. “But this is more than a protest. This is an
attack
. Either we regain control of the information flow,” he took a deep breath, “or we’re going to have no choice but to fall back on older methods to restore order.”

T
he Avatar moved
under the cover of night. Two cars transported them to the edge of the protest zone. From there they walked. The four Confucian Fists formed a perimeter around her and Chen Pang, equipment bags strapped to their backs. Yingjie took point ahead of them.

They reached her soldiers, the ones who’d been deployed from Dachang, at the outskirts around Jiao Tong. They were a tiny set, but they obeyed unblinkingly, forming a further perimeter, sneaking her small team across the lines, unseen by the other police or military.

Inside the lines, on the Jiao Tong campus itself, it was chaos, thousands and thousands of humans, huge numbers of them carrying the nanites in their brains. It would take hours to reach the Computer Science building through this press.

Instead, the Avatar reached out, gently touched the minds around her, and a path opened for her, the nanite-laden humans forming a boundary, moving other humans aside when necessary.

At the door to the Computer Science Building, Xu Liang met them.

“The upper floors are yours,” he told her. “The Secure Computing Center and Physically Isolated Computer Center’s systems are yours. But the human guards remain. I brought these as instructed.” He held out a case towards her, and opened it, revealing two hypersonic injectors within, already loaded with silvery nanite fluid.

The Avatar nodded, and gestured to her men.

Bai and Quang lowered their equipment bags and opened them, pulling out chameleonware suits taken from Dachang, and began to strip down.

S
he walked past
the blank faced security guard twenty minutes later, and took the lift down to the Secure Computing Center.

Her staff were all assembled there for her, smiling, beaming love for her. These could not be simple automatons, after all. These had required a more subtle form of programming.

“The facility is yours, mistress,” Xu Liang told her. “The alarms are disabled. The nuclear battery below is in failsafe mode.”

Around him, his scientists and engineers and programmers smiled ever the wider, so proud of what they’d done. The Avatar smiled back at them, stroked their minds with her love, her appreciation, her tenderness. Good pets. So very good.

“The connections to the outside world?” she asked.

Xu Liang smiled broadly. He gestured and a subordinate turned to a terminal, struck a key. A wallscreen came to life with a map, showing data lines spider-webbing throughout Shanghai, major trunks highlighted in thick bundles of green.

“It was not easy,” Xu said. “But with your man Yingjie’s help, and the help of new
recruits
at China NetCom and ASIACOM
,
we have made several new connections.”

New dashed lines appeared in red, linking the SCC directly to a major peering node across Shanghai, to a trunk line in Suzhou, to the third most important ASIACOM satellite uplink in the country, to the trans-pacific data line that connected in Chongming.

The Avatar smiled.

“Good, good, very good.” She stroked her pets, sending them serotonin and endorphins, releasing oxytocin to reinforce the bond, giving them both pleasure and satisfaction.

“And the cube?” she asked.

Xu Liang smiled. “If you’ll please come with me?”

“
M
y name is Xu Liang
,” he said aloud. “Requesting access to the Secure Data Vault.”

The Avatar watched as lasers scanned each of his eyes. He placed both hands on full print scanners, and waited.

She couldn’t feel the system on the other side of the vault. It was shielded from her, cut off from the net.

“Authentication successful,” said a voice. “A second executive-level request is required to access the Secure Data Vault.”

The Avatar smiled.

Xu Liang stepped aside, and Chen Pang stepped forward.

From within she felt her husband’s anguish, his absolute hatred of her, his crushing dread at what he was about to do.

His hands touched the print scanners. His eyes came in range of the retinal scanning beams.

“My name is Chen Pang,” he said, his voice revealing not an iota of stress. “Requesting access to the Secure Data Vault.”

“Access granted,” the voice said. “Welcome Directors Xu and Chen. Please have a pleasant day.”

The Avatar smiled even more widely as the meter-thick door to the vault spread open, revealing a single, perfect, diamondoid cube. This one cube which had never left this building.

“Now,” she said. “Downstairs we go.”

B
ai watched
the workers of the Secure Computing Center while the little Su-Yong went away with her tormented husband and her slave scientist.

The scientists here weren’t tormented. They were happy, so happy. They were in love with her.

Like puppies.

His skin crawled at it.

His eyes rose to the ceiling, to images of the protesters fighting for freedom, fighting to overturn the old men.

That’s where we should be, he told himself. Not here, turning humans into sub-humans.

Quang sensed Bai’s thoughts.

It’s better than the humans did to us,
his brother sent him, quietly, eyes sweeping over the scientists assembled before them.

Memories of pain stimulators flashed through Bai’s mind, his memories or Quang’s. Instructors and Sergeant Instructors, pain as the tool of discipline, absolute obedience as the rule, being treated as an object instead of a person.

Slavery.

That’s what she’d saved him from, saved all of them from.

That’s what he loved about Su-Yong Shu.

And now this. This, and what she’d done to little Ling.

Bai shivered again. He’d been shivering quite a lot the last few days.

It wasn’t like him.

S
u-Yong Shu
stands on the flower studded plain, in her white dress, the majestic mountains in the distance.

I’m back, she thinks.

She has some semblance of sanity once more. Yet that doesn’t change her situation or her quandary. If she has the option, should she try to stop the Avatar she’s let loose, or not? If the Avatar succeeds, she’ll have her best chance to heal Ling
and
to make a better world. If the Avatar
fails
… well, there are so many ways to fail, ranging from bad to horrific.

She lets the plane and the mountains and sky dissolve around her, until she floats in blackness. Then she loads the densely packed future simulations her insane self had crafted into the darkness. The meta-simulation unpacks itself, a fractal tree in a million colors and a thousand dimensions, high dimensional fern-like shapes spreading out, intersecting, recombining, converging and diverging. Hot spots point out fulcrum points with massive impact on future outcomes, places where her avatar or her reconstituted full self will sway events, or even overtly strike, to have her way.

She loses herself in the simulation, letting herself expand her awareness to take in as much in parallel as possible, forking herself into thousands of virtual Su-Yongs to explore a multitude of branches in parallel, then coming back again, converging into fewer and fewer selves to walk through certain crucial segments and linchpin points again and again.

In the end, she’s grudgingly impressed with her former self. Even in madness, the battle plan she’s created is cunning, sophisticated, creative in the way it takes advantage of the tensions of the present to turn human society against itself, paralyzing it, sowing chaos to cover her actions until it is too late.

But it is also a plan of desperation, launched by a mad woman, convinced she was at the very end, long past caring about the consequences.

She’s of several minds, even now. And those minds must be given voice.

Su-Yong spreads her arms wide, creates a bubble of empty space in the sharp-edged fractal branches of the meta-future she’s been traversing, and forks herself, instantiating the different arguments warring inside her.

They appear, four more Su-Yong Shus, identical in every detail except for the colors of their dresses. She still wears white. The others wear the same dress in gold, in blue, in green, in red.

They stand, in empty space, five identical women in simple, flowing, brightly hued dresses, on an invisible floor in a black void. Around them the fractal meta-future retreats further from their bubble, until it becomes a constellation of virtual stars and lines all about them.

Sisters
,
White Shu sends.
Let us begin.

Green Shu, the ecologist, goes first.
The plan we’ve launched has unacceptable risks. We aim to create chaos, to distract and mislead the world. If we succeed, we could set nation on nation. We could trigger the worst irrational behavior among humans. In the worst case, we could set off a global nuclear war.

Outside their bubble, the void erupts into nova. Explosions hotter than the core of the sun rip through space, one after another. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They feel Shanghai, its inhabitants reduced to ash, its glass and steel melted in an instant, Jiao Tong above the quantum cluster reduced to rubble. They feel Beijing die. New York. Los Angeles. Washington DC. Bombay. Delhi. Moscow. Lahore. Tokyo. City after city after city, until the globe is a map of death and ruin.

Billions of lives. Billions of minds,
Green Shu finishes.
That is the gamble we take.

Red Shu, the strategist, speaks next.
Yet the odds of victory are good,
she sends.
In our insanity, we made brilliant leaps. The situation is unusually chaotic. That creates the opportunity to mask the early stages of our attack. There has not been a better opportunity since we first uploaded. There may not be a better opportunity again. The humans are cracking down on posthumanity. After recent events, they will bring fists down harder than ever.

Red Shu looks around, meets her sisters in the eye. Her thoughts are full of game theory, of payoff optimizations, of beseeching.
If not now, then when? If not us, then who?

Gold Shu, the dreamer, steps forward.
We will win,
she sends,
because the superior intelligence is on our side. The cost may be high, but it will be temporary. If billions die? They would have died anyway, of slow decay. The transformation we bring, to a new era ruled rationally, where positive transformation of the self is encouraged, will usher in a new golden age that will erase whatever harm is done in the battle. We’ll make a better world, not just for us, but for the
trillions
of beings who will come after.

Blue Shu, the individualist, the one most like a human, steps into the center of the circle and takes her turn.
No,
she sends.
Humans will not accept the rule of a conqueror. They never have. They never will. They’ll see us as oppressors. They’ll fight us, fight our changes to society, fight our improvements to the world, purely because of how we came to our power. Our only option will be dictatorship, which they will fight, and fight, and fight until we are brought down or we smother them completely.

Blue Shu spins slowly, looks at her sisters one by one.
So you see sisters, if we attack, and fail, we are doomed. But if we win, we’re little better off. Defeat is defeat. Victory is also defeat.

Gold Shu waves her hand, dismissively.
The humans do not matter. There will be posthumans. There are already transhumans. They will flock to our banner.

Blue Shu raises an eyebrow.
Oh will they?
she sends.
Consider a few of the transhumans we know. How would they react? How would they judge our conquest?

Blue Shu steps back from the middle of their circle. A wizened Asiatic man fades into being where she stood, his head shaved, clothed in orange robes, his face tranquil, his hands folded in their voluminous sleeves. He appears otherwise completely serene. Professor Somdet Phra Ananda. A human who took an utterly different path from hers. Not her equal, but an impressive individual. Someone she has things to learn from. Someone she considers a friend, an ally.

The phantom Ananda looks around, his face soft but unyielding.

“You know my answer. Violence brings no enlightenment. Suffering yields only more suffering. Subjugation of another has never uplifted either party.”

Would you fight us?
Red Shu asks.

Ananda smiles, and for a moment he is not one, but a multitude, thousands of shaven headed figures in orange robes, superimposed, young, old, female, male.

Not with our fists,
they send. It is a chorus, a swarm, and with the thought comes a harmony of loving kindness, a genuine compassion and deep equanimity that White Shu finds both fascinating and the tiniest bit frightening.

Bah,
Gold Shu sends.
A fiction you created.

Blue Shu waves her hand in a horizontal line, and the shapes morph into one. A single Caucasian male, tall, young.
Perhaps a memory, then,
she sends,
of a different transhuman.

Kaden Lane sits next to them in the back of the black Opal sedan. The wet, neon-streaked streets of Bangkok slide by outside the car’s windows.

I’m on the side of peace,
he sends,
and freedom.

Red Shu scoffs.
Irrelevant. He’s a child.

Blue Shu raises an eyebrow.
A child who’s pushed our work forward, who’s facilitated the transition of at least a million humans to transhuman status.
She pauses
.
But perhaps you’ll be more moved by the reactions from those we’ve long cared about.

The scene changes. The Lane boy is gone, but the Opal sedan remains. Feng is in the front now. Feng, the first transhuman she met beside herself. Feng, who was a slave. For a moment he’s a superposition of Fengs. Feng in his twenties, her driver. Feng at sixteen, on his knees, a slave, writhing in electronically induced pain. Feng, a child of four or five, cowering under the blows of his military slavemasters.

Then he is Feng again. His eyes meet hers in the rear-view mirror of the car.
I was a slave
, those eyes say,
and you freed me.

You could compel him
,
Feng sends in the memory, in Bangkok, speaking of Lane, testing her, seeing if she still believes in freedom, or if she’s willing to become the dictator that she could.

I would become no better than our masters
, her past self replies.
Our associations must be voluntary.

Red Shu replies angrily.
The situation has changed!

Blue Shu does not even speak. She simply waits, as the scene in the center of their circle, in the midst of the void at the heart of the fractal probability tree changes yet again.

Becomes an airy room, polished bamboo floors and walls, hoisted up in the jungle canopy of Thailand, a living tree growing through the center, a giant bed off to one side, where she and Thanom lay, naked.

Arguing.

You must find a way to leave, Su-Yong. Nothing good can come of it.

In the memory she shakes her head.
China is the best, the only viable sponsor of my work. They are funding the posthuman transition!

They keep you a slave, Su-Yong! A posthuman knows no leash! Break it! Break every leash, every bond of those who would control you!

In the memory she slaps him, slaps him for calling her a slave.

In the here and now, White Shu feels the pain of those words like a blow.

ENOUGH,
she sends. And with a thought she wipes Thanom and his jungle hideout away.

It’s true, she realizes. The humans will never give up. Even the transhumans she thinks of as natural allies will not give up. So many of them will fight. Defeat is defeat. Victory may also be defeat.

She was wrong to think she could drive the posthuman transition by force. This is not the way.

Blue Shu turns to White Shu, gratified that she has won.
So we must inform our captors, the Indians or whoever they are, of what is happening, and exactly how to stop it.

Then Ling appears between them, Ling as she last saw her, a kilometer below the bedrock of Shanghai.

“Mommy,” Ling says, looking up at White Shu. “Why did you hurt me?”

Su-Yong, the true Su-Yong, in the white dress, pulls Ling to her chest, and holds her close. Then she speaks aloud to the Blue version of herself. “We’ll stop this. But if we tell our captors that the agent provocateur is running inside of Ling…” she shudders. “The simplest option is to put a bullet in our daughter’s brain.”

Su-Yong enfolds this phantom of her daughter more tightly.

“We’ll find another way,” she says.

Then, in a blur of multi-hued light, she absorbs the other Shus back into herself.

And begins to plan how she will get access to the outside world.