Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (19 page)

I thought like that once, Rangan thought. Ilya thought like that. Wats thought like that. Kade thought like that.

What he really wanted was just to get someplace safe. He’d
told
Tempest and the others that he would. That he’d move on. Hell, he couldn’t live in their tiny room forever.

But he had nowhere to go. He didn’t know where in Baltimore Oscar was taking him. He didn’t dare contact Levi and Abigail, for fear of bringing the hammer down on them. Kade was alive, and safe, in India. Maybe India would take him. His grandparents had been born there…

He’d tunneled through an anonymous cloud, under Tempest’s grudging supervision, then through a second anonymous cloud to further throw off the trail, connected to a Nexus board hosted in Thailand, created a brand new account, left a carefully worded message for Kade there, not using his own name, but dropping certain phrases, hoping to get his attention…

But Kade hadn’t replied.

Maybe, Rangan thought, I should just walk up to an Indian consulate, ask for asylum…

“Axon,” Cheyenne said. “I think you need to see this.”

Rangan turned. She was sitting at a console, her broad shoulders filling the chair, her head turned, facing him, black eyes in that dark face boring into his.

He pushed his chair back and looked over at her. “What’s that?”

“Just…” she started. She shook her head. “You need to see.”

He went, and as he approached, she stood, almost apologetically, rising to stand a good two inches taller than he was, and handed him a pair of ear buds.

He sat. On screen was a picture of his mother. His mother
and
his father, behind her.

His heart started pounding. He hadn’t contacted them. He’d wanted to, but Oscar’s words had rung through his head, his warning about not reaching out to anyone who he cared about.

Oh god. What happened?

He put the ear buds in his ears, and touched his finger to the screen. It was a video. It had reached the end.

He replayed it.

It started with his father and mother side by side, his father talking.

“My son,” Rohit Shankari said. “Your mother and I have been informed by the authorities, by the Department of Homeland Security, that you’ve somehow escaped from their custody. They told us that you killed a man, and nearly killed another.”

Rangan shook his head. “No,” he said aloud. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

“They told us that it’s only a matter of time until they catch you, and that they will be more…” his father, a professor of chemistry, seldom at a loss for words, hesitated. “That they will be more
lenient
with you…” He saw the emotion pass over his father’s face. Saw his mother close her eyes briefly. “… if you turn yourself in.”

His father swallowed on screen. “My son, here is what I think of these authorities, and what they say about you.”

And then his father leaned forward, worked his mouth, and spat upon the floor.

Rangan laughed, tears in his eyes.

His mother stepped forward then. “Rangan,” she said, “we believe in you. We know you’re innocent. Stay safe. They’re watching us, hoping you contact us, so they can find you. Don’t. It brings joy to our hearts to know that you’re free. That’s enough, for now.”

Rangan pulled the ear buds out, and touched his fingers to the screen, as if he could touch his mom, touch his dad, and then he was crying, and he was laughing, and there were arms hugging him from behind, and minds opening to him, and offering comfort, and for some reason he thought of Bobby just then, and hoped the boy was in Cuba, with Alfonso, and Tim, and all the rest, whether Rangan ever made it there or not.

And then a voice cut through everything, and the sense of a mind in stunned delight.

“Well frack my random seed,” Tempest said. “This isn’t possible.”

“What?” Angel asked.

“Someone just broke the crypto on a bunch of high-end chemreactors,” Tempest said. “A dozen different models with their own keys, maybe more. And put out a high-throughput recipe for Nexus on all of them.”

S
unday 2040.11.11

Breece woke in the morning, rolled over to reach for Kate, found only empty bed instead.

He pulled himself to alertness, heart pounding, muscles tensing, senses scanning for a threat.

The apartment was quiet. Faint early morning light came in through the curtains over the bedroom window. The door to the living room was open a crack, artificial light coming in through the gap. The bed sheets were mussed. Everything was as it should be.

He took a breath, flexed and unflexed his hands, let himself calm down.

Too many years of this.

Too many years waiting for the hammer to drop.

Too many years of knowing his death was going to be a bad one. A violent one.

So close now. So close to victory.

He rolled out of bed, pulled on shorts and a tee shirt, and padded out into the apartment.

The Nigerian was at the kitchen table, a pistol disassembled on a towel, cleaning and oiling it methodically.

“You clean that gun every day,” Breece said.

“It’s my meditation, my friend,” the Nigerian replied, not looking up.

“Rodrigo Pereira,” Kate’s voice said.

Breece turned. She was on the couch, her hair back in a ponytail, in casual pants and shirt, long legs folded under her. There was a slate in her hand, and she was looking at him.

“Biotech researcher,” Breece said. “Died… a long time ago. Murder. We suspected assassination. None proven. He was… Argentinian?”

Kate raised an eyebrow and nodded approvingly. “Brazilian, actually. Specialized in human genetic manipulation. Died in a mugging in 2033, two years before Copenhagen was ratified. A random mugging.”

She smiled.

“Except now, thanks to Barnes’s files, we know it wasn’t random at all. We know the ERD killed him, and at least a dozen more people like him.”

Breece raised an eyebrow. “We have proof?”

Kate nodded. “Enough. They had dossiers on the targets. Movements, photos, potential means and locations for hits. It’s compelling.”

Breece heard a snick, looked over to see the Nigerian slide parts of the pistol back together. He looked up at Breece and smiled.

“Have you seen this?” Kate asked.

Breece turned. She tapped something on her slate, and the wall screen came alive. An image of a large building with a dome, ornate and exotic looking, its walls tinged red, a reflecting pool in front of it.

A British-accented woman’s voice spoke over it. “…Rumors continue to fly that the Indian government is considering leaving the Copenhagen Accords. Evidence surfaced months ago of research programs in violation of Copenhagen restrictions, drawing criticism from the US and China.”

The scene changed to a newsroom, a blonde female newscaster, in a smart suit and with the looks of a model, a BBC logo in the corner. “Tensions are running even higher between India and the US,” she said, “since the Indian government granted asylum earlier this week to fugitive American scientist Kaden Lane, convicted of multiple violations of Copenhagen-related laws, and wanted in connection with terrorist bombings…”

The screen froze, the newscaster/model’s face frozen in mid-sentence, just another attractive talking head spewing propaganda.

“Aparna Gupta,” Kate said.

Breece smiled. She was quizzing him. He knew these names. They’d burned themselves into his memory. When your parents are murdered as part of the war on the future, you remembered the other victims.

“AI researcher,” he said. “Self-healing systems. Or self-adapting. Something like that. Academic. She was killed in a car bomb. 2033. Muslim extrem…”

The words died on his lips. He turned to look at Kate.

She met his eyes.

“The ERD,” she said. “Operating in India. Teetering on the edge of leaving Copenhagen.”

His eyes grew wide.

Behind him he heard another solid
chunk
as the Nigerian slid the last piece of the pistol home.

“Just one good push,” Kate said. “That’s all it’ll take.”

T
hey gamed
it out for the morning and into the afternoon.

There were risks. Leaking evidence of the assassinations would give away data. It would reveal to the ERD and others that certain information was public. Suspicious minds might draw a connection between the leak and Barnes.

But there were also positives. Fracturing Copenhagen. Tainting Stockton, who’d been VP when the assassinations happened.

“I support it,” the Nigerian said slowly.

“Me too,” Breece said. “Great stuff.”

Kate smiled.

Hours later, it was done. A new account, unlinked to the PLF, was created – ERD_SECRETS. And from that account a set of documents were leaked, documents that provided evidence that over a period of two and a half years between the creation of the ERD and the signing of the Copenhagen Accords that prohibited research into branches of AI, genetics, nanotech, and neurotech around the world, the new US organization assassinated at least fourteen top scientists working in those fields in half a dozen countries. Some of which were already wavering in their commitment to the Accords.

C
arolyn Pryce was
in her home office, at her secure terminal, reading the State Department’s reports on the counter-Copenhagen summit going on in New Delhi. The parties involved were doing as much as possible via face to face, of course. But that hadn’t stopped the NSA from reading their dispatches and position papers, and the CIA from determining exactly who was there.

It was going to get ugly. State was going to start waving carrots around with one hand, and sticks with another. Trade deals and sanctions. Favored nation status or visa revocations and border searches for every package coming through.

Pryce wasn’t sure it was going to be enough.

Her terminal chimed with a new alert. She narrowed her eyes. Her thresholds were set high.

It scrolled across the screen and her eyes widened again.

She dug into the data, skimmed through it, page after page, and then leaned back.

She’d known about this. Not directly, not the specifics.

But she’d known there had been an active threat neutralization program, before she was National Security Advisor, before Copenhagen even existed, long since ended.

Killing people. Killing
scientists
. It was easy to condemn.

Until you remembered what those days had been like.

They’d been terrifying. A small army of Aryan clones, engineered to be immune to a virus, Marburg Red, created to wipe out the rest of humanity. That virus killed thirty-one thousand people in four days, the worst terrorist attack on record. And they’d been lucky. If the Aryan Rising’s genetic engineers had perfected it, if the clone children hadn’t risen up and slaughtered their makers and released Marburg Red early, the final version might have killed millions, hundreds of millions.

Billions.

And that hadn’t been the only threat. Eschaton, the self-replicating AI that came within a hair’s breadth of getting free on the net. Arrington, the near-trillionaire who’d managed to upload a digital replica of his brain into a custom data center and then gone insane from it, crashing markets and airplanes and power grids, killing thousands in what they’d told the world was a terrorist cyber-attack. The public didn’t even know about half the things that had really happened in the late Twenties and the early Thirties, or why.

But she did.

And still the global negotiations towards a Copenhagen agreement to restrict humanity-threatening research had ground on at a glacial pace, taking years, unclear if they’d ever actually get an agreement, every country trying to squeeze out financial incentives or trade benefits as bribes to sign on, risking gigadeaths so they could profit a bit from the Accords. And meanwhile, researchers in those countries sprinted faster and faster, to make as much progress as possible in horrifically dangerous areas before restrictions came down.

So… kill a handful, and maybe save millions?

No, she hadn’t given the order to kill these men and women.

But she had a hard time blaming those who had.

Pryce shook it off.

ERD_SECRETS. That’s where this had come from.

The account had an address, hosted offshore, no doubt, connected through anonymizing layer after anonymizing layer.

She stared at it.

Dealing with the fallout of this particular leak was the State Department’s problem.

But could this account have more? Might this be Lisa Brandt, Holtzman’s former student and lover, whom he’d called and visited days before his death? If Holtzman had sent her this, might the woman have something else that Pryce could use? Something to help get to the bottom of the PLF’s creation?

FBI was still watching Brandt in Boston, had kept Pryce at arm’s length with good arguments about the intel the woman might reveal under passive surveillance…

Carolyn Pryce grabbed her jacket.

An hour later, across town, via a fresh phone she’d paid cash for, she connected to an anonymizing service herself and created a fresh account on a messaging site.

And then she sent a message to the account behind ERD_SECRETS.

“Hello. I’m a friend, inside the US government. I’m highly placed. And I’m looking for evidence of how the PLF was created. Can you help me?”

She waited, and waited, and waited.

She waited so long that she put an alert on the account, flagged it for the highest possible importance notification to her, any time, any place.

Then she waited some more.

There was no response.

S
u-Yong Shu
walks the street of her simulated Shanghai, her future projection of the city she loves. She’s barefoot, her hair wild, her white dress stained with soot and blood.

Shanghai is in chaos.

Two dozen mirror-faced, battle-armored soldiers move down a rubble-filled urban canyon of a street, firing at something ahead. Smoke rises from all around. An explosion blows out glass windows tens of meters above.

Then with a sudden whirring, a pair of armed, quadcopter drones round the corner, their chain guns firing, jerking from angle to angle with eerie insectile precision, proboscis ejecting death, even as micromissiles streak out on jets of white-hot flame. The soldiers dive for cover behind chunks of fallen building, behind overturned cars.

There are explosions and screams. In seconds the humans are dead, the machines unharmed.

The drones are rising, now, their fans whirring faster, lifting them up to clear the hundred meters and more of the buildings all around. Su-Yong lifts her head to watch, to track them, and she sees the sky full of drones, drones of all type. Small and large. Copter and winged. Fan and jet. Unarmed and armed to extreme lethality. They are rising, blotting out the sky of Shanghai. Her army. Off to do her bidding. To conquer this world.

She screams again, dropping to her knees, beating her hands against the broken asphalt of the street. Where her fists land, fissures appear, race forward, cracking the street in two.

I’m still mad, she realizes. There hasn’t been enough time!

Distantly, she can feel the humans sending messages to her, punching text in through interfaces in her exoself. They’re pumping sedatives into the body they provided her with, now, injecting anti-nauseants, anti-convulsants. She doesn’t care.

She closes her eyes against the chaos.

Behind her eyes the world is just as overwhelming. Dense tree-like structures are blossoming in her inner sight. They are multi-dimensional, tightly packed, fully immersive. They’re unpacking themselves, now, loading themselves into her attentional space.

Simulations. Future projections.

She sees her drones shoot down the antiquated fighter-bombers sent against her. Sees her forces secure nuclear armaments. Sees herself seize the world’s electronic systems. Sees Confucian Fist soldiers jab injectors loaded with silvery nanite-laden fluid into the necks of Politburo members. Sees her provocations and protests paralyze the world while she does her work.

Sees Ling. Sees Ling healed, after Su-Yong’s victory. Restored. The avatar she released, its purpose complete, erased from the nanite processors in Ling’s brain, allowing Ling’s own biological mind to gradually regrow into that cleared space, to eventually grow into something greater, an digital upload of herself, expanding, transcending, no longer compelled to hide who and what she is from the humans.

She opens her eyes and Shanghai around her is whole, better than whole. It is gleaming, iridescent. She looks up and the sky is blue. The towers around her rise not a hundred meters, not three hundred meters, but a thousand, three thousand. Towers a kilometer high.
Three kilometers
high. They gleam gold and silver and cobalt and crimson in the afternoon sun. She lifts up her hands and rises into the air. The buildings are sculpted into intricate whorls and arcs and geometric shapes made possible by breakthroughs in materials. Humanity, no longer constrained, has turned its cities into art.

The street where she walked is a park, alive with verdant growth, plants she recognizes and plants she has never seen before.
Every
street she sees is a park. Every rooftop. Humans – no,
posthumans
– walk along the paths of that giant city-park, or through the tubes and spires of the glorious buildings.

She opens her mind as she rises and finds the city alive with thought, a symphony of thought, a living being, a meta-organism of never-before seen scale. Vast braided trunks of thought, tens of millions of them, connect them at the speed of light to every other city across the face of the Earth, to outposts spreading across the solar system.

She rises higher, until she is above the tallest building, and still climbing, where the air is growing thin, and the curvature of the earth is appearing, and other glorious iridescent cities loom on the green and blue horizons.

And then she can see it, even as she senses it in her thoughts.

The city, this glorious golden metropolis, with its magnificence of architecture, has been re-sculpted into a shape that can only be seen from above.

A face.

Her face. Or Ling’s.

And the one mind that permeates it all, greater than all the rest.

Her mind.

For this is the golden age.

The age after her victory.

After her daughter has done her duty, and been healed.

After Su-Yong Shu has conquered the world, and remolded it, for the better.