Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (21 page)

F
riday 2040.11.16

Colonel Wang Rongshang, Medical Director of Dachang Military Air Base, closed his eyes in anticipation as the car drove him through the night. It had been far too long since he’d seen his mistress. The duty had been intense since the night Shanghai failed. Soldiers from Dachang had been dispatched. Many had been injured in the rioting. Some killed. It had kept him and his staff busy ever since.

Now at least, he could escape, escape into Ma Jie’s arms for a few hours.

His private car came to a stop, and Wang Rongshang climbed out. No driver tonight. Only software.

Wang ascended the stairs of the modest building until he reached the third floor. He knocked on Ma Jie’s door, and it opened, and there she was, in a long silken gown that made him hunger for what was beneath.

“I’ve missed you, my love,” she said.

Wang smiled and stepped into his lover’s embrace.

A
hundred kilometers away
, the Avatar smiled. This, at last, looked like a way to reach her children.

S
aturday 2040.11.17

“I wish I was going with you,” Rangan said again.

“You
want
to get caught?” Tempest snapped, her face a checkerboard of black and white. “You want to take us
all
down with you?”

“Leave off, Tempest,” Cheyenne sighed, hoisting a bag from the floor, her face similarly painted. “Not like
you
wanna be recog–”

“Hey!” Tempest interrupted.

Something flashed between their minds. Rangan caught the bare edge of it. Tempest silencing Cheyenne, before she revealed something.

Rangan grimaced.

These three knew almost everything about him.

He didn’t even know their real names.

Beggars can’t be choosers, he thought.

“I just want to see how the mesh works,” he said.

“You want to make yourself useful?” Tempest asked. “Check what I told you about the chemreactor hack. I don’t trust it.”

Rangan opened his mouth.

“The mesh is going to work great,” Angel said from behind him, before he could speak. She patted his arm as she walked by. “Thanks for your help.”

Rangan closed his mouth and nodded. He’d been able to help a little. He wasn’t quite as horribly rusty as he’d feared. Coding was still coding.

Angel walked over to the one blank wall, next to Tempest and Cheyenne.

They were dressed and face-painted as court jesters, costumes that gave them an excuse for the high contrast blocks of white and black across their faces that conveniently threw off most of the cues that facial recognition software looked for. The rest of their costumes were made up of flamboyant patchwork clothes in matching and horribly clashing patterns and colors that went with the face paint; no wigs this time, but tall pointy hats that covered their real hair and conveniently contained the Nexus-boosting antennae they’d built.

And juggling balls and pins, which in turn necessitated gear bags, which in turn created plenty of space for doses of Nexus. Many, many doses of Nexus.

“Alright, Axon,” Tempest said. “Camera three.”

Rangan nodded, stepped back to the table with surveillance cameras, and picked up the one she’d specified.

“Alright,” he said, as brightly as he could, trying to ignore the obvious tension coming off their minds, to make this a moment of fun, of lightness. “Time for your close-ups!”

Tempest scowled.

“Come on,” he said, panning the camera across their faces. “You are undoubtedly the hottest three-person, all-female, DC-based, hacker collective with the goal of bottoms-up neural-software based–”

Angel laughed at him.

Cheyenne rolled her eyes.

Tempest flipped him off.

The camera display superimposed a grid of vertical and horizontal lines over each woman’s face. Layers of meaning appeared atop the grid immediately. Facial feature recognition. Eyes-nose-mouth. Then second level features appeared – cheekbones, jawlines, chins, brows, hairlines – seemingly at random, thrown off by the alien facial planes added by the strong contrasts of the face paint.

NO MATCH the face recognition software on the camera said.

He played it over their faces again, slowly, as they turned and gave him more angles, more facial expressions.

NO MATCH it repeated.

He moved the camera over their faces again, as they cranked up and down the lighting, as he zoomed in closer.

NO MATCH it told him one more time.

Rangan looked up at the three women, about to venture out into this protest, these three women who, for reasons of their own, didn’t want to be identified. He could feel the tension coming off them. They were taking their own risks. They were risking a lot, just to have him here.

He nodded.

“You’re good to go.”

Minutes later they filed out the door, and he was alone.

B
reece rocked
his head in time to the chanting, the long, natty hair of this wig moving to the rhythm; the fake scar, the fake tan, the brow and cheek and jaw implants all morphing his face. Signs and banners flew above the crowd of thousands on the National Mall. More every day. More every
hour
, it seemed. He’d been here for three days, himself, and the ever increasing density was palpable.

Out of the corner of his eye he watched another Nexus dose handed out. The mules didn’t know that he was out here, had no idea what he looked like. They had simple instructions. Go to a locker. Pick up a backpack or duffel full of vials. Go to the protest. Hand them out. Concentrate on certain areas, particularly the double fence-line, where the anti-Stockton protest was squared off against the pro-Stockton loyalists: just ten feet of empty space and a few dozen cops between them.

The mules were low level PLF wannabes, most of whom had never seen field experience, eager to show off their skills, maybe earn a real mission.

Hell, some of them were probably cops or feds. But those could be weeded out later.

He scanned the crowd. Kate was out there somewhere. Not the Nigerian, though. He was a bit too distinctive with his height. Too easy to remember.

His tactical contacts told him it was almost time. He reached his hand into his pocket, found the button, waited… waited… and then pressed.

A
ngel did
her best to hide her surprise as they were funneled into the Mall at 17
^th
Street. There was Nexus here already. Lots of Nexus. She’d expected some, but this much…

Police officers in mirrored glasses tracked her and the rest of C3 as they pushed in with the crowd through the side streets. She smiled her widest entertainer smile, moved juggling clubs up in the air in a jaunty little dance, never letting go of them, wiggling her hips in time.

I’m just a
girl
, officer, she thought at the cop. I’m no threat to you.

No Nexus transmissions until they were out in the middle of the Mall. That was the plan. The entrances were the most likely places for Nexus scanners. And while they had to get within a couple feet of you to detect Nexus in your brain if you were in receive only, they could pick you up from thirty, forty, fifty feet away if you were broadcasting.

Though, frankly, if they were scanning, they’d be running out there to bust what must be hundreds of people running Nexus on the Mall already.

Of course, if that were
tens of thousands
…

They broke radio silence minutes later.

…feel all that?

…hundreds of them…

…mostly that way…

…let’s head that way then…

…think they came dosed, or someone else handing it out here?

…one way to find out…

They headed west, on the south side of the Reflecting Pool, towards the Lincoln Memorial, where there seemed to be the greatest concentration of people.

The concentration of Nexus grew stronger as well. Denser. The minds felt fresh, inexperienced. Some of them disoriented, even, in the rush of a synesthetic blur as Nexus 5 learned them.

…newbies…

…dosed here…

…calibration phase…

Up ahead it was growing even denser. There was something different, Angel saw. A gap in the protest, then more signs, different signs.

A counter-protest. Stockton loyalists.

And that’s where the greatest concentration of Nexus was coming from?

She pushed her way right up to it, until she was up against the orange plastic fencing that held the anti-Stockton crowd back. Ten feet away, another orange plastic fence held a smaller but equally fervent crowd of Stockton loyalists with their own angry signs back. In the gap were cops, spaced one every few feet, their presence serving to discourage the two groups from attacking each other at least as much as the fence.

She reached to cut off her Nexus communication, so close to these cops. But before she could, something hit her hard. A wave of emotion. Anger. Violence. Repugnance. Intolerance. She felt it hit Tempest and Cheyenne. Felt them hit with the same urge to shout and yell and bash, to throw themselves across the gap and hurt their foes.

She reached out with all she could, grabbed hold of them with her thoughts, and threw herself back from the fence, to the ground.

SOMEONE’S FUCKING WITH OUR MINDS!
she sent.

She heard the sound of yelling, of screams, of a cop ordering people to stay back, of the fence failing, of signs being slammed into people’s bodies.

LET’S GET THE HELL OUT!
Cheyenne sent back.

There’s a transmitter!
Tempest sent.
I can find it! I can disable it!

Then something crashed physically into Angel, and the world went away.

B
reece watched
the fight break out with fascination. The anti-Stockton protesters, those with Nexus in their brains – most of them, anyway – threw themselves over the fence, charged past the cops, and slammed themselves into the Stockton loyalists, swinging signs like swords, like clubs.

The Stockton loyalists, enraged, fought back.

“That’s enough,” Kate’s voice said into his ear.

“It’s fascinating,” Breece subvocalized in reply.

“We said a test, Breece,” Kate said. “Test successful.”

“Roger that,” Breece subvocalized. He clicked the button in his pocket again. Perhaps a few of the combatants out there looked confused. But more were piling on, throwing themselves into the fight from both sides now, as violence begat more violence.

He nodded, then turned and walked away.

Behind him, sirens began to wail as the melee grew.

R
angan sat alone
in the Bunker.

He’d been here by himself quite a lot. Most nights he was the only one here. The other three had lives elsewhere. They didn’t talk about them, at least not with him. They had apartments or homes or something. Boyfriends or girlfriends. Not full time jobs – not from the amount of time they spent here – but other obligations that sometimes took them away for chunks of time during the day, or occasionally for more than one day at a time.

They didn’t say. He’d learned quickly not to ask.

He’d stay here, by himself, scouring the web for news of Kade, or his parents, or hacking on the mesh code, or playing with Nexus apps, or playing music, messing around with the new DJ apps that existed on top of Nexus, putting together playlists that he could beam straight out from his mind, to the right audio gear or, heck, to anyone running Nexus. He’d let himself dream a little dream that one day he’d be a free man and could do something as trivial and fun as play a set in a club.

As if.

Not today.

You want to make yourself useful?
Tempest had asked, before they left for the protest.
Check what I told you about the chemreactor hack. I don’t trust it.

What Tempest had told him – what she’d told them all – was that it was highly improbable. That it was highly
suspicious
that someone could hack so many models all at once. And she was right.

The hack that had gone live on November 10
^th
included the private keys to seventeen different models of high end commercial chemreactor. Seventeen different makes and models of devices that could synthesize complex molecules and molecular brews like Nexus, given their component ingredients and the right recipe.

Those seventeen, Tempest had verified, were the seventeen highest market share models out there. Together they accounted for more than ninety-five percent of all the chemreactors in use.

Normally those chemreactors were locked down. Censor chips ensured they couldn’t be used to synthesize patented pharmaceuticals, or dangerous explosives, or illegal street drugs.

But with the private key, you could override all of that.

A hack that broke
one
chemreactor model key would be a massive coup. But seventeen at once? Who could do that? Had someone hacked them slowly year over year and stockpiled those hacks?

Tempest’s suspicion was that the version of Nexus released along with the hack was a fake, with a back door, a vulnerability to exploit. He felt a pang of guilt at that. There
were
back doors in Nexus – back doors he and Kade had placed there. That Kade must have changed.

But when he checked and checked and rechecked the version of Nexus released with this hack… it was identical to what was in the public depots a few days back.

The recipe for synthesis was identical.

The source code was identical.

The compiled
binaries
were identical.

There was even the option to download the latest version from any of the most popular repositories and install that instead.

Whoever was doing this just seemed to want more Nexus out there, period.

Rangan was pondering this when the door to the Bunker slammed open.

He practically jumped out of his chair.

Cheyenne and Tempest came in, supporting Angel between them, gear bags slung over their backs.

He stepped forward. “Angel? You OK?”

She looked up at him. “No,” she said, a bit groggily, her arms still wrapped around her friends. “I’m pissed.”

“Somebody got there with Nexus before us,” Cheyenne said.

“And they’re a total asshole,” Tempest finished.

B
reece stayed
silent as Kate railed at him.

“That was a test?” she yelled. “It turned them into animals! I thought we were talking about a little encouragement! A little nudge! That was about revolution, alright, but it wasn’t about moving humanity forward!” She was livid. He’d seen her this angry before, but seldom at him. “Those protesters are on
our side
fighting for the
same thing
we’re fighting for!” She looked around the table at Breece and the Nigerian. “And we just helped someone violate them.”

Breece waited a moment to make sure she was done, then he held up his hands palms open.

“OK, I hear you, Kate. It was a test.”

“And you want to move forward!”