Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (24 page)

W
ednesday 2040.11.20

It wasn’t until the next evening that Kade could break free from work and receptions early enough to bring the children together.

He chose the ones aged five and up, whom he hoped would be able to understand enough of what he was to explain. That was eleven of them.

They sat together, on the lawn, beneath a giant palm, in a circle. The sun had already set, and the sky was a deep blue with clouds touched by flame. The air was pleasantly cool at this hour, up here at Bangalore’s elevation nearly a thousand meters above sea level, even though they were close to the equator. Its breeze was fragrant with the scent of tropical plants that Kade couldn’t name.

I have something to ask all of you, and all the other children as well
,
Kade sent them.

Their minds gave him questions, eagerness, trust.

He didn’t want their trust today. He didn’t want them to act on his word. He wanted them to see, and understand.

He wanted them to help
him
understand.

And then decide.

He let down the walls of his mind to them, opened himself, and began to breathe.

In, out.

Slow, sure.

Watch the breath.

Observe it. Don’t control it.

Let your attention sink into the breath completely.

Anapana.

He felt Sarai’s mind open to his, her attention on her own breaths, sharing them, entwining her perceptions with his, their breath falling into rhythm, their minds falling into synch. Then Kit was with them. Then Aromdee, who’d come from near Chiang Rai, then Meesang, than Sunisa, then suddenly they were a symphony of mind, a harmony of mind, a concordance of brains resonating at the same frequency.

Deeper they went, deeper, breath slowing further, hearts slowing, minds falling more closely into sync, walls crumbling.

Atop the carrier wave of shared breath, shared attention, shared meditation, bandwidth expanded, communication expanded, consciousness expanded. Thoughts and memories blossomed out beyond the walls of single skulls.

The world became sharper. A dozen pairs of eyes opened and the world was glorious, a place of intricate detail clearer than ever before, a million blades of grass, a thousand shades of blue and pink and red and white above them. A hundred different scents on the breeze. The sounds of crickets, of birds, of vehicles, of people talking softly as they walked, of distant traffic and horns and what had been to them the chaos of Bangalore beyond the walls but now had pattern, had texture, had meaning.

This was transcendence. This was the posthuman.

Now
,
they thought,
this request
.

The part of the whole that was Kade felt knowledge sucked from his mind. The work he was doing. The Indian education project. What they wanted to study about the Nexus-born children. What he hoped it might add to NexusOS, and how that would affect those who took Nexus later, how it might change India. How it might change the world.

The whole pulled at him, pulled at the Nexus nodes in his brain, tunneled into his thoughts, beyond the surface, digging for comprehension, for possibilities seen, for fears, for hopes, and he opened himself wide to allow it.

He was part of that whole, doing the digging. He was himself, feeling himself burrowed into and giving himself to it, feeling his back arch, feeling his bandwidth saturated, feeling Nexus nodes sap hungrily at ATP to power themselves, pushing to the limit of safety, beyond, into the red.

The whole dug deeper,
he
dug deeper, combing through his mind, sweeping up images, ideas, facts, searching for and finding patterns that Kade alone would never have seen. Warnings flashed unheeded on the screen of one mind within the hole.

Thoughts flashed through them, almost too fast to follow. Navya Kapoor at the UN. Tears on Kade’s face. Sam’s trauma. The pawn seldom knows. Meditation with Ananda. Shiva’s research plans. Elections and protest in the United States. Ling’s absence. A building on campus whose explanation had been an evasion. Code structures, mind structures, thought structures. Webs of knowledge. Monks in lotus, thousands of them. A million minds they could feel now, every day, every day. Dancing in Club Heaven in Saigon, the Nexus Jockey named Lotus closing a feedback loop with the crowd, turning it into a single glorious organism not unlike their own. Varun, the Indian scientist who’d been anxious during the UN speech. Orchestra musicians becoming one. Clone soldiers. Su-Yong Shu embodied in row upon row of vast computing machinery.

Children. A million children. A hundred million children. Minds linked. Everywhere around the world.

Transforming everything.

Kade snapped out of the whole in a wrenching, jarring moment of disunion.

He was on his back, disoriented, drained, the sky dark above him.

He was panting, gasping for breath, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling, desperate to suck in oxygen. His heart was beating like a drum.

Oh my god, he thought. Oh my god.

The children were standing around him, standing above him, towering above him.

Too much, he realized. I was too deep, giving too much, pushing my brain too far.

I couldn’t keep up.

We’ll allow it
,
they sent him, in harmony, eleven minds sending down to him at once.

No.

One mind, posthuman. Alien. Remote.

My god, he thought. What are they?

But we want to be more than subjects
,
the posthuman sent him. Eleven minds. One mind.
We want to be part of the team.

H
e looked up at them
, at it, and what he felt was fear. What have we done?

Then they saw him, saw his fear, saw his brain sucking oxygen. And the distance collapsed.

Kade! We’re so sorry!

Alien dissipated in the familiar. Sarai and Kit and Sunisa and Meesang and…

Kade! Oh Kade!

Concern enfolded him. Childish, young concern for an injured elder. Minds probed his, searching, giving, bolstering. Exhaustion faded. Clarity returned. His heart slowed. His breathing eased.

And he saw what he was to them. Teacher. Friend. Brother. Champion.

Treasure.

Forerunner.

He could feel their minds enfolding him, apologizing, still searching for injury, learning, designing bulwarks against that happening again. And above all, caring.

Kids. He knew them. He trusted them. Because they trusted him.

Tit for tat.

Generosity rewarded.

That was the lesson here.

One more thing, Kade,
they sent, a bit later, when they were sure he was well. Their thoughts resonated, harmonized, were eleven and at once one
.
Sam is right. The Indians are hiding something from you.

Kade nodded, absorbing, trying to see the whole of it. But what the hidden thing was, neither he nor they could say – it was an insight, a pattern, an intuition, of pieces not connecting.

And,
they sent, images of protest, of chaos, of Nexus spreading suddenly faster.
Something else is going on.

F
riday 2040.11.23

The Avatar lay upon the bed in her daughter Ling’s room. Above her, the Milky Way slowly rotated across the night sky, replicated in exquisite detail on the ceiling.

Tension was escalating. Outside, Shanghai was lit by the glow from the buildings, from the gigantic advertisements, by the river of vehicles flowing through the streets. Tens of thousands of sky-eyes hovered and darted above the city again, vectoring thrust on their quadcopter frames, watching the populace more closely than ever. With their glowing red collision avoidance lights they could have been a multitude of mutant fireflies. Or a multitude of sinister eyes.

They were hardened, these new sky-eyes. Hardened in their little brains. Codes changed. Encryption keys lengthened and diversified. Communication ports successively closed until absolutely the bare minimum remained. Their leashes to central command loosened, giving them more autonomy, more survivability on the electronic battlefield.

Other hunters emitted fewer photons, but posed greater risks. The routers she had to reach through were being upgraded to new versions, their controls tightened, their censor codes more paranoid, their packet and protocol inspections more intrusive.

And in every corner, hunter-killer software lurked. There were forensic tools adapted for real-time response, ready to scavenge through digital heaps and stacks, read through every byte of memory of a corrupted system in microseconds, looking for any clue, pointing the way back to the origin of attack. They were dangers to her. She was frightened more by the evolved things, products of artificial selection, millions of generations of it, with internal structures that made no sense, code that, in the small snippets she could glean, read like baroque garbage to her, that resembled neither the output of human AI programmers nor the network structure of the organic brain that she and her greater self were based on. What frightened her most was that she did not know the capabilities of those creatures. She could not predict their behavior.

She would love to swallow the whole code of one of the evolved hunter-killers, place it in a sandbox, then take it apart, bit by bit, again and again and again, just to see what made it tick. Later. She could do that if she survived.

The Avatar shivered. The constraints on her were tightening. She must keep moving forward. And faster. Before the noose was closed too tight.

The doorbell rang.

The Avatar smiled. Their dinner guest was here.

Within her, she felt Ling whimper.

T
he Avatar watched
through Chen’s mind, through his eyes, as he opened the door to greet their guest. Xu Liang stood there, grey haired, distinguished, a polite, aloof smile on his face.

Xu Liang, the Director of Jiao Tong’s Secure Computing Center, and the Physically Isolated Computing Center below it. A long-time rival of Chen’s. The sort who’d be intrigued by an invitation to a private dinner.

Chen closed the door after Xu, and offered him a drink.

S
he watched
through Chen’s eyes as Xu leaned back in his chair, the remains of the meal Chen’s people had laid out in front of him. They’d disappeared promptly after serving, of course, leaving the two distinguished men to discuss their important matters.

The Avatar smiled to herself at that.

“Chen,” Xu said. “My old friend. I think your notion of…” he blinked, paused, seeming to lose his train of thought. “…of using the quantum cluster to model social unrest is a
decent
one.” He paused again, blinking, as the sedatives in his food and drink worked their way into his brain. “But why should they trust
you
? You’re Sun Liu’s creature. You’re…”

Xu’s head was rocking slightly from side to side now.

“Suddenly… tired…” he said.

Chen’s hand reached under the table, brushed the hypersonic injector secured there.

“Are you feeling well?” he asked Xu solicitously.

From her husband’s mind the Avatar caught flashes of memory, of his own horror, of his daughter Ling standing above him, the injector and the ampule half-full of silvery fluid in her hand, as the nanites took hold in his brain, as her mind overpowered his, paralyzed him, as she leaned in closer, to press it against his neck once more, to empty the rest of it his veins.

Pain. Humiliation. Wretched self-loathing of himself that he was about to be used to do this to another human.

Hatred of her.

The Avatar smiled wider, relishing it.

She could have resculpted Chen. She could have eased his pain. She could have emotionally rewired him at a deeper level, making him truly loyal to her, ending the cognitive dissonance.

She preferred it this way. A program of her creation, running inside her husband’s brain, controlling him. But leaving him trapped within it, to suffer.

She relished horror rising within Chen as she prepared to use him to enslave Xu Liang.

Inside she felt Ling stirring more.

Stop it, please,
her daughter whispered to her.

Oh daughter,
the Avatar replied.
We’ve only just begun.

Chen’s hand closed around the grip of the injector.

STOP IT!
Ling said.

The Avatar ignored her.

“Water…” Xu whispered.

Chen ripped the injector free and stood. “I have something better than water, old friend.”

STOOOOOOOOOOP!!!!

Ling’s will ripped into her. The Avatar recoiled, shocked. Her daughter had
seized back some of her nanites.
Ling was reaching out with them, pushing on Chen’s mind, crashing the software she had running, the code that actively managed Chen’s behavior.

BAD GIRL!
the Avatar sent back, coursing current through Ling’s pain centers, hurling chaos at the nanite circuits her daughter had managed to seize.

In the living room, she was vaguely aware of Chen, standing, dumbfounded, over a suddenly terrified Xu Liang.

“Run…” Chen whispered. Then louder. “Run!” He hurled the injector across the room, flinging it into a wall, and ran for the kitchen, for the block of knives.

Ling roared back harder, scratching and biting at her with virtual tooth and nail, using raw willpower and her long connection to this hardware to claw back control.

The Avatar surged more pain through her daughter.
Relent, child! Relent!

“AAAAAAAH!” Ling screamed aloud. Her will gave a millimeter.

Circuits came back to the Avatar.

She turned back to the room. Xu Liang was stumbling, up and out of his chair, trying to run for the door, clumsily, impaired by the sedatives. She sent a thought to the house, locked
all
the doors, trapped him here.

She turned to Chen, found him with a knife in his hand, expected him to be coming for Ling’s room, to kill her, found that he had it in two hands, the point up, about to plunge it into his own throat instead.

She seized hold of his motor cortex, twisted his muscles in mid thrust. The knife veered off course, left a score across the right side of his neck. Blood welled up immediately.

Xu Liang was at the door, was trying to open it, failing. He turned and looked, saw Chen with a bloody knife in his hand, and turned back to the door, started pounding on it, screaming for help.

There would be no help, the Avatar knew. No one could hear his screams. And the fate in store for him was far worse than the knife.

She took control of Chen’s motor cortex manually, dropped the knife from Chen’s hand, sent him towards the injector he’d flung across the room.

Ling raged at her again, hard, grabbing for control of the hardware in her brain, pushing the Avatar off balance once more.

She struck back viciously against her daughter, lashed her with pain, again, again, and again. It was a horrid thing to do. It hurt her to do it. But she must. If Ling wrestled control back, they would both die.

The dream would die. Darkness would fall.

Ignorant old men would rule forever.

Finally Ling submitted. The Avatar pushed down hard on her daughter, held her down by brute force as the girl struggled. She wouldn’t be surprised this time. Then she bent Chen down to pick up the hypersonic injector from where it had fallen after bouncing off the wall. It looked undamaged. She turned Chen’s head, looking for Xu Liang.

The Secure Computing Center Director was on his knees at the door now. His phone was in his hands. She smiled. She’d disabled transmission on his phone shortly after he’d arrived.

As she closed on him with Chen’s body, he looked up, his limbs becoming less and less coordinated, unable to stand even, and begged.

“Please… please… why are you doing this?”

The Avatar crouched Chen’s body down by his old rival, pressed the hypersonic injector against the man’s neck, and smiled.

“You were always jealous of my husband’s success, were you not?”

She saw Xu’s eyes widen further, in horror, in comprehension.

“Well now you can join him, as an equal.”

And then she pulled the trigger.

L
ater
, after she’d examined her daughter, made sure the child wasn’t permanently harmed; after she’d soothed the girl, and explained so patiently that Ling must not interfere, that her mother was doing this for both their good; after she’d restarted the control software running on her husband’s brain; she came back to Xu, and began trawling through his mind, searching for all the details of the security around the quantum cluster, what she’d need to do, who she’d need to corrupt, and how.

And then the other topic. Where had the data cubes gone? Did Xu have any idea where the backups made of her full self might be?

When she saw what he knew, she laughed, laughed, and laughed out of little Ling’s body.

Restoring her full self might just be easier than she’d thought.