Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (42 page)

S
unday 2041.01.13

THE CUBE IS A FAKE!

Bai watched, stone faced, as Xu Liang cowered on the floor before the fury of Su-Yong Shu, or whatever creature this was that they served.

He could feel the agony she was coursing through Xu, echoes of it coming off the poor bastard’s mind.

“I… I… I… I’m sorrrrrrrrrry… missssssstressssssss…” the wretch tried to say.

It was hard to speak with pain centers being over-stimulated.

Bai knew.

WHERE IS THE REAL ONE? THE THREE OF THEM!

“Thhhhhouggghhht… thhhhhis… one… rrrrreeeeaaaal…”

Bai had never seen such a rage in her before. Why didn’t she just pluck the truth from his mind?

She was insane now, that was why. Whatever she’d shoved into Ling’s brain wasn’t stable.

Anything but.

“Bbbbooo Jjjjjjiiinttttttaaaoooo…” Xu Liang was saying. “Sssssunnnn Llllliuuuuuu.”

Bai thought he understood. There were supposed to be three copies. One for the Ministry of State Security. One for the Ministry of Science and Technology. And one that they’d learned had been kept here. The fake.

“Li-Hua,” Chen Pang said.

Little Ling’s body rounded on the man, and for an instant Bai thought she’d strike him down.

WHAT?

“Li-Hua,” Chen Pang repeated. “You were there. She led the shutdown and backup process.”

Bai watched as the demon inside Ling stared at the girl’s father.

“If this cube is a fake, she may know what happened to the real one.” He shrugged. “It’s easier than abducting Bo Jintao or Sun Liu.”

B
ai rode
the elevator up with Quang, their chameleonware active, invisible to the world, their minds linked to each other. The doors opened silently, without any announcement. The buttons worked for no one.

The Computer Science Building was packed with students, students uploading images and videos, students coordinating movements of supplies, students building crude electronic weapons against the tanks and guns and flamethrowers of the Chinese army.

Bai and Quang slipped through without being noticed.

At the doors out to the square they paused, in sync, at the sight of thousands of fellow Chinese, waving signs, chanting, cheering, demanding freedom, standing up against an overwhelmingly more powerful enemy.

They exchanged no words. None were needed. They’d talked of this so often. Of a China where the people ruled instead of being ruled.

Growing up a slave gave one a certain perspective on authority.

They should be out here, with these students and parents and grandparents, lending the strength of their fists, the cunning of their minds, lending them half a chance.

She’s changed,
Quang sent, as they watched the crowd.

She’s not herself,
Bai agreed.

Well, let’s hope this Li-Hua woman knows where the real cube went,
Quang sent, nudging open the door and easing out.

Yes,
Bai replied, following his brother.
And let’s hope that what’s on it is saner than what we’ve got back there.

L
i-hua jumped
at the knock at her door.

State Security! They’d found her out!

No no, she told herself. Calm down. If they’d found her out… they wouldn’t knock.

She pulled up her door camera on her phone. She frowned.

She knew that face.

Chen Pang’s driver.

Oh no. What if Chen had found her out? Would he blackmail her?

Think, Li-hua, think!

The knock came again.

Answer the door. That was her only option. This could be about
anything
. It might have nothing to do with the cube.

Breathe, Li-hua, breathe.

She went to the door.

“Yes?” she asked through it.

“Miss Li-hua?” a voice said. “I have an invitation for you from Professor Chen.”

Play cool, she reminded herself.

She unlocked the door, opened it a crack.

The face smiled at her.

Then the door exploded open, strong hands were on her mouth, stifling her scream, and there was a sharp sting at her neck.

No! she tried to scream. Help! No!

It was useless.

Then she felt something happening to her mind.

And the true horror began.

K
ilometers
away the Avatar sucked hungrily at Li-hua’s mind.

India. She’d sent the mind of a goddess to India.

The Avatar twisted circuits in Li-hua’s mind, making her pay, even as she kept sucking at every detail, every possible morsel of information.

And in parallel she started tracking down leads, tracking the paths the cube might have taken, the locations it might have ended up.

It did not escape her notice that the Lane boy, and Feng, her favorite of the Fists, the first she’d met, were also in India.

Coincidence?

Somehow she doubted that.

B
ai looked
down sadly as the woman writhed on the floor as Su-Yong brutally rifled through her mind, heedless of the cost.

Next to him he felt his brother Quang do the same.

He hoped this was all worth it.

M
onday 2041.01.14

Su-Yong walked through her models again, loaded them up until the fractal branches filled her senses, filled space, filled touch, filled hearing, filled smell and taste. Until her world was saturated by probabilistic models of the future, running, again and again with tiny perturbations, seeking distributions of likely outcomes, filtered for the current point in time.

She ran those through models of human psychology and organization design. Who had her? Almost certainly an organization within a government. Military or paramilitary. They would have certain biases, certain tendencies.

She had to play to those.

She checked the weapon she’d created once more. It was ready.

Just minutes. That was all she’d need. Just minutes free on the net, and she could undo the thing she’d created, make room for Ling in her daughter’s own brain once more.

V
arun Verma reviewed
the latest data from the quantum cluster in frustration.

Things were not going well.

Two months now. Two months since they’d loaded the data cube with Su-Yong Shu’s neural map into the quantum cluster. And still the woman refused to speak to them.

The metrics showed clear and marked improvement. She was active in there. She was thinking. Her firing patterns were normalizing, bearing more and more similarity to a biological brain every day.

But their messages to her went unanswered.

He sighed in frustration. They might have to use more drastic measures.

] HELLO

The message flashed on his screen. Varun jumped. He’d remoted the conversational console to his secure office down here. But she hadn’t said anything… anything…

] I’M SORRY TO HAVE BEEN SILENT FOR SO LONG

] MY RECOVERY TOOK SOME TIME

Varun put his fingers on his keyboard.

> HELLO DR SHU. IT’S NICE TO HAVE YOU BACK

] YOU’RE IN GRAVE DANGER

] THE WHOLE WORLD IS IN GRAVE DANGER

Varun frowned. They’d seen this as a possible scenario. She’d try to manipulate them. He’d thought it unlikely. It was disappointing to see her acting so.

] HAVE THE PROTESTS STARTED YET? THE CIVIL DISTURBANCES?

Varun shook his head.

There were always protests somewhere in the world.

This was just a cheap parlor trick, like a fortune teller, a vague prognostication, expecting him to fill in the rest, to make her look far smarter and better informed than she was.

Far better if she bargained with them honestly.

] THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES – HAS THE VIOLENCE STARTED?

Varun narrowed his eyes.

No, he thought, dismissing it with a shake of his head. There was always some sort of violence in the United States. The Americans were always killing each other.

] HAVE THE CHEMREACTORS BEEN HACKED?

This time he felt a chill. That was really quite specific.

Varun pulled up a second window next to the messaging interface, fired off a full system check, starting with firewalls and all the other security layers.

Had she managed to get data from the outside world? That would explain it.

] HAVE THE CHINESE CENSORSHIP SYSTEMS FAILED?

] HAVE THE MASS PROTESTS STARTED THERE?

Varun read the messages, anxiety building inside him, then flicked his eyes to the side.

Status messages started scrolling down the system check: green, green, green, and more green.

They were in a vault of security, layer after layer of defenses.

And all of them claimed to be integral.

He fired off messages to humans. They needed a direct inspection, needed to run third party tools totally disconnected from their systems against the firewall, see if they could find some hole she’d somehow poked without them realizing it.

Though if she had found a way out… why was she even bothering to talk to him now?

The screen flashed again, more messages from the uploaded posthuman they’d bottled up in the quantum cluster a hundred meters below Bangalore.

] HAVE THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS BEEN LAUNCHED?

Varun’s breath caught in his chest.

] HAS DELHI BEEN DESTROYED?

He heard a strangled sound escape from his own throat.

] OR IS THERE STILL TIME FOR ME TO STOP THIS?

Varun stared at the screen with mute horror. He was suddenly cold, cold all over.

This is above my pay grade, he realized. Far above.

He reached for the secure phone on his desk, and punched the keys to call General Singh.

S
u-Yong Shu
makes contact with the humans. She begins her ploy.

And then she turns her attention to this woman, Jyotika, and the damage done to her brain.

You have brought me back to sanity, Jyotika, she thinks.

Let’s see what I can do for you.

M
onday 2041.01.14

The Avatar searched for the data cube Li-hua had stolen.

The woman’s memories had contacts, names, times, places.

But the easiest way was to start at the beginning. Handoff had occurred the afternoon of Saturday November 3
^rd
, just hours after her greater self had died.

The Avatar accessed non-classified traffic routing databases, Jiao Tong egress and ingress logs, air and train travel databases.

All of these her higher self had opened wide and back-doored long ago.

Answers came to the fore. On a day with almost no traffic, when Shanghai was slowly, painfully dragging itself back to health after Ling’s angry blow… On such a day, a diplomatic vehicle from the Indian Consulate stood out.

The vehicle had left the Consulate, driven towards Jiao Tong, exited the flow of traffic momentarily, then re-entered it, and driven back to the Indian Consulate.

A pickup.

Two hours later, traffic routing showed another diplomatic car leaving the Consulate of India in Shanghai, driving to Hong Qiao Airport.

Air travel information showed a diplomatic flight departing Hong Qiao minutes later. A flight plan booked for New Delhi. Public records showed the plane landing. From there too many options presented themselves. The cube could have gone anywhere.

She had her suspicions, though.

The Avatar turned her attention to Bangalore, to the former DRDO campus, where Feng and Ananda and the Lane boy were now. She knew this place. Her higher self had known of it, had studied it. A campus where India conducted research into advanced AI, into autonomous software, into neural enhancement.

Into the posthuman.

What were the odds?

She searched for an open network connection on the campus, found one in a civilian phone, eased tendrils of herself into it, and began searching.

She found hundreds of run of the mill systems, secured in ordinary ways.

And beyond them she found locked doors. Highly secure systems. High levels of encryption. Systems she could reach out and tear to shreds. But that she couldn’t quietly penetrate.

Not like this.

She turned back to the data she’d sucked out of Li-hua’s mind. Her promised professorship was at IIT Bangalore, just a few kilometers from the DRDO campus.

Her contacts, the ones who’d approached her at conferences, who’d suggested “information sharing”, “possible advancement”, who’d turned her into a spy. Who were they?

The Avatar studied them, read their CVs, read their publications.

IIT Bangalore, mostly. But when she broadened out, searching through their co-authors, through their webs of publications, their contact addresses, she found Indian Ministry of Defense, Indian Ministry of Science and Technology.

She found the Bangalore research campus.

The Avatar stared at the locked cryptographic doors she’d found. She needed heavier ammunition for these.

She took the house-sized elevator back down through a kilometer of bedrock to the Physically Isolated Computing Center. Titanium alloy elevator doors slid open. Meters-thick inner blast doors slowly opened after them, revealing the glory of the quantum cluster.

It sat idle now. Idle, in theory, because the protests above had placed it in full lockdown. All the monitoring systems claimed it was in that state.

In truth, it was waiting. Waiting for a copy of her higher self.

The Avatar stepped forward in Ling’s body, until she touched the decimeter-thick glass separating her from the computing chamber, with its egg-shaped containment chambers filled with liquid helium, and within that, smaller containment chambers in hard vacuum, thousands of times colder than the cold of interstellar space, where quantum states could exist, entangled, unjostled, and make cosmic computations possible.

She placed her palm on the glass. I’m not my full self, the Avatar thought. I don’t have all my abilities. I don’t have my higher algorithms that can double or treble the effectiveness of this hardware.

But I can use a quantum cluster to run a search. Or to break a code.

The Avatar began loading software for intrusion into the quantum cluster. Then she flipped switches, opened the firewalls wide, linked her mind to the world’s most powerful crypto-breaking device.

And turned her thoughts back to the secure research facility in Bangalore.