Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (43 page)

W
ednesday 2041.01.16

Greg Chase leaned back in his office chair in the West Wing, watching the sentiment analysis scroll by, sampling the top images and videos of the week, the headlines.

Terrible. It was just terrible.

Relatives of some of the dead in Houston attempting to file suit against the President, denouncing him angrily, claiming he was pulling the PLF’s strings.

Anne Holtzman and Claire Becker issuing a joint video from somewhere in Europe, saying in the strongest terms that John Stockton ordered the deaths of their husbands, that he was behind the assassination attempt on himself in DC, that it was all a sham, that he killed seventy men and women just to take the lead in the race.

Speeches on the House and Senate floor from the opposition, calling angrily for an Independent Prosecutor to investigate Barnes’s final confession, the Holtzman video, the leaked memos.

Mothers protesting outside of ERD facilities around the country, waving signs, claiming children were being held prisoner inside, being experimented on in attempts to “cure” them of Nexus against their will.

State houses advancing bills to cut off power and water to any ERD facility suspected of housing children inside.

Hundreds of thousands massing for another march on DC during the inauguration on Monday.

The inauguration they’d decided to move
indoors
into the Capitol Building, out of plain fear of civil disturbance.

It was a hell of a time to be Press Secretary.

Dammit, Chase thought. It’s still heading to shit.

Those few days in December had been good. The Supreme Court ruling had given Stockton legitimacy. The violence of the protesters had torn down theirs.

But when that spasm passed… the core issues remained.

America still believed the lies.

We have the proof, Chase thought. We know Barnes was coerced. We know the Chinese hacked his defenses.

Damn it all to hell, Chase thought. We’ve got to discredit these lies.

H
e waited
until the day was over, until well past 7pm.

Only then, as his car drove him home, did he reach into his glove box, and pull out a fresh phone, bought with cash, never before used.

He logged the phone on to an anonymizing cloud, let it route its signals through layers of obfuscating cryptography, anonymizing its trail.

Then he punched in a number from memory.

For Brad Mitchell, American News Network Special Correspondent, Washington DC.

C
HINA BEHIND DEATH
OF WHITE HOUSE ACCUSER, SOURCES SAY

Friday 6.03am, Washington DC

American News Network

T
he home security
of Maximilian Barnes, the White House aide who accused President John Stockton of creating and directing the PLF terrorist organization, was penetrated by a Chinese cyber-attack in the hours before his death, say highly-placed sources.

Defense and intelligence officials believe Barnes, the Acting Director of the ERD branch of Homeland Security, was coerced by Chinese government operatives into making false accusations. The attack was kept secret until now, they say, because American cyber-defense officials wanted to hide their ability to detect such attacks from their Chinese opponents.

The attack may help explain US troop movements and a rise in tensions with China that began shortly…

“
G
oddammit
,” Stockton said. “Find out who leaked this!”

General Gordon Reid nodded. “We will, Mr President.”

T
he woman
who called herself Kate finished her prep work for the day. The flurry of electronic messages and electronic transfers and data wipes that would initiate at her command was ready. She closed up her terminal, put it away in her go-bag with the guns and the false passports and matching disguises and everything else.

Then the story played on the wall screen.

What?

China?

She stopped, stared at it, played the story again.

Breece had killed Barnes, with the help of his mysterious hacker.

Could his hacker be a Chinese government agent? A whole intelligence agency? It would explain the incredible capabilities.

Then she thought about what was going on in China, about the chemreactor hacks, about the explosion of Nexus, about how Breece was using it to spread chaos here, about the huge protests there, also apparently sodden with Nexus.

No. Kate shook her head. Whoever was helping Breece wasn’t on the side of the Chinese government.

The story was wrong. And if the American government believed it…

Kate frowned, and thought back to a message she’d ignored.

A message she’d assumed was a trap.

What if it wasn’t?

Kate pulled out her terminal and started searching for that message, and that address. Just in case.

Sometimes there was an advantage to keeping a line of communication open with one’s enemies.

B
reece stared
at the anonymous message on his screen. It had arrived just this morning.

I know your plans for Monday. Do not attack your allies. Do not repeat Decision Day. Everyone else is fair game. This is your last warning.

He grimaced at it. Kate. Fucking Kate.

God that still hurt.

“Everything OK?” the Nigerian asked.

“Just fine,” Breece said.

DELETE

S
aturday 2041.01.19

In the window sill of a third floor office on the former DRDO campus outside of Bangalore, a cheap, tiny camera sits, secreted in a plant, staring endlessly at a building. It watches as people come. It watches as people go. It tags them, records the times of their ingress and egress, their faces and gaits, the combinations they travel in, the urgencies with which they move on each visit.

For days it watches. The large majority of visitors to the building are the same, day in, day out. Most of those have faces that, even at this range, it can match against the database it has been loaded with.

Nothing rises to the level of noteworthiness that would warrant a realtime alert to its master.

Then, on the thirteenth day of its surveillance, something noteworthy does happen. A first-time visitor arrives, in the early evening, in the company of Varun Verma, a Priority 1 Monitoring Target, and two other men. Under the glow of the outdoor LEDs, the man’s face is clearly recognizable.

General Rajan Singh.

The camera’s crude decision-making software runs through its models. Excitation ramps up. It fires up additional image analysis coprocessing, despite the drain on batteries that have not been charged in a day, may not be charged again until Monday. Its alerting module reaches eighty-seven percent of the threshold needed to send a message to its upstream human.

No. Not quite. But something interesting may be happening. It will be vigilant. It will see if more transpires.

“She’s insisting that there’s a huge danger,” Varun summarized for General Singh. “Billions of deaths. She’s been eerily right on all of her other predictions.”

They were in the control room of India’s first quantum cluster. Varun; General Singh with his broad frame and his thick, black Bollywood mustache; and Singh’s two armed bodyguards.

The soldiers made Varun nervous.

“But she won’t say what’s driving this danger?” Singh asked. “What will cause this nuclear exchange?”

Varun shook his head. “No. Only that she can stop it. That with just a few minutes of access to the net, she can neutralize the threat. And that we can close the firewall after that.”

General Singh looked dubious.

“Do you believe her?”

Varun paused. He’d asked himself that every day. “I don’t know what to believe, General.”

“Is she sane?” Singh asked.

Varun pursed his lips. “Her neural patterns suggest so… but,” he shrugged. “We can’t really be sure.”

Singh didn’t seem to like that answer.

S
aturday 2041.01.19

“We’re going dancing,” Feng announced.

Kade looked up from his terminal. “I really can’t, Feng.”

“All you do is work!” Feng said. “Work, work, work! Time to have a
good
time!” He grinned widely. “Remember that place in Saigon? Club Heaven? Club Hell? A good time!”

Kade half frowned, horrified yet amused at how Feng’s mind worked. “Where you got run over by a truck? Where a small army tried to kidnap us? Where a
building
fell on you?”

Feng waved that away. “Building fell on me later.
Totally different building
. It was a cool club. I hear they got good ones downtown too, places people using Nexus know. We go check ’em out tonight. You need fun!
I
need fun.” He grinned and winked at Kade. “You can call it research if you want.”

Kade laughed, despite himself. He looked at the terminal. He was really just checking and rechecking the same code now.

“The US inauguration is on Monday,” he told Feng.

Feng nodded. “End of the world,” he said. “You told me. Better party one last time. Confucius says, night spent sweating with good music, sexy women, good for the fighting spirit.”

Kade laughed again. He couldn’t argue with that logic. He met Feng’s eyes. He could feel something else behind his friend’s cheerful exterior. What was going on in China had been eating away at Feng all week, worrying him. Feng needed this too.

“OK,” Kade said. “Just for a couple hours.”

G
eneral Singh didn’t look
happy.

“What could she do in a few minutes of access to the net? If she were insane? Or hostile?”

Varun took a deep breath. “A tremendous amount, sir. Just tremendous.”

Singh’s frown deepened. “Can we force the truth out of her?”

Varun sighed. “General,” he said. “Before we take that step, we do have a resource here, who knew her, who may be able to help us assess her state of mind.”

Singh’s eyes narrowed. “Get him.”

K
ade and Feng
were on their way out of the research building when a scientist Kade vaguely recognized nearly ran into them.

“Dr Lane!” the man yelled.

Kade grinned. “It’s not ‘Doctor’. Just Kade.” He tried to remember this guy’s name. Gaureen? Grameen? He was a postdoc. On Varun Verma’s team.

The team whose work he still didn’t really understand.

“You have to come with me, Dr Kade!” The man looked frantic, eyes wide open. Kade could feel hurry and anxiety coming off his mind. The postdoc put two hands around Kade’s wrist – his good one – and tugged, pulling Kade off balance.

“Hey now!” Feng put his own hand over the postdoc’s two, stabilized Kade. “Dr Kade and I have some very important research to do tonight! You can find him on Monday.”

Kade laughed, and tried to smile reassuringly. “What do you need, exactly? Can it wait?”

The postdoc looked back and forth between Kade and Feng, clearly unsure how to handle the situation. “General Singh said to get you, sir.”

Kade raised an eyebrow at that. He didn’t know Singh was even here.

“And Professor Verma,” the postdoc went on. “It’s about
her
.” His eyes lingered on Feng.

Kade cocked his head. “Her? You mean Sam?”

The postdoc stared at him.

“Lakshmi?” Kade asked. “Sarai?”

The postdoc slowly looked at Feng again. “Her,” the man said.

Kade felt the thought dawn on Feng first, then spread into his own mind.

“Su-Yong?” Feng asked, hope in his voice.

The postdoc said nothing. Then he nodded a tiny bit.

All thought of partying left Kade’s mind.

“We’re coming,” he told the postdoc.

“I was only instructed to bring you!” the man protested.

Feng shook his head. “No.”

“It’s both of us or nothing,” Kade said. “And you
really
want to say both of us.”

T
he camera
in the plant on the windowsill in the office watches as three more individuals enter the building it has been observing.

One of these it has seen entering and exiting this building many times. His name is Guarav Aurora, and while the late hour of his coming and going is unusual, it does not raise an alarm.

The presence of the
other
two individuals, however, is quite anomalous.

The camera knows their faces from the human who programmed it.

Kaden Lane.

Confucian Fist Feng.

Already in a hypervigilant state, this new stimulus pushes its models over the alert threshold with ease. Something important is happening. The human must be informed.

S
aturday 2041.01.19

“You have her as a slave!” Kade yelled, less than an hour later.

He could feel the rage inside of Feng, leaking across their link. In Feng’s thoughts the control room was a maze of firing angles, a blurred possibility space of blows and strikes, lunges for weapons and cover, red lines of projectiles hurtling through the air.

And the two security officers with General Singh were already dead.

“We had a fucking deal!” Kade went on, shooting his gaze back and forth between Singh and Varun Verma. “
I
had a deal with the
Prime Minister
. What part of the UN speech didn’t you hear?”

General Singh was glowering, his face turning red behind his Indian brown. His two men had their hands on the butts of the pistols in their holsters.

They didn’t have any idea how useless those weapons were at this range, against Feng.

Or maybe they did.

Singh opened his mouth, spoke in a voice of command, hard and firm. “This is
not
a person,” he said. “This is a
machine.
”

Calm down, some part of Kade seemed to say.

Sam’s face loomed in his mind. Her words echoed.
You’re just a tool to them. The pawn seldom knows.

The children’s pronouncement.
The Indians are lying to you.

Rage carried him.

“That,” he said, his finger pointed beyond the walls of the control room, at the quantum cluster itself. “Is as much a person as you are!” He brought the finger back to point at General Singh. In Feng’s thoughts he saw the soldiers shift, readying to shoot. “It doesn’t matter what
hardware
her mind runs on. It matters that she
has
a mind.”

Varun Verma burst into speech, his mind exuding anxiety. “She’s been insane!” Verma said. “She’s not a prisoner! She’s a patient! Until she’s stabilized!”

“How long have you had her?” Kade demanded.

Verma swallowed. “Ten weeks,” he said quietly.

“Ten weeks in
complete isolation
?” Kade yelled.

“We’ve tried to talk to her!” Verma said.

“Jesus,” Kade said. “And is she sane now?”

“That is why you are here!” General Singh said. “To help us assess that!”

Kade took a deep breath. He’d lost his cool.

But, Jesus, he thought. They’d fucking lied to him.

“Let me talk to her,” he said.

“After the clone leaves,” Singh said, gesturing with his chin towards Feng.

Kade felt Feng’s temperature rise at that, felt death inch a bit closer to Singh and his soldiers.

“We can’t have him here,” Singh said. “She could order him to attack us.”

Feng spoke slowly, so slowly, a smile spreading across his face.

“I don’t need an order to k–”

“Feng!” Kade interrupted with alarm.

Feng stopped mid-word. In his thoughts Kade saw a whirlwind of death in the midst of red firing lines and blurred phantom limbs, a wish for more of these men to break with his fists and feet.

Kade took another deep breath.

“No one’s leaving,” he said. “Feng knows Su-Yong Shu a lot better than I do. Better than
anyone
does.”

Anyone except Ling, Kade thought.

Ling. Something tugged at his mind about Ling.

He pushed it aside.

“Put Su-Yong on audio,” he said. “You have speech synth for her, right? And audio pickups?”

Varun Verma nodded and looked at Singh.

“You wanted my help,” Kade said. “Well there it is. Do it!”

S
am looked
up from the assessment she was reading in bed:
Pro and Anti-Technology Sentiment in Rural Villages: Strategies for Successful Mediation
. It was something people’s lives depended on, and that the authors seemed to do their damndest to make absolutely mind-numbingly unreadable.

Something was beeping at her.

The phone. The new phone.

She reached over, fished it out of her bag.

Then frowned at what it was telling her.

Kade? Feng?

She scrolled back farther, at the log, at what it displayed.

Singh? Verma?

She checked the time. It was past 11pm. General Singh and Varun Verma had been inside the building, on a Saturday night, for hours.

And the way Kade and Feng had arrived. She pulled up video, played it back.

They’d sent someone looking for them. One of Verma’s postdocs. They’d
summoned
Kade and Feng.

This didn’t look planned. Something was going on there. Right now.

What the hell?

What went on in that building that they needed so much power? That they’d needed deep bore diggers? That they’d erased all the real records of it?

That they needed to summon Kade and Feng there in the middle of the night?

Was that an emergency?

Was it a threat to the children in her care?

Sam got up, pulled on trousers and a shirt, shoved her feet into boots, and went to the window. From here, in front of the old Victorian manor house they were lodged in, with the children three and four to a bedroom, she could see the small guard house, see the guards in there, armed, vigilant. She could see their armored four wheel drive vehicle beside it.

“Camera,” she said into the phone. “Alert me to any changes on the Advanced Computational Sciences Building. Any at all.”

Then she turned, looked at the desk in her small bedroom. She walked over to it, pressed her thumb to the lock on the bottom drawer until it released, and pulled out the side-arm Division Six had issued her.

“
Y
ou wanted my help
,” Kade said. “Well there it is. Do it!”

Singh nodded.

Varun Verma struck keys, then nodded at Kade. A red indicator light came on.

“Su-Yong?” Kade said aloud.

“Kade?” the voice was Su-Yong’s. It sounded light, happy, Su-Yong talking about her favorite dishes at dinner on that rooftop in Bangkok. “You’re here, Kade? In India?”

“Su-Yong,” Feng said, his voice low, his eyes still moving back and forth across the general, the soldiers, Varun Verma. “How’s the weather in there?”

“Feng!” Su-Yong Shu sounded even more delighted. “How wonderful! Oh, the weather’s fine. They’ve treated me well. But I’m isolated.” Her voice turned darker. “And the world is in danger. Extreme danger. Billions of deaths danger. I can stop it. I just need a few minutes of unfettered access to the net. Nothing more.”

Kade felt dread build up inside him. Pieces of a puzzle started to move together in some ponderous way, their shape not yet clear, but their collision inevitable.

“What kind of danger?” Feng asked sharply. “Why won’t they give you access?”

Varun Verma interjected. “That’s what I was going to tell you before you started yelling! She’s been talking about the protests, the chemreactor hacks, the Chinese censor systems failing. Things she couldn’t know about. And she’s been saying nuclear war comes next.”

The puzzle pieces slammed together in Kade’s mind, like tons of granite, like mountains.

“It’s you,” he said. “Oh my god. You’re doing this.”

Next to him, he felt General Singh tense. Through Feng’s eyes he saw a hand-signal pass from the general to Singh’s soldiers.

“No, Kade,” Shu said, her voice somber now. “It’s not me.”

“It’s a copy of you then,” Kade said. “Another instance, running somewhere else.”

“It’s not that either,” she said, her voice turning darker yet. “It’s something I created in my insanity, in my half year of isolation, in my torture. Something I set loose. It’s software. But it’s broken. It’s frozen in the state of madness that consumed me when I created it. It
thinks
that it’s me. But it can’t heal. It can’t move back to sanity. It’s a monster. And I have to stop it.”

Ling,
Feng sent to Kade.
It’s in Ling. That’s why she’s gone silent.

Oh god, Kade thought.

Then darkness fell, and the explosions started.