Nexus 02 - Crux (16 page)

“Like hell I can’t,” the bounty hunter said.

His gun boomed and the bullet burst open the boy’s skull and exploded Kade’s world. The shock of it sent Kade’s mind reeling, then rippled through all the other monks. Dimly through the chaos he felt some of them reflexively bring their hands up, their minds recoiling. One leaned over to vomit, and the pain and fear and chaos and loss threatened to overwhelm them all. These weren’t Ananda’s long trained monks. These were just boys!

The second shot took another monk in the gut. Kade felt the bullet burst his own midsection open and the pain tore through the cobwebs in his mind.

The monks almost broke. Instead he felt their minds harden, felt them come together. Determined monks moved to drag away their fallen comrades and the collective mass pressed in on the bounty hunters. Three dozen monks. Four dozen monks.

Then he heard someone screaming in Vietnamese and he saw through a dozen eyes as the abbot rushed into the circle. The words were foreign but the meaning came across.

What are you doing! You said no monks would be hurt!

A bounty hunter turned and shot him in the belly. Thich Quang An crumpled forward in pain.

The assembled monks moved as one, now, gelling into a single organism with a single intent, to pull Kade away from these men. The assemblage pushed forward with a hundred limbs and one mind and Kade could see what was about to happen and it wouldn’t, it couldn’t. No more of these men would die for him.

He rallied himself, focused, multicast his thoughts to the monks around him, opened up their minds with the backdoor…

…and the conjoined will of the monks pressed down on his, blocking him with iron force from sending the passcode, from forcing them to abandon him.

A bullet took a monk in the arm, spinning him around. Another punched through a young monk’s chest. The pain echoed through Kade.

Then Feng was among them, his mind cool and hard. Time slowed for Kade as Feng’s combat trance touched his own mind, stretching out every instant into a long, deadly span.

The augmented bounty hunters moved like molasses, lumbering, overly muscled brutes turning in slow motion. The flight paths of unfired bullets shone in Feng’s thoughts, brilliant lines of red light extending from the muzzles of their guns. The bounty hunters’ bodies cast echoes of potential blows and kicks that Feng foresaw.

Feng moved like a dancer, calm and graceful. He leapt over the plane of fire of a swinging pistol, rolled under another as he converged on the first bounty hunter. His mind was utterly absorbed. This was
samadhi
. This was meditation. Guns exploded and the bullets were living things in Feng’s mental map, ripping out of the muzzles, shockwaves rippling visibly through the air, flinging themselves at the spots Feng had occupied fractions of a second ago.

Then Feng reached the first bounty hunter, and the man went down with his neck snapped.

A stray bullet punched into a monk’s thigh then, and the echoing pain of it snapped Kade out of the trance of Feng’s mind, back into real time. And just like that, the bounty hunters were dead, all of them, the last bodies toppling to the courtyard at Feng’s feet as Kade watched through others’ eyes. Kade lay on the ground where they’d dropped him, as Feng pulled the tape off of him, cut through the bonds on his limbs.

Kade pushed himself to his feet with his good hand, his body shaking.

There were bodies around him. A monk was whimpering. He could feel pain radiating from half-a-dozen minds. At least three were dead. Another was dying even now, the boy’s mind falling apart into a thousand little pieces and then into nothing at all. Someone sobbed.

The pain and loss hit Kade full force. His sight dimmed. His legs felt weak, and he fell back to one knee.

“No safe place for you,” said the abbot, and coughed. Kade turned to look. The man had blood across his robes, blood coming out of his month. Pain and disgust wafted off of him. “I’m not the only one,” the man said weakly. “You… not a Buddha. An abomination.
Maya
. Illusion.”

Feng stepped towards the man and lifted one gun with a scowl, anger radiating from his mind.

“No!” Kade yelled, his still-healing hand outstretched.

“What?” Feng turned, confused.

“Let him go, Feng.”

“He was gonna give you to Americans. Almost got you killed! Killed all these!” Feng gestured around himself at the dead and dying monks.

“We’re better than that,” Kade said.

Feng took a deep breath, exhaled with a shake of his head, and lowered the gun to his side.

Monks moaned around them, yelled to each other for help, stared at the carnage in their tranquil home in horror.

Kade closed his eyes wearily, reached out to the abbot’s mind, used his back doors, opened the man to him. And saw.

“Not safe,” the old man coughed. “Not safe anywhere.” More blood welled out of his mouth. “Many of us… Better… you die. Abomination.”

Then Thich Quang An, abbot of Ayun Pa, was gone.

Kade stared around himself at the horror. The ERD again. Their dollars. Their stupid bounty on his head. That had caused this.

Feng put a hand on his shoulder. “We gotta go,” he said. “Cops soon. Can’t be here.”

Kade rose to his feet, still dizzy. Go. Yes. They had to go. Somewhere. Anywhere.

14

GOOD NIGHT, SHANGHAI

Friday October 19th

Ling Shu stared out the rain-streaked window of the high-rise apartment at the vast spectacle of Shanghai. Glowing advertisements rippled across the wet skyscrapers opposite her. Glimmering aurorae of blue and white light shrouded inducements for clothes, for vacations, for cars, for homes. The twenty-story-tall inhumanly alluring face of Zhi Li smiled at Ling, winked at her. It was the image of China’s most famous actress, the supranormal stimulus of her eyes so big and almond-shaped, her skin so porcelain white, her lips so full and red. The image smiled again, winked for only Ling to see, then held up a bottle of some sports drinks her masters wished her to sell.

Do you think you’re posthuman? Ling asked the giant screen. Do you think that a billion people knowing your face makes you special?

It doesn’t.

A surveillance drone cruised by the window, one of Shanghai’s tens of thousands of sky-eyes, moving slowly on its four all-weather rotors, spinning to point its proboscis-like camera at Ling through the rain. Its glowing collision-avoidance light cast red reflections on the rain-slicked glass.

Ling stared back at the thing through the window and the downpour, reaching out, feeling its primitive mind, the stream of data in and out of it. She could see herself in its data stream. She could twist that if she wanted, lie to its masters, or send it instructions of her own, take control of it.

She did none of these things.

The sky-eye stared at her, then rotated its quad-copter frame, canted to one side, and moved on to inspect something else in the great city.

Hundreds of meters below her, Ling could see more sky-eyes, dozens of them peering into windows and watching the city at ground level. Cars streamed below them in a river of metal and carbon-fiber on the wet streets. Motorcycles and scooters zipped between cars. Horns blared. Pedestrians with umbrellas darted across walkways. The rain fell in hard sheets on all of them. It sounded a ragged drumbeat against the window where she stood.

Badadadadadadadum. Badadadadadadadum.

The heavy cloud and pouring rain blotted out the sun, but the city was alive with artificial light from the giant advertisements, from the windows of buildings, from the red glow of brake lights, from the glowing red lights of the surveillance drones, circling, always circling, over the heads of Shanghai’s citizens. The light reflected off the heavy clouds above, turned the whole sky to a multicolored glow, twenty-four hours a day.

This city was alive. It was a living thing. The streets were its arteries. The cars and trucks and scooters and pedestrians its blood.

Ling closed her eyes and she could feel the nerve-signals of the living city, the vast pulsing web of data that interwove everything around her. She could lose herself in the web that linked people and cars and buildings. She could feel the far-off power stations and the local substations, the water pumps and sewage lines, the spy eyes and traffic routing systems and all the rest.

The city soothed her. She could sink into that hubbub of data, and for a while her own fears and longing and sadness would fade, and she would stop thinking and just feel the sizzling, crackling thoughts of the city around her instead.

It helped her. It helped her not think about Mother.

But today was different. Because today was the day she’d set Mother free. Today was the day she’d touch her mommy’s mind again. Her father was going to visit the Quantum Cluster today. Going to visit her mother.

And part of Ling would be there with him.

Chen Pang lifted his eyes from his slate as the car pulled up to the chrome and glass building. He slid the device away into his briefcase as his driver Bai opened the armored door of the vehicle. Chen stepped out under the umbrella the clone held aloft for him. The Confucian Fist closed the car door and walked him towards the building. The mirrored glass walls reflected the two of them back to Chen’s eyes. He: a late forties man in suit and overcoat, hair graying at the temples, his face stern – his body a bit thicker in the midsection than in his youth. His bodyguard: young, fit, tall for a Chinese man, in black chauffeur’s garb, face expressionless, umbrella held aloft to shield Chen from the driving rain, the man’s eyes scanning left and right for any threat.

The glass doors parted for him and he paused.

“Wait with the car. I’ll be an hour, perhaps two.” Then he strode on as his driver bowed to his retreating back.

Chen passed through the metal detectors and T-rays, waved his ID, and placed his eye before the retinal scanner. The elevator door opened, and he stepped in. Five floors down, below the main building, he stepped out, and into the Secure Computing Center.

The armed guard nodded at him. Chen ignored the man, and made his way across the facility to the entrance to the PICC – the Physically Isolated Computing Center.

Ling closed her eyes and followed her father’s slate and phone as they made their way down into the earth, deep below the official buildings of Jiao Tong. The devices accessed the local network inside the Secure Computing Center and formed a tunnel back to her. She reached her mind through that tunnel now, gently stroked the flow of data inside the facility, parsing, absorbing, searching. Her mother was here, trapped, cut off from the outside world, cut off from Ling. She would find her.

Chen crossed the facility. Men and women stopped work and bowed their heads respectfully as he passed. He was Chen Pang, after all, the architect of China’s explosive surge in quantum computing. He was a figure of awe to them. If only they knew.

Li-hua saw him coming. His assistant rose to her feet – a homely woman, too short, too pudgy. She bowed her head to him. “Honored Professor,” she said, “the tests you requested…”

Chen waved her away, kept walking. Yes, yes, she’d done the tests. But he needed to see them again.

He kept walking, past all the bowing underlings. The resentment rose in him again. The envy. That his greatest accomplishment was to serve as the secret scribe for his wife. That
she
was the true discoverer of so much.

Still, it had its rewards.

“Ling, your break time is over. Time for your next lesson.”

Ling clenched her small fists.

“Ling.” Her tutor’s voice rose slightly.

Ling forced herself to smile, forced herself to turn back to the human, the way her mother had taught her, forced herself to say the insipid words.

“May I please have a few minutes more, teacher? I like to watch the rain.”

“Well.” The tutor sounded surprised. “Since you asked so politely, you may.”

Chen surrendered his electronics at the next checkpoint. Then the security man slowly and thoroughly wanded him, looking not for weapons, but for any device that could possibly carry data in or out of the PICC.

The guard finally declared him clean, and Chen stepped forward and into the cavernous elevator. The doors closed behind him, and the elevator started its descent through one thousand meters of bedrock and towards the mad software entity that was all that remained of his dead wife.

Ling sifted through exabytes of data. Cryptographic libraries. High resolution satellite imagery. Whole brain scans. Genome sequences. None of it was her mother.

She looked for maps, physical maps, network maps. She found them. The network topology told her little. Nothing obviously fit the description of the quantum cluster her mother existed in. The physical blueprints of the building were no more helpful. Multiple data centers existed here, but their functions weren’t clear.

Ling kept searching. She would find her mother here.

The room-sized elevator took Chen down through the rock beneath Shanghai. A lit sign declared that the current PICC status was

ISOLATION IN EFFECT

All this was a precaution. Computer scientists, philosophers, futurists, writers of speculative fiction – they’d all written about the dangers of runaway superintelligence. If humanity ever created a being of radically increased mental capabilities, it placed itself at grave risk. That new being could be benevolent, of course. That would be the hope. Or it could be malicious, or simply indifferent to humans. It could seek to change the world in ways that it saw as improvements, but which were incompatible with the interests of its creators.

A superintelligent being might also be able to improve on itself, reaching into its own structure and finding ways to optimize them, to make itself smarter than its creators could have, with no obvious end in sight.

And for that reason, Su-Yong’s ability to edit herself was limited to superficial layers only.

Chen himself doubted the risk of runaway self-improvement. Intelligence showed diminishing returns. Just as a single human could not design a human-level intelligence from scratch, no superhuman creature could possibly design a creature of its own intelligence or greater. Oh, it might be able to make improvements on the methods used by its creators, and get some boost, but without collaborators, without access to new hardware, the improvements would level off.