Authors: Ramez Naam
But were the code’s authors running Nexus themselves? And even if they were, could he find them and stop them before they struck again?
24
ANGRY DADDY
Sunday October 21st
The policemen came to Ling’s door an hour after the lights went out. She could feel them as they climbed up the forty stories from the ground floor to hers. In the near data-vacuum of the crippled city, their electromagnetic presence shone like a beacon. She peered out of their lapel cameras as they climbed the red-lit emergency stairwell. She followed their data links back over the airwaves to the precinct house, and from there to Shanghai police headquarters.
The city was a mess. She could see it in their information systems. Fires. Floods. Car accidents. Looting. Deaths. Police stations and emergency services were limping along on emergency power.
Ling tapped into their data, watched humans drowning in subway tunnels, watched a recording of security forces around a store, firing their automatic weapons into a desperate mob, watched as the sopping wet mass of humans clawed their way forward in a human wave, the front of it dying, until they crested over the soldiers, crashed down on them, and the recording ceased.
Shanghai was in pain. Good. These humans had trapped her mommy. They deserved worse.
Already the city was trying to knit itself back together. She saw reports on replacing key transformers, on redirecting the rain water that was flooding the streets, on getting a handful of spy-eyes back into the air. Ten thousand little human ants were out working to repair the damage she’d done. The city was a hive, a colony-organism.
What would happen if she hit it again, harder? Could she kill this city? Could she send the little humans scurrying away in fear? It was so tempting to try, to rip a wing off of this insect pinned down and splayed out in front of her, and see what happened.
But she didn’t.
Patience
, her mother had told her,
is a posthuman virtue
. And the humans were looking for her. They had their hackers out, their counter-intrusion packages, their tame security AIs with their boring rigid minds, hunting for the source of the attack. Striking the city once was one thing. Striking a second time, while they were looking… that would be foolish, impatient, something an angry little girl would do.
And Ling couldn’t afford to be a little girl any more.
She waited for the policemen. And when they came, sweating and panting from the stairs, she was polite and sweet and told them she’d offer them tea but that the stove wasn’t working.
They laughed and told her she was the nicest little girl ever and that they were here to protect her.
She smiled and thanked the soft pathetic creatures. Daddy’s driver Bai was worth a hundred of them. Feng was worth three hundred. Stupid humans.
Who will protect you, she wondered, when my mother returns?
Later, as she lay in her bed with the sheets pulled up to her chin, she wondered what had happened to her father? Had she trapped him there with her mommy? Was there any food? Any water? Enough air?
Ling frowned. Her father was nothing like her mommy. He was just a human. Even so, she hoped she hadn’t killed him. She loved her father, after all. As much as one
could
love a human.
She woke in the middle of the night. 3.30am. A modicum of power had been restored this wealthy, exclusive block. A small trickle of data flowed through Ling once more. There was an intruder in her home network. She peered at it. A hunter-tracker program. It sniffed around, looking for any trace of the attacker who’d struck Shanghai. She made her net presence small, cloaked herself from the vicious software agent, and it passed her by.
The still fragile net brought her data, carefully stolen from police and emergency services systems. Most of Shanghai was still dark. Security forces surrounded this little island of light, this small enclave where the wealthiest executives and politicians lived. Outside that ring, it was chaos.
And one more thing. Her daddy was alive! And a peek at his calendar showed that he’d be home in just a few hours. Ling smiled, relieved. Even if he was only human, he was still her daddy.
Chen slept for a few hours, then an executive military jet whisked him away to Shanghai.
His car was there, wet on the gray tarmac of the airstrip, and a new driver, who introduced himself as Yingjie. A Marine. Not a clone.
Where do his loyalties lie? Chen wondered. Not with me
.
Yingjie drove him home. Two military jeeps came with them, one ahead, the other behind. Soldiers in armor manned heavy machine guns atop the vehicles. Heavy rain sleeted the windshield as they drove.
The streets were horrendous, full of unmoving cars, with filthy sewage-soaked water half a meter deep. Through the armored window of his car Chen saw men and women lurking in doorways, sullen, angry-looking. They gave his vehicle and their military escort a wide berth.
Ahead he could see a handful of lit buildings in Lujiazui, the financial district in the very tip of Pudong, the expensive and exclusive heart of Shanghai. His tower was among them, part of the famous Shanghai skyline now returned to illumination. Naturally. The elites of Shanghai would be the first to see services restored, as was right and proper.
“Trouble ahead,” Yingjie said, one finger to his earpiece. “A mob, trying to get into Lujiazui.”
A mob? Trying to reach his home?
The closer they came, the more signs Chen saw. As they penetrated into the downtown area, as the buildings loomed above them, as the lights grew ever closer, the number of the people on the streets increased. More and more of them each block, wet, hungry, desperate people. Angry people. Fires burning in trash cans. Someone threw a bottle and Chen flinched as it broke against his window.
The smattering of people became a milling, then a dense throng, all trying to get in to where the lights were, where the power was back, where they could find warmth and shelter. The jeep ahead shone its spotlight into the crowd. An amplified voice ordered them to make way. Bedraggled men reached out, put their wet filthy hands on the jeep. A thud sounded next to Chen, and he turned to see a face pressed against the glass of his window, a man, wild eyed, one tooth missing, yelling angrily. Fists rained down on the car. Chen shrank away in fear, then turned in time to see a metal pipe crash into the window on the other side. It bounced off the hardened glass, then came back, again, and again.
He could hear the loudspeaker proclaiming again that the crowd must disperse. He felt his own vehicle rocking now, as the mob grabbed hold of it. He looked towards his marine driver. Their eyes met in the mirror and Chen saw fear. He felt the vehicle rock harder, the wheels on the left side coming up off the street, and he frantically grasped for something to hold onto.
ZZZZZZZZZZT!
An awful sound at insane volume filled his ears, his teeth, his bones, his bowels. A sonic weapon. An anti-crowd device.
ZZZZZZZZZZT!
It came again and Chen clenched around an ache that it brought to his intestines. The wheels of the car slammed back down onto the ground with a jerk. Chen looked out the window in time to see a gloved armored hand grab the man with the missing tooth by the hair, slam his face against the window, crunching the man’s nose, then toss him aside, a smear of blood marking the place he’d struck.
Then the car was jerking forward, the filthy crowd fleeing around them. Ahead a military barricade loomed topped by soldiers with vicious-looking weapons all aimed at the mob, and then Chen saw a gate, and a moment later they were through it, and he breathed a sigh of relief as they rolled into the empty, well-lit streets between the soaring, well-lit skyscrapers of Lujiazui.
Chen was in the elevator, minutes later, recovered now from the assault of the sonic weapon that had dispersed the crowd. He had just punched in the code for his apartment when Ling’s tutor called.
The woman was in hysterics, babbling and tripping over herself, making no sense at first. Hiding in this building, she said. Nowhere else to go. Then more nonsense, about Ling, about the outage, about Shanghai. Babbling. Nonsense.
Then it clicked. Suddenly what the tutor was saying made perfect sense. And Chen understood exactly what had happened last night, and who had been behind it.
The elevator doors opened onto his magnificent flat, and there, before him, was his abomination of a daughter.
Ling busied herself in the morning, making tea and dialing up sandwiches from the kitchen for the bored police officers, ensuring that the apartment was tidy as Father liked it.
She felt him when he entered the elevator, and she told the kitchen to put water on, and make a mug of his favorite tea. She lifted the heavy mug and stood across the room from the entranceway door, by the windows so he’d see her. One of the police officers commented that she was very mature for her age, and she just smiled at him, her sharp teeth bared, and thought of how insignificant he was.
Then the door opened, and her father was there.
“Daddy!” she yelled excitedly. She held up the heavy mug of tea to him. Then her father strode across the room, and the back of his hand swung around and struck her in the face, knocking her off her feet.
“You monster!” he yelled.
Ling cried out as he struck her but it was too late. The blow knocked her head into the hard glass of the window behind her. She bounced off it and fell to the floor on her side. The scalding hot tea splashed all over her, burning her face and her arms. The mug fell from her hands and crashed to the marble floor, shattering into a thousand pieces. The world swam around her, a haze of pain. Tears came to her eyes. Despite herself, she began to sob.
The police officers were on their feet, their mouths open in shock. One made a noise of surprise. Chen turned, and seemed to notice them for the first time. The three men stared at each other. Chen’s chest rose and fell with his anger.
Ling crawled, feebly, towards her mother’s room, her sobs the only sound in the apartment.
Finally, Chen spoke.
“You saw nothing. Now go.”
The police officers bowed and made their way out.
Ling kept crawling. She was almost there. Almost to Mommy’s room. Where she’d be safe.
Her father was silent for a while, as she crawled across the floor. Then he spoke to her again. “If you ever do anything like that again, I will kill you. Do you understand?”
The words brought more tears, more racking sobs. Her head was swimming and she could barely see, but she was there. She was to the door. She reached out with her mind and it opened for her. The door that hadn’t opened since Mommy had died. The door that Father couldn’t open. It opened for
her.
“Ling!” His voice was raised, angry. “I will
abort
you as you should have been aborted eight years ago. Do you
understand
me?” He was nearly shouting. She grabbed hold of the door frame and pulled herself up, threw herself into the room.
“Ling!” he yelled. Her father came after her in three long strides and he was going to hit her again, but she reached out with her mind and slammed the security door first. Happiness jolted through her as she saw him forced to yank back his fingers rather than have them crushed.
Chen pounded on the door for a while, but it was no use. Let the little abomination rot in there.
He crossed the room of his magnificent flat, the flat that fame and wealth and success had brought him, and stared out at the chaos of Shanghai, the dark wreckage of the shattered city.
Some part of him whispered of guilt and remorse. Remorse that he’d struck his eight year-old daughter, that he’d threatened her life. Guilt that he planned to torture the ghost of his dead wife to extract more discoveries that he could pass off as his own.
No
,
he told himself. I have no wife. I have no daughter. My wife died ten years ago. And that thing I’ve called a daughter is no child of mine. It’s a construct. A golem. It’s not even human.
25
AMBUSH
Wednesday October 24th
Breece almost died near Austin.
The cemetery was in the hills to the west of the city. He arrived in the afternoon, parked the Lexus, shut off his phones and slate to keep distractions at bay, and hiked up the hill to his parents’ graves.
He could see his dad smiling, hear his mom laughing, their faces full of joy. They’d be in their early sixties now, if they’d lived. Still sharp. Still helping people. Still young enough to have a chance at immortality, to have a hope that uploading or the reversal of biological aging would come along in time. They might have lived to become posthuman. They might have lived forever.
But they hadn’t.
Ten years ago now. Ten years since the war had begun.
He still remembered waking to the news that morning, waking to the videos of people vomiting blood, of bodies piled in the streets of Laramie, Wyoming, of National Guard vehicles surrounding the city, of hazmat-suited early responders trying to make sense of it all. Marburg Red. The virus had killed thirty thousand, wiped out the town, and almost killed millions more.
Then the Aryan Rising clones had been found. The new master race. The sociopathic blond neo-Nazi children. The genetically sculpted children who’d butchered the scientists who’d created them. Who’d released Marburg Red prematurely, eager to see it wipe out the genetically inferior races that populated the planet.
Ten years since the backlash. Since Josiah Shepherd had spoken out, his face, his words broadcast endlessly, burned into Breece’s memories. “Mad scientists warping God’s creation, doing the devil’s work, bringing to life the devil’s children.” Spittle had flown from the televangelist’s lips. “The Lord will surely reward any who send them to hell where they belong.”
Ten years since the firebomb had ripped through his parents’ fertility clinic. Since they’d been murdered for the crime of reversing genetic diseases, of boosting a few points of IQ, of entirely benign actions that had nothing to do with the Aryan Rising.