by Ramez Naam
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.
Varun 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.
Su-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.
85
Plan B
Monday 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 3rd, 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.
86
Controlled Release
Wednesday 2041.01.16
Greg Chase leaned back in his office 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.
He 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.
87
BREAKING
CHINA BEHIND DEATH OF WHITE HOUSE ACCUSER, SOURCES SAY
Friday 6.03am, Washington DC
American News Network
The 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…
“Goddammit,” Stockton said. “Find out who leaked this!”
General Gordon Reid nodded. “We will, Mr President.”
The 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.
Breece 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
88
Risk Management
Saturday 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 13th 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 87% 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. “Billi
ons 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.
89
Totally Different Building
Saturday 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!”
