Crux n-2

by Naam, Ramez

  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

  Br
eece 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.

  Ten years since fear had turned America into a police state, since the priests and the politicians had decided that they could control who you were, what you were, what genes you carried, what tech you put in your brain.

  Ten years since he’d become a freedom fighter. And now, finally, they were making headway.

  Breece crouched beside his parents’ graves, reached out his fingers to brush the cold stone.

  “I miss you,” he whispered.

  He rose to his feet hours later, as the sun dipped below the plains of central Texas. He dusted himself off and started down the hill, pulling out his phones and turning them on as he did so.

  His team phone buzzed angrily the instant he activated it. An urgent message, long delayed. Breece looked at the display. It was from Hiroshi.

  [Your up-phone is burned. DHS.]

  Breece stared at the phone numbly for a moment, then dropped to the ground behind a headstone.

  His up-phone. Fuck. The one that connected to Zarathustra. How’d they know that number? Only he, Zara, and Hiroshi knew. And Hiroshi only because he’d been employed by AmeriCom, had set up the hidden alert that would tell Breece when the Homeland Security backdoors were activated to tap into his data, his location.

  They must have taken Zara. Breece pulled out the up-phone. The thing was poison now, reporting his location to DHS. How long did he have until they arrived?

  He left the up-phone powered on, tossed it away from him, then reached into his pants pocket and pressed the hidden switch. His shirt, pants, and shoes shifted color to match the grass. From his other pocket he pulled out thin gloves and balaclava which did the same, then pulled them on. His clothing lacked the speed and resolution of true chameleonware. They wouldn’t turn him into a blur when he moved. They wouldn’t mimic a detailed pattern behind him. But if he lay still or moved slowly, they could blend him into the grass and the headstones and trap most of the IR signature of his body.

  He slowly belly-crawled away from the phone. At the end of the row was a small family crypt. He got there and lay still against it, his body hidden from the cemetery entrance, at least. He searched the sky. Were there invisible drones up there? Did they have a lock on him already? Had a cordon been pulled around him? His eyes saw nothing.

  Breece carefully peeked his head around the crypt. In the twilight he could still clearly make out the Lexus in the parking lot, maybe three hundred yards away. He could make a run for it, leave the phone in the grass, get in the vehicle and get out of here before DHS closed the noose.

  His other phone buzzed again. Hiroshi, calling in real time. Good friends, the Japanese. Loyal. Good transhumans, too. Always thinking ahead.

  “Breece here,” he replied.

  “Breece,” Hiroshi replied. “What’s your status?”

  “Nominal,” Breece answered. “No sign of DHS.”

  Then he saw the other car inbound. Black SUV. Tinted windows. No insignia of any sort. He couldn’t make out the plates from here. The SUV pulled into the parking lot slowly and came to a stop just by the entrance gate. The doors opened and three men in dark clothing stepped out. They wore light jackets that were totally unnecessary in the warm evening air. Perfect for concealing weapons.

  Breece’s own gun was carefully hidden inside the Lexus, a conscious choice that the risk posed by carrying the weapon was greater than the risk of being caught without it.

  “Scratch that,” he said into the phone. “Someone’s here.”

  Two of the men were coming up the hill now, heading in the direction Breece had thrown the phone. Unremarkable faces. Dark hair. Athletic figures held calm and erect. Eyes calmly scanning to and fro.

  Professionals.

  Both men coming up the hill had hands in their jacket pockets. Breece imagined their fingers curled around the grips of pistols. The third man stood at alert by the SUV in the parking lot at the foot of the hill, a bundle over his shoulder. A rifle, perhaps.

  “We’re inbound to you,” Hiroshi said. “Forty minutes out.”

  “Don’t think I have forty, Hiroshi. Gotta go now. Call you back.” He cut the connection.

  Who were these men? No uniforms. Unmarked vehicle. Hidden weapons. Where was the SWAT team? Where were the snipers? The drones and choppers? This didn’t smell like the law.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that these men were here for him. To capture him or kill him. And that wasn’t going to happen.

  He was sweating now. The active camo he’d turned on was trapping his body heat, not letting it escape into the air around him where an infrared scope could pick it up. Without a thermal capacitor to suck that heat up, he was going to get warmer and warmer until he cooked.

  Breece eased back behind the crypt, slowly, no sudden moves. Then he went Inside, launched a bootleg app.

  [remote_driver -boot -silent]

  The app reached through the net connection of his phone, connected to the Lexus’s sleeping auto computer, and booted the car up in silent mode, no lights, no sound, all electric. A window came alive in his mind’s eye, and he pushed it full screen, complete immersion. He could see out of the car’s cameras now. Status panels showed battery charge, GPS, engine temperature down the side of his vision. Front and center, through the car’s cameras, he could see the man standing against the SUV. The plates were Texas, standard civilian, no government endorsement of any sort. He couldn’t be sure, but inside the tinted windows the vehicle looked empty.

  The man by the SUV was looking the other way, up towards the cemetery and his colleagues. The man held onto the bundle over his shoulder like a rifle. Breece used his mental finger to click on the screen, drag it to one side. Down below, the Lexus panned its cameras slowly. Through its eyes he watched the two others ascending the hill. They were almost to his discarded phone.

  He’d only get one shot at this. He tapped commands into the app running on his Nexus OS for a moment. Then he reached down with his right hand and pulled the ceramic blade from his calf holster. He peered one last time around the crypt wall, then ba
ck into his inner eye and the feed from the Lexus’s cameras again.

  Now.

  Breece closed his eyes and tapped a mental button. The Lexus surged forward at the man by the SUV. Breece opened his eyes immediately, bringing them back to the two men here on the hill with him.

  He heard the crash of metal on metal, saw a flash of something across the window in his mind. The men turned, startled, and then Breece was up and the ceramic blade was whistling through the air between them, thrown with superhuman force. The knife turned end over end, then lodged itself in the neck of the closest one with a meaty thunk. By then Breece was hot on its trail, sprinting at breakneck speed.

  The one he’d hit staggered and fell into his colleague. The second man struggled to shake off the body and pull the gun from his pocket. Then Breece was on him. He grabbed the assassin’s wrist, stepped inside the man’s reach, and punched him in the solar plexus. The man dropped and Breece wrenched the gun from his hand.

  Something bit into his arm and he dropped to one knee on instinct, thinking he’d been hit. An instant later the sound registered – a bullet shattering stone. It came again and again. Someone was shooting in his direction, hitting gravestones, sending stone chips flying.

  He closed his eyes and looked out of the Lexus’s cams again. The third man was pinned, his lower body crushed between the Lexus and the SUV, but somehow the man had a silenced rifle in his hands and was shooting up the hill. Breece felt a flash of admiration for the man. A real trooper. True grit.

  Breece grabbed the mental shifter of the car, threw the Lexus into reverse, tapped the accelerator. On screen, the man collapsed to his hands and knees as the Lexus backed away from the SUV. Breece braked, shifted gears, then jammed the Lexus forward again. The man’s face snapped up, loomed in the cameras, eyes wide in shock and horror, and then all went black as the Lexus crushed what remained of the would-be assassin against the SUV.

  Breece opened his eyes again, still down on one knee. The world was quiet suddenly. Breece’s breath came fast and his heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest. He was drenched in sweat and burning hot. Were there any others out there?