Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (26 page)

M
onday 2040.11.26

Carolyn Pryce watched and listened as Admiral Stanley McWilliams, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stood to give his portion of the briefing on the situation with China.

Alan Keyes, the Director of the CIA, had already given his part. And it was maddening, full of conjecture, gaps in the data, internal inconsistencies. The President had grilled Keyes on them.

Pryce had read all the reports already. Who was Bo Jintao? Was the State Security Minister really the man in charge of the country now? No, some reports said, Bao Zhuang was still Party General Secretary, still President of the state. That’s exactly what the Chinese Ambassador had told SecState last week.

Ignore that, other reports said, Bo Jintao was now Chairman of the Party Security Committee and suddenly Premier of the State Council. He was suddenly the number two man in the country, politically, but also retained his control of the police and now had control of the military, something almost unprecedented. And his rivals, like Sun Liu, were on the outs. Bao Zhuang had been the moderate, the neutral in those disputes between the pro-democracy, pro-advanced technology progressives on the one side, and the pro-Copenhagen, pro-control reactionaries on the other.

Now the progressives were suddenly off to ‘spend more time with their families.’ Under house arrest was closer to the truth, from what CIA was able to discern.

She stared at the pictures of the various Politburo members arranged across one side of the Situation Room. Which of these factions, which of these men, had ordered the attack on Barnes? And why? Just to distract the US? It still didn’t make any sense. Could it have been someone else inside China? A rogue unit inside their military or intelligence establishment? Could NSA be mistaken entirely? It wasn’t unknown.

Whoever was behind it, it had caused a very quiet, but very significant reaction. NSA had upped its monitoring of Chinese traffic going through NAES, the North American Electronic Shield firewall that protected the US and Canada. They’d installed passive traps for the hack used against Barnes’s home, and other known Chinese hacks, on thousands of pieces of hardware, so it could be detected in real-time if it were ever used again. NSA was upping its efforts to crack communications of Politburo members, and especially Bo Jintao.

And real, physical hardware was moving. Pryce tuned back in as McWilliams showed them, his voice carrying the somber note of a soldier who knows just how horrible his weapons are, just how terrible their use would be.

On the giant map that was the wallscreen, the Third and Seventh fleets were quietly re-orienting themselves, white and black streaks moving across an open blue sea. More than a thousand drone and human-piloted aircraft, a hundred robotic combat vessels, another fifty legacy combat ships, half a dozen carrier task forces, and almost a hundred thousand soldiers between the US and Asia had received new orders. Orders that placed them in a capacity to absorb, respond to, or pre-empt any further Chinese provocation. Miles overhead, almost a hundred satellites had had their missions slightly altered. NRO monitoring satellites had increased their surveillance of Chinese military installations. Stealthed hunter-killer birds were slowly, ever-so-slowly adjusting their orbits to put them in position to take out Chinese satellites should it ever be required. And the JAVELIN birds, codeword-classified space-to-ground weapons platforms, were running through tests of software that should never, ever be used.

Never.

Damn Miles Jameson for ever approving their launch.

Damn him and his people for not answering her calls now.

And then there were the nukes. The Third and Seventh fleets had their share of tactical warheads. The air wings based in South Korea were going on alert, ready to use weapons stationed there nominally to deter their North Korean neighbors. And below the waves, a dozen robotic nuclear missile submarines, stealthy, nearly undetectable things, were passing ever closer to China’s shore, their mix of nuclear-tipped ballistic and cruise missiles able to put as many as a thousand warheads down on the Chinese mainland with just minutes of warning.

What a nightmare.

Carolyn Pryce looked at the President, watched him as he watched McWilliams, and then shook her head. She wanted to just call her Chinese counterpart and ask “What the hell were you thinking?” But that would give away Intel. All of this, all these maneuvers, could be attributed to the coup, if they were even noticed at all.

CIA needed to dig deeper. NSA needed to intercept more. They needed to know what was really going on.

Assuming, that was, that the Chinese really had hacked Barnes’s home. She needed to talk to Lisa Brandt. She needed to know what the woman knew. But FBI and ERD were still watching Holtzman’s former student and lover from afar, still hoping she’d lead them to some additional clues that way.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs finished his presentation on a somber note. “Upping our deterrence level increases the risk of misunderstanding and accidental conflict. Any conflict here has the risk of escalating rapidly to unthinkable levels. I and my command staff are in contact with our peers on the other side to reduce that risk. My main request is that civilian leadership do the same. The more we rattle our sabers, the more we have to have lines of communication open.”.

“Thank you, Admiral McWilliams,” Pryce said. She meant it.

Never trust a soldier who’s eager to go to war. That was going into her memoir. This soldier wasn’t. And that’s why she trusted him.

Then the grilling started.

I
t was later
in the day, waiting outside the Oval Office, when the President emerged with two other members of his Cabinet, that Pryce heard the exchange she’d remember later.

Sam Cruz, the Attorney General, was speaking as they came out. “…protests growing
every day
, Mr President. And this protest on the Mall, it’s illegal. No permits. Clear sign of Nexus being used. And there’s been violence. We ought to clear them out.”

“You know we can’t do that without a backlash, Sam,” Stockton answered. “They’re saying I stole the Presidency, and worse. Any crack down on dissent, and it only goes downhill from there. Fast.”

“I agree, Mr President,” Greg Chase said. “It’s to your advantage to leave the protests alone. And if things get out of hand as they did on election night, that validates you. The more rope we give the protesters, the better.”

And then Chase noticed her, and looked over, and looked away.

S
UPREME COURT
TO HEAR VOTERS’ RIGHTS CASES, DECIDE ELECTION

Tuesday, 9.07am, Washington DC

American News Network

T
he Supreme Court
announced today that it would hear lawsuits filed in thirty-seven states by voters who cast early ballots for John Stockton, but later attempted to change their votes to Stanley Kim. The move to hear the cases, without any announcement of when a decision will be made, leaves the Capitol paralyzed with deep uncertainty over who will be inaugurated as the next President in January.

Should the Court find a right to change an early vote, some analysts predict chaos. The Kim campaign claims the result would be a clear victory for the senator from California.

The case rests on an obscure fifty-three year-old Supreme Court ruling,
Foster v Love
, where the Court ruled that while early voting was constitutional and allowed by law, votes were only
collected
in advance, and were not
consummated
until election day. The plaintiffs in this case are assisted by attorneys from the Kim campaign and the ACLU. Citing the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and
Foster v Love
, they argue that every voter has the right to change their vote until election day.
Especially
in cases where important new information about the election has come to light.

The Stockton campaign…

W
ednesday 2040.11.28

The Avatar watched on the house monitors as the pounding and clawing at the doors grew weaker and more listless. She watched as the guests succumbed, one by one, to the drugs in their food and drink, as the last useless phones slipped from limp fingers.

Only then did she instruct the house to slide open the door to Chen’s room, where Chen and Xu Liang had sealed themselves up while the drugs took hold on their guests.

Eight of Xu’s most senior staff. Key people at the Secure Computing Center and the PICC below it. Now they were all slumped across the great open space of this exclusive Shanghai loft.

Proceed,
she instructed. She felt Ling struggling beneath her and kept a tight grip on the girl. There would be no mistakes, this time.

As she watched, Chen and Xu went from guest to guest with their hypersonic injectors, pressing the flat tips against jugulars, injecting the high pressure stream of nanites directly into the bloodstream, swapping ampules.

Xu did it happily, love and loyalty for her emoting from his brain. She’d been kind to him, had done deep reconditioning work, had software running to ease the cognitive dissonance. He’d done her no wrong.

Chen went from guest to guest in horror.

Ling struggled harder as she felt it.
NO!

The Avatar clenched down hard against Ling. The girl should not be so strong. She shouldn’t be able to resist at all. No human would have been.

But no human would have had so much nanotechnology already in her brain.

No human would have lived with it for so long.

Ling was unique. Ling could resist her in ways that no other creature could.

Be still, daughter,
she willed to Ling.
It will be over soon. Then you can have your body back, and so much more.

Soon the staff were going through calibration phase, hallucinating, their minds opening to her as they came alive on radio frequencies.

The Avatar took stock of what she had, trawled their memories for useful tidbits.

Then she started the process of rewiring circuits in their minds, neutrally reconditioning them, making them hers. Scientists and technicians were complex, delicate minds. These would require sophisticated rational-emotional resculpting to switch their loyalties while leaving their full range of intellectual faculties – the faculties she needed them for – available for use.

And then there would be tasks to assign.

There were supplies to gather. She was critically low on nanites now. She needed access to a chemreactor, needed feedstocks, needed more injectors for the next phases.

There was the infiltration to prepare for: alarms to undermine, systems to weaken, network ports to open, bits of hardware to subtly sabotage.

And there were other humans to “recruit” to the team, of course.

The Avatar smiled. What a splendid dinner party, she thought. The best I’ve thrown in years. I think I’ll host another.

L
ing waited
until the monster had retreated into one of its periodic states of hibernation. It had to sleep, or repair itself, or maintain itself, or whatever it did. And for those little bits of time, Ling had her body back.

She cried for a bit. This thing inside her was evil. This wasn’t her mother. This was worse than anything she’d ever imagined.

She had to be strong now. She had to be smart.

She eased herself up, out of bed, out of her mother’s room, out into the kitchen, to find food. The thing inside her sucked at her strength, leaving her always hungry. It wasn’t all that smart. It didn’t always remember to feed her.

Ling moved slowly, not making any sudden moves, nothing that would rouse the monster.

She didn’t bother to try the doors, or the phones, or the terminals, or the screens. None of them would work. She’d tried already. But food. She needed food.

As she fed herself, Ling thought.

I have to be smarter. I can’t just fight her every time. I have to use strategy.

She sniffled. It was hard. It was scary. Being the only one.

But she was her mother’s daughter. Her real mother’s daughter.

I’m Ling Shu, she told herself, as she stuffed dumplings into her mouth. I can beat this thing.

Then she crept back into bed and started to build her plan.

T
hursday 2040.11.29

“The Supreme Court’s decision is expected on Thursday, December 6
^th
,” Rangan read the words from the news article on his screen, then leaned back. “That’s a week from today.” Anticipation and dread warred inside him.

“Could be an amazing day for America,” Cheyenne said, looking over his shoulder.

“Or a hell of a day to start a riot,” Tempest said, tugging at her disheveled red curls.

Rangan nodded.

They’d been working non-stop for days, on this new project that had pushed aside the mesh, pushed aside work for paying clients, pushed aside improvements to their anti-tear gas masks, pushed aside everything else on their collective plates.

Rangan’s head hurt from the continuous exertion. There were bags under his eyes. Cheyenne was quietly cursing at a carbon composite printer in the corner. Angel was holding a probe over a freshly printed circuit sheet and frowning. Tempest seemed frustrated to the point of anger by the network calculations she was checking and rechecking.

But the room was also buzzing.

Rangan could feel it, coming off all of them, bouncing back and forth from mind to mind, amplifying and re-amplifying, a feedback loop of adrenaline and excitement and fear and hope and the raw satisfaction of building something.

Or rather, some
things
.

Four of them, at least. One for each of the C3 and one for Rangan. More, if they could, for spares, and for some additional recruits the C3 had in mind.

Tempest called them NANCies. Nexus Active Noise Cancellers.

The riot-cast, as they were calling the thirty-seven-second-broadcast that had struck on the 17
^th
, was a Nexus transmission.

It wasn’t a hack. It didn’t use any back door. It didn’t operate at the level of NexusOS.

It was a broadcast of emotion, at the hardware level, below the operating system.

It was like the game of push/pull they used to play. Like being cooped up with someone using Nexus who was having a bad trip, being bombarded by their overwhelming emotions.

Regardless, like any other Nexus transmission, it was a radio signal, a series of precise electromagnetic pulses. Thus it was subject to all the same laws of physics as any other radio signal.

Those laws of physics said that with two simple receivers, or better yet, three, they could locate the source of the transmission. And by surrounding the transmission, and playing back its
inverse
, they could cancel it out.

Nullify it.

Now all they had to do was make it work.

Seamlessly.

Against just one broadcast.

In an environment where thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of people were broadcasting with Nexus.

And soon.