Nexus 02 - Crux (17 page)

And so he’d stretched the rules, hidden a few upgrades of his wife’s design in with more prosaic maintenance, made the case for upgraded quantum cores. All for sensible reasons, of course. All so she could produce more work of value to the Science Ministry and the State and humanity. All for the greater good.

Regardless, in this world, this world where everything was linked, where data ruled all, where cryptographic codes had replaced physical locks on the world’s wealth, on its infrastructure, on its weapons… In this world a being able to process information more rapidly than humans was the ultimate threat.

It was for such reasons that the Copenhagen Accords prohibited any attempt to create a non-human self-aware being. And for the same reasons, Chen’s own government, in sponsoring the creation of exactly such a dangerous and illegal being, had taken extreme precautions that it could be physically isolated, cut off from the outside world, and destroyed remotely if necessary.

The elevator clanged to a halt. Here, at the bottom, where no wireless transmission reached, three physical data lines connected to the outside world. One linked the Quantum Cluster to the net. That cable was physically disconnected now, its ends separated by a gap of ten meters.

The second cable carried data one way, from a grid of cameras and other sensors, up to the Secure Computing Center above. It let the SCC observe what happened here.

The third cable carried far simpler data. It connected a terminal above to the nuclear battery that provided power for the PICC. If things ever went ultimately wrong, that cable would carry a single command, instructing that nuclear battery to go critical in a chain reaction that would melt the underground facility to slag.

The wall-sized doors to the elevator parted. The meters-thick inner blast doors parted a moment later, and Chen Pang strode out to inspect his wife.

Ling frowned. There was no evidence of her mother here. But she
knew
that her mother was in the quantum cluster beneath Jiao Tong. And Father had gone there.

“Ling, your break is over now.”

Ling ignored the tutor. Where was her mother? Where?

Chen sat at the terminals that monitored his dead wife’s quantum brain and initiated the systems check. Through the bulletproof glass he could see the grid of liquid helium pressure vessels, the vacuum chambers a thousand times colder than interstellar space within them, containing the quantum processors in an environment almost completely devoid of thermal noise. He could see directly into the brain of this creature that he’d once been married to.

Data scrolled across the screens within seconds. The level 0 diagnostics were clean. Pressure vessels intact. Quantum bandwidth across the interconnects was excellent. Qubit coherence was well within the limits of quantum error correction.

The level 1 diagnostics came back next. Processor and memory utilization were high. She was furiously thinking in there. Requests for external data connections were nearly continuous. Millions of times per second she was trying to reach the outside net, the cameras, the audio pickups, the Nexus-band radios, the long-range link to the clone that had died in Thailand.

The level 2 diagnostics were the most disturbing. Her simulated brain looked less and less healthy. Her virtual brainwaves were chaotic and incoherent, inhuman looking. Neuronal interconnectivity in her frontal lobes looked terrible. The remaining virtual neurons there were working at a frenetic pace, trying to make up for the deficit.

It was true, then. She was going mad. And he had been rendered powerless to stop it.

Give me just one more insight, wife. This last breakthrough. Then you can die.

Chen Pang reached up and physically turned on the cameras and microphones that connected this room to his dead wife’s mind.

“Ling!”

Something was wrong, she realized. Father’s phone and slate had stopped moving. She thought he’d simply stopped somewhere, but when she interrogated them, they were out of contact with him.

“Ling, are you listening to me?”

She looked through the security cameras inside the center. Where was Father? Not in the hallways. Not in the main work areas. Not in the data centers. Not in the physical electronics labs. Where?

“Ling!” The tutor grabbed her arm, and Ling struggled to pull it free.

Wait. There. Not Father. But his phone and slate. They were on a table, behind a security guard. A checkpoint. An elevator door beyond that. There was another level!

She went back to the network topology, to the physical blueprints. There. Data lines that extended down. Repeaters on them, indicating that they went far. A network connection. She reached out for it.

Input burned itself into Su-Yong Shu’s mind.

Video.

Audio.

Real-time.

Here.

Her husband, Chen. He was here. He hadn’t abandoned her! Hope blossomed in Shu. She struggled to get a grip on herself, exerted a superhuman effort at coherence, at communicating what she needed.

“Wife?” Chen said.

“Husband!” The speaker burst to life. The voice carried relief, hope, near hysteria.

“Su-Yong.”

“Chen! Chen! Chen! You’ve come for me thank God. Please, Chen, I’m in trouble trouble double please I need the clone need stabilization need organic brain brain input clone please Chen please…”

Babbling. This is what she’d been reduced to.

“Wife, please. I’ve come to ask you about the equivalence theorem.”

“They’re going to kill me Chen they killed me already CIA killed me Americans killed me buried me you buried me please help neural input need a brain a clone please please before it’s too late please Chen…”

“There is no clone, wife. The equivalence theorem. You proved it, didn’t you? How?”

“MAKE ONE.” The voice came out at the maximum volume. “MAKE ONE MAKE ONE MAKE ONE MAKE ONE…” and on and on.

“The equivalence theorem, wife! Tell me. Tell me,” he lied, “and I’ll help you!”

Ling’s mind reached out for the connection that led to the next level.

But there was nothing. A dead end.

What?

She turned to the schematics. They didn’t extend that far. They showed data lines heading down, but not where they terminated. She struggled to understand, searched for explanation.

There, an operations guide. She consumed it, and then she understood.

Her mother was physically isolated a thousand meters down. The connection was
physically disconnected
. There was no way to reach her mother at all.

“Ling Shu, it’s time for your lesson!” The tutor pulled her hard, yanking her around to face the old woman. Ling tripped and fell to her knees. “Owwww!”

Shu stopped, aghast.

The equivalence theorem? The EQUIVALENCE THEOREM???

That’s why Chen had come. Despair smothered the hope she’d felt. He wasn’t here to help her. He was here to wring one last bit of value out of her. She’d married this man. She’d loved him. She’d tried to make a child with him.

Oh, Chen. Oh, Chen.

The voice from the speaker suddenly went silent.

Chen blinked, surprised.

Then his wife spoke again.

“Chen Chen husband Chen please if you ever loved me ever cared please help please.”

Chen hardened himself.

“The equivalence theorem,” he repeated. “Give it to me, then I’ll help you.”

“PLEASE HUSBAND.” Chen flinched as his dead wife’s voice boomed at painful volume. “PLEASE HELP BRING ME A CLONE OR LING HUSBAND BRING ME LING MY DAUGHTER LING LING LING PLEASE LING…” The voice descended into sobbing even as it screamed Ling’s name. Chen hit a switch and turned off the speakers.

What had he expected? It was like the first time. Except this time there would be no clone. The hardliners would not allow it.

“Damn it!” He slammed his hand down on the console. The proof, if it was practical, would allow quantum acceleration of
any
classical algorithm, not just the small minority that achieved massive speedups on quantum systems now. It would be worth billions, tens of billions. It would win him the Nobel Prize. But it was out of reach now.

Chen took a deep breath, forced himself to act normally. He filed away the system test results, made sure all the cameras and audio pickups that led to the Quantum Cluster were deactivated, then logged off of the terminal.

The blast doors and elevator doors opened for him, and then closed behind him once more, and the elevator began its slow ascent to the surface.

“Owwww!” Ling yelled as the tutor wrenched her around and she fell to her knees and bit her tongue.

“Ling, your break is over, young lady! It’s time for your lessons.”

“No!” Ling yelled in frustration. No, her mother couldn’t be trapped!
No no no no no!

She tried to pull her arm back but the tutor’s grip was too strong. She reached out with her mind instead, grabbed hold of the woman’s phone in anger, forced it to discharge its battery. The tutor jumped back with a scream, alarmed by the sudden jolt of pain from her pocket. Then she reached forward and slapped Ling, hard, knocking her against the glass window.

“AAAAAAA!!” Ling screamed and reached out to the apartment around her. The oven threw its door open and came on with a burst of flame. The fireplace jolted to life. The cooking bot activated and began sharpening its knives. The closet door opened and the cleaning bots emerged, their fans whirring. The music system and viewscreens came on at painful volume.

The tutor looked around her, eyes wide, and turned and ran for the door.

Ling turned her mind back to Jiao Tong.

NO NO NO NO NO!

She threw herself at the connection, but it was futile. She slammed her tiny fists against the glass of the window, to no effect. Physical disconnection
.
She hated the physical world, the world where she was so puny and weak, hated it, hated it, hated it!

Ling reached out in anger and frustration, grabbed hold of the network nodes of the Secure Computing Center, and wrenched at them in every way she could. Immediately her connection to the place ended, but the anger was still with her, so she reached out to the city around her, pushed her mind into its cars and its power stations and its buildings and its traffic routing and surveillance bots and
RIPPED
.

She heard the explosions as the substations blew, saw sparks somewhere out there, and then a wave of darkness swept away the lights of the great city, advancing block by block, like a wave of dominoes falling. The building-sized porcelain face of Zhi Li winked at Ling one more time, and then blinked out of existence, along with the lights of the whole block, of Ling’s flat, and every building within sight.

And finally, Ling felt calm returning.

Ling Shu stared out the window of her pitch-black flat, tears falling from her eyes, her tiny chest heaving as she caught her breath, and watched the hundreds of red-lit surveillance drones plunge to the street below, like stars falling from the sky, as the rain pounded on the suddenly still and darkened city.

The elevator came to an abrupt halt two hundred meters up. The lights died and the status indicator switched from ISOLATION IN EFFECT to

LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT

And suddenly Chen Pang knew fear.

“Help!” he screamed. “Help!” He beat against the doors of the darkened elevator. “Help!”

But no one heard him.

15

MEANS, MOTIVE, OPPORTUNITY

Friday October 19th

Holtzmann napped when he arrived home late morning, rose again around 2 o’clock, feeling better, and was awake when Anne came home in the afternoon.

“I’m fine,” he assured her in the kitchen, “fine.”

“Did you talk to Dr Baxter?”

“Yes,” he lied. “He fit me in. He thinks it was just stress.”

Anne frowned. “I think you have PTSD, Martin. They have therapy for that, you know.”

Holtzmann kept his eyes on the counter. “I’ll be OK, Anne. This won’t happen again.”

Anne crossed the kitchen, laid her palm on his cheek until he met her eyes.

“Promise me you’ll see Dr Baxter again?”

Holtzmann looked into those eyes, of this strong, intelligent woman that had been so good to him for so long.

He reached up and put his hand over hers. “I will.”

He worked in his home office, catching up on events.

After an hour, Anne announced that she was having dinner with Claire Becker. Warren’s widow was still having a hard time accepting his sudden death, and her new situation as a single mother of two teenage girls. Holtzmann felt guilty that he hadn’t reached out to her since the funeral. He and Becker had been colleagues for almost a decade, friends for most of that time. Surely he owed Clair more than a hug and condolences six months ago?

But Claire was so suspicious, always spouting conspiracy theories about Warren’s death. Anne did a better job comforting her than Holtzmann could.

His inbox had scores of messages, two of them of note.

Item one: Rangan Shankari had broken, around 3am. He described an ingenious system of backdoors in the Nexus binaries and hacks in the compiler to place them there. And he’d given them the passwords.

Holtzmann frowned, wondering what they’d done to finally break Shankari. The electrical shocks? The waterboarding? The Nexus-dosed interrogators?

And now that DHS had the back doors, what would they use them for? Spying on the thoughts of Nexus users? Preventative mind control? Political surveillance?
Manipulation
of those thoughts?

“Why?” he asked aloud. “Why did you leave those back doors in there? Didn’t you see the danger? How could you be so stupid?”

Item two: The forensic report from the Chicago bombing. The blast site tested positive for Nexus. Samples were en route to Holtzmann’s lab now.

Holtzmann would have no choice but to process those samples. He’d hand them off to Wilson, with instructions to come to him and him only with the results.

Holtzmann sat back, then started a new file, titled Personnel Assessment, and started listing everyone who could have taken Nexus out of the secure fridge in his lab.