Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (3 page)

S
aturday 2040.11.03

Qiu Li-hua waited outside the elevator doors, just past the armed guards and the scanners, and listened to the slow grind as the giant machine slowly climbed its way up through the kilometer of bedrock. The all-important equipment bag was at her feet, with the only electronic equipment they’d be allowed to bring in or out. The post-docs and technicians were arranged respectfully behind her.

I’m
Senior Researcher Qiu
, after all, she thought. Top aide to the great Chen Pang. Though I should be
Professor
Qiu.
Distinguished
Professor Qiu.

She’d have that professorship already, tenure certainly, perhaps a departmental chair even, if Chen Pang hadn’t blocked her, hadn’t hoarded the discoveries coming out of Su-Yong Shu’s mind for his own, hadn’t refused to share the glory, even after all she’d done for him.

Chen Pang, the greatest mind in quantum computing, Li-hua thought scornfully. A fraud.

Oh, he had been once. He’d designed the cluster Su-Yong Shu’s mind ran on. But all his discoveries of the past several years? Well, it was clear to Li-hua who
really
produced those insights, even if no one else seemed to have made the connection.

Su-Yong Shu had long since eclipsed her husband, or any other human for that matter. The great Professor Chen was little more than front man.

Now they’d shut Shu down. Chen’s star would fade. And Li-hua’s would rise. Fast.

The Shanghai Crash had done it. That was the reason they were shutting Su-Yong Shu down, even if no one wanted to say it.

Two weeks ago, everything in Shanghai had failed. Power had failed. Water had failed. Subways and trains had failed. Self-driving cars – completely autonomous things that should be fully independent from the outside world – had failed. Automated food and goods delivery trucks had failed. The sewer pumps that kept Shanghai from flooding over had failed. People had
died.
They’d
drowned
in basements and subway cars as filthy water rose up over their heads.

Li-hua shuddered.

Even surveillance had failed. Red-lit surveillance drones with their quadcopter frames had simply stopped flying, had fallen out of the very skies, had crashed to the streets like broken toys.

How that must terrify the people in charge.

There were riots. There were soldiers, shooting people. Shanghai teetered on the edge those first few days before order was restored.

A “cascading systems failure” they called it, “shoddy western code”. Some junior deputy assistant sub-minister’s aide was arrested for laxness in management of civic systems.

Yet here they were. About to deactivate the most advanced electronic entity she knew of on the planet.

And in politics, in Beijing? Well, the Politburo had suddenly had a rather sweeping change in membership, hadn’t it?

Was there a connection between all those things? Oh no… Of course not.

A deep bass clang announced the arrival of the giant elevator car. The grinding halted. And then massive doors parted, revealing Chen and that strange, strange child of his, smiling oddly up at her. Why had he brought her here?

“Honored Professor,” Li-hua started.

“Li-hua,” Chen said. “Complete the backups and initiate the shutdown. I’ll await your report.” Chen strode toward the guards, his odd little daughter in tow, and presented himself to be scanned.

So Chen wasn’t going to participate? Too much for him to see his golden goose slaughtered, perhaps. All the better.

“Come, then,” Li-hua said to the team behind her. She walked for the elevator. The guards had already cleared them, verifying that they had no electronics whatsoever. The only data that would leave here today would be in Li-hua’s equipment bag, in one of the three snapshots of Shu’s brain sent to secure locations for safe keeping.

She drilled the team one last time as the great elevator descended its kilometer-long shaft. Backing up a quantum computer was a tricky business. The no-clone theorem stipulated that it was technically impossible. No quantum state could be copied with precision. They would be taking only an approximate recording. To do so they’d be collapsing waveforms, forcing qubits suspended in an indeterminate mathematical superposition of 1s and 0s to become quite determinate indeed, to suddenly decide one way or the other.

It would be a death of sorts to Su-Yong Shu, an end to her consciousness, even as an approximation of her state was written to a form of storage that she could one day be – approximately – resurrected from.

Yet they must take great care. The wrong step could trigger a catastrophic cascade of decoherence, prematurely collapsing waveforms in an avalanche across her simulated mind, destroying information before they could capture it.

Li-hua wasn’t going to allow that to happen. Nor would her team. They’d do it right – for her, if not for Chen.

This was her domain. In the outside world she wasn’t special. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t famous. She wasn’t from an important family. (Of course, those three traits were highly correlated, now weren’t they? Hmmm.)

But she was intelligent in the extreme. She was fair to subordinates. And she worked hard – far harder than the world famous Distinguished Professor Chen. The team might be in awe of him, might worship him, might crave his favor. But they were loyal to
her
.

It would be a bit sad to leave them behind.

T
he elevator clanged
to a halt at the bottom. Its wall-sized metal doors opened. A moment later, the meters-thick stone blast doors of the Physically Isolated Computer Center beyond parted, and Li-hua led her team forward to kill Su-Yong Shu.

Li-hua took the central console seat as the others spread out to their own tasks.

She ran system diagnostic first. Su-Yong Shu looked remarkably good today, if anything. More neural coherence than they’d seen in months.

Had Chen done something? Had he tried some last ditch effort to try to bring his wife back from the brink?

Li-hua shook her head. It didn’t matter. Whatever he’d tried would be in the logs they’d snapshot with Shu’s brain.

She placed the equipment bag beside her and opened it. Inside the bag was a sealed electronic key which would activate the data output systems of the quantum cluster. Next to it, nestling in their separate cases, were four perfect diamondoid data cubes, each almost the size of her fist, each a marvel of high precision multi-layer carbon deposition – their structures more flawless than any diamond ever found in nature – capable of storing hundreds of zettabytes of data in laser-etched holographic form.

Three of them were for the three copies that would be made of Shu’s mind. The fourth was pure redundancy, in case of a problem with any of the first three.

Li-hua lifted the key out of the case, broke the seal with her finger, then slid it home into the appropriate slot in the console. The crimson orb of a retinal scanner came alive before her, and she held herself still as it played its red laser across the back of her eye.

A moment later, status messages appeared on the display:

USER ACCESS GRANTED.

DATA OUTPUT SYSTEM ACTIVE.

LOAD OUTPUT MEDIA.

Li-hua played her fingers across panels to the side of the main console, and three compartments opened, ready to accept the diamondoid data cubes.

She reached back into the equipment bag, lifted the first data cube out of its case and then into the console compartment. She did the same with the second, then rubbed a spot behind her ear with her finger for a moment, reached into the case for the third cube, and smeared that finger across the face of it, leaving a nearly transparent smudge across the diamondoid surface.

Transparent in the spectrum humans could see, at least.

Li-hua took the smudged third cube, seated it in its compartment to the side of the console, and tapped in commands.

DATA I/O TEST

DATA STORE 1… OK

DATA STORE 2… OK

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3… ERROR CANNOT WRITE

Li-hua frowned. “Jingguo,” she said aloud. “Can you come here for a moment?”

She re-ran the I/O test as the other researcher approached.

DATA STORE 1… OK

DATA STORE 2… OK

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3…

DATA STORE 3… ERROR CANNOT WRITE

“Hmmm…” Jingguo said. He was in his fifties, white-haired, fatherly, but keenly intelligent. She was in her mid-thirties and had eclipsed him – a rare feat in a China still more ageist and sexist than it cared to admit.

She deserved more.

“I’m going to use the backup data cube,” Li-hua said. “You concur?”

Jingguo nodded slowly. “I concur.”

Li-hua nodded herself. “Thank you, Jingguo.”

She opened the compartment for the third data cube, lifted it out, and replaced it with the spare from the equipment bag.

This time the test worked perfectly.

From there it was smooth sailing. Su-Yong Shu died in pieces. Li-hua watched in fascination as the diagnostics became more and more erratic, as her simulated brain became aware of what was happening, as activity spiked, even as each fragment of her was collapsed and written in triplicate to the waiting diamondoid cubes.

What are you thinking in there? Li-hua wondered. What are you feeling? Are you frightened? Does it hurt?

She shook her head. Irrelevant.

Hours later, at the end of it all, Li-hua carefully lifted the three cubes out of their compartments. The first two went into the first two cases in the equipment bag. The third data cube, with a perfectly valid recording, went into the case for the unused spare.

T
he third data
cube rode along in the equipment bag on Li-hua’s shoulder. It rode through the parted meters-thick blast doors into the cavernous elevator car, then up the kilometer-long shaft to the top. It rode with her out through the security screens, past the guards who scanned them again to make sure no contraband had left, who opened the equipment bag, took careful inventory inside, verified that only the protocol-specified number of devices were emerging. It rode out into the Secure Computing Center, to a conference room, where Li-hua opened the bag again, removed the other three data cubes in their individual cases, handed them to the men from the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Science and Technology. It rode in the re-closed bag to Li-hua’s tiny closet of an office.

There it was lifted out of the equipment bag, into a small plain paper bag in Li-hua’s spacious purse, knocking momentarily against a nearly identical data cube, before its doppelganger left the purse to take its place in the equipment bag.

From there the data cube rode in Li-hua’s purse to facilities, where she returned the equipment bag and reported that one of the data cubes had shown an error and was being returned, unused, in place of the spare.

It rode with Li-hua to the surface, to the grey and soggy campus of Jiao Tong University, where power had only recently been restored, to a café where Li-hua ate noodles on a communal bench, stared up at a viewscreen showing a news program about the restoration of power and services to the rest of Shanghai, and almost absentmindedly pulled the data cube in its plain paper bag out and left it on the table when she departed.

From there it was swept up by the innocuous-looking female student seated beside Li-hua, who walked with the bag across the damp campus, towards the political science building, where she handed it to a dark skinned man carrying an umbrella as they passed, neither of them breaking stride.

The man doubled back a hundred meters later, walked out the west gate of Jiao Tong, and onto Huaihei West Road. He walked the kilometer to Hongqiao Road, his umbrella held high against the on-again-off-again drizzle. In the aftermath of the spasm that had shaken Shanghai two weeks ago, vehicle traffic remained minimal.

At Hongqiao Road a car met him. A darkened window rolled down. A hand extended, and the man passed over the bag.

The car drove west, three more kilometers, before pulling into an alley, and then slipping between the retracting metal doors of a building bearing a flag of orange, white, and green.

The flag of the Republic of India.

By then Li-hua was on her way home, daydreaming of her reward for this and the other data and specifications she’d passed on.

Soon she’d be rich, and famous, and Distinguished Professor Qiu of Quantum Computing, Indian Institute of Technology, Bangalore.

S
aturday 2040.11.03

Three thousand kilometers away, in the mountains of Thailand, north and east of Bangkok, beyond Saraburi, beyond Nakhon Nayok, beyond Ban Na, a lean, wizened man in orange robes stood against the balustrades of a monastery carved into the nearly sheer rock, a calm smile on his face, his hands folded calmly into his sleeves, the pinnacle of his life’s work around him.

Professor Somdet Phra Ananda looked out into the lovely narrow valley before the monastery: the gorgeous green-topped mountains above and ahead, with their grey flanks, the lake below with the perpetual waterfall streaming out of it, bringing the ever welcome tranquil sound of running water, the ribbon of river running far below that, nourishing rice paddies to the south, before emptying into the Gulf of Thailand. Nature was truly sublime.

He closed his eyes, and what he felt was even more sublime: Many hundreds of monks, across a score of monasteries now, all meditating in concert, breaths synchronized, hearts synchronized, thoughts synchronized, consciousness merging, unifying, walls of Maya receding as something wiser and purer than all of them emerged from their intertwined minds, something greater than the sum of its frail, human parts.

It coursed through him for a moment, washing away all else. This was what he’d worked for all his life – a merging of neuroscience and Buddhism, of their tools and goals, to advance humanity, to advance peace, to advance harmony, to make something like
nirvana
real on Earth. It was, he believed, what the Buddha himself would have worked for, if he could have conceived of neural circuits and carbon nanotechnology and radio-frequency-proxied synaptic signaling.

And yet Ananda slowly eased himself out of the blessed union, the most joyous, most true, most peaceful thing he had ever experienced, once more. Because of the boy. The boy, who’d given them a large push in this direction, whose tools had allowed them to bring far more meditators into the fold, had given them the ability to connect monasteries even thousands of kilometers apart into this union. The boy, who had trusted Ananda, and had twice been betrayed, had his life threatened, because of others whom
Ananda
had trusted.

Hidden in the sleeve of his robe, one finger tensed ever so slightly. Ananda felt his pulse rise by a beat, his breath shorten. He observed this calmly, without judgment, mindful of what his body revealed of his emotions, his attachment to those betrayals.

You will not be punished
for
your anger
, Buddha had said.
You will be punished
by
your anger.

It still amazed Ananda how few understood this.

He took another easy breath, let his face relax, let the calm smile inform the deeper parts of his brain, of his peace. The past was the past.

The boy had resurfaced. He was alive, and perhaps free, despite the efforts of so many. Yet he’d resurfaced in a place and a manner that would undoubtedly change the world again.

Everything changes,
the Buddha had said.
Nothing remains without change.

So be it.

The boy had resurfaced. And, on both his own initiative and at the request of his government, Ananda must go to him.