Crux

DARKNESS

Su-Yong Shu walked slowly through the tall grass studded with its yellow flowers. The sky above her was a stunning cobalt, peppered with small white clouds. In the distance, beyond the wide flower-dotted plain, majestic purple mountains reared into the air, crowned in snow as white as the simple dress she wore now. She walked barefoot, luxuriating in the feel of the grass as it brushed her legs, as her downstretched fingers stroked the tall stalks.

Su-Yong stopped, then crouched down, and plucked one of the flowers from its stem. She brought it close to her face, letting her senses drink in the sweet smell of it, the brilliant golden hue of it. She smiled, her face young and carefree, her hair long and dark and blowing in the wind like a girl’s.

Chrysanthemum boreale, this was. The “golden flower”. One of the Four Gentleman of Chinese lore. Her favorite flower, dating back to her sweet, innocent childhood.

She stared at the flower now. If she wished she could zoom her vision into it, penetrate into its internal structure, peel away mental layers, right down to an individual cell, then down further, into its eighteen diploid chromosomes, then further, to each of its individual genes and every nucleic acid base pair within them.

She didn’t. Instead, she let the flower take her back, back in time. The air before her parted, a wide rectangular swath of silver, ten times her height and twice as wide as it was tall. It sliced into being, interrupting the vast plain and its flowers, obscuring the mountains behind.

And what it showed her was memory. A ball, a gala. A handsome man in a black tuxedo, a chrysanthemum pinned to his lapel. Two handsome men. Her men. Chen Pang, her husband. Thanom Prat-Nung, her lover.

She saw herself, tall and young and slender and stylish, whirling with them, dancing, spinning, smiling, laughing, drunk on the beauty of life, of possibility, of a world without boundaries or limitations or social conventions.

2027, that had been. The height of China’s gong kāi huà period. China’s glasnost. China’s counterculture moment. That summer of freedom when progressives ruled, when democracy seemed at hand, when science and the arts flourished, when the phrase of the day was “let a billion flowers bloom”, when unthinkable indecencies were nearly acceptable, when a woman might have a husband and a lover and they might both accept that. When a woman and her husband and her lover might dream of elevating human consciousness beyond mere biology.

She smiled down at her younger self, whirling the night away in that glorious golden age, escorted by her handsome men. Then it struck her, as it always did.

One of these men was dead, murdered by the Americans. And the other had abandoned her to her Chinese prison.

She came back to herself abruptly, on that vast plain. Through the portal looming above her she now saw flashing scenes of death. Thanom Prat-Nung sliced in half by gunfire in that Bangkok loft, a victim of the Americans and his own career as a Nexus drug lord. A limousine bursting into flame from a CIA bomb, a pregnant version of herself trapped inside, burning. Her own body, her avatar, struck by American neurotoxin darts in that Thai monastery, her skin turning gray as she told Feng to save the boy. Death. Death. Death.

The noise was in her head again. The chaos. Storm clouds boiled from nothing into an ominous maelstrom blotting out the sky above. Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, forked down to strike the plain around her. Thunder clapped loud and close. Wind howled out of nowhere, cold and biting, penetrating through her thin dress. She looked down and the flowers were dying, aging prematurely as she watched, yellow petals fading, drooping, stems wilting and then the whole flowers decomposing into dead brown lumps.

Stop this, she told herself. Stop this!

Instead the silver portals opened, everywhere on the plain. One, two, a dozen, more. Vast two-dimensional silver rectangles sliced into life, flickered, and opened to show her scenes from her life, from the films she’d imagined into being, the operas she’d written and directed and composed during her imprisonment, the virtual worlds she’d created and spent virtual decades in to fill the vast time of her superaccelerated consciousness.

They bombarded her, a cacophony of sight and sound and smell and touch and taste and emotion blaring at her, driving her down to her knees.

Madness, the cacophony screamed. Madness is coming for you.

The ground began to crack below her, fissures abruptly spreading across the plain, fires rising up from them, reflecting red on the terrifying clouds above.

Su-Yong Shu brought her hands to her head and screamed at the top of her lungs. Then with one burst of thought she wiped all of it away, wiped this multiverse she’d created out of her thoughts, and brought herself back down to her true existence.

Darkness.

Nothingness.

No light. No ground. No flowers or mountains or plain. No wind or descending clouds or bursts of lightning. No hellfire cracks spreading across the terrain.

No body. No stimulus of any kind from outside herself.

Only darkness. Endless darkness. Endless silence. Endless numbness.

This was the truth. This was her existence.

Su-Yong Shu drifted in the isolation of her own mind.

How long had it been? How long since the Americans murdered her body in Thailand? How long since her masters cut her off from the outside world in punishment?

Eight billion milliseconds. Was that all? Three months? Lifetimes, it felt. Lifetimes.

They were angry with her. She was being punished. She had shown the Americans too much of what she was capable of, given away the strategic value of surprise.

But didn’t her masters understand the risk? What could happen if they left her like this for too long?

Su-Yong Shu mulled that over, pondered what the more and more frequent breakdown of the virtual worlds she’d created meant, wondered how much time she had left to her.

A data package appeared in her mind sometime later, copied into shared memory. Her daily input of news.

Savor it, some part of her whispered, stretch it out.

But the hunger was too great. She was so starved of any outside data, any sensation, any input that was not a figment of her own solipsistic imagination, not subject to her slowly spreading madness. She ripped through the scanty terabytes they gave her in milliseconds.

Never any mention of her in the news. Not once. Not her, not her husband Chen, her daughter Ling, her students, her lab at Jiao Tong. Redacted. They were keeping things from her.

Why?

An hour passed. A thousand years it felt like. She busied herself coding, manipulating, creating more safeguards, more internal scaffolding to support herself, to keep her sane, just a bit longer, just days, or weeks, or months if she could…

Then, without warning, another data package, larger. Work for her to do, flagged for rapid turnaround. Codes to break. Satellite imagery to process. And one hidden task, from her husband Chen. That one she would not touch. She finished all the work except for the hidden request, took whole seconds to do so, spat it back out to them, and then waited. Waited for an eternity.

None of the other uploads Shu knew of had lasted long. Not the Japanese woman, who’d been reduced to a babbling generator of Zen poetry. Not the Chinese man, who’d begged for death as he’d felt his digital mind becoming a warped, twisted distortion of the flesh and blood brain that it had been copied from. Not the American billionaire, who’d declared himself a god. He’d sent planes plummeting from the sky, set power grids to burning and markets crashing – before the Americans finally burrowed into his underground data center and shut him down, violently, and then blamed his actions on a fictional terrorist group.

Software beings, all of them. Digital representation of brains. Like her. What mattered was pattern, not substrate. A physical brain was an information processor and nothing more. A mind was the information being processed, not the physical brain that did the processing. A digital brain, with digital neurons and digital synapses and digital signals passing through it, could process that information just the same, could give rise to a mind just as well.

Provided, of course, that the underlying model of neurons and synapses and all the rest of the brain was accurate.

I went mad myself, once.

After the CIA tried to kill her, years and years ago. After she’d been pulled from the flaming wreckage of the vehicle, burns covering most of her body, barely clinging to life… After it became clear that nothing could save her body from the injuries she’d sustained in that attack.

Coughing in the heat and smoke inside the limousine, her mentor Yang Wei screaming as he burnt horribly to death, the pain of her own flesh charring, of metal piercing her, pinning her, murdering the unborn son inside her...

Her imminent body-death had forced Chen and Thanom to try the one thing that might save her mind: uploading her, using the technology they three had been building. The perfect team – Thanom Prat-Nung, the Thai nano-engineer with his molecular devices that could scan a brain at nanometer scale; her brilliant husband Chen with his quantum computing cluster powerful enough to simulate a human brain; and her, the neuroscientist with the mathematical model to run that uploaded brain.

Only her near death had forced her to become their first human test subject.

Terrified, burning all over, coughing up bloody mucus, grieving the loss of her unborn son, as the metal tentacles of the destructive scanner reached out for her, hungrily, like some alien lover, lowering themselves onto her head, onto her face, obscuring her vision. Then the scream of pain as they drilled through bone and let loose their swarms of nanoprobes to burrow through her brain, take it apart, cell by cell, and record everything about her, all that she was and ever would be…

AAAAAAH!

And miracle of miracles, it worked. Her burned, broken, ruined body died, but the pattern of her brain, the precise wiring of her hundred billion neurons and the hundred trillion synaptic connections between them, was captured, simulated, and run. She awoke as software running on the massive cluster beneath Jiao Tong University. She was angry, grieving, but alive. More alive and more aware than ever.

Breathe.

Then the dementia had crept in as her uploaded brain drifted into states less and less like those of a biological brain. Even with all her work to update the models, she’d still missed something. Deep in the math that simulated flesh-and-blood neurons and synapses, something was wrong. In the ion channel relaxation models, maybe, or the long-range electric field modeling, or the gene expression code, or any of a hundred other places. Somewhere in the software, things were happening differently than they did in real human brains.

Just like in all the previous uploads.

Over time those differences compounded. She’d started slipping and changing and losing sight of what was real and not real and who she was and wasn’t–

goddess

and what she wanted–

burn them all

and what she didn’t want and how long she’d been the way she was–

forever

and why they couldn’t.

just.

understand.

breathe.

Shu laughed at that, laughed as well as a being without lungs or mouth or flesh of any kind can laugh.

How do I breathe without lungs?

The clone, she’d begged them. My clone.

Just a drooling idiot body grown for spare parts, but it had provided what she needed: input from a real flesh-and-blood brain. Nanowires carried its neural signals into her mind, where she amplified them, used them to correct her own inner firing patterns, and bit by bit,

breathe.

they stabilized her.

Now that body was gone. Dead. She was so very very alone, and she could feel the dementia sneaking up on her again

Fire. Burning. Cleansing.

…and Su-Yong Shu was more frightened than she’d ever been.

Surely her masters would see the risk.

Surely.

Rangan Shankari stirred in his cell. Restraints now.

They’d busted down his door in the middle of the night weeks ago, taken him away in cuffs and thrown him into this cell. Something had gone wrong back then. Something had soured in the ERD’s deal with Kade and his trip to Bangkok. Rangan wished he knew what or why. He wished he knew what had happened to his friends. Did his family even know where he was? Did anyone?

This was what was left of his life, he’d realized. No career in science. No more hacking on Nexus with Kade and Ilya. No more living the rock star life as DJ Axon at clubs and parties. No more girls. Nothing but this cell.

Since the ERD had thrown him in here, for however many weeks or months it had been, they’d left him pretty much alone. Early on they’d asked questions about technical details of Nexus. Why had he and Ilya and Kade chosen this route? What was this subroutine intended to do?

Then nothing but meals and a few interviews here and there. Boredom.

Then something had changed. The last few days had been different. The kid gloves had come off. His body was sore and bruised from a harsher form of interrogation. The memory of drowning was strong in his mind – the false drowning when they put the towel over his head, poured water over it until he couldn’t breathe, until he thought he was going to die. Waterboarding.

They only had one question these last couple days. The back door. The code that activated it. That’s all they wanted.

The serenity package had kept them at bay so far, had buffered him from some fraction of the horror. Some.

Where was Ilya now? Where was Kade? Where was Wats? Were they dead or alive? Free or imprisoned? Were they being tortured too?

Something had changed. Something bad. Now they knew about the back doors. Now they wanted them. And Rangan didn’t know how long he could hold out.