by Ramez Naam
The flame was inside him, he saw. He turned his eyes inward and the fire was there, the fire of freedom, of democracy, of justice. It was red. It was blue. It was brilliant, blinding, sun-hot white. It was all those colors, everywhere, at the same time.
The flame burned inside him, inside every molecule of his being, but he was not consumed. It possessed him. He was its vessel. He was made of freedom, made of justice, and his role was to keep it alive, pass it on, pass it on to the next vessel, whoever that might be, whoever the people might choose, even if they chose to impeach him, even if they chose to murder him before his time was over.
The flame stretched backwards and forwards in time. It transcended the now. It was bigger than him, older than him, would live longer than him. So long as he kept the flame burning through his days, then he would have done his duty, and so-help-him-God he would.
“Dad,” he heard. “Dad.”
Stockton opened his eyes.
Julie. Julie was talking to him. Looking at him.
And Liam. Liam wasn’t scared any more. His grandson was staring at him, with eyes wide. He could see himself in those eyes.
He could see himself in his grandson’s eyes.
Through his grandson’s eyes.
Through his daughter’s eyes.
And they were the flame too. The flame was in them.
Oh my god, John Stockton thought. Oh my god.
“Dad,” Julie said. “This is amazing.”
His daughter was alive. They were all alive. They hadn’t died. He could feel her. He could feel her love, her love for Liam, her love for him. He could feel Liam looking around, taking everything in, his thoughts reaching into his mother’s mind, searching, looking through her eyes, trying to understand.
Why? Liam’s mind seemed to ask. Why? Why this? Why this color? Why this shape? What does this mean?
All bright shapes and forms and motions, all beautiful chaos, all love, love for his mother, his mother above all, his ultimate source of comfort.
Stockton’s heart was so full, so full watching this.
And Liam felt it, turned to look, his eyes wide, his mind suddenly gurgling with love and laughter at the thought of his playful grandfather, and held out his arms to John Stockton.
Stockton’s heart was bursting. He reached out his hands, took his grandson in his arms, cradled him in one, then reached out, pulled his daughter close in the other.
He closed his eyes to focus on what was inside.
All love. All fire.
“Oh dad,” Julie said. “This is so wonderful.”
Yes, Stockton thought. Yes.
“Please don’t let them take Liam away,” Julie went on, tears falling from her face, fear of loss rising from her. “Please.”
Shock rippled through John Stockton.
What?
Who?
“What are you…?” he started.
Then he saw it through her thoughts, felt it through her, the fear, the things she’d seen, the things he’d seen, the things that were suddenly real.
Families torn apart.
Children ripped out of their parent’s arms.
Men and women imprisoned.
Children…
The children on those videos…
His chest constricted.
His stomach rose up.
“Don’t let them, Dad,” Julie said again. “Please!”
Oh, God, Stockton thought. What have I done?
He swallowed hard, pulled Julie tight, sent soothing thoughts to his daughter, shushed her, kissed her brow, as Liam squirmed and looked out the windows of the Beast, his mind alive with wonder at the everyday world all around them.
“It’s going to be OK,” John Stockton told his daughter. His voice cracked as he spoke. His heart ached.
“I’m going to make it OK."
God have mercy.
128
Merge
Monday 2041.01.20
Rangan stood, ripped the mask off his face. The tunnel was spinning, the nightmare chaos of images from the minds around him forcing him to stagger against the wall behind him.
They were reaching for him, wanting what he was giving, buffeting him too much in the process, feeding back the chaos in their heads.
He needed some deeper pool of peace.
He reached deep inside, pulled up a memory, fresh in his mind.
That monk who’d come up on stage. That first moment.
Peace flowing out of him like water. Tranquility. Ripples of it.
Rangan closed his eyes. Leaned back into the wall. Breathed deep. Imagined waves of cool, liquid calm washing outwards.
Going to be OK.
We’re going to be OK.
Deep breath.
The water was more than peace.
It had been… what?
Love?
Compassion.
That’s what.
He summoned it from that memory, let it wash out of him now.
White compassion.
White like snow.
White like fluffy clouds.
Soft white.
Soothing white. Cotton ball white.
Brushing the mind. Comforting. Understanding. Soaking up the confusion.
Turning it to peace.
The music was still playing from the app in his mind.
Bubble Tea.
Nova Bliss.
Cloud Giant.
Apoptosis.
Lovely downtempo track after lovely downtempo track.
The tracks brought back memories. Memories of other parties, other events. Memories of one party in particular. One eventful party, where he’d played Apoptosis by Buddha Fugue.
Ilya loved that song.
The relentless chaotic pressure of madness subsided. He felt threads of joy, threads of beauty, of people experiencing how gorgeous Nexus could be, how amazing the calibration phase hallucinations could be, the glory of self-discovery.
He picked the threads up, grabbed them, rebroadcast them out, amplified through the high-gain antenna he wore.
NJ, he realized. I’m acting like an NJ. A Nexus Jockey, weaving together thoughts.
He felt minds hear that thought. Felt minds touch his, felt minds realize that he wasn’t wearing a mask, felt minds realize who he was.
He took a deep breath and pushed on. He was doing what had to be done. If this was the last thing he did as a free man, so be it.
They’d gone past some tipping point without him noticing, he saw now. The people around him were coming up, many struggling still, fighting or crying or raging, but more easing into it or finding wonder, many confused, but at least as many of them understanding, now. More of them realizing they were still alive, they hadn’t been chemically attacked, hadn’t been biologically attacked, not really.
They’d been drugged.
They’d been enhanced.
They’d been connected to one another.
Whether they liked it or not.
He could feel some of them roaming his mind. He let them see who he was, what he knew about Nexus, about how to center themselves, how to have a positive experience. He pushed aside any thoughts that might lead to anyone who’d helped him.
He could feel more of them connecting to each other now. He could feel emotions and ideas and memories and abstractions flitting from person to person, feel them intermeshing, chaotically, out of anyone’s control, unpredictably, tripping hard on each other, looking deep into each other, or shying away, fleeing from showing themselves, or fleeing from seeing each other.
People stumbled to their feet as he watched. They were moving around, now, self-organizing, finding each other, their colleagues, their political allies, finding the friends they wanted to connect with, sobbing together, or talking, connecting, planning.
They were helping each other, too. The ones who were coping were reaching out to the ones who were still having a bad time, soothing them.
Stan Kim reappeared, plopped down on the groun
d next to Rangan, tripping, smiling.
And Rangan understood now why the man had been touching so many of his colleagues. Ballsy, when they’d all been tripping so hard. Rangan shook his head.
Rangan could feel insanely diverse calibration trips all around him. Oceans and forests. Fantasy lands. Choose Your Own Adventure stories. Childhood replays. Body hallucinations. Abstractions. Death and rebirth experiences. A woman in a power suit just a few steps from him, with her back to the wall, whose face he was sure he’d seen before, had gone to a super-vividly realized heaven, had met her own personal God. She still had her eyes closed, was still holding on to that memory of towering Archangels with their flaming swords and the Lord on his throne too bright to see and the glowing cubic city of New Jerusalem that she’d been carried up to.
Heaven seemed pretty damn cool, Rangan had to admit.
There were dozens of paramedics down here now, going from person to person, checking pulse and heart rate, administering tests. Rangan saw men and women in suits point at him. He saw the paramedics give out pills more than once to people who were highly agitated.
Sedatives.
There were dozens of Capitol Police down here now too. Rangan let his eyes drift over them. How long before they hauled him away? Not long, he figured.
A man in a suit lumbered down the hallway, stumbling through people, a tall man, in his fifties, maybe, a familiar face, he came straight up to Rangan and Rangan shied back.
Stan Kim came to his feet beside Rangan, a little unsteady.
“Help me!” the new man said, his eyes wild, his face leaning in way too close to Rangan’s. “I can’t have this in my head. Get it out of me!”
Rangan held up his hands, let the music fade.
“OK,” he said. “You can purge it. I’ll show you how.”
Rangan opened his thoughts, reached out to the man, showed him how to bring up a command prompt inside Nexus OS, felt the man get it, felt the command prompt come up.
Now, [nexus purge], Rangan sent.
Then he saw the message flash across the man’s mind.
ACCESS DENIED.
Oh shit.
This wasn’t the same version as the standard Nexus. This wasn’t the same as the version that had gone out to millions of people with the chemreactor hack. Those were normal. Those could be purged.
But the one they’d dosed the Capitol with…
The man’s eyes went wild. His hands went up and he lunged forward, grabbing Rangan around the throat, slamming him against the wall.
Rangan gurgled in surprise. He felt shock rise up from minds all around.
“Foster!” Stan Kim yelled.
“He’s stuck this in our brains!” the man strangling Rangan yelled. “We can’t get it out!”
Then the woman Rangan had seen, the one who’d gone to heaven, was on her feet, next to him.
Her hand smacked the man strangling Rangan across the face, hard.
And suddenly Rangan was free, gasping, hands rising to his throat.
The familiar-looking woman stared at the man who’d been strangling Rangan, saying nothing. And Rangan could feel in her mind who she was now.
Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security.
Christ.
“This man is a terrorist!” Foster said.
“You’re confused, Senator Foster,” Engels said. “It’s probably the drugs.”
She turned to Rangan. “It’s time you left.”
129
Final Sacrifice
Tuesday 2041.01.21
Feng struggled back to his feet, panting. He could feel the minds everywhere, the connection, like the things he’d felt with the monks, the things he’d felt on the dance floor, but so much bigger.
Su-Yong was sane again. Or closer
Ling. Ling was crumpled, but breathing.
Kade. Oh no, Kade.
Then Su-Yong spoke.
“Nuclear attack,” her loudspeakers said. “Shanghai is about to be vaporized.”
He felt it come into his mind, the knowledge of what was coming, the two ICBMs, minutes away from their launch deadlines, cut off entirely from the net.
Ten million tons of TNT equivalent.
Five hundred Hiroshimas.
Feng saw the first explosion through Su-Yong’s mind.
The first fireball would rip out of the night sky, blazing from nothing to a temperature of more than fifty million degrees Celsius.
In the first hundredth of a second it would expand to more than two kilometers across, instantly vaporizing cars, trees, people, buildings.
The massive flash of heat would fry everything it touched for tens of kilometers around, sending temperatures soaring by hundreds of degrees, setting skin and grass and wood and even sometimes metal on fire.
The pressure wave would strike Shanghai in all directions with winds of nearly a thousand kilometers per hour, ripping apart buildings, destroying concrete and steel and carbon fiber, ripping through the skyscrapers of the Pudong, shredding the lower apartment towers that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.
The sudden wind would fan the flames, turn them into a conflagration, a thousand-degree-Celsius firestorm that would consume everything not already destroyed for almost twenty kilometers in every direction.
Forty million people would die.
Then the world would react.
Then the radioactive fallout would spread on the wind.
Feng gasped.
“You have to stop it!”
Su-Yong spoke again through the loudspeakers, her voice resigned.
“You must leave now,” she said. “And I must die.”
“What?” he heard Sam say.
Stop the missiles, Su-Yong! Feng sent her.
From Kade he felt only resignation.
“The odds of failure are unacceptably high,” Su-Yong’s voice said. “There are so many ways I could stop the attack. But each of them has a chance of failure. Even one percent is too high.”
NO! Feng yelled. I’ll take the chance!
“It’s not just you, Feng,” Su-Yong said aloud. “It’s millions of lives. I was wrong. I created this situation. I have to make amends. You came here to set a precedent for the future. I choose to do the same. I will die rather than have them launch. We’re out of time. Please, Feng – save Ling. Take her and leave. Two minutes until I must blow the reactor, to let them know.”
“Aaaaah!” Feng fell to his knees, slammed his hands against the cold floor.
He knelt there for a moment, in despair, in frustration.
Then he rose, stepped forward, and gently, oh-so-gently, scooped Ling up in his arms.
Sam listened, in horror.
Then she stared down at Kade, bleeding, struggling to breathe.
Jesus. It was all for fucking nothing.
Feng came up with Ling in his arms.
“Get Kade,” he said to her.
Sam crouched down.
Kade shook his head, raised one hand weakly.
“Not… gonna make it… no way…”
Oh no. She looked at him and he was so right, there was no way he’d survive the acceleration up to the surface, the emergency pull of moving out so quickly.
That didn’t stop the anger shooting through her.
“You have to try!” Sam yelled.
He shook his head again. “…Slow you down…” he managed. “…go…”
“There’s a chance!”
He looked at her, his eyes met hers.
“…Sam…” he coughed. “…you didn’t kill me…” he coughed again, blood coming up. “…I chose…”
Then Feng’s hand landed on her shoulder, gently.
“He’s chosen, Sam,” Feng said. His voice was broken, devastated. His hand was steady. “He’s a soldier. Let him die like one.”
Sam stared down at Kade.
“Kade…”
What the hell was there to say?
She bent down, took his face in one hand, pressed her cheek against his for a moment.
“You did good,” she said, holding their faces together like that. A tear fell from one eye. “You did better than anybody knows.” She swallowed. “You deserved better.”
He coughed weakly in response.
“…thanks…”
Sam stood and took one last look at the dying boy before her. He smiled up at her. She did her best to smile back.
Then she turned and ran through the massive doors, for the elevator cable, and the powered ascenders.
Feng crouched before Kade, Ling’s unconscious form in one arm.
Kade’s eyes were fluttering, closing. He put his hand on Kade’s shoulder.
I’m sorry it was like this, he sent Kade.
Kade’s eyes flew open again, met Feng’s.
I’m not… He replied. You’ve been… best friend I could ask for… these months. Better.
Feng smiled sadly. I love you like a brother. You’re the first brother I chose.
Go save Ling, Feng, Kade sent. Go tell the world… choice Su-Yong made… Make it count… Make sure Sam… tells too.
I will, Feng said. Then he rose. It was time to go. Ling was his responsibility now. Time to take her, and himself, and get them the hell out of here.
Feng slammed the powered ascender home around the cable, his harness locked to it, the full two kilos of battery wired to it, set for emergency discharge, all the rest of his gear behind.
Ling cradled in his arms.
Sam was skyrocketing into the night.
Feng, Su-Yong sent. I’ve loved you like a son. Always. Thank you for everything.
You gave me freedom, he sent back, pushing back his grief, pushing it back like a soldier, pushing it back with pride. I’ll tell them the choice you made.
The door is primed to close on emergency power if the reactor fails, she sent. The signature of the reactor should be unmistakable. Get clear of the building if you can.