Crux

by Ramez Naam

  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.

  OCTOBER 2040

  THREE MONTHS AFTER THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN STOCKTON

  1

  TAKEN

  Monday October 15th

  Sergeant Derik Evans, US Marine Corps Special Forces, retired, kept a calm smile on his face as he and his twelve year-old son made their way through the train station. Nothing to worry about. Just make it onto this train, and they’d be on their way south to Baja. No more questions from social workers on Bobby’s remarkable improvements. No more worries about being snitched out.

  No more worries about having his boy taken away from him, having his boy locked up like some kind of animal, some kind of test subject, some kind of subhuman. It wasn’t going to happen to them. Not if Derik had a damn thing to say about it.

  The train was the only way now. The airports had their Nexus detectors installed already. And he’d seen on the news last week a story about a Nexus bust at the car crossing. And Bobby just threw a screaming fit every time Derik tried to show him how to purge the Nexus from his brain. Nexus had changed the boy’s life. It was the thing he loved most. Nothing would convince him to let go of it, even for a little while.

  So they couldn’t make it through a Nexus scanner. This was the only way.

  Derik steered them into the security line before the main train terminal. He looked over the gear ahead as the line inched forward. Metal detectors, terahertz scanners, TSA agents. All standard stuff. Nothing that looked like a Nexus scanner.

  He looked at his son, smiled, sent happy calm thoughts. Bobby laughed his awkward laugh and smiled back, his mind sending off waves of excitement at the new adventure. Jesus, what a change.

  Derik hadn’t ever planned to try Nexus therapy. The only time he’d seen Nexus before was when they’d rescued that poor bastard Watson Cole in the KZ,
the big sarge brainwashed by the drug, confused who his friends were, who his enemies were, like that poor SOB that’d blown himself up trying to kill the President.

  But then he’d heard whispers in the autism dads’ support group. That guy Schneider, he’d taken Derik aside and told him about it. Schneider’s boy had severe autism, way out on the spectrum, like Bobby. Not one of those easy borderline cases. But his boy was getting better. It was the Nexus, Schneider said. Vitamin N. Not a cure, but a big big step. But they both had to take it. Bobby and Derik. It wasn’t the drug. It was the connection.

  Derik felt his son’s hand in his own, his son’s happiness in his own mind. Bobby was learning to see a different perspective through Derik’s thoughts, to understand other people and the world a bit better, to be less threatened by the loud stimulus of places like this.

  Bit by bit, Bobby was changing. The teachers and social workers said so. Then they asked their questions…

  On the news screen in the terminal, an old brown-skinned man was talking, a brown woman and an old white couple behind him. A subtitle went by. “PARENTS OF NEXUS DEVELOPERS APPEAL FOR DAY IN COURT. ‘We don’t know where Rangan or Ilya are. No one has seen them. They’ve been held for six months without trials, without access to attorneys. This isn’t American.’”

  Every parent’s nightmare. They weren’t going to do it to him. They weren’t going to take Bobby away.

  Derik stepped forward, hoisted his duffel onto the baggage scanner’s moving belt. Almost there.

  Baja, here we come.

  He reached into his pocket to pull out his Aug Card, declare himself to TSA as lethally enhanced, like the law and the Corps said he had to.

  Then he saw the TSA agent walking down the line of people, an electronic wand in his hand. Derik froze. The man behind him in line said something. The TSA agent with the wand lifted his eyes from the wand’s readout, a frown on his face. And his eyes met Derik’s.

  Shit.

  Derik hoisted the duffel off the belt with an apologetic laugh to the man behind him. “Forgot somethin’.”

  His hand tightened on Bobby’s, and he turned, dragging the boy away from the line, back towards the exit to the train station. Bobby’s mind radiated confusion, agitation. He wanted to go on a train trip.

  Another TSA agent stepped into his path. “Everything alright, sir?”

  “Yeah,” Derik improvised. “Just forgot my wallet at the coffee shop.”

  The TSA man raised a finger to the radio in his ear, nodded at something.

  “I’m going to need you to come with me, sir.”

  Derik heard a footfall behind and to the right of him. Another agent moving in for backup.

  Shit.

  Bobby felt his agitation. Derik could feel it rebounding, magnifying, the boy vibrating on edge now.

  “Uh, I should really go get my wallet.”

  “Sir.” The TSA man’s hand dropped to the taser at his hip. “You need to come with me.”

  My boy, Derik thought. They’re gonna take Bobby away from me. They’re gonna lock him up.

  Derik sighed, then nodded in resignation.

  “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you say, man.”

  The TSA agent relaxed fractionally. Then Derik’s booted foot lashed out, taking the man in the ribs and sending him flying through the air. Derik swung hard with the duffel even before the first man hit the ground, slamming the fifty-pound weight of it into the agent behind him, sending the man staggering back.

  No one was going to take his boy.

  Then Derik had a screaming Bobby over his shoulder and he was running, hyper-muscled legs propelling him at a frightening sprint, enlarged heart sending a flood of superoxygenated blood to power his mad dash.

  Shouts rang out. People jumped out of his way. Bobby was screaming like a banshee, “AAAAGH! ARRRRR! AAIIEEEE!” and scratching and clawing at him. The main doors were two hundred yards away. One fifty. Just a hundred yards away!

  The taser barbs took him in the lower back mid-stride. The muscles of his back and legs seized up, and he and Bobby crashed to the ground, sliding across the tile floor in a heap.

  Derik forced his arm to move, reached back and yanked the barbs out of his flesh. He got them out as the TSA men closed on him. He was on his feet in a heartbeat. His right fist cratered a man’s face, took the man off his feet.

  Bobby screamed again, “AAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!”

  The terror and rage and chaos of it filled his mind.

  Another one came at him with a baton and Derik broke the man’s arm. Two men tried to wrestle him to the ground and Derik snapped one’s knee like dry kindling and sent the other flying with a concussive smash to the side of his head.

  They weren’t going to take his boy!

  Bobby was on the ground, dazed. Derik hoisted the boy over his shoulder and ran like hell.

  Eighty yards.

  Fifty yards.

  Thirty yards.

  We’re gonna make it!

  Then the shots rang out, and Derik felt the bullets punch through his chest, again and again and again, and he fell, and fell, and fell until the floor met his face.

  The last sound he heard was Bobby screaming endlessly, in mind and voice, as they dragged him kicking and thrashing away from his father’s dying body.

  2

  ON THE MOVE

  Mid October

  Kade wiped sweat from his face, batted away leaves with his good left hand. The heat was brutal, even this high in the mountain passes that separated Cambodia from Vietnam, even this early in the morning, even shielded by the jungle.

  “Today,” Feng called from up ahead. “We’ll get there today.”

  Moving. Constantly moving. That’s what life had become.

  Cambodia had been good for a while. Months, really. They’d been safe, shielded in the monasteries. Kade had worked with the monks there, learning what they knew, their techniques for stilling and guiding their own minds through meditation, for sinking into that egoless state where their minds, bridged by Nexus, could become one. In exchange he’d taught what he knew – neuroscience, the rudiments of programming Nexus, ideas for apps that could augment meditation.

  He’d seen beautiful things in those months, in Cambodia and across the net. The mentally and emotionally scarred, healing. Patients in comas being touched and restored to consciousness. Scientists tapping into each other’s perspectives, making breakthroughs they never could have alone. Artists creating new forms that they didn’t even have names for, that immersed you in experiences unlike any other.

  And union. Minds coming together. Walls dropping. Consciousness spanning bodies. Group minds, self-assembled, voluntary, greater than the sum of their parts…

  But then someone had used Nexus to try to kill the President. And the ERD had put a bounty on his head. Wanted alive, for questioning.

  Men had come asking about him, a tall, gangly Westerner, young, head shaved to look like a monk. They’d shown pictures of him. In Khun Prum. In Kulen. In Pou. Kade and Feng had taken to moving every two weeks, then every week, then every few days, leaning hard on the extraordinary generosity the monks showed them.

  Then Ban Pong. Kade and Feng had been there less than two days before the news came. Men were looking for him, in the village below. It was time to move again.

  This was the only way left to them. Off the grid. Off the roads. Into the jungle-covered mountains to the east, on the unmapped trails that led from Cambodia to Vietnam, with nothing but the packs on their backs and a destination – the monastery at Chu Mom Ray.

  Today was day seven. Feng could have made the trip in two days, Kade figured. His pack weighed at least twice what Kade’s did, yet the Chinese ex-soldier never slowed, never tired. Kade was the weak link here.

  “Hey, Kade,” Feng called from up ahead. “What did Confucius say about man who runs in front of car?”

  Kade smiled and shook his head, brushing away more foliage from his face. “I don’t know, Feng. W
hat?”

  “He gets tired!” Feng roared. “Get it? Tired?”

  Kade laughed. Feng’s jokes were as endless as his stamina.

  “Yeah, I get it, Feng.” Kade reached up to adjust the straps of his pack once more, settling the load more comfortably on his back. His right hand ached as he did so, still weak and painfully fragile, even six months after the regeneration genes had been injected. He forced himself to use the hand, regardless. Keep working it, the doctors had told him. Give it every reason to grow stronger.

  “Kade,” Feng said up ahead, more seriously now.

  Kade looked up at his friend. Feng had stopped, at a spot where a clearing in the jungle gave them a view off the side of the trail and down the mountain. And now he was pointing, smiling.

  Kade squinted into the morning sunshine. His cloned right eye watered in the glare, more light-sensitive than the left. He brought one hand up to block the sun, followed Feng’s pointed finger.

  Down below them on this winding mountain path, tucked away in the lush green jungle that clung to these slopes, he could see buildings. The ornately sloped red roof of a pagoda. Two smaller buildings tucked away.

  “Chu Mom Ray,” Feng said with a grin. “Welcome to Vietnam.”

  Kade smiled in return, then nodded in satisfaction. Chu Mom Ray. They’d made it.

  Feng turned, moving faster down the trail now, buoyed by the nearness of their destination.

  “Hey Kade,” he called from up ahead. “You know what Confucius said about the man who runs behind a car?”

  Kade laughed, struggling to keep up. “What, Feng?”

  “He gets exhausted!” Feng sang out. “Exhausted!”

  Kade groaned, and chased his friend down the mountain.

  It took another hour to make their way down to the tiny monastery, scrambling down the trail, whacking their way through brush, inhaling the lush green scent of the jungle. The monks greeted them as heroes, Kade as a holy man. He did his best to deflect their adoration, laugh with them, diffuse the power imbalance as always.