Crux

by Ramez Naam

  I’m just like you, he tried to show them. Just another novice.

  The monks let them wash themselves in the cold mountain water. It felt amazing in the heat. Then the novices brought them clean clothes and led them into the kitchen to be fed.

  Kade watched the cooks with joy. They were preparing the midday meal, peeling, chopping, stirring, spicing. They moved as one, wordlessly, bridged by Nexus, a six-armed being, human yet more than human, moving with a single purpose.

  This, Kade thought. This is what Nexus can be. Total coordination. Emergent order. Another symphony of mind.

  It was the logical direction of human evolution. Humanity had achieved what it had not through strength or claws or armor, not even through individual human intelligence, as impressive as that was. No, it was the ability of humans to coordinate, to work together, to produce ideas and solutions collectively that no individual mind ever could, that truly set them apart. Nexus was just one more step in that direction.

  And for the monks, it was more than that. In their view, Nexus was a spiritual tool. It helped tear down the illusion of separateness. It helped pierce the veil of maya. It helped these monks, all part of the same conscious universe, forget the lie that they were separate, the broken distinction of one person ending before the next began. By linking their minds it helped them remember that they were, in fact, all one.

  On his best days, Kade almost believed them.

  Then the abbot was there, a small man, wizened, standing before them.

  “We are honored to have you here,” the abbot told them. Then his face became more somber. “I have bad news I must relate.”

  A wave of sorrow swept across the monks in the room. Kade felt something tighten inside him. The cooks stopped their chopping. A deadly stillness had come across Feng.

  “The monastery at Ban Pong is gone,” the abbot said. “Burned to the ground. The brothers there chose that way out, rather than tell your pursuers where you’d gone.”

  Still seated, Kade stared up in shock. “They’re dead?”

  “Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man,” the abbot replied. “Your escape was more important to them than their own lives.”

  Kade looked down at the table in horror. Dead. Words wouldn’t come. Beside him he felt Feng nodding in agreement with the abbot.

  “As a precaution,” the abbot said, “you should press on. We have a vehicle prepared for you. The monastery at Ayun Pa is farther from the border, larger, a safer place for you.”

  Kade looked up at the man again. “What about you? The monks here?”

  The abbot smiled. “I prefer to live if I can, my friend. All of us here will scatter. Now, we must restock your provisions, and then you must go. Your life is valuable, young man. Honor this sacrifice. Keep yourself safe.”

  Kade didn’t hear. One thought ran through his mind. The ERD. The ERD had done this, with their bounty, their price on Kade’s head. They’d killed those monks, as surely as if ERD agents had pulled the triggers themselves.

  Fuck.

  3

  DOMESTIC BLISS

  Early October

  Sam straightened her back, spade in hand. Sweat ran freely down her face, uncaught by the bandana across her brow, and dripped into the CO2-filtering respirator she wore over mouth and nose. Her tank top was plastered to her skin by perspiration. It felt glorious. The plastic panels of the greenhouse trapped the sun’s warmth and held it in. The solar-powered CO2 pumps captured carbon dioxide from the outside air and concentrated it inside, where the plants breathed it in, and grew.

  She was harvesting gene-hacked Aloe arborescens today, heavily engineered to grow fast in this high-CO2 atmosphere, its thick succulent leaves loaded with bio-engineered antibiotics and wound healing factors. A plant they could sell at market to bring in funds for the orphanage. Sam looked around the greenhouse, looked at the dozens of other plants, little chemical factories, all growing something they could sell.

  Every one of these plants would be illegal in Europe, she thought. Most of them illegal back in the US.

  How strange to live in a place where this technology was so normal, so essential, even. Rich countries had the luxury to ban biotechnologies. Poor countries depended on them.

  Sam caught the train of her thoughts and laughed into her respirator.

  Me, a gardener. Who would’ve thought?

  It was absurd. She’d come to the polar opposite life of her eight years as a spy and a soldier.

  What would Nakamura think, Sam wondered, if he could see me now?

  Her smile disappeared for a moment. Her mentor was a long way from here. Did he think she was a traitor? Did she?

  Change happens, Nakamura had told her once. You have to be adaptable to survive.

  Adaptable, Sam mused. She’d go with that.

  Then she felt the minds of the children, and her worries dissipated as a smile came back to her face. She finished her task, cycled through the flimsy plastic airlock, and came outside as Kit and Sarai rounded the small copse of trees and ran at her, hand in hand, laughing in the bright sunshine.

  Seven year-old Kit jumped into her arms, his mind a gem more glorious than the sun, and she twirled him around, as twelve year-old Sarai laughed and smiled, her eyes and mind twinkling.

  Behind them, more slowly, came old Khun Mae, a frown on her face, no sense of a mind there, the head caretaker casting her disapproving gaze over Sam, in her Western garb with her shoulders uncovered, and her carefree embrace of the drug that connected her to these children.

  Sam ignored it, and spun and spun and spun little Kit, feeling the endless whirling emanating from his mind, the wonder of it, the limitless joy of youth, of life with these children.

  There were nine children here, and three caretakers, and Jake. Eight of the children, ranging in age from one to eight years old, had been exposed to Nexus in the womb, most of them repeatedly. Once a mother felt her unborn child’s mind through Nexus, most felt a strong draw to take Nexus again, to touch the half-formed thoughts of the little being growing inside themselves once more.

  The children were enchanting, vexing, confounding. Most of them were scarred in some way. They acted out at times, testing her, bickering with each other, being petulant or disobedient or just stubborn. But they were also radiant at a level that shone right through their scars and the trouble they caused. Their use of Nexus was instinctive, fluent in a way that Sam would never be. They communicated with each other more in thoughts than words, in blurs of impressions and ideas often too fast for her to follow. And she could hide nothing from them. They knew her inside and out. The touch of their minds made her spirit soar. She couldn’t get enough of them.

  The ninth child, Sarai, was different. Twelve years old, she’d been four when she’d drunk one of the vials she’d seen her mother drink with one of the “uncles” who paraded through their lives. The drug had lodged in her brain just as surely as if she’d been exposed to it in the womb.

  Sarai had had a hard life, her home a never-ending stream of men who paid to take her mother in body and mind, their brains flushed with Nexus as they fucked, or worse. More than once she’d lain in her bed, terrified as she felt men hurt her mother, use her cruelly with their minds connected so they could feel her pain and degradation.

  She’d learned to shut it out. Mostly.

  Sarai was nine when she first slipped, and a john noticed her mind, and wanted her too. Her mother had thrown the man out, yelling and screaming until neighbors had come to the door and he’d left. And the next day, Sarai’s mother took her to temple, and begged the monks for help for her special daughter. Four months later, the nine year-old Sarai had arrived here, the safe and loving home she’d never had before. She was more fluent with Nexus than Sam would ever be, but less so than the children who’d gestated with it. A bridge between generations.

  And now Sarai was on the verge of becoming a young woman. She was the same age that Sam’s sister had been, when… when eve
rything had gone to hell at Yucca Grove.

  Sam loved Sarai most of all.

  Sam met the youngest of the children on her first night. Jake’s pleading and the enthusiasm of the older kids had persuaded old Khun Mae, reluctantly, to let Sam stay for a day or two. A day or two that became months.

  She woke that first night to the sound of a baby crying, inconsolably. Ten minutes. Twenty. Forty. An hour. Finally she roused herself and crept down the hall towards the sound. The room was half lit, but she had no trouble seeing. Khun Mae was there, stern-faced. And Jake, holding little Aroon, the one year-old, and bouncing on his feet, up and down, trying to soothe him. Sarai was next to them, shushing Aroon. Aroon’s tiny mind wailed in chaos, louder than his lungs. Jake and Sarai’s minds were consternated, trying to exude some sort of peace and tranquility for the infant, but also giving off fatigue, tension, a quiet despair that Aroon would never fall back asleep.

  Sam stepped into the room, softly, slowly, singing a lullaby her mother had sung to her, letting it come out of her mind as well as her voice. They all turned to look. Khun Mae, Sarai, Jake, and even little Aroon.

  He cried, and she came closer, and he looked into her eyes, and held out his arms, and reached out with his tiny, magical mind. She took him from Jake, and his urgent cries turned to tired cries, then to sobs, and eventually to sleep. From that day on, all Sam had to do was hold him, and sing to him in her mind, or meditate with him, and little Aroon would quiet, and calm, and find his way back to sleep if it was bedtime. In his happy awake moments, his mind was the most wonderfully unique of any of them, all bright colors and moving shapes and form without meaning. The universe shimmered when she saw it through his eyes.

  Zen mind. Beginner’s mind.

  And through her thoughts, perhaps, little Aroon made a bit more sense of the world around him.

  “His mother was a heroin addict,” Jake told her in the kitchen, that first night. “She was shooting up while she was pregnant with him. He doesn’t self-soothe well. Dopamine, serotonin, opioid – all his neurotransmitter systems are screwed up. Most of these kids were born to mothers that used drugs besides Nexus while they were pregnant, but Aroon had it the worst.”

  Jake. Dr Jacob Foster, to be precise. He was tall and built like a lumberjack. Boyishly good-looking behind that reddish beard. A child psychologist who’d finished his PhD at U of Chicago, three years ago. He’d been at the home for almost two years when Sam had arrived, on a grant from the Mira Foundation to study these children.

  “His mom lives in the village,” Jake went on. “Well, lived there. She gave him up to us when he was born. But then changed her mind a month later. She was a mess. Not fit to take care of him. And he was bonding with the kids here, already. We wouldn’t give him back. And that’s what really heated up all the tension with the villagers.”

  “Where’s the mother now?” Sam asked. Her Nexus was back on a short leash, her mind listening but not transmitting.

  “Dead. Heroin overdose. Suicide, maybe. Her family said we killed her with black magic. Not good.”

  Jake was gentle and kind to the children. He laughed a lot, even as he studied them. He taught them as much as he observed them. His mind gave off a sense of earnestness. His affection for the kids was as clear in his thoughts as it was in his words and deeds. He was curious about “Sunee Martin”, attracted to her, but respectful of the way she raised her mental guard around him, the way she shared everything with the children but almost nothing with the one adult nearby who also had Nexus 5.

  She took him to bed a month after she arrived. He was handsome and smart and funny, but it was his basic goodness that won her over. The gentle way he took a splinter out of Sarai’s finger, the love in his voice and mind when he talked about his parents and little brother, his guileless enthusiasm for making the world a better place, his hope to have kids of his own one day.

  She explained her rules to him. Sex would happen when she initiated. She would always be on top. And it would be just sex, nothing more.

  He complied, mostly. And it was sweet and hot and uncomplicated. She loved the touch of his hands on her skin, the feel of his body beneath her, the passion and pleasure that rose from his mind, the satiated feeling they shared after. She started to look forward to her nights, almost as much as she looked forward to the daytimes playing with and tutoring the children.

  4

  TRANSITIONS

  Wednesday October 17th

  Bobby lay curled up on the floor of the cell, his brow to the cold concrete floor. He was hot everywhere. The cool felt good on his head.

  It all kept replaying like a movie.

  They were going to take a train trip! Then everything had gone crazy and his daddy had picked him up and then he’d been hurt and there were bad men and it was scary and his daddy fallen down with Bobby over his shoulder and it had HURT when Bobby had hit the ground but not as bad as it hurt inside his daddy when those… when those… when those BULLETS had hit him and his daddy had fallen down and been so cold inside and there’d been a puddle all around him…

  And now there was nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all where his daddy had been in his head he was just so very very sad too. He was twelve and he didn’t have a daddy anymore.

  They put him in a little room and left him there and then came to move him and he’d tried to BITE them and tried to HIT them but they’d been too strong and put him in a bad car and moved him to a bad place where a lady had tried to talk to him and make him think she was good but he wanted his daddy and he knew she was with the bad men so SHE WAS BAD TOO.

  And after he’d bitten her on the FACE they’d grabbed him and brought him to another bad place where doctors asked him questions and poked him with needles which HURT and he didn’t like so they’d held him down while they stuck needles in him which made him ANGRY and then he’d slept and it felt like he’d slept a long long time and he’d woken up in another BAD CAR like a cage with his hands tied together like he’d seen on TV when he sneaked a look at the shows he shouldn’t see and he wanted to KICK them because his hands were tied but he couldn’t because he was in a cage.

  Then they’d taken him out and taken him to a big building and he’d fought but they were too strong and they HIT him and they took him in an elevator and down a hall and another and another and then they opened the door…

  …and then he felt someone else’s head. And someone else. And someone else. And someone else besides that.

  And everything changed.

  Ilyana Alexander lay strapped to the gurney, alone in the sterile white room. The sedative dripped into her veins. She was so tired. So very tired. How much more of this could she take? What would they try today? Waterboarding again? Truth drugs? fMRI lie detection?

  Ilya lay there thinking, remembering her father’s stories of Pudovkin’s secret police, the torture chambers, the political disappearances, the creative ways they pulled confessions out of dissidents these days in Russia. All the reasons they’d fled when she was thirteen.

  Most of all, she remembered what her dissident father, who’d been taken by the police more than once, had told her about torture. Everyone breaks eventually, he’d said. Everyone.

  Sharp pain lanced across her skull. Thousand-decibel static overwhelmed her. A roaring crackling filled her hearing. An overwhelming smell of fire was in her nose. Pain sizzled through every nerve cell in her body. Every muscle tensed and she screamed, arching away from the gurney that confined her.

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

  [aegis activated]

  The defenses Rangan had built slid into place. The static receded to a dull roar. Her head ached like she’d been smashed by a twenty-pound sledge. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Her breath came fast.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Rangan.

  Tears ran down her face.

  Then the minds appeared.

  T
hree of them. She looked up from the gurney, and there they were. Two women and a man in business attire, government IDs hanging around their necks.

  They’d never tried this before.

  She felt the agents’ minds, flush with Nexus, looked into their hard eyes, and then they were on her.

  They pushed on her mind in unison. The back doors! The codes! Give them to us! Three strong healthy minds pushed against her tortured, abused, sedated one. Her will buckled under the first onslaught.

  She felt her mouth open. Felt memories of those frantic hours on the plane start to rise.

  Nyet!

  Code structures started to flood into her memory. Her jaw moved. Three of them. Together, they were stronger than she was.

  The back door! She could hack them, shut them down!

  No. A trick. They want you to!

  She used the other half of Rangan’s battle package instead.

  [activate: nd*]

  She sprayed all three of them with the Nexus disruptor they’d used on her, saw and felt them stagger.

  She picked the weakest of them, the woman on the left, still dazed from the disruptor, and followed up with a push to her mind, grabbing for control of her hand with all she had, and punched the woman in the nose with her own fist.

  The woman staggered back, a look of surprise on her face, blood beginning to flow. Ilya’s mouth began to open again as the other two pressed once more.

  Nyet!

  She grabbed control of the stunned woman’s leg and spine and kicked up and jerked back hard. The woman’s body threw her to the ground, backwards, and her head made a satisfying crack against the cold tile floor.

  The other two jerked away, but held on to their wits. Shields had descended over their minds, blocking out the disruptor. Ilya grabbed for the man’s fist, and tried to hit him with it. He fought back, and the other woman helped him. His clenched fist came up slowly, slowly, until it paused in front of his face, vibrating, trembling in the air, muscles straining as Ilya pushed the man’s fist towards his face and he and the woman pushed back. They were two against her one, and they were fresh.