Crux

by Ramez Naam

  But instead there were monks in orange robes, standing outside the white walls with their inlaid designs and their golden-painted posts. Two of the monks were opening the gate through the pagoda-like archway in the wall, beckoning them in, smiles on their faces. Already Kade could feel the mass of minds behind those walls, the compassion and radiance. His heart eased just a little and a smile formed on his lips.

  Feng slowed and the monks reached out their hands to touch him as they passed. Their heads were nearly shaven and their faces wore huge smiles. Kade could feel their minds clearly and feel the awe they felt. He was the one who’d given them Nexus 5. He was the one who’d made the touch of another’s mind possible to millions, not just the most seasoned meditators who’d learned to permanently integrate the older Nexus 3.

  Kade stretched out his arm, his posthuman hand partially reformed by gecko genes. His fingers brushed those of young monks as they passed. His eyes locked on to young eyes. His mind met tranquil thoughts, tinged with youthful excitement at his arrival.

  Then they were through the gates and into the stone courtyard, and Kade’s breath caught. There were dozens more monks in orange robes standing in a ring around them. A hundred, maybe. Most of them just as young as the ones who’d greeted them outside the gate.

  Feng stopped the jeep and Kade climbed out. The minds of the monks caressed his, bathed him in their peace and tranquility. He walked towards one at random, dazed by this. And as one, the monks dropped to their knees on the cobblestones.

  “Bo Tat,” he heard. “Bo Tat.” A hundred voices said it. He didn’t know the words but he could see the meaning of it in their minds, their hundred minds merged as one.

  Bodhisattva. Heroic-minded one. Bringer of light. He who would sacrifice himself, be reborn in suffering, time after time, until every living being reaches enlightenment.

  Kade’s breath came fast. His heart was bursting. So much beauty. Amid all the pain and horrors of the world, there was so much beauty in the world. The way the minds of the monks intertwined, the way they connected to one another.

  He caught an echo of those million minds he could feel when he tried, a thin layer of consciousness encircling the globe, still shapeless, still unformed. Those million minds could be like this, connected, merged, mutually comprehending, more than the sum of their parts. He closed his eyes and the dream pulled at him, tried to tug him out of the here and now.

  Kade opened his eyes, forced himself back to the present, reached out the hundred monks before him with his thoughts. “I am not Bo Tat,” he told them with a laugh. Not enlightened. Not heroic. “I’m a novice. Less than a novice.”

  He turned as he spoke, to take them all in, speak to them all.

  “You are the brave ones,” he told them. “You are the ones risking your lives to shelter us. You are the ones who’ll build a better world. You are the beginning of something much bigger.”

  He felt them smiling, joy and hope rising in unison across a hundred minds.

  Then there was another mind behind him, harder, closed off. He finished the turn and came face to face with the man. Older than the rest. Tall, sharp featured, with dark expressionless eyes. The abbot.

  “Welcome, Kaden Lane.” The voice carried no warmth.

  Kade bowed and lowered his eyes to show respect.

  “Thank you so much for taking us in.”

  The old monk nodded. “I am Thich Quang An. This way. I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  Feng grabbed their packs and they followed him. The monks rose as they left the courtyard. Two of them fell in behind Kade and Feng.

  Quang An led them to a branch in the path. He rattled off something in Vietnamese to the two monks who’d followed them, then turned to Feng. “Dat and Lunh will take you to your rooms to get settled. Kaden, come with me to my quarters. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Feng gave Kade a curious look. Kade shrugged. Feng shrugged back, and then he was off with their packs and the two monks.

  The abbot’s mind was still hard and opaque as he led Kade the other way.

  “Thank you again for taking us in,” Kade said. “I know it’s a risk for you.”

  “It’s nothing,” the man said curtly. His mind was a mask, unyielding.

  “If I’ve offended…” Kade began.

  The old monk snorted.

  They turned a corner, and then another, and kept walking. The monastery was larger than Kade had realized.

  “I know that I’m not a bodhisattva,” Kade said. “Not a holy man.”

  “Do you?” The abbot turned, raising an eyebrow. “Do you really?” His mind was inscrutable.

  “Yes,” Kade said. “I do.”

  “You’ve given great powers to the young and foolish. Dangerous powers. Powers they should have worked for. Powers that even now are being abused, are they not? Some may love you for it. I do not.”

  Chicago flashed through Kade’s mind, a glimpse of wires and then chaos. The news videos of broken bodies strewn about, men and women whose lives had been ended abruptly.

  Powers that even now were being abused.

  Kade opened his mouth, reached for some answer, some way to say that he still believed in people, still believed they’d use this mostly for good, despite the abuses.

  But the abbot had already turned, walking briskly away, and Kade had to rush to catch up to him.

  “Here.” Thich Quang An opened a door, gestured Kade inside before him. “There is something within, for you.”

  Kade bowed, and entered.

  Then something hard jammed itself into Kade’s belly and he gasped. Someone grabbed him from behind and slapped heavy tape over his mouth. He thrashed and tried to kick out but men held him. Then everything went black as they brought something down over his head.

  [activate: bruce_lee full_auto]

  His body dropped low and twisted and for an instant the hands on him were gone.

  [Bruce_Lee: Escape Succeeded!]

  He felt his leg lash out and make contact with a soft target.

  [Bruce_Lee: Attack Succeeded!]

  Someone groaned. Kade’s body twisted again and he felt something whoosh by him.

  [Bruce_Lee: You Dodged One!]

  Then he felt the heat of a body nearby and his fist lashed out and–

  [Bruce_Lee: Attack Succeeded!]

  Oh my fucking God

  pain lanced up his right hand as soft, not-yet-fully-healed bone and raw nerve made contact with something much harder. He curled over, cradling his throbbing hand as the pain brought tears to his eyes. Then something hit him in the head, hard, and the world spun.

  [Bruce_Lee: Dodge Failed L]

  Kade came to slowly. They were carrying him by his ankles and armpits. He could see nothing through whatever was over his head, but something told him he was outdoors again. He tried to yell but he was still groggy, and managed only a weak grunt. The tape around his mouth stifled it.

  Then he felt other minds. Three of them. A handful. A dozen. Monks closing in. They were all around him. Their minds were linked and that linkage encompassed him, showing him what they saw, a dizzying image of himself, black bag over his head, carried by hugely muscled Asian men while three more armed with guns and knives moved with them.

  Two dozen monks. They moved to block the way of the bounty hunters, minds serene, trembling a bit, but calm and determined. A faint breeze ruffled their orange robes. Their faces were still, their mouths set in impassive lines. Not a sound came from them but the rustling of their robes and the soft shuffle of their sandaled feet.

  Kade tried to speak. He tried to reach out to them with his thoughts, but the world still spun.

  Then he saw the gun come up.

  No.

  He focused, forced himself to concentrate.

  Run… He tried to shout it with his mind. It came out as a whimper instead.

  A bounty hunter put the muzzle of his pistol between the eyes of a monk. And Kade recognized him… one of the monks
who’d opened the gate, who’d reached out to touch him… Just a boy, just a boy.

  Run!

  The bounty hunter said something in Vietnamese, and Kade understood it through the minds of the monks.

  “Get out of my way or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  “You cannot have him,” the young monk replied. And Kade saw it from the monk’s perspective, saw the ugly brute of a bounty hunter, the shaved head, the tattoos across his scalp, the bulging muscles, the dark hole in the muzzle of the huge gun, the man’s thick finger on the trigger. He felt it all from the young monk’s perspective, felt his heart beating in his chest, felt the boy’s terror and his awe of Kade and his utter resignation to this moment.

  “Like hell I can’t,” the bounty hunter said.

  His gun boomed and the bullet burst open the boy’s skull and exploded Kade’s world. The shock of it sent Kade’s mind reeling, then rippled through all the other monks. Dimly through the chaos he felt some of them reflexively bring their hands up, their minds recoiling. One leaned over to vomit, and the pain and fear and chaos and loss threatened to overwhelm them all. These weren’t Ananda’s long trained monks. These were just boys!

  The second shot took another monk in the gut. Kade felt the bullet burst his own midsection open and the pain tore through the cobwebs in his mind.

  The monks almost broke. Instead he felt their minds harden, felt them come together. Determined monks moved to drag away their fallen comrades and the collective mass pressed in on the bounty hunters. Three dozen monks. Four dozen monks.

  Then he heard someone screaming in Vietnamese and he saw through a dozen eyes as the abbot rushed into the circle. The words were foreign but the meaning came across.

  What are you doing! You said no monks would be hurt!

  A bounty hunter turned and shot him in the belly. Thich Quang An crumpled forward in pain.

  The assembled monks moved as one, now, gelling into a single organism with a single intent, to pull Kade away from these men. The assemblage pushed forward with a hundred limbs and one mind and Kade could see what was about to happen and it wouldn’t, it couldn’t. No more of these men would die for him.

  He rallied himself, focused, multicast his thoughts to the monks around him, opened up their minds with the backdoor…

  …and the conjoined will of the monks pressed down on his, blocking him with iron force from sending the passcode, from forcing them to abandon him.

  A bullet took a monk in the arm, spinning him around. Another punched through a young monk’s chest. The pain echoed through Kade.

  Then Feng was among them, his mind cool and hard. Time slowed for Kade as Feng’s combat trance touched his own mind, stretching out every instant into a long, deadly span.

  The augmented bounty hunters moved like molasses, lumbering, overly muscled brutes turning in slow motion. The flight paths of unfired bullets shone in Feng’s thoughts, brilliant lines of red light extending from the muzzles of their guns. The bounty hunters’ bodies cast echoes of potential blows and kicks that Feng foresaw.

  Feng moved like a dancer, calm and graceful. He leapt over the plane of fire of a swinging pistol, rolled under another as he converged on the first bounty hunter. His mind was utterly absorbed. This was samadhi. This was meditation. Guns exploded and the bullets were living things in Feng’s mental map, ripping out of the muzzles, shockwaves rippling visibly through the air, flinging themselves at the spots Feng had occupied fractions of a second ago.

  Then Feng reached the first bounty hunter, and the man went down with his neck snapped.

  A stray bullet punched into a monk’s thigh then, and the echoing pain of it snapped Kade out of the trance of Feng’s mind, back into real time. And just like that, the bounty hunters were dead, all of them, the last bodies toppling to the courtyard at Feng’s feet as Kade watched through others’ eyes. Kade lay on the ground where they’d dropped him, as Feng pulled the tape off of him, cut through the bonds on his limbs.

  Kade pushed himself to his feet with his good hand, his body shaking.

  There were bodies around him. A monk was whimpering. He could feel pain radiating from half-a-dozen minds. At least three were dead. Another was dying even now, the boy’s mind falling apart into a thousand little pieces and then into nothing at all. Someone sobbed.

  The pain and loss hit Kade full force. His sight dimmed. His legs felt weak, and he fell back to one knee.

  “No safe place for you,” said the abbot, and coughed. Kade turned to look. The man had blood across his robes, blood coming out of his month. Pain and disgust wafted off of him. “I’m not the only one,” the man said weakly. “You… not a Buddha. An abomination. Maya. Illusion.”

  Feng stepped towards the man and lifted one gun with a scowl, anger radiating from his mind.

  “No!” Kade yelled, his still-healing hand outstretched.

  “What?” Feng turned, confused.

  “Let him go, Feng.”

  “He was gonna give you to Americans. Almost got you killed! Killed all these!” Feng gestured around himself at the dead and dying monks.

  “We’re better than that,” Kade said.

  Feng took a deep breath, exhaled with a shake of his head, and lowered the gun to his side.

  Monks moaned around them, yelled to each other for help, stared at the carnage in their tranquil home in horror.

  Kade closed his eyes wearily, reached out to the abbot’s mind, used his back doors, opened the man to him. And saw.

  “Not safe,” the old man coughed. “Not safe anywhere.” More blood welled out of his mouth. “Many of us… Better… you die. Abomination.”

  Then Thich Quang An, abbot of Ayun Pa, was gone.

  Kade stared around himself at the horror. The ERD again. Their dollars. Their stupid bounty on his head. That had caused this.

  Feng put a hand on his shoulder. “We gotta go,” he said. “Cops soon. Can’t be here.”

  Kade rose to his feet, still dizzy. Go. Yes. They had to go. Somewhere. Anywhere.

  14

  GOOD NIGHT, SHANGHAI

  Friday October 19th

  Ling Shu stared out the rain-streaked window of the high-rise apartment at the vast spectacle of Shanghai. Glowing advertisements rippled across the wet skyscrapers opposite her. Glimmering aurorae of blue and white light shrouded inducements for clothes, for vacations, for cars, for homes. The twenty-story-tall inhumanly alluring face of Zhi Li smiled at Ling, winked at her. It was the image of China’s most famous actress, the supranormal stimulus of her eyes so big and almond-shaped, her skin so porcelain white, her lips so full and red. The image smiled again, winked for only Ling to see, then held up a bottle of some sports drinks her masters wished her to sell.

  Do you think you’re posthuman? Ling asked the giant screen. Do you think that a billion people knowing your face makes you special?

  It doesn’t.

  A surveillance drone cruised by the window, one of Shanghai’s tens of thousands of sky-eyes, moving slowly on its four all-weather rotors, spinning to point its proboscis-like camera at Ling through the rain. Its glowing collision-avoidance light cast red reflections on the rain-slicked glass.

  Ling stared back at the thing through the window and the downpour, reaching out, feeling its primitive mind, the stream of data in and out of it. She could see herself in its data stream. She could twist that if she wanted, lie to its masters, or send it instructions of her own, take control of it.

  She did none of these things.

  The sky-eye stared at her, then rotated its quad-copter frame, canted to one side, and moved on to inspect something else in the great city.

  Hundreds of meters below her, Ling could see more sky-eyes, dozens of them peering into windows and watching the city at ground level. Cars streamed below them in a river of metal and carbon-fiber on the wet streets. Motorcycles and scooters zipped between cars. Horns blared. Pedestrians with umbrellas darted across walkways. The rain fell in hard sheets on all
of them. It sounded a ragged drumbeat against the window where she stood.

  Badadadadadadadum. Badadadadadadadum.

  The heavy cloud and pouring rain blotted out the sun, but the city was alive with artificial light from the giant advertisements, from the windows of buildings, from the red glow of brake lights, from the glowing red lights of the surveillance drones, circling, always circling, over the heads of Shanghai’s citizens. The light reflected off the heavy clouds above, turned the whole sky to a multicolored glow, twenty-four hours a day.

  This city was alive. It was a living thing. The streets were its arteries. The cars and trucks and scooters and pedestrians its blood.

  Ling closed her eyes and she could feel the nerve-signals of the living city, the vast pulsing web of data that interwove everything around her. She could lose herself in the web that linked people and cars and buildings. She could feel the far-off power stations and the local substations, the water pumps and sewage lines, the spy eyes and traffic routing systems and all the rest.

  The city soothed her. She could sink into that hubbub of data, and for a while her own fears and longing and sadness would fade, and she would stop thinking and just feel the sizzling, crackling thoughts of the city around her instead.

  It helped her. It helped her not think about Mother.

  But today was different. Because today was the day she’d set Mother free. Today was the day she’d touch her mommy’s mind again. Her father was going to visit the Quantum Cluster today. Going to visit her mother.

  And part of Ling would be there with him.

  Chen Pang lifted his eyes from his slate as the car pulled up to the chrome and glass building. He slid the device away into his briefcase as his driver Bai opened the armored door of the vehicle. Chen stepped out under the umbrella the clone held aloft for him. The Confucian Fist closed the car door and walked him towards the building. The mirrored glass walls reflected the two of them back to Chen’s eyes. He: a late forties man in suit and overcoat, hair graying at the temples, his face stern – his body a bit thicker in the midsection than in his youth. His bodyguard: young, fit, tall for a Chinese man, in black chauffeur’s garb, face expressionless, umbrella held aloft to shield Chen from the driving rain, the man’s eyes scanning left and right for any threat.