Crux

by Ramez Naam

  But Claire was so suspicious, always spouting conspiracy theories about Warren’s death. Anne did a better job comforting her than Holtzmann could.

  His inbox had scores of messages, two of them of note.

  Item one: Rangan Shankari had broken, around 3am. He described an ingenious system of backdoors in the Nexus binaries and hacks in the compiler to place them there. And he’d given them the passwords.

  Holtzmann frowned, wondering what they’d done to finally break Shankari. The electrical shocks? The waterboarding? The Nexus-dosed interrogators?

  And now that DHS had the back doors, what would they use them for? Spying on the thoughts of Nexus users? Preventative mind control? Political surveillance? Manipulation of those thoughts?

  “Why?” he asked aloud. “Why did you leave those back doors in there? Didn’t you see the danger? How could you be so stupid?”

  Item two: The forensic report from the Chicago bombing. The blast site tested positive for Nexus. Samples were en route to Holtzmann’s lab now.

  Holtzmann would have no choice but to process those samples. He’d hand them off to Wilson, with instructions to come to him and him only with the results.

  Holtzmann sat back, then started a new file, titled Personnel Assessment, and started listing everyone who could have taken Nexus out of the secure fridge in his lab.

  Holtzmann crawled into bed hours later. The pain was back, an aching deep in his bones. His muscles were cramping. His mouth was dry. His heart was beating fast. He had all the blankets pulled over him, was sweating, but he still felt so cold all over.

  All he wanted was another little opiate surge. Just for the pain. The doctors had cut him off too soon. He just needed a little bit more, for a little bit longer, until he was fully healed.

  I nearly died last night, some part of himself said.

  Just a little one, just once more, the other part of him answered.

  He had the interface up when he heard the garage door open. He lay paralyzed in bed as he listened to Anne ascend the stairs to the bedroom.

  “Sorry I was out so late,” she told him as she disrobed. “Claire’s in a really bad space. She’s not moving on.”

  Holtzmann made a sympathetic sound.

  Anne slid into bed beside him. “She’s convinced it was a cover-up, that Warren was killed to keep him from testifying.”

  Holtzmann stared longingly at the interface in his mind. If he did just a small dose, would Anne notice?

  She curled up against him and stopped talking for a while. Holtzmann forced himself to breath slowly and regularly, to not touch the interface in his mind’s eye.

  If I sound like I’ve fallen asleep…

  “Martin?” Claire asked.

  Holtzmann said nothing, and finally Claire stopped. A few minutes later she rolled over, towards her side of the bed.

  He waited until her breathing turned regular, and he was sure she was asleep.

  Then Martin Holtzmann dialed up a small dose, and finally he felt OK again.

  He rose early, brought Anne coffee in bed with a smile, put on his game face as he readied for work.

  “You seem better today,” she noticed.

  “I feel better.”

  “You were dead to the world when last night. Do you remember me coming to bed? Our conversation?”

  He cocked his head quizzically. “Yeah… Something about Claire, right?”

  Anne smiled tolerantly at him, and then they were off to their respective offices.

  The day was a succession of nearly useless meetings. He sat in on a planning session related to the Nexus back doors, vetoed a proposal to use “aversive stimuli” to motivate Nexus children to purge the drug, got briefed on the Nexus vaccine development, which was looking promising, and on the proposed Nexus cure, which wasn’t looking promising at all.

  Through the day, his list of potential Nexus thieves was never far from his mind.

  Means, motive, and opportunity, he thought.

  Twenty-two people had access to the fridge in the wet lab, giving them the means.

  Any of them could have worked a late night, providing opportunity. Access logs could show who had been in the lab when. But he didn’t have access to those logs or videos. Only Internal Affairs did, and he certainly didn’t want them digging.

  Motive, then. What was the motive for the inside man? Hatred of the President? Money? Blackmail?

  He played it out in his head at the end of the day, as he walked to his car in the dark but now heavily secured parking garage. Which of those twenty-two were ideologues? Who needed money? Who’d bought a flashy car recently, moved into a bigger house?

  Holtzmann frowned as he opened his car and placed his cane and bag in the passenger seat. He kept pondering his list of suspects as the car cleared the security perimeter and turned onto the freeway on autodrive. And so he didn’t see the ripple of distortion in his rear-view mirror. Didn’t hear a rustle of cloth as the man who’d been hidden in the back of the car came up to a seated position, a barely visible blur against the faux-leather seats and the retreating highway lights behind them.

  “Martin.”

  Holtzmann jumped in shock. The voice was distorted, mechanical. His heart slammed into his throat. He scrambled for the handle to the door, then heard the chunk as the car locked itself.

  Stupid man. If they’d come for him, he was dead already. Nothing he could do.

  “Relax, Martin,” said the deep, anonymized voice again.

  Holtzmann looked into the mirror to see the face of his killer. The figure in the back seat was just a shadow, a barely perceptible distortion. A man in a high-tech chameleonware suit, then. A professional.

  Holtzmann swallowed hard, wishing he’d told Anne the truth, that he’d trusted her.

  Then the figure behind him raised a hand, and Holtzmann closed his eyes to wait for the killing blow.

  16

  ONLY FORWARD

  Friday October 19th

  Feng pulled Kade along behind him to the jeep, then climbed into the driver’s seat. Monks followed them with canisters of fuel and liters of water. Even in the midst of shock and sorrow, they did what needed doing. Like soldiers.

  Feng leaned out of the jeep to place a hand on the shoulder of a monk.

  “Thank you.” He put his respect into it, beamed it out of his mind to theirs, one soldier to another. They bowed. Then Feng put the pedal down, and he and Kade were off.

  The first priority was to be gone. Feng pushed the jeep hard and fast down the dirt road. Brilliant green trees and brush raced past them, contrasting with the red earth of the bare ground they drove on. This was the bottleneck, the one road up or down from Ayun Pa.

  The tires skidded just a bit as he found the maximum lateral acceleration they’d take. Every sound of every pebble, every twig, every bit of give and play of the tires on the road loomed loud in his mind. He absorbed the sounds, the feel of the wheel, the response of the jeep to his acceleration. The vehicle became an extension of his body. He felt Kade grab hold with his one good hand as a sharp turn pulled him out to the side. Feng spun the wheel back the other way as the road hairpinned, sending red dirt and loose scree flying. The smile came to his face of its own accord. He was alive, and free, and totally absorbed in their mad dash down this hillside road.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were off a different side road, the jeep hidden in a copse of date palms. They’d heard no sirens, but Feng intended to take no chances.

  “We wait here till dark,” he told Kade.

  Kade nodded. “It’s the back door,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Feng asked.

  “I’ve been sitting here thinking about the bounty, Feng. Why do they want me so badly? A ten million dollar bounty? And alive? They’ve already convicted me in absentia. They could just kill me.”

  Feng turned and looked at his friend. “So what’re you saying?”

  Kade looked back. “They want the back door.”

&nbs
p; Feng thought this over. “It’s a dangerous thing.”

  Kade nodded. “It’s funny, we put it in there as a safeguard against the ERD, so that if they misused Nexus we could stop them…”

  “And now they trying to get it from you,” Feng said.

  “I could close it,” Kade replied. “I have the code. Another bot. A virus. It’d spread from person to person, close the back doors anywhere it found them.”

  “So why don’t you?” Feng asked.

  “Because there are people I have to stop, Feng.”

  He felt thoughts flit through Kade’s mind. Images. A glimpse of wires and a flashing red light in that building in Chicago, before white noise and then – nothing.

  Feng mulled that over. “Maybe somebody else deal with those things?” he told Kade. “Not just you?”

  Kade shook his head. “I made those abuses possible. I have to stop them if I can.”

  They sat in the car and waited for night. The palm trees shaded them from the worst of the sun, but it was still brutally hot.

  The news brought word of a fire in a remote mountain monastery. Chu Mom Ray. No fatalities were reported.

  “You saved my life back there,” Kade said.

  Feng turned and grinned at him. “Not the first time.”

  Kade laughed. “No. Not the first.” He shook his head. “At this rate, not the last either.”

  Feng shrugged. “It’s what Su-Yong would want. Save the boy, she said.”

  Kade nodded.

  “And you’re my friend, Kade,” Feng said, grinning again. “First one I ever chose for myself!”

  Kade smiled at that, turned his head, and took Feng’s hand.

  “Thank you.”

  “Hey, don’t get all mushy now!” Feng joked. “I just don’t have so many friends I can lose them, is all.” But it was long moments before he let go.

  “Why’d that monk sell you out?” Feng eventually asked Kade.

  Kade shook his head again. “I’ve upset the order of things. It used to be that only the most experienced meditators could master Nexus and keep it in their minds indefinitely. But now anyone can permanently integrate it. And the young monks pick up Nexus 5 faster than the old ones. They don’t need the old ones as teachers. I’ve undermined their authority, inverted the hierarchy.”

  “Fuck hierarchy,” Feng said.

  Kade laughed aloud. It felt good to hear it. Feng smiled in return.

  “Aren’t you a soldier, Feng? You grew up with hierarchy.”

  Feng was the one to look away this time, his thoughts far away.

  “Yeah. Never liked it.”

  “Tell me,” Kade said. “What it was like.”

  Feng watched a palm frond sway in the wind. Kade had asked before. Feng knew his friend meant well, but it wasn’t something he wanted to go back to.

  “Please,” Kade said.

  Feng sighed. It had been a rough few days. Kade needed something. Needed some perspective. Needed some hope. He leaned back.

  “My first memory was pain.” Feng spoke quietly, but he opened his mind, let Kade feel it, let him remember it with him.

  “I was four, maybe. Big. Strong. They engineer us to grow up fast. But not so much mind, yeah? Get big and strong fast, but smart just as slow.

  “I was doing rings, yeah? Swinging one to the next, like a monkey.”

  “Then I fell. No mat. No net. Just ground. It hurt. Bloody knee. Nothing bad, but I was four. Just knew it hurt.” He shook his head, and Kade felt it coming, the real pain.

  “Instructor comes over, and he says, ‘Get up!’ And I say ‘It hurts!’ So he kicks me across the field. And now I’m screaming. And all my brothers. They all stop. Staring at me.”

  Feng’s fists were clenched. He was that little boy again. Kade felt his stomach knotting up. Felt the pain and fear and incomprehension.

  “Instructor walks over, and he says, ‘Get up!’ And I’m crying, cuz it hurts. Hurts real bad now. And I say ‘Can’t! It hurts!’ and he says ‘I’ll show you what hurts!’ and he kicks me again.”

  Kade felt sick to his stomach. His face was hot.

  “Instructor walks over one more time. He says ‘Get up! Get up, dog!’ And this time I try, but something’s broken inside. I fall down. But I know, I stay there, he’ll hurt me worse… So I crawl. It takes me long time. Hurts so bad. Feels like an hour. But I make it over to rings again.”

  Feng was breathing heavily now, his chest heaving as he remembered. His face was flushed with it.

  “And I try to get up, and it hurts so bad and I fall down. And I try to get up again and I pull up on the pole and get to where I can stand. I try to go up the ladder. But I slip. Arm not working. And I fall down again.

  “And now I know I can’t say I can’t. So I say, ‘Help me!’”

  Feng shook his head, and leaned out the jeep to spit. He pulled back upright, wiped the spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand. The wind rustled the date palms softly overhead. A bird called out somewhere near them.

  After a moment, Feng went on, softly, more slowly.

  “So I say, ‘Help me!’ and instructor says, ‘This what happens to boys who ask for help.’ And he kicks me, again and again. And I ask him to stop and I try to curl up and he just keeps on kicking me. ‘You see that?’ he asks my brothers. ‘You see what happen if you’re weak?’”

  Kade bowed his head at the horror of it. A four year-old boy.

  Feng’s body was vibrating now, his hands clenched around the wheel. He had to hold himself back from breaking it in two.

  “They take me away to hospital. Two months. I’m a lesson for all my brothers.” Feng snorted. “Some lesson.”

  “I’m sorry, Feng,” Kade said. “I… I’m sorry to make you relive that pain.”

  Feng snorted again. “Yeah. Pain. You know why I tell you that?”

  Kade shook his head, his mind still reeling from what Feng had shared.

  “Because I want you to understand. You think Nexus making so many bad things happen. Your fault, yeah? But this all happens to me before Nexus. Nexus not bad. Just some people bad. You understand?”

  Kade said nothing for a few seconds. Then slowly, he nodded. They sat in silence for a while.

  “When did you first meet Su-Yong Shu?” Kade asked him.

  Feng nodded. “All my childhood, lots of pain. Physical pain. They rig us with implants when I’m six.” His hand went to the back of his head. “Direct nerve stimulus, yeah? Pure pain. Pure.”

  Feng shook his head, put his hand in his lap again. “They use pain to punish us, discipline us. Use pain when we’re too slow, too weak, when we miss targets shooting, when we lose fights sparring, when we don’t clean our guns fast enough, hold our breath long enough, make our beds neat enough.

  “All they teach us is how to fight, how to kill. Weapons. Tactics. Strategy. Planes. Helicopters. Cars. Kung fu. Knives. Guns. All that stuff. For fun, we get war movies, fight movies.” Feng laughed. “Those we like.

  “They make us fight each other, fist and feet and knives. And other kind of fights. Compete with our brothers. Whoever slowest, or weakest, or stupidest, more pain. And shame in front of other brothers. No dinner. No bed sometimes – sleep standing up.

  “But doesn’t work so good after a while. We stop caring about pain. They built us too well. We get wild. Start to talk back. Show off to other brothers.”

  Feng shook his head again. “They punish us more. One boy dies. I probably gonna die, if I keep on the way I am. Instead, I meet her.” Su-Yong Shu.

  “She came first time when I’m fifteen. Full grown. Stronger than any instructor. But wild. Not a very good soldier. Whole program, down the drain. Soldiers no good. They want her help, yeah? To control us. Make us better slaves.

  “First time I ever see her… I’m being punished. Insubordination. So, pain stim. Which means I feel pain everywhere. All over, inside, fire pain, sharp pain, beating pain, all pain, all at once. And I’m curled up trying to figh
t it, trying show my brothers I’m tough, when she walks in.”

  Kade saw it through Feng’s eyes. The barracks. The institutional gray walls and cold concrete floor. The metal frame bunk beds with the rolled-up olive green blankets. The drab brown footlocker that held every possession Feng had. The sergeant instructor pressing the button on the remote that sent Feng’s nervous system into a primeval hell. The door opening. Shu, standing there, in white. A formidable man in a dark uniform next to her. His face an ugly scowl, his shoulders bearing insignia. An officer. A colonel.

  “Not just a colonel. The colonel. Man in charge of whole program. And she says to him ‘Stop! Stop this!’ And he says ‘No. They’re not human. We teach them to behave through pain.’”

  Feng smiled grimly.

  “Then she slaps him. Hard. And she says, ‘This man is more human than you are.’ And she walks up to the sergeant instructor and yanks remote from his hand and turns it off.”

  Feng shook his head in admiration.

  Kade seemed surprised. “She could do that?”

  Feng nodded. “This was maybe two years after she… you know. After she goes digital. After ascension. She’s first true posthuman. And she’s Chinese and making all kinds of discoveries the big bosses like. She thinks she can do anything.”

  Feng shrugged, “Me, I just collapse, not sure what to do. Then she asks me, ‘What’s your name?’ and I say ‘Confucian Fist D-42, sir!’”

  “’No,’ she says. ‘Your name.’” Feng laughed, then stopped talking for a while, let Kade soak up the shock he felt in that moment. A name. The idea of it!

  “My whole life, they taught me that I’m not human. I’m a clone. A treaty violation. I’m a number. I do what I’m told. Su-Yong, she treats me like a human being.

  “She changes everything. Next day, colonel is out. Pain stim remotes gone. Training changes. We start to learn more science, politics, history. We get Nexus – what you call Nexus – in our brains.