Crux

by Ramez Naam

  Breece opened his eyes again, still down on one knee. The world was quiet suddenly. Breece’s breath came fast and his heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest. He was drenched in sweat and burning hot. Were there any others out there?

  The man he’d punched stirred on the ground next to him, and Breece grabbed him by the hair, and held the man’s own silenced pistol to his face.

  “How many of you?”

  The man coughed. “Three.”

  “Who sent you? What was your mission?”

  The man said nothing.

  “Who sent you?” Breece raised his voice.

  The man shook his head. “They’ll kill me.”

  Breece clamped his hand over the man’s mouth, lowered the gun, and obliterated the man’s knee cap with a single shot.

  The man screamed into his hand.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Breece whispered to him. “The only question is whether you want to die fast or slow.”

  He waited for the man’s muffled screams to subside, then put the tip of the silencer against his other knee.

  “Ready to talk?”

  The man nodded miserably, tears flowing down his face.

  “Who sent you?” Breece asked again, pulling his hand off the man’s mouth.

  The man closed his eyes and panted for a moment, and Breece thought he’d have to shoot the other knee. Then the assassin opened his eyes. “Zarathustra,” he said. “I’m PLF.”

  Well, well, well. He hadn’t thought the old man had it in him.

  He got the rest of the assassin’s story, and then it was time to go.

  He put the silencer tip against the downed man’s forehead. “Any last message you want me to deliver?” he asked his would-be killer.

  “Please,” the man pleaded, eyes locking with Breece’s in fear. “I’m PLF, like you. Let me live. You’ll never see me again. Please, man. I wanna live forever!”

  Breece thought of his parents, their bodies decomposing just yards from here. “We don’t all get what we want,” he told the man. And then he pulled the trigger.

  26

  ASIAN TRAVELS

  Wednesday October 24th

  It took Kevin Nakamura twenty-eight hours to reach Saigon disguised as a civilian. He could have come faster via military transport, but that would risk DOD finding out about his mission. Which CIA was adamant could not happen. He pondered this as the cab took him towards the nicer end of town, to his apartment. He paid the taxi fare, took his entirely innocuous luggage, and rode the elevator to his floor.

  At the door hidden biometric sensors identified him. Anyone who failed that identification would soon find themselves in for some very rude questions.

  Inside the apartment he found the gear, cunningly hidden, all there. He found himself smiling, whistling as he inspected it, found everything ready and top notch.

  And out there, in the countryside, and under the waters off the coast. Resources the DOD and DHS and Congress didn’t know CIA had. Resources that even the White House might not know about. Resources he’d never known existed, and that he had access to now.

  That alone told him how important this task was.

  Will the White House know when I’ve snatched Lane out from under the ERD? he wondered.

  Doubtful.

  What did that say about his mission?

  Nakamura pulled the small Toyota four-wheeler out of the garage an hour later, loaded with fuel, food, cash, and hidden weapons. This would be his mobile command center, taking him wherever he needed to go to find Sam. To find Lane, he corrected himself.

  The wind blew through his hair as he drove into the early evening traffic. Saigon was alive in the way that only developing world cities ever were. The traffic was complete chaos, cars going to and fro, scooters and tuk-tuks racing between them, pedestrians playing a deadly game of Frogger with the vehicular traffic.

  Sidewalk vendors had their fires going, offering noodle soups, roasted corn, spicy sandwiches, whole birds cooked on spits. Music blared from a dozen directions. Lights were coming on in shops. Brilliant signs over storefronts were starting to glow in a riot of colors. Sidewalk entrepreneurs sold watches, slates, phones, belts, shoes, drugs, all shouting out their offers, competing with one another for the attention of the crowd.

  Nakamura smiled. He felt alive in the field. He didn’t belong in DC, taking briefings or writing reports. Out here, where chaos rules, where his wits and his skill were all that stood between life and death, that’s where he was meant to be.

  Six hours later, well after midnight, he was in the hills above Ayun Pa.

  Three monasteries attacked. Two of them burned to the ground.

  And this one, Ayun Pa. Local police reports – cracked by CIA – showed nine dead, four assailants and five monks. No women dead. Not in any of the three monasteries.

  Nakamura left the four-wheeler, activated his chameleonware suit, and hiked up in the darkness to look down onto the monastery. His pupils dilated in the moonlight. Enhanced rod and cone density sucked up every available photon. The scene was leached of color, but as bright as day to his eyes. That thrill of the mission, of being on the edge of danger, of discovery, of action, tickled up his spine again.

  The monastery complex was walled, roughly oval, with a handful of buildings, a wide open courtyard, two entrances large enough for vehicles to come through.

  The autopsies revealed that one man had died from bone fragments driven into his brain. Two had died from broken necks. The last from a crushed larynx.

  Sam could have done that, Nakamura thought. She always liked to go for the throat.

  He pulled up orbital reconnaissance photos of the site in his mind’s eye. Retinal implants superimposed them on his vision. Remote Vietnam was not a high priority target for the National Reconnaissance Office, but with more than three hundred recon birds circling in low earth orbit, now, and most of them taking frames five hundred miles square, every patch of the planet was photographed at least once an hour.

  Those photos had revealed two hard-top four-wheel drive vehicles hidden in the brush, off-road, a few hundred yards from the back entrance. They’d been there for three hours before the shootings.

  Then, next frame. An open-top jeep is now in the courtyard. Dozens of monks out there as well.

  Next frame, almost an hour later. All three vehicles are gone. Multiple bodies lie prone.

  The police had found tire tracks, but no vehicles. The assailants had run.

  Three monasteries attacked. They were bounty hunters, he was sure, seeking the ten million dollar reward ERD had offered for Lane’s live capture.

  Nakamura tried to imagine the scene as it had played out here. The bounty hunters, closing in on Lane, somehow knowing where he would be, then surprised to find Sam at his side. Four of them dead in seconds. The other two, in the trucks, frightened, taking off to save their own skins.

  Yes, that could have happened.

  But most importantly, where was Sam now? How would she think? No. How would Lane think?

  Nakamura closed his eyes, thought back to everything he knew about Lane. He’d spent eight weeks with the boy, two or three hours a day, training him. Lane had been a hopeless liar, too nervous, too earnest. Not a natural-born deceiver. Not a killer, either. Not a monster. But someone who resented the ERD, hated it for what it had done to him and others he loved. Hated it enough to be willing to coerce Sam, turn her into his personal bodyguard.

  Nakamura had gone over everything CIA had on Lane. He knew this boy. Lane was an idealist, in way over his head. If he was here in Vietnam, then his pact with the Chinese had evaporated. Either Shu’s death had canceled it, or Lane himself had backed out, running from them.

  Yes. That was right. Lane wouldn’t willingly serve the Chinese either. He’d want to be free, free to pursue his idealistic pursuits.

  He tried to imagine being Lane. Protected by monks. But on the run. He’d know about the bounty on his head, the attacks on the othe
r monasteries, the monks dying to protect him.

  How would he react? Seek out another monastery?

  Oh no. Lane would be scared, but his idealism would be stronger. He wouldn’t want any more blood on his hands.

  He’d find another way, put as much distance between himself and the monks as possible, reduce the risk to them as much as he could. And the opposite of a remote monastery… was a big city.

  27

  HEAVEN

  Wednesday October 24th

  Kade slept, rose, and worked. To catch the ones behind the assassination attempt and the Chicago bombing, he needed a new agent.

  He started with the scaffolding of his previous agents. Code that scanned for other Nexus-running minds, that embedded itself in memory files and sensory dumps that Nexus users traded back and forth. Code that used the back doors he and Rangan had built to silently copy itself into each new mind it encountered, that hid itself from process listings and cloaked its CPU and memory usage. Libraries to rummage through the mind it entered, to alert Kade if that mind matched certain parameters, to send him back snippets of memories, contents of directories, parameters pulled from the Nexus OS.

  What differed from his previous viruses was the search pattern. He wasn’t looking for thoughts of Rangan or Ilya, here. He wasn’t looking for a running coercion program, or even the source code – he already had agents searching for that. He was looking for a mind that knew about such code, that knew about a particular piece of such code.

  The OS version number was the best hook he had. Nexus OS version 0.72. If someone saw it, thought of it, had code in their mind that referred to it, Kade wanted to know. He added other search criteria – memories of violence, of explosions, thoughts of the PLF. He combined them into a rough model, giving weights to each to produce an overall confidence level.

  Kade worked for two days, iterating on it, testing it in various scenarios, while Feng brought him food and stretched and did his martial arts exercises and read paper books bought from street vendors.

  When he couldn’t work anymore, when his eyelids grew heavy from fatigue, when his mind started to wander, he felt the temptation to reach into his own brain, to push his neurons further, to artificially stimulate himself to stay awake and working.

  Instead Kade closed his eyes, lay back and tapped into the white noise of a million Nexus-running minds, the surf of consciousness bathing the planet, the stuff of mind that would one day self-assemble itself into something that truly thought and felt, that could solve the problems that solitary human minds couldn’t. And then he slept, filled with hope.

  On the third day he finished his work on the new agent, finished every test he could think to run on it, finished fixing the bugs he’d found.

  It was time to let it loose.

  They went down into the club together on Friday night. “Going downstairs to Heaven!” Feng laughed. “Down to heaven!” Feng gestured with his hand. “Good joke, yeah?” Feng elbowed Kade gently.

  Kade snorted and shook his head.

  They looked like any other pair of tourists, Kade with his long black extensions and the biological circuit tattoos crawling up his arms, Feng with his short hair bleached blond and the barcode he found so hilarious across the back of his neck.

  It was Friday night here. Friday morning back home. A hip-looking Vietnamese girl in a silver halter dress – with silver hair and silver eye makeup – took their money at the door. A massively muscled bouncer looked them over with a menacing glare while she did. Kade could feel Feng struggling to restrain a laugh.

  Stay cool, Kade told his friend.

  He’s so big! Feng laughed into Kade’s mind. I’m SCARED!

  And Kade laughed out loud despite himself.

  He felt the door girl’s mind brush against his as she smiled and stamped their wrists. He felt the bouncer’s glowering mind touch his as well, felt the agent he’d coded slip into each of them and start scanning, looking for others to infect.

  Beyond the entrance, the club was a sea of flashily dressed twenty-somethings illuminated in pulsing, strobing lights. Bodies dressed in next to nothing moved to pounding flux beats. Their minds were alive, reaching out to Kade’s, reaching out to each other, opening for his agents. Tendrils of artificial fog snaked across the floor, twined themselves around tanned legs. The walls were white with faux columns and pearly gates. The ceiling was a glowing blue with white fluffy clouds flowing across its digital surface. Scantily clad Vietnamese waitresses carrying trays of drinks made the rounds to the tables around the periphery of the dance floor.

  Feng’s eyes were everywhere, tracing the exposed curves of a waitress, or the gyrating form of a dancer, then snapping back to scan the crowd for threats, alert and aroused at once.

  A shirtless Vietnamese boy, not more than twenty, danced by them, his face exulting, his hairless chest covered in sweat. His mind touched Kade’s, and Kade was suddenly elsewhere – a flat in London. This boy was being ridden, Kade realized, leasing himself out to a banker a continent away, letting someone pay him to take a short vacation in his body.

  Two nearly identical Vietnamese go-go dancers in silver hot pants, silver knee-high boots, silver angel wings, and tiny silver pasties covering their nipples moved in perfect sync on the stage, silver-streaked hair flinging around their heads in unison, sweat glistening on their taut stomachs and lean thighs as they pranced and spun and fanned their Nexus-controlled wings and set the crowd on fire. Between them a muscular Vietnamese DJ in mirrored shades and a tight black T-shirt held one hand above his head, then dropped it down in time to a massive boom in the music.

  Flashbulbs burst from every angle, blinding Kade, inundating the club in white, and then there was a new mind pushing through the Nexus chaos of the club, amplified by the Nexus repeaters in the walls and ceilings. The NJ. The Nexus jockey. She projected her mind onto theirs like a song, projected it like a dance, in time to the music, and the crowd roared its approval.

  Kade blinked the flash blindness away and then he could see her on the stage, next to the DJ. Her dress was a mirror ball molded to her body. Her smiling lips glittered a metallic ruby red. Her lashes were silver and iridescent. Her hair was long and platinum blond, woven through with brilliant glowing strands of blue and green and red that pulsed to the music. She opened her mouth and sang, a pure wordless note of glory, and raised her silver gloved hands up and out and over the crowd.

  And her mind… Her mind was dance. It was pure joy in motion. It was ecstasy. He felt the urge to move to her rhythm, to feel her emotions. He looked around himself and the crowd wasn’t chaos anymore, wasn’t a mob. It was a single living thing moving in time, exulting in the music and the lights and the pure ecstatic glory the Nexus jockey was pumping out of herself. From her perspective he saw the club, and it was heaven in her eyes, angelic beings dancing atop the clouds, exulting in the glory of some futuristic paradise. The amplifiers boosted her signal, let her project her song and sights and ecstasy to the entire club, and the crowd loved her for it, roared their approval in mind and voice.

  Kade turned to find Feng, and his friend was there, grinning. And Kade was grinning, and then he was dancing, as he hadn’t danced since this whole nightmare began. And even Feng was swaying side to side, smiling, enjoying himself, eyes still flashing over breasts and hips and then searching, searching for any threat.

  Kade danced, and as he danced, he let his virus do its work. Minds brushed against his, dancers, waitresses, go-go dancers, the DJ, the NJ… He felt them dancing, felt them boosting and twisting their own neurochemicals, drugging themselves into bliss or psychedelia, absorbing the NJ’s thoughts as they did, retransmitting their own, adding to the collective vibe. The whole crowd was beaming, grinning, smiles showing on faces all around. Friendly minds offered Kade Nexus apps to get himself higher – neurotransmitter modulators with names like DigitalEcstasy, SimTHC, and CyberAcid – but he passed with a smile each time. He was working, and he was high enough from the NJ and
the crowd around him.

  His agent infiltrated every mind that touched his. One of them would upload a memory of this night, or connect over the net to touch the mind of a friend back home, or go online to download a new software patch or a new app. And then his agent would spread.

  Six degrees of separation, Kade thought. In days his new agent would reach every corner of the Nexus world.

  The brunette was there, from the restaurant, dancing with her friends, a drink in her hand. She met his eye and smiled and he felt her mind brush against his. And oh, how nice it would be… But he couldn’t. And so he smiled and then turned away, pulled his eyes and his mind away from her, put all of himself into the music and the rhythm and movement of the crowd and his body and the song and dance and hallucinatory vision of the NJ.

  Kade danced and danced and danced, until he was exhausted and covered in sweat and the agent he’d unleashed was already on its way to other continents. Then he stumbled out of the club, Feng at his side.

  “Being your friend, fun sometimes!” Feng laughed as he pulled Kade along behind him.

  And Kade laughed too, happy, satisfied with a strong night’s work.

  28

  THE FAMILY

  Wednesday October 24th

  Breece jogged down the hill to the Lexus, slowing as he approached the car. He checked for any movement from beyond it, where he’d crushed the third man up against the SUV. Nothing. He peered under the car cautiously, until he could make out what was left of the man. It was a gruesome sight. The assassin’s head and upper body weren’t visible, crushed between the Lexus and the SUV. One arm dangled limply down to meet a lower body splattered with blood, legs bent at impossible angles. He was definitely dead.

  Breece rose and opened the driver-side door of the car. The vehicle was marked now, just like his phones, just like the identities all three objects were registered to. He had to stop the damage there, stop them from retrieving DNA samples, stop any chance of the authorities finding out Breece’s real identity, cut off any path that might unmask Hiroshi and Ava and the Nigerian.