Crux

by Ramez Naam

  He tapped on the car’s center console, navigated the menus, touched a corner that was blank, and let it scan his retina. A new menu appeared, with hidden options.

  Self-destruct. He set it for a ten minute countdown, or when triggered from his phone.

  From the trunk he pulled out his go bag with gear, phones, gun, and fresh false identities. Then he grabbed an enzyme bomb as well.

  He took off up the hill again, the enzyme bomb in his still-gloved hand. The landscape was quickly growing darker in the post-sunset twilight. He gained the top of the hill, found the two assailants he’d killed. He pulled the ceramic knife out of one man’s throat, cleaned it on the man’s jacket, and slid it back into his ankle sheath.

  Then he stood back from the area, brought the cylindrical enzyme bomb up, pulled the pin on it, and tossed it at the spot where he’d been hit. It rolled to a stop against one of the bodies. A half second later a dozen tiny ports opened on the soda-can-sized cylinder, hissing out a dense white fog of DNA- and protein-degrading enzymes. With any luck they’d erase any biological traces he’d left.

  Breece pulled out his phone again, sent an encrypted message to Hiroshi.

  [Am safe. Stay clear of area. Your phone now burned as well. Meet at rendezvous.]

  Then he dropped down behind a headstone, looked around it at the Lexus, pulled up the menu, and moved the self-destruct time up to now.

  Three hundred yards away, a solenoid opened a canister of compressed oxygen, venting it into the gas tank of the car, hyperpressuring it. Seconds later, a score of tiny penetrators poked holes in the fuel tank, sending aerosolized gasoline into the car’s interior and into the air around it, turning the vehicle into an unexploded fuel-air bomb. Breece counted down: 3… 2… 1…

  The car erupted in a fireball that lit up the twilight sky. The heat of it warmed his face. Any evidence left in that car was now vaporized.

  Breece pulled the batteries from his phone, turned, and slowly crept down the back side of the hill. It was a long way to the rendezvous.

  He made it to Houston eighteen hours later, wearing his spare clothes, his hair freshly dyed black, a car rented under a fresh identity.

  He drove a two-block circuit around the rendezvous point, looking for any sign that his team had been compromised, that FBI or ERD were waiting for him inside the flat. He couldn’t call his team. By mutual agreement, none of them knew each other’s backup identities. All their primary identities had been burned by his presence at the cemetery.

  The problem was one of linkability. His phone was linked to the site by its presence there when the deaths happened. His team’s previous identities were linked by the contact their phones had had with his in the past. All of those identities were connected. Break one, and you could break the others. So all those fictional names and bank accounts and ID cards had to go.

  He parked the car two blocks away and ate in the restaurant across the street from the flat while he casually studied the area around him.

  Was one of the other diners an FBI watcher? That electrician’s van – did it have a mobile listening post? That young couple walking down the street holding hands – were they enhanced ERD operatives waiting for someone to walk up to that door?

  He stretched the lunch out, ordered a beer that his genetically upregulated alcohol dehydrogenase levels would chew up long before it could get him buzzed. The other diners paid and left. The electricians returned to their van and drove away. The young couple didn’t come back.

  In the window of the flat, there was movement. A good sign. If there were an FBI or ERD ambush in there, they’d be utterly still, totally undetectable, waiting for their mark to make himself known.

  He paid the bill and walked across the street to the flat.

  No one fired on him as he approached. At the door he put his right hand around the pistol in his pocket and rapped out the knock with the knuckles of his left. Slow-fast-fast-fast-slow-slow.

  The door swung open and his fingers tensed around the pistol and then there was Ava in front of him, as gorgeous and cool as ice as ever.

  “Took you long enough,” she said, one eyebrow raised.

  Breece grinned and swept her up in his embrace, twirled her around, sending her long dark hair flying. The ice melted and she laughed and kissed him.

  They were all here. Hiroshi, the brilliant telecoms engineer turned hacker, his Japanese face careworn, his long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. The Japanese understood the future. They embraced it. This man more than most. Breece had no problem admitting that Hiroshi was his intellectual superior, might always be. He counted himself lucky for the man’s friendship over the years.

  The Nigerian, tall, leanly muscular, quiet – but apt to sudden smiles and bursts of deep bellowing laughter. Their weapons specialist. A man of deep courage and conviction, who’d put his life on the line for the cause many a time.

  And Ava. The chameleon. The woman who could blend in anywhere, persuade anyone of anything. Smart. Fearless. Gorgeous. Unflappable. The woman he loved.

  They hugged and smiled, and slapped each other on the back, and then gathered in the kitchen. It was good to be back with his people again.

  He opened his mind to theirs and they to his. Through the Nexus link he showed them the attack at the cemetery and they showed him their rushed trip to rescue him. They’d been on their way to risk their lives for him, heading to his location expecting to find a DHS team between them and him. He loved these three. He’d die for them if he had to.

  “So Zara decided to off you,” Hiroshi said. “Why?”

  Breece shrugged. “He’s always been a control freak. He’s always wanted to pick the missions, move cautiously. We’ve upset that. The truth is, we don’t need him, and that’s a threat to his power.”

  “What does he know about this mission?” Ava asked.

  Breece shook his head. “Nothing. Same as Chicago.”

  “We need to deal with him,” Hiroshi said.

  Breece nodded. “We will. After this.”

  “So we’re still a go?” the Nigerian asked.

  “We have one other problem,” Breece said. “Hiroshi?”

  Hiroshi showed them the feed from the Chicago mission. Everything was normal until the last moments.

  I think I have a bomb! the mule said in their minds. A bomb!

  “The mission succeeded,” Breece told them, “but only barely.”

  “We thought at first that the software had glitched,” Hiroshi said. “But the logs showed otherwise. Someone else hacked into that mind and overrode our commands. And whoever did this is very very good. It was less than a minute between the mule’s activation and this hack.”

  Breece watched as his team absorbed that.

  “Could this explain DC?” the Nigerian asked. “The mule there fired only twice instead of four times. And he missed.”

  Breece looked at Hiroshi.

  “Possibly,” Hiroshi said, nodding.

  “So what do we do about this?” Ava asked.

  “Two things,” Breece said. “First, we’re going to make a few changes to the mission profile. Second, we need to be more careful ourselves. As long as we’re running Nexus, we could be vulnerable to this hacker again. Hiroshi needs to run Nexus to prep the mule. None of the rest of us do. So until we’ve figured out what happened, the three of us are going to dump our Nexus, and after Hiroshi preps the mule, he will too.”

  He felt their disappointment, Ava’s especially. He wanted to touch her in mind and body, feel her pleasure as he made love to her. But that would have to wait.

  They all agreed with this decision. They’d all do what needed to be done. They were a team, and more. They were family. They were soldiers.

  29

  NEANDERTHALS

  Friday October 26th

  Holtzmann kept cool as he and Barnes cleared security prior to their meeting with the president. They cleared Nexus detectors and terahertz scanners and a physical pat-down. Then an ai
de showed them into the empty Oval Office and to their seats. A secretary brought them water and coffee.

  Holtzmann felt the preternatural calm and confidence of the neurochemical cocktail he’d prescribed himself. The room was bright, every detail vivid. He felt completely sharp, not even the slightest bit nervous or cloudy. He was himself again, before the bombing. Better, even.

  The President entered, and Holtzmann and Barnes came to their feet.

  “Dr Holtzmann,” Stockton shook Holtzmann’s hand. His palm was warm and large, his shake firm and strong. All-star quarterback strong. The President took his seat behind the desk, waved them down into their chairs. “Director Barnes has sent me memos summarizing the status of the Nexus children. What I want is to make sure I understand the situation.”

  “Of course, Mr President.”

  “These children are smarter than human children?”

  Holtzmann answered. “Not exactly, Mr President. Individually, they have a wide spectrum of intelligences. But when housed together and educated together, they can learn far faster than unaugmented humans, and they can solve problems together that are beyond normal human difficulties.”

  President Stockton nodded. “Yes. So in groups they’re smarter. And it matters how early they were exposed to Nexus?”

  Holtzmann nodded in return. “Yes, Mr President. Learning is definitely accelerated among groups of people using Nexus. The younger they’ve received it, the larger the effect. Adults receive a boost to group cognition. Children – mostly autistic children – who first received Nexus at younger ages get an even larger boost. And the effect is most dramatic in those few children we’ve found who were exposed to Nexus in the womb.”

  “Do we know what the long-term effects are? Health concerns?”

  Holtzmann spread his hands wide. “We don’t see any signs of specific health concerns from Nexus, but we could easily miss anything subtle, let alone anything that took many years to develop.”

  “And the long-term limits?” the President asked. “How far can these children grow in intelligence, particularly the ones exposed to it in the womb?”

  Holtzmann shook his head. “Mr President, I wish I could tell you. But at this point we have so little data. The oldest children exposed to Nexus in the womb are eight, and we’ve only seen a handful of those.”

  “What’s your best guess, then?” Stockton said.

  Holtzmann wanted to refuse. He glanced at Barnes, and the man raised an eyebrow and inclined his head slightly.

  You don’t refuse the President, he thought to himself.

  Holtzmann met Stockton’s eyes. “Mr President, if I had to guess, I would say that these children, if raised in groups or in constant contact with others of their kind, will grow up to be extraordinary, in both the amount they’re able to absorb over the course of their lives, and their ability to reason and problem solve as a group.”

  The President held his gaze. “Well above human norm, would you say, Dr Holtzmann?”

  “Yes, sir. Well above. Many times above. They’ll accomplish things we can only dream of.”

  The President nodded. “And how is progress on the vaccine?”

  It cut Holtzmann to hear that question. It was a physical pain to go from a discussion of the immense wonder and beauty of these children to a question of how to prevent new ones from being born.

  “It’s coming along, Mr President. In mice, we have encouraging early results. We can train the immune system to component molecules of Nexus before they reach the brain.”

  “When can we deploy it?” Stockton asked.

  “It’s very early, Mr President. Best case? Another year or two to get it working reliably and then map this research to humans, and then three to four years of human trials.”

  The President frowned. “Four to six years? That’s not acceptable, Dr Holtzmann. We need to be deploying this next year. You need to fast-track this.”

  Holtzmann blinked. “Mr President, those numbers are the fast track. We’re bypassing every FDA step we can and cutting every corner we can to get it done so quickly.”

  Stockton drummed his fingers on his desk, clearly annoyed.

  “Talk to me about the cure.”

  Where the vaccine question had cut, this stabbed. It drove deep into his soul. To take a supremely gifted child who could touch the mind of another and rip that ability out of it…

  He took a breath, kept his voice neutral. “Mr President, so far, we haven’t found any safe and effective cure.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The cures we’ve tried kill the mice, Mr President. We have some ideas of ways to proceed…” He thought of Shankari’s back door, which should at least work on children exposed to the most recent version of Nexus. “…but it’s too early to say if they’ll work, of if they’ll work on all populations.”

  Stockton continued to drum his fingers.

  “Dr Holtzmann, let me make it clear what’s at stake. These Nexus children are a threat. If we’re unable to prevent the spread of Nexus to more children, and we’re unable to cure children that have been exposed, we’re going to have no choice but to be interning them. Thousands of them, at least. Now, I don’t want to do that. The public doesn’t want to do that. But I will do that if there’s no other option.”

  Holtzmann opened his mouth to protest. Why? Why not embrace them? But Barnes was faster.

  “You could euthanize them, Mr President,” the acting ERD Director said. “The law gives you the power to. And the ones born with Nexus in their brains… they’re from broken homes, drug-abusing mothers. We can manage the PR.”

  Kill them? Kill these children? Even through his pumped up levels of serotonin and dopamine, Holtzmann felt like he’d been punched in the gut.

  “I’m not going to kill children,” Stockton replied.

  “The law says they’re not even human,” Barnes replied. “Not even children.”

  “I don’t care, Barnes,” the president replied. “They’re kids. They didn’t choose this. I’ll lock them away to protect America if I have to, but only until we can cure them. I won’t sign their death warrants.”

  Barnes didn’t let up. “President Jameson euthanized the Aryan Rising clones.”

  “Barnes!” Stockton raised his voice.

  There was silence for a moment. Then Holtzmann heard his own voice speaking. “Why? Why imprison them? Why try to cure them? Why not embrace them?”

  They looked at him in shock.

  Barnes spoke first. “Martin, really…”

  Stockton raised his hand, silencing Barnes.

  “I want to hear what he has to say,” he said to Barnes. “Go on, Dr Holtzmann.”

  Holtzmann swallowed. What am I doing?

  The right thing, something inside him answered.

  “Mr President, these children… They’re the future, sir. They’ll grow up to be smarter than we are, better able to understand each other. And this technology… It doesn’t have to divide us. It can be the future for all of our children, or all our grandchildren…”

  Stockton didn’t respond the way Holtzmann feared. The President didn’t snap at him, didn’t drum his fingers, didn’t look angry. He looked puzzled.

  “Dr Holtzmann, you’ve already said that we don’t know the long-term effects of this drug. That those exposed to it in the womb grow up fundamentally differently than those exposed to it later. What about those parents that don’t want to try this drug? That don’t want to risk the life or health of their children on it? From what you’ve told me, their children, their normal human children won’t have any chance of keeping up with these Nexus kids. The Nexus children will get all the best jobs, get all the wealth, and leave everyone else behind. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  Holtzmann closed his eyes for a moment. He couldn’t deny what the President was saying. Not everyone would choose Nexus for their unborn. And those who didn’t would see their children left behind.

  He couldn’t deny it. So he
spoke from the heart.

  “Mr President, have you ever heard of the Neanderthal Dilemma?”

  Stockton shook his head. “No.”

  “It’s taught in ethics of emerging technology courses.”

  “Martin,” Barnes cut in, “I hardly think we need to get into…”

  Stockton cut Barnes off with a gesture of his hand again. “Go on, Dr Holtzmann. Our ancestors outcompeted Neanderthals. We led to their extinction. Is that it?”

  Holtzmann nodded. “Yes, Mr President. Everywhere modern humans went, Neanderthals eventually went extinct. The groups mingled. They even mated. But the modern humans were just smarter, faster, better able to think and communicate and invent things. They made better tools and hunted and gathered more effectively. The Neanderthals couldn’t keep up.”

  Stockton nodded. “Yes. Exactly. And that’s what could happen to us. We’re the Neanderthals, and we need to nip this problem in the bud, before we aren’t able to keep up.”

  Holtzmann reached forward with his hands, almost pleading. “But, Mr President, if Neanderthals had managed to nip the human problem in the bud, we wouldn’t be here.” He gestured around him. “There wouldn’t be a White House, a United States of America. The world would have less art, less science, less of everything we value, all those inventions of culture that the Neanderthals couldn’t have achieved, but that our homo sapiens ancestors could. That’s the Dilemma, Mr President. If you were a Neanderthal and could stop humans from coming into being, or stop them from getting a foothold, you might extend the life of your species, but leave the world a poorer place.”

  Stockton was shaking his head now, not unkindly. “Dr Holtzmann, that’s no dilemma at all. We’re here now. My job is to protect the citizens of the United States of America. And there’s no way that I’m going to allow a threat to them to develop, no matter what wonderful world you think might come later, after we’re extinct.”

  Holtzmann hung his head in defeat.

  “So now, Dr Holtzmann. Back to that cure and that vaccine. You need to get those moving. Because I may be unwilling to euthanize those children, but by the time you’re saying any cure is available, someone else is going to be sitting in my chair. And neither you nor I know what decision that President will make.” He paused for effect. “If you want these children to live, Doctor, you better find them a cure.”