Crux

by Ramez Naam

  Fucking hilarious!

  46

  LO PRANG

  Sunday October 28th

  The guards frisked Sam, searching for weapons. And like the last set their frisk was thorough, careful, taking no risks on their master’s safety.

  After the frisk, Lo Prang kept her waiting. Minutes crept by, minutes she could be using on her way to Burma, on her way to Sarai and Aroon and Kit and…

  Half an hour after she arrived, one of the guards nodded.

  “He’ll see you now,” the huge man said in Thai, and then he opened the door to show her in.

  Lo Prang’s office was an opulent space larger than her apartment back in DC. Thick shag carpet like red gold covered the floor. Designer couches lined the room. A dozen overly pretty, well-dressed boys and provocatively dressed young women lounged on them. Sensations of pleasure and delirium oozed into the air. Precious paintings hung everywhere, on walls that extended up twelve feet to the gold leaf ceiling. One full wall was given over to floor-to-ceiling screens showing the action throughout the club, rotating through zoomed-in full-color scenes of men and women dancing, drinking, gambling, fucking. The wall was voyeurism, not security.

  Lo Prang himself sat squarely in the middle. Lean, hard, his black hair cut to a buzz. He’d been a champion muay Thai fighter in his youth. Now, in his fifties, he still looked formidable. In the midst of the decadence of his office, he came across as totally focused, untouched by drugs or delirium or debauchery. A business man above all else.

  Lo Prang sat behind a massive desk seemingly made of a single piece of lab-grown onyx. Atop the desk was nothing but a slate, a tumbler of water, and a single large pistol. He wore a black silk suit. A single heavy ring was on the finger of one hand. His eyes were dark. Once, when Sam had been closer, she’d seen the distinctive gleam of tactical contacts worn on those eyes, feeding who-knows-what data to the mob boss.

  Behind Lo Prang was the giant wall spying on the events happening in his club, switching from scene to scene. Standing with their backs to it were two more of the hugely muscled men in black suits. If they had any fear of her – if anyone in this room did – Sam couldn’t see it.

  “Jade,” Lo Prang said in Thai. “Or should I call you Sunee? It’s good to have you back.”

  “Lo Prang.” She nodded to him. She could feel some of the Nexus transmissions of the club piped in here, an amalgamation of all the sex and drunkenness and partying out there. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “To what do we owe this pleasure?”

  Two of the women were kissing now, touching each other’s breasts through their low cut dresses. One of the men was snorting a line of some powder off a woman’s thigh. Arousal and stimulation echoed out from them.

  Battles are won in the mind, Nakamura had taught her. Throw your enemy off, and he’s yours.

  Yes, Sam thought. That was Lo Prang’s game. Distraction. All just distraction. All to throw her off balance.

  “I need to get into Burma,” she told him. “With weapons, transport, infiltration gear.”

  Lo Prang laughed, a dry chortle. His lean leathery face wrinkled in mirth. His people laughed with him. Even the man who’d just snorted something and the two girls kissing stopped to laugh, at her foolishness, her presumption.

  Sam waited for the laughter to die down. “I’ll fight for you again,” she told Lo Prang. “Once I’m back. I’ll beat the best out there. Or I’ll take dives, throw fights. Whatever you want.”

  Lo Prang looked her in the eye, then shook his head. “Jade, Jade, Jade,” he said. “Or whoever you are. A few fights wouldn’t come close to covering that.”

  Sam stared back at him. “What would?”

  She felt his mind working, felt his thoughts reaching out to others in the room. Two women detached themselves from the groups lounging on the couches, approached her from either side. They were in their early twenties, Thai, slender and chesty, in dresses as scanty as the ones worn by the girls upstairs, but more embellished, more expensive-looking. They wore flashy jewelry and sported improbably long nails on each finger, an inch long, red for one girl, black for the other. She caught a flash of muscle on their arms, their legs.

  Sam watched them out of the corners of her eyes, her attention still focused on Lo Prang.

  “You’re so unhappy, Sunee,” he told her. “Always struggling for something.”

  The girls moved languidly towards her, swiveling on heeled feet, until their fingers touched the bare skin of her arms. She could smell their perfumes. Thoughts of pleasure came from them, and devotion. One of them exhaled hot breath against the back of Sam’s neck.

  “I could take care of whatever problem you have in Burma,” Lo Prang said. “And in exchange you could join me. You could be part of my little family.”

  Sam shuddered at the thought.

  “It’s so nice,” the girl on her right breathed.

  “Just a little tweak to your thoughts,” the one on her left intoned.

  They ran their hands over her, pressing their bodies against her now, and Sam wanted to push them away, but she needed Lo Prang, needed his help.

  “You’d be happy,” Lo Prang said.

  Their hands roamed over her bare arms, her back, her neck, her sides. Their touch repulsed her. Slaves.

  “We chose this way,” they said in unison, in stereo. “It’s so very nice,” they finished together, voices entwined, timing perfect. Pleasure wafted from their minds. Contentment. The warm, enfolding love of Lo Prang. The security of belonging to someone else, utterly, of never having to worry again…

  “No,” Sam said, fighting the revulsion. They chose this? Oh, she believed them. It still made them slaves.

  “You’d be safe,” Lo Prang told her. “I treat my family well.”

  “So well,” the girls harmonized, from her right and left. And she felt the truth of it from them, how they loved this life and all that came with it…

  Slaves. Not her. Never again.

  “No,” Sam said louder. “No deal.”

  Lo Prang leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk, folded his fingers together. “There’s another way, then.”

  “Tell me,” Sam said, her stomach turning as the girls continued to caress her.

  “Your genes, Sunee.” Lo Prang’s eyes burrowed into hers. “Muscle biopsies. Bone biopsies. Tissue samples. I want what makes you you.”

  Sam closed her eyes. She’d feared it would come to this. She could trade the most valuable thing about herself, in exchange for a chance to get back the most precious. But if she did... She’d be selling out others, signing death sentences for people she didn’t know.

  “No,” she said, eyes closed.

  And she knew what came next.

  “Then we’ll just take it,” Lo Prang said.

  She heard the snick as the girls’ fake nails extended into two-inch-long finger blades. One set raked across her back, leaving painful bloody furrows through her blouse. But by then she was dropping, one leg extended, then coming around in a blurringly fast straight-leg spin that swept the girl on her left from her feet.

  Chaos exploded through the minds in the room. She saw Lo Prang reaching for the pistol on his desk, his two bodyguards reaching into their jackets for their guns.

  Sam rolled away from the other razor-fingered girl, came up with a high-heeled shoe in each hand, her thumbs toggling the hidden switches as she rose. The guards had their submachine guns out, were raising them, bringing them to bear…

  She spun, loosed the heels up and towards the sides of the room, felt her left shoulder groan as she did, closed her eyes tight, and let her momentum carry her back down into a right-shoulder roll towards the relative safety of the desk. More pain jolted up from her abused shoulder. Automatic gunfire exploded through the room.

  Then she heard the crackle, saw her world turn red even through closed eyes, as the flash charges in her heels went off at maximum intensity, discharging all the energy of their fuel cells in an inst
ant, burning out all their LEDs in the process. She heard a man yell as she came up and around the desk, opening her eyes to take in the scene. The guards had their hands to their faces, blinded for a few critical seconds, waving their guns around, but no longer daring to let loose without their sight. Lo Prang was in front of her, his pistol on her, she couldn’t tell if he was blinded or not.

  Sam threw herself forward and to the side as he fired, felt the bullet graze her hip. And then she was inside his reach. He threw an elbow at her in the close quarters, raised a knee towards her gut. He was fast, and he was good, but he was old, and Sam was young and had the better tech in her body. She blocked his elbow with her right forearm, raised a leg and took his knee to her thigh, then spun, throwing him to the floor and pulling the gun from his hand in one brutal motion. Her shoulder ached but did as she told it.

  Lo Prang rolled with the fall, came up on one knee, fast as a snake, with a knife in his hand. Sam moved faster, grabbed the knife hand, twisted it behind him, and brought his pistol to his head.

  She looked up just in time to see the two girls get to their feet, trying to blink away the momentary blindness, and the two guards from outside the door push their way through the crowd, automatic weapons in hand.

  They stopped when they saw her holding a stunned, blinking Lo Prang, a gun primed to blow his head off.

  “Now,” she said to her prisoner. “I’m going to Burma. And you’re coming with me.”

  47

  NEW HORIZONS

  Sunday October 28th

  Kade woke slowly, head spinning, disoriented. There was static in his mind. His head ached. He cracked his eyes open ever so slightly. He was on his back, atop something soft. He saw sunlight, a ceiling with a lazily spinning fan and gold filigreed moldings. He was in a bed, giant and ornate, with elaborately carved wooden posts at the corners that towered above him.

  He blinked, tried to adjust.

  “Good morning,” the Indian man said. Kade looked over. The white-haired figure was dressed in white. He’d pulled back cloth-of-gold curtains from a wide picture window. Beyond it, there was blue sky and ocean. Between Kade and that ocean, there were bars on the windows, a fine mesh built into them.

  Kade sat up in the bed. He found himself dressed in cotton trousers and a loose cotton shirt. They’d changed him while he’d slept. Feng. Where was Feng?

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re at my home,” the Indian man said. “In Burma.”

  “Who are you?” Kade asked.

  “My name is Shiva Prasad,” he answered. The name sounded familiar.

  “…and I hope we’ll become good friends,” Shiva finished.

  Kade felt his anger flare.

  “Some way to start a friendship,” he spat out.

  Shiva smiled. “Eat first,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  Then the Indian man strode out of the room.

  Kade jumped to his feet, but before he could follow Shiva out through the door, a young Asian woman wheeled in a cart. A muscular, dusky-skinned man whose origin Kade couldn’t place followed her. The server and the guard. Kade stopped and stood where he was.

  The girl wheeled the cart to the middle of the room and unveiled a platter of eggs, bacon, and potatoes; then another of pancakes; flagons of juice, water, and coffee.

  “Breakfast,” she said in heavily accented English. Her eyes met his briefly. Then she looked away, and she and the guard left through the door, and he heard a lock click as they did.

  Kade ate. If they wanted to drug him or poison him, they could just hold him down and administer what they wanted. Then he explored his prison.

  The room was spacious. A king-sized four-poster bed. An antique writing desk and chair. Two oversized ornate antique chairs in a small sitting area. A private bathroom suite almost the size of his apartment in San Francisco. A walk-in closet. Clothes waited for him there. More pants and baggy shirts in soft cotton. Jeans, shorts, T-shirts, sandals, hiking boots, socks, underwear, two bathrobes, a pair of swimming shorts. All in his size.

  A kitchenette held snacks, dishware, bottles of beer and sparkling water and expensive-looking wine, a coffeebot, a cookbot that probably cost more than most cars.

  Every room had windows. He had incredible views in two directions of a green and blue sea, seen from atop a cliff. From the kitchenette another window afforded a view east into a courtyard dotted with date palms, orange trees, bright tropical flowers, and flowing water. He looked to be on the fifth and topmost floor of what could only be called a mansion.

  The windows opened at the touch of a switch to allow the breeze and the scent of sea and citrus. But inset in the window sills were metal frames that covered the space with bars and a fine metallic mesh. Kade could see that these, too, were built to open. But they were all locked and bolted in place. The bars would keep his body here. The mesh was a Faraday cage, he imagined, to keep his mind and any electronics trapped just as surely.

  This was an elaborate cell. However luxurious it may be, it remained a prison, and he, the prisoner.

  Last, he came to the final piece of his bondage. Around his neck, a thin metal chain held in place a dull metal disk, perhaps two inches in diameter and half an inch thick. Try as he might, he couldn’t get it loose, couldn’t get it over his head. There was a slot where a key of some sort would slide into it. Other than that there was no way he could see to remove it.

  A Nexus jammer. Another layer of his prison.

  He knew more now than ever before. He’d learned things, from studying Feng’s mind, from his contact with Ling, from meditation with Ananda and the monks, from secrets and tools and pieces of code gained legitimately or stealthily from scientists around the world experimenting with Nexus. He could make his Nexus nodes stand up and do tricks now.

  He tried the tools in his toolbox one by one. Frequency tuning code that searched for a band with weaker interference. Filtering packages to suppress the static. An active noise reduction app he wrote himself that played the static reversed, back at itself, to cancel the signal out. Directional tuning of his Nexus antennae, to bore through the jamming in one direction, or boost gain in that direction.

  Nothing. Nexus worked fine inside his mind. His code all ran fine. But he could broadcast nothing through the interference, could pick up nothing from around him.

  He tried to think like Ling, to remember the feel of her contact, to amp and broaden the sensitivity of the Nexus in his brain until he could pick up the feel of the circuits in the walls, the transmissions all around him, and in particular the inner logic of this jammer.

  The static only grew louder in his mind, painfully louder until he broke off in frustration.

  He sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and began the practice of vipassana. He would rein in his attention until he could shift it in such a way that the static wasn’t there, was completely removed from his awareness, and then perhaps he’d be able to pick up…

  The door opened. Kade opened his eyes, and Shiva was there, a slate in his hand.

  48

  ACCESS DENIED

  Saturday October 27th

  Holtzmann closed his eyes again.

  Alive. I’m still alive.

  He had to get Rangan Shankari free. He felt it in his bones. The strong desire. The deep need to break Shankari loose from ERD custody.

  Lane had done this to him, had bent him this way, had turned him into a tool. The boy’s mind had been monstrous, terrifying. The memory of it sent shivers through him. And the President, the assassination… Panic was rising again, clawing at him, threatening to break loose.

  He needed something. Relief from this horror. Holtzmann pulled up the neurotransmitter controls, dialed up a dose of his own opiates, just a little one, just enough so he could think. He pressed the mental button, waited for the sweet relief.

  Nothing.

  What?

  He pressed the button again. Nothing happened.

&nb
sp; He closed the controls, killed the process, relaunched it, dialed up an opiate dose again.

  Nothing.

  The panic was rising higher now. Higher every instant.

  Lane. Lane must have done this.

  He pulled up a diagnostic suite within Nexus OS, ran it to scan the system. Half the diagnostics failed, instantly. Error messages came back. ACCESS DENIED. ACCESS DENIED. ADMINISTRATOR PRIVILEGES REQUIRED. ACCESS DENIED. INSUFFICIENT PERMISSIONS. ACCESS DENIED.

  Oh no. Oh God no.

  Lane had taken away Holtzmann’s root access to his own Nexus OS. He’d taken away control of the software running on Holtzmann’s own brain.

  He forced himself to think, forced himself to concentrate. There must be some way around this.

  He reached out to his home network again. Success. He could still access the net. From there he linked to an anonymization service, and from there out to a Nexus code repository. There, a new version of Nexus OS, more recent than his own. He clicked the link to install it, to override his current Nexus OS.

  ACCESS DENIED.

  Damn it!

  He could uninstall Nexus, remove it from his brain. Then find another dose, somehow, reinstall his apps… He launched the command to evict the Nexus nodes from inside his skull

  [Nexus purge]

  The system threw up a prompt:

  [This command will erase Nexus OS and purge all Nexus nodes from your brain. All stored data and applications will be lost. Are you sure you want to continue? Y/N]

  [Yes], he thought at it eagerly.

  [ACCESS DENIED.]

  Holtzmann nearly screamed in frustration. He tried a dozen more things, installing patches, changing permissions on files, editing raw bits that controlled access to resources, writing his own crude code to control his neurotransmitter levels.

  [ACCESS DENIED.] [ACCESS DENIED.] [ACCESS DENIED.]

  He was sweating now. He could see Rangan Shankari’s face. He could see the boy in captivity. His stomach was clenching. It was intolerable. He had to get the boy out of ERD custody. But he had another problem. A problem that would get in the way.