Crux

by Ramez Naam

  Feng whistled softly. “Manta class,” he said, turning back to Nakamura. “Chinese. How’d you get this?”

  Nakamura smiled broadly. “Feng, weren’t you listening? I’m with the CIA.”

  They loaded the supplies into the sub. The interior was too small to stand upright in, but more than large enough for the two of them and their supplies. When they were done, Nakamura sent instructions to the jeep on the beach. It would tint its windows and drive itself carefully and unobtrusively back to its home.

  “This sub…” Feng asked. “If things go wrong, everything’s blamed on China, yeah?”

  Nakamura shrugged, then made the ground rules clear to Feng.

  “This sub is slaved to me. The controls respond only to me. And if my biometrics fail, it vents the air and dives to the deepest point it can find. If you try to take the controls, it does the same thing. You understand?”

  Feng nodded. “I understand.” He smiled grimly. “You my buddy.”

  Nakamura smiled in return. “Feng, I’m the best friend you’ve got in the world right now.”

  57

  THE FREEDOM TRAIL

  Tuesday October 30th

  Holtzmann called in sick, then took the train to Cambridge. He passed Nexus detectors, all of his own design, all blind to him. The news on the train was of the pending landslide election and of Zoe. The tropical storm turned hurricane had beaten a path across Cuba, leveling buildings, tossing cars around, killing dozens, sending tourists fleeing for shelter before heading north to narrowly miss Miami.

  He emerged hours later into stifling heat. He’d been an undergrad at MIT, not far from here, thirty years ago. October should be cool, highs in the sixties, trees turning yellow and red. But today it was in the eighties. The trees were brown, suffering in heat that had beaten down the Eastern Seaboard the last several months, wiping out crops and feeding energy into storms like Zoe.

  He found Lisa Brandt at an outdoor table in a cool white dress, an iced drink in a plastic cup in front of her. His heart beat fast at the sight of her.

  She saw him, met his eyes, and rose, gesturing for him to follow her.

  “Lisa…” he started.

  “Wait,” she said, as she led them off, across the street and onto the Harvard campus.

  Holtzmann bit his tongue.

  She led them to the Harvard Yard. Undergrads sped past them, on their way to and from classes.

  “Now,” Lisa said. “Softly. And from the beginning.”

  Holtzmann took a deep breath.

  “There’s someone… someone I think you’d be interested in.”

  Lisa turned, raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Rangan Shankari,” he half whispered.

  Lisa frowned. “What about him?”

  “I know where he is.”

  Her frown deepened. “It’s the children we’re most interested in, Martin. If you have information that can prove children are being held for research purposes…”

  Holtzmann swallowed. “You need to get Shankari out. I need him out. I need him safe.”

  Lisa stopped walking. “What are you talking about?”

  He stared into her eyes, whispered intently. “I’ll give you whatever you want. Proof children are being held. But my price is Shankari. You have to get him out.”

  Lisa was shaking her head. “Martin, if you think you’re going to… to entrap me into planning some sort of prison breakout…”

  He reached out, took her by the shoulders. “Please, Lisa. You have to help me. Please!”

  She stepped back, smacked his hands away. “Don’t touch me.” Her voice was hard, angry. Students looked their way as they passed.

  Holtzmann closed his eyes, took another deep breath, opened them. “I’m sorry. It’s just that, if he stays in custody…” He felt it deep inside. The compulsion. Pressing on him, expanding, threatening to burst him open if he didn’t act on it. “Bad things will happen. Very bad.”

  Lisa shook her head. “You’re just wasting my time.” She turned and walked away.

  “Please, Lisa!” Holtzmann said to her back. “Please!” He walked after her, grabbed her arm.

  She turned and slapped him, yanked her arm away. “Don’t touch me!” More students looked their way now. Lisa whirled, then strode away.

  He did the last thing he could, then. He opened his mind to her, reached out to her, hoping against hope…

  He felt nothing there. But she stumbled, surprised, maybe, and turned, and looked at him.

  He beamed his sincerity to her, his sincerity in offering her the proof she wanted, his deep desire to see Rangan Shankari go free.

  He couldn’t feel her. But she held his gaze, then stepped towards him.

  “Give me an account,” she whispered. “Where you can be reached.”

  He told her. Told her the name of an account he kept on a Nexus message board, an account whose existence was enough to hang him.

  Then she stepped back, and spoke loudly, for any passerby to hear. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. Good luck.”

  Then Lisa Brandt turned and walked away.

  Holtzmann was in a daze as he took the train back to DC. At home he logged into the Nexus board. There was a message there, from an account he’d never seen before.

  [Send the evidence. Then we’ll talk.]

  He sent his own note in reply.

  [Will send half. The rest when my friend is out.]

  The reply came back in less than a minute.

  [Agreed.]

  Holtzmann sat down at his secure terminal in his second-floor office, connected to work, and started collating the files. He heard Anne come home while he worked. He yelled out a hello, but she didn’t answer from downstairs.

  He pulled the data together. Records of experiments on the children. Manifests of their ages and names. A recording of the torture used to force Nexus out of a nine year-old autistic boy. Blueprints for “long-term residence” facilities that were little more than concentration camps. Plans and imperatives for the Nexus “cure” and “vaccine”.

  He made sure none could be tied specifically to him, then downloaded the files. He ran it all through a filter, cutting the documents and images and video into right and left halves. The right half he fired off in reply to the message. The left half he uploaded to his own account on the message board, but didn’t send. For that, they’d have to deliver.

  Anne was in the kitchen when Holtzmann went downstairs.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She turned and stared at him. “Where were you today, Martin?” Her face was cold, hard.

  Holtzmann blinked.

  “At the office.”

  “No, you weren’t. I checked. You’ve been sick since Friday.”

  Holtzmann reached for some explanation.

  “And who’s Lisa Brandt, Martin? Wasn’t she a student of yours?”

  Holtzmann’s chest caught in his throat.

  “Is she who you went to visit in Boston today?”

  “Anne…”

  “I have access to the accounts and the phone records, Martin. I’m not stupid.”

  “Anne, it’s not what you think…”

  She stared at him. “What’s going on, Martin?”

  Holtzmann’s head spun. What could he tell her? Jesus.

  “Come with me,” Holtzmann told his wife.

  He dragged her down to the basement, to the laundry room, past it, to the room with the old furnace, the room with no windows a laser could be bounced off of, the room least likely to be bugged. He closed the door behind them, and then leaned close to her, and whispered.

  “Anne. Who had the most to gain from the assassination attempt? Who benefited?”

  She frowned at him. “What the hell are you talking about?” Her voice was angry, impatient.

  “The President, Anne.” He glared back at her. “You said it yourself! The PLF couldn’t shoot straight! And Stockton was losing!”

  Anne scoffed. “You’re paranoid, Martin.
You’re worse than Claire! Those were Stockton’s friends that died. Cabinet members.”

  He took her by the shoulders. “Think, Anne! Think about it!” He needed to make her understand.

  “You think, Martin. Didn’t the President overrule Barnes on killing those kids? Would a man who’d kill his own friends do that?”

  Holtzmann stared at her.

  “And why the bomb in Chicago? He was already up in the polls. So that wasn’t him.”

  Holtzmann kept staring at her, a terrible feeling of disorientation washing over him. He’d been so sure… It made so much sense.

  “And you’re running around trying to dig into this conspiracy? You need help, Martin. You need a psychiatrist. Get yourself together!”

  Holtzmann sat in his office after Anne had gone to bed.

  Something kept tickling at his head. Something she’d said. You’re worse than Claire!

  Claire. Warren Becker’s wife. And what had Warren said? It had been the Spears kidnapping. The one the files blamed on the PLF.

  Mexican cartels, Warren Becker had told him once over drinks.

  Cartels. Not the PLF. Cartels.

  So why did the official record read differently?

  It was thin, very thin. But if the PLF wasn’t what everyone thought… Perhaps that one thread…

  A notification chimed in his mind. From the Nexus board. A new message.

  [Files look good. Get your friend to the ER at Vincent Gray tomorrow night, between 10pm and 4am. We’ll provide appropriate care.]

  Holtzmann stared at the message, then deleted it.

  Vincent Gray was the closest hospital to DHS Headquarters. Now all he needed was to get Rangan Shankari there.

  58

  ALONE TOGETHER

  Tuesday October 30th

  The bad men came for Bobby two days after Alfonso and he knew that if he let them take him away they’d take the Nexus from his head and he’d be no one he’d be dead he wouldn’t be a person anymore, so Bobby tried to KICK the bad men and BITE them and SCRATCH them, but they were too strong and one of the men slapped him in the head and it HURT and then they dragged him out, through two doors into the special testing room.

  The door closed behind Bobby and then his friends were gone. They were gone from his head. He couldn’t feel them at all. The bad men put Bobby in a chair and they strapped his hands down to the arms of the chair which they’d never done before and which scared him and he knew this was it, they were going to push the Nexus out of his head like they had to Alfonso and things would be like they were before, before his daddy Derik had given Bobby Nexus and given himself Nexus and then Bobby could feel his daddy for the first time and know that he was a PERSON – a person like Bobby and not like all the other fake people who didn’t have anything in their heads at all. And since that day Bobby hadn’t been so alone. He could feel people now, his daddy and then the boys here Tim and Alfonso and Jason and Tyrone and the other boys, and for the first time he had real FRIENDS even if they were in a bad place; he had other boys he could feel and understand and who could feel him and understand him and now he was crying and crying – and he knew that only little boys cried only babies cried and he was twelve and he wasn’t supposed to cry – but he knew what was going to happen, they were going to make him like Alfonso and Alfonso was all alone now and Alfonso just cried, and Alfonso MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD because he’d never feel anyone again and no one would ever feel him and he was just empty like all the other STUPID PEOPLE who didn’t have Nexus and weren’t really people at all.

  They lowered something metal onto Bobby’s head in the chair, and he cried and asked them please please please let me go please I need it to feel other people, please I need it to be real, please I need it to have friends please please please don’t be mean, don’t make me stop being real I’ll take a test, I’ll learn Spanish I’ll learn French I’ll do TRIGONOMETRY I’ll do anything, please please please he cried and cried and cried.

  Rangan felt the chaos as the orderlies took Bobby from the room next door, and he knew what it meant. He was untied again, uncuffed from the gurney. He sat in the corner, head down, in defeat. The ERD didn’t have the real back doors. But that was academic. Eventually they’d succeed in reverse-engineering the code. It would be difficult, with the passcodes buried among hundreds of millions of parameters of the neural nets, among blocks of synaptic weights and neural interconnectivity graphs that looked like so much random numerical garbage, that would mask the passcodes for quite a long time. Deciphering that would be a harder problem than building Nexus 5 in the first place. But the ERD had resources. Sooner or later, after months or years, they’d crack it.

  And even if they didn’t? They still had the guns. They could still arrest kids like Bobby, take them away from their parents, kill their parents. They’d found a way to force Nexus out of Alfonso’s brain. And now they’d do to the same to Bobby. They’d cripple a little boy because it didn’t fit their ideology.

  Rangan shook his head. Tyrone came and lay down in Bobby’s bunk, reached out to Rangan, and Rangan did his best to send soothing thoughts, to try to calm the boys down, even when what he felt inside was despair.

  Bobby cried and begged and then one of the men spoke to him.

  “Bobby, that’s your name, right? Bobby, we’re not going to hurt you. We’re trying to help you, son.”

  Bobby stared at the man. He was old and had a mustache and he was smiling like the teachers told Bobby to do to show that he was nice but there was nobody there in the man’s head and he had Bobby tied down to a chair with something on his head so he definitely wasn’t very nice at all.

  “Bobby, you know how to run Nexus commands, don’t you?”

  And even though the man wasn’t nice, Bobby nodded his head because there was always the chance that he was wrong and that they weren’t going to push the Nexus out of him – and maybe if he was good and did what they wanted they’d let him go back to the other boys and still have Nexus and still be a person and still have friends and…

  “We need you to run a command, son. There in your Nexus. On the screen inside your head. OK?”

  Bobby nodded again and this wasn’t so bad if they just wanted him to run some sort of command, which meant running some sort of program or executing some sort of script or changing some configuration and Bobby understood how Nexus was kind of a computer in his head because he’d learned about it from Rangan, and he understood about computers because they made sense they made way more sense than people especially the fake people that…

  “The command is Nexus Purge,” the man said. “It’ll make you feel better.” And then the man started to spell out “Nexus” and “purge” for Bobby, like Bobby was an idiot – but Bobby wasn’t listening because he understood computers and he had a good vocabulary, and he knew what Nexus was from Rangan and he knew what purge meant and sometimes it meant something about your body like if you pooped or threw up a whole lot, but now it meant the other kind, to rid, clear, or free, and so the old man with the mustache was telling him to rid, clear, or free Nexus and Bobby didn’t want to do that at all, and they were trying to trick him and that made him mad.

  “NO!” he yelled. “I need Nexus I need Nexus please please please.”

  “Son,” the man said, “This won’t hurt your Nexus. It’s just gonna fix some problems and make you feel better.”

  And he was lying to Bobby and treating Bobby like he was stupid that made him even more mad and so he yelled at the man “I’M AUTISTIC – NOT STUPID!” and he kept yelling it and kept yelling it, and the man shook his head and nodded at someone else, and then something hit Bobby’s head hard, something different like noise, like static, like ALL THE STATIC IN THE WORLD and he saw static and he heard static and he tasted static and he felt static and he smelled static and it was SO LOUD he couldn’t think, couldn’t think, and it HURT it HURT it HURT and he SCREAMED at them…

  And then it stopped.

  Bobby was crying when i
t ended, crying and crying and crying, and he thought maybe he’d peed himself, but he wasn’t sure because everything was so confused and he couldn’t tell what was happening anymore and then the man spoke again.

  “Son, you’re sick. What you just felt… that was you being sick. We want to help you. We want to make that go away. Just run the command. Nexus Purge. And then you’ll feel better.”

  And Bobby cried, but he knew the man was lying. He wasn’t sick he hadn’t felt that way because he was sick, he’d felt it because of the metal thing over his head and it was because these men were doing it to him because they were so so so so bad, and he kept crying because he didn’t want to feel that way again, didn’t want it to happen again, but if he PURGED Nexus then it would be even worse and then he thought of something, LOGIC told him something, and suddenly he felt different because he understood, he had an ADVANTAGE like his daddy used to say, because if these men were trying to get him to run Nexus Purge and get rid of his Nexus himself, then maybe that was because THEY COULDN’T DO IT TO HIM!

  And then they did the awful static thing to him again and he couldn’t think and his hands were twitching and his feet were twitching and he bit his tongue and nothing worked, and he definitely peed himself this time and maybe pooped himself and everything hurt so bad and everything was so confusing and when it was over he was crying again – but he remembered he remembered what he’d figured out and when the man said, “Son, please, you have to run Nexus Purge! You have to help yourself or you’ll keep getting sick!” then Bobby just looked at the man and he was still crying, but he yelled at the man, “YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”

  And he kept yelling it, every chance he could, in between the times they hurt him.

  Rangan sat slumped in the corner, trying to find some way to keep hope, to keep the boys hopeful, even when they all seemed doomed.