by Ramez Naam
And then a ripple went through the boys. Something shocked them. Something spread out through them, and into Rangan.
Bobby. Bobby.
Rangan could feel the boy’s mind, reflected through Pedro’s. Bobby was back. He felt exhausted, stunned, drained. But he was there. His mind was there. Somehow he’d beaten them.
The other boys led Bobby in to the night room, and onto his bunk, and Bobby reached out for Rangan, and Rangan put his mental arms around the boy, and pulled Bobby in close, and wept in relief.
59
VISIONS
Wednesday October 31st
Shiva gave Kade access to the research staff. He could leave his rooms during daylight, always with the Nexus jammer on him. He waited for any crack of discipline, any accident, a drained battery, an outer door left open when the inner door opened, a key left unprotected in his sight.
He saw none. The researchers answered his questions, showed him the tools they were building, the systems to coordinate millions of minds, the incredible results the Nexus children showed on intelligence tests, the ways to tap into that on an even grander scale.
And despite himself, he was impressed.
How different were Shiva’s goals from his own? He thought of that thin layer of mind encircling the globe, unformed, raw potential. What if he could touch those minds with Shiva’s tools? What could they make real?
Every day, Kade dined with Shiva, and at times with others of Shiva’s staff. A breakfast here. A lunch there. Tea, between meetings and calls that Shiva had. Dinner, whenever Kade chose to go. The weather was hot and clear when he arrived. It grew windier and wetter as the days went on. Yet all of it was beautiful.
Shiva denied him one thing, beside his freedom.
“I want to talk to the children,” Kade said.
“Absolutely not,” Shiva replied. “They’re young, vulnerable. Some of them have been traumatized. I won’t have you confusing them further.”
Still, he saw the children from a distance from his window, or from the roof, or when visiting researchers. There were three or four distinct groups. One of those groups seemed to recognize Kade. Had they seen Sam? Kade wondered where she was now. But he said nothing to Shiva. Any information he held back might prove an advantage.
The days passed. Sunday turned to Monday turned to Tuesday turned to Wednesday.
After Wednesday night’s dinner a guard brought him back to his room. The guard activated his own Nexus jammer and removed Kade’s. They treated him gently, politely, even deferentially. The servers and the security staff called him “sir”.
He sat on one of the antique oversized chairs and stared at the box with the slate inside.
What am I afraid of? he asked himself. Why don’t I want to touch Shiva’s thoughts?
You’re afraid he’s telling the truth, Ilya’s voice answered him. That he has only the best of intentions.
Why?
Because, Ilya went on, if that’s the case, he has as much right to the back doors as you do. Maybe more. He’s smarter than you are. He understands the world better than you do. If you deserve the back doors, then he does too. If he doesn’t, then you don’t either.
Kade fell asleep struggling with that thought, looking for a way to refute it.
He woke again in darkness, restless. He rose, put on one of the robes they’d given him, threw back the curtains, found a cloudy night, wind blowing, a tossing and churning sea. Where was Feng now? Where was Rangan? Was the PLF still moving forward with their plot? Were hundreds more going to die because of him? Would war break out?
He looked over at the locked box. He’d moved it to the writing desk. It would be so easy. Open his mind to it. Let Shiva persuade him. Agree to hand over this burden to someone else.
He thought of all the benefits it would bring. More resources. Giant server farms spread around the world, orbital communication satellites, teams of programmers. They could nip Nexus coercion in the bud, stop the rapists and thieves and assassins. Shiva’s coders could help him finish Nexus 6, integrate the safeguards that would make it difficult to use Nexus that way.
They could rescue Rangan. They could stop the assassination set for Saturday. They might find Feng, still alive, if he was lucky.
They could bring all those Nexus-carrying minds across the planet together, into something greater.
All he had to do was give Shiva the key that would open a million minds.
Kade sat at the writing desk. He put his hands on the armored case. It was cool to the touch. Inside was a device, a transmitter, loaded with thoughts and memories.
Kade went Inside, and turned Nexus OS’s file sharing back on.
Shiva lay sleepless on his hard cot in the narrow cell he allowed himself. Lane was softening. He could see it in each conversation. The boy was tired of his burden, was tired of being alone, was increasingly persuaded of Shiva’s good intentions. Soon, days or weeks, he would consent.
Shiva took a deep breath.
Am I worthy? Is this just? Is this moral?
Now, as the tool he’d sought was almost in his grasp, he had his doubts.
Nita would hate this, he mused. Hate it more than anything I’ve ever done. Hubris, she’d call it.
The gods punish hubris, he told himself, in every religion, in every mythology.
But he had only to think of the world outside, of the multiple precipices that humanity and this world teetered on, to hear the opposing view. That humanity needed saving. Needed it desperately. And could not do the saving itself.
“I’m doing this for the world, Nita,” he whispered in the darkness. “And if not me, then who? If not now, then when?”
Kade inspected the available data. It was huge. Shiva was offering him giant swaths of thought and memory.
He analyzed the files, ran them through virus checkers and security sweeps, made sure there was no embedded code in them. It was one thing to be persuaded. It was another to be tricked.
He found nothing untoward.
Even so, he instanced a sandbox inside his mind, and another, differently configured sandbox within the first, and only in that secure environment did he allow the files to play.
He was engrossed, immediately, sucked in to what Shiva was sharing. This was more than his plans. It was his life, his childhood, the events that had formed him, the triumphs and tragedies he’d been through. The fears he held deep inside, fears for the whole world. And the hopes he held onto as well.
Kade devoured the thoughts, the memories, the experiences, the knowledge. He bent all his Nexus CPU cycles to the task, cranked up his assimilation rate far beyond real-time. He slipped into a near trance, immersing himself in this person, in what he knew, in what he’d done. The mask of maya slipped away, and for a time he was Kade no longer. He was Shiva, and so much more.
He came back to himself hours and hours later. It was fully light outside, late morning, approaching noon. He had a vague memory of the serving girl coming and going. The wheeled cart was still here, loaded with food.
Kade ignored it.
He got up, went to the window, looked outside at the gorgeous water down below, the multicolored sea with its bands of jade and emerald and sea-green and lapis lazuli and a dozen more colors he couldn’t name.
He understood these waters, now. He knew their chemistry. He knew their ecology. He remembered diving off the coast of India, Shiva diving there, guided by his wife, examining the dying corals, despairing at their fate. Kade had read about ocean acidification. Now he understood it intimately – the horror of seeing once vibrant reefs reduced to a deathly gray. The intimate comprehension of their vulnerability, how even after Shiva’s viral hack they teetered on the edge, how their death threatened all the fish and other species that depended on them.
North, near the poles, the tundra of the Arctic, melting, decaying, giving off methane. He’d been there. Shiva had been there, at Nita’s insistence. Bundled in sub-zero gear, he’d seen the methane belching from thawin
g permafrost. He’d seen the mile-wide plumes of methane bubbles rising from the decaying slush of carbon ice just below the warming Arctic Sea.
He understood the risk, at last. It wasn’t just an abstraction to him, anymore. It was a visceral threat, as Shiva felt it, as real as the fear he felt looking down from a great height. A few more hot summers could destabilize those fields, send up even more massive bubbles of heat-trapping gas that would bake the Earth, scour the fields where food grew with drought and storm, wither away the rainforest, destroy humanity’s food supplies and shelter in the span of months or years, bring human civilization and the biosphere both to their knees.
Kade looked out further west. Beyond that horizon lay India, his homeland. Shiva’s homeland. The third largest economy on the planet now. Yet he had vivid memories of holding a dying child in his arms, of watching villagers starve just kilometers from the homes of the newly wealthy kings of technology.
He knew the count and position of thousands of nuclear warheads there, pointed at nearby Pakistan, at China, at Iran, even at Europe and the United States. He knew all about the three secret times that India and Pakistan had come within millimeters of going nuclear, had almost killed millions in the matter of minutes, almost ignited war that would kill hundreds of millions.
He looked across those waves and he remembered his childhood as an orphan, an untouchable orphan, the lowest of the low, struggling to eat, to survive. The beatings. The vicious street gangs that he’d barely escaped. The conviction that violence must be met with violence, that those who hurt you must be punished. And later, when ignorant villagers had killed orphans under his protection, the rage he’d felt, the screams as his men had nailed the perpetrators to those crosses, as the flames had brought him justice.
Further west, Europe, North America. He knew more than ever about the treatment of humanity’s successors there. The secret purges. The viral weapons lying in wait, ready to deal death down on the genetically enhanced. The Nexus detectors to find the enhanced. The work to create a vaccine against Nexus, to create a “cure” that would purge it from the mind, even from the minds of those who’d lived their entire lives with it. The backup plans. The concentration camps for the expected wave of Nexus-born children, the hundreds of thousands of them that might be born in the next decade.
There was so much wrong with the world. There were so many precipices. So many cliffs humanity could fall off of. So many crimes being committed, so many risks being taken.
And Kade understood why. They were a tribal species. They’d evolved in a world where a few dozen men and women made up a tribe, and virtually all others were enemies, threats. They lacked the cognitive capabilities necessary to collaborate on this scale. They’d done their best with democracy, with capitalism, but those had reached their limit long ago. They’d been corrupted, twisted to the interests of a few individuals, when the greatest problems the world faced were problems of collective interest.
He could fix those systems. He could nudge the world, could pull strings from behind the scenes, could direct scientists and engineers towards the right problems, could link their minds together to make them even more effective, could manipulate banks and corporations to provide resources, could twist politicians to enact the laws needed to save the world and benefit the people on it.
And beyond that – Kade could bring the world’s minds together, link human to human, into something more, into a global consciousness, a posthuman intelligence, mediated by Nexus, coordinated by the tools Shiva had built.
All it would require was the key. The key that would open a million minds today, that would open tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of minds, at some point in the future. That was all.
60
WAR STORIES
Wednesday October 31st
In a cramped submarine beneath the waters of the Andaman Sea, Kevin Nakamura laughed as Feng gesticulated with his cuffed hands.
“So I throw the butter knife, yeah?” the Chinese soldier was saying. “Boom! Right through the eye.” Feng shook his head. “But he gets me with cleaver first. That’s how I get this one.” Feng gestured at the scar across one forearm.
“So that was Almaty?” Nakamura asked.
“Yeah,” Feng replied. “In ’37. You there?”
Nakamura nodded, rolled up one pant leg, showed the scar below his knee.
Feng peered at it and frowned. “Sniper?” he asked.
Nakamura laughed. “Farmer. With a pitchfork.”
“Pitchfork!” Feng laughed in return. “You see action at Astana too?”
Nakamura shook his head. “Not me. But I had friends who were there.” He cocked his head. “Were you at Mashadd, in ’35? Or what about Maymana, back in ’26?”
Feng’s expression turned puzzled. “In ’26… I was eight.”
Nakamura frowned.
“You old, man,” Feng said.
Nakamura glared at the pup, then snorted and turned back to the sub’s controls. Two more days to Apyar Kyun.
Two hundred miles off the coast of the southeastern United States, Zoe raged. Beneath her, the October seas were hot, hotter than they’d been this late in the year in millennia. The currents of the Gulf Stream dragged warm water north from the equator and into the mid-Atlantic, adding energy to seas already heated from a record summer.
The Atlantic gave off that excess heat now, evaporating it as water vapor into the air above.
Zoe gorged on that warm vapor-filled air, absorbing its energy and its moisture. They added to her, strengthened her, fueling her winds, driving them ever faster and more furiously about her calm center until she whirled about at a fifth the speed of sound.
North Zoe went. And chaos went with her.
61
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
Wednesday October 31st
Holtzmann slipped out of bed at 6am, while Anne still slept. His head pounded and his mouth was dry. His body felt stiff. His stomach was unsteady. He craved more opiates. But that wasn’t going to happen today.
He showered and dressed quickly. Anne rolled over in bed, murmured something, then nothing more. Then he was in the car and on his way to the office.
The news had more on Stockton’s impending victory. The rest was Zoe. The hurricane had sped north and east into the warm, wide open Atlantic, sucking energy from the unprecedentedly hot surface waters as it went, intensifying from the Category 4 storm that had wrecked Havana into a Category 5 monster, with hundred-and-sixty mile per hour winds and ten-foot sea swells. And now Zoe’s track was bending again, turning it towards north by northwest, putting it on a course towards central New Jersey, with possible landfall Friday night. God, what a disaster that would be.
He arrived at the office a little after 7 o’clock, collected his slate and the images he needed, then headed to the Human Subjects wing. ERD Headquarters was no prison. It wasn’t equipped for long-term interment. But the Human Subjects wing could house up to fifty subjects, for research purposes, for months at a time.
Holtzmann swiped his ID to enter the wing, then walked up to the security desk.
He recognized the guard. “I’m here to see Rangan Shankari,” he told the man, holding up his ID.
The guard nodded, then looked over at his maze of monitors.
“Room 31,” he replied. “He’s still asleep.”
“Wake him up,” Holtzmann said. “I’ll be in the interview room.”
Two guards brought Shankari to him ten minutes later, his wrists cuffed to one another. They clipped his cuffs to the hardpoint on the table, which was itself bolted to the floor. Holtzmann waited across that table for the guards to leave. Just seeing Shankari sent a powerful buzz through him. He was so close… So close to getting Rangan out of here…
Wait for it, he told himself. Tonight.
The guards left.
“Rangan,” Holtzmann said. “It’s been some time.”
“Not long enough,” Shankari muttered darkly.
Hol
tzmann slid his slate across the table to Shankari.
“Open it. See what Nexus has done to the world.”
With his hands restrained, Shankari could just barely touch the surface of the slate. The first image was an aerial view of the assassination site, just a quarter-mile from here. Bodies were scattered across the ground, the geometry of the white seats shattered in a zone around the blast.
Shankari looked at the image. “What’s this?”
Holtzmann answered him. “Three months ago the Posthuman Liberation Front used Nexus 5 to reprogram a Secret Service agent. They tried to assassinate the President. The President lived, but dozens of others died.”
Shankari looked up at him for a moment. His eyes showed nothing. Then he looked back down and touched the surface again to advance the images.
“This is why we want the Nexus back doors,” Holtzmann told him. “To stop these sorts of things.”
A lie, he told himself. We want them for control. Surveillance. Nothing more noble than that.
“I already gave them to you,” Rangan said. “Not my fault they don’t work anymore.”
“Keep looking at the pictures,” Holtzmann told him. “Go through the whole set. Maybe you’ll think of something once you see what we’re up against.”
Shankari grunted, touched the slate again.
Then Holtzmann reached out, carefully, cautiously, for the boy’s mind, sent a request for a chat connection.
Shankari looked up, his eyes wide in surprise. His mind gave off shock, disbelief. And then he accepted the chat request.
[holtzmann]Make no sign. Keep advancing images.
[rangan]What the fuck?
[holtzmann]I’m here to get you out.
Holtzmann opened himself partially to the boy, showed him his sincerity, his deep desire to see Rangan free.
Rangan tapped the surface of the slate again, then looked down.
[rangan]Why?