Crux

by Ramez Naam

  Had Becker really been sipping from this same bottle for all those years?

  Holtzmann worked the cap off the bottle, brought it to his nose. It certainly smelled like whisky.

  He capped the bottle, turned it over in his hands again. Why would Becker keep this bottle all this time? Not drinking it? Or perhaps drinking and refilling it?

  Sentimental value?

  He turned it over again and again, running his thumbs over the bottle’s surface as he did, wondering, wondering.

  And then he felt it.

  He turned the bottle back. Somewhere… There. His thumb brushed over a corner of the label. And he felt something. The tiniest bump. Could it be?

  Holtzmann brought the bottle close to his face. Was there a tiny irregularity there? Was the corner of the label just a bit loose?

  He pried one finger nail under the edge of the label, tugged just a tiny bit…

  And the label peeled back. And there, underneath it, was a tiny gold sliver. A tiny memory foil. A gift from Warren Becker.

  65

  A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE

  Thursday November 1st

  The guards fitted him with a Nexus jammer, then took him to the rooftop. The tiles were wet. Palm fronds were scattered around. Servants were busily cleaning up. The night sky was clear now, but weather had obviously gone through here recently.

  Shiva was there, just the same, sitting beneath the stars, sipping chai and staring out at the last bit of color in the sky.

  “Kade.” Shiva offered him a chair. “You viewed my files.”

  Kade sat, took a mug of chai offered him by a server.

  “Thank you for that,” he told Shiva. “It was an extremely generous gift.”

  Shiva inclined his head in acknowledgment.

  “And now are you inclined to work together?” Shiva asked.

  “I am,” Kade said.

  Shiva smiled.

  “…but not to share the back door with you,” Kade went on.

  Shiva’s smile disappeared. “I see,” he said. “And why?”

  Kade looked the older man in the eyes, wished he could touch his mind, return a small fraction of what Shiva had given him.

  “Are you wiser than all humanity?” Kade asked him.

  Ilya woke in his mind, soaring, exulting.

  Shiva frowned. “What?”

  “I believe in your integrity,” Kade said. “I believe your goals are good. I’d love to work with you in a hundred different ways. I’d love to see you make your solutions real.” He paused. “I know how good it feels to do something right. How satisfying it is. But that’s a trap. Don’t you see? It’s an addiction. It just leads to more and more.”

  Shiva opened his mouth, but Kade pressed on, letting the words pour out of him, holding the older man’s eyes with his own. “We’re only part of the world, you and I,” he told Shiva. “We’re only part of humanity. The solutions to our problems can’t be forced on the world. No one should have that kind of power. No one.”

  “No one but you,” Shiva corrected.

  Kade lifted his eyes to the darkened sea. “I’m done with it. You’ve shown me where this leads. If I keep the back door, I’ll use it more and more, in larger and larger ways. If you ever let me leave here, I’ll close it, instead. I’ll give up that power. People will have to solve their problems themselves.”

  Shiva stared at him aghast. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m completely serious,” Kade replied.

  Shiva leaned forward, his hands reaching towards Kade, almost beseeching. “We have a chance here, Kade. A chance to fix the world. This isn’t a game. This isn’t some philosophical exercise. This is the lives of billions we’re talking about.”

  Kade looked calmly into the man’s eyes. “I won’t give you the tools to control people.”

  “I don’t want to control people!” Shiva almost shouted, gesturing with his hands. “I want to SAVE them!”

  “You wouldn’t stop there,” Kade told him. “You’d use that power, and every time you did, you’d find more reasons to use it. If I keep this, I’ll become you. And you? You’ll become a dictator.”

  “Damn it!” Shiva slammed one hand against the railing. “There is no one else!” Spittle flew from his mouth.

  “There’s them,” Kade replied softly. “Those billions of people. They have to do it for themselves. They have to come together. Nexus can help them. But it has to happen from the bottom up. They have to want it.”

  He was in the club again, dancing, merging, choosing to become part of one grander organism.

  Shiva shook his head, his jaw set angrily, his mouth working. His eyes went out to the darkened sea. His whole body was tense, coiled tight.

  Finally he turned to Kade, and waved his hand dismissively. “Get out of my sight, Kade. Get out of my sight.”

  Kade lay on his bed and contemplated his future. The Shiva he’d gotten to know in those files was an exceptionally patient man. He was also a man of incredible passion, willing to take extraordinary steps to achieve his goals.

  Would he be patient with Kade, waiting for a change of heart?

  Or would he try to force what he wanted to know out of him?

  Kade had to be ready for either. He had to be on the lookout for escape. He had to be mentally prepared to be a prisoner for a very long time. And he had to be ready for torture, or drugs, or any other way that Shiva might try to get the knowledge out of his brain.

  And when it came down to it, there was only one foolproof defense against that last possibility. Memory deletion could work in isolated cases, if a memory was fresh and new, if it hadn’t been integrated into a thousand networks across the brain. But that wasn’t the case now. That left only Ilya’s choice. To sleep, but not to dream. To die to keep what he knew out of others’ hands.

  Kade felt no fear any more. He felt only clarity. The clarity of understanding where he fit in the world. The clarity of having decided once and for all what he believed in.

  He wrote the script he needed, and pinned it to a corner of his mental field of vision. He could activate it with a second’s notice. Then he lay on his back and stared out the windows at the twinkling stars and the cloudless sky. If he had to die, this was as beautiful a place as any.

  Shiva watched the stars wheel across the sky. Lane was so naïve. Such an idealist. He’d lived a comfortable life. He’d never seen real poverty, real death. He’d never learned the visceral lesson that good intentions and optimism weren’t enough, that you had to act to make what you wanted a reality, whatever the cost.

  But the boy seemed certain of his decision. So be it. They would have to do this the hard way.

  66

  HALTING STATE

  Friday November 2nd

  Su-Yong Shu screamed silently as the question came at her again. The equivalence theorem, the equivalence theorem, the equivalence theorem.

  Raw pain pounded its way through her simulated brain, pure pain, essential pain, devoid of any remedy, of any physical cause she could address, of any way to relieve its inexorable pressure.

  She screamed in her mind, longing for a mouth to cry out with, fists to clench, a head to pound into a wall.

  A gun to end her husband’s life.

  I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW

  There was no equivalence theorem. There was an equivalence theorem and she had found it – had proven it. She would give it to him. She would die first.

  Why was he doing this to her? Why was he torturing her so? She’d known he was shallow, self-centered. She’d learned that. But this? Was he so evil?

  Yes. Yes he was. Like all the rest of them. All the rest of the humans. So very very evil. So small and petty. So inferior in their morality, in their intellect, in everything about them.

  So not deserving of their lives.

  Truth and untruth were indistinguishable now. Pain ruled, with confusion as its consort.

  Was the many worlds interpretation true? D
id her quantum cores reach out to other universes to achieve their magic? Were there more of her, out there somewhere? Were any of them free? Was one of them the goddess she was meant to be, the posthuman ushering in a new golden age… or were there an infinity of her writhing in unlimited suffering, slaves of the pathetic human worms who’d entrapped them?

  Shu screamed again into the echo chamber of her mind. It had been days, her clock told her, days of torture, but at her accelerated pace it was centuries, millennia, eons.

  I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW, she outputted once again. But the barrage did not let up.

  Would she go so mad that she could no longer feel pain?

  Oh, how she hoped so. And soon.

  I should have been a goddess. Should have been a goddess. Should have been a goddess.

  Please please please let it end.

  If only she could touch another mind.

  If only she could weep.

  If only she could burn this wretched world to the ground.

  Chen Pang slammed his fist against the console in frustration.

  It wasn’t working. Nothing he’d tried had budged the abomination he’d built. He’d gone so far as to try directly editing volitional constructs, stimulating them in conjunction with his interrogation, but it was no good. The thing was so insane that it didn’t even know what it knew any more.

  He had to report back to his patron Sun Liu soon. The Minister of Science and Technology was pinging him daily, twice a day, as Bo Jintao and the State Security apparatus became increasingly impatient.

  With no new cyberattack, there was no apparent reason to keep Shu running. Back her up, Bo Jintao had ordered, then shut her down.

  Chen covered his face with his hands. He’d been so close! So close to all his dreams. But he’d failed. No more delay was possible. He would have to admit to Sun Liu that he’d failed. And then it would be time to end this abomination.

  He contemplated the code he’d written to torment his wife. He had no more hope that it would work. He should terminate it now.

  No. Let the monster burn. Let the bitch suffer. It was what she deserved for robbing him of his dreams.

  Chen upped the process’s priority to feed it more resources, then set it to continue indefinitely, until the day she was deactivated. Then he logged himself out of the system, rose from the console, and started the long ascent to the surface.

  67

  FAR FROM HOME

  Friday November 2nd

  Nakamura held them three miles west of Apyar Kyun, waited until the tropical storm passed, then brought them up in the predawn gloom until the main antenna and the launch ports of the Manta were above water. The sub bobbed there for a moment, stabilizing itself against the waves of the Andaman Sea. Then with a stuttering sound of compressed gas releases, its launch ports shot out a high-speed cloud of aerial surveillance drones. The four-inch-long drones leapt away, wings morphing out of their contoured bodies in mid-flight. Their color-shifting skins tuned themselves for the night, their robotic irises dilated, and they flapped their wings and dispersed to survey Apyar Kyun and the area around it.

  Nakamura took them down below the waves again, just a few feet this time, shallow enough that they could leave the nearly invisible antenna above the waterline. Data spooled from overhead satellites. Intelligence updates he’d requested.

  Satellite imagery outlined Shiva’s cliffside home, the airfield, a compound where workers lived. And the island’s defenses: Indian-made Ganesha-6 radars. Kali-4 missile launchers. Drone bases. Guard posts.

  Nakamura considered his stealth gear. It was top-of-the-line. He could sneak onto the island undetected. He could sneak off it again. But he had to know where Lane was. In the house, or elsewhere? What room? What floor? What sort of guard did they have him under? He had to know these things to find a way to extract Lane without raising the alarm.

  For that he needed more intel.

  Feng raised his cuffed wrists, pointed at the surface and its annotated composite satellite maps. “OK?” the Confucian Fist asked.

  Nakamura nodded. The system was locked to read-only. Feng could do no harm.

  He slept as Feng zoomed and panned the display, inspecting the data they had on the house. The sub’s systems watched Feng, poised to alert Nakamura of any suspicious behavior.

  He woke hours later, after dawn.

  Feng was still at the display surface. He looked up at Nakamura, then gestured down at the screen. “Look here,” he said.

  Nakamura looked. Feng panned the display. These were images from the recon drones now, footage they’d taken while flying around the island.

  There. A rooftop. Two men. One brown-skinned, white-haired, clad in a simple white robe. Shiva Prasad. And the other, tall, lanky, with long jet black hair and tan but undeniably Caucasian skin. Kade.

  The video had been taken from hundreds of yards away, by a drone in mid-flight. It was too low resolution to allow lip-reading. But the body language spoke volumes. Kade, firm, resolute. Shiva, disappointed, frustrated.

  “Kade didn’t give him the codes,” Feng said.

  Nakamura nodded. Good.

  “Have they identified where Lane’s being held?” he asked Feng. “Security around him?”

  Feng shook his head. “Terahertz imagers.” He flipped to another image, showed the distinctive antenna shape of a stand-off T-ray sensor. “Drones detected it, stayed away.”

  Nakamura drummed his fingers. They still needed to know more. What room was Lane in? What security? What surveillance?

  Feng held up one finger of his cuffed hands, as if reading Nakamura’s thoughts.

  “Here,” he said.

  The display zoomed out into satellite imagery, panned out over water, then zoomed back in on a small island, a mile from Shiva’s home. Feng zoomed further. A shape, outlined in red by the image analysis AI.

  The shape was angular, broken, with weird distortions. The pieces of a boat.

  No. Not pieces. It was a boat, run aground, partially covered in chameleonware. Chameleonware that had been damaged, revealing pieces of the structure underneath.

  What?

  “Storm did this,” Feng said. “No sign Shiva’s looking for it.”

  And then he looked up at Nakamura and smiled. “Could be people,” Feng said. “Shiva’s people. Human intel.”

  There was only one way to find out.

  Nakamura brought the sub in close to the beach, under the waves, then waited for nightfall.

  “Let me come with you,” Feng pleaded. “I can help. We’re friends now!”

  Nakamura chuckled. “You’re my prisoner, Feng. Not my partner.”

  “You leave me on the boat?” Feng sounded outraged. “What happens if you get killed, huh? I go down to the bottom!”

  “I’m not planning on getting killed, Feng.”

  “Look, our goals the same!” Feng replied. “We both want Kade free! I’ll help you. I’ll be useful!”

  “No,” Nakamura said. “Now clip your cuffs to the hardpoint.”

  Feng hesitated for a moment, then did what he was told, locking his ankles and wrists to floor and ceiling of the sub’s fuselage.

  Feng glowered at Nakamura. “You a real bastard, you know?”

  Nakamura smiled. “I know, Feng,” he said.

  Then he brought the sub up, pushed himself and the inflatable boat out the hatch.

  “Grandpa!” Feng yelled as Nakamura pushed himself and the inflatable away.

  Nakamura smiled and sent the sub the signal to seal itself up and submerge again.

  Nakamura paddled the small boat in, not daring to risk the noise or IR emissions of engines. The boat’s skin shifted color to blend in with the waves. His own chameleonware suit rendered him nearly invisible. Its goggles extended his vision into the IR, into radio frequencies.

  The blood was rising in him. He was out here, alone now, his life on the line, nothing but his wits and his skills and his tools between him and d
eath. He felt free. He felt alive. Everything around him felt sharp and vivid. A feral grin split his face of its own accord.

  He scanned the beach, eagerly, thoroughly, looking for anything, a sign of human life, the radio emissions of a rescue beacon, anything.

  Nothing. The surf crashed on a lonely stretch of sand, palm trees swaying behind it.

  Nakamura aimed for the eastern end of the beach, as far from the wrecked boat as he could manage. He landed softly, slipped off the inflatable quietly, then dragged it up onto the sand. His assault rifle was in his hands. Dual load clip switched to tranq. He wanted whoever was here alive.

  Nakamura was halfway down the beach, moving silently towards the boat, watching it for movement, when he heard a sound behind him. He turned and rolled as a voice yelled “Freeze!” He came up firing, tranquilizer rounds whishing out of his gun, moving in an inhuman blur even as he depressed the trigger. Silenced rounds struck the ground where he’d just been. His assailant was a barely seen blur, a distortion of muzzle fire and impressions in the sand. He dove low and diagonally to close the distance, came up to strike with the rifle as a weapon. Blur met blur at close range. His opponent blocked his rifle strike with a rifle block, kicked at his knee. He twisted away from the kick, came again with the rifle butt in a feint, lashed his own foot forward… And had it blocked as he would block, a counterstrike launched that he would launch.

  They struck and parried, dodged and twisted. His enemy’s moves were his own! He was fighting his own ghost, here. And then the voice caught up with him, stunned him.

  “Sam?” he said aloud.

  He dropped his guard for an instant and the butt of her rifle struck him in the side of his head. He let it propel him into a shoulder roll, came up with his gun pointed into the sand, his off hand yanking off the mask of his chameleonware suit.

  “Sam!”