by Ramez Naam
He blocked, blocked, blocked, with the rifle, gave ground, opened his mind as he did.
SAM!
He felt her mind there but she didn’t respond, just kept on coming. His combat display showed him status updates from the drones. Red dots. Men headed this way. Shiva knew where they were now.
Fuck this.
He lashed back out at Sam, took advantage of her disregard for self-protection, slammed his foot into her midsection, let her slice him across the shoulder in exchange for a vicious slam of his rifle into her head. She stumbled back and Feng jumped up, got one foot on the top bar of the railing, and then kicked out against it, propelling himself up, towards the second-story window.
The sound of gunfire erupted just as Feng got his fingers onto the ledge. He hauled, flipped himself up and over, and into the hallway beyond in a shower of breaking glass.
Kade collapsed to his knees, his insides aching, his skin burning – his damaged hand in pain so bad he thought he would cry. All around him the security men were unconscious, knocked out by the back door command that the children had amplified for him. He reached out with his left hand, unclipped the unlocked Nexus jammer from the guard’s throat, tossed it to the side.
Then he opened the man’s mind, burrowed into it. He needed the passwords to the network.
There. He had them now. He could reach Houston, contact the police, the FBI, warn them about the bombing, evacuate the people.
Then someone was shaking him in the real world. He tried to break loose of them, to focus on the task at hand.
Kade! It was one of the children, the girl, Sarai.
Sam! she sent him. Shiva’s taken her! You have to help! Please!
He pulled himself back, his mind still reeling.
Sam? Here? And Shiva.
Gunfire burst out somewhere, barely audible over the ringing in his ears. Distantly he heard another explosion. Fighting was still going on. They were in danger here.
He tried to twist, to look around him, to see what was going on. Pain burst up from his midsection. He was so tired… And Houston…
Sam! the girl yelled into his mind. Help her!
Kade groaned. He had to help Sam, stop Shiva, stop the fighting, make them safe here on the island. Then he could tackle Houston.
Kade opened his senses wide. There, at the edge of his perception, he could feel that familiar mind. Fatigue and pain tried to pull him down. But she was here. She’d saved his life before. And now she’d come for him…
Kade forced himself to concentrate, pulled himself together. And then he reached out his mind to hers.
Sam’s world was horror. Pure horror. She wanted to go to that place she’d known so well on the ranch. The place she’d gone to when they’d hurt her, when she’d learned to stop fighting and just shut it out.
But Shiva wouldn’t let her.
Kill them.
She did her best to kill Feng. She wanted it. He had to die. She didn’t want to want it, but dear God she couldn’t help herself.
She tried to shoot Feng, to hit him, to cut him. Even as she did her mind replayed the horror she’d just been party to. The bullets striking Kevin. Her bullets striking Kevin. His body toppling backwards out into nothing…
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
She screamed inside as Shiva’s compulsion drove her. This was rape. Worse than rape. His mind was inside hers and she had no choice. She wanted Feng dead. She knew it wasn’t true, but she had no choice. Shiva had turned her into a zombie, like her parents had become, worse, far worse, a tool for killing the man who’d saved her life, who she’d loved as a mentor and friend!
Aaaaaaah!
She wanted to stop, to turn a knife against herself, to stab herself in the throat to end this pain.
But she wanted to kill Feng more. And so she fought.
And then his rifle collided with her head, and in a split second, he was gone.
Shiva’s men raced past her, ignored her, leapt up, scrambled for holds, and followed Feng into the building.
She moved to follow. Catch him, Shiva commanded her. And she would.
And then Kade was there, in her mind as well, his thoughts wrestling Shiva’s, tearing her in two, and Sam screamed inside.
85
SIGNAL STRENGTH
Saturday November 3rd
Feng took in his surroundings as he hurtled through the window. Glass shattered around him, fell in slow motion as he came down on the carpeted floor. A hallway. Doors.
He surged forward. One foot lashed out at a closed door. Wood splintered as the door buckled inward and crashed open. He moved forward to the next open doorway, rolled into it, rifle in his hands, eyes taking in the scene instantly. An office, empty.
He listened as Shiva’s men scramble up the wall and in through the window. Glass crunched under booted feet. Four men. They moved without speech but their footsteps, their breaths, even their pulse rates gave them away to him. They moved to the door he’d kicked open, paused.
Feng slipped back out into the hall, a ghost in his chameleonware, as silent as death. He leveled his assault rifle at the four men, and pulled the trigger.
The gun clicked.
SAFETY LOCKED – FIRE AUTHORIZATION DENIED flashed across his vision.
Fuck!
The security men heard the click, turned, guns rising. They moved in slow motion to Feng’s eyes, turning like molasses, their eyes widening in dawning awareness, fingers tightening over triggers.
Feng threw himself forward, into a roll that propelled him at their feet. Gunfire burst from muzzles as dozens of rounds filled the air. Feng’s accelerated senses brought him each boom and pop as a discrete event. His mind filled with pressure waves and firing solutions and the neon red paths of bullets zipping through the space he’d just occupied.
Then he was up, out of the roll, a man-shaped blur moving faster than they could imagine.
Kade found Sam’s mind hard and sealed off from him. So he did what he had to. Activate the back door. Send the passcode.
And then he was in. He could feel her mind, feel the homicidal thoughts Shiva was forcing on her, feel her horror at what was happening.
Then Kade threw his mind against Shiva’s, tried to force the other man’s mind out of Sam’s. Shiva counter-attacked, jammed his will hard against Kade’s. They wrestled over her, mind against mind.
Kade felt Sam scream as their struggles tore at her, as her brain was assaulted by conflicting signals from inside itself, from Shiva, from Kade. Distantly he felt her fall to her knees, her head throbbing, pain and confusion and despair like she’d never known tearing at her…
Brute force was futile. Kade dropped to a lower layer, fired random data at Nexus nodes in Sam’s brain that Shiva controlled, hoping to confuse them. He felt Shiva reinforce them, bolstering the signal from his own brain.
Kade switched strategies again, pulled up a network connection listing, fired a kill command at Shiva’s connection to Sam’s mind, felt Shiva clone the connection before the first one died. Then Shiva counter-attacked again, hopping from Sam’s mind to Kade’s, trying to open the back door, send the passcode to crack into Kade’s mind.
And then Kade had him. For there was no back door in his own mind.
He ignored Shiva’s attack, dropped the struggle for Sam’s body, felt her topple over in pain as he did, and grabbed control of Nexus nodes in her brain as a proxy instead, using them to hop from Sam’s mind to Shiva’s.
The second back door! There were three, and Shiva only knew of one!
He activated the second one now, entered the second passcode, to break into Shiva’s mind…
Then Shiva dropped the connection, severed it before Kade could get inside the man’s head. And he was alone with Sam in her mind.
Sam screamed as Kade invaded her mind. There were two of them now, raging at each other inside her. Her limbs trembled. Pain shot through her. She was distantly aware of hitting the ground. All was chaos. Thoughts wouldn’t come
. She felt like she was being torn apart, her head forced open, her mind ripped in two in horrible agony as her twin invaders tore at her will, clawed at each other through the substrate of her brain.
She screamed again, and no sound left her lungs. Her whole body was shaking now, thrashing wildly, like a seizure. Her arms and legs flailed as the two men fought for control of her. Lightning bolts of pain and confusion and memories of horror shot through her.
The agony increased. The confusion. She was spinning, falling, dropping through the floor. She was burning up – ice cold. Her limbs were being ripped from her body. Her mind was hell, agony lancing through every iota of her being.
Kill them. Kill them. Kill them.
Kevin falling. Bullets from her gun punching into his face. His body pirouetting out into empty space.
The Prophet on top of her, forcing her thighs apart, forcing himself into her, smashing his fist into her face as she resisted.
Her home burning, her sister and her parents and everyone she knew dying, dying because of her.
Mai’s tiny body ripped to pieces by American bullets.
Jake’s mind splintering, fading to nothingness as blood bubbled up through the hole in his chest.
Agony. Agony. Nothing but agony.
Kill me! Please!
She screamed again and for the first time she heard herself. She forced herself up to her knees and screamed again, harder, until she could feel the scream as pain in her throat. The sound was good. It was real. She willed her body to claw at the path beneath her and her fingers responded, clenching until tiles cracked and shattered in her gloved hands.
She forced herself to remember. To remember other things. Not the loss. Not the despair. The overcoming!
The beach beyond Sari, tired, hurt, running for her life, bullets lodged in her body, but still alive! Still alive!
The Prophet, lying on the floor of his office, blood spurting from the bullet she’d put into his belly, forming a pool around him, soaking into his expensive carpet. Standing over him, taking careful aim at his head, the gun huge in her young hands, seeing the fear in his eyes, and then firing again and again and sending that bastard straight to hell.
She could do this. She could do this.
GGGGHHHHH!
And then Shiva was gone, and it was only Kade in her mind.
Sam! he reached out to her, his thoughts laced with concern, with pity.
She raged at him in response, with all the anger and hatred she had inside her.
GET. OUT.
Kade cut the connection to Sam’s mind with an inner groan. What Sam had gone through…
No time for that. He had to win this battle. Then Houston. He felt for Shiva’s mind but it was nowhere.
He turned and his eyes met Sarai’s. She was crouched beside him, a hand still on his shoulder. He reached out for her with his mind and felt her thoughts meet his. She was frightened but controlling it, controlling it like a monk. And her mind… Fluid. Fluent with the Nexus.
He showed Sarai what he needed, sent it to her.
Sarai nodded into his mind, opened the bandwidth between them again, let down her own walls. Kade closed his eyes, let his mind touch this child’s. He felt her breath, in, out, in, out. Anapana. Sam had taught her. Kade let himself be absorbed by his own breath, let it consume his attention. His breath. Her breath. Match them. Match the breath. Match the thoughts. Open and synchronize and enmesh…
And then he was with her. With all of them, the minds of the children, coming together into one, falling into a common rhythm, a unified whole, greater than the sum of its parts. So fluid. So natural. So complete.
Kade felt his heart soar in joy from the pure glory of it, the pure wonder of these children. Everything became clearer. His thoughts became sharper. His eyes opened. The world around him became brighter, every detail more complete, more precise, more part of a larger whole. The texture of the ground beneath him, the feel of the breeze on his skin, the view of the courtyard all around him, the stars twinkling in their constellations behind the plumes of smoke rising into the air, the fire burning in the apartment that was once his, even the pain of his broken body. It all fit. He could hold it all in his mind, see the patterns and connections between everything he perceived, all at once, in a way he never could as Kade alone.
This. This was what it meant to be posthuman. This was what Nexus could do. His fear and pain and panic fell away below him. Even in the midst of chaos, here was beauty. Here was an instant of pure transcendence.
And then they reached out together, he and the children, one mind, one being, like nothing Kade had ever known.
Their senses found Shiva atop the roof. He was transparent to them now. They understood him in a single flash of insight.
They could fix him. They could make Shiva whole again.
But first they had to stop him.
As a single being they touched Shiva’s mind, invoked the second back door, and sent out the passcode.
Shiva recoiled from the American agent’s mind. Lane had tried to jump from the woman’s mind to his. He couldn’t allow that.
He could feel Lane’s mind down below. Could feel him merging with the minds of the children, making an even more formidable foe. He had only instants to act.
Shiva reached out, into the Nexus repeaters throughout his home, flipped off their safeguards, cranked up their gain to the maximum levels possible, and then pulsed out a single simple thought through them all.
Kade and the children reached out together, as a single being, reached out for Shiva’s mind, invoked the second back door, sent out the passcode…
And then a wall of coherent thought struck them from all angles, an absurdly amplified Nexus signal, pressing down on them. It came at them from emitters scattered throughout the house, across the grounds. It came at them at a broadcast strength that trampled over their own signals, saturated the air around them, deafened each of them to the minds of the others. Their connection broke. Their union disintegrated, and Kade was alone in his mind again, with a single overriding urge to unconsciousness blasting into him from all around.
Shiva felt the group mind of the children crumble under his assault. He felt them cut off from one another, from Lane. The children were falling, their minds still young, still vulnerable to this brute force attack. But Lane was struggling, still fighting back.
Shiva pressed harder, concentrating on driving them down into submission. Sweat beaded on his brow as he pushed his full will at them, amplified hundreds of times over by the repeaters.
He raised his left wrist to his mouth, spoke into it.
“Activate your Nexus shielding. Lane is in the courtyard. Take him. Alive.” He gritted his teeth and continued. “The American woman is free. Take down the remaining intruders.”
He felt his men’s jammers activate, buffering them at least partially against his attack. Good.
Then he turned his full attention back to Lane.
86
AGAINST THE TIDE
Saturday November 3rd
Sam rose to her feet, free and full of rage. Three of Shiva’s soldiers were running towards her, in pursuit of Feng, oblivious to her presence in her chameleonware suit.
Then a mind blared out at her at staggering volumes, buffeting her with the urge to submit, to surrender, to crumble into stasis.
She threw back her head and roared out loud, fighting it.
The soldier passing by heard her, recoiled in surprise, turning, trying to bring his gun up at this ghostly target.
Her fingers made a spear and she jabbed forward, her gloves turning her hand into a weapon as hard as carbon. Her fingers punched through the man’s throat. He made a gurgling sound and his body went limp, dead on his feet, but by then she was turning, spinning.
The other two raised their assault rifles, turning. A gun went off but she was around it, finishing her spin, and her rigid knife hand slammed into the side of a man’s neck, severing his spine.
&
nbsp; The last man was firing now, in full auto, his gun swinging towards her, but Sam was faster, coming around him, kicking off the wall with one foot, then lashing out with her other in a vicious roundhouse to his head.
The soldier saw it coming, saw the blur running on the wall like a floor, saw it all too late. Her booted foot collided with his face, snapped his neck instantly, sent his body flying out, tumbling over the railing, and down to join Kevin’s.
Sam landed on her feet, caught herself against the railing, her head out over it, looking down into the dark as the man’s still warm body tumbled in infrared towards the rocks and surf.
And then she dropped to her knees and wept.
Kade groaned under the weight of Shiva’s attack. He felt his eyes close. All he wanted was to lie still, to go limp, to let this pain and struggle end.
Fuck. That.
He forced his eyes open. Sarai was on her side, hands to her head. The other children were crumpled all around him. He saw one of Shiva’s scientists on her knees across the courtyard.
It couldn’t end this way. He wouldn’t get another chance like this.
Kade tried to push up onto his feet. Sharp stabbing pain came from his midsection, sent him sprawling once again. His head was so cloudy. It would be so easy to give in, to just rest for once… His eyes closed. Sleep. Give up. Rest. Just rest.
No… No…
Kade reached inside himself, clumsily now, in a haze. He could see a command prompt in his mind, far away, at the end of a long tunnel. He mentally flailed at it. Incomprehensible errors came back. Shhhh. Sleep. Just sleep. He bent his mind against the command prompt again. Errors. Again.
And then there was something before him. A screen. A control panel, neurotransmitter levels. It was wavering, dark and hazy. He just wanted to rest. Instead he grabbed a control. Adrenaline. He turned it up, fumbled at the mental button. God, just to sleep.
Something jolted through him and the world swam almost into focus. Adrenaline. Yes. He reached in again, gave himself a second dose, then a third. Kade felt his heart respond, start beating faster, faster, manically fast. Serotonin next. Then endorphins. He pushed them through his system, no idea how close he was to safe limits, knowing only that he had to conquer Shiva’s signal and the pain of his own body if he had any hope of winning.