by Naam, Ramez
Screen 3 showed the status of their two ground units and the squads within them.
Screen 4 showed the status and location of California Highway Patrol and Mountain View Police units standing by to assist.
Screen 5, where the stream of data from Agent Blackbird should be, was blank. It would update when she left the EM shielding and her surveillance devices uploaded what she'd seen and heard in the intervening time.
Being out of contact with a field agent always made Nichols nervous. Tonight was no exception.
Sight and sound slowly faded back into Sam's reality. She heard her own breathing, first. Then saw the tiniest hint of light. Shapes. A wall. She blinked, and the world came back more strongly. She was still in the same room. Kade was here, slumped in a chair. No sign of Wats, Rangan, or Ilya.
She tried to wiggle her toes. Nothing. Fingers. Nothing. Still paralyzed.
Nichols and his team watched the hangar closely, waiting for Blackbird to emerge. It might be hours yet until the Nexus party wound down.
On scope, a small number of people came and went from the party. A cluster of smokers emerged around the east exit. Three couples snuck out to find private time outside the structure. A dozen stragglers arrived late and were let into the building. Seven individuals left in the same timeframe. All groups were faceprinted. None were among the primary targets.
A young man emerged in a hoodie, his face hidden from the aerial camera, his body glowing in infrared. There was a tense moment as he crossed towards the neighboring golf course. Then he pissed on a bush and strolled back to the party.
Just after midnight another couple emerged and strolled in the same direction. Faceprinting identified one as Tania Wellington, a martial arts instructor residing in San Francisco. The other's face was shielded by a hooded sweatshirt. He was a large man, tall and broad. Could that be Cole?
The two figures crossed slowly across the golf course, making no move towards the road or Sunnyvale. Eventually their stroll led them to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. IR showed their forms entwine, their faces meet, their clothes begin to come off.
Three individuals came out the east entrance, walked past the smokers, headed towards a car. The first two were ID'd successfully. The third kept his face in the shadows of the hoodie. The car door opened, and light momentarily illuminated him.
Rangan Shankari.
"Get CHP on that car," Nichols ordered. "Just follow. I want to see where Shankari goes."
"Roger that," Jane Kim called out.
"Why'd you do this to us?" Kade asked. He was slumped in the chair across the room once more, the ice pack to his head.
Sam took a breath before answering. "What you're doing is illegal. My job is to uphold the law."
Kade shook his head. "That's no answer. Why'd you choose this job?"
"Because what you're doing is dangerous. That's why I care. You're playing with fire."
"This isn't a weapon. It's a new way to communicate. It connects people. You saw that. You felt it."
Sam had felt it. She'd loved it, until she'd been horrified by it, by the discovery that she was not who she thought she was. She dodged the topic.
"It can be abused. Maybe you wouldn't use it to hurt people, but others would."
"It's not like that," said Kade. "It's a way of bridging the gap between people. It makes us smarter together than we could be apart. It can raise collective intelligence, collective empathy. Ilya talks about…"
Sam cut him off. "Ilya talks about creating things that aren't human, Kade. Non-human intelligences."
"Groups of humans," Kade retorted. "Human networks."
"Hive minds. Borgs. Super-organisms," Sam spat out. "What if they don't like us?"
"How could they not like us? They'd be us." Kade was getting heated now.
"And what if I didn't want to join a hive? Would I be forced to? Assimilated? Could I keep up if I didn't? Would there be a place for ordinary humans?"
Kade exhaled in frustration. "Look, that's all paranoia. There are positive effects too."
"It's not just paranoia, Kade. You have me under your thumb right now. You can make me do whatever you want. Rangan could too. That's coercion, Kade. You've built a coercion technology. A way to control people. And you tell me this isn't a weapon?"
Kade shook his head. "It's just a safety precaution. This is still experimental."
"Just a precaution, huh? Do other people have this back door in their heads? Can you paralyze any of your friends out in the party? Can you read their minds?"
Kade said nothing, just looked down at his hands.
"You can, can't you?" Sam continued. "Do they know? Have you told them that taking part in your little experiment hands you and Rangan the keys to their heads?"
Kade shook his head, still not looking at her. "It's a safeguard, that's all. We'd never release it like this."
"How can you be so naïve, Kade? You're a good guy. I've felt that. But what about other people who get their hands on this? You think they won't reverse-engineer it? You think they won't make slaves out of this? Suicide troops? Sex slaves? Worshippers?"
Awful memories were rising up inside of her. The ranch. The cult. The way her parents had become cattle, or worse. She wanted to push them at Kade, couldn't. He was opaque to her. She was cut off from his mind.
Kade bristled. "This is stupid. You can hurt people with guns. You can get them to do awful things with words. Books are as dangerous as anything I'm doing. We need this. 'Our current problems can't be solved by the level of thinking that created them.' Einstein said that. This can take us to a new level of thinking."
"Kade, it's going too fast," Sam replied. She fought down the pain and despair of old memories, hardened herself. She despised the longing she felt to touch his mind and show him. Hated the weakness of it, the wrongness of it. Damn this drug. Damn this mission.
"You're talking about changing everything about people, the way we've been for a hundred thousand years, in a heartbeat. You can't know the consequences, you can't understand how people will abuse this, you can't know that humanity will survive this. We have to slow down the rate we're becoming something that's not human."
Kade glared at her. "You're one to talk. You're not quite baseline human yourself, are you?"
Nichols turned his attention back to the couple at the edge of the water. The red blobs in the IR scope were bent over, making odd motions. What were they doing?
It clicked. They were taking off their shoes. And now their pants. A little rendezvous on the beach. The couple now appeared to be kissing passionately, red lines blurring in IR, only heads and limbs distinguishable in the image. He was about to look away, when they did something he didn't expect. They turned, hand in hand, and ran into the Bay, water splashing up around them. They ran till they were hip-deep, the lower halves of their bodies disappearing from IR view, and then dove head first into the water, and vanished under the waves entirely.
"Isn't that water a little cold for a swim this time of year?" Nichols asked aloud.
"I was just thinking the same," Bruce Williams replied. "Can't be much more than fifty degrees."
On screen, twenty feet further out, the head and shoulders of one of the red blobs. Nichols held his breath. Wait for it… Wait for it… Nothing. The other was nowhere to be seen.
"Fuck!" he exclaimed. "Get Mobile 2 there now! Scramble the mini drones. Light that place up. Find that guy!"
Kim and Williams furiously hit keys. On screen, Mobile 2 turned on its lights and spun tires as it accelerated to the spot, leaving the road and crashing into the manicured greens of the course. A narrow beam spotlight shot out from the overhead Sky Eye. The naked figure in the water turned, put her face in the water and kicked towards shore.
"And pull over the car with Shankari in it!" Nichols called out.
"Yes, sir," Jane Kim replied.
A tense minute passed, and then another. Mobile 2 arrived at the scene and took Tania Wellington into custod
y. Yes, she confirmed, that had been Cole. And no, she had no idea where he was going.
Cole was gone. If he had a rebreather or had undergone black market blood hyperoxygenation, he could stay down for hours. He could come up anywhere. Unless they were very, very lucky, he was gone.
California Highway Patrol had more luck. On screen a cruiser pulled in behind the vehicle carrying Rangan Shankari. Moments later, they had him in custody.
Sam took her time in replying. "I'm human, Kade. I've made compromises. I've accepted things that are necessary for me to do my job, to help keep people safe."
"Funny," Kade said, "I don't feel any safer with you around."
"You don't see the things we do on your behalf."
"I saw what you did tonight."
"There are monsters out there, Kade," Sam said. "We have to stop them."
"I'm no monster."
"You're no monster," Sam agreed, "but they're out there. There are people who would do awful things with this technology."
"There are people who would do wonderful things with it, too," Kade replied. "We'll put safeguards in. That's always been the plan. We don't want this used for mind control any more than you do."
"Other people will reverse-engineer the technology. They'll remove the safeguards, or figure out how to build a clone system that doesn't have them. That's how it always works. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't control what they do."
Kade threw up his hands in frustration. "You can't control what people do with phones, or planes, or the net," he replied. "People do terrible things with all of those, but the good things outweigh them. Should we take all of those back too?"
"Those don't change what we are. We're still human."
"You get to decide who's human? Pretty damn arrogant."
Sam tried to stay cool, didn't entirely succeed. "Arrogant? You're the one who's taking risks that could affect billions of people. You're the one threatening to make real humans obsolete. Do you have any idea the danger you're putting the whole world in?"
Kade shook his head bitterly. "You have this so backwards. I'm not making choices for anyone. I'm giving people options. I'm giving them new decisions to make for themselves. You're the one taking people's freedoms away. You're the one locking people up for doing the wrong science, or for trying something new." He stabbed an accusatory finger in her direction. "If there's any monster here, it's you."
The state trooper placed Rangan in the back of his squad car. Bruce Williams patched Nichols into the CHP comms system.
Nichols put on his headset. "Rangan Shankari?" he asked.
Silence. On the screen, Rangan looked towards the floor of the vehicle, making no sign he'd heard.
"Mr Shankari, you are now in the custody of the Emerging Risks Directorate. My name is Special Agent Nichols."
More silence.
"Mr Shankari, is Samara Chavez still inside Hangar 3? What's her status?"
"I want to see my lawyer." Rangan uttered the words without looking up.
"Mr Shankari, you're under suspicion of very serious crimes in breach of the Emerging Technological Threats Act. Under these conditions you don't have the right to a lawyer."
Silence.
Nichols continued. "What I care about is the safety of Samara Chavez. Is she still in that building? What's her situation?"
Rangan said nothing.
"Mr Shankari, I have a team of men ready to knock down the door of that building and do whatever it takes to get my agent out. There are also at least a hundred civilians in the building, many of whom are your friends. If we go in with force, some of your friends could be hurt. Do you understand me?"
"Suck my dick."
Nichols was irritated now. "Rangan, you may think you're accomplishing something with this, but you're not. If you're covering for your friends, we already have Watson Cole," Nichols lied. "What we want is to know if Samara Chavez is still alive, and a way to communicate with the people inside that building to get her out."
Rangan said nothing, but shifted slightly in his seat.
"If you don't help me, we're going in, and people are likely to get hurt. People might get killed. You understand that?"
Rangan shifted again. "I want my lawyer."
"You're not going to get one. Are you going to help us, or do we kick in the door and start shooting?"
Rangan visibly hesitated, then spoke. "They're going to let her go in a couple hours."
Nichols leaned back in his seat. So, she was alive. And being held.
"Let's end this now," he said. "Not a couple hours from now. You're going back in there, and here's what you're going to tell your friends inside…"
Fifteen minutes later, a black SUV deposited him outside the hangar's back entrance.
"…if there's any monster here, it's you!"
The handle of the door to the storage room turned. Both Kade and Sam turned, startled, to see Ilya enter, a glum look on her face, trailed by Rangan, dressed in a grey hoodie and jeans. Rangan looked pale and unhappy. His eyes were fixed on the ground in front of him. Party sounds followed them in.
"They caught me," Rangan announced. His voice shook.
Kade could feel the bitterness of it. The words tasted like ashes in his mouth.
"They sent me back in to deliver a message," Rangan said. "They have this place surrounded. They have Wats too."
"Ugh." Kade felt it like a blow.
"They want the three of us to come out, with her." Rangan nodded towards Sam, still bound to the chair. "They want us to shut down the party, send everyone home with some excuse, and surrender ourselves. Just us. We're not to mention the ERD at all. If we don't come out in thirty minutes, they say they'll come in here with guns out."
"What about everyone else here?" Kade asked.
"As long as we surrender, everyone else can go home."
"I'd rather make a scene," said Ilya. "Force them to arrest a hundred of us. Take it public. Show people what they're doing. That's how we fight."
"Everyone knows what they're doing," Rangan said. "No one cares. We're just druggies to them."
Kade spoke up. "I don't want other people going to jail because of us. That was the whole point of not running."
"That was part of the point," Ilya said. "The other part is standing up for what's right. We've done nothing wrong. The ERD are the bad guys here. We can show the world that."
Kade shook his head. "No. This is our fall to take."
"I'm with Kade," Rangan said softly.
Ilya bowed her head. She didn't look convinced. Her mind felt angry to Kade, defiant.
"Fine," she said. "I'll go start shutting things down." She left through the open door.
Rangan looked at Kade. "You OK?"
Kade nodded but said nothing.
Minutes passed. They waited in silence.
What's taking so long? Kade wondered.
Just then, through the door, they heard the current track fade, Ilya's amplified voice, something about a noise complaint, the party over, time to go, drive safe.
Ilya returned shortly after that. Her eyes were wet. Had she been crying? He wanted to comfort her, but she felt hard and angry.
"I left Antonio in charge of clearing people out," she said. "That'll take a while. We might as well go now."
"They said to head out the side entrance and walk towards the golf course parking lot," Rangan said.
Ilya untied the rope around Sam's feet, helped her up with a hand on her bicep.
Sharp pains lanced up Sam's left side as she rose. She ignored them. The four of them walked out of the storage room, turned and took a hallway away from the main hangar area. A minute later Rangan opened the side door of the hangar and they emerged into the cool night air.
Sam's contacts immediately lit up with the positions of the DEA SWAT team that was providing her support on this mission. The two vehicles were a hundred yards ahead. Two agents were with the vehicles. Four more in a loose perimeter blocking possible esc
ape. All showed ready to fire, half with lethal loads, half with tranq. A green handshake glyph showed that their tactical systems had registered hers as well.
She looked to her right at Rangan, squinted to illuminate him as a target, then Kade on her left, squinted, and hit the fire icon with her eyes. Rangan started to turn, the start of a frown on his face. Sam felt him tense in her mind. Then tranquilizer rounds shot out from two agents and hit each men in the neck. They went down like comic actors, hands rising to the sudden wasp stings at their necks, gurgling cries of surprise, then eyes going glassy, balance lost, toppling into loose-limbed heaps.