by Naam, Ramez
"Here is where the Soviets fucked us," the geologist had said, "before you Americans came to finish the job." He'd laughed, hard and bitter. "Communism, capitalism, all the same. The powerful want resources. Water. Natural gas. Uranium. The powerful see them, reach out their hand and scoop them up, and who cares who they crush in the process, eh? Dictatorships and democracies, all alike. Your precious democracy doesn't care about us, does it? All men are created equal, eh? We all have inalienable rights. Unless we live so very far away, perhaps? You Americans defeated your British king because he was a dictator. We are the same. We will defeat our dictator, even if you oppose us."
No, Wats thought. I'm sorry, Nurzhan. But you won't. You didn't.
Two years dead. All of them.
He tossed a rock into the sea. No way back. Only forward.
He'd come out of captivity to find a changed world. The rebels were beaten. The "president" in Almaty had secured his power. The natural gas was flowing. The uranium mines were purring. America had one more ally bordering China, containing it.
He came out to find that his enhancements caused cancers. They'd discovered that during his months of captivity. Not right away, of course. They just destabilized the genome a bit. The viruses that had given his cells extra copies of the genes for muscle mass and bone density and fast nerve conduction, and all the other ways he was enhanced, hadn't done their job quite cleanly enough. One in every few million of them had inserted the new gene in the wrong place, disrupting some other part of his cells' genetic instruction set. Not many. No big deal, really. Except that eventually… eventually those genetic disruptions would add up. Eventually the tumors would come. By the time he hit forty, they said, forty-five at the latest. After that… modern medicine could fight the cancers. They could zap tumors with gamma rays, reprogram them with even more targeted viruses, cut off their blood supplies with angiogenesis suppressors.
Eventually one would get through. A year. Five years. Ten. It depended on when they were detected, what part of his body they were in, how he responded to aggressive treatment. So many variables.
Someone before him had quietly threatened a lawsuit, threatened publicity. That was what the Corps couldn't abide. There was a quiet settlement offer for everyone who'd received his enhancement package. Enough that Wats could go home to Haiti and live like a king there for the rest of his – probably quite short – life. Enough that he could stay in the States instead, and live as an activist, speak out about the war he'd seen, about how his brothers bled and died and killed to prop up a killer, to keep in place a government of thieves, rapists, and murderers, as Temir used to say. Enough to get an education. Enough to wait, and hope, and get the checkups, and cross his fingers that they'd find a cure.
He tossed another stone into the sea.
Enough money to acquire a few extra identities and to buy his hidey-hole here, out in the middle of nowhere.
What now? Even if he could make it back to America, he had no home there. His stepfather had disowned Wats for his antiwar activism. He'd spoken too clearly about how the American war on drugs had created the narco-barons who'd destroyed Haiti. He'd said too much about how the war in the KZ propped up a dictator. He was no son of Frank Cole.
Back to Haiti? Return to the land that had birthed him? They'd be looking for him there. Make a small comfortable life for himself somewhere else? Live off his savings here in Mexico until the cancers killed him? He was meant to do something else, something bigger. Temir, Nurzhan, Lunara… they'd risked their lives to teach him something. He had to make that mean something. This wasn't over yet.
The cheap disposable phone he'd picked up in Cabo beeped at him. He glanced at it. His data miners had found something. A new mention of Kade on the net. That was rare. Since he'd had the data miners running, they'd come back with dozens of hits about Rangan's shows and music, hundreds of hits on Ilya's writings, but none about Kade.
He opened it. Conference listing. International Society for Neuroscience meeting in Bangkok. Abstract of a poster to be presented by Kaden Lane. Kade hadn't mentioned any trip to Thailand.
Bangkok. The city of vice. The modern Babylon. A city of temples and whores. He'd spent some memorable R&R time there during his two years deployed in Burma. You could buy anything in Bangkok. Flesh. Fantasies. Drugs.
Weapons.
If it was a trap, it was a perfect set-up. They would know he'd been there. Wats knew the seedy underbelly of that city. He spoke a little Thai. He'd imagine that he could get there, find Kade, get him free.
And if he got Kade free… Then Wats could keep Nexus 5 alive. He could hope to someday get it out into the world. And if it got out to the world… It could change people. The way Nexus had changed him. The way the touch of another's mind through Nexus had changed him.
There was no choice. Even though Kade might refuse him again. Even though it might be a trap. He would go in with his eyes open. He was a dead man anyway. It was only a matter of time.
We're all born dying, someone had said. What matters is only how we spend the instant we're given.
He wanted to spend his instant changing the world. He wanted to spend it opening the eyes of his adopted countrymen. He wanted to spend it paying forward the gift that Temir, and Nurzhan, and Lunara, and all the rest had given him.
He tossed a final stone into the sea. It was time to move. He had seven weeks.
Watson Cole rose to his feet and set himself in motion.
Sam waited outside Enforcement Division Deputy Director Warren Becker's office. She was angry. She wanted to pace. Instead, Sam ruthlessly clamped down on her body, forcing herself to sit completely immobile in the uncomfortable chair in his anteroom, spine erect, hands folded in her lap. The vision of calm, but seething inside. Surely this was a mix-up?
The door opened, Becker's previous appointment walked out. The man, someone she vaguely recognized from Policy, made eye contact with her and then hurriedly looked away.
"Come on in, Sam," Becker projected through the door.
Sam took a deep breath, ignored the secretary, strode into Becker's office, and closed the door behind her. Becker was behind his massive mahogany desk, emblazoned with the twin seals of the DHS and the ERD.
"What can I do for you?" he asked.
"Sir, Dr Holtzmann just set up lab time with me to dose me with Nexus 5, permanent integration. He says it's under your orders."
"Yes," the deputy director replied. "My orders."
"Sir," Sam said, fists clenched at her sides. "I think this is a very bad idea."
"Noted," he said.
"It's one thing to face the risk of trying Nexus during an op, sir, but Holtzmann's talking about me having it in my skull for weeks, maybe months… That can't be right."
"Sam, in this case, it's vital for the mission and potentially for more."
"I don't see how."
Becker started to tick items off on his fingers. "First, gaining experience in this will increase your ability to fool anyone else on Nexus as to your identity in the case of mind-to-mind contact."
"We have the hypnotic memory implantation for that," Sam retorted.
"…which didn't work last time you were in the field," Becker pointed out.
"I'll do better next time. I'll be more prepared," Sam said.
"Yes," Becker said. "You will. Because you will have had multiple weeks of practicing mind-to-mind contact with Nexus 5.
"Second," Becker went on, ticking off another finger, "it'll give you and Lane a backchannel to communicate via during the operation, without needing to speak. Third, it'll let you monitor how Lane is doing emotionally and perhaps bolster him. He's doing terribly in his training. His inability to stay cool is a risk to the mission."
"Then send someone else," Sam replied, as calmly as she could. She could feel her nails gouging painful half-moons in her palm. "My presence is going to agitate him, not stabilize him. And I'm the wrong agent to have walking around with this thing in her skull."
"We don't have anyone else who's suitable, Sam."
"What about Anderson?"
"On a deep cover mission, weeks to go at minimum, maybe longer."
"Novaks, then."
"Novaks doesn't have an alias that makes sense. You have an identity as a neuroscience PhD student already in place, and just two hops from Lane. Novaks doesn't."
Sam racked her brain.
"How about Evans? He has a neuroscience alias."
Becker kept his face still, but something changed in his eyes.
"Chris Evans was critically wounded last week." He sighed. "You'll get a memo about it soon. We wanted more data on his recovery before we let the word out. I know you were friends…"
Sam felt the blood drain from her face. More than friends. She and Evans had gone through training together. They'd been lovers once, before the challenges of the job and hiding their relationship from their colleagues became too much. He'd been so gentle with her…
"How bad?" she asked.
Becker's face fell. "Bad, Sam. He was infiltrating a DWITY ring. They figured out who he was somehow. He was off comms. They put twenty rounds into him. We didn't find him for two hours. He was flatlined when we got there. His brain valves and the hyperox saved him. He survived, but just barely."
DWITY. Do What I Tell You. The drug that turned humans into slaves. Slaves for sexual predators, for sex trafficking rings, for worse. The thought made her sick. That Chris had been hurt fighting that…
"Rehab?" she asked.
Becker nodded slowly. "The damage is extensive. He suffered major cell death in most organs. They're regrowing a heart right now so they can get him off the machine. It's going to be a long hard road for him. He may never recover fully."
Sam swallowed. She could feel bile rising up inside her. Had he been conscious for those two hours? she wondered. The fourth-gen corticovascular valves would have snapped shut as blood pressure dropped, sealing hyperoxygenated blood in his brain. Pain control would have kicked in. He might have stayed awake and aware through the whole thing. What would it have felt like to lay there, heart stopped, body riddled with bullets, blood seeping out, all of your body dying as your brain lived on, helpless… waiting to be found or to die…
That could be her someday.
Becker was talking to her again. "So you see, Sam, there really isn't anyone else."
Sam nodded. Against what Chris Evans had gone through, her own reservations paled.
"I know you have a deep revulsion to this technology," Becker said. "And I know why. And that's part of why I trust you. We all do hard things. We all take risks. Chris did. He put his life on the line. I know this is not going to be pleasant for you. I trust you more because of that."
Becker still didn't understand. It wasn't that it was so horrible. It was that it wasn't. That she had enjoyed the ability to touch another person's mind. That was what scared her. That was what felt like a betrayal. Sam felt the nausea rising higher.
But there was no one else. She would do her job.
"Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, sir. If you talk to Agent Ev… If you talk to Chris, please tell him I'm rooting for him."
Becker nodded. "I'm sure he'll be happy to hear that. I'll let you know when you can visit him. Anything else?"
"No, sir," Sam replied. She walked out, closing the door behind her. Her stomach was in full revolt. It was rising up at the thought of Chris Evans nearly dead. Rising up at the thought of what she was about to do in the name of her duty.
She held the bile down long enough to make it into the restroom, past the woman fixing her make-up, into one of the stalls, down onto her knees, and then to puke her lunch into the toilet.
Even after all these years, the memories were too fresh. Another wave of nausea hit her. She spasmed and heaved over the toilet again, retching up whatever little food still dwelt in her stomach. She would do her duty, she was certain. It was all she knew how to do. The ERD was the only family she had, the only family she'd had for years now.
She bent forward, heaved and heaved again, until nothing was left inside her.
11
SERENITY
April came. It had been five weeks since the bust. Three weeks until Kade left for Bangkok. The serenity package was ready. He'd tested it at low levels on his own. It could keep his pulse steady on a heart rate monitor, keep his breathing and pulse steady at whatever rate he told it, keep his skin resistance steady on the psych lab's biofeedback rig.
Time to give it a harder test. He turned the system up to a level of three out of ten, and went to meet Nakamura.
"Have you spent any time thinking about what you'll do after your doctorate?" the simulated Shu asked inside the VR rig.
"I'm going to apply for postdoc positions," Kade replied. "I'm really interested in higher function decoding and mapping."
There was no buzz from the lie detector.
"That's great to hear," Su-Yong Shu replied. "We may have funding for a postdoc in that area in my lab next year. I'd encourage you to apply."
"That'd be fantastic," Kade said. "It'd be such an honor to work with you."
Still no buzz.
"It's such a shame how tightly the authorities regulate neuroscience in your country," she said. "Don't you think?"
"Umm, well, you know, it's for safety reasons."
No buzz.
"Why, I'd love a postdoc position in your lab. You're one of my scientific heroes."
Nothing.
"I think the ERD serves a useful purpose in the US, even if they do go a bit too far."
Nada.
"Why, yes, I'd love to talk in more depth about how you came across your amazing insights and learn more about the mind behind those incredible papers."
Zip.
"No, I don't worry about my friends back home. What could possibly happen to them?"
Nothing.
Nakamura reached over and plucked the goggles and headphones from Kade's head. "You've done something."
Kade grinned.
"Mmm. You've done something inside your own skull, haven't you?"
Kade remained mute.
"You should have told me," the CIA man said.
"It was on a need-to-know basis," Kade replied.
Nakamura chuckled. "Well, let's see how it does under greater stress. Please understand that this is in no way personal."
Kade had a moment to be puzzled by the comment, then the CIA man was on him.
Nakamura was up, out of his chair, and halfway around the table, coming around to Kade's left, before Kade even had a hope of reacting. The CIA man took Kade's left arm, twisted it behind his back, used it to lift him painfully out of his seat.
BZZZZZZT! The stress detector went off. BZZZZZZT! BZZZZZZT!
In annoyance, Kade cranked the serenity package to ten out of ten. The buzzer abruptly stopped.
Nakamura chuckled. "Very good. Now, tell me, Kade," he crooned into Kade's ear in an imitation of Shu's voice, "does the idea of working with me in China excite you?"
"Oh, Dr Shu, I'd like nothing better." Kade ground the words out around the pain in his shoulder and elbow.
The sensor made no sound.
"In fact, Dr Shu, I have a little present for you."
Kade activated Bruce Lee. He flicked the switch to full auto, hit START.
Kade's body twisted to the right to elbow Nakamura in the head, then spun back to the left to kick the CIA man in the knee. Nakamura parried the elbow, fell back and bent his leg to take Kade's kick on his thigh instead of knee. Kade's body came all the way around, free hand lashing out in a palm heel strike to break Nakamura's nose and drive the shattered fragments into his brain.
The CIA agent dodged the strike with a preterhuman twitch of his neck, let go of Kade's pinned arm and took another step backwards into the apartment. There was a feral grin on his face.
Uh-oh, Kade thought.
Kade's body sprang forward with a lunging kick to Nakamura's
groin and a spear finger strike at his eyes. Nakamura stepped forward, knocked the kick away with his forearm and dodged the finger strike entirely. Nakamura spun, and then somehow he was behind Kade.
Bruce Lee lashed back with an elbow and a low kick. Neither connected. Kade's body twisted to the right. Nakamura put a hand on Kade's shoulder and came around behind him again. An open palm slapped Kade almost gently on the side of his face. Bruce Lee sent a straight kick backwards towards Nakamura's groin and connected with a chair instead. The agent was beside him now, still grinning.