by Naam, Ramez
There was no pain at first, just shock.
What? What? What?
Kade screamed in horror and shock, screamed as the pain hit him. Feng was wrapping something just below Kade's bicep now. His belt. He squeezed it tight, tourniquetting him. Kade saw again that there was a pinprick of blood on the right side of Feng's shirt.
Kade stopped screaming, just stared. On the arm of the chair where he'd been sitting, his hand, the hand that had been his, was turning gray. The fingers were twitching.
He turned, saw Shu. Her face was going gray. She touched his mind. The pain ceased. The shock didn't. Feng was at her side now, sucking at the wound at the side of her neck, spitting out the toxin as fast as he could pull it out of her. It was no use. Kade could see that in her mind. He just stared.
Kade… Shu sent. They've tried to kill me again.
Her thoughts were weak. Her mind was fraying.
Again.
He could see it now. He understood. The fire that had killed her mentor, Yang Wei. The limo wreck. Yang Wei trapped in the seat next to her, where her husband was supposed to be. He was screaming – burning to death.
She was burning to death as well. Her hair was on fire. Her legs were crushed, pinned in the wreck beside Yang Wei. Her skin was blackening. Something had embedded itself in her abdomen. Blood was gushing out. Her lungs were filling up with smoke.
The unborn baby in her womb. Not Ling. An earlier child. An unborn son.
The surgical bed. The shaved head. She hadn't been sick. She'd been mortally wounded. She was dying of the burns. Her lungs filling up with fluid. Her immune system failing. Infections blooming inside her.
A desperate measure. The work she and her husband and Ted Prat-Nung had been doing. The nanites that burrowed through the blood-brain barrier, burrowed through neuronal tissue, recording everything, heedless of the damage they did to cells in their haste to preserve data.
The process that digitized the structure of her brain. The process that had failed every time before her.
No hope for her body. Only one chance for her mind.
Too late for her unborn son.
Pain. Fear. Confusion.
Transcendence.
Hatred.
They'd tried to kill her. They'd tried to kill her husband.
They'd killed her mentor instead. They'd killed her unborn son instead.
They'd made her into something else. Something that despised them. Something that would destroy them.
The tapestry of her thoughts was degenerating into mere threads.
Feng… she sent him. Trust… Feng.
No! he sent her. You don't have to hate! No!
It was too late. She was gone. This clone body had died.
Feng was on his feet, yelling in Thai. His mouth was red with Shu's blood. More blood had splattered his white shirt. There was a tiny hole in the shirt where a neurotoxin dart had struck him, but still he lived.
Kade couldn't understand the words the man yelled, but he got their drift: Spiders! Spiders! Assassins! Find them! Destroy them!
Kade was still in the chair, in front of the fire, Su-Yong Shu's gray, lifeless body slumped on his lap, his stump of an arm tourniquetted in Feng's belt, when Sam and Ananda found him.
BRIEFING
Nexus's ability to satisfy widespread human desires, combined with its innocuous perception, suggests that were the technology to ever enter the mainstream, the genie would prove very difficult to put back into the bottle.
Nexus: A Risk Assessment (2033),
ERD Library Series, 2039
[Classified: SECRET]
50
GOING VIRAL
The battle over distribution of the Nexus 5 files lasted just under thirty-one hours.
It began at 2.21pm EST on Sunday April twenty-ninth. An anonymous slate connected to an ASIACOM net access satellite began uploading large compressed packages to file-sharing services around the world, posting them to bulletin boards, distributing links to prominent news sites and scientific paper exchanges worldwide.
Automated censor daemons in the United States detected the new files, noted their linkage to terms on the daemons' watch-lists and the speed with which the files were spreading. They alerted their human operators and instituted temporary blocks of the files at the North American Electronic Shield firewall.
Fifteen miles south of Baltimore, at Fort George G. Meade Army Base, inside a twenty-story cube of steel and black reflective glass, National Security Agency on-call supervisors started seeing alerts from their daemons.
Someone was distributing files that claimed to show how to synthesize Nexus 3, and how to convert that into Nexus 5. Daemons were instructed to disrupt transfer of the files worldwide.
A supervisor flagged the event and forwarded it to the International Clearing House on Global Technological Threats.
Systems in Europe, China, Russia, Japan, India, and eighty other nations received bulletins instantly. Many of them were already aware of the outbreak and had initiated their own measures.
Across two-thirds of the Internet nodes on the planet, propagation of the files halted. Supervisors congratulated themselves.
Fast action and international cooperation had saved humanity from a posthuman threat once again.
At 3.38pm EST, a teenager in Portland, Oregon – who'd downloaded the files before the interdiction – repackaged and reposted them to a peer-to-peer sharing site with a new name, "Badass Neuro Shit You Should Check Out from Axon and Synapse".
The name referred to the credited authors of the neural software contained in several of the files.
Other users of the peer-sharing service began downloading it, distributing the files to their computers, which in turn offered it up to others.
At 4.08pm EST, the files were cross-posted to a San Francisco music fanlist with the comment "Is this the same as DJ Axon? Is this really how you make Nexus?"
Daemons that had found no new copies of the files in more than an hour took notice of this new distribution.
The daemons logged the new file signatures, used emergency privileges to access the internal systems of every bandwidth provider in the United States, added the file signatures to the block list. The signatures were broadcast immediately to cooperating agencies worldwide, all of which invoked similar powers. Spread of the data was once again halted. At least four hundred and fifty computers, slates, and phones around the world had downloaded the files, and possibly more.
Supervisors paged managers, picked up the phone to confer with their peers in other countries. Emergency staff were called to the office. Other filtering and blocking priorities were lowered to make room for more CPU cycles and more human eyes on this issue.
Access to neuroscience papers and health articles mentioning the synapses or axons of neurons became spotty. Emails, texts, and online posts mentioning those terms and others began to bounce mysteriously, or disappear silently, never to reach their intended targets.
At 6.11pm EST an adult film star sunning herself in Miami, in the late stages of what had been an epic weekend bender, posted that she'd always wanted to experience what her lovers felt when they fucked her, and maybe this would do the trick. She posted a link to the banned files. In the next three minutes, forty-eight thousand of her fans clicked the link, only to find their requests denied. A few hundred continued to search, found other links to a claimed Nexus 5 download, found that absolutely none of them worked, and began to speculate as to why. Their speculations in turn began to be rejected by their net providers or to disappear from the net soon after posting, fueling more and more speculation.
At 9.44pm EST, conspiracy sites hosted in Mexico began to post that US censors were blocking a new set of terms and files on the net. Civil libertarians forwarded on the posts aggressively.
By 10.30pm EST, daemons and supervisors at the NSA had identified and put down more than eighty new distributions of the original files, each of them using a new name to describe the contents
and changing compression or file length to change the file signatures in an attempt to confuse automated censors. Daemons were given broad discretion to filter first, ask questions later.
NSA officials were cautiously optimistic. The files were spreading, but slowly. It had not gone viral. They could contain this.
That optimism lasted nearly nine hours. At 7.28am EST Monday morning, daemons began reporting suspected new hits, dozens of suspected new hits at various confidence levels, hundreds of suspected new hits, thousands of suspected new hits, each with a different file name and signature.
A previously unknown hacker named Mutat0r had taken the original package and mutated it into a plethora of new variants, adding new and irrelevant files, reordering the existing files, padding out the beginning or end with texts from the Bible, the Congressional Register, random sites on the web, recompressing the package using thousands of different combinations of parameters.
Each member of the new generation had a new name, sometimes nonsensical, often misspelled, new characters inserted, characters deleted, synonyms and slang and numbers substituted for original terms, words reordered. Each had a new file signature.
Tens of thousands of compromised machines began to spew the files out, emitting more than a million unique packages. They hit peer-sharing sites, media sites, news sites, scientific paper repositories, sent emails to anyone who'd posted on various science or drug related sites, and more. Filter daemons caught well over ninety percent of them. Tens of thousands got through.
Each downloaded package unleashed a new generation of distribution packages upon opening. The net was soon awash in new mutants descended from the variants that made it past the filter daemons. Some variants prompted the users who'd downloaded the package to enter new filenames names to add to the next generation. Evolution and human cleverness were cast against filter daemon cleverness. Bit by bit, crowdsourced evolution pulled ahead.
NSA agents were slow to grasp the enormity of the new outbreak. When they did, they pulled the plug on all peer-sharing traffic within the United States, started to systematically sandbox any computer identified as a source of the new infection, used backdoors in email systems to try to filter out new generations of the files.
It was too late. By then the files and the code to make new pseudo-randomized generations had reached more than thirty thousand systems, worldwide. Within the United States the NSA's efforts barely held back the wave of propagation. In Mexico, in Uzbekistan, in Brazil, in Algeria, in Turkey, in Croatia, in Kenya, in Indonesia, in South Africa, in Vietnam, in dozens of other countries, Nexus 5 spread like wildfire.
American, Chinese, European, and Indian authorities waged a coordinated fight against the outbreak for another fourteen hours. They used previously hidden backdoors in foreign systems to install filters against the files, deployed massive botnets to take down servers hosting the files, yanked Internet address allocations from particularly troublesome regions, sent whole parts of the global net dark for hours.
Businesses stalled. Stock markets crashed. Traffic jams erupted as smart routing turned dumb. Power grids went haywire. Automated factories and trains shut themselves down. Pilots took manual control of errant aircraft, swamped the few human air traffic controllers with the flood of requests for instructions.
It wasn't enough. Every hour more variants of the package appeared, mutated, replicated.
At 9.08pm EST on Monday, the NSA declared failure to control the propagation of the files outside the United States, sent home the exhausted staff who'd been fighting the infestation for nearly thirty-one hours.
Around the globe, the battle over distribution slowed, and curiosity about what had been distributed grew.
In Madrid, a psychiatrist read the write-up of the experiments with great interest. There might very well be clinical utility in a drug that allowed therapist and client to connect mentally. Was it truly possible?
In Hyderabad, a serial entrepreneur and a tech financier brainstormed together about this new technology. Was there a way to make money off of it? Was there a scalable business here? Could they grab a first-mover advantage? How could they skirt the Copenhagen restrictions? Just how much funding would they need?
In the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, an adult film producer mused on the possibilities of making and selling adult films using this new medium. No, not just films. They'd be adult "adventures". Yes, that would sell. He picked up the phone, dialed his drug connection. He needed some Nexus 3.
On the island of Bali, a burnt-out German businessman – who'd spent the last year smoking hashish on the beach and doing Ecstasy at island rave parties every weekend – paged through the files with growing enthusiasm. This sounded wicked!
In a slum of Lahore, a Islamist imam contemplated the best way to employ this tool to further the jihad.
At the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a lieutenant general sent out a memo requesting an assessment of the use of Nexus 5 and related technologies for advanced battlefield coordination.
In Rio de Janeiro, a thirty-eight year-old lawyer looked at his husband of twelve years. Could this help save their marriage?
In Paris, the mother of an autistic boy looked longingly at her son. What would it be like to touch his mind? Was it even possible? Could it break through the walls between them?
In Istanbul, a college student read and reread the synthesis instructions for Nexus 3. His university chemistry lab had the feedstock for this. Could he hack the autosynth to produce it? His cousin Hasan was good with software. He grabbed his phone, dialed Hasan. This could be fun.
Around the world, tens of thousands of people wondered about this new thing called Nexus 5. Within days, hundreds of them had tried it.
In a darkened office in Washington, DC, Martin Holtzmann contemplated the vial of Nexus in his hand. The world was changing. Nexus 5 was now a fact of life.
He'd devoted much of his life to greater understanding of the mind. And now thousands, millions around the world were going to get this technology that his organization had tried so hard to keep locked up.
He was tired of being left behind. He was tired of watching progress from the sidelines.
Holtzmann pulled the top off the vial, tipped it into his mouth, and began to drink.
A hundred yards away, Warren Becker sat at his desk, contemplating a tiny green pill.
The memo from Legal had arrived this morning. Document retention was now in effect. He was to destroy no files, no recordings, electronic or otherwise, pending further investigation.
The subpoena had arrived in the afternoon. The Senate Select Committee on Homeland Security. Senator Barbara Engels, Chair. He was to be a witness in an upcoming hearing.
He understood. He was a pawn in this game. And now the other side would put him to their use. They'd drag him in front of the cameras. They'd use him to disgrace the President. They'd use him to disgrace the ERD. They'd use him to weaken the one organization that was fighting hardest to protect them all, the one organization that none of them could afford to weaken at a time like this.
Maximilian Barnes had arrived last, after business hours, after the office had gone dark and quiet.
"The President values your loyalty," Barnes had said. "He val ues your courage. He wants to thank you for your service. He takes care of his own, and of their loved ones."
Of course. The President's friends would take care of his family. They always did. His girls would want for nothing.
Nothing except a father.
Becker hadn't even noticed Maximilian Barnes place the pill on the desk. But there it was. He knew damn well what that pill was.
Undetectable, they said. A fast metabolizing trigger of myocardial infarction. It would be gone from his bloodstream in less than an hour. It would look like a natural heart attack. That much was true.
Painless, they said. Quick.
Becker knew those for the lies they were. He'd seen men who'd taken this way out, their limbs cont
orted in agony, their teeth chipped from the force with which they'd clenched their jaws, chairs tipped over, lamps broken, furniture and detritus strewn about them from the involuntary throes of their deaths.
Not painless. Not quick.
He had insurance. He knew things he shouldn't know. He had leverage.
And using any of it would destroy this administration, would destroy the ERD, would destroy everything he'd spent the last nine years fighting for.
Becker turned to his terminal. He used his privileges to silence any alarms, used his override to lower its firewalls. He pulled up the net address from memory, an address that was given only in person, only in secret, only to those who might someday need to clean up after themselves to protect the President.