Nexus 02 - Crux (44 page)

North, near the poles, the tundra of the Arctic, melting, decaying, giving off methane. He’d been there.
Shiva
had been there, at Nita’s insistence. Bundled in sub-zero gear, he’d seen the methane belching from thawing permafrost. He’d seen the mile-wide plumes of methane bubbles rising from the decaying slush of carbon ice just below the warming Arctic Sea.

He understood the risk, at last. It wasn’t just an abstraction to him, anymore. It was a visceral threat, as Shiva felt it, as real as the fear he felt looking down from a great height. A few more hot summers could destabilize those fields, send up even more massive bubbles of heat-trapping gas that would bake the Earth, scour the fields where food grew with drought and storm, wither away the rainforest, destroy humanity’s food supplies and shelter in the span of months or years, bring human civilization and the biosphere both to their knees.

Kade looked out further west. Beyond that horizon lay India, his homeland.
Shiva’s
homeland. The third largest economy on the planet now. Yet he had vivid memories of holding a dying child in his arms, of watching villagers starve just kilometers from the homes of the newly wealthy kings of technology.

He knew the count and position of thousands of nuclear warheads there, pointed at nearby Pakistan, at China, at Iran, even at Europe and the United States. He knew all about the three secret times that India and Pakistan had come within millimeters of going nuclear, had almost killed millions in the matter of minutes, almost ignited war that would kill
hundreds
of millions.

He looked across those waves and he remembered his childhood as an orphan, an
untouchable
orphan, the lowest of the low, struggling to eat, to survive. The beatings. The vicious street gangs that he’d barely escaped. The conviction that violence must be met with violence, that those who hurt you must be punished. And later, when ignorant villagers had killed orphans under
his
protection, the rage he’d felt, the screams as his men had nailed the perpetrators to those crosses, as the flames had brought him justice.

Further west, Europe, North America. He knew more than ever about the treatment of humanity’s successors there. The secret purges. The viral weapons lying in wait, ready to deal death down on the genetically enhanced. The Nexus detectors to find the enhanced. The work to create a vaccine against Nexus, to create a “cure” that would purge it from the mind, even from the minds of those who’d lived their entire lives with it. The backup plans. The concentration camps for the expected wave of Nexus-born children, the hundreds of thousands of them that might be born in the next decade.

There was so much wrong with the world. There were so many precipices. So many cliffs humanity could fall off of. So many crimes being committed, so many risks being taken.

And Kade understood why. They were a tribal species. They’d evolved in a world where a few dozen men and women made up a tribe, and virtually all others were enemies, threats. They lacked the cognitive capabilities necessary to collaborate on this scale. They’d done their best with democracy, with capitalism, but those had reached their limit long ago. They’d been corrupted, twisted to the interests of a few individuals, when the greatest problems the world faced were problems of
collective
interest.

He could fix those systems. He could nudge the world, could pull strings from behind the scenes, could direct scientists and engineers towards the right problems, could link their minds together to make them even more effective, could manipulate banks and corporations to provide resources, could twist politicians to enact the laws needed to save the world and benefit the people on it.

And beyond that – Kade could bring the world’s minds together, link human to human, into something more, into a global consciousness, a posthuman intelligence, mediated by Nexus, coordinated by the tools Shiva had built.

All it would require was the key. The key that would open a million minds today, that would open tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of minds, at some point in the future. That was all.

60

WAR STORIES

Wednesday October 31st

In a cramped submarine beneath the waters of the Andaman Sea, Kevin Nakamura laughed as Feng gesticulated with his cuffed hands.

“So I throw the butter knife, yeah?” the Chinese soldier was saying. “Boom! Right through the eye.” Feng shook his head. “But he gets me with cleaver first. That’s how I get this one.” Feng gestured at the scar across one forearm.

“So that was Almaty?” Nakamura asked.

“Yeah,” Feng replied. “In ’37. You there?”

Nakamura nodded, rolled up one pant leg, showed the scar below his knee.

Feng peered at it and frowned. “Sniper?” he asked.

Nakamura laughed. “Farmer. With a pitchfork.”

“Pitchfork!” Feng laughed in return. “You see action at Astana too?”

Nakamura shook his head. “Not me. But I had friends who were there.” He cocked his head. “Were you at Mashadd, in ’35? Or what about Maymana, back in ’26?”

Feng’s expression turned puzzled. “In ’26… I was eight.”

Nakamura frowned.

“You old, man,” Feng said.

Nakamura glared at the pup, then snorted and turned back to the sub’s controls. Two more days to Apyar Kyun.

Two hundred miles off the coast of the southeastern United States, Zoe raged. Beneath her, the October seas were hot, hotter than they’d been this late in the year in millennia. The currents of the Gulf Stream dragged warm water north from the equator and into the mid-Atlantic, adding energy to seas already heated from a record summer.

The Atlantic gave off that excess heat now, evaporating it as water vapor into the air above.

Zoe gorged on that warm vapor-filled air, absorbing its energy and its moisture. They added to her, strengthened her, fueling her winds, driving them ever faster and more furiously about her calm center until she whirled about at a fifth the speed of sound.

North Zoe went. And chaos went with her.

61

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Wednesday October 31st

Holtzmann slipped out of bed at 6am, while Anne still slept. His head pounded and his mouth was dry. His body felt stiff. His stomach was unsteady. He craved more opiates. But that wasn’t going to happen today.

He showered and dressed quickly. Anne rolled over in bed, murmured something, then nothing more. Then he was in the car and on his way to the office.

The news had more on Stockton’s impending victory. The rest was Zoe. The hurricane had sped north and east into the warm, wide open Atlantic, sucking energy from the unprecedentedly hot surface waters as it went, intensifying from the Category 4 storm that had wrecked Havana into a Category 5 monster, with hundred-and-sixty mile per hour winds and ten-foot sea swells. And now Zoe’s track was bending again, turning it towards north by northwest, putting it on a course towards central New Jersey, with possible landfall Friday night. God, what a disaster that would be.

He arrived at the office a little after 7 o’clock, collected his slate and the images he needed, then headed to the Human Subjects wing. ERD Headquarters was no prison. It wasn’t equipped for long-term interment. But the Human Subjects wing could house up to fifty subjects, for research purposes, for months at a time.

Holtzmann swiped his ID to enter the wing, then walked up to the security desk.

He recognized the guard. “I’m here to see Rangan Shankari,” he told the man, holding up his ID.

The guard nodded, then looked over at his maze of monitors.

“Room 31,” he replied. “He’s still asleep.”

“Wake him up,” Holtzmann said. “I’ll be in the interview room.”

Two guards brought Shankari to him ten minutes later, his wrists cuffed to one another. They clipped his cuffs to the hardpoint on the table, which was itself bolted to the floor. Holtzmann waited across that table for the guards to leave. Just seeing Shankari sent a powerful buzz through him. He was so close… So close to getting Rangan out of here…

Wait for it, he told himself. Tonight
.

The guards left.

“Rangan,” Holtzmann said. “It’s been some time.”

“Not long enough,” Shankari muttered darkly.

Holtzmann slid his slate across the table to Shankari.

“Open it. See what Nexus has done to the world.”

With his hands restrained, Shankari could just barely touch the surface of the slate. The first image was an aerial view of the assassination site, just a quarter-mile from here. Bodies were scattered across the ground, the geometry of the white seats shattered in a zone around the blast.

Shankari looked at the image. “What’s this?”

Holtzmann answered him. “Three months ago the Posthuman Liberation Front used Nexus 5 to reprogram a Secret Service agent. They tried to assassinate the President. The President lived, but dozens of others died.”

Shankari looked up at him for a moment. His eyes showed nothing. Then he looked back down and touched the surface again to advance the images.

“This is why we want the Nexus back doors,” Holtzmann told him. “To stop these sorts of things.”

A lie, he told himself. We want them for control. Surveillance. Nothing more noble than that.

“I already gave them to you,” Rangan said. “Not my fault they don’t work anymore.”

“Keep looking at the pictures,” Holtzmann told him. “Go through the whole set. Maybe you’ll think of something once you see what we’re up against.”

Shankari grunted, touched the slate again.

Then Holtzmann reached out, carefully, cautiously, for the boy’s mind, sent a request for a chat connection.

Shankari looked up, his eyes wide in surprise. His mind gave off shock, disbelief. And then he accepted the chat request.

[holtzmann]Make no sign. Keep advancing images.

[rangan]What the fuck?

[holtzmann]I’m here to get you out.

Holtzmann opened himself partially to the boy, showed him his sincerity, his deep desire to see Rangan free.

Rangan tapped the surface of the slate again, then looked down.

[rangan]Why?

[holtzmann]It doesn’t matter. But we have an opening tonight. Can you fake a seizure at 11pm?

[rangan]Yes. What then?

[holtzmann]If it’s convincing enough, you’ll be taken to the nearest hospital. From there some friends will get you free.

[rangan]What about the kids?

[holtzmann]Just you.

Rangan blinked in surprise. Holtzmann felt the boy struggle inside, felt hope and guilt and fear and principle war with one another. Seconds passed. Then he felt Rangan come to a decision.

[rangan]No.

[holtzmann]We may not get another chance.

[rangan]Not without the kids. They come, or I don’t.

Holtzmann groaned inside. He wanted this so badly. He needed to get Rangan out. It was so close, so very close.

[rangan]They’re kids, man. You’re torturing them. It’s fucked up.

Holtzmann closed his eyes. He could fake a medical emergency. There were any number of things he could inject Shankari with that would force a trip to the ER.

[rangan]Goddammit, don’t you have any fucking conscience at all? They’re KIDS.

Holtzmann felt himself slipping further. Images of the children went through his head. Alfonso Gonzales, the one who’d been tortured until he gave up Nexus. Bobby Evans, the one they’d spent
four hours
torturing before finally giving up…

[rangan]Please. I don’t even have to go. Don’t worry about me. Get at least get
one
of the kids out instead.

Holtzmann grabbed his slate out of Rangan’s hands, stood up.

[holtzmann]I’ll think about it.

[rangan]Wait, wait. What about Ilya? Kade? Wats?

Holtzmann stared at Shankari. And suddenly he felt so tired, so very tired of all of this.

[holtzmann]Dead. Hunted. Dead.

Shankari dropped his head into his cuffed hands as Holtzmann turned and strode from the room.

Holtzmann sat in the bathroom stall, the lid down over the toilet, fully clothed, and wept. He wept in frustration. He needed to get Rangan out. He had to do it. His whole body was wracked with the need, his palms sweating, his breath coming fast, his skin tingling. Rangan had to be free!

He could do it. He could go into his lab, load up a syringe with a cocktail of tramadol and dapoxetine. That would do the trick. One injection, and a few minutes later, Rangan would be seizing hard, would need to be taken somewhere for treatment.

Yet Rangan was right. Those children… One by one, they’d be tortured. They’d become guinea pigs for new cures. Some would die in the process. Some would survive to be shipped off to concentration camps, or to be set free, scarred by the loss of Nexus.

Holtzmann clenched his fists, pressed them against his head. He wanted to scream with the force of the struggle inside him. Gaaaaah!

I’ve never been brave
,
he told himself. Always been a coward.
Goddamn it!
I want to do something right for once.

He had to try. Had to try to get Rangan
and
these children out at the same time.

And the other children? The children being studied in Virginia? In Texas? In California?

Dear God, he told himself, I can only do so much at once!

He would save these children here, the ones under his own direct care, if he could. The rest would have to wait.

Holtzmann took the car, left campus, went to a coffee shop in the DC slum that surrounded the sprawling Homeland Security complex in Anacostia. There he linked himself to the net, tunneled in through an anonymizer, connected to the Nexus board, and fired off a message.

[Change of plans. A dozen more friends to get out. Young ones. You get the rest of the files after.]

And then he went back to the office, and stumbled his way through another day of hypocrisy.

Rangan sat in his cell, shaking.

Did I just do that? he wondered. Did I just say no to getting out of here?

Yeah. I did.