Nexus 02 - Crux (6 page)

Derik forced his arm to move, reached back and yanked the barbs out of his flesh. He got them out as the TSA men closed on him. He was on his feet in a heartbeat. His right fist cratered a man’s face, took the man off his feet.

Bobby screamed again, “AAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!”

The terror and rage and chaos of it filled his mind.

Another one came at him with a baton and Derik broke the man’s arm. Two men tried to wrestle him to the ground and Derik snapped one’s knee like dry kindling and sent the other flying with a concussive smash to the side of his head.

They weren’t going to take his boy!

Bobby was on the ground, dazed. Derik hoisted the boy over his shoulder and ran like hell.

Eighty yards.

Fifty yards.

Thirty yards.

We’re gonna make it!

Then the shots rang out, and Derik felt the bullets punch through his chest, again and again and again, and he fell, and fell, and fell until the floor met his face.

The last sound he heard was Bobby screaming endlessly, in mind and voice, as they dragged him kicking and thrashing away from his father’s dying body.

2

ON THE MOVE

Mid October

Kade wiped sweat from his face, batted away leaves with his good left hand. The heat was brutal, even this high in the mountain passes that separated Cambodia from Vietnam, even this early in the morning, even shielded by the jungle.

“Today,” Feng called from up ahead. “We’ll get there today.”

Moving. Constantly moving. That’s what life had become.

Cambodia had been good for a while. Months, really. They’d been safe, shielded in the monasteries. Kade had worked with the monks there, learning what they knew, their techniques for stilling and guiding their own minds through meditation, for sinking into that egoless state where their minds, bridged by Nexus, could become one. In exchange he’d taught what he knew – neuroscience, the rudiments of programming Nexus, ideas for apps that could augment meditation.

He’d seen beautiful things in those months, in Cambodia and across the net. The mentally and emotionally scarred, healing. Patients in comas being touched and restored to consciousness. Scientists tapping into each other’s perspectives, making breakthroughs they never could have alone. Artists creating new forms that they didn’t even have names for, that immersed you in experiences unlike any other.

And union. Minds coming together. Walls dropping. Consciousness spanning bodies. Group minds, self-assembled, voluntary, greater than the sum of their parts…

But then someone had used Nexus to try to kill the President. And the ERD had put a bounty on his head. Wanted alive, for questioning.

Men had come asking about him, a tall, gangly Westerner, young, head shaved to look like a monk. They’d shown pictures of him. In Khun Prum. In Kulen. In Pou. Kade and Feng had taken to moving every two weeks, then every week, then every few days, leaning hard on the extraordinary generosity the monks showed them.

Then Ban Pong. Kade and Feng had been there less than two days before the news came. Men were looking for him, in the village below. It was time to move again.

This was the only way left to them. Off the grid. Off the roads. Into the jungle-covered mountains to the east, on the unmapped trails that led from Cambodia to Vietnam, with nothing but the packs on their backs and a destination – the monastery at Chu Mom Ray.

Today was day seven. Feng could have made the trip in two days, Kade figured. His pack weighed at least twice what Kade’s did, yet the Chinese ex-soldier never slowed, never tired. Kade was the weak link here.

“Hey, Kade,” Feng called from up ahead. “What did Confucius say about man who runs in front of car?”

Kade smiled and shook his head, brushing away more foliage from his face. “I don’t know, Feng. What?”

“He gets tired!” Feng roared. “Get it? Tired?”

Kade laughed. Feng’s jokes were as endless as his stamina.

“Yeah, I get it, Feng.” Kade reached up to adjust the straps of his pack once more, settling the load more comfortably on his back. His right hand ached as he did so, still weak and painfully fragile, even six months after the regeneration genes had been injected. He forced himself to use the hand, regardless. Keep working it, the doctors had told him. Give it every reason to grow stronger.

“Kade,” Feng said up ahead, more seriously now.

Kade looked up at his friend. Feng had stopped, at a spot where a clearing in the jungle gave them a view off the side of the trail and down the mountain. And now he was pointing, smiling.

Kade squinted into the morning sunshine. His cloned right eye watered in the glare, more light-sensitive than the left. He brought one hand up to block the sun, followed Feng’s pointed finger.

Down below them on this winding mountain path, tucked away in the lush green jungle that clung to these slopes, he could see buildings. The ornately sloped red roof of a pagoda. Two smaller buildings tucked away.

“Chu Mom Ray,” Feng said with a grin. “Welcome to Vietnam.”

Kade smiled in return, then nodded in satisfaction. Chu Mom Ray. They’d made it.

Feng turned, moving faster down the trail now, buoyed by the nearness of their destination.

“Hey Kade,” he called from up ahead. “You know what Confucius said about the man who runs
behind
a car?”

Kade laughed, struggling to keep up. “What, Feng?”

“He gets
exhausted!
” Feng sang out. “Exhausted!”

Kade groaned, and chased his friend down the mountain.

It took another hour to make their way down to the tiny monastery, scrambling down the trail, whacking their way through brush, inhaling the lush green scent of the jungle. The monks greeted them as heroes, Kade as a holy man. He did his best to deflect their adoration, laugh with them, diffuse the power imbalance as always.

I’m just like you
, he tried to show them.
Just another novice.

The monks let them wash themselves in the cold mountain water. It felt amazing in the heat. Then the novices brought them clean clothes and led them into the kitchen to be fed.

Kade watched the cooks with joy. They were preparing the midday meal, peeling, chopping, stirring, spicing. They moved as one, wordlessly, bridged by Nexus, a six-armed being, human yet more than human, moving with a single purpose.

This, Kade thought. This is what Nexus can be. Total coordination. Emergent order. Another symphony of mind.

It was the logical direction of human evolution. Humanity had achieved what it had not through strength or claws or armor, not even through individual human intelligence, as impressive as that was. No, it was the ability of humans to coordinate, to work together, to produce ideas and solutions collectively that no individual mind ever could, that truly set them apart. Nexus was just one more step in that direction.

And for the monks, it was more than that. In their view, Nexus was a spiritual tool. It helped tear down the illusion of separateness. It helped pierce the veil of
maya
. It helped these monks, all part of the same conscious universe, forget the lie that they were separate, the broken distinction of one person ending before the next began. By linking their minds it helped them remember that they were, in fact, all one.

On his best days, Kade almost believed them.

Then the abbot was there, a small man, wizened, standing before them.

“We are honored to have you here,” the abbot told them. Then his face became more somber. “I have bad news I must relate.”

A wave of sorrow swept across the monks in the room. Kade felt something tighten inside him. The cooks stopped their chopping. A deadly stillness had come across Feng.

“The monastery at Ban Pong is gone,” the abbot said. “Burned to the ground. The brothers there chose that way out, rather than tell your pursuers where you’d gone.”

Still seated, Kade stared up in shock. “They’re dead?”

“Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man,” the abbot replied. “Your escape was more important to them than their own lives.”

Kade looked down at the table in horror. Dead. Words wouldn’t come. Beside him he felt Feng nodding in agreement with the abbot.

“As a precaution,” the abbot said, “you should press on. We have a vehicle prepared for you. The monastery at Ayun Pa is farther from the border, larger, a safer place for you.”

Kade looked up at the man again. “What about you? The monks here?”

The abbot smiled. “I prefer to live if I can, my friend. All of us here will scatter. Now, we must restock your provisions, and then you must go. Your life is valuable, young man. Honor this sacrifice. Keep yourself safe.”

Kade didn’t hear. One thought ran through his mind. The ERD. The ERD had done this, with their bounty, their price on Kade’s head. They’d killed those monks, as surely as if ERD agents had pulled the triggers themselves.

Fuck.

3

DOMESTIC BLISS

Early October

Sam straightened her back, spade in hand. Sweat ran freely down her face, uncaught by the bandana across her brow, and dripped into the CO
2
-filtering respirator she wore over mouth and nose. Her tank top was plastered to her skin by perspiration. It felt glorious. The plastic panels of the greenhouse trapped the sun’s warmth and held it in. The solar-powered CO
2
pumps captured carbon dioxide from the outside air and concentrated it inside, where the plants breathed it in, and grew.

She was harvesting gene-hacked
Aloe arborescens
today, heavily engineered to grow fast in this high-CO
2
atmosphere, its thick succulent leaves loaded with bio-engineered antibiotics and wound healing factors. A plant they could sell at market to bring in funds for the orphanage. Sam looked around the greenhouse, looked at the dozens of other plants, little chemical factories, all growing something they could sell.

Every one of these plants would be illegal in Europe, she thought. Most of them illegal back in the US.

How strange to live in a place where this technology was so normal, so essential, even. Rich countries had the luxury to ban biotechnologies. Poor countries depended on them.

Sam caught the train of her thoughts and laughed into her respirator.

Me, a gardener. Who would’ve thought?

It was absurd. She’d come to the polar opposite life of her eight years as a spy and a soldier.

What would Nakamura think, Sam wondered, if he could see me now?

Her smile disappeared for a moment. Her mentor was a long way from here. Did he think she was a traitor? Did she?

Change happens, Nakamura had told her once. You have to be adaptable to survive.

Adaptable, Sam mused. She’d go with that.

Then she felt the minds of the children, and her worries dissipated as a smile came back to her face. She finished her task, cycled through the flimsy plastic airlock, and came outside as Kit and Sarai rounded the small copse of trees and ran at her, hand in hand, laughing in the bright sunshine.

Seven year-old Kit jumped into her arms, his mind a gem more glorious than the sun, and she twirled him around, as twelve year-old Sarai laughed and smiled, her eyes and mind twinkling.

Behind them, more slowly, came old Khun Mae, a frown on her face, no sense of a mind there, the head caretaker casting her disapproving gaze over Sam, in her Western garb with her shoulders uncovered, and her carefree embrace of the drug that connected her to these children.

Sam ignored it, and spun and spun and spun little Kit, feeling the endless whirling emanating from his mind, the wonder of it, the limitless joy of youth, of life with these children.

There were nine children here, and three caretakers, and Jake. Eight of the children, ranging in age from one to eight years old, had been exposed to Nexus in the womb, most of them repeatedly. Once a mother felt her unborn child’s mind through Nexus, most felt a strong draw to take Nexus again, to touch the half-formed thoughts of the little being growing inside themselves once more.

The children were enchanting, vexing, confounding. Most of them were scarred in some way. They acted out at times, testing her, bickering with each other, being petulant or disobedient or just stubborn. But they were also radiant at a level that shone right through their scars and the trouble they caused. Their use of Nexus was instinctive, fluent in a way that Sam would never be. They communicated with each other more in thoughts than words, in blurs of impressions and ideas often too fast for her to follow. And she could hide nothing from them. They knew her inside and out. The touch of their minds made her spirit soar. She couldn’t get enough of them.

The ninth child, Sarai, was different. Twelve years old, she’d been four when she’d drunk one of the vials she’d seen her mother drink with one of the “uncles” who paraded through their lives. The drug had lodged in her brain just as surely as if she’d been exposed to it in the womb.

Sarai had had a hard life, her home a never-ending stream of men who paid to take her mother in body and mind, their brains flushed with Nexus as they fucked, or worse. More than once she’d lain in her bed, terrified as she felt men hurt her mother, use her cruelly with their minds connected so they could feel her pain and degradation.

She’d learned to shut it out. Mostly.

Sarai was nine when she first slipped, and a john noticed her mind, and wanted her too. Her mother had thrown the man out, yelling and screaming until neighbors had come to the door and he’d left. And the next day, Sarai’s mother took her to temple, and begged the monks for help for her special daughter. Four months later, the nine year-old Sarai had arrived here, the safe and loving home she’d never had before. She was more fluent with Nexus than Sam would ever be, but less so than the children who’d gestated with it. A bridge between generations.

And now Sarai was on the verge of becoming a young woman. She was the same age that Sam’s sister had been, when… when everything had gone to hell at Yucca Grove.

Sam loved Sarai most of all.