Nexus (22 page)

  More troubling was the driver of that car. He'd seen that face before. He'd seen it on a very dangerous man, a man he could swear was dead.

  It had been in the KZ. A Chinese "advisor" they'd flushed out of a rebel command center. They'd taken the command post, not aware of his presence. When they'd discovered him, he'd fought. Fought like no one Wats had seen fight, before or since. He was dead. How could he be here?

• • • •

Su-Yong Shu gave a contented sigh. Kade could feel the sensual satisfaction of the meal emanating from her. She was not what he'd expected.

  "Kade," she said, "I had an ulterior motive for inviting you here. I'll likely have a postdoctoral position opening in my lab soon. I think you'd be a strong candidate. Would you be interested?"

  Lightning flashed off to the east. It struck somewhere out beyond the city, flickered for a moment, lit up the sky.

  "I'd be honored," he told her. "Can you tell me more about your lab's direction?"

  "I have three goals." Shu ticked them off with her fingers, "One, direct brain-to-brain communication. Two, boosting human intelligence to superhuman levels. And three, uploading human minds to machine systems."

  Kade blinked.

  "This surprises you?" she asked.

  He nodded. "I love the goals. But what about the law? The Copenhagen Accords?"

  Shu held his gaze. "Laws and treaties change. Those restrictions will end one day. We'll be ready."

  Kade felt her again, then. Hints of the future. A time when their work would be unfettered. When they could be free to improve upon the human mind, to expand themselves, uplift themselves, take the next steps in human evolution. Her vision of a future human was sublime. He ached for it. He ached to become it.

  And as she projected this vision, he could feel her mind searching for his. She was reaching out, trying to draw him in. Her Nexus nodes sent out affinity pings, looking for complementary nodes in his brain. Kade felt a ripple of it across his mind. The Nexus nodes in his brain resonated in response to Shu's pings, primed to respond, held in check by Nexus OS and by Kade's force of will.

  He could not let her see why he was here.

  He tried to act natural. "I'm impressed by your vision, Dr Shu. I admire that you're doing this work to be out ahead of the game."

  Shu raised her cup of tea to her lips, took a sip, closed her eyes momentarily to savor it. "Yes," she said. "It's always good to be out ahead."

  She did something then that Kade didn't understand. New pings emanated from her brain, in a pattern too fast and intricate for him to follow. Colors and shapes flickered in his mind. For a moment he didn't know what had happened, and then he felt the change, saw the errors. Starting somewhere near his midbrain, sets of Nexus nodes had dropped out of his control, were starting to broadcast a pattern of their own, against his will. And it was spreading.

  He flicked on one of the defenses that Rangan had created. 

  [activate: aegis]

  Firewalls blocked out all external signals, descending like massive blast shields over his thoughts. Watchdogs activated, isolating the misbehaving nodes in his brain, inundating them with kill signals.

  Stay cool, he told himself. He smiled calmly back at Su-Yong Shu.

  More errors flashed across his vision. Watchdogs were faltering. Nodes in his mind were reaching out to touch Shu's. Their pattern was spreading within his mind. More and more nodes were rebelling, reaching out to Shu. The power of their broadcast was ratcheting up from microwatts towards milliwatts. Could she hear it yet? He had to stop it before she could.

  Kade pulled up the radio firewall's interface, flipped a switch to block out the signal coming from his own brain. It didn't make a difference. The foreign signal continued to spread within his brain, reaching out to Shu's. Nexus OS was faltering now. Errors were piling up. His Nexus nodes were becoming Shu's.

  He was losing. His blast shields were crumbling. Nexus nodes in his brain were starting to synchronize with nodes in Shu's. He could feel bits of her mind touching his. Vast and majestic, that's how she felt.

  He was fast running out of options. He would need to halt everything in his head.

  [system halt] he commanded. [system halt] [system halt]

  The command took. Processes collapsed. Windows closed. The serenity package code – which was bolstering his serotonin levels, regulating his pulse and breathing, and suppressing the fear signals propagating through his amygdala – ceased.

  The viral pattern didn't stop.

  Nexus nodes in his brain continued to reach out to Shu's. Sweat beaded on his brow. His heart jumped into his throat.

  Kade was well and truly fucked. Only a single option remained.

  
Volcano. Mastodon. Cedar.

  Kade heard the words, visualized them superimposed. The mantra unfolded within him, a fractal persona expanding into the spaces of his mind, sweeping away bits of memory, identity, and conception, replacing them with, with, with…

  The world went blurry for just a moment, then snapped back into a new focus. Kade blinked. He was dizzy, suddenly – disoriented. He blinked again, lifted his glass of water to his mouth. His hand was trembling. Damn, he was nervous. What had they just been talking about?

  "I'm sorry, Professor Shu, what were you saying?" He looked up at her.

 
 

Wats patiently watched from afar. Dinner was all smiles and ooohs and aaaahs. Then something happened. The smile left Shu's face. She shook her head slightly… And something happened to Kade. A worried look crossed his face, he closed his eyes, his head nodded – like he'd nearly fainted. When he opened his eyes again, something was different. He took a sip of water and his hand shook visibly in the scope. His body language changed. He slumped, seemed to withdraw into himself.

  Shu seemed hyper-alert now. On a hunch Wats moved the scope down to ground level. There. The driver of the car that had dropped Kade off, walking briskly towards the restaurant.

  Wats judged the distance. No way could he get there first. He reached into his pack, pulled out the highly illegal rifle, screwed on the barrel, slid the scope he'd been using into the groove on top until it snapped into place. He looked at the assembled sniper rifle for a moment. Was he willing to do this? Was he willing to kill? He just didn't know.

 

"…what were you saying?" Kade asked. He blinked again to try to shake this fog from his head.

  Su-Yong Shu was looking at him, her head cocked to one side, lips slightly parted, eyes narrowed, studying him like a particularly puzzling scientific specimen.

  "I was saying…" she spoke slowly, as if picking her words carefully, "that it's important to understand ourselves, and what makes us tick."

  "Ummm, yes, of course." Whatever had just happened, it was passing. His head was clearing. He must still be jet-lagged.

  
Kade?

  Kade blinked in surprise. Shu's mind had just touched his. She'd just sent him verbal thoughts. Was she using Nexus?

  Show no sign? Why? "I agree completely," he said aloud. "It's important to understand ourselves."

  How was she doing this? And what was going on in his head? Why wasn't Nexus OS running? How was she talking to him?

  Kade, you can talk to me this way as well. Like….
 

  He saw it. He felt it.

  Hello?
he sent to her.

  A chill went up Kade's spine. A seizure? Was it a side effect of the Nexus? Had all their playing with fire finally burnt him?

  
OK, he sent back.

  He felt tendrils of her mind touch him lightly, insinuate themselves into him.

  He babbled something to her about his research.

  As he did, Kade could feel her in his mind, going deeper, going broader, tendrils of thought branching and spreading throughout him. She felt unlike any other human being he'd ever touched through Nexus. Her mind was everywhere inside his.

  Keep talking
, she sent him. He rambled, distantly aware that she was nodding, replying.

  Stay calm, he told himself. Shu's mind permeated his. She touched memory after memory. It frightened him. He should be resisting. There was something he couldn't let her see…

  He was sweating. Her scrutiny was terrible. Her mind was vast, her tendrils everywhere.

  Calm. Yes. He took a breath. He had some way of calming himself… some software he'd written…

  
Kade, I think someone has been manipulating your memories. They're somehow hiding things from you.

  His memories? Oh, fucking fuck. What the hell was going on?

  
Relax
, Shu sent to him.
Open to me fully. I think I can undo what's been done.

  She exuded peace, compassion, tenderness.

  Kade was confused. His memories were hazy. Things didn't make sense. What could have happened?

  Shu chattered at him, covering the moment. Something about animal studies. He could barely follow.

  He felt her expand even further within him then. She suffused his mind, touched every part of him at once. It was beyond anything he could imagine doing.

  He could see links between his memories as she explored them. She was sifting through his thoughts and memories faster than Kade could follow. It was as intense an experience as a Nexus calibration. How was she processing so much information? How could her mind be so vast?

  Wait… he remembered now. The memories started to flood back in as Shu unlocked them. The briefing with the ERD. The mission. The defenses Rangan had built. The training. False memories… The panic code. On his phone. A code to call in help. In case he was in danger.

  He reached for his phone. Nothing happened. His hand refused to obey. He tried the other. No good. He tried to yell for help. Nothing. Shu had paralyzed him. He was under her control.

  Oh no. He remembered why he was here now. If she saw what was in his mind, she'd know he was a spy. He had to get out of here.

  He had one last weapon left. The weapon Rangan had given him. He needed Nexus up and running.
  [restart]

  Boot sequences scrolled across his mind's eye. As he drew his attention Inside, Kade became more aware of Shu's presence.

  Shu had synchronized millions of Nexus nodes in his brain to hers. She'd configured them in thousands of complex circuits, each a sensor, each a manipulator. He could feel her fascination as she observed his transformation. Thousands of the circuits were trained on the Nexus OS, studying it, analyzing its parts.

  The circuits were in
his
brain.
His
mind. He would take it back from her.

  He remembered nights playing push/pull with Rangan, with Ilya, with Wats. They'd use the Nexus synchronicity between their minds to try to maneuver each other's bodies with their thoughts alone. Reaching out with Nexus to try to move Ilya's hand, blink Rangan's eyelid, make a word come out of Wats' mouth. If you could send enough of the right signals into someone else's brain via Nexus, if your signals could be stronger and more coherent than their own, then you could overcome the signals coming from within their own brain. You could control them. That's what Shu was doing to him now.

  But no one was better at that than Kade.

  He pushed at the circuits she'd built in his mind, aiming to disrupt them, to free his neurons from her invading signals. The circuits flexed, bent, but didn't break. He drew in a breath, pushed harder, gave it everything he had. Circuits snapped, frayed, decohered. Coherence from within his brain squeezed out her foreign signals. For a moment he was almost free of her.

  Outside, Shu closed her body's eyes for a moment, continuing with some story. "It was a priceless moment, let me tell you. I find animal subjects just
fascinating
."

  I'm not your enemy,
she sent him.
Stop fighting me.

  He paused to get his mental breath, and in that break Shu's mind infiltrated his own again. Her circuits began to reassemble inside him. She was putting out an incredible volume of radio traffic, swamping the Nexus nodes in his brain with it. Sensors reformed. Manipulators reformed.

  Kade gritted his teeth. If he gave in, she would discover that the ERD had sent him. And when she did…

  He clenched his mind with all the effort he could muster, disrupted her circuits once more, pushed her fractionally out of his head. He grunted from the effort. Pain blossomed in the front of his skull. His vision wobbled.

  He couldn't maintain the effort of forcing her out. His mental push faltered. Her thoughts bored back into him, spreading, expanding, going deeper. She was analyzing him, analyzing his thoughts, trying to get into his memories, trying to pry apart his mind, trying to absorb the complexity of the still booting Nexus OS.

  How was that possible? Her mind was so vast. She was what Holtzmann had said – a superhuman intelligence, a posthuman. His life would mean nothing to her.