Nexus (3 page)

  "So you're a brain guy. Have you heard of this drug Nexus?" she asked.

  Kade nodded cautiously. "I've heard of it."

  "They say it's some sort of nano-structure, not really just a drug. And that it links brains. Is that possible?"

  Kade shrugged. "We can do it with wires and with radios. Why not with something you swallow? As long as it gets into the brain…"

  "Yeah, but does it actually work?"

  "I've heard it does," Kade replied.

  "You've never tried it?"

  He grinned. "That would be illegal."

  Sam grinned back.

  "Have
you
tried it?" he asked her.

  She shook her head. "I had a chance in New York last year, but I missed it. It's all dried up on the East Coast."

  A first-timer, Kade thought to himself. We could use more first-time females for the study…

  He hesitated. "It's dried up out here too. A lot of busts lately."

  Sam nodded.

  Kade missed whatever she said next. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of something. Some
one
. Frances.

  
Oh, fuck.

  "…total asshole. He was so rude."

  Her back was to him. She hadn't seen him yet.

  "…seizure or something. He needs help.
Professional
help."

  The back door. He started to edge towards it.

  "Kade? Everything OK?"

  Sam. He looked at her. "I've got to go. Sorry. Hope I see you again."

  He left her there as he hustled out the door.

 

Samantha Cataranes watched as Kaden Lane fled the party.

  Did I spook him? she wondered. Must have.

  Her eyes flicked to a readout at the corner of her tactical contact display. It was red. Off the charts red. The sensor on the necklace she wore had picked up clear Nexus transmissions. Whatever Kaden Lane might say, he had not only tried Nexus before, he'd been using it this very night, in quantities beyond any they'd seen in a human before.

  How very odd to be using that drug here, when no one else was. What good was Nexus without another Nexus user for it to bridge a connection to?

  Time would tell. She would find another way into their little circle. Rangan Shankari, perhaps.

  Sam turned and looked for someone else to chat up. Her cover required it.

 

Kade soared through a three-dimensional maze of neurons and nano-devices. Nano-filament antennae crackled with life as Nexus nodes sent and received data. Vast energies accumulated in neuronal cell bodies, reached critical thresholds, surged down long axons to pulse into thousands more neurons. Code readouts advanced in open windows around him. Parameter values moved as he watched.

  After the debacle of the party, debugging the code running in his own brain was bliss. His body lay safely in his bed. His mind exulted inside the Nexus development environment, tracing the events that had led to the fault. Here he was in his element.

  He traced the events of the night through the logs, through the pulses of Nexus nodes and neurons in his brain, until he found the place where Nexus OS had faulted. He traced system parameters backwards in time until he understood what had happened. Nexus nodes had fired in response to excited neurons and triggered an uncontrolled cascade. They needed more bounds checking. It was a simple fix. The code opened itself to him, changed in response to his thoughts. He compiled it, tested it, fixed a new bug he'd introduced, repeated until he was done.

  Reluctantly, he left the world inside his mind, and came back to the senses of his body. It was then that he remembered the other girl. Samara.

  They could still use another first-time female subject for the study tomorrow to test out the changes they'd made to calibration. They had their minimum sample size, but another wouldn't hurt. Would she fit? Yes. Was that foolish? Perhaps. But they really could use another first-time female…

  And she did happen to be smart, funny, and good looking…

  He pulled out his slate, projected it onto the wall, and paid a reputation bot to look up everything there was to know about Samara Chavez of New York City.

  There she was. Samara A. Chavez. Reputation green.

  He drilled into the details. Two degrees of separation from Kade. A Brooklyn address. Thousands of pictures of her online. Mentions of her at various data archeology conferences and online forums. A business license for a private consultancy. No mention on narc sites. No face match against suspected narc photos. The bot summarized her as legit and reputable.

  
Always use a second source
, Wats had said.

  He paid for a credit verification service to check her out as well. She came back with an address that matched, a phone number that matched the one she listed online, a decent credit record, no convictions, no gaps in employment and education. Everything was consistent.

  Kade yawned and checked the time. It was almost two in the morning. Was there anything else to check? He couldn't think of anything.

  He fired off an invitation to Sam's public address. Would she like to attend a party Saturday night? A party where she might be able to find a certain something she'd asked about? He couldn't tell her where, but he'd be happy to pick her up.

  Reread. Send.

  Then he stripped off his clothes and collapsed into bed.

 

Sam kicked, blocked, punched, dodged, kicked again. Imaginary enemies fell.

  Across the room, a new message chime sounded. The tone was keyed to Kaden Lane.

  Sam ignored the sound and continued her blurringly fast path through the hundred and eight steps of the
kata
she was practicing, her limbs moving with superhuman grace and precision through a four hundred year-old sequence of strikes, parries, and evasions.

  Focus, Nakamura had taught her. Absorb yourself in your task. Leave all the rest aside.

  She let the message wait as she completed the
kata.
Only when she was done and had bowed to the empty room did she turn, limbs trembling slightly, brow beaded with sweat, and ask her slate to show her the message.

  It appeared in the air before her. A message to Samara Chavez. An invitation to a party. A party where, he hinted, she could try Nexus.

  Guess I didn't spook him so badly after all, Sam thought to herself.

  She waved away the slate's projection and the image evaporated. She'd respond tomorrow at a reasonable hour.

  Samantha Cataranes turned back towards the center of the room, bowed to the air, and began the next
kata
.

 
 

Transhuman –
noun
–

 

The lump on his forearm was red, agitated. It stood out against his dark skin. Wats rubbed at it. It felt hard, hot to the touch. Skin peeled away under his fingers. He was bloody underneath. He peered at the uncovered tumor. Deep within it he could almost see the broken strands of DNA, his chromosomes fraying like split ends, giving birth to the cancers that would eat him. Another lump caught his attention. Another. His wrist was covered with them. His hands. His arm. In horror he ripped open his shirt. Red, angry lumps were growing on his chest, on his belly. They were rising, expanding, spreading as he watched, covering him…

  Wats jerked awake.

  Breathe. Breathe. Early morning light was filtering in through the windows.

  Not the cancers. Not yet.

  He scanned his arms. They were bare, unblemished.

  "Lights!"

  He threw himself out of bed, scanned the rest of himself.

  Nothing.

  Breathe. Close your eyes. Breathe. Pull yourself together, Sergeant Cole.

  He hadn't been Sergeant Cole for a long time now.

  Wats crossed to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. Wash away the rest of the nightmare. He pulled down a disposable tester, slid his finger into it. A short, sharp prick. A drop of his blood was sucked into its microfluidic channels. The box hummed softly as it worked. Flow cytometers examined every cell by laser, looking for telltale swelling of the cell nuclei, elevated hormone levels, abnormal chromosomes. DNA and protein assays took burst cells, evaluated them for cancerous genetic and proteomic fragments.

  Wats stared at the device as it did its work. He willed it green. He willed it to finish. He willed it to give him time to do what must be done.

  The device beeped. Its display turned green. No sign of the cancers. Not yet.

  Wats breathed a sigh of relief and tossed the tester into the garbage. Someday he'd pay for his crimes. But not today.

 

Kade picked Sam up just past nine in a Siemens autocab. The little plastic and carbon fiber car drove them south and east along the 101, past SFO, past San Mateo, past Menlo Park and Palo Alto and Stanford, and the venture capital hub of the world. She kept Kade engaged in conversation. She asked about his work, his friends, the party, the music he listened to, when he'd first tried Nexus. He answered everything except the questions on Nexus, and asked his own about her, her life, New York, her work in data archeology. She stepped into her role and answered the way the fictional Samara Chavez would answer. The lies came easy after so many years. She had him in stitches with Samara's misadventures in data archeology.

  The cab drove them to Simonyi Field, formerly the site of NASA's Ames Research Center, and dropped them in front of the giant Hangar 3. It loomed above them, longer than a football field, taller than a seven story building.

  "Welcome to our party space." Kade grinned.

  Sam nodded her approval. "Impressive. How'd you score this?"

  "Our lab leases it for experiment space. And, well, this is kind of an experiment."

  Sam raised an eyebrow.

  "You'll see."

  Kade led them to a back door into the hangar. He knocked quickly three times, and the door opened.

  Inside an entryway, a large sign read "Welcome! Please turn off data connections on all phones, slates, pens, watches, specs, shades, rings, etc… No active transmitters, please!"

  Below that, another sign: "Close Door and Open Mind As You Enter."

  To her right, the man who'd opened the door for them. Six feet tall, black, muscular, and lean, with a shaved head and a relaxed posture. Watson Cole. Data spooled across her tactical contacts in pulsing red. Threat level: high.

 

  Watson "Wats" Cole (2009 - )

  Sergeant 1st Class, US Marines (ret 2038)

  Deployed: Iran (2035), Burma (2036-37), Kazakhstan (2037-38) (…)

  Specialist: Counter-intel, Hand-to-Hand Combat

  Augments: Marine Combat & Recovery Boosters (2036, 2037, 2038)
  Approach with Extreme Caution

 

  Cole clasped hands with Kade. "Kade."

  Kade responded. "Good to see you, Wats. This is my friend Sam. She should be on the list now."

  Wats raised an eyebrow, eyes still on Kade. Then, slowly, he nodded. Calm, dark eyes turned towards her. "Samara Chavez. You're on the list. I'm Wats." He extended his large brownskinned hand.

  Sam had read Cole's bio already. A refugee from war-torn Haiti, brought to the US by a Marine who'd met and married his mother. Cole had enlisted in the Corps at age eighteen, distinguished himself in missions across the globe, been handpicked for augmentation and promotion. Then he'd been captured by rebels in Kazakhstan. The man who emerged from that months-long ordeal was different. A peace activist. A Buddhist. A pacifist. Had captivity changed him? Or something more?

  Sam took his hand. "Nice to meet you, Wats."

  His grip was firm but not forceful. Those hands could crush steel. They'd killed men across two continents. Even with her newer, top-secret fourth-generation enhancements, Sam wasn't sure she wanted to mess with Watson Cole.

  "Please turn off any radios," he said.

  
Why?

  "Sure," she answered.

  She pulled her show phone from her jacket pocket, flipped it to standby, used the motion as cover to blink the surveillance gear on her body into passive mode.

  Kade was returning his own phone to a pocket. He turned and smiled. "Wanna go see the space? We're still a little early."

  "Absolutely," she answered. "Lead on."

  Lane led her through a large heavy door, the kind Sam suspected might be EM shielded, and closed it behind them. On the other side was a hallway. Kade opened the door at the far end and they stepped through into a large open space, the true interior of the original hangar. It was at least two hundred feet across, with a vaulted ceiling seventy or eighty feet tall – a space you could fit an old 747 into. A circle of couches occupied one end of the hangar. Along one wall was a bar. A dozen people were milling about, apparently setting up for the party. At the other end she saw a DJ platform with four large screens. Behind them was the DJ, dark-skinned, bleached blonde hair, in multicolored Sufi robes.