Nexus (7 page)

  He looked around the room. Ilya met his eyes. Rangan was nodding, his face pale. Kade still had his eyes on the ground. Wats could feel their emotions. Rangan: fear and anger. Ilya: defiance. Kade: guilt and self-doubt. He was reprimanding himself for creating this situation.

  "Kade. Sit up straight, my friend. It doesn't matter how we got here. We're here." Wats saw Kade nod at his words, felt the kid get fractionally more of a grip on his emotions. "Look, our getaway plans are solid. If we stay, they have us for sure. If we bolt right now, we have a chance. It's a deep dark hole or a chance at getting out. We've got to do the sensible thing."

  He paused, looking around. Rangan was ready. He didn't know what to make of Ilya and Kade's emotions.

  "OK, you all ready? Rangan, can you knock her out and leave her that way for a few hours?"

  "I'm not going," Kade said.

  Wats paused again. Then, "Kade, if you stay, it's over. You won't ever get free of them."

  Kade nodded. "I know. It's just… If we run, what happens to everyone else here? Antonio, Jessica, Andy… The volunteers that measured out the doses and hooked up the repeaters. Do we tell all of them to run too? They don't have fake passports. They don't have someplace to run to. They just get fucked. Hell, what about Tania, Wats?"

  Wats flushed. "If you stay here, you get fucked too," he replied.

  Kade shook his head. "Ilya's right. If they want me for something, then I have leverage. It's a bargaining chip. I can get other folks off the hook."

  "You have bigger things to attend to," Wats replied.

  Now Kade exuded anger. "That's a cop-out, Wats. We created this situation. It's our responsibility." He calmed himself, spoke more softly. "Actually, you know what? It's
my
responsibility." He shook his head.

  Wats let his breath out slowly again. He had to reach this kid. "Kade… It's important that you get out of here. All three of you. What you're doing here is powerful. It has potential. It can save a lot of lives. It can end wars. It's bigger than you. It's more important than just this party.
You're
more important."

  "I'm not more important than the hundred people out there," Kade said sharply.

  "Your work is."

  Ilya cut in. "Wats, we can't let the ends justify the means. These people haven't done anything wrong. We haven't done anything wrong. We have to fight. We can take this public, take it to the press…"

  Wats shook his head. So naïve. "Ilya, they're not going to let you, don't you see? You have no rights in this country, not as of tonight. They're not going to let you near the press. And even if they did, no one would care."

  Ilya stood her ground. "We have to try. We have to stand up and fight for what's right." She exuded resolve, defiance.

  This wasn't going to work, Wats saw. As much as he'd tried to educate them on the realities of the world, they wouldn't ever understand until they'd experienced it first hand.

  He turned to Kade.

  "Then give me the code," he said. "The design, the blueprints, the recipe, all of it. If you disappear, I'll get it out into the world."

  Kade shook his head. "It's not ready yet."

  "Kade, if you go to jail, it'll never get out. This may be your only chance left to make a difference with it."

  Kade kept shaking his head. "It's too easy to abuse. Look at what we're doing to her right now." He gestured towards the now blind and deaf ERD agent tied to the chair. "If we let it out now, people will get hurt."

  Wats kept his breathing steady, held onto his calm. "Then I'll find someone trustworthy to keep working on it until it is ready. Don't let it go down the drain."

  Rangan interjected, "I'm not staying either."

  Kade turned and looked at him. There was no surprise there. He just nodded. "OK. I'm the one with the bargaining chip. The rest of you get out of here. You too, Ilya."

  "I'm with you," she said. "We have to fight for what's right."

  Wats relaxed fractionally. Rangan had the full code and design. If Rangan got out too, then all was not lost. Then he looked again at Kade and at Ilya. These were his friends. The best friends he'd made since he'd left the Corps. He doubted he'd ever see them again. He let his eyes drink up the sight of them.

  Wats picked Kade up in a bear hug. Kade winced, then relaxed into it. Wats moved on to Ilya, picked her up off the ground and twirled her around. She squealed, despite the grave circumstances. There were tears in her eyes. Then Rangan said his goodbyes as well.

  At the door, Wats turned and soaked up the sight of Ilya and Kade once more. "I won't forget you," he promised. "Good luck." Then he and Rangan were gone.

 

Three hundred and fifty miles to the south, ERD Special Agent Garrett Nichols watched the developing situation with some interest. Five of them clustered in the command and control room at the Department of Homeland Security Tactical Situation Center outside Los Angeles. The Drug Enforcement Agency liaison and the Department of Homeland Security Counterterrorism Division liaison sat quietly behind him. This was a joint operation, but given its nature, the Emerging Risks Directorate of DHS had operational command.

  His two analysts sat at the consoles in front of him. Half a dozen giant screens filled a wall that all of them could see. Screen 1 showed overhead false color visual of Simonyi Field, as seen from the Coast Guard's HQ-37 Sky Eye flying silent circles one thousand feet above it. Hangar 3 was their focus. Lights illuminated either end of the vast building. Cars in the nearby parking lot shone in infrared, their engines still warm.

  On screen 2, a running stream of tagged identities of attendees. Every vehicle arriving was having its registration quietly interrogated. Every person who stepped out of a vehicle was being optically faceprinted. Their profiles streamed across the screen. Almost every one was an associate of targets Alpha through Delta.

  Screen 3 showed the status of their two ground units and the squads within them.

  Screen 4 showed the status and location of California Highway Patrol and Mountain View Police units standing by to assist.

  Screen 5, where the stream of data from Agent Blackbird should be, was blank. It would update when she left the EM shielding and her surveillance devices uploaded what she'd seen and heard in the intervening time.

  Being out of contact with a field agent always made Nichols nervous. Tonight was no exception.

 

Sight and sound slowly faded back into Sam's reality. She heard her own breathing, first. Then saw the tiniest hint of light. Shapes. A wall. She blinked, and the world came back more strongly. She was still in the same room. Kade was here, slumped in a chair. No sign of Wats, Rangan, or Ilya.

  She tried to wiggle her toes. Nothing. Fingers. Nothing. Still paralyzed.

 

Nichols and his team watched the hangar closely, waiting for Blackbird to emerge. It might be hours yet until the Nexus party wound down.

  On scope, a small number of people came and went from the party. A cluster of smokers emerged around the east exit. Three couples snuck out to find private time outside the structure. A dozen stragglers arrived late and were let into the building. Seven individuals left in the same timeframe. All groups were faceprinted. None were among the primary targets.

  A young man emerged in a hoodie, his face hidden from the aerial camera, his body glowing in infrared. There was a tense moment as he crossed towards the neighboring golf course. Then he pissed on a bush and strolled back to the party.

  Just after midnight another couple emerged and strolled in the same direction. Faceprinting identified one as Tania Wellington, a martial arts instructor residing in San Francisco. The other's face was shielded by a hooded sweatshirt. He was a large man, tall and broad. Could that be Cole?

  The two figures crossed slowly across the golf course, making no move towards the road or Sunnyvale. Eventually their stroll led them to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. IR showed their forms entwine, their faces meet, their clothes begin to come off.

  Three individuals came out the east entrance, walked past the smokers, headed towards a car. The first two were ID'd successfully. The third kept his face in the shadows of the hoodie. The car door opened, and light momentarily illuminated him.

  Rangan Shankari.

  "Get CHP on that car," Nichols ordered. "Just follow. I want to see where Shankari goes."

  "Roger that," Jane Kim called out.

 

"Why'd you do this to us?" Kade asked. He was slumped in the chair across the room once more, the ice pack to his head.

  Sam took a breath before answering. "What you're doing is illegal. My job is to uphold the law."

  Kade shook his head. "That's no answer. Why'd you choose this job?"

  "Because what you're doing is dangerous. That's why I care. You're playing with fire."

  "This isn't a weapon. It's a new way to communicate. It connects people. You saw that. You felt it."

  Sam had felt it. She'd loved it, until she'd been horrified by it, by the discovery that she was not who she thought she was. She dodged the topic.

  "It can be abused. Maybe you wouldn't use it to hurt people, but others would."

  "It's not like that," said Kade. "It's a way of bridging the gap between people. It makes us smarter together than we could be apart. It can raise collective intelligence, collective empathy. Ilya talks about…"

  Sam cut him off. "Ilya talks about creating things that aren't human, Kade. Non-human intelligences."

  "Groups of humans," Kade retorted. "Human networks."

  "Hive minds. Borgs. Super-organisms," Sam spat out. "What if they don't like us?"

  "How could they not like us? They'd
be
us." Kade was getting heated now.

  "And what if I didn't want to join a hive? Would I be forced to? Assimilated? Could I keep up if I didn't? Would there be a place for ordinary humans?"

  Kade exhaled in frustration. "Look, that's all paranoia. There are positive effects too."

  "It's not just paranoia, Kade. You have me under your thumb right now. You can make me do whatever you want. Rangan could too. That's
coercion
, Kade. You've built a coercion technology. A way to control people. And you tell me this isn't a weapon?"

  Kade shook his head. "It's just a safety precaution. This is still experimental."

  "Just a precaution, huh? Do other people have this back door in their heads? Can you paralyze any of your friends out in the party? Can you read their minds?"

  Kade said nothing, just looked down at his hands.

  "You can, can't you?" Sam continued. "Do they know? Have you told them that taking part in your little experiment hands you and Rangan the keys to their heads?"

  Kade shook his head, still not looking at her. "It's a safeguard, that's all. We'd never release it like this."

  "How can you be so naïve, Kade? You're a good guy. I've felt that. But what about other people who get their hands on this? You think they won't reverse-engineer it? You think they won't make slaves out of this? Suicide troops? Sex slaves? Worshippers?"

  Awful memories were rising up inside of her. The ranch. The cult. The way her parents had become cattle, or worse. She wanted to push them at Kade, couldn't. He was opaque to her. She was cut off from his mind.

  Kade bristled. "This is stupid. You can hurt people with guns. You can get them to do awful things with words. Books are as dangerous as anything I'm doing. We
need
this. 'Our current problems can't be solved by the level of thinking that created them.' Einstein said that. This can take us to a new level of thinking."

  "Kade, it's going too fast," Sam replied. She fought down the pain and despair of old memories, hardened herself. She despised the longing she felt to touch his mind and show him. Hated the weakness of it, the wrongness of it. Damn this drug. Damn this mission.

  "You're talking about changing everything about people, the way we've been for a hundred thousand years, in a heartbeat. You can't know the consequences, you can't understand how people will abuse this, you can't know that humanity will survive this. We have to
slow down
the rate we're becoming something that's not human."

  Kade glared at her. "You're one to talk. You're not quite baseline human yourself, are you?"

 

Nichols turned his attention back to the couple at the edge of the water. The red blobs in the IR scope were bent over, making odd motions. What were they doing?

  It clicked. They were taking off their shoes. And now their pants. A little rendezvous on the beach. The couple now appeared to be kissing passionately, red lines blurring in IR, only heads and limbs distinguishable in the image. He was about to look away, when they did something he didn't expect. They turned, hand in hand, and ran into the Bay, water splashing up around them. They ran till they were hip-deep, the lower halves of their bodies disappearing from IR view, and then dove head first into the water, and vanished under the waves entirely.

  "Isn't that water a little cold for a swim this time of year?" Nichols asked aloud.

  "I was just thinking the same," Bruce Williams replied. "Can't be much more than fifty degrees."

  On screen, twenty feet further out, the head and shoulders of one of the red blobs. Nichols held his breath. Wait for it… Wait for it… Nothing. The other was nowhere to be seen.

  "Fuck!" he exclaimed. "Get Mobile 2 there now! Scramble the mini drones. Light that place up. Find that guy!"