Crux

7 DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

Thursday October 18th

Kade watched as Feng steered the open-top jeep down the narrow mountain road, away from Chu Mom Ray and towards the plains and the monastery of Ayun Pa. Afternoon light filtered through the lush jungle foliage around them. Feng maneuvered them expertly around ruts, rocks, and fallen branches. The wind felt good on Kade’s skin, a welcome cooling in this heat.

Kade leaned back and closed his eyes to work. He’d spent the last week offline, in areas with no net access. Now they were approaching civilization again. He reached out to the phone networks, and from there through a cloud of anonymization servers to the broader net. Nexus traffic flashed around the world, now, disguised as other sorts entirely. In the vast data flows of machines talking to machines, it was a bare trickle of bits, easy to hide.

Information streamed into his mind. Software collated it, organized it.

First he surveyed the reports from the agents he’d sent searching for Rangan and Ilya. Small autonomous pieces of code, they used the backdoors he and Rangan had installed in Nexus – with the new passcodes Kade had set just hours before he’d released Nexus 5 – to search the minds of Nexus users, hunting, always hunting…

Ilya would hate this, some voice inside himself whispered. I’m invading privacy on a massive level.

Kade ignored it. He’d started down this path to find her. Her and Rangan.

It wasn’t easy to write a bot that would sift someone’s mind for knowledge of two individuals. What to key off of? Their names? Their faces? And if someone had heard one of their names? Had seen one of their faces in the news?

He’d had to endlessly fine-tune the variables. The face or name of either of them – spoken or read – in conjunction with a sense of captivity or imprisonment or prosecution or law enforcement. The person he was looking for would be an ERD employee, perhaps, or part of the wider Department of Homeland Security, or a contractor, or their spouse or lover or confidant. Someone who knew where Rangan and Ilya were, who would help Kade find a way to free them.

Over the last six months he’d gone through hundreds of false hits. Today there were dozens more, the consequence of his time in the wilderness between Cambodia and Vietnam. One by one he replayed the memories and discarded them. False positives, every one.

When he was done, he moved to the next category, the code updates. He’d pulled down hundreds from the most popular Nexus hub, the place where programmers and neuroscientists and others gathered to chat about, analyze, debug, and improve the Nexus OS that he and Rangan and Ilya had built.

Nexus OS was open source now. Anyone could change it. And hundreds did. The updates came thick and fast. Bug and crashes fixed. Security holes closed. New ways to share data, to write apps. Performance speedups. And deep neuroscience tools for working with memory, attention, emotions, sleep, and more, all the way down to raw neutotransmitter levels.

So much more than we could ever have done on our own, Kade thought. Hundreds of people hacking on Nexus now. Lots of them smarter than I am. The progress is amazing.

Kade lost himself in it, the sheer joy of the code and the windows it opened on his mind lifting him.

After an hour, regretfully, he pulled himself out. There was one more thing to catch up on. The one he hated – coercion software. Code for subjugation, domination, and torture. Code used to steal. Code used to rape. Code used to enslave others. He had agents out searching for it – searching for the signal of its use, searching for the patterns of its design.

The first time he’d found such code, he’d reacted crudely, destroying the repository, forcibly purging Nexus from the brain of the man he’d found working on the enslavement tech.

The rapist on his knees, screaming. The mixed sense of revulsion and power Kade had felt as he’d ripped through the man’s brain, deleting all the code he found, then forcing the Nexus painfully out of the slimebag’s skull.

But that was no solution at all. Code would be backed up, or if not backed up, could be recreated. Someone forced to purge Nexus could procure more later, dose themselves again.

He’d grown more sophisticated since then. He’d turned the tools of the subjugators against them. He stopped them, reconditioned them, made sure they weren’t a threat to anyone ever again. He took them down and neutered them and it felt so good, so right to stop those bastards.

Nairobi. The sex-slaver writhing on the dirt floor of the smoke filled room. Kade smiling in grim satisfaction as he mentally rewired him, as he crippled the man’s sex drive and cross-linked violent thoughts to body-racking seizures, made sure the bastard never hurt anyone again.

Yes. Take them down. Stop them. That felt good, at least.

You’re the one turning into a monster, Ilya whispered to him. He could see her face as she spoke. Pixyish. Earnest. Stern. You’re invading people’s minds, taking control of them. It’s the power you love.

I don’t have any choice, Kade interrupted the voice in his head. Not until I finish Nexus 6.

What did Ananda ask you? Ilya whispered to him. “Are you wiser than all humanity?” Are you, Kade? Are you?

You weren’t even there, Kade told the voice in his head. Then he ignored her.

One thing was true. He couldn’t keep up this way. He couldn’t stop them all himself each time. There were more people running Nexus every day, and still just one of him. He needed to make Nexus itself smarter, more resistant to abuse. Nexus 6, he called it. And every one of these abuses he stopped, every one of these chances to stop a monster, was also a lesson he could employ in Nexus 6, a type of abuse that wouldn’t be possible when he finished it.

He went through the finds his agents had made over the seven days he’d been offline. False positives, most of them. Bogus hits that weren’t really abuses.

Good. For once he was ahead of the game.

Twilight fell as Feng drove. Kade turned at last to the thing that moved him most.

His software agents were everywhere now, in hundreds of thousands of minds, searching for his friends, searching for abuses. His agents spread using the back doors in Nexus, using one of the codes Kade had updated in Thailand, just hours before the ERD’s attack on Ananda’s monastery had forced him to release Nexus 5 into the wild.

In most of the minds they entered, his agents found neither signs of abuse nor signs of his friends. But that didn’t mean that they found nothing. They found a human being, after all, a thinking, breathing, feeling person, a spark of light.

And as his agents sent pings back to Kade, he became aware of all those hundreds of thousands of minds, all around the world, and just the tiniest glimmer of what they were thinking and feeling.

He closed his eyes once more now, and let all that data pour through him. The software in his mind visualized it, placed those minds on a shadowy globe as points of light, the shape of continents visible in the diffusion of minds over the earth’s surface, a pattern like nothing so much as the night-time lights of civilization as seen from space.

Kade slowed his breath, opened his palms atop his knees, and let the minds of the Nexus users of the planet wash over him. It was like a sound, like the surf of the ocean against a long shore, like a rushing river nearby. But it wasn’t a sound. It was pure mind, pure thought, pure emotion.

That wash of mind was inchoate, formless, a white noise of thought. Kade breathed, and let himself sink into it, let his thoughts dissolve into that ocean of incipient consciousness, until it filled him, until there was nothing of him left, until he was just a vessel, filled up with the tiniest echo of the thoughts of humanity.

Then he slept, and dreamt of a day when that mind would not be formless, when Nexus would conjoin humanity into something more.

Kade woke in the darkened jeep. An alert was flashing in his mind, flashing, flashing.

He was disoriented. The alert was part of the dream, part of humanity becoming something else, something greater.

But it wasn’t.

[Alert: Coercion Code Sample Alpha Detected. Status: Active.]

Kade’s heart caught in his throat.

Code Sample Alpha. The code used in DC, in the attempted assassination of the President.

Kade shook off the disorientation as best he could. Now was his chance. He could stop them. He could catch them.

He clicked on the link to the mind in the status notification. Encrypted connection formed. Backdoor activated, full immersion. Password sent. And he was in.

Breece smiled at the waitress as she brought him another coffee. She smiled back warily. He was just another customer at this interstate diner. Tall, muscular, maybe good-looking once, but now with a bulge of belly growing under his grimy T-shirt, his long hair tangled in dreadlocks, a ragged beard not quite concealing the scar that ran down one side of his face.

He stirred cream into the coffee, took a sip, and turned his attention back to the cheap slate in front of him.

Timing. It was all about timing. A punchline delivered too soon gets no laughs. The late bird gets no worms.

For maximum effect you had to time something just… so.

8.47am. There. The inflow of people to the building was hitting its max. Men and women waved their passes, stared into the retinal scanner, and then walked through the bulletproof glass doors. On the other side, when the doors opened, he could see that the queue in the lobby was backing up, DHS employees waiting to make their way through the bomb sensors and Nexus detectors inside. Breece smiled to himself. The Nexus detectors DHS had added were just slowing things down, creating a new bottleneck, a place of rapidly rising density of targets.

And there. Walking through the doors. Target numero uno. The man they’d been waiting for. DHS Chicago Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Bradley Meyers. The agent who’d stood by as an enraged mob had killed a pair of geneticists three years ago, and had done nothing to stop it. A man who should have lost his badge, should have been convicted, but instead went on to be promoted. Well, his career ended now.

It was time.

Breece tapped the surface of the slate to initiate the action. A thousand miles away the mule’s cell phone sent a signal to the Nexus OS in the man’s mind. The mule hoisted the package, walked across the square, waved his ID and put his eye to the retinal scanner, and then opened the doors to the secure building and stepped inside.

Kade tried to make sense of the input from the man’s mind. He was indoors. People. A line. Multiple lines. Metal detectors. A belt feeding bags into a scanner. An airport, maybe. Dozens of people all around him.

Assassination. This code was for assassination. A gun. He’d have a gun. Kade grabbed control of the man’s body, patted himself down, searching for it in the pockets of the suit jacket, in his pants, in the small of his back. Nothing.

Someone bumped into him from behind as the line moved forward.

He turned, reflexively. The woman in a blouse and skirt was wearing a badge around her neck. So was the next. Department of Homeland Security. Oh no. Not an airport.

What were the assassins doing here? What was the plan? Kade could see doors back behind the people in line, darkened glass, a gleam of sunshine beyond. He could make a run for it, get away from these people, get outdoors.

A voice came from behind him. “Sir, keep moving, and put your bag down on the scanner.”

Bag. There was a backpack over one shoulder. He swung it around, tossed it onto the scanner. It landed with a hard thud. Heavy. Very heavy.

Kade looked up and around himself. So many people. He had to warn them. “I think I have a bomb!” he yelled. “A bomb!”

Shock registered from all around him. People jerked back. A security man reached for his gun. Kade moved this body’s hands, ripped open the zipper of the backpack. He caught a glimpse of wires, of something blinking red inside.

Then pure chaos overwhelmed his senses.

[CONNECTION LOST]

Kade gasped in shock as he snapped back to himself. What? What?

The jeep was stopped, he saw. Feng had pulled to the side of the road, was grimly watching over Kade.

Kade turned to look at Feng, numb, disoriented. His mouth opened, but no words came out.

But Feng understood. “You’ll catch them,” he said, putting a hand on Kade’s shoulder. “I know you will.”

Breece stayed outwardly calm as he surfed sports scores on the battered slate. Inside, he was roiling.

Someone got in there. Someone grabbed control of the mule and almost stopped us. Who? How?

He drank coffee, played at the pathetic human sport of “spectating” on true competitors, and stayed in character. It was three minutes later that the waitress gasped and turned up the sound on the diner’s screen.

“…Again, we have unconfirmed reports of an explosion just minutes ago at the Homeland Security building in Chicago. Witnesses are reporting scores of dead and injured. As we learn more…”

Breece turned, played as shocked at the rest of them.

“…statement from the Posthuman Liberation Front,” the newscaster on the screen went on, “…stating that this was a, quote, targeted assassination against Homeland Security Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Bradley Meyers for his complicity in the murders three years ago of…”

Only fifteen minutes later, after the details had started to trickle in and video of the explosion had been played again and again and again did he drop the enzymatic cleanser into what was left of his coffee to erase his tracks, pay his check, and then make his way out to the battered Hyundai in the parking lot.

He was ten miles down the road when the encrypted phone rang. A phone that only one person in the world would call. Zarathustra.

“I told you to stand down.” Even through the electronic distortion, the voice was hard, controlled, anger held in check.

“I gave you three months. Then I stood back up.”

“You’re out of line.”

Breece smiled to himself, spoke calmly back. “Maybe you’re the one who’s out of line, Zara.”

“This is your last warning. I won’t tell you again.”

Breece held the smile. “Keep your eyes on the news.” Then he cut the connection.

Three towns down the road he pulled the Hyundai into a rented storage building. He emerged twenty minutes later in a late model Lexus convertible, trim, clean shaven, unscarred, his hair a short sandy brown. The micron-thick gloves, mask, and lip liners that had captured most of his DNA were nothing more than an oil blot now. The slate he’d used was a smoldering hunk of plastic. The clothes and fake hair and fake belly were gone, burned, replaced by expensive slacks and a linen shirt. Inside the garage, DNA-destroying enzyme fog was even now erasing any traces of him from the car and building. In the unlikely event that FBI or ERD ever traced the signal back, it would lead them to the diner. And from there to nowhere. Even if, somehow, they got to this garage, they would still be no closer to him.

Hiroshi and Ava and the Nigerian all reported just as clean.

Breece retracted the top on the Lexus. The sunshine bathed him in its warmth and brought a smile to his face. What an excellent day this was shaping up to be.

I teach you the overman, Nietzsche had written.

Oh yes, Breece thought. I am the overman. Man is something I will overcome.

He took manual control of the Lexus, put his foot down, and drove south in the brilliant morning sunshine, and towards the prep for the next mission.

The man code-named Zarathustra stared at his phone with cold dark eyes.