Nexus

18 AYUTTHAYA

"Kade. Thank you so much for joining me."

Su-Yong Shu took his hand in both of hers. Her eyes were bright, compelling.

"Professor Shu, it's an honor." They sat.

"This place is spectacular," Kade said.

Shu smiled again. She looked around, taking it all in. "I love it here," she said. She gestured at Wat Arun, soaring above them. "Humans create so much beauty."

Humans, Kade observed to himself. Not "we". Humans.

The waiter came to them with water and tea, walked them through the menu.

"Everything looks so incredible," Kade commented.

Shu smiled. "Let me. You'll be happy."

"I'm in your hands."

Shu rattled off a stream of high-speed Thai to the waiter, who smiled broadly, bowed, and backed away.

"You speak Thai," Kade noted.

Shu smiled. "Talk to me about your research, Kade. I hear your paper in Science is going to be very exciting. What's in it?"

Kade talked. He gave her the edited, sanitized version, with conventional nanotube filaments, software built on the models from Shu's lab. He left out all the leapfrogs that Nexus 5 had allowed them to make. All the dead ends it had allowed them to avoid.

Nexus had enabled them to paint a Leonardo. They'd traced that into a crude crayon drawing, and still they were years ahead of the field.

Shu asked good questions. She probed details and high-level conclusions. Kade struggled to keep up.

Finally, she nodded appreciatively. "Well, I'm very impressed." She held his eyes.

"Thank you." He smiled calmly, a little sheepishly. "We're really proud of it. Rangan did as much work as I did."

The food arrived, breaking the moment.

The waiter presented each small dish with fanfare.

Yum Mamuang, a delicious mango salad.

Pad Pak Boong, fried morning glory.

Goong Kra Tiem, savory garlic fried shrimp.

Ped bai Gra-pow, basil duck.

Phat goo-ay-dtee-o neu-a, stir-fried noodles with sliced beef.

They ate family style, remarking on each delicious dish. Shu had an enthusiasm for the food that Kade found infectious. The waiter brought them fresh guava juice, cool and refreshing. As they talked, the sky darkened into full night. Their table was illuminated by the flame from the lanterns, the amber lights on Wat Arun just to their south, the neon glow from the east, from the teeming city across the river.

Shu shifted the conversation from food back to neuroscience, grilling him on topics all across the field. He was being interviewed. The questions came thick and fast, on topics far and wide. The neural basis of creativity. Prospects for boosting human intelligence. The difficulty in uploading human minds into computers. The evolutionary basis of sleep. The limits of a human brain's storage capacity. Reasons for the human perception of time.

The questions were all speculative, open-ended, on the frontiers of modern neuroscience. He had to synthesize, reveal hunches, sketch out possibilities based on incomplete data in the field. Shu wouldn't accept "I don't know" as an answer. She kept pushing him to take an educated guess, to explain his thoughts. It was exhilarating. He wondered if she knew the answers to her own questions.

And then Kade felt it. Her mind reached out to his. He could feel her curiosity, her crystal clear intellect. Her mind felt amazing. Vast, intricate, like no one he'd ever felt before.

He longed to touch that mind. But he gave her nothing. To open to her would be to reveal why he was here and who had sent him.

Keep talking, Kade told himself. Pretend you've felt nothing.

Shu watched him, her face pensive.

Wats watched from a rooftop north of Ayutthaya Restaurant. He lay there on his stomach, utterly still, a scope to his eye. Chameleonware in his clothing blended him into the rooftop. There was Kade, with someone that facial recognition software identified as Professor Su-Yong Shu of Jiaotong University, Shanghai. Shu was one of the top researchers in Lane's field, and an occasional dabbler with the Chinese Ministry of National Defense. What was she doing there?

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.