Ramez Naam - Apex

On top of all that, he was running this new Nexus stealth code. It wouldn’t hide any Nexus transmissions , so he wouldn’t transmit at all. But it suppressed the reflexive response Nexus nodes sent back to pings from the ERD’s Nexus detectors, making you undetectable if you stayed in receive-only mode. Or so people were claiming in underground boards.

“Now push the hair back,” Cheyenne said, pointing yet another camera at him.

Rangan did with relief, looked right into the camera, then turned, giving her a range of profiles.

Cheyenne put the camera down, a serious look on her face.

“You’re good,” she finally declared. “But keep the hair in front of your face, and your scarf up, just in case.”

Rangan turned and looked at Tempest.

She had her arms crossed. She was frowning, shaking her head.

“Don’t do this, Rangan,” she said.

It was the first time any of them had used his name. And it reinforced something he’d thought of often – that he didn’t know any of theirs.

“I have to,” he said. “And it’s Axon to you.”

The first cop they saw sent his pulse soaring, and Rangan reached Inside, fired up the serenity package, just to level three.

The cops looked right past him.

The National Mall was like nothing he’d ever seen. The crowd was huge, epic huge, music festival huge. They pushed past fervent protesters with signs, waving them around. They saw hippies in drum circles. A group of nuns, complete with black and white habits, waved signs saying LOVE THY NEIGHBOR.

Angel flashed them a peace sign as they walked by. “Rock on sisters.” A nun flashed a peace sign back.

They dove deeper into the massive throng, walked around an ad hoc stage where a serious looking man was making an impassioned speech about civil liberties. A digital sign proclaimed a list of apparently notable speakers for the rest of the day. Rangan hadn’t heard of any of them. They passed med tents, food stations, water stations, row after row of portable washrooms, power charging stations fueled off portable fuel cells, tents for the hardcore who stayed out all night, a legal aid booth, a group of yellow-robed monks, a soundstage where a jam band was playing and where hundreds of people were rocking out, dancing, their coats and some of their shirts discarded in piles as their body heat built up from their joyous motion.

It was warm, this November. The warmest November on record so far, in what looked on track to be the warmest year ever recorded around the world or in North America. Apparently it wasn’t freezing at night yet. That had to be helping these crowds.

And all that body heat.

Three times they passed a scene where Rangan was sure he saw one person handing a vial of Nexus to another. He had no idea how many times he missed that.

“Wow,” Rangan said.

“Bigger every day,” Angel said quietly. “And charged up by the Supremes.”

Nexus was everywhere. He could feel the righteous fury coming off the minds of the sign-waving protesters, the deep tranquility from the little knot of shaven-headed monks, the trippy rhythmic trance in the thoughts of the drummers, the fugue of music-making from the jam band, the hardcore ecstasy of rocking from the dancers. It called to him. He wanted to just sink into it, let himself go, let himself go wild in this crowd…

“Stay on target,” Cheyenne said, putting a strong hand on his shoulder.

Rangan shuffled on, a court jester with bad hair and a worse limp.

“This is the place?” Rangan asked.

Angel nodded. The spot where the fight had broken out – where the projection of rage and violence had assaulted them – was nothing special now. The pro-Stockton protesters had been moved to a different area, on the other side of the Washington Monument, with two streets and a hill separating the two camps.

But Angel had wanted him to see this.

“This is where the N was densest?” Rangan asked.

“Yeah,” Angel confirmed, casually looking around, making sure no one was close. “That’s why I dragged us over here. It seemed like a weird place for it.”

“The… transmission,” Rangan said. “The thing that hit you… It lasted for less than a minute?”

“Thirty-seven seconds,” Tempest answered. “I’ve gone over it again and again.”

“And not again since.”

No one said anything.

“And no outbreaks of violence at any other protest that day,” Rangan said.

They all shook their heads. They’d been over this already, more than once. Whatever had happened here had been unique.

“Someone freaking out, maybe,” Cheyenne said. “A first timer. Bad trip. Maybe high on meth or something else. Couldn’t hack it, overprojected.”

Angel shook her head. “No. There wasn’t any sense of self. No identity. No thoughts. No stream of consciousness. Just urges. Not a hack, either. It wasn’t at the level of the operating system. It was just talking directly to Nexus nodes, just an emotional projection, incredibly simple. And incredibly loud.”

Rangan chewed his lip. He had a flash of a late night, passing a pipe around at Ilya’s place in SF. Wats going on about world peace, about what would happen if everyone could touch each other’s minds, about mutual understanding, about empathy, about an end to war.

What if you wanted the opposite?

What if you wanted to incite violence?

He turned, and looked around, let his mind relax and feel the edges of the thousands of other brains running Nexus out there. He thought of the Nexus handoffs he’d seen. He got a flash of the high end chemreactor at the Bunker, churning out Nexus at high speed now, the sudden appearance of a hack that had cracked the crypto on seventeen different models of modern chemreactors at once.

He had a bad feeling about this.

He turned back around, to the place where the fight had broken out.

Tempest was there, looking at him. He wasn’t broadcasting, but she knew what he was thinking.

No.

She’d worked it out for herself, already.

Her paranoia about the chemreactor hack…

“They’re all connected,” she said. “Someone’s spreading Nexus intentionally. So they can spread chaos. Last week was just a test, just a rehearsal, for something bigger.”

Rangan nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “And we have to stop ’em.”

45

Mindful

Sunday 2040.11.25

Laughter is the best medicine.

Sam laughed and played with the kids every chance she got. Body time. Play time. Laugh time. They could get so pulled into their brains, and each other. She made it her job to get them into their bodies. Feng helped.

Tumbling in the grass. Tag. Summersaults and cartwheels. Patty cake. (Hide and seek turned out to be a total flop, alas, unless Sam was the one who hid. And who could hide for long with a bunch of posthuman kids all linked together looking for you?) Little tiny bits of self-defense and kata .

The eight who knew her well were always happy to play. The seventeen who’d come to Shiva’s island from other sites were… not wary, really. But they took some time warming up. They didn’t know her mind the way the others did. Without Nexus they didn’t have that bond. But they learned about her from the others. And they grew to love body play time.

And at the end, she’d force one or two or three to play her favorite game.

“What am I thinking?”

They’d be sitting cross-legged. They’d chat about something. She’d stop. Would alter her body language.

“What am I thinking?”

Could they still interact with a human they weren’t linked with? Could they find connections that weren’t obvious on the surface? Or would she grow to feel less and less real without the direct presence in their minds?