Ramez Naam - Crux

And union. Minds coming together. Walls dropping. Consciousness spanning bodies. Group minds, self-assembled, voluntary, greater than the sum of their parts…

But then someone had used Nexus to try to kill the President. And the ERD had put a bounty on his head. Wanted alive, for questioning.

Men had come asking about him, a tall, gangly Westerner, young, head shaved to look like a monk. They’d shown pictures of him. In Khun Prum. In Kulen. In Pou. Kade and Feng had taken to moving every two weeks, then every week, then every few days, leaning hard on the extraordinary generosity the monks showed them.

Then Ban Pong. Kade and Feng had been there less than two days before the news came. Men were looking for him, in the village below. It was time to move again.

This was the only way left to them. Off the grid. Off the roads. Into the jungle-covered mountains to the east, on the unmapped trails that led from Cambodia to Vietnam, with nothing but the packs on their backs and a destination – the monastery at Chu Mom Ray.

Today was day seven. Feng could have made the trip in two days, Kade figured. His pack weighed at least twice what Kade’s did, yet the Chinese ex-soldier never slowed, never tired. Kade was the weak link here.

“Hey, Kade,” Feng called from up ahead. “What did Confucius say about man who runs in front of car?”

Kade smiled and shook his head, brushing away more foliage from his face. “I don’t know, Feng. What?”

“He gets tired!” Feng roared. “Get it? Tired?”

Kade laughed. Feng’s jokes were as endless as his stamina.

“Yeah, I get it, Feng.” Kade reached up to adjust the straps of his pack once more, settling the load more comfortably on his back. His right hand ached as he did so, still weak and painfully fragile, even six months after the regeneration genes had been injected. He forced himself to use the hand, regardless. Keep working it, the doctors had told him. Give it every reason to grow stronger.

“Kade,” Feng said up ahead, more seriously now.

Kade looked up at his friend. Feng had stopped, at a spot where a clearing in the jungle gave them a view off the side of the trail and down the mountain. And now he was pointing, smiling.

Kade squinted into the morning sunshine. His cloned right eye watered in the glare, more light-sensitive than the left. He brought one hand up to block the sun, followed Feng’s pointed finger.

Down below them on this winding mountain path, tucked away in the lush green jungle that clung to these slopes, he could see buildings. The ornately sloped red roof of a pagoda. Two smaller buildings tucked away.

“Chu Mom Ray,” Feng said with a grin. “Welcome to Vietnam.”

Kade smiled in return, then nodded in satisfaction. Chu Mom Ray. They’d made it.

Feng turned, moving faster down the trail now, buoyed by the nearness of their destination.

“Hey Kade,” he called from up ahead. “You know what Confucius said about the man who runs behind a car?”

Kade laughed, struggling to keep up. “What, Feng?”

“He gets exhausted! ” Feng sang out. “Exhausted!”

Kade groaned, and chased his friend down the mountain.

It took another hour to make their way down to the tiny monastery, scrambling down the trail, whacking their way through brush, inhaling the lush green scent of the jungle. The monks greeted them as heroes, Kade as a holy man. He did his best to deflect their adoration, laugh with them, diffuse the power imbalance as always.

I’m just like you , he tried to show them. Just another novice.

The monks let them wash themselves in the cold mountain water. It felt amazing in the heat. Then the novices brought them clean clothes and led them into the kitchen to be fed.

Kade watched the cooks with joy. They were preparing the midday meal, peeling, chopping, stirring, spicing. They moved as one, wordlessly, bridged by Nexus, a six-armed being, human yet more than human, moving with a single purpose.

This, Kade thought. This is what Nexus can be. Total coordination. Emergent order. Another symphony of mind.

It was the logical direction of human evolution. Humanity had achieved what it had not through strength or claws or armor, not even through individual human intelligence, as impressive as that was. No, it was the ability of humans to coordinate, to work together, to produce ideas and solutions collectively that no individual mind ever could, that truly set them apart. Nexus was just one more step in that direction.

And for the monks, it was more than that. In their view, Nexus was a spiritual tool. It helped tear down the illusion of separateness. It helped pierce the veil of maya . It helped these monks, all part of the same conscious universe, forget the lie that they were separate, the broken distinction of one person ending before the next began. By linking their minds it helped them remember that they were, in fact, all one.

On his best days, Kade almost believed them.

Then the abbot was there, a small man, wizened, standing before them.

“We are honored to have you here,” the abbot told them. Then his face became more somber. “I have bad news I must relate.”

A wave of sorrow swept across the monks in the room. Kade felt something tighten inside him. The cooks stopped their chopping. A deadly stillness had come across Feng.

“The monastery at Ban Pong is gone,” the abbot said. “Burned to the ground. The brothers there chose that way out, rather than tell your pursuers where you’d gone.”

Still seated, Kade stared up in shock. “They’re dead?”

“Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man,” the abbot replied. “Your escape was more important to them than their own lives.”

Kade looked down at the table in horror. Dead. Words wouldn’t come. Beside him he felt Feng nodding in agreement with the abbot.

“As a precaution,” the abbot said, “you should press on. We have a vehicle prepared for you. The monastery at Ayun Pa is farther from the border, larger, a safer place for you.”

Kade looked up at the man again. “What about you? The monks here?”

The abbot smiled. “I prefer to live if I can, my friend. All of us here will scatter. Now, we must restock your provisions, and then you must go. Your life is valuable, young man. Honor this sacrifice. Keep yourself safe.”

Kade didn’t hear. One thought ran through his mind. The ERD. The ERD had done this, with their bounty, their price on Kade’s head. They’d killed those monks, as surely as if ERD agents had pulled the triggers themselves.

Fuck.

3

DOMESTIC BLISS

Early October

Sam straightened her back, spade in hand. Sweat ran freely down her face, uncaught by the bandana across her brow, and dripped into the CO2-filtering respirator she wore over mouth and nose. Her tank top was plastered to her skin by perspiration. It felt glorious. The plastic panels of the greenhouse trapped the sun’s warmth and held it in. The solar-powered CO2 pumps captured carbon dioxide from the outside air and concentrated it inside, where the plants breathed it in, and grew.

She was harvesting gene-hacked Aloe arborescens today, heavily engineered to grow fast in this high-CO2 atmosphere, its thick succulent leaves loaded with bio-engineered antibiotics and wound healing factors. A plant they could sell at market to bring in funds for the orphanage. Sam looked around the greenhouse, looked at the dozens of other plants, little chemical factories, all growing something they could sell.

Every one of these plants would be illegal in Europe, she thought. Most of them illegal back in the US.

How strange to live in a place where this technology was so normal, so essential, even. Rich countries had the luxury to ban biotechnologies. Poor countries depended on them.