Ramez Naam - Crux

“Martin.” Her voice grew firmer. “How stupid am I? You’d have to know, wouldn’t you?” Lisa shook her head. “Help us. Even you can’t buy into this crap. Help us make the case to Congress. These children are human beings , no matter what the President or the Chandler Act say. Kids, Martin. Help us.” Her voice dropped, softened. “Please.”

Finally her words caught up with him. Holtzmann took a breath, closed his eyes. He let his hand drop from her arm. When he opened his eyes again, she was still there.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, “There’s nothing I can do.”

He turned and limped away, the self-loathing rising like bile through his chest.

“Asshole,” he heard her mutter to his back.

His car picked him up at the passenger load point, a bomb blast radius away from the Capitol itself.

Holtzmann slid into the front seat and put his cane on the passenger side. “Office,” he told it, then reclined his seat. He felt the allure of the opiate surge but he ignored it. Instead he used his Nexus to dial up a thirty-minute nap while the car drove through DC afternoon traffic.

An hour later he watched the children from the observation room, watched them socialize in ways that children with this degree of autism never socialized, watched them weave themselves together into something more than just a group of mentally handicapped kids.

Who are you? he wondered. What will you grow up to be?

Nothing, if he did what he’d been told to do. Nothing, if he produced a vaccine and a cure the way that Barnes and the President wanted.

He and the ERD were committing a crime here, Holtzmann knew. A crime against the future. He felt it in his bones. They were Neanderthals, trying to stop the arrival of modern humans. They were dinosaurs, trying to eradicate the mammals lest they one day proved a threat. They were stripping these children of their human rights when they were more than human, when they were beautiful and precious and should have more protections.

He was a hypocrite and a coward, fighting against a technology that he himself embraced. Finding ways to purge it from the brains of children who’d lived with it their entire lives. Consulting on the design for “residence centers” that were little more than concentration camps, just in case the “cure” failed. All while terrified that they’d spot the Nexus in his own brain.

The hypocrisy was acid inside him. The risk of being caught was a cold dread.

What can I do? he asked himself. Resign? Resignations trigger audits. And any audit would turn up missing Nexus. Nexus that I’ve taken…

He was between a rock and a hard place. Follow his heart, and go to jail? Or do the disgusting things they asked of him, and stay free?

They’d just find someone to replace me, Holtzmann told himself. I wouldn’t help anyone by going to jail.

His own cowardice turned his stomach.

He was there, pondering his own weakness when he got the news. Ilyana Alexander was dead. Heart attack.

Damn it! Holtzmann slammed his fist against the one-way mirror separating him from the children in frustration.

Those bastards from Enforcement had pushed her too hard. Constant interrogation. Searching for that damned back door. What did they expect?

And God help them all, God help everyone running Nexus, if the ERD ever got the back door out of Alexander or Shankari. No one should have that power over so many minds.

He ended the day at his desk, clearing the backlog of work that had built up while he’d been at the White House and on Capitol Hill. It had been a long, stressful day. It would be so easy to wipe it away with one more little bump…

No. Anne expected him home. The house was so empty now, with their sons off at college, an ocean away in Germany and France. Why had he ever let them go? To sclerotic, stagnant, backwards-looking Europe of all places? They should have gone to Asia if anywhere, to a place that looked towards the future instead of fetishizing the past.

Holtzmann shook his head and pushed himself up with his cane to head home, just as Kent Wilson barged in.

“Dr Holtzmann,” Wilson said. “I’m so glad I caught you.” The young postdoc looked anxious, skittish.

“Kent,” he replied. “I was just heading home. Can this wait until tomorrow?”

“No, sir.” Wilson closed the door behind him.

Holtzmann frowned. “What is it?”

“Sir,” Wilson. “It’s the Nexus from the assassination attempt. I found something…”

Holtzmann perked up. “You found an impurity! We can identify the source!”

Wilson blanched. “Sir, no, I didn’t find any impurities, but…”

“What?” Holtzmann cut in. “You just have to keep looking, Kent.”

“I found something else, Dr Holtzmann,” Wilson said. “A chemical barcode.”

Holtzmann frowned. “Why would they have put a barcode in?”

Wilson shook his head. “It’s our chemical barcode, sir. It came from here, from this lab. We made it.”

Then Holtzmann’s sight narrowed, and the world receded. Because if the Nexus had been taken from inside the ERD, then they’d come looking. And when they came looking… they’d find out about all the Nexus that he had taken from their supplies, for his own use, in his own skull…

And then his life would be over.

Holtzmann sat at his desk, after Wilson had gone, and stared at nothing. He’d extracted a vow of silence from the boy, snowed him with a claim that he would take this to Internal Affairs himself, that they had to keep it quiet so the thief would never know they were on his trail.

Now his hands shook. His mind wouldn’t focus. It was all coming down around him. He knew what he needed. Not a little one. More. Enough to make this pain and fear and nausea go away.

Holtzmann pulled up the interface, turned the dial, and stared at it. There must be a better way. For a moment he hesitated. Then he thought of what would happen when they caught him and it took his breath away. He turned the dial higher and pressed the mental button.

The relief was instant. It washed through him, taking away all his cares. Then behind it came more. A deep deep satisfaction. An ocean of pleasure. An epic wave of bliss rose up, higher and higher, and crested over him, and he was loose on that ocean, drifting in nothing but endless bliss. For a moment it was perfect. Then another wave crested over him, and another, and another, and he wasn’t floating on an ocean of pleasure, he was drowning in it, falling down, down, all thought washed away by the enormous weight of the opiate deluge crashing through his brain.

His last conscious thought was that he’d taken too much. Too much. And then the opiate sea swallowed him whole.

Lisa Brandt quietly opened the door to her Boston flat. It had been a long, discouraging day. Fucking politicians. They had no balls. Nexus was synonymous with suicide bombers now, with terrorists. They wouldn’t dare back legislation to decriminalize its use among autistic children, or to recognize children born with it as human. Not this close to the election.

And Martin Holtzmann. What a disaster. God, to think that he’d appealed to her once. He’d seemed so smart and distinguished.

Yeah, when I was twenty-five. Before I figured out what a slime-bag he was.

Lisa sighed as she closed the door behind her. A nightlight illuminated hardwood floors, a carpet she’d brought back from Turkey, vibrantly colored paintings she’d picked up on trips through Central America. She quietly crept down the hall to the bedroom and peered in. Alice was fast asleep in the bed they shared. Across the room, in the crib, little Dilan slept soundly. Lisa went quietly over to him, looked down at the rise and fall of his small chest, the impossible frailty of his tiny clenched fists and scrunched eyes. Their son, now. Their adopted son. Their very very special adopted son.