Ramez Naam - Crux

Then the towel came back and then the water came again and it would be better if he didn’t even try to hold his breath but God help him he couldn’t fucking help it, and so he did and then the fist came down like he knew it would and the breath exploded out of him and when finally the air rushed back into his lungs it wasn’t air at all, it was the ocean drowning him like when he’d swum out too far from the beach at Goa and he’d started panicking and going under and didn’t know which way the shore was or which way was up or down and he was sure he was going to die this time and the water kept coming and he was retching and convulsing and pulling at the restraints and his wrists were burning with the pain as he yanked and yanked and his eyes were bulging and the water just kept fucking coming and he couldn’t breathe God I can’t breathe I can’t get to shore I can’t breathe I’m drowning here and it kept coming and every time he coughed he just sucked more water in and no air until he wasn’t coughing, wasn’t coughing, wasn’t breathing, and the world was going gray and he was going under the waves now and he couldn’t fucking breathe and God help me I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going under, going to drown here can’t get to shore can’t get up to the air going to drown going to die and then the world jerked around him and even as he was dying he felt the gurney snap all the way to upright and his head snapped back and he was vertical – the emergency position emergency dear God I’m really dying .

They’ve lost it they’ve fucked up I’m really gonna die.

A fist slammed into his gut and he still couldn’t fucking breathe.

Gonna die here gonna die.

The fist slammed into him again and he tried to cough the water out but he still couldn’t fucking breathe and he tried to let go and give into it and live his last seconds on earth in peace but he just couldn’t do it.

Sweet Jesus I’m sorry I’m so sorry. Please I don’t wanna die.

Then the fist slammed into his gut a third time and he coughed out fluid and gasped for air and then he retched and his stomach convulsed and he was puking again, puking into the mask, into the mask, still dying.

Then it was off him, and he was heaving and coughing and gasping for breath. And even though he was trying not to he was crying and he was whispering something…

“Please… Please… You win… Please… No more…”

They cleaned him up, brought him clean clothes and hot soup, and questioned him for three hours.

Nexus OS came back online as the Nexus nodes restored themselves. He thought about launching the serenity package again, but he trembled just thinking about it. That way led pain. That way led torture. That way and sooner or later they’d kill him for real.

Instead, he told them everything. How the back doors worked, all three of them. The hacks in the compiler to bake them into Nexus even though they didn’t exist in the source code. The obfuscation tricks that hid the back doors and passwords as random ones and zeros scattered among billions in the binaries, indistinguishable from the parameters that governed millions of neurons, nearly impossible to reverse-engineer.

And of course, the passwords themselves.

He told them how they could build a new compiler from scratch to evade the back doors, but he could tell they didn’t care. All they wanted was the current passwords, and how to use them.

Which meant that they wanted to break into minds already running Nexus 5. Which meant that it had gotten out.

Which made him scum.

They walked him back to his cell this time, blindfolded, but unrestrained. When he got there the blindfold went away, and there was light in his cell, and a bed that didn’t have straps, and a viewscreen. And as he sat down, the door opened again and an orderly walked in with a tray of hot food.

His stomach rumbled at the smell and sight of a warm, solid meal, even as something inside him broke at the understanding of just how badly he’d sold himself out.

He looked down, not able to meet the orderly in the eye, and as he did, he heard a sound, a door opening somewhere down the hall and he felt something, something incredible.

Minds. Many minds. Children’s minds. He felt them and they felt him and they were weird and warped and full of chaos and he was trying to understand who they were and what they were doing here.

Then the door clanged shut, and the minds were gone, and he was alone with his traitor’s meal.

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 .