Ramez Naam - Crux

Kade lost himself in it, the sheer joy of the code and the windows it opened on his mind lifting him.

After an hour, regretfully, he pulled himself out. There was one more thing to catch up on. The one he hated – coercion software. Code for subjugation, domination, and torture. Code used to steal. Code used to rape. Code used to enslave others. He had agents out searching for it – searching for the signal of its use, searching for the patterns of its design.

The first time he’d found such code, he’d reacted crudely, destroying the repository, forcibly purging Nexus from the brain of the man he’d found working on the enslavement tech.

The rapist on his knees, screaming. The mixed sense of revulsion and power Kade had felt as he’d ripped through the man’s brain, deleting all the code he found, then forcing the Nexus painfully out of the slimebag’s skull.

But that was no solution at all. Code would be backed up, or if not backed up, could be recreated. Someone forced to purge Nexus could procure more later, dose themselves again.

He’d grown more sophisticated since then. He’d turned the tools of the subjugators against them. He stopped them, reconditioned them, made sure they weren’t a threat to anyone ever again. He took them down and neutered them and it felt so good, so right to stop those bastards.

Nairobi. The sex-slaver writhing on the dirt floor of the smoke filled room. Kade smiling in grim satisfaction as he mentally rewired him, as he crippled the man’s sex drive and cross-linked violent thoughts to body-racking seizures, made sure the bastard never hurt anyone again.

Yes. Take them down. Stop them. That felt good, at least.

You’re the one turning into a monster , Ilya whispered to him. He could see her face as she spoke. Pixyish. Earnest. Stern. You’re invading people’s minds, taking control of them. It’s the power you love.

I don’t have any choice, Kade interrupted the voice in his head. Not until I finish Nexus 6.

What did Ananda ask you? Ilya whispered to him. “Are you wiser than all humanity?” Are you, Kade? Are you?

You weren’t even there, Kade told the voice in his head. Then he ignored her.

One thing was true. He couldn’t keep up this way. He couldn’t stop them all himself each time. There were more people running Nexus every day, and still just one of him. He needed to make Nexus itself smarter, more resistant to abuse. Nexus 6, he called it. And every one of these abuses he stopped, every one of these chances to stop a monster, was also a lesson he could employ in Nexus 6, a type of abuse that wouldn’t be possible when he finished it.

He went through the finds his agents had made over the seven days he’d been offline. False positives, most of them. Bogus hits that weren’t really abuses.

Good. For once he was ahead of the game.

Twilight fell as Feng drove. Kade turned at last to the thing that moved him most.

His software agents were everywhere now, in hundreds of thousands of minds, searching for his friends, searching for abuses. His agents spread using the back doors in Nexus, using one of the codes Kade had updated in Thailand, just hours before the ERD’s attack on Ananda’s monastery had forced him to release Nexus 5 into the wild.

In most of the minds they entered, his agents found neither signs of abuse nor signs of his friends. But that didn’t mean that they found nothing. They found a human being, after all, a thinking, breathing, feeling person, a spark of light.

And as his agents sent pings back to Kade, he became aware of all those hundreds of thousands of minds, all around the world, and just the tiniest glimmer of what they were thinking and feeling.

He closed his eyes once more now, and let all that data pour through him. The software in his mind visualized it, placed those minds on a shadowy globe as points of light, the shape of continents visible in the diffusion of minds over the earth’s surface, a pattern like nothing so much as the night-time lights of civilization as seen from space.

Kade slowed his breath, opened his palms atop his knees, and let the minds of the Nexus users of the planet wash over him. It was like a sound, like the surf of the ocean against a long shore, like a rushing river nearby. But it wasn’t a sound. It was pure mind, pure thought, pure emotion.

That wash of mind was inchoate, formless, a white noise of thought. Kade breathed, and let himself sink into it, let his thoughts dissolve into that ocean of incipient consciousness, until it filled him, until there was nothing of him left, until he was just a vessel, filled up with the tiniest echo of the thoughts of humanity.

Then he slept, and dreamt of a day when that mind would not be formless, when Nexus would conjoin humanity into something more.

Kade woke in the darkened jeep. An alert was flashing in his mind, flashing, flashing.

He was disoriented. The alert was part of the dream, part of humanity becoming something else, something greater.

But it wasn’t.

[Alert: Coercion Code Sample Alpha Detected. Status: Active.]

Kade’s heart caught in his throat.

Code Sample Alpha. The code used in DC, in the attempted assassination of the President.

Kade shook off the disorientation as best he could. Now was his chance. He could stop them. He could catch them.

He clicked on the link to the mind in the status notification. Encrypted connection formed. Backdoor activated, full immersion. Password sent. And he was in.

Breece smiled at the waitress as she brought him another coffee. She smiled back warily. He was just another customer at this interstate diner. Tall, muscular, maybe good-looking once, but now with a bulge of belly growing under his grimy T-shirt, his long hair tangled in dreadlocks, a ragged beard not quite concealing the scar that ran down one side of his face.

He stirred cream into the coffee, took a sip, and turned his attention back to the cheap slate in front of him.

Timing. It was all about timing. A punchline delivered too soon gets no laughs. The late bird gets no worms.

For maximum effect you had to time something just… so.

8.47am. There. The inflow of people to the building was hitting its max. Men and women waved their passes, stared into the retinal scanner, and then walked through the bulletproof glass doors. On the other side, when the doors opened, he could see that the queue in the lobby was backing up, DHS employees waiting to make their way through the bomb sensors and Nexus detectors inside. Breece smiled to himself. The Nexus detectors DHS had added were just slowing things down, creating a new bottleneck, a place of rapidly rising density of targets.

And there. Walking through the doors. Target numero uno . The man they’d been waiting for. DHS Chicago Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Bradley Meyers. The agent who’d stood by as an enraged mob had killed a pair of geneticists three years ago, and had done nothing to stop it. A man who should have lost his badge, should have been convicted, but instead went on to be promoted. Well, his career ended now.

It was time.

Breece tapped the surface of the slate to initiate the action. A thousand miles away the mule’s cell phone sent a signal to the Nexus OS in the man’s mind. The mule hoisted the package, walked across the square, waved his ID and put his eye to the retinal scanner, and then opened the doors to the secure building and stepped inside.

Kade tried to make sense of the input from the man’s mind. He was indoors. People. A line. Multiple lines. Metal detectors. A belt feeding bags into a scanner. An airport, maybe. Dozens of people all around him.

Assassination. This code was for assassination. A gun. He’d have a gun. Kade grabbed control of the man’s body, patted himself down, searching for it in the pockets of the suit jacket, in his pants, in the small of his back. Nothing.