Ramez Naam - Crux

Beneath those waves he could feel the reefs, feel the corals, real-time sensors feeding their health into the Nexus nodes in his brain. He had only to close his eyes and invoke the right command and he could feel them growing again, returning to health, adapting to the ever warmer, ever more acidic waters of the world. Because of him. Because of what he’d done. Because of his crime.

Out there to the west, a thousand kilometers across the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal beyond it, lay his true home. Mother India. The land that had birthed him, embraced him, celebrated him, and then rejected him.

They revere me, Shiva thought, but when I act for the greater good, when I do what must be done, they punish me, outcast me.

The virus had been his idea. With the thawing Arctic belching ever more carbon into the skies, with solar shields caught up in endless political debate, with every attempt to reduce the warming and acidification of the planet falling short of what was necessary, someone had to take the initiative. And so he had. Survival genes, culled from the coral species with the greatest tolerance to heat and acid, inserted into a viral vector that would spread those genes to every coral reef in the world, give them precious decades of additional life. And it was working, bit by bit, restoring life to nearly dead reefs, strengthening others. Just a buffer, just ten or twenty years’ worth, perhaps. But at least he’d done something .

And how they hated him for it. Unilateral, they called it. A crime against nature . Uncontrolled experimentation. Unsanctioned madness .

Shiva shook his head. As if any of the governments or NGOs or environmentalists had any better idea.

It had cost him his home. The Prime Minister himself had passed word to Shiva. The prosecution could not be stopped. It would be best if he were gone. The Burmese were happy to have him, of course. Billions in crypto cash and his promise of assistance with their biotech programs had won him their support.

But worse, it had cost him his wife, his love.

“You’ve gone too far, again ,” Nita had yelled at him, through the tears. “You promised.”

She broke his heart. What could he tell her? That it was her doing? That she had changed him from a man who cared only about himself to one who sought to make a better world? But she’d never loved his methods, never loved the ruthlessness he’d brought to his good works. For him, this was the logical extension of who he was and what she’d taught him. Words never solved anything. If you believed in something, you had to act to make it happen.

For her it was the final straw.

Shiva sighed. Humanity has lost control , he thought. It can no longer govern itself or this planet. It can no longer guarantee its children a future. The world needs new leadership. Posthuman leadership .

Was he willing to embrace that mantle? With all that it would mean?

The offices of Dunn and Broadmoor were on the sixtieth floor of a glass and carbon-fiber building in London’s West End. They might as well have been in Antarctica for all that their location mattered to Shiva Prasad. What mattered was that the consultancy was very good at what they did, and that they had a track record of extreme discretion.

Shiva projected himself there from the rooftop of his island home. Custom networking software atop the Nexus OS took his posture and gestures and facial expressions directly from his mind’s representation of his body and mapped them onto the three-dimensional digital image the conferencing bot projected at the other side. It took the video and audio received by the conferencing bot and piped them directly back into his mind. One moment he was watching the sun set over the sea. The next moment he was in a luxuriously appointed private conference room thousands of miles away.

He took the meeting still dressed in his simple white robe. Loving Nita had changed him. He could still remember the day he’d met her. A gala celebrating India’s immense victories in the 2024 Olympics – victories made possible by the nearly undetectable genetic tweaks Shiva’s firm had provided to the team. He’d been high on his secret success, his offshore accounts stuffed to overflowing, his address book filled with the private numbers of members of parliament, of cabinet ministers. Tall, handsome, and rich. The untouchable billionaire. No woman could resist him. None had in years.

Until Nita. Slender, elegant, and utterly captivating in her backless green gown, her long black hair done up in elaborate piles atop her head. Dark eyes dancing with mischief. Lips he wanted, needed to kiss. Hips he intended to grip as he took her in the night. An Indian woman who dressed and spoke like a brazen American. A software tycoon’s daughter who devoted her time and money to charity. He’d inquired about her, then approached her, knowing she’d be his. She’d rejected him instead, then and there, just shaken her head and walked away as he tried to speak to her. She’d walked away from him, Shiva Prasad, the most eligible man in India!

He pursued her across two years and three continents, lured by the self-confidence that allowed her to reject him. He gave to charity to impress her, started his own foundation, endowed it with tens of millions, invited her to sit on its board. And bit by bit she gave him tiny snatches of her time. Not in the boardroom, but in the slums. In the refugee centers. In the disaster zones. In the impoverished schools. On research vessels surveying the melting Arctic and the other dying oceans. She pulled him into her life, showed him a larger world, a world that needed him, a world where his mark could linger on long after his life ended, through the ripple effects of his good deeds.

And at the end of that process, she did not become his. He, a changed man, became hers .

That was the end of most of his luxuries of wealth – the cars, the clothes, the women, the vacations and yachts and jets and opulent chalets. It surprised the world. Hadn’t he come from the poorest of poor backgrounds? An orphan from the mean streets? An untouchable who’d become one of the most ruthless business tycoons of the decade? Surely with his billions he’d relish all the material pleasures life had to offer.

The changed Shiva knew better. Luxuries and indulgences were distractions from true greatness, tawdry and ephemeral baubles that dissipated energy that could be directed toward more meaningful and durable accomplishments in the world around him.

Yet one must wear the costume to play the role. And so it was that he absorbed the briefing in white cotton, but thousands of miles away, his avatar appeared in the semblance of gray silk Armani.

“We’ve clustered around eighty per cent of the Nexus users into three demographics,” Kenneth Dunn was saying. He was tall, forty-something, handsome in all the ways that money could buy, with a genetically squared jaw, broad shoulders, and perfectly black hair. He might even have bought those genetic tweaks from one of Shiva’s own companies.

“Cluster one: Mid-teens to mid-twenties of age, urban and suburban, medium to high income, roughly even gender split.”

“Recreational users,” Elizabeth Broadmoor piped in. “Party kids.” She was barely more than a child herself. In her late thirties still, incredibly successful for her age, able to afford the cosmetic gene modifications that gave her the glossy blonde hair, flawlessly tanned skin, and lithe figure of a woman ten years younger.

Dunn nodded. “Cluster two: Thirties to fifties, suburban, tilted towards high income, sixty per cent women. These are parents of special needs children. Autism spectrum, ADHD, etc...”