Ramez Naam - Crux

“Like hell I can’t,” the bounty hunter said.

His gun boomed and the bullet burst open the boy’s skull and exploded Kade’s world. The shock of it sent Kade’s mind reeling, then rippled through all the other monks. Dimly through the chaos he felt some of them reflexively bring their hands up, their minds recoiling. One leaned over to vomit, and the pain and fear and chaos and loss threatened to overwhelm them all. These weren’t Ananda’s long trained monks. These were just boys!

The second shot took another monk in the gut. Kade felt the bullet burst his own midsection open and the pain tore through the cobwebs in his mind.

The monks almost broke. Instead he felt their minds harden, felt them come together. Determined monks moved to drag away their fallen comrades and the collective mass pressed in on the bounty hunters. Three dozen monks. Four dozen monks.

Then he heard someone screaming in Vietnamese and he saw through a dozen eyes as the abbot rushed into the circle. The words were foreign but the meaning came across.

What are you doing! You said no monks would be hurt!

A bounty hunter turned and shot him in the belly. Thich Quang An crumpled forward in pain.

The assembled monks moved as one, now, gelling into a single organism with a single intent, to pull Kade away from these men. The assemblage pushed forward with a hundred limbs and one mind and Kade could see what was about to happen and it wouldn’t, it couldn’t. No more of these men would die for him.

He rallied himself, focused, multicast his thoughts to the monks around him, opened up their minds with the backdoor…

…and the conjoined will of the monks pressed down on his, blocking him with iron force from sending the passcode, from forcing them to abandon him.

A bullet took a monk in the arm, spinning him around. Another punched through a young monk’s chest. The pain echoed through Kade.

Then Feng was among them, his mind cool and hard. Time slowed for Kade as Feng’s combat trance touched his own mind, stretching out every instant into a long, deadly span.

The augmented bounty hunters moved like molasses, lumbering, overly muscled brutes turning in slow motion. The flight paths of unfired bullets shone in Feng’s thoughts, brilliant lines of red light extending from the muzzles of their guns. The bounty hunters’ bodies cast echoes of potential blows and kicks that Feng foresaw.

Feng moved like a dancer, calm and graceful. He leapt over the plane of fire of a swinging pistol, rolled under another as he converged on the first bounty hunter. His mind was utterly absorbed. This was samadhi . This was meditation. Guns exploded and the bullets were living things in Feng’s mental map, ripping out of the muzzles, shockwaves rippling visibly through the air, flinging themselves at the spots Feng had occupied fractions of a second ago.

Then Feng reached the first bounty hunter, and the man went down with his neck snapped.

A stray bullet punched into a monk’s thigh then, and the echoing pain of it snapped Kade out of the trance of Feng’s mind, back into real time. And just like that, the bounty hunters were dead, all of them, the last bodies toppling to the courtyard at Feng’s feet as Kade watched through others’ eyes. Kade lay on the ground where they’d dropped him, as Feng pulled the tape off of him, cut through the bonds on his limbs.

Kade pushed himself to his feet with his good hand, his body shaking.

There were bodies around him. A monk was whimpering. He could feel pain radiating from half-a-dozen minds. At least three were dead. Another was dying even now, the boy’s mind falling apart into a thousand little pieces and then into nothing at all. Someone sobbed.

The pain and loss hit Kade full force. His sight dimmed. His legs felt weak, and he fell back to one knee.

“No safe place for you,” said the abbot, and coughed. Kade turned to look. The man had blood across his robes, blood coming out of his month. Pain and disgust wafted off of him. “I’m not the only one,” the man said weakly. “You… not a Buddha. An abomination. Maya . Illusion.”

Feng stepped towards the man and lifted one gun with a scowl, anger radiating from his mind.

“No!” Kade yelled, his still-healing hand outstretched.

“What?” Feng turned, confused.

“Let him go, Feng.”

“He was gonna give you to Americans. Almost got you killed! Killed all these!” Feng gestured around himself at the dead and dying monks.

“We’re better than that,” Kade said.

Feng took a deep breath, exhaled with a shake of his head, and lowered the gun to his side.

Monks moaned around them, yelled to each other for help, stared at the carnage in their tranquil home in horror.

Kade closed his eyes wearily, reached out to the abbot’s mind, used his back doors, opened the man to him. And saw.

“Not safe,” the old man coughed. “Not safe anywhere.” More blood welled out of his mouth. “Many of us… Better… you die. Abomination.”

Then Thich Quang An, abbot of Ayun Pa, was gone.

Kade stared around himself at the horror. The ERD again. Their dollars. Their stupid bounty on his head. That had caused this.

Feng put a hand on his shoulder. “We gotta go,” he said. “Cops soon. Can’t be here.”

Kade rose to his feet, still dizzy. Go. Yes. They had to go. Somewhere. Anywhere.

14

GOOD NIGHT, SHANGHAI

Friday October 19th

Ling Shu stared out the rain-streaked window of the high-rise apartment at the vast spectacle of Shanghai. Glowing advertisements rippled across the wet skyscrapers opposite her. Glimmering aurorae of blue and white light shrouded inducements for clothes, for vacations, for cars, for homes. The twenty-story-tall inhumanly alluring face of Zhi Li smiled at Ling, winked at her. It was the image of China’s most famous actress, the supranormal stimulus of her eyes so big and almond-shaped, her skin so porcelain white, her lips so full and red. The image smiled again, winked for only Ling to see, then held up a bottle of some sports drinks her masters wished her to sell.

Do you think you’re posthuman? Ling asked the giant screen. Do you think that a billion people knowing your face makes you special?

It doesn’t.

A surveillance drone cruised by the window, one of Shanghai’s tens of thousands of sky-eyes, moving slowly on its four all-weather rotors, spinning to point its proboscis-like camera at Ling through the rain. Its glowing collision-avoidance light cast red reflections on the rain-slicked glass.

Ling stared back at the thing through the window and the downpour, reaching out, feeling its primitive mind, the stream of data in and out of it. She could see herself in its data stream. She could twist that if she wanted, lie to its masters, or send it instructions of her own, take control of it.

She did none of these things.

The sky-eye stared at her, then rotated its quad-copter frame, canted to one side, and moved on to inspect something else in the great city.

Hundreds of meters below her, Ling could see more sky-eyes, dozens of them peering into windows and watching the city at ground level. Cars streamed below them in a river of metal and carbon-fiber on the wet streets. Motorcycles and scooters zipped between cars. Horns blared. Pedestrians with umbrellas darted across walkways. The rain fell in hard sheets on all of them. It sounded a ragged drumbeat against the window where she stood.

Badadadadadadadum. Badadadadadadadum.

The heavy cloud and pouring rain blotted out the sun, but the city was alive with artificial light from the giant advertisements, from the windows of buildings, from the red glow of brake lights, from the glowing red lights of the surveillance drones, circling, always circling, over the heads of Shanghai’s citizens. The light reflected off the heavy clouds above, turned the whole sky to a multicolored glow, twenty-four hours a day.