Ramez Naam - Crux

“AAAAAAA!!” Ling screamed and reached out to the apartment around her. The oven threw its door open and came on with a burst of flame. The fireplace jolted to life. The cooking bot activated and began sharpening its knives. The closet door opened and the cleaning bots emerged, their fans whirring. The music system and viewscreens came on at painful volume.

The tutor looked around her, eyes wide, and turned and ran for the door.

Ling turned her mind back to Jiao Tong.

NO NO NO NO NO!

She threw herself at the connection, but it was futile. She slammed her tiny fists against the glass of the window, to no effect. Physical disconnection . She hated the physical world, the world where she was so puny and weak, hated it, hated it, hated it!

Ling reached out in anger and frustration, grabbed hold of the network nodes of the Secure Computing Center, and wrenched at them in every way she could. Immediately her connection to the place ended, but the anger was still with her, so she reached out to the city around her, pushed her mind into its cars and its power stations and its buildings and its traffic routing and surveillance bots and RIPPED .

She heard the explosions as the substations blew, saw sparks somewhere out there, and then a wave of darkness swept away the lights of the great city, advancing block by block, like a wave of dominoes falling. The building-sized porcelain face of Zhi Li winked at Ling one more time, and then blinked out of existence, along with the lights of the whole block, of Ling’s flat, and every building within sight.

And finally, Ling felt calm returning.

Ling Shu stared out the window of her pitch-black flat, tears falling from her eyes, her tiny chest heaving as she caught her breath, and watched the hundreds of red-lit surveillance drones plunge to the street below, like stars falling from the sky, as the rain pounded on the suddenly still and darkened city.

The elevator came to an abrupt halt two hundred meters up. The lights died and the status indicator switched from ISOLATION IN EFFECT to

LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT

And suddenly Chen Pang knew fear.

“Help!” he screamed. “Help!” He beat against the doors of the darkened elevator. “Help!”

But no one heard him.

15

MEANS, MOTIVE, OPPORTUNITY

Friday October 19th

Holtzmann napped when he arrived home late morning, rose again around 2 o’clock, feeling better, and was awake when Anne came home in the afternoon.

“I’m fine,” he assured her in the kitchen, “fine.”

“Did you talk to Dr Baxter?”

“Yes,” he lied. “He fit me in. He thinks it was just stress.”

Anne frowned. “I think you have PTSD, Martin. They have therapy for that, you know.”

Holtzmann kept his eyes on the counter. “I’ll be OK, Anne. This won’t happen again.”

Anne crossed the kitchen, laid her palm on his cheek until he met her eyes.

“Promise me you’ll see Dr Baxter again?”

Holtzmann looked into those eyes, of this strong, intelligent woman that had been so good to him for so long.

He reached up and put his hand over hers. “I will.”

He worked in his home office, catching up on events.

After an hour, Anne announced that she was having dinner with Claire Becker. Warren’s widow was still having a hard time accepting his sudden death, and her new situation as a single mother of two teenage girls. Holtzmann felt guilty that he hadn’t reached out to her since the funeral. He and Becker had been colleagues for almost a decade, friends for most of that time. Surely he owed Clair more than a hug and condolences six months ago?

But Claire was so suspicious, always spouting conspiracy theories about Warren’s death. Anne did a better job comforting her than Holtzmann could.

His inbox had scores of messages, two of them of note.

Item one: Rangan Shankari had broken, around 3am. He described an ingenious system of backdoors in the Nexus binaries and hacks in the compiler to place them there. And he’d given them the passwords.

Holtzmann frowned, wondering what they’d done to finally break Shankari. The electrical shocks? The waterboarding? The Nexus-dosed interrogators?

And now that DHS had the back doors, what would they use them for? Spying on the thoughts of Nexus users? Preventative mind control? Political surveillance? Manipulation of those thoughts?

“Why?” he asked aloud. “Why did you leave those back doors in there? Didn’t you see the danger? How could you be so stupid?”

Item two: The forensic report from the Chicago bombing. The blast site tested positive for Nexus. Samples were en route to Holtzmann’s lab now.

Holtzmann would have no choice but to process those samples. He’d hand them off to Wilson, with instructions to come to him and him only with the results.

Holtzmann sat back, then started a new file, titled Personnel Assessment, and started listing everyone who could have taken Nexus out of the secure fridge in his lab.

Holtzmann crawled into bed hours later. The pain was back, an aching deep in his bones. His muscles were cramping. His mouth was dry. His heart was beating fast. He had all the blankets pulled over him, was sweating, but he still felt so cold all over.

All he wanted was another little opiate surge. Just for the pain. The doctors had cut him off too soon. He just needed a little bit more, for a little bit longer, until he was fully healed.

I nearly died last night , some part of himself said.

Just a little one, just once more , the other part of him answered.

He had the interface up when he heard the garage door open. He lay paralyzed in bed as he listened to Anne ascend the stairs to the bedroom.

“Sorry I was out so late,” she told him as she disrobed. “Claire’s in a really bad space. She’s not moving on.”

Holtzmann made a sympathetic sound.

Anne slid into bed beside him. “She’s convinced it was a cover-up, that Warren was killed to keep him from testifying.”

Holtzmann stared longingly at the interface in his mind. If he did just a small dose, would Anne notice?

She curled up against him and stopped talking for a while. Holtzmann forced himself to breath slowly and regularly, to not touch the interface in his mind’s eye.

If I sound like I’ve fallen asleep…

“Martin?” Claire asked.

Holtzmann said nothing, and finally Claire stopped. A few minutes later she rolled over, towards her side of the bed.

He waited until her breathing turned regular, and he was sure she was asleep.

Then Martin Holtzmann dialed up a small dose, and finally he felt OK again.

He rose early, brought Anne coffee in bed with a smile, put on his game face as he readied for work.

“You seem better today,” she noticed.

“I feel better.”

“You were dead to the world when last night. Do you remember me coming to bed? Our conversation?”

He cocked his head quizzically. “Yeah… Something about Claire, right?”

Anne smiled tolerantly at him, and then they were off to their respective offices.

The day was a succession of nearly useless meetings. He sat in on a planning session related to the Nexus back doors, vetoed a proposal to use “aversive stimuli” to motivate Nexus children to purge the drug, got briefed on the Nexus vaccine development, which was looking promising, and on the proposed Nexus cure, which wasn’t looking promising at all.

Through the day, his list of potential Nexus thieves was never far from his mind.

Means, motive, and opportunity, he thought.

Twenty-two people had access to the fridge in the wet lab, giving them the means.

Any of them could have worked a late night, providing opportunity. Access logs could show who had been in the lab when. But he didn’t have access to those logs or videos. Only Internal Affairs did, and he certainly didn’t want them digging.