Ramez Naam - Crux

Motive, then. What was the motive for the inside man? Hatred of the President? Money? Blackmail?

He played it out in his head at the end of the day, as he walked to his car in the dark but now heavily secured parking garage. Which of those twenty-two were ideologues? Who needed money? Who’d bought a flashy car recently, moved into a bigger house?

Holtzmann frowned as he opened his car and placed his cane and bag in the passenger seat. He kept pondering his list of suspects as the car cleared the security perimeter and turned onto the freeway on autodrive. And so he didn’t see the ripple of distortion in his rear-view mirror. Didn’t hear a rustle of cloth as the man who’d been hidden in the back of the car came up to a seated position, a barely visible blur against the faux-leather seats and the retreating highway lights behind them.

“Martin.”

Holtzmann jumped in shock. The voice was distorted, mechanical. His heart slammed into his throat. He scrambled for the handle to the door, then heard the chunk as the car locked itself.

Stupid man. If they’d come for him, he was dead already. Nothing he could do.

“Relax, Martin,” said the deep, anonymized voice again.

Holtzmann looked into the mirror to see the face of his killer. The figure in the back seat was just a shadow, a barely perceptible distortion. A man in a high-tech chameleonware suit, then. A professional.

Holtzmann swallowed hard, wishing he’d told Anne the truth, that he’d trusted her.

Then the figure behind him raised a hand, and Holtzmann closed his eyes to wait for the killing blow.

16

ONLY FORWARD

Friday October 19th

Feng pulled Kade along behind him to the jeep, then climbed into the driver’s seat. Monks followed them with canisters of fuel and liters of water. Even in the midst of shock and sorrow, they did what needed doing. Like soldiers.

Feng leaned out of the jeep to place a hand on the shoulder of a monk.

“Thank you.” He put his respect into it, beamed it out of his mind to theirs, one soldier to another. They bowed. Then Feng put the pedal down, and he and Kade were off.

The first priority was to be gone. Feng pushed the jeep hard and fast down the dirt road. Brilliant green trees and brush raced past them, contrasting with the red earth of the bare ground they drove on. This was the bottleneck, the one road up or down from Ayun Pa.

The tires skidded just a bit as he found the maximum lateral acceleration they’d take. Every sound of every pebble, every twig, every bit of give and play of the tires on the road loomed loud in his mind. He absorbed the sounds, the feel of the wheel, the response of the jeep to his acceleration. The vehicle became an extension of his body. He felt Kade grab hold with his one good hand as a sharp turn pulled him out to the side. Feng spun the wheel back the other way as the road hairpinned, sending red dirt and loose scree flying. The smile came to his face of its own accord. He was alive, and free, and totally absorbed in their mad dash down this hillside road.

Fifteen minutes later, they were off a different side road, the jeep hidden in a copse of date palms. They’d heard no sirens, but Feng intended to take no chances.

“We wait here till dark,” he told Kade.

Kade nodded. “It’s the back door,” he said.

“What’s that?” Feng asked.

“I’ve been sitting here thinking about the bounty, Feng. Why do they want me so badly? A ten million dollar bounty? And alive ? They’ve already convicted me in absentia. They could just kill me.”

Feng turned and looked at his friend. “So what’re you saying?”

Kade looked back. “They want the back door.”

Feng thought this over. “It’s a dangerous thing.”

Kade nodded. “It’s funny, we put it in there as a safeguard against the ERD, so that if they misused Nexus we could stop them…”

“And now they trying to get it from you,” Feng said.

“I could close it,” Kade replied. “I have the code. Another bot. A virus. It’d spread from person to person, close the back doors anywhere it found them.”

“So why don’t you?” Feng asked.

“Because there are people I have to stop, Feng.”

He felt thoughts flit through Kade’s mind. Images. A glimpse of wires and a flashing red light in that building in Chicago, before white noise and then – nothing.

Feng mulled that over. “Maybe somebody else deal with those things?” he told Kade. “Not just you?”

Kade shook his head. “I made those abuses possible. I have to stop them if I can.”

They sat in the car and waited for night. The palm trees shaded them from the worst of the sun, but it was still brutally hot.

The news brought word of a fire in a remote mountain monastery. Chu Mom Ray. No fatalities were reported.

“You saved my life back there,” Kade said.

Feng turned and grinned at him. “Not the first time.”

Kade laughed. “No. Not the first.” He shook his head. “At this rate, not the last either.”

Feng shrugged. “It’s what Su-Yong would want. Save the boy , she said.”

Kade nodded.

“And you’re my friend, Kade,” Feng said, grinning again. “First one I ever chose for myself!”

Kade smiled at that, turned his head, and took Feng’s hand.

“Thank you.”

“Hey, don’t get all mushy now!” Feng joked. “I just don’t have so many friends I can lose them, is all.” But it was long moments before he let go.

“Why’d that monk sell you out?” Feng eventually asked Kade.

Kade shook his head again. “I’ve upset the order of things. It used to be that only the most experienced meditators could master Nexus and keep it in their minds indefinitely. But now anyone can permanently integrate it. And the young monks pick up Nexus 5 faster than the old ones. They don’t need the old ones as teachers. I’ve undermined their authority, inverted the hierarchy.”

“Fuck hierarchy,” Feng said.

Kade laughed aloud. It felt good to hear it. Feng smiled in return.

“Aren’t you a soldier, Feng? You grew up with hierarchy.”

Feng was the one to look away this time, his thoughts far away.

“Yeah. Never liked it.”

“Tell me,” Kade said. “What it was like.”

Feng watched a palm frond sway in the wind. Kade had asked before. Feng knew his friend meant well, but it wasn’t something he wanted to go back to.

“Please,” Kade said.

Feng sighed. It had been a rough few days. Kade needed something. Needed some perspective. Needed some hope . He leaned back.

“My first memory was pain.” Feng spoke quietly, but he opened his mind, let Kade feel it, let him remember it with him.

“I was four, maybe. Big. Strong. They engineer us to grow up fast. But not so much mind, yeah? Get big and strong fast, but smart just as slow.

“I was doing rings, yeah? Swinging one to the next, like a monkey.”

“Then I fell. No mat. No net. Just ground. It hurt. Bloody knee. Nothing bad, but I was four. Just knew it hurt.” He shook his head, and Kade felt it coming, the real pain.

“Instructor comes over, and he says, ‘Get up!’ And I say ‘It hurts!’ So he kicks me across the field. And now I’m screaming. And all my brothers. They all stop. Staring at me.”

Feng’s fists were clenched. He was that little boy again. Kade felt his stomach knotting up. Felt the pain and fear and incomprehension.

“Instructor walks over, and he says, ‘Get up!’ And I’m crying, cuz it hurts. Hurts real bad now. And I say ‘Can’t! It hurts!’ and he says ‘I’ll show you what hurts!’ and he kicks me again.”

Kade felt sick to his stomach. His face was hot.

“Instructor walks over one more time. He says ‘Get up! Get up, dog!’ And this time I try, but something’s broken inside. I fall down. But I know, I stay there, he’ll hurt me worse… So I crawl. It takes me long time. Hurts so bad. Feels like an hour. But I make it over to rings again.”