Ramez Naam - Crux

He wiped his mouth with a piece of toilet paper, flushed the vomit away. He knew what he needed.

Martin Holtzmann pulled up the interface in his mind, dialed up another opiate surge, and let it take him away.

He cleaned up, later, and let the car drive him home as he thought about the next day.

He knew the content. He knew the facts backwards and forwards. But the President terrified him. The risk of being caught…

What he needed was confidence.

That night, as Anne lay asleep next to him, he wrote a simple script to elevate his serotonin and dopamine levels during the meeting. No sudden surge. Just a long, steady flow that would keep him calm, alert, and confident.

When he was satisfied he gave himself a large luxurious opiate surge as a reward. His cares went away. All was peace and bliss.

22

MEMORIES

Saturday October 20th

Shiva’s security team brought him the bounty hunter, prepared as ordered. The man’s larynx had been crushed by Lane’s traveling companion, but not so far as to cut off all air instantly. The Vietnamese police had managed to stabilize and intubate him before swelling finished the job the Chinese soldier had started. It had taken a non-trivial bribe to get him here, now.

His soldiers had the man on his knees, between them, his hands and feet bound in high-test carbon restraints behind his back. He was a macho sort, his muscles bulging from black market enhancements, his head mostly shaven and covered in jagged, angry-looking tattoos. Shiva imagined his dark eyes had once been fierce; now they looked up at him wide with fear. His team had injected the man an hour ago with the modified Nexus version Shiva used for interrogation. The version that responded to his commands alone. The man would just be coming out of the calibration phase hallucinations now. He must have some idea of what was to come.

Shiva reached out and wrapped his will around the bounty hunter’s mind. “Tell me what you know of Kaden Lane,” he commanded the man. “And how you found him.”

He extracted what knowledge the bounty hunter had, of the bounty hunter networks and their strategies and communication protocols, and how they’d tracked Lane down.

When he’d taken all there was to take, Shiva contemplated the man’s fate. The wretch had murdered, lied, stolen. All of those had their time and place. All of them could be justified under the right circumstances, when fighting for the right noble cause. But this man had done them all for mere money.

This bounty hunter offered no value to the world. For his whole life he’d only taken. It was sad, really. But if Shiva freed him now, the man would return to selling the only skill he had – violence – and do so without scruple. No, as harsh as it was, it would be better for the world if this one were no longer among the living.

Shiva closed his eyes to consider a moment longer. Nita would be horrified at this, of course. She’d never understood the law of the jungle, the law of the street. Action ruled. Predators and prey. And the only way to deal with an anti-social predator like this was to put it down. He’d learned that often enough in his youth, and later, in his years in business.

My conscience is clear, Shiva observed. He nodded to himself.

Shiva reached out with his mind once more, gripped it around the bounty hunter’s brainstem, looked him in the eyes, and then squeezed until the man’s heart stopped beating. The wide eyes grew wider. The man made a strangled cry, hardly audible through the remains of his larynx. The soldiers let go of his arms, and he toppled from his knees to the floor, falling onto his side, his bound legs and arms thrashing futilely, staring up at Shiva with those once fierce eyes, trying, desperately, somehow, to find a way out of this. Then the gaze became fixed, the thrashing slowed and halted, and the bounty hunter was no more.

As his security staff dragged the body away, Ashok came to him.

“We may have a situation,” Shiva’s vice president of operations told him. “The orphanage in southern Thailand. Our inside source reports a possible complication. A woman. A soldier, perhaps. Or an agent of some sort. Clearly enhanced. She arrived recently, just three months ago. American .” Ashok emphasized the last word, then handed Shiva the file on a slate.

Shiva scanned it. A North American woman, traveling on a false identity, who’d intentionally sought out Nexus children, and demonstrated her enhancements by assaulting men from the village nearby. Who was she? An infiltrator? A threat? CIA, perhaps?

For a moment he was back in Bihar, weeping in the ashes of orphanage there, weeping for the dozens of his children who’d died, and then later, after the corruption and the cronyism had seen the murderers acquitted, watching his soldiers nail the criminals and the corrupt judge and lawyers to their crosses, watching them burn, listening to the muffled screams of a punishment that could never equal the severity of their crimes.

Nita had been so angry when she’d found out what he’d done. “They were acquitted , Shiva!” she’d told him. “You can’t just take the law into your own hands!”

Her reaction still stung. But what choice did he have? To let ignorant savages kill his people with impunity? To let them murder children under his protection, and then face no consequences? He felt the old anger rising. Those monsters deserved worse, far worse than the fate he’d given them. Why couldn’t Nita understand the steps he had to take to forge a better world?

Shiva felt the slate starting to buckle as his hands clenched of their own accord around it. He took a breath to push the memory away, relaxed his superhuman grip, and handed the device back to Ashok. These special children were his wards. Their safety was his paramount concern. The Americans viewed them as monsters, as inhuman. He knew all about their attempts at finding a vaccine against Nexus, at finding a “cure” to force it out of the brain involuntarily. He knew their plans for “residence centers” to imprison this new subspecies they feared. If the Americans were trying to find where he was taking the children…

“Take her,” he told his VP of Ops. “Do it quietly. Find out what she knows, and who sent her.”

Ashok nodded, and turned to go.

Shiva spoke one more time. “Ashok, one more thing. I’m going to Vietnam. And I’m taking one of your squads with me. It’s time I found this Kaden Lane.”

23

CAT AND MOUSE

Sunday October 21st

Saigon – Vietnam’s beating heart of commerce and culture and vice. Still officially known as Hồ Chí Minh City, it was universally referred to by its older, pre-unification name. It was a place Kade and Feng hoped they could blend in, lose themselves among the tourists and expats from all over the world, rather than risking the lives of more monks.

They had some money. A grateful father in Cambodia had sought them out at a monastery, pressed a thick bundle of bills into Kade’s hand, thanked him for the work that had pulled his daughter out of a coma. Kade had tried to refuse, but the father would hear none of it. Kade tried later to give it to the monastery, but Feng had insisted he keep the gift, just in case.

Feng drove them through the night now, south and east again, risking the main highways this time, opting for speed.

They reached Saigon mid-morning. Feng parked the jeep in a storage lot in the outskirts. They strapped their packs on their backs, and took a bus towards Bến Thành Market and the tourist hub of the city – just another pair of backpackers exploring what Vietnam had to offer.

From Bến Thành they walked to the backpacker district around Bùi Viện Street and lost themselves in the morning crowd. Even at this hour there were people about. The faces around them were mostly Anglo, but some Asian, some Indian. Whatever the face, the language on the street was English, with American accents, Indian accents, Chinese accents, German accents, Australian accents.