Ramez Naam - Crux

Signs offered hair braiding, custom tailoring, American food, Chinese food, all-night dance parties, body piercing, smart drinks, tours to the Mekong Delta, live sex shows.

And then there was the Nexus. Half the store fronts used cheap transmitters tuned to a Nexus band, broadcasting advertisements at them. Smells and tastes came at them. The feel of fingers kneading their shoulders. Tantalizing images of the entwined bodies they might see inside. Whiffs that hinted at pot for sale, at other drugs more exotic. The sensual feel of skin against skin, with more available for a price.

Feng spun around with his eyes and mind wide, taking it all in. Kade laughed, kept some distance from it, yet couldn’t help but take an interest.

There was Nexus in the minds around them as well. Kade kept his thoughts reeled in tight, and so did Feng. Others around them were less cautious. A pair of South African girls, tall and blonde, just coming down from their room for a late breakfast, giggling together, their thoughts on food and sun and last night’s debauchery. Three Indian boys, sipping tea in an open-front café, talking out loud, thinking of weed and girls.

This was a place where Nexus was used openly. A place where Westerners and Asians alike came and went, where Kade and Feng would not stick out. A place where they could disappear.

They passed advertisements for Nexus applications that could resculpt your personality – give you confidence or adventurousness or dedication or good humor or whatever it was you felt you lacked. Be who you want to be, they said.

Halfway down the street, Kade felt another advertisement, more sophisticated than the rest. He let it touch him, let himself absorb the sensorium it was pushing at him.

Welcome to HEAVEN , a seductive female voice spoke into his ear. And then he was inside the club, touring it, the laser lights and smoke machines and pearly gates décor and sexy dancers dressed like angels inundating his senses. And despite himself, he smiled. Rangan would have loved this.

“We’re here, Feng,” Kade said aloud. “This is the place.”

They took a room in the hostel above Heaven, then headed out to make what changes they could to their appearances. In a street-front stall, Kade had jet black extensions protein bonded to his scalp. The vat-grown locks fell down to his back in thick ropy braids. Feng dyed his own short black hair blonde. They bought melanin pills to turn Kade’s fair skin darker. They purchased marginally legal gene-hack tattoos to transform themselves further – silvery circuit-like patterns that covered Kade’s hands and arms, that shifted slowly as one watched; a pair of gold and black dragons that spiraled down from Feng’s shoulders to his forearms, and spat red flames onto the backs of his hands when he clenched his fists, an ironic barcode tattoo Feng loved for the back of his neck.

“Barcode!” Feng laughed. “Like a robot!”

Kade shook his head, then winced as the tattoo tech injected the tattoo into the back of his not-quite-human, not-quite-functional right hand. He watched in fascination as the living ink pattern drew itself up his arm. The silver circuits spread up from the injection point, past his wrist, up his forearm. He turned his hand over and watched as his skin transformed. When it was done, the pattern looked the same on his right arm as on his left. If there was any interaction with the gecko genes, it wasn’t evident. In thirty days he’d need to pay again, or the tattoo would fade and his normal skin would return.

They bought wooden rings and peace symbol necklaces and tourist T-shirts.

And at the end of it, they looked like any other backpacker tourists walking down Bùi Viện.

They caught dinner in an open-front restaurant with a sign that offered Real Fake American Food. Feng ordered sushi pizza while Kade had the 100% Real Cultured Beef Burger. After eating mostly vegetarian Cambodian food for months, the vat-grown meat was mouth wateringly good.

They watched the crowd go by on the darkening street, young people in their twenties, mostly. All off on grand adventures. They all seemed like kids to Kade now, though his own twenty-eighth birthday was still a few months in the future.

He turned back to look into the restaurant, and his eyes met someone else’s. A pretty brunette. She looked away quickly, laughing and chatting with her friends, and then her eyes came furtively back to his before flitting away once more. For a moment all he wanted was to smile, to flirt, to buy her a drink, to have a chance at a normal life and a new friend or something more.

But being Kade’s friend had been a losing proposition this past year. A deadly proposition. He turned away, and didn’t look at her again.

I’m not here to make friends, Kade reminded himself. I’m here to hide. To stay alive. And to work.

Work he did.

Nexus 6 called to him. That was his real project – his way to get ahead of things, to block off most paths of abuse, to make Nexus safe again at the most basic levels of the OS. In the long term there was no way he could keep fighting individual abuses himself. There simply wasn’t enough of him to keep up. He had to build something like Nexus 6 in order to solve this problem at scale.

But Nexus 6 was too far out. Kade had months more work to do before he could even start properly testing it. He couldn’t wait until then to deal with the PLF. He had to tackle them now, before they struck a third time and ignited the war Su-Yong Shu had seen coming.

Idiots, Kade thought. What are they going to accomplish? Every killing is just going to make things worse, just going to scare the public more, increase support for the Chandler Act, increase demonization of transhuman technologies.

He could see it coming. The PLF would make their own worst fears true. Bombings and assassinations would lead to crackdowns, police and ERD retribution, witch-hunts against scientists and activists, laws even worse than the Chandler Act, more loss of civil liberties in the name of “security”, another step towards a police state in the USA. And that would incense the PLF, draw numbers to their ranks, drive them to ever worse atrocities, until the whole thing blew up into a full-scale conflagration.

Wasn’t it always this way? When had terrorists ever accomplished anything but to enrage people, drive them towards greater security, greater sacrifice of freedom? They only gave their oppressors more excuses for oppression. And the oppressors just drove the oppressed further towards violent rebellion. Extremists on both sides gave power to the very forces they fought against.

He had to stop them. He hated the ERD and the Chandler Act, but the PLF’s approach was only going to make things worse.

So he went back to the DC and Chicago attacks, looked at them again, took them apart piece by piece.

His agents had spotted the coercion code used in the attack on the President four days before the attack itself. They’d never seen the source code. Instead, they’d detected it based on a pattern of activity. Disruption of the frontal cortex to lobotomize the subject, a motor control package that turned the subject into a remote-controlled robot. It was sophisticated software, far more complex than other abuses he’d seen. Whoever had written this had invested a lot of time to write the code, even more time to test it, iterate on it until it was reliable.

Narong was up on his feet, just a meter from Ted Prat-Nung, the ceramic pistol with its graphene-tipped rounds pointed at the older man’s head. “Everyone freeze. Thanom Prat-Nung, you’re under arrest.”

The memory came unbidden. The ERD had turned his new friend Narong Shinawatra into a robotic assassin as well. They’d used Kade’s technology in exactly the way the Chinese had used Su-Yong Shu’s, just as she’d warned him they would. The code he was hunting now was just as complex.