Ramez Naam - Crux

I won’t let anyone use Nexus that way , Kade thought. Not the ERD, not the PLF, not anyone.

You’re using Nexus that way, Ilya’s voice whispered to him. You’re the one enslaving people now. You’ve made yourself into judge and jury.

Kade ignored the voice inside his head. He had no choice.

He went back to the beginning. He pulled up logs taken from the mind of Secret Service agent Steve Travers, in the seconds before he’d died. They still mystified him. His agent had infiltrated Travers’ mind four days before the assassination attempt. It had spotted the coercion code immediately. But the agent hadn’t been able to alert Kade, because it hadn’t had network access until just before the assassination attempt.

That made no sense. If Travers had been running Nexus for weeks to connect with his autistic son, the agent should have jumped to the son’s mind, at least. And autistic kids running Nexus seemed had an endless appetite for network apps and experiences they could plug into.

What were the odds that for all that time, Kade’s software agent wouldn’t get word back to him, and that suddenly, just seconds before the assassination attempt, while on-duty, Travers would link his mind to the net, letting the agent contact Kade? It was totally improbable.

Kade checked more of the logs. The Nexus OS running had been Nexus 5 version 0.72. 0.72 was old, hardly more than a few bug fixes over the 0.7 version Kade had released. He himself was running Nexus 5 version 1.32 now, with quite a lot of special mods atop that. He pulled up a release calendar. The assassination attempt had been in late July. If Travers had installed Nexus in, say, late June, he should have been downloading 0.9, at least. Why such an old version?

He flipped to the Chicago bombing. Brendan Taylor had been an apparently mild-mannered accountant. Two daughters, both neurotypical. A financial planner wife who had tested clean for Nexus and sworn that Brendan wasn’t the type to have tried it. Kade checked the logs from that alert. The Nexus OS version was the same – 0.72. A Nexus OS version from early May, used in a bombing in October. And again, Kade’s agents had infiltrated the man’s mind a week before the attempt, had detected the coercion code immediately, but hadn’t been able to access the net to send a message back to Kade until just moments before the bombing.

What did that mean?

He tried to think like a PLF terrorist. His job was to program assassins. He’d want reliability, of course. That was why they were using an old version. They’d built code they knew worked. They didn’t want to mess that up by upgrading to a new version and potentially introducing new bugs.

And why wasn’t he finding these assassins until just before the events? The only thing that made sense was that they weren’t actually online until then. They’d be in some dormant state, just a tiny loader program running, perhaps. Not the full Nexus OS. Everything locked down. Waiting for a signal to activate. Then, when activated, they went online to receive instructions. Once online, Kade’s agents got word back to him.

He pushed himself back from the problem, rubbed his eyes, and took a deep breath. When he opened them, he saw Feng at the window, staring out into the night. It was nearly midnight. The sounds of raised voices and beat-heavy music came up from the street. He could feel scores of minds down below, dancing, partying in the club below them. He wished he could join them, lose himself for just a little while.

He dragged himself back to the problem at hand. If the people who were turned into assassins weren’t online with the version of Nexus that contained the coercion code until moments before the attacks, then he stood little chance of stopping them that way. That’s why he’d failed to stop Chicago. That’s why he’d fail again, if he stuck with the same strategy.

He had to go one step further. He couldn’t focus on just finding someone running the coercion code. No. He had to build an agent that would find the people writing that coercion code, the ones installing it in the minds of the human bombers, and stop them.

But were the code’s authors running Nexus themselves? And even if they were, could he find them and stop them before they struck again?

24

ANGRY DADDY

Sunday October 21st

The policemen came to Ling’s door an hour after the lights went out. She could feel them as they climbed up the forty stories from the ground floor to hers. In the near data-vacuum of the crippled city, their electromagnetic presence shone like a beacon. She peered out of their lapel cameras as they climbed the red-lit emergency stairwell. She followed their data links back over the airwaves to the precinct house, and from there to Shanghai police headquarters.

The city was a mess. She could see it in their information systems. Fires. Floods. Car accidents. Looting. Deaths. Police stations and emergency services were limping along on emergency power.

Ling tapped into their data, watched humans drowning in subway tunnels, watched a recording of security forces around a store, firing their automatic weapons into a desperate mob, watched as the sopping wet mass of humans clawed their way forward in a human wave, the front of it dying, until they crested over the soldiers, crashed down on them, and the recording ceased.

Shanghai was in pain. Good. These humans had trapped her mommy. They deserved worse.

Already the city was trying to knit itself back together. She saw reports on replacing key transformers, on redirecting the rain water that was flooding the streets, on getting a handful of spy-eyes back into the air. Ten thousand little human ants were out working to repair the damage she’d done. The city was a hive, a colony-organism.

What would happen if she hit it again, harder? Could she kill this city? Could she send the little humans scurrying away in fear? It was so tempting to try, to rip a wing off of this insect pinned down and splayed out in front of her, and see what happened.

But she didn’t. Patience , her mother had told her, is a posthuman virtue . And the humans were looking for her. They had their hackers out, their counter-intrusion packages, their tame security AIs with their boring rigid minds, hunting for the source of the attack. Striking the city once was one thing. Striking a second time, while they were looking… that would be foolish, impatient, something an angry little girl would do.

And Ling couldn’t afford to be a little girl any more.

She waited for the policemen. And when they came, sweating and panting from the stairs, she was polite and sweet and told them she’d offer them tea but that the stove wasn’t working.

They laughed and told her she was the nicest little girl ever and that they were here to protect her.

She smiled and thanked the soft pathetic creatures. Daddy’s driver Bai was worth a hundred of them. Feng was worth three hundred. Stupid humans.

Who will protect you, she wondered, when my mother returns?

Later, as she lay in her bed with the sheets pulled up to her chin, she wondered what had happened to her father? Had she trapped him there with her mommy? Was there any food? Any water? Enough air?

Ling frowned. Her father was nothing like her mommy. He was just a human. Even so, she hoped she hadn’t killed him. She loved her father, after all. As much as one could love a human.

She woke in the middle of the night. 3.30am. A modicum of power had been restored this wealthy, exclusive block. A small trickle of data flowed through Ling once more. There was an intruder in her home network. She peered at it. A hunter-tracker program. It sniffed around, looking for any trace of the attacker who’d struck Shanghai. She made her net presence small, cloaked herself from the vicious software agent, and it passed her by.