Ramez Naam - Crux

“I’m sorry, Kade,” he said. “Sorry your friend is dead. I’m glad you’re worried about what you did. But sometimes no good option.”

Kade shook his head. “I can’t let that happen again, Feng. A million people running Nexus. I have all this power. I can’t lose my head, can’t lose control.”

Feng spoke softly. “Maybe too much power. Too much control. Trust people, that’s what Ananda told you, yeah? Maybe you should let go, close the back door.”

Ananda. Kade remembered. Are you wiser than all humanity? Ananda had asked him.

No.

He closed his eyes, and in his mind’s eye the icon for the script was there, the bot that would close the back door. It hovered in the upper left of his virtual workspace. All he had to do was invoke it, and he’d close off that hole he’d left for himself, forever.

Then another memory flashed through his mind, a blinking light, wires, then chaos, and death.

War is coming , Shu had said.

Kade opened his eyes, looked into Feng’s. “But if I do that, Feng, who’s going to stop the PLF? Who’s going to stop them from starting a war?”

Feng broke the eye contact, looked down at his hands.

Kade spoke again. “Sometimes, there’s no good option.”

Kade wanted to stay in, lick his wounds, see if he could turn up any additional leads on the PLF. But Feng insisted that Kade get out, do something to reset his thoughts.

So they went down to club Heaven hours later. It was Hell Night when they arrived. The Saturday before Halloween. A night of demons.

The door girl looked them over skeptically in their lack of costumes, but she took their money, stamped their wrists, and let them in. The bouncer glowered like the night before.

It was early still, just barely evening, and the club was sparsely populated. The music was downtempo, quiet enough to talk over. The dance floor was empty, the stage where the DJ and NJ and go-go dancers would be later tonight held a few racks of equipment and nothing else.

They took a seat at the bar. Kade wasn’t hungry, wasn’t thirsty. Even after the meditation and the hours coding, the shock of the day still coursed through him. Feng ordered drinks for them both, made Kade down one as he watched, then ordered food as well.

Kade felt the drink mellow him. Felt the food restore him. He had to stay strong right now. He had to stop the PLF from killing again. He had to avert that war between human and posthuman. He had to stay steady to do that. Later, there’d be a time to collapse, to process Ilya’s death and his near murder of Holtzmann and everything else. For now, he had a job to do.

So he focused on eating, on watching his breath, on remembering the good things he’d seen happening around the world with Nexus. Tried to maintain his mental balance.

The club filled in slowly. Minds brushed Kade’s. Some he’d felt the night before. Some were new.

Before long the club was crowded, people all dressed up, drinking, talking, laughing, waiting for the DJ to go on. The shirtless Vietnamese boy was here again, and through him Kade could feel the same banker’s mind in London, riding this boy, spending his afternoon in London on the town in Saigon instead. He caught sight of the brunette from the restaurant too, through a gap in the crowd. She was peering at him from across the room. Then bodies shifted and she was obscured from his view.

Kade sat back, sipped at his drink, watched the crowd, and let his agent loose upon them, and the world.

Sabrina Jensen stepped out of the club and into Saigon’s muggy night air. She’d seen him three times now. And this time she was almost sure. He looked different than the pictures. The hair was different. The tattoos. He looked older, more tired. But the face was the same. And he was always with that Chinese man.

This was the one they were looking for, the one whose picture she’d seen posted with the reward. One thousand dollars would extend her trip another month, at least.

She’d thought to approach him, tell him someone was looking for him, just in case it was some sort of scam or he was in some sort of trouble. But he was so aloof. Not friendly at all.

Sabrina linked the Nexus OS in her head to her phone, downloaded the image she’d snapped with Nexus. Then she broke the link and dialed the number from the post.

Sabrina smiled as it rang. She was about to make a cool grand. “Bali, here I come.”

“I want that soldier disciplined ,” Shiva told Ashok over their link. “Then I want him out of my employ.”

Shiva breathed to control his frustration. A grantee killed by one of his own men! A second security man lost, dead according to his biometrics. Children traumatized. The American agent still on the loose.

There would be hush money to pay. Cleanup to remove any linkage of the events to Shiva and the Mira Foundation. They had to boost security now around the island, find some way to locate that woman. But the worst of it was that those children had seen someone they trusted shot and killed! They’d been forcibly separated from everyone they knew. That trauma would last years, would impede his efforts to build trust…

“We may have a sighting of Lane.”

Shiva whirled. It was Hayes, the commander of the squad Shiva had brought with him to Vietnam. “What?”

“We just intercepted a message internal to a group of bounty hunters,” Hayes went on. “They believe Lane is in a tourist club in Saigon right now. They’re moving in to get him.”

“Then we have to get there first,” Shiva said.

40

HELL

Saturday October 27th

Kade sat at the bar with Feng and watched the club heat up.

The crowd grew thicker, the music louder. Then the DJ was there, on stage. The same one as last night. Asian, muscular, with short black hair and mirrored shades and a dark T-shirt and jeans that showed off his physique. The go-go dancers climbed up to the stage as well, all in glossy red tonight – boots, hot pants, pasties, streaks through their hair. Red devil horns and shiny red devil wings topped it off.

The smoke machine kicked in, covering the floor of the club with a foot-thick layer of smoke. Lights turned the smoke red, made the tendrils of it that crept up people’s legs into an illusion of flames.

The music faded out, the crowd stilled, and then the DJ started in. He kicked off the set with a slow build, a flux piece that started at the downtempo end of the spectrum and then grew deeper, faster, harder, until, just minutes in, it was epic, and the crowd was dancing.

Kade felt a small smile grow across his face. Rangan would love this .

Then he realized what he’d thought. Ilya would have loved this too . And the smile faded. It was 10pm here. Mid-morning on a Saturday on the East Coast. He’d check on Holtzmann when they left the club, make sure the man was on track.

Then red smoke rose in a thick cloud from the stage, and he caught his breath in anticipation, and then she was in the club, the NJ, the Nexus jockey. He felt her mind even as the smoke obscured her. And she was as glorious as she’d been the night before, sending out waves of exultation and dance and near hallucinatory visions of how the club looked to her, from up on stage, singing, raising her arms above the demonic figures crowding the club. Tonight, Heaven looked like a piece of Hell. She loved it.

Her thoughts moved him, captivated him, pulled him out of his funk and into something else, something reverent, something full of awe, something he used to feel.

The smoke on stage cleared and he could see her again. Lotus she called herself. She was in red tonight, a long dress of red sequins, low in the back, tight through the waist and hips, then loose again from mid-thigh to her feet. She wore iridescent red gloves that went beyond her elbows. The hair that had been platinum the night before was the color of flame, now, with bright strands that pulsed to the music woven through it. She was a mermaid, made of fire.