Ramez Naam - Crux

She held her arms out above the crowd in benediction and parted her ruby lips to sing to them, mouth wide open, head canted back, a soaring aria that intertwined with the techno beats. Then she pumped out her mental song and it was so so good. Darker and hotter even, than the night before. It seemed a betrayal of everyone who’d died because of him to dance. But it also seemed a betrayal of Ilya and Rangan not to dance.

Feng felt his thoughts, patted him on the back, and pointed him at the dance floor. “Go,” his friend said. “You need it. I wait here.”

So Kade went. He went out onto the floor of a club that reminded him so very much of the parties that he and Rangan and Ilya used to throw. And he danced. He moved slowly, at first. He kept his eyes on the floor, or closed. He felt those around him, let them feel him, but made no motion to interact. He danced for Ilya. He danced for Rangan. He danced for himself, to clear his head, to fill his spirit back up, and to give him the strength to make it through all the perils that were sure to be ahead.

Shiva sat in the back of the armored command center as they rushed into Saigon. Hayes was next to him, studying an array of screens. A map of the area showed on one. Structural diagrams of the building that had been hastily downloaded on another. On a third, status of his team members, both human and drone. And on the fourth, running progress on the attempt by their hacker to penetrate the club’s systems.

They were tapped into this group of bounty hunters. That was the one useful thing they’d gotten from the man Shiva had interrogated – the frequencies and codes and identities of the others in his group. They were lucky that it had been that specific group that had found Kade. Had it been another, they wouldn’t have known of it.

Audio transmissions came across the channel they’d broken into.

“South-east corner, fifty cal and tranq, ready.”

“North-west corner, fifty cal and tranq, ETA three minutes.”

“Backup 1 ready.”

“Backup 2 ready.”

“Door 1 ready.”

“Door 2 ready.”

“Bait ready.”

Hayes plotted it on the map. The bounty hunters were well organized. They’d learned from their last attempt to capture Lane. They were placing teams of snipers on the rooftops nearby, armed with heavy caliber weapons to take out Lane’s traveling companion, and tranquilizer weapons to incapacitate Lane. They were waiting for the two to emerge.

And Shiva had no way to warn the boy.

Kade danced hard now, his limbs moving to the beat, his eyes closed, his thoughts lost in his own head, until the sweat dripping from his body and the beat and the amplified ecstatic rhythms of Lotus’s mind and the hundred other minds that brushed his drove everything else away.

He heard Lotus’s song, he felt her thoughts, and felt them changing, reflecting the crowd, adapting to them. The music changed as well, flowed, responded. And he realized, they were making music, the crowd, the dancers, and Lotus was channeling it, absorbing the thoughts and emotions of the heaving throng, playing their mental music back to them.

The feedback loop closed and he wasn’t just Kade any more, wasn’t just a person. He was part of something more, a living breathing heaving organism, thousand-limbed, hundred-headed, a gestalt of all these minds and bodies.

Grief leached out from him, absorbed and processed and healed by the union. He moved his arms and legs and body to the beat, thrashed his head and sent his new braids flinging, somehow perfectly in sync with the bodies next to him. He was the beat. They were the beat. How could any of them step wrong?

This is samadhi , he realized. Meditation. Complete absorption.

The walls of his ego faded, dissipated, subsumed in this merger. He caught glimpses of a thousand thoughts, of here and now, of memories and visions. He saw the world like this, saw scientist merging into greater forms, people abandoning their distinctions.

There was no Kade, he saw. No self, no other. There was just this experience, this epicness he was part of, this surging, moving, billowing, exulting radiance of an organism that was the crowd, was the DJ, was the tiny fragment called Lotus. This was real, more real than he was, more real than any individual. This was the now.

He caught a flash of a thin layer of consciousness encircling the globe and it was his thought but now it was their thought and he knew it was real, not just a fantasy, and he reached out with this thoughts so he could touch those million other minds and pull all those bright points of light into this dance, this moment, this glorious luminous union…

Kade.

Something was tugging at this fragment, pulling at it.

Kade!

Feng. Feng should be here, dancing, merging, joining them!

Kade! You’re being watched!

An image crossed the fragment’s mind, a glimpse, an Asian man, muscled, shaved head, tattooed. His face was a mask, his eyes dead, scanning from side to side.

The cold splash of danger struck Kade, yanking him back. He was on a dance floor, surrounded by moving, exulting bodies. Their joyous minds called to him. The ecstatic music of their thoughts…

Come back to the bar,Feng said.

The union beckoned. Danger is an illusion , it whispered. You’re just a small piece. Death doesn’t matter. The whole lives on.

Kade shivered, and realized what he’d been about to do. To reveal those million minds, to reach out to them all at once... He shook his head hard, fought to snap out of the trance of union, to remember who he was.

Smile and laugh,Feng sent him. Get a drink.

Kade forced himself to smile on the dance floor, wiped sweat from his brow, and worked his way out of the crowd, squeezing past gyrating men and women, all moving in sync, hips and hands and minds reaching out to pull him back into their whole.

Merger. The lifting of the veil of maya . The sweet oblivion of the self. God he wanted it.

But I matter too, Kade told himself. Not just the whole. The individual.

He held on to that thought as he slipped through the press of bodies.

Feng was at the bar, smiling, making every appearance of enjoying himself.

“You having fun?” Feng shouted over the crowd.

“You know it!” Kade forced a smile, forced himself to focus on the here and now.

Now what?he asked Feng.

Can you see front and back doors?Feng asked. Through people’s eyes?

Kade nodded mentally. He leaned on the bar, facing away from their watcher, closed his eyes, and reached out towards the front of the club, hopping from mind to mind, fighting to stay clear of that call to union, until he found the view he needed.

Two of them out front,Kade said, showing Feng what he saw.

Kade took his thoughts the other direction, to the service entrance in the back.

Two more out back.

Feng nodded mentally, his mind calm and cool.

We’ll go out the back then. Let them think we don’t see them. Joke’s on them.

Kade nodded. Feng felt no fear. He’d trust his friend. There was no one he’d rather have with him here and now.

Joke’s on them,he told Feng, and forced another smile.

“North-west corner ready, fifty cal and tranq,” came the intercepted voice.

“Roger that,” came a reply across the same channel. “Go bait.”

Shiva held his breath. A minute later a new voice came across the channel. “Bait has contact. They’ve seen me.”

“They’re trying to lure Lane and his friend out,” Hayes said. “Where the snipers can pick them off.”