Ramez Naam - Crux

Kade sat up in the bed. He found himself dressed in cotton trousers and a loose cotton shirt. They’d changed him while he’d slept. Feng. Where was Feng?

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’re at my home,” the Indian man said. “In Burma.”

“Who are you?” Kade asked.

“My name is Shiva Prasad,” he answered. The name sounded familiar.

“…and I hope we’ll become good friends,” Shiva finished.

Kade felt his anger flare.

“Some way to start a friendship,” he spat out.

Shiva smiled. “Eat first,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

Then the Indian man strode out of the room.

Kade jumped to his feet, but before he could follow Shiva out through the door, a young Asian woman wheeled in a cart. A muscular, dusky-skinned man whose origin Kade couldn’t place followed her. The server and the guard. Kade stopped and stood where he was.

The girl wheeled the cart to the middle of the room and unveiled a platter of eggs, bacon, and potatoes; then another of pancakes; flagons of juice, water, and coffee.

“Breakfast,” she said in heavily accented English. Her eyes met his briefly. Then she looked away, and she and the guard left through the door, and he heard a lock click as they did.

Kade ate. If they wanted to drug him or poison him, they could just hold him down and administer what they wanted. Then he explored his prison.

The room was spacious. A king-sized four-poster bed. An antique writing desk and chair. Two oversized ornate antique chairs in a small sitting area. A private bathroom suite almost the size of his apartment in San Francisco. A walk-in closet. Clothes waited for him there. More pants and baggy shirts in soft cotton. Jeans, shorts, T-shirts, sandals, hiking boots, socks, underwear, two bathrobes, a pair of swimming shorts. All in his size.

A kitchenette held snacks, dishware, bottles of beer and sparkling water and expensive-looking wine, a coffeebot, a cookbot that probably cost more than most cars.

Every room had windows. He had incredible views in two directions of a green and blue sea, seen from atop a cliff. From the kitchenette another window afforded a view east into a courtyard dotted with date palms, orange trees, bright tropical flowers, and flowing water. He looked to be on the fifth and topmost floor of what could only be called a mansion.

The windows opened at the touch of a switch to allow the breeze and the scent of sea and citrus. But inset in the window sills were metal frames that covered the space with bars and a fine metallic mesh. Kade could see that these, too, were built to open. But they were all locked and bolted in place. The bars would keep his body here. The mesh was a Faraday cage, he imagined, to keep his mind and any electronics trapped just as surely.

This was an elaborate cell. However luxurious it may be, it remained a prison, and he, the prisoner.

Last, he came to the final piece of his bondage. Around his neck, a thin metal chain held in place a dull metal disk, perhaps two inches in diameter and half an inch thick. Try as he might, he couldn’t get it loose, couldn’t get it over his head. There was a slot where a key of some sort would slide into it. Other than that there was no way he could see to remove it.

A Nexus jammer. Another layer of his prison.

He knew more now than ever before. He’d learned things, from studying Feng’s mind, from his contact with Ling, from meditation with Ananda and the monks, from secrets and tools and pieces of code gained legitimately or stealthily from scientists around the world experimenting with Nexus. He could make his Nexus nodes stand up and do tricks now.

He tried the tools in his toolbox one by one. Frequency tuning code that searched for a band with weaker interference. Filtering packages to suppress the static. An active noise reduction app he wrote himself that played the static reversed, back at itself, to cancel the signal out. Directional tuning of his Nexus antennae, to bore through the jamming in one direction, or boost gain in that direction.

Nothing. Nexus worked fine inside his mind. His code all ran fine. But he could broadcast nothing through the interference, could pick up nothing from around him.

He tried to think like Ling, to remember the feel of her contact, to amp and broaden the sensitivity of the Nexus in his brain until he could pick up the feel of the circuits in the walls, the transmissions all around him, and in particular the inner logic of this jammer.

The static only grew louder in his mind, painfully louder until he broke off in frustration.

He sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and began the practice of vipassana . He would rein in his attention until he could shift it in such a way that the static wasn’t there, was completely removed from his awareness, and then perhaps he’d be able to pick up…

The door opened. Kade opened his eyes, and Shiva was there, a slate in his hand.

48

ACCESS DENIED

Saturday October 27th

Holtzmann closed his eyes again.

Alive. I’m still alive.

He had to get Rangan Shankari free. He felt it in his bones. The strong desire. The deep need to break Shankari loose from ERD custody.

Lane had done this to him, had bent him this way, had turned him into a tool. The boy’s mind had been monstrous, terrifying. The memory of it sent shivers through him. And the President, the assassination… Panic was rising again, clawing at him, threatening to break loose.

He needed something. Relief from this horror. Holtzmann pulled up the neurotransmitter controls, dialed up a dose of his own opiates, just a little one, just enough so he could think. He pressed the mental button, waited for the sweet relief.

Nothing.

What?

He pressed the button again. Nothing happened.

He closed the controls, killed the process, relaunched it, dialed up an opiate dose again.

Nothing.

The panic was rising higher now. Higher every instant.

Lane. Lane must have done this.

He pulled up a diagnostic suite within Nexus OS, ran it to scan the system. Half the diagnostics failed, instantly. Error messages came back. ACCESS DENIED. ACCESS DENIED. ADMINISTRATOR PRIVILEGES REQUIRED. ACCESS DENIED. INSUFFICIENT PERMISSIONS. ACCESS DENIED.

Oh no. Oh God no.

Lane had taken away Holtzmann’s root access to his own Nexus OS. He’d taken away control of the software running on Holtzmann’s own brain.

He forced himself to think, forced himself to concentrate. There must be some way around this.

He reached out to his home network again. Success. He could still access the net. From there he linked to an anonymization service, and from there out to a Nexus code repository. There, a new version of Nexus OS, more recent than his own. He clicked the link to install it, to override his current Nexus OS.

ACCESS DENIED.

Damn it!

He could uninstall Nexus, remove it from his brain. Then find another dose, somehow, reinstall his apps… He launched the command to evict the Nexus nodes from inside his skull

[Nexus purge]

The system threw up a prompt:

[This command will erase Nexus OS and purge all Nexus nodes from your brain. All stored data and applications will be lost. Are you sure you want to continue? Y/N]

[Yes], he thought at it eagerly.

[ACCESS DENIED.]

Holtzmann nearly screamed in frustration. He tried a dozen more things, installing patches, changing permissions on files, editing raw bits that controlled access to resources, writing his own crude code to control his neurotransmitter levels.

[ACCESS DENIED.] [ACCESS DENIED.] [ACCESS DENIED.]

He was sweating now. He could see Rangan Shankari’s face. He could see the boy in captivity. His stomach was clenching. It was intolerable. He had to get the boy out of ERD custody. But he had another problem. A problem that would get in the way.