Ramez Naam - Crux

How different were Shiva’s goals from his own? He thought of that thin layer of mind encircling the globe, unformed, raw potential. What if he could touch those minds with Shiva’s tools? What could they make real?

Every day, Kade dined with Shiva, and at times with others of Shiva’s staff. A breakfast here. A lunch there. Tea, between meetings and calls that Shiva had. Dinner, whenever Kade chose to go. The weather was hot and clear when he arrived. It grew windier and wetter as the days went on. Yet all of it was beautiful.

Shiva denied him one thing, beside his freedom.

“I want to talk to the children,” Kade said.

“Absolutely not,” Shiva replied. “They’re young, vulnerable. Some of them have been traumatized. I won’t have you confusing them further.”

Still, he saw the children from a distance from his window, or from the roof, or when visiting researchers. There were three or four distinct groups. One of those groups seemed to recognize Kade. Had they seen Sam? Kade wondered where she was now. But he said nothing to Shiva. Any information he held back might prove an advantage.

The days passed. Sunday turned to Monday turned to Tuesday turned to Wednesday.

After Wednesday night’s dinner a guard brought him back to his room. The guard activated his own Nexus jammer and removed Kade’s. They treated him gently, politely, even deferentially. The servers and the security staff called him “sir”.

He sat on one of the antique oversized chairs and stared at the box with the slate inside.

What am I afraid of? he asked himself. Why don’t I want to touch Shiva’s thoughts?

You’re afraid he’s telling the truth , Ilya’s voice answered him. That he has only the best of intentions .

Why?

Because , Ilya went on, if that’s the case, he has as much right to the back doors as you do. Maybe more. He’s smarter than you are. He understands the world better than you do. If you deserve the back doors, then he does too. If he doesn’t, then you don’t either.

Kade fell asleep struggling with that thought, looking for a way to refute it.

He woke again in darkness, restless. He rose, put on one of the robes they’d given him, threw back the curtains, found a cloudy night, wind blowing, a tossing and churning sea. Where was Feng now? Where was Rangan? Was the PLF still moving forward with their plot? Were hundreds more going to die because of him? Would war break out?

He looked over at the locked box. He’d moved it to the writing desk. It would be so easy. Open his mind to it. Let Shiva persuade him. Agree to hand over this burden to someone else.

He thought of all the benefits it would bring. More resources. Giant server farms spread around the world, orbital communication satellites, teams of programmers. They could nip Nexus coercion in the bud, stop the rapists and thieves and assassins. Shiva’s coders could help him finish Nexus 6, integrate the safeguards that would make it difficult to use Nexus that way.

They could rescue Rangan. They could stop the assassination set for Saturday. They might find Feng, still alive, if he was lucky.

They could bring all those Nexus-carrying minds across the planet together, into something greater.

All he had to do was give Shiva the key that would open a million minds.

Kade sat at the writing desk. He put his hands on the armored case. It was cool to the touch. Inside was a device, a transmitter, loaded with thoughts and memories.

Kade went Inside, and turned Nexus OS’s file sharing back on.

Shiva lay sleepless on his hard cot in the narrow cell he allowed himself. Lane was softening. He could see it in each conversation. The boy was tired of his burden, was tired of being alone, was increasingly persuaded of Shiva’s good intentions. Soon, days or weeks, he would consent.

Shiva took a deep breath.

Am I worthy? Is this just? Is this moral?

Now, as the tool he’d sought was almost in his grasp, he had his doubts.

Nita would hate this, he mused. Hate it more than anything I’ve ever done. Hubris, she’d call it.

The gods punish hubris , he told himself, in every religion, in every mythology .

But he had only to think of the world outside, of the multiple precipices that humanity and this world teetered on, to hear the opposing view. That humanity needed saving. Needed it desperately. And could not do the saving itself.

“I’m doing this for the world, Nita,” he whispered in the darkness. “And if not me, then who? If not now, then when?”

Kade inspected the available data. It was huge. Shiva was offering him giant swaths of thought and memory.

He analyzed the files, ran them through virus checkers and security sweeps, made sure there was no embedded code in them. It was one thing to be persuaded. It was another to be tricked.

He found nothing untoward.

Even so, he instanced a sandbox inside his mind, and another, differently configured sandbox within the first, and only in that secure environment did he allow the files to play.

He was engrossed, immediately, sucked in to what Shiva was sharing. This was more than his plans. It was his life, his childhood, the events that had formed him, the triumphs and tragedies he’d been through. The fears he held deep inside, fears for the whole world. And the hopes he held onto as well.

Kade devoured the thoughts, the memories, the experiences, the knowledge. He bent all his Nexus CPU cycles to the task, cranked up his assimilation rate far beyond real-time. He slipped into a near trance, immersing himself in this person, in what he knew, in what he’d done. The mask of maya slipped away, and for a time he was Kade no longer. He was Shiva, and so much more.

He came back to himself hours and hours later. It was fully light outside, late morning, approaching noon. He had a vague memory of the serving girl coming and going. The wheeled cart was still here, loaded with food.

Kade ignored it.

He got up, went to the window, looked outside at the gorgeous water down below, the multicolored sea with its bands of jade and emerald and sea-green and lapis lazuli and a dozen more colors he couldn’t name.

He understood these waters, now. He knew their chemistry. He knew their ecology. He remembered diving off the coast of India, Shiva diving there, guided by his wife, examining the dying corals, despairing at their fate. Kade had read about ocean acidification. Now he understood it intimately – the horror of seeing once vibrant reefs reduced to a deathly gray. The intimate comprehension of their vulnerability, how even after Shiva’s viral hack they teetered on the edge, how their death threatened all the fish and other species that depended on them.

North, near the poles, the tundra of the Arctic, melting, decaying, giving off methane. He’d been there. Shiva had been there, at Nita’s insistence. Bundled in sub-zero gear, he’d seen the methane belching from thawing permafrost. He’d seen the mile-wide plumes of methane bubbles rising from the decaying slush of carbon ice just below the warming Arctic Sea.

He understood the risk, at last. It wasn’t just an abstraction to him, anymore. It was a visceral threat, as Shiva felt it, as real as the fear he felt looking down from a great height. A few more hot summers could destabilize those fields, send up even more massive bubbles of heat-trapping gas that would bake the Earth, scour the fields where food grew with drought and storm, wither away the rainforest, destroy humanity’s food supplies and shelter in the span of months or years, bring human civilization and the biosphere both to their knees.

Kade looked out further west. Beyond that horizon lay India, his homeland. Shiva’s homeland. The third largest economy on the planet now. Yet he had vivid memories of holding a dying child in his arms, of watching villagers starve just kilometers from the homes of the newly wealthy kings of technology.