Ramez Naam - Crux

He knew the count and position of thousands of nuclear warheads there, pointed at nearby Pakistan, at China, at Iran, even at Europe and the United States. He knew all about the three secret times that India and Pakistan had come within millimeters of going nuclear, had almost killed millions in the matter of minutes, almost ignited war that would kill hundreds of millions.

He looked across those waves and he remembered his childhood as an orphan, an untouchable orphan, the lowest of the low, struggling to eat, to survive. The beatings. The vicious street gangs that he’d barely escaped. The conviction that violence must be met with violence, that those who hurt you must be punished. And later, when ignorant villagers had killed orphans under his protection, the rage he’d felt, the screams as his men had nailed the perpetrators to those crosses, as the flames had brought him justice.

Further west, Europe, North America. He knew more than ever about the treatment of humanity’s successors there. The secret purges. The viral weapons lying in wait, ready to deal death down on the genetically enhanced. The Nexus detectors to find the enhanced. The work to create a vaccine against Nexus, to create a “cure” that would purge it from the mind, even from the minds of those who’d lived their entire lives with it. The backup plans. The concentration camps for the expected wave of Nexus-born children, the hundreds of thousands of them that might be born in the next decade.

There was so much wrong with the world. There were so many precipices. So many cliffs humanity could fall off of. So many crimes being committed, so many risks being taken.

And Kade understood why. They were a tribal species. They’d evolved in a world where a few dozen men and women made up a tribe, and virtually all others were enemies, threats. They lacked the cognitive capabilities necessary to collaborate on this scale. They’d done their best with democracy, with capitalism, but those had reached their limit long ago. They’d been corrupted, twisted to the interests of a few individuals, when the greatest problems the world faced were problems of collective interest.

He could fix those systems. He could nudge the world, could pull strings from behind the scenes, could direct scientists and engineers towards the right problems, could link their minds together to make them even more effective, could manipulate banks and corporations to provide resources, could twist politicians to enact the laws needed to save the world and benefit the people on it.

And beyond that – Kade could bring the world’s minds together, link human to human, into something more, into a global consciousness, a posthuman intelligence, mediated by Nexus, coordinated by the tools Shiva had built.

All it would require was the key. The key that would open a million minds today, that would open tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of minds, at some point in the future. That was all.

60

WAR STORIES

Wednesday October 31st

In a cramped submarine beneath the waters of the Andaman Sea, Kevin Nakamura laughed as Feng gesticulated with his cuffed hands.

“So I throw the butter knife, yeah?” the Chinese soldier was saying. “Boom! Right through the eye.” Feng shook his head. “But he gets me with cleaver first. That’s how I get this one.” Feng gestured at the scar across one forearm.

“So that was Almaty?” Nakamura asked.

“Yeah,” Feng replied. “In ’37. You there?”

Nakamura nodded, rolled up one pant leg, showed the scar below his knee.

Feng peered at it and frowned. “Sniper?” he asked.

Nakamura laughed. “Farmer. With a pitchfork.”

“Pitchfork!” Feng laughed in return. “You see action at Astana too?”

Nakamura shook his head. “Not me. But I had friends who were there.” He cocked his head. “Were you at Mashadd, in ’35? Or what about Maymana, back in ’26?”

Feng’s expression turned puzzled. “In ’26… I was eight.”

Nakamura frowned.

“You old, man,” Feng said.

Nakamura glared at the pup, then snorted and turned back to the sub’s controls. Two more days to Apyar Kyun.

Two hundred miles off the coast of the southeastern United States, Zoe raged. Beneath her, the October seas were hot, hotter than they’d been this late in the year in millennia. The currents of the Gulf Stream dragged warm water north from the equator and into the mid-Atlantic, adding energy to seas already heated from a record summer.

The Atlantic gave off that excess heat now, evaporating it as water vapor into the air above.

Zoe gorged on that warm vapor-filled air, absorbing its energy and its moisture. They added to her, strengthened her, fueling her winds, driving them ever faster and more furiously about her calm center until she whirled about at a fifth the speed of sound.

North Zoe went. And chaos went with her.

61

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Wednesday October 31st

Holtzmann slipped out of bed at 6am, while Anne still slept. His head pounded and his mouth was dry. His body felt stiff. His stomach was unsteady. He craved more opiates. But that wasn’t going to happen today.

He showered and dressed quickly. Anne rolled over in bed, murmured something, then nothing more. Then he was in the car and on his way to the office.

The news had more on Stockton’s impending victory. The rest was Zoe. The hurricane had sped north and east into the warm, wide open Atlantic, sucking energy from the unprecedentedly hot surface waters as it went, intensifying from the Category 4 storm that had wrecked Havana into a Category 5 monster, with hundred-and-sixty mile per hour winds and ten-foot sea swells. And now Zoe’s track was bending again, turning it towards north by northwest, putting it on a course towards central New Jersey, with possible landfall Friday night. God, what a disaster that would be.

He arrived at the office a little after 7 o’clock, collected his slate and the images he needed, then headed to the Human Subjects wing. ERD Headquarters was no prison. It wasn’t equipped for long-term interment. But the Human Subjects wing could house up to fifty subjects, for research purposes, for months at a time.

Holtzmann swiped his ID to enter the wing, then walked up to the security desk.

He recognized the guard. “I’m here to see Rangan Shankari,” he told the man, holding up his ID.

The guard nodded, then looked over at his maze of monitors.

“Room 31,” he replied. “He’s still asleep.”

“Wake him up,” Holtzmann said. “I’ll be in the interview room.”

Two guards brought Shankari to him ten minutes later, his wrists cuffed to one another. They clipped his cuffs to the hardpoint on the table, which was itself bolted to the floor. Holtzmann waited across that table for the guards to leave. Just seeing Shankari sent a powerful buzz through him. He was so close… So close to getting Rangan out of here…

Wait for it, he told himself. Tonight .

The guards left.

“Rangan,” Holtzmann said. “It’s been some time.”

“Not long enough,” Shankari muttered darkly.

Holtzmann slid his slate across the table to Shankari.

“Open it. See what Nexus has done to the world.”

With his hands restrained, Shankari could just barely touch the surface of the slate. The first image was an aerial view of the assassination site, just a quarter-mile from here. Bodies were scattered across the ground, the geometry of the white seats shattered in a zone around the blast.

Shankari looked at the image. “What’s this?”

Holtzmann answered him. “Three months ago the Posthuman Liberation Front used Nexus 5 to reprogram a Secret Service agent. They tried to assassinate the President. The President lived, but dozens of others died.”