Ramez Naam - Nexus

Rangan Shankari.

"Get CHP on that car," Nichols ordered. "Just follow. I want to see where Shankari goes."

"Roger that," Jane Kim called out.

"Why'd you do this to us?" Kade asked. He was slumped in the chair across the room once more, the ice pack to his head.

Sam took a breath before answering. "What you're doing is illegal. My job is to uphold the law."

Kade shook his head. "That's no answer. Why'd you choose this job?"

"Because what you're doing is dangerous. That's why I care. You're playing with fire."

"This isn't a weapon. It's a new way to communicate. It connects people. You saw that. You felt it."

Sam had felt it. She'd loved it, until she'd been horrified by it, by the discovery that she was not who she thought she was. She dodged the topic.

"It can be abused. Maybe you wouldn't use it to hurt people, but others would."

"It's not like that," said Kade. "It's a way of bridging the gap between people. It makes us smarter together than we could be apart. It can raise collective intelligence, collective empathy. Ilya talks about…"

Sam cut him off. "Ilya talks about creating things that aren't human, Kade. Non-human intelligences."

"Groups of humans," Kade retorted. "Human networks."

"Hive minds. Borgs. Super-organisms," Sam spat out. "What if they don't like us?"

"How could they not like us? They'd be us." Kade was getting heated now.

"And what if I didn't want to join a hive? Would I be forced to? Assimilated? Could I keep up if I didn't? Would there be a place for ordinary humans?"

Kade exhaled in frustration. "Look, that's all paranoia. There are positive effects too."

"It's not just paranoia, Kade. You have me under your thumb right now. You can make me do whatever you want. Rangan could too. That's coercion , Kade. You've built a coercion technology. A way to control people. And you tell me this isn't a weapon?"

Kade shook his head. "It's just a safety precaution. This is still experimental."

"Just a precaution, huh? Do other people have this back door in their heads? Can you paralyze any of your friends out in the party? Can you read their minds?"

Kade said nothing, just looked down at his hands.

"You can, can't you?" Sam continued. "Do they know? Have you told them that taking part in your little experiment hands you and Rangan the keys to their heads?"

Kade shook his head, still not looking at her. "It's a safeguard, that's all. We'd never release it like this."

"How can you be so naïve, Kade? You're a good guy. I've felt that. But what about other people who get their hands on this? You think they won't reverse-engineer it? You think they won't make slaves out of this? Suicide troops? Sex slaves? Worshippers?"

Awful memories were rising up inside of her. The ranch. The cult. The way her parents had become cattle, or worse. She wanted to push them at Kade, couldn't. He was opaque to her. She was cut off from his mind.

Kade bristled. "This is stupid. You can hurt people with guns. You can get them to do awful things with words. Books are as dangerous as anything I'm doing. We need this. 'Our current problems can't be solved by the level of thinking that created them.' Einstein said that. This can take us to a new level of thinking."

"Kade, it's going too fast," Sam replied. She fought down the pain and despair of old memories, hardened herself. She despised the longing she felt to touch his mind and show him. Hated the weakness of it, the wrongness of it. Damn this drug. Damn this mission.

"You're talking about changing everything about people, the way we've been for a hundred thousand years, in a heartbeat. You can't know the consequences, you can't understand how people will abuse this, you can't know that humanity will survive this. We have to slow down the rate we're becoming something that's not human."

Kade glared at her. "You're one to talk. You're not quite baseline human yourself, are you?"

Nichols turned his attention back to the couple at the edge of the water. The red blobs in the IR scope were bent over, making odd motions. What were they doing?

It clicked. They were taking off their shoes. And now their pants. A little rendezvous on the beach. The couple now appeared to be kissing passionately, red lines blurring in IR, only heads and limbs distinguishable in the image. He was about to look away, when they did something he didn't expect. They turned, hand in hand, and ran into the Bay, water splashing up around them. They ran till they were hip-deep, the lower halves of their bodies disappearing from IR view, and then dove head first into the water, and vanished under the waves entirely.

"Isn't that water a little cold for a swim this time of year?" Nichols asked aloud.

"I was just thinking the same," Bruce Williams replied. "Can't be much more than fifty degrees."

On screen, twenty feet further out, the head and shoulders of one of the red blobs. Nichols held his breath. Wait for it… Wait for it… Nothing. The other was nowhere to be seen.

"Fuck!" he exclaimed. "Get Mobile 2 there now! Scramble the mini drones. Light that place up. Find that guy!"

Kim and Williams furiously hit keys. On screen, Mobile 2 turned on its lights and spun tires as it accelerated to the spot, leaving the road and crashing into the manicured greens of the course. A narrow beam spotlight shot out from the overhead Sky Eye. The naked figure in the water turned, put her face in the water and kicked towards shore.

"And pull over the car with Shankari in it!" Nichols called out.

"Yes, sir," Jane Kim replied.

A tense minute passed, and then another. Mobile 2 arrived at the scene and took Tania Wellington into custody. Yes, she confirmed, that had been Cole. And no, she had no idea where he was going.

Cole was gone. If he had a rebreather or had undergone black market blood hyperoxygenation, he could stay down for hours. He could come up anywhere. Unless they were very, very lucky, he was gone.

California Highway Patrol had more luck. On screen a cruiser pulled in behind the vehicle carrying Rangan Shankari. Moments later, they had him in custody.

Sam took her time in replying. "I'm human, Kade. I've made compromises. I've accepted things that are necessary for me to do my job, to help keep people safe."

"Funny," Kade said, "I don't feel any safer with you around."

"You don't see the things we do on your behalf."

"I saw what you did tonight."

"There are monsters out there, Kade," Sam said. "We have to stop them."

"I'm no monster."

"You're no monster," Sam agreed, "but they're out there. There are people who would do awful things with this technology."

"There are people who would do wonderful things with it, too," Kade replied. "We'll put safeguards in. That's always been the plan. We don't want this used for mind control any more than you do."

"Other people will reverse-engineer the technology. They'll remove the safeguards, or figure out how to build a clone system that doesn't have them. That's how it always works. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't control what they do."

Kade threw up his hands in frustration. "You can't control what people do with phones, or planes, or the net," he replied. "People do terrible things with all of those, but the good things outweigh them. Should we take all of those back too?"

"Those don't change what we are. We're still human."

"You get to decide who's human? Pretty damn arrogant."

Sam tried to stay cool, didn't entirely succeed. "Arrogant? You're the one who's taking risks that could affect billions of people. You're the one threatening to make real humans obsolete. Do you have any idea the danger you're putting the whole world in?"

Kade shook his head bitterly. "You have this so backwards. I'm not making choices for anyone. I'm giving people options. I'm giving them new decisions to make for themselves. You're the one taking people's freedoms away. You're the one locking people up for doing the wrong science, or for trying something new." He stabbed an accusatory finger in her direction. "If there's any monster here, it's you."