Ramez Naam - Nexus

Sam looked down at her hands. How to get through to him? "Sir, when I was being held captive, and no longer part of the Nexus… connection that they'd established, I missed it. I wanted to be back in that loop. I wanted… something that goes against everything I stand for." Sam was faltering now.

"Agent Cataranes." Becker said it in a tone of command.

Sam snapped her eyes to him.

"Samantha, I know how you were raised. I know what happened to you and your family at Yucca Grove. I know about Communion virus and the things you were exposed to. It's exactly because of those experiences that I have complete faith in you. You, among all people, understand the dangers of this tech. I know you won't falter in your duty. You're going on this mission because you're the available field agent with the best relevant experience and positioning. You're going because I have one hundred percent confidence in you. And you're going because it's an order. Is that understood?"

Sam let go of the breath she was holding. "Yes, sir. Understood."

Becker smiled fractionally. "Good. Now, we have an additional briefing for you. Tell me what I haven't told Kaden Lane."

Sam turned her eyes back to the briefing room, where Kade and Holtzmann were finishing up. "At a guess… This mission isn't just to learn what we can from having someone close to Su-Yong Shu. If possible, you want more. You want her to try to turn Kade, with whatever techniques she's been using. So we can study them in depth."

Sam paused for a moment, then finished her thought. "Which means that Kade isn't just a spy," she said. "He's bait."

7

EXPLANATIONS

TRANSCRIPT: RANGAN SHANKARI, TECH BRIEFING, "NEXUS 5"

Sunday February 19th 2040 0951 hours

[NOTE: Subject should be considered hostile.]

INTERVIEWER: OK. Let's start again. Tell us about Nexus 5.

SHANKARI: [inaudible, likely profanity] Fine. Nexus 5 is Nexus, but with software layered on top.

INTERVIEWER: What does that mean?

SHANKARI: We found a way to program it. We found a way to get data in and out. To get instructions in and out.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of data?

SHANKARI: Neural data at first. We were using it as a way to measure neural firing in the motor cortex. Individual neurons, but millions of them at a time.

INTERVIEWER: This was for your research?

SHANKARI: Yeah. The goal was to get the data from the brain, decode it, and use it to control a robot arm.

INTERVIEWER: Systems like that already exist. Why the research?

SHANKARI: Existing systems get implanted surgically. That limits them. The procedures are long. You can get infections. And you can only tap into tens of thousands of neurons. The motor cortex has maybe ten billion neurons. With Nexus, we could tap into more of them. Millions. Tens of millions. We could get finer control over robot arms. You could catch a ball, write with a pen, do stuff you can't do with current systems.

INTERVIEWER: Go on.

SHANKARI: Well, we knew we could get data in too. Nexus nodes talk to each other by radio.

INTERVIEWER: How do they talk by radio?

SHANKARI: I dunno. Fucking nanotubes are little radios all by themselves, man. There's a lot of nanostructures in Nexus.

INTERVIEWER: OK. Software.

SHANKARI: Software. Yeah. So, anyway, they talk by radio. They sync up. Every node has some way of saying what part of the brain it's in. Every node listens for broadcasts addressed to its part of the brain, so it knows when to fire. If we could crack that, we could listen in on brain activity, and we could make neurons fire in whatever part of the brain we wanted.

INTERVIEWER: Why would that be relevant to your work?

SHANKARI: There's a million reasons. More than that. But for us it was about feedback. Sending the brain information on what the arm was touching, where it was relative to the body. Without that, an artificial limb is useless.

INTERVIEWER: So again, systems like that exist. Why your work?

SHANKARI: Same reason. More neurons. Higher bandwidth. Higher sensitivity, more precision, no surgery. Next question?

INTERVIEWER: Software. How did this lead to software?

SHANKARI: Yeah. Well, we dosed up some mice, started recording all the signals…

INTERVIEWER: Where did the Nexus come from?

SHANKARI: [pause] We bought it from a guy on the street.

INTERVIEWER: Your pulse just shot up ten points, you're starting to sweat, and your systolic blood pressure just went up by five. Try again.

SHANKARI: [sighs] We made it.

INTERVIEWER: How?

SHANKARI: We autosynthed it.

INTERVIEWER: How'd you get past the censor chip?

SHANKARI: [pause] We got access to an old one. It's out of date. The updates haven't been installed on it for years.

INTERVIEWER: Who's the license holder?

SHANKARI: [sighs] Crawford Lab. They've got a newer fancier one. Their old one mostly just sits idle. I've got access to their lab. They never knew.

INTERVIEWER: Where'd you get the molecular structures?

SHANKARI: We got the chemistry from Recipes for a Revolution . I smuggled a hard copy back from India.

INTERVIEWER: And the source material?

SHANKARI: All over. It's mostly innocuous. The only problem is there are so many different molecules in Nexus… sixty-three different molecular parts. The autosynth only had one chemreactor. We had to do sixty-three runs, then hand mix in the right proportions.

INTERVIEWER: OK, back to the software.

SHANKARI: Yeah. Fine. So we recorded the signals. It was a bitch. Way too much going on. We did more and more mice studies, tapered down the doses as low as we could go. We started injecting straight into the brain to get the lowest possible doses, simplify the traffic between the mice, simplify the analysis for us.

INTERVIEWER: How long did it take you?

SHANKARI: Most of a year. We would do the dosing before we left lab each day, then record activity overnight. The results made no sense. The signal traffic was chaos. Huge volumes of chaos. There was nothing that looked like the position of the nodes.

INTERVIEWER: And then?

SHANKARI: And then… and then we hit pay dirt, man. Kade figured it out. The nodes don't know where they are in the brain. They know where they are relative to other nodes in the same brain. How much position data they send depends on how many nodes there are around 'em. And it's not even really position data. They figure out what functional region they're in, send that in their signals. It's fucking amazing. [shakes head] Anyway, once Kade figured that out, the data miners cracked the encoding. We could listen to brain activity, and trigger new activity anywhere we wanted.

INTERVIEWER: And this led to software how?

SHANKARI: [drums fingers] It was the damnedest thing, man. Once we understood the encoding, we could tell there was room for a lot more data in those signals. There were unused bits. So we just started fucking around with it one day, on a lark.

INTERVIEWER: And?

SHANKARI: And… it would do shit. It would store the data we sent it. If that node sent out a signal again, we'd get the data back. If we sent specific modifier signals, we could tell two nodes to talk to each other, to add their values together, or subtract them. We could do logical operations. [Shankari stops talking, shakes head] It still blows my mind, man.

INTERVIEWER: You'll share these codes with us, all of this data.

SHANKARI: Like I have any fucking choice.

INTERVIEWER: So you could make Nexus nodes perform logical operations and math operations. Go on.

SHANKARI: Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted.