Ramez Naam - Nexus

"Where do you guys get it?" she asked Ilya.

Ilya hesitated just a moment too long. "We have a friend on the East Coast who gets it for us."

She's lying, Sam thought.

"You have experience with psychedelics?" Ilya asked.

"The usual. Experimentation in college. Not a regular thing."

"How'd you tolerate them?"

"Fine. I had fun. Just nothing I needed to do too often."

Ilya nodded. "Good. Experience with psychedelics always makes this easier. The first time people try Nexus can be a little disorienting, especially the first hour or so. Your brain is learning how to interface with the drug and other brains. With a whole party full of people pressing up against your mind, it's going to be even more intense."

Sam frowned. "I thought Nexus only worked at short range, like arm's length maybe."

"Usually." Ilya's gaze flickered away for a moment. "But there are ways to increase the range."

Pieces clicked together for Sam. The "no transmitters" rule. The "repeaters" Rangan had mentioned. These kids had found a way to extend Nexus transmissions.

Dear god.

"Sounds great," she replied. "I'll take your lead."

Her pulse was quick now. Her stomach was a knot.

Ilya popped the top of the vial. Sam caught a glimpse of a metallic liquid swirling through the glass. Brownian motion mixed tendrils of grey and silver. For an instant she had the impression of the drug as a living thing, aware, alert, purposeful.

The moment passed. Ilya handed her the vial, followed closely by a glass of juice from the table.

Sam downed the drug. The liquid tasted strongly metallic, slightly bitter. It felt heavy on her tongue, oily as it flowed down her throat. She sipped the juice. It was orange-guava. It cut through the taste and feel of Nexus instantly, leaving her mouth just slightly sweet, tart, and tropical.

Now for the other part I hate.

Samantha Cataranes closed her eyes, recited the mantra that would rearrange parts of her memory, make her believe she was someone else.

Elephant. Skyscraper. Maple.

She saw them as she thought the words, superimposed them on each other. Mental tumblers clicked, knowledge that should not leak out of her mind was suppressed. Fictions became reality.

Samara Chavez opened her eyes.

3

CALIBRATION

Saturday 2040.02.18 : 2314 hours

Samara Chavez was flying. Eyes closed, reclined on the couch, she soared above a landscape of shapes and emotions, senses and experiences. Below her a pulsing red sea of arousal lapped against a sharp and glistening black shore of mathematics, which gave way to green and brown hills of Spanish, Mandarin, and English. She dove into those hills, let the ground accept her and pass through her, burrowed into the earth, tasting tones and verbs and conjugates, feeling the shape of letters, words, characters, feeling their meanings and sounds coalesce. It felt gorgeous.

Sam was aware that she was high. She was tripping more intensely than any time since… since… And at the same time she felt clear-headed. Every sensation was sharp. Everything fit together just so. She understood where she was and what was going on.

Nexus is learning me, she thought. This is the calibration phase.

She penetrated through the dense earth of languages into a cavern of abstraction, filled with a soaring, brilliant city of concepts. Broad lanes of Time and Space cut the city into quarters. A bell tolled from within the towers of the delicate crystal and steel Temple of Self in the center of the city. The sound of the bell was the sound of everything she'd ever tried to communicate. It pulsed in the air, almost physical, spreading outwards in concentric waves she could see, resonating through city blocks where ideas crashed together. Open public squares of contemplation, serene parks and elegant symphony halls of harmony and synthesis, wrecked bombed-out shells of discord, confusion, misunderstanding. Her thoughts spread out into suburbs full of memories and beyond them into the dark forest of Other which wrapped the city, isolated it.

With delight she dove down into a public pool of Laughter, pulled herself out and walked a street of Beauty, turned down the lane and entered the vast museum of Animate Things, exited from its rear door onto a street of Actions, and soon came to the great open plaza around the Temple of Self. Everywhere she looked in the plaza she saw the faithful come, called to prayer. The faithful were her. A hundred of her, a thousand, ten thousand, all kneeling, praying, paying homage and sending prayers to herself.

She spun around then, taking in this city, her city, her mind. She whirled once, twice, three times, until the spin had a perpetual motion of its own, and then she found herself rotating faster and faster, the city blurring by too fast to see, but her mind spreading out to encompass it, the centrifugal force of her dervish-whirl sending the edges of her thoughts and senses outward from her, spread out and held taut to her by the line of her will.

She was this city. She was the million hers within it. She tasted a hundred thousand memories. Memories of places and times and things and words. Her sixth birthday, falling off her bike, blood running down her knee, she'd dipped her finger in it, brought it as close to her face as she could, wanting to see those tiny cells inside. Her college graduation, unexpectedly meaningful to her, a flush of excitement, visible pride on the face of her aunt and uncle, wishing her parents could be there if not for… for… Her first taste of sushi, incredible texture of raw albacore, followed by intense wasabi flavor overwhelming her sense of smell. A rainbow in the desert, seen alone. A lover's kiss on her neck. The sharp joy of sparring. Childhood games. And data archeology – the 3am discovery of the key that cracked the Watzer archive, the way the pieces of the puzzle fit together perfectly to decode the message Venter had encoded with his genome.

All of this is you – the words came unbidden to her. The memories came not one at a time, but in parallel, overlaid with one another, interleaving in ways she'd never seen, the timeline of her life becoming three-dimensional.

She felt she would explode with joy, with the sheer intensity of being, with the incredible largeness she felt. She wanted to grow ever larger, to spread beyond this city and cavern, to encompass this entire psychedelic planet of self, to experience every instant and morsel and potential of her being at once. To spread beyond this one planet, to experience everything of everyone!

"Sam?"

Her eyes opened. She was flush with excitement. Her chest was heaving. Her heart was pounding. She was damp between her thighs. She had never felt so turned on or so alive in her life. Except… except…

"Sam?"

It was Kade. Kaden Lane. The boy who'd brought her here, given her this chance to try Nexus for the first time. ( first? ) That beautiful, tall, confusing, shy, naïve young man, with a mind like fire and a boyish disregard of the consequences of his curiosity. He was standing at the foot of the couch she reclined on, looking at her tentatively.

"Kade." It came out husky. She tried again, more casually. "Hi."

"Hey, how're you feeling? Sorry I couldn't get here sooner, I was trying to help Rangan track down that glitch."

Rangan. Right. The DJ. She was at a party. OK.

Get it together, Sam.

"Kade." She held his gaze with her own, took a deep breath. "This is amazing . I was just lost, swimming, deep inside… I can't even explain."

Even as she spoke she felt the whirlwind, felt the assimilation and calibration continuing inside her. Her skin was sensitized. Every word and every breath felt electric with potential.