Authors: Ramez Naam
“Now,” Bogdan said. “Kindly swipe your thumb, place your eye to the scanner, and enter your access codes.”
Arkady moved forward to comply.
Kade tunneled into fear. This mind was gripped in terror. He struggled to take in the situation. A dark room. Pounding music came in from beyond the walls. The sense of a vast crowd nearby, thousands of minds. And here, in the room with him.
He flicked this body’s eyes over, took in the slate, the retinal scanner, the man with the cigarette.
Theft. Theft and likely murder.
Kade reached out with his thoughts, opened the mind of the man before him, sent the passcode, and then he was in.
Bogdan smiled as Arkady moved forward. The money would be dumped into offshore accounts which would be cashed out minutes later. Arkady here would have a nasty accident. And by the time the authorities realized that it
hadn’t
been an accident, Bogdan would be long gone, and much, much richer.
Then Arkady stopped, suddenly. Bogdan felt something change about the man’s mind. Then he felt something press against his own mind, something vast.
Oh fuck, Bogdan thought. He turned and ran for the door.
Kade saw the man turn and run, just as the passcode opened his mind. He reached out and
yanked
on the man’s motor cortex.
The man stumbled and fell to the floor of the store room, cursing.
Bogdan. That was his name. Kade could feel it now.
Kade gripped the man’s mind tighter, then took stock of the rest of the situation.
Bogdan couldn’t breathe. His heart was pounding. There was something in his mind. Something in his mind!
He tried to get up but the stranger had control of his limbs. He tried to break the connection but he was locked out.
Oh God, he thought. Someone
else
has a back door. A back door into me!
Kade let himself breathe deeper. The man named Arkady was physically unharmed. He’d gotten here in time. He broke the bonds on Arkady’s mind, and the Russian rose to his feet, and ran, screaming.
Kade rifled through Bogdan’s mind. Where was the coercion code? Ahhh, there. Files opened for him. He skimmed through them. More patterns to block in the next version of Nexus. More abuse paths that he could cut off from everyone.
Bogdan had given out hundreds of doses of Nexus loaded with this code. Thousands. Kade would need to send out a virus, hunting for them, rewriting code to fix these exploits when it found them.
Who are you?
Bogdan asked.
Kade shook his head mentally.
I’m the last mind you’ll ever touch
.
Please
, Bogdan thought at him.
I have money. I have friends.
Kade ignored him. He downloaded the code to add to his libraries, then went to work.
He removed Bogdan’s administrator privileges to the Nexus OS in his own mind, locked him out of any control over the nanobots that infested him, took away Bogdan’s ability to modify, upgrade, or even remove Nexus in the process.
No!
Bogdan screamed.
Kade locked Bogdan out of Nexus communication, then. His brain would be hermetically sealed, never to touch another’s. Only Kade would be able to access it, via his own back doors.
Fuck you!
Bogdan raged.
You can’t do that
.
Now the rest.
How many times have you done this?
Kade asked Bogdan.
None!
Bogdan replied.
This was the first time! And I didn’t!
Memories came back, streaming from Bogdan’s mind. Corfu. Ibiza. Mykonos. Three Nexus-aided thefts. One leading to a murder.
And worse. He caught a glimpse of a girl, terrified, senses mentally crippled, her clothes half ripped off, her body held down by Bogdan’s will and his perverted code as he…
Kade grimaced, and yanked himself away from Bogdan’s memory. Thousands of miles away, his stomach rose up. His fists clenched.
You’re disgusting, Bogdan.
Kade started in on the rewiring, tying neural circuits together. Bogdan’s knowledge of programming. His understanding of Nexus. His concept of violence. His capacity for sexual arousal. All of these Kade tied to nausea, to crippling anxiety, to pervasive pain.
The man yelled at him.
What are you doing?
I’m neutering you
, Kade told him, grim satisfaction rising in his thoughts.
You won’t ever steal, or kill, or fuck again.
Bogdan gasped in shock, then resumed his rage.
You can’t do this! What gives you the right?
I made this
, Kade told the man.
That gives me the right.
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
One Week Later
The eye stared at Kade, unblinking, lying in its cooling bath. That black pupil in the green iris. The white egg-shaped sphere of it, with a bundle of freshly grown optic nerve trailing off behind it, looking like so much wet data cable.
My eye, Kade thought, cloned from my cells, to replace the one I lost in Bangkok.
He blinked the one eye in his head, lying back on the clinic bed as the doctors did their final prep. Late afternoon light filtered in through curtains drawn over the windows. His regrowing stump of a hand ached down deep in its fragile bones. He could feel the anesthetic starting to flow through his veins now. If all went well, in a few weeks he’d be seeing out of two eyes again, maybe even using two working hands.
Kade.
A mind touched his. Ling’s mind. Su-Yong Shu’s daughter. Alien. Young. A whirlwind of swirling thoughts. The data flowing all around him came alive in his mind – the flow of information through the medical monitors in the room, the power cables running through the wall, the wireless data channels permeating even this remote Cambodian clinic. He could see and feel them all, an intricate web of information and electrons all around him, as he could any time she touched his mind.
Kade smiled.
Hi, Ling.
He could feel her smile in return. Such a strange child, so unlike any other mind he’d ever touched. But he was starting to understand her, to see how her thoughts worked, to see the world the way she saw it.
Feng and I won’t let them hurt you while you’re asleep
, Ling sent him.
Kade almost laughed.
It’s OK, Ling
, he sent her.
I trust them.
They’re humans
, Ling sent back.
So am I
, Kade replied.
Oh no, Kade
, Ling sent him.
You’re not human any more. You’re like me now. Me and my mother.
Kade reached for a reply, but all he found was the anesthesia, sucking him down into a warm sleepy place.
They buried my mother today, Kade
, Ling sent him.
Visions came to Kade – Su-Yong Shu in that remote Thai monastery, the spot of blood blooming at her throat, the sudden sting in Kade’s hand as a dart struck him, Su-Yong’s skin going gray as the neurotoxin pumped through her, Feng lifting up the cleaver to amputate Kade’s hand…
She’s not dead
,
Ling was saying.
I’m going to find her. I’m going to get my mommy back.
Ling
… Kade started.
Be careful
, he wanted to tell her. But the drugs pulled him under first.
Martin Holtzmann closed his eyes and he was there again. The spray of snow stung at his face. The wind rushed by, roaring in his ears. His borrowed body leaned left, skis cutting in so perfectly to deep powder on this steep slope. Muscles flush with strength and youth pushed poles in and leaned right, carving around the next mogul like he hadn’t since…
An elbow dug into his side, and he snapped his eyes open. Joe Duran, head of Homeland Security’s Emerging Risks Directorate, and Holtzmann’s boss’s boss, was glaring at him.
“Pay attention,” the man whispered.
Holtzmann mumbled something in reply, shifted in his seat, bringing his eyes back to the podium. President John Stockton was speaking, addressing this assembled crowd outside Department of Homeland Security headquarters.
Holtzmann mopped sweat from his brow, beneath his shock of unruly white hair. Even at 9am, the Washington DC sun was brutal. Already they were on track for the hottest summer in North American history, coming just on the heels of the record-breaking heat wave of 2039. He wanted to just sink back into that memory of snow, that experience of another’s body, of youth, gleaned through the Nexus connection between Holtzmann’s mind and another’s.
“…have to protect our humanity,” the President was saying. “We must understand that some technologies, however exciting, put us on a path to
de
humanization…”
Like the technology in my skull, Holtzmann thought.
Nexus 5. How could he resist it? As ERD’s Neuroscience Director, he’d led technical debriefing of Kaden Lane, Rangan Shankari, and Ilyana Alexander. He’d understood what they’d done. Something marvelous – taking Nexus and transforming it from a street drug and into a tool. Dangerous, yes. Full of potential for abuse. But oh, what a temptation!
And when Nexus 5 was released to the world? That horrible night when the mission to recapture Kaden Lane from that monastery in Thailand had gone completely awry? The night that Su-Yong Shu, one of the greatest minds of a generation, had been killed. The night his friend and colleague Warren Becker had died of a heart attack.
A terrible night. And to watch as thousands around the world got access to this tool… How could he resist? He’d taken that vial from storage in his lab, tipped it back and sent the silvery liquid down his throat, then waited as the nanoparticles found their way into his brain, attached themselves to neurons, self-assembled into information processing machines.
The three months since then had been the most exhilarating Holtzmann could remember. He’d seen incredible science done, published carefully on anonymous message boards. With Nexus 5 they were getting glimpses of paths to reversing Alzheimer’s and senile dementia, making incredible progress in connecting autistic children to neurotypical adults. They were suddenly moving forward again in deciphering memory and attention, in seeing ways to boost intelligence. This was a tool that would change everything about the study of the mind, Holtzmann knew. And in so doing, it would transform humanity.
Holtzmann had already found it transformative at a personal level. He’d touched the thoughts of physicists and mathematicians, poets and artists, and other neuroscientists like himself. He’d
felt other minds
. What neuroscientist, what scientist of any sort, could pass up such an opportunity?
You could experience anything now, touch another’s mind and see the world how they saw it, feel their experiences, their adventures, their…
Another memory bubbled up.
He’d been a young man again, strong, fit, with a beautiful young woman. He remembered the softness of her skin beneath his hands, the smell of her perfume, the taste of her kisses, the way he’d tugged the silken negligee off her shoulders and down her body, the wetness as his fingers found her so ready and so very turned on by him, the erotic thrill as she’d straddled him in stockinged thighs, and then the incredible warmth and tightness as she’d lowered herself down onto…
Enough, Holtzmann thought.
He pushed the memory out of his mind with an effort. Once had been the end of it. No need to go back there now. Truth be told, it had felt
too
real – not like pornography, but like infidelity. And Martin Holtzmann had sworn to himself that he’d never be unfaithful again.
No matter. There were tawdry ways to use the technology, but sublime ways as well. He felt more alive than he had in years, more excited about the future than he could remember since his youth.
“…that’s why we have to win in November,” Stockton was saying from the podium.
You’re not going to win, Holtzmann thought. You’re ten points down in the polls. Stanley Kim is going to be the next President. Americans aren’t scared any more. All the atrocities are in the past. Americans want to see the future again.
I
want to see the future.
Holtzmann smiled. Yes. Things were looking bright indeed.
?b64AECS448TxQRmeKwMcMoK83QyozvgSaLPsA0Kkc++clA1KJHS/
What? Holtzmann jerked in his seat. A Nexus transmission had just rippled through his mind. He was dimly aware of ERD Director Joe Duran glancing at him in annoyance.
?HX?52a06967e7118fce7e55b0ba46f9502ce7477d27169da72/
His heart was pounding. What the hell was going on? Had they found him out?
fcd55afa0/
No. Encrypted data. On a Nexus frequency. Holtzmann looked left and right, scanning the crowd, oblivious to Joe Duran’s scowl.
?RU5L8PP0hLarBNxfoQM23wG6+KTCEBhOIAAQyPPc76+TWhj+X/
There, it was coming from behind him.
SntyZox/
And another…
He craned his neck to look backwards, ignoring the frowns of those behind him. There was nothing unusual back there. Senior Homeland Security people from all branches – FBI, TSA, DEA, Coast Guard, ERD – seated on white plastic chairs. A Secret Service agent, cool in mirrored glasses, walking slowly down the center aisle and towards the front of the crowd. In the far back, a semicircle of news cameras and reporters.
?0jRwTX0tQ5jSl03cfWGCmkvt5b17dzwt78jWXNx15Ur2sBf1fyBbS/
The signal came loud and clear from somewhere back there.
1suuHKZmZAE/
And the shorter reply.
They both came from… From…
Oh God. Dear God.
Kade woke from his drugged slumber in the clinic bed. It was dark outside the windows. He blinked in confusion. What had woken him? Ling again?
[Alert] [Alert] [Alert]
Then he saw the blinking in the corner of his eye. High priority notification. Permission to alert him while he was sleeping.