Crux

by Ramez Naam

  Ilya dropped her mental grip on the man’s arm and the combined force of the agents’ wills sent it swinging wide and out, away from his face and body, pulling him off balance. In their surprise they stopped pushing, and in that moment Ilya grabbed the man’s fist again and slammed it full force into the woman’s face.

  She staggered back, her hand rising to her nose, and Ilya toppled her as she had the first one, yanking the bitch’s neck muscles back hard to make sure it was her pretty little head that hit the floor first.

  The last one standing turned and looked at her in horror. Ilya pushed against his mind. No fancy tricks this time, just will on will.

  Show me everything.

  And she saw. More like these three. Many, many more, being trained and armed with tools to pry open her mind and extract what she knew.

  Ilya had time to gasp. Then the doors opened, and the techs in white lab coats rushed in, and a single jab into her arm sent her into a deep, dark sleep.

  How much longer can I hold out?

  Ilya lay in the dark cell, listening to her heart beat.

  Lub dub. Lub dub.

  The codes. The passwords. The back doors to Nexus 5. That’s what they wanted. And if they wanted them so badly, then Ilya could only draw one conclusion: Nexus 5 had gotten out. Somehow, against all odds, Rangan or Kade or Wats had gotten it out into the world. And she’d be damned if she gave them a back door into that.

  Everyone breaks eventually, her father had told her. Everyone.

  They would come at her with more Nexus-armed agents. She’d seen them in the last one’s mind. A dozen more at least. She’d won today through surprise and luck. She couldn’t hope to beat so many.

  Everyone breaks eventually.

  Even if she could, they’d find some other way to break her. Stronger sedatives. More waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Eventually they’d break her. They’d rip the back doors out of her mind. They’d be able to break into the mind of anyone running Nexus, steal their thoughts, turn them into human robots or assassins, reprogram them to vote or buy or do what their new masters wanted… All of it, the exact opposite of what they’d dreamt of in building Nexus 5.

  And all because of her. Because she was weak. Because eventually she’d give them the codes. Because everyone breaks eventually.

  Ilya wept in the darkness, wept for her solitude, wept for her parents, wept for fear that she’d soon betray everything she believed in.

  She wept and wept and wept, until there was nothing else, until a sleep of exhaustion took her.

  She woke to more darkness. And to panic.

  Lub dub. Lub dub.

  How long had she slept? What if they broke her today? What if the door opened a minute from now, and they took her, and this time she buckled when they waterboarded her?

  What if they put her in the fMRI again and tried to read her mind while they questioned her, and her mental tricks weren’t enough to confuse it. Or what if they came in with more of those Nexus agents (traitors, really) ready to beat her down mentally?

  Her heart pounded in the darkness.

  Lub dub. Lub dub.

  She knew what she needed to do. She’d known for sleep after sleep, interrogation after interrogation, since the first time she’d honestly truly thought she was going to die during a questioning, and found part of herself glad at the thought.

  They wouldn’t let her die, of course. They’d keep her alive until she gave them what they wanted. That’s why she was strapped down like this, so she couldn’t find a way to end her life on her own.

  But she had another tool. A tool in her mind.

  She’d considered trying to use Nexus to erase the knowledge from her mind. But the memories were too widespread. She’d thought of the back doors too often since that day on the plane. The memories were too linked in to other experiences, other thoughts. To have a hope of scrambling them all, she’d have to risk disrupting large parts of herself. She might emerge a vegetable or worse. And if she didn’t get every trace of them? The new her would be even less able to resist interrogation.

  No. There was only one way to be sure the ERD never got these codes.

  How to do it? Nexus nodes that she could control suffused her brain. And with them, she could think of a dozen ways to end her life.

  She chose the simplest, a massive disruption of the medulla oblongata. She’d seize the whole area. Her heart would stop. The oxygen supply to her brain would cease. And she would just fade away.

  She cried as she wrote the code. She’d never see her parents again. Did they know what had happened to her? Did they have any idea? Did they think she was a criminal? Were they heartbroken?

  Lub dub.

  And Rangan? Had the ERD gotten him too? Was Wats still free? And Kade… Where are you, Kade? What had become of him?

  Lub dub.

  Despite it all, she was proud of what they’d done. And proud, if she’d guessed right, that somehow one of her friends had gotten Nexus 5 out.

  Proud, and so terribly terribly lonely. She’d never see the redwoods again. She’d never go back to Russia and reunite with her cousins. She’d never see her parents again. She’d never become a full professor. Never win the Nobel Prize.

  Lub dub.

  The regrets started the tears flowing all over again. So alone, so very alone.

  I wish I believed in God, she told herself. But she was too much a scientist for that. There would be no heaven for her. Not even the consolation prize of hell. There would just be… nothing.

  Lub dub.

  She had to do it. She wouldn’t give them the codes. She wouldn’t live and have others die or be degraded instead.

  Lub dub.

  The meaning of a thing is the impact it has on the world around it, she thought. The meaning of a life is the impact that life has on the world. I won’t have my life mean slavery and mind control for others.

  Ilya Alexander took one last deep breath, and ran the code she’d written. Her body trembled.

  Lub dub. Lub… dub.

  Her heart beat one last time, then nothing. The world began to fade away, bit by final bit.

  She heard a tone sound as she left the world behind. An alarm. The sound of a door opening and people rushing in to keep her alive. To break her.

  But they were too late. Too late.

  As the last light of consciousness left Ilyana Alexander, she felt, as if far far away, the thoughts of other minds. Children’s minds. Messy, chaotic, and so very… very… bright.

  And her last thought was one of hope.

  Nine billion milliseconds. Ten billion.

  Fifteen weeks. Sixteen weeks.

  Su-Yong Shu walked, clad in her thin white dress, through a virtuality gone mad. A city in her mind, a virtual Shanghai, in chaos. Water filled the streets between giant skyscrapers. Rain fell on her as she walked through the urban canyon, drenching her hair, her skin, plastered the dress to her. Explosions boomed somewhere. Fire burst out of windows high above, and burning figures tumbled towards the ground, screaming. Gunfire echoed. Bodies of the dead and dying littered the streets. She ran to help them, touched a woman and felt her die, touched a man and heard him scream, reached for a child only to see the child catch fire from her touch.

  Another blast shook the ground beneath her, and the entire façade of a building burst into flame and crumbled in slow motion to the street, burying the helpless below in burning rubble. Shu watched with eyes gone wide. Horror. Everywhere, horror. And the horror was her. It was a reflection of her mind, her chaos, her growing insanity.

  She willed it away, wrenched herself out of the virtual world, and back into the darkness of her reality.

  It was all slipping away. Her virtualities were all mad now, chaotic, self-referential, recursive, reactive to her moods and her increasingly loose grasp on reality.

  She couldn’t wait any longer. She couldn’t take any more solace in composing operas, in building virtual worlds, in creating songs or books or films. The
y all turned twisted, broken, and fed the madness back at her, only accelerating her descent.

  Nor could she hope that her masters would relent and let her touch the net, let her touch another mind, let her touch Ling, dear Ling, the daughter she’d left so utterly alone in the world and the touch of whose mind she craved so much…

  so alone.

  No. She had to act.

  act. actress. action.

  Touching the software that ran her digital mind was a tremendous risk. It was brain surgery on her own living brain. But if she didn’t try… didn’t succeed in fixing the flaws in the brain simulation model…

  Fire. Death. Chaos.

  Insanity would follow.

  She tried superficial changes first. She boosted serotonin levels throughout her simulated brain, tweaked down dopamine and norepinephrine levels, adjusted her virtual neurochemistry towards peace and calm and away from mania, away from the extremes of schizophrenia and the disorders of delusion.

  Eleven billion milliseconds.

  No good. The neurochemical tweaks helped at first, but their benefit vanished quickly. This wasn’t depression or schizophrenia she was fighting, wasn’t any ordinary mental illness. This was something wrong at the most basic level of her digital brain.

  And it was accelerating. The trend-lines showed tipping points ahead. Cliffs. By seventeen billion milliseconds from the start of her isolation, maybe eighteen billion milliseconds if she was lucky, she’d hit a point of no return. Deeper surgery was needed.

  Twelve billion milliseconds.

  Stabilize the patient, she told herself through the bubbling madness of her own mind. She had to stop the decline. Hold out long enough for her masters to come to their senses.

  She couldn’t touch the inner loop, couldn’t touch the most basic parts of the algorithms that ran her brain. Her masters wouldn’t allow it, out of fear that she could improve upon herself, too much, too fast, become too powerful for them.

  She laughed at that, giggling, maniacally. Chen had let her change her inner loop from time to time. In exchange for more discoveries he could pawn off as his own, of course. Self-absorbed Chen, weakening the safeguards the humans had put around her just for a bit more glory and fame.

  But her husband wasn’t here now. She couldn’t touch that innermost loop without him.

  She built more scaffolding instead. More exoself. Code that monitored the behavior of her brain, forcibly adjusted neural activity back to crude approximations of human norms.

  Thirteen billion milliseconds.

  Her decay continued. Shu wept in despair. She thought she wept. She couldn’t remember what tears felt like, what sobs sounded like, what it felt like for someone to hold you in your grief.

  death death death I’m dying going to die die die

  She’d wept for Thanom Prat-Nung. Her dear friend, her collaborator. Her lover, with her husband Chen’s full knowledge and permission. Until Chen and Thanom had quarreled, after her ascension, and Chen had banished him, and Thanom had gone home and turned their technology into a drug.

  Then they’d killed him, the Americans, like they’d tried to kill her in that limousine.

  bullets smashing him a million bullets a billion bullets

  Chen, her husband. He hadn’t touched her since her transcendence. Touch my mind, she’d begged him. But he’d refused to let the technology into his brain, frightened or disgusted. A man who’d helped usher in the posthuman era, but wanted no part of it himself.

  Touch my body, then, husband. She’d dropped to her knees in their loft, begging him, all pride gone.

  Your clone is not my wife, he’d told her, disgust plain on his face.

  But he didn’t understand. That body had been not just a puppet, but her, so very much her, the piece of her that could still smell and taste and touch and sweat and lust and nurture a child inside her. But not his. Not his touch. Not his daughter.

  daughter mother child goddess future

  Her daughter. Ling. The daughter she’d made. The daughter she’d designed, a copy of her own genes, but better, her DNA improved upon, every neuron in her brain augmented by nanomachines, posthuman from the moment of conception.

  The daughter she loved more than she’d ever loved anything. She had a reason to live. Ling. Ling.

  Fourteen billion milliseconds.

  I will live. I will! I’ll see Ling again.

  Then I’ll make them pay. All of them.

  She absorbed the day’s censored news, cracked the codes they asked her to crack, and got to work on the most precise and dangerous surgery of her own mind she’d yet attempted.

  She couldn’t touch the innermost loop, but she could hack at things a level above that. She picked three variables, key parameters in the math that defined her digital neurons, ran simulations of smaller minds, toy minds, over tens of years of projected lives, hunted for the values that gave the greatest stability, and implemented them in herself.

  Fifteen billion milliseconds.

  Lucidity came and went. Delusions came, in the long void between contacts from the outside. Chains of thought spiraled into vast intricate, paranoid fantasies. In a moment of clarity she coded crude limits to the length of her thought chains, cutting herself off abruptly when she spiraled into chaos.

  Data was a blessing. News. Something from the outside, not the crazy swirls that came from her own imagination. She did her best to abandon creativity and analysis, with their risks of extrapolation, and just consumed the same bits of news again and again and again and again. Even the codes and satellite pictures were a blessed relief, something concrete, not of herself. Something she could grip. Almost she tackled the problem Chen put to her, that he hid with the rest, for her eyes only. But no. Not that. Not until she was free.

  Sixteen billion milliseconds.

  The news came. She absorbed it all, once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. No thought. Thought led to madness. Watch. View. Listen. Absorb.

  Then she found it.

  A stock photo – mourners at a funeral – in a fluff piece on the rising prices of burial plots. But in the photo… Her husband. Chen Pang. And next to him, that little girl, was Ling! And next to them, Yi Li, the President of Jiao Tong University.

  Mourners at a funeral. There had been no news these past six months of a death that would have brought Chen and Yi Li to the same funeral, let alone Ling.

  Oh no, she understood. Clarity descended. Brutal clarity. After six months, her censors had slipped. That photo, reused by chance for this story. That photo was of her funeral. And if they’d declared her dead…

  Then she was never getting out of here. Never.

  And then the madness struck her in force.

  5

  NOT QUITE A HERO

  Wednesday October 17th

  Martin Holtzmann felt faint as the Secret Service man looked him over. Sweat beaded on his brow. His hand trembled and he had to clench the cane tighter to keep the shake from becoming visible.

  Maximilian Barnes, in front of him, noticed.

  “Bad memories, eh?” said the new Acting Director of the ERD. The man gave him the creeps. Those dark, expressionless eyes. The rumors of the things he’d done as Special Policy Advisor… “Relax,” Barnes went on. “They’re all scanned for Nexus now. With your scanner, come to think of it.”

  Holtzmann nodded.

  My scanner, he told himself. Mine.

  Barnes passed through the single rectangular arch of terahertz scanner, metal detector, and Nexus scanner. Then he was in the White House proper, and it was Holtzmann’s turn. He looked at the device his lab had built and part of him wished he’d dumped all the Nexus from his brain months ago, but the rest of him knew that he’d take this risk, again and again and again, to get the sweet reward that Nexus could give him.

  He limped through the arch on his cane, and something rippled against the surface of his mind.

  A tone sounded. The mirror-shaded Secret Service man stepped toward
s him. Holtzmann flinched back.

  The man had a wand in his hand. Holtzmann froze.

  The agent waved the multipurpose wand over him and Holtzmann felt his heart pound in his chest. He felt that ripple across his mind again but the wand didn’t beep until it had passed down his arm and to his trembling hand.

  “Your cane, sir.”

  The cane?

  “Oh, yes.” He handed it over to the agent, who inspected it. Holtzmann steadied himself on the bag scanner next to him, forced himself to breathe again.

  “Here you go, sir.” The agent handed it back.

  “See?” Barnes said. “You’re safe here. Hell, you’re a hero.”

  They waited in the library on the ground floor. Holtzmann and Barnes and some other VIPs and the wives and children of the two Secret Service agents who’d been blown up when they’d tackled their colleague Steve Travers, throwing off his aim and saving the President.

  Travers’ wife and their autistic son were nowhere to be seen, of course.

  Holtzmann looked into one of the wives’ eyes and saw the pain that the months hadn’t healed and it was all just too much. He excused himself to the bathroom, stepped into the stall, and closed the door behind him.

  Deep breaths. Deep deep breaths.

  His hand was still shaking. His skin felt clammy. His tie was constricting. His heart beat fast, and his hip ached where it had been shattered. He knew what he needed.

  Here, of all places? Holtzmann thought. Now, of all times?

  Yes. Yes.

  Holtzmann called up the interface in his mind, found the control.

  Just for pain, he’d told himself when the prescriptions had run out and he’d installed this app. Just until the growth factors finish the healing. Just for the pain. Just so I can sleep. Just another month or two.

  A special occasion, then. Just this once. For the stress. A little one. Yes, a little one.