Crux

by Ramez Naam

His diaphragm spasmed and he couldn’t breathe. His dark world turned red. Then something unclenched and sweet air rushed back into his lungs.

  “Towel,” the voice said.

  Something heavy and soft landed on his face. The world went from merely dark to pitch black. He knew what came next. He was ready for it.

  The water came down on the towel. He felt the pressure a second before he felt the wetness on his face. Then it was in his mouth and his nose and he couldn’t breathe. He was being suffocated. His body jerked and spasmed on the table, reacting involuntarily, trying to free itself from whatever was smothering it.

  He felt it all from a distance, buffered by the serenity package.

  They’re not gonna kill me, Rangan told himself. Just a trick, a bluff, a head game.

  And then the water was gone and the weight of the towel was gone and Rangan forced himself to gasp, like any normal person would, like anyone who didn’t have a piece of code controlling his reactions would. Gasp. Breathe. Fill up on oxygen. Breathe.

  Stupid fuckers, he thought. You’re not gonna break me.

  Then he heard another voice. Female this time.

  “Pulse sixty-five. Galvanic skin resistance… unchanged. He’s suppressing.”

  What?

  Then the first Voice. “Naughty naughty, Rangan. But we’ve figured out how you’re holding up against us.”

  What?

  Then his shirt was being tugged up, and something cold and hard was pressed into his side and then

  AGGGHHGHG!

  Electricity coursed through him. His body jerked again, spasming and straining.

  AGGGHHGHG!

  They shocked him a second time. A third. Garbage scrolled across his mind’s eye as Nexus nodes were disrupted and Nexus OS suffered critical faults. The serenity package failed with the rest of Nexus 5. His shield against fear was gone. Sweat beaded on his brow instantly. His pulse raced again, his stomach knotted up inside.

  “Pulse jumping,” the woman’s voice said, emotionless. “Suppression eliminated. Clear to proceed.”

  No. Oh no. No no no no no.

  Then the wet towel was on Rangan’s face again. He held his breath, instinctively, terrified now, and they punched him. He gasped as the air left him and he couldn’t breathe couldn’t fucking breathe and when he could he gasped in again – but it was water not air, choking him, filling up his nose and mouth and lungs and he was coughing it out, his whole body convulsing and his arms and legs pulling so hard he was cutting himself on the straps and the water kept coming down and he couldn’t breathe and his heart was pounding and he panicked and tried to breath harder and oh my fucking God I’m going to die.

  Then the water was gone and he was coughing and coughing and thought he was going to puke into the mask and the towel and then finally sweet air between the coughs.

  “You like that, Rangan?” the Voice said. “Because I can keep doing this all fucking day.”

  Fuck you.

  He tried to say it through the fear and the water in his lungs but all that came out was a long fit of coughing. The Voice laughed. Rangan gasped for air. He reached through his terror for some witty insult and they punched him again and the air rushed out of his lungs and when he sucked back in it was only water and he was fucking drowning again and please God, please, fucking God, please motherfucking God.

  And then he was coughing, and coughing, and coughing and then he retched and the awful chocolate drink they’d been feeding him came back up with the sick taste of bile and he was drowning in his own fucking chocolate puke.

  They ripped off the towel and mask and he retched and convulsed again, puking to the side into a bucket and squinting his eyes against the intense white of the bright, clinical room. And before he could turn his head to see, finally see, the face of the Voice, the mask was down over his face again, smelling of chocolate and bile.

  He lay there panting for a while, the vomit buying him a reprieve.

  They’re not gonna kill me, he told himself again as he panted. He tried to cling to that, even without the serenity package. Motherfuckers want me alive. Won’t let me die. Just hold on, hold on.

  Then the towel came back and then the water came again and it would be better if he didn’t even try to hold his breath but God help him he couldn’t fucking help it, and so he did and then the fist came down like he knew it would and the breath exploded out of him and when finally the air rushed back into his lungs it wasn’t air at all, it was the ocean drowning him like when he’d swum out too far from the beach at Goa and he’d started panicking and going under and didn’t know which way the shore was or which way was up or down and he was sure he was going to die this time and the water kept coming and he was retching and convulsing and pulling at the restraints and his wrists were burning with the pain as he yanked and yanked and his eyes were bulging and the water just kept fucking coming and he couldn’t breathe God I can’t breathe I can’t get to shore I can’t breathe I’m drowning here and it kept coming and every time he coughed he just sucked more water in and no air until he wasn’t coughing, wasn’t coughing, wasn’t breathing, and the world was going gray and he was going under the waves now and he couldn’t fucking breathe and God help me I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going under, going to drown here can’t get to shore can’t get up to the air going to drown going to die and then the world jerked around him and even as he was dying he felt the gurney snap all the way to upright and his head snapped back and he was vertical – the emergency position emergency dear God I’m really dying.

  They’ve lost it they’ve fucked up I’m really gonna die.

  A fist slammed into his gut and he still couldn’t fucking breathe.

  Gonna die here gonna die.

  The fist slammed into him again and he tried to cough the water out but he still couldn’t fucking breathe and he tried to let go and give into it and live his last seconds on earth in peace but he just couldn’t do it.

  Sweet Jesus I’m sorry I’m so sorry. Please I don’t wanna die.

  Then the fist slammed into his gut a third time and he coughed out fluid and gasped for air and then he retched and his stomach convulsed and he was puking again, puking into the mask, into the mask, still dying.

  Then it was off him, and he was heaving and coughing and gasping for breath. And even though he was trying not to he was crying and he was whispering something…

  “Please… Please… You win… Please… No more…”

  They cleaned him up, brought him clean clothes and hot soup, and questioned him for three hours.

  Nexus OS came back online as the Nexus nodes restored themselves. He thought about launching the serenity package again, but he trembled just thinking about it. That way led pain. That way led torture. That way and sooner or later they’d kill him for real.

  Instead, he told them everything. How the back doors worked, all three of them. The hacks in the compiler to bake them into Nexus even though they didn’t exist in the source code. The obfuscation tricks that hid the back doors and passwords as random ones and zeros scattered among billions in the binaries, indistinguishable from the parameters that governed millions of neurons, nearly impossible to reverse-engineer.

  And of course, the passwords themselves.

  He told them how they could build a new compiler from scratch to evade the back doors, but he could tell they didn’t care. All they wanted was the current passwords, and how to use them.

  Which meant that they wanted to break into minds already running Nexus 5. Which meant that it had gotten out.

  Which made him scum.

  They walked him back to his cell this time, blindfolded, but unrestrained. When he got there the blindfold went away, and there was light in his cell, and a bed that didn’t have straps, and a viewscreen. And as he sat down, the door opened again and an orderly walked in with a tray of hot food.

  His stomach rumbled at the smell and sight of a warm, solid meal, even as something inside him broke at the
understanding of just how badly he’d sold himself out.

  He looked down, not able to meet the orderly in the eye, and as he did, he heard a sound, a door opening somewhere down the hall and he felt something, something incredible.

  Minds. Many minds. Children’s minds. He felt them and they felt him and they were weird and warped and full of chaos and he was trying to understand who they were and what they were doing here.

  Then the door clanged shut, and the minds were gone, and he was alone with his traitor’s meal.

  7

  DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

  Thursday October 18th

  Kade watched as Feng steered the open-top jeep down the narrow mountain road, away from Chu Mom Ray and towards the plains and the monastery of Ayun Pa. Afternoon light filtered through the lush jungle foliage around them. Feng maneuvered them expertly around ruts, rocks, and fallen branches. The wind felt good on Kade’s skin, a welcome cooling in this heat.

  Kade leaned back and closed his eyes to work. He’d spent the last week offline, in areas with no net access. Now they were approaching civilization again. He reached out to the phone networks, and from there through a cloud of anonymization servers to the broader net. Nexus traffic flashed around the world, now, disguised as other sorts entirely. In the vast data flows of machines talking to machines, it was a bare trickle of bits, easy to hide.

  Information streamed into his mind. Software collated it, organized it.

  First he surveyed the reports from the agents he’d sent searching for Rangan and Ilya. Small autonomous pieces of code, they used the backdoors he and Rangan had installed in Nexus – with the new passcodes Kade had set just hours before he’d released Nexus 5 – to search the minds of Nexus users, hunting, always hunting…

  Ilya would hate this, some voice inside himself whispered. I’m invading privacy on a massive level.

  Kade ignored it. He’d started down this path to find her. Her and Rangan.

  It wasn’t easy to write a bot that would sift someone’s mind for knowledge of two individuals. What to key off of? Their names? Their faces? And if someone had heard one of their names? Had seen one of their faces in the news?

  He’d had to endlessly fine-tune the variables. The face or name of either of them – spoken or read – in conjunction with a sense of captivity or imprisonment or prosecution or law enforcement. The person he was looking for would be an ERD employee, perhaps, or part of the wider Department of Homeland Security, or a contractor, or their spouse or lover or confidant. Someone who knew where Rangan and Ilya were, who would help Kade find a way to free them.

  Over the last six months he’d gone through hundreds of false hits. Today there were dozens more, the consequence of his time in the wilderness between Cambodia and Vietnam. One by one he replayed the memories and discarded them. False positives, every one.

  When he was done, he moved to the next category, the code updates. He’d pulled down hundreds from the most popular Nexus hub, the place where programmers and neuroscientists and others gathered to chat about, analyze, debug, and improve the Nexus OS that he and Rangan and Ilya had built.

  Nexus OS was open source now. Anyone could change it. And hundreds did. The updates came thick and fast. Bug and crashes fixed. Security holes closed. New ways to share data, to write apps. Performance speedups. And deep neuroscience tools for working with memory, attention, emotions, sleep, and more, all the way down to raw neutotransmitter levels.

  So much more than we could ever have done on our own, Kade thought. Hundreds of people hacking on Nexus now. Lots of them smarter than I am. The progress is amazing.

  Kade lost himself in it, the sheer joy of the code and the windows it opened on his mind lifting him.

  After an hour, regretfully, he pulled himself out. There was one more thing to catch up on. The one he hated – coercion software. Code for subjugation, domination, and torture. Code used to steal. Code used to rape. Code used to enslave others. He had agents out searching for it – searching for the signal of its use, searching for the patterns of its design.

  The first time he’d found such code, he’d reacted crudely, destroying the repository, forcibly purging Nexus from the brain of the man he’d found working on the enslavement tech.

  The rapist on his knees, screaming. The mixed sense of revulsion and power Kade had felt as he’d ripped through the man’s brain, deleting all the code he found, then forcing the Nexus painfully out of the slimebag’s skull.

  But that was no solution at all. Code would be backed up, or if not backed up, could be recreated. Someone forced to purge Nexus could procure more later, dose themselves again.

  He’d grown more sophisticated since then. He’d turned the tools of the subjugators against them. He stopped them, reconditioned them, made sure they weren’t a threat to anyone ever again. He took them down and neutered them and it felt so good, so right to stop those bastards.

  Nairobi. The sex-slaver writhing on the dirt floor of the smoke filled room. Kade smiling in grim satisfaction as he mentally rewired him, as he crippled the man’s sex drive and cross-linked violent thoughts to body-racking seizures, made sure the bastard never hurt anyone again.

  Yes. Take them down. Stop them. That felt good, at least.

  You’re the one turning into a monster, Ilya whispered to him. He could see her face as she spoke. Pixyish. Earnest. Stern. You’re invading people’s minds, taking control of them. It’s the power you love.

  I don’t have any choice, Kade interrupted the voice in his head. Not until I finish Nexus 6.

  What did Ananda ask you? Ilya whispered to him. “Are you wiser than all humanity?” Are you, Kade? Are you?

  You weren’t even there, Kade told the voice in his head. Then he ignored her.

  One thing was true. He couldn’t keep up this way. He couldn’t stop them all himself each time. There were more people running Nexus every day, and still just one of him. He needed to make Nexus itself smarter, more resistant to abuse. Nexus 6, he called it. And every one of these abuses he stopped, every one of these chances to stop a monster, was also a lesson he could employ in Nexus 6, a type of abuse that wouldn’t be possible when he finished it.

  He went through the finds his agents had made over the seven days he’d been offline. False positives, most of them. Bogus hits that weren’t really abuses.

  Good. For once he was ahead of the game.

  Twilight fell as Feng drove. Kade turned at last to the thing that moved him most.

  His software agents were everywhere now, in hundreds of thousands of minds, searching for his friends, searching for abuses. His agents spread using the back doors in Nexus, using one of the codes Kade had updated in Thailand, just hours before the ERD’s attack on Ananda’s monastery had forced him to release Nexus 5 into the wild.

  In most of the minds they entered, his agents found neither signs of abuse nor signs of his friends. But that didn’t mean that they found nothing. They found a human being, after all, a thinking, breathing, feeling person, a spark of light.

  And as his agents sent pings back to Kade, he became aware of all those hundreds of thousands of minds, all around the world, and just the tiniest glimmer of what they were thinking and feeling.

  He closed his eyes once more now, and let all that data pour through him. The software in his mind visualized it, placed those minds on a shadowy globe as points of light, the shape of continents visible in the diffusion of minds over the earth’s surface, a pattern like nothing so much as the night-time lights of civilization as seen from space.

  Kade slowed his breath, opened his palms atop his knees, and let the minds of the Nexus users of the planet wash over him. It was like a sound, like the surf of the ocean against a long shore, like a rushing river nearby. But it wasn’t a sound. It was pure mind, pure thought, pure emotion.

  That wash of mind was inchoate, formless, a white noise of thought. Kade breathed, and let himself sink into it, let his thoughts dissolve into that ocean of incipien
t consciousness, until it filled him, until there was nothing of him left, until he was just a vessel, filled up with the tiniest echo of the thoughts of humanity.

  Then he slept, and dreamt of a day when that mind would not be formless, when Nexus would conjoin humanity into something more.

  Kade woke in the darkened jeep. An alert was flashing in his mind, flashing, flashing.

  He was disoriented. The alert was part of the dream, part of humanity becoming something else, something greater.

  But it wasn’t.

  [Alert: Coercion Code Sample Alpha Detected. Status: Active.]

  Kade’s heart caught in his throat.

  Code Sample Alpha. The code used in DC, in the attempted assassination of the President.

  Kade shook off the disorientation as best he could. Now was his chance. He could stop them. He could catch them.

  He clicked on the link to the mind in the status notification. Encrypted connection formed. Backdoor activated, full immersion. Password sent. And he was in.

  Breece smiled at the waitress as she brought him another coffee. She smiled back warily. He was just another customer at this interstate diner. Tall, muscular, maybe good-looking once, but now with a bulge of belly growing under his grimy T-shirt, his long hair tangled in dreadlocks, a ragged beard not quite concealing the scar that ran down one side of his face.

  He stirred cream into the coffee, took a sip, and turned his attention back to the cheap slate in front of him.

  Timing. It was all about timing. A punchline delivered too soon gets no laughs. The late bird gets no worms.

  For maximum effect you had to time something just… so.

  8.47am. There. The inflow of people to the building was hitting its max. Men and women waved their passes, stared into the retinal scanner, and then walked through the bulletproof glass doors. On the other side, when the doors opened, he could see that the queue in the lobby was backing up, DHS employees waiting to make their way through the bomb sensors and Nexus detectors inside. Breece smiled to himself. The Nexus detectors DHS had added were just slowing things down, creating a new bottleneck, a place of rapidly rising density of targets.