by Ramez Naam
“Motherfuckers!” Sam exploded.
“Can you help me home?”
And some part of her wanted to wade into that village, and find those men, and hurt them. But the rest of her knew: that way was the past. She took Jake’s arm over her shoulder. Took as much of his weight as he would give her, and they started the long walk home.
“We’re done,” Jake told her on the walk home.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“The money’s gone. Apsara, the woman who started this place and left it to Khun Mae. She left money behind to run the home when she died. But it’s gone.”
“But we sell the meds from the greenhouse…”
Jake shook his head. “Not enough. There’s food to buy. Repairs for the truck and the house. The doctor’s bills for Aroon last year, for Kit the year before. The bribes…”
“Bribes?”
Jake snorted. “We run an unlicensed orphanage. Our brains are loaded full of a drug that’s still technically illegal. Yeah. Bribes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t want to know.” Jake snapped at her. His thoughts were rough, angry. Sam felt herself pull away. Then he gentled. “Sorry. I’m beat. I just… I never thought you were interested in that side.”
Sam nodded. They walked in silence for a while, Jake limping as they made their way up the road. Her mind worked through fantasies. Taking the children with her, going to Phuket, or starting a farm, or taking them back to the States somehow.
None of them made sense.
“So what now?”
Jake coughed. She could feel the pain in his ribs where one of the men had punched him.
“The Mira Foundation. The folks who pay me. They have their own orphanage, with other Nexus kids. They want to take ours in.”
Sam blinked. “That… That’s great! Other kids. You said they learn faster the more there are, right? They’d have more friends their own age. We could…”
“Sunee,” he cut in. “Sunee.”
She paused, and turned her face to his.
“They won’t take you. I tried. I tried hard. But they don’t know you. They only want the kids. And me.”
12
POTENTIAL
Friday October 19th
Shiva Prasad smiled and bounced the boy on his knee as the salt breeze caressed them both. The child’s mind was a marvel, staring out at the azure waters of the Andaman Sea as the sun dipped towards them, full of questions about the world out there.
Why can’t we live under the water, Shiva? the child asked.
Shiva smiled, his white teeth splitting the brown of his aged, leathery skin.
Well, he sent the child. We can’t breathe down there, for starters.
He sent concepts along with the verbalization – lungs, oxygen, air pressure.
But the fish live there, the child sent. How do they breathe?
Shiva smiled again. So bright. So inquisitive.
The fish have gills, Shiva replied. The gills let them breathe in the water.
He sent an image this time, the slit-like gills of a fish.
Why don’t we have gills? the boy asked.
We evolved on land, Shiva sent. We didn’t need gills.
The boy frowned, clearly unhappy with this answer.
I want to live in the water, he sent to Shiva. When I’m older, I’m going to give us gills.
Shiva laughed out loud this time, kindly, and tussled the boy’s hair, even as the child sent him an image – his own youthful body, gill slits in his neck.
I’m sure you will, my boy. I’m sure you will.
Later, after one of the teaching staff had come to take the boy to rejoin the others, Shiva stood alone at the battlements of his island home. He stared out to the west as the waves swallowed the last rays of the sun. The breeze blew through his long, white, fine hair. The thin white robe he wore rippled in the wind. Shiva stood relaxed, yet his spine was as straight as any soldier’s, schooled by a lifetime of hard work, bolstered by the biotechnologies that kept him more fit than any man his age should be.
Beneath those waves he could feel the reefs, feel the corals, real-time sensors feeding their health into the Nexus nodes in his brain. He had only to close his eyes and invoke the right command and he could feel them growing again, returning to health, adapting to the ever warmer, ever more acidic waters of the world. Because of him. Because of what he’d done. Because of his crime.
Out there to the west, a thousand kilometers across the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal beyond it, lay his true home. Mother India. The land that had birthed him, embraced him, celebrated him, and then rejected him.
They revere me, Shiva thought, but when I act for the greater good, when I do what must be done, they punish me, outcast me.
The virus had been his idea. With the thawing Arctic belching ever more carbon into the skies, with solar shields caught up in endless political debate, with every attempt to reduce the warming and acidification of the planet falling short of what was necessary, someone had to take the initiative. And so he had. Survival genes, culled from the coral species with the greatest tolerance to heat and acid, inserted into a viral vector that would spread those genes to every coral reef in the world, give them precious decades of additional life. And it was working, bit by bit, restoring life to nearly dead reefs, strengthening others. Just a buffer, just ten or twenty years’ worth, perhaps. But at least he’d done something.
And how they hated him for it. Unilateral, they called it. A crime against nature. Uncontrolled experimentation. Unsanctioned madness.
Shiva shook his head. As if any of the governments or NGOs or environmentalists had any better idea.
It had cost him his home. The Prime Minister himself had passed word to Shiva. The prosecution could not be stopped. It would be best if he were gone. The Burmese were happy to have him, of course. Billions in crypto cash and his promise of assistance with their biotech programs had won him their support.
But worse, it had cost him his wife, his love.
“You’ve gone too far, again,” Nita had yelled at him, through the tears. “You promised.”
She broke his heart. What could he tell her? That it was her doing? That she had changed him from a man who cared only about himself to one who sought to make a better world? But she’d never loved his methods, never loved the ruthlessness he’d brought to his good works. For him, this was the logical extension of who he was and what she’d taught him. Words never solved anything. If you believed in something, you had to act to make it happen.
For her it was the final straw.
Shiva sighed. Humanity has lost control, he thought. It can no longer govern itself or this planet. It can no longer guarantee its children a future. The world needs new leadership. Posthuman leadership.
Was he willing to embrace that mantle? With all that it would mean?
The offices of Dunn and Broadmoor were on the sixtieth floor of a glass and carbon-fiber building in London’s West End. They might as well have been in Antarctica for all that their location mattered to Shiva Prasad. What mattered was that the consultancy was very good at what they did, and that they had a track record of extreme discretion.
Shiva projected himself there from the rooftop of his island home. Custom networking software atop the Nexus OS took his posture and gestures and facial expressions directly from his mind’s representation of his body and mapped them onto the three-dimensional digital image the conferencing bot projected at the other side. It took the video and audio received by the conferencing bot and piped them directly back into his mind. One moment he was watching the sun set over the sea. The next moment he was in a luxuriously appointed private conference room thousands of miles away.
He took the meeting still dressed in his simple white robe. Loving Nita had changed him. He could still remember the day he’d met her. A gala celebrating India’s immense victories in the 2024 Olympics – victories made possible by the nearly undetectab
le genetic tweaks Shiva’s firm had provided to the team. He’d been high on his secret success, his offshore accounts stuffed to overflowing, his address book filled with the private numbers of members of parliament, of cabinet ministers. Tall, handsome, and rich. The untouchable billionaire. No woman could resist him. None had in years.
Until Nita. Slender, elegant, and utterly captivating in her backless green gown, her long black hair done up in elaborate piles atop her head. Dark eyes dancing with mischief. Lips he wanted, needed to kiss. Hips he intended to grip as he took her in the night. An Indian woman who dressed and spoke like a brazen American. A software tycoon’s daughter who devoted her time and money to charity. He’d inquired about her, then approached her, knowing she’d be his. She’d rejected him instead, then and there, just shaken her head and walked away as he tried to speak to her. She’d walked away from him, Shiva Prasad, the most eligible man in India!
He pursued her across two years and three continents, lured by the self-confidence that allowed her to reject him. He gave to charity to impress her, started his own foundation, endowed it with tens of millions, invited her to sit on its board. And bit by bit she gave him tiny snatches of her time. Not in the boardroom, but in the slums. In the refugee centers. In the disaster zones. In the impoverished schools. On research vessels surveying the melting Arctic and the other dying oceans. She pulled him into her life, showed him a larger world, a world that needed him, a world where his mark could linger on long after his life ended, through the ripple effects of his good deeds.
And at the end of that process, she did not become his. He, a changed man, became hers.
That was the end of most of his luxuries of wealth – the cars, the clothes, the women, the vacations and yachts and jets and opulent chalets. It surprised the world. Hadn’t he come from the poorest of poor backgrounds? An orphan from the mean streets? An untouchable who’d become one of the most ruthless business tycoons of the decade? Surely with his billions he’d relish all the material pleasures life had to offer.
The changed Shiva knew better. Luxuries and indulgences were distractions from true greatness, tawdry and ephemeral baubles that dissipated energy that could be directed toward more meaningful and durable accomplishments in the world around him.
Yet one must wear the costume to play the role. And so it was that he absorbed the briefing in white cotton, but thousands of miles away, his avatar appeared in the semblance of gray silk Armani.
“We’ve clustered around eighty per cent of the Nexus users into three demographics,” Kenneth Dunn was saying. He was tall, forty-something, handsome in all the ways that money could buy, with a genetically squared jaw, broad shoulders, and perfectly black hair. He might even have bought those genetic tweaks from one of Shiva’s own companies.
“Cluster one: Mid-teens to mid-twenties of age, urban and suburban, medium to high income, roughly even gender split.”
“Recreational users,” Elizabeth Broadmoor piped in. “Party kids.” She was barely more than a child herself. In her late thirties still, incredibly successful for her age, able to afford the cosmetic gene modifications that gave her the glossy blonde hair, flawlessly tanned skin, and lithe figure of a woman ten years younger.
Dunn nodded. “Cluster two: Thirties to fifties, suburban, tilted towards high income, sixty per cent women. These are parents of special needs children. Autism spectrum, ADHD, etc...”
“And cluster three?” Shiva asked.
Elizabeth Broadmoor spoke up. “This is the one you asked us to look for. Highly educated, mostly high socio-economic status, fifty-five per cent male, urban and suburban. They’re highly international. What unites them most are the features you suggested: high scientific literacy, high IQ, careers in engineering, computing, and the sciences. These are people seeking out Nexus for themselves, to connect and enhance their own performance. These are the intelligentsia you thought we’d find.”
Shiva nodded. “And the numbers?”
“These are extrapolations, of course,” Dunn said. “We have only indirect data. There’s a wide margin of error.”
Shiva nodded. “Of course.”
“Around one point three million total Nexus users,” Dunn said, “plus or minus forty per cent.”
Shiva stroked his chin thoughtfully, and the suited avatar did the same. The numbers were similar to the other studies he’d commissioned. “And the long-term projections?”
“A year from now we expect five million total Nexus users,” Broadmoor answered. “Around one million in your cluster three. At three years and five years it gets much harder to predict. Media events, public perception, law enforcement effectiveness – those all affect the numbers.”
“Understood,” Shiva nodded. “Go on.”
Broadmoor took a breath. “Growth is strong. Consumer demand is high. Word of mouth spread is off the charts strong. By year five, we’re looking at anywhere from twenty million to one hundred million Nexus users, worldwide.”
“And the last number?” Shiva asked. “The children?”
We could have one of those, Nita, Shiva thought. A beautiful child. A posthuman child. Even now. You’re not too old, not with modern technology...
But Nita had always seen having a child as selfish. Why bring another soul into this world, she’d say, when there are so many out there that need our help?
And Nita was gone from his life.
Elizabeth Broadmoor’s façade cracked just a tiny bit as she answered. “Using the previous estimate,” she said, “by year five we expect half a million to two million children alive born to Nexus mothers.”
Later, Shiva stood on the inner balcony and looked down into the tree-lined courtyard. The boy he’d bounced on his knee was down there, along with a dozen more like him, their minds linked with each other and with three adults. Their linked brains were playing a game, or so they thought. A molecular design game, searching through genetic sequences that would yield a protein that would go even further in restoring the world’s corals, in protecting them from the acidification of the seas. Shiva closed his eyes and he could see the shifting protein shapes in the children’s minds, writhing, folding, refolding, transforming as the youngsters searched the possibility space for a new way to save the world’s reefs.
The expertise in this game came entirely from the adults – molecular biologist and biochemists with deep knowledge in the calcifying proteins used by corals. But the raw skill in the game, that came from the children, who tapped into that knowledge and then applied it together at staggering speed.
Shiva pulled himself back and focused his mind’s eye on the numbers floating in space above them. And then he nodded to himself. Tonight, on this game, these children were outperforming even the most sophisticated supercomputers.
They were learning to merge themselves into an intelligence that had no human equal. They were destined to exceed him, to exceed any solitary human, perhaps to exceed any computer that now existed on Earth as well. And they were just the beginning.
There would soon be millions of scientists and engineers running Nexus. Another million children born to Nexus mothers, as these had been. What could all of those minds be turned into, if linked together?
Humanity was failing. It could not solve the problems it now faced. But those millions of Nexus-augmented minds could. They could become a single posthuman intelligence of epic scale. A god forged out of humanity, finally able to manage the planet through its Anthropocene calamities. But those millions would not merge willingly or easily. Shiva would need to forge that god out of its component pieces, would need to give it direction, to turn it into the rightful governor of this world and the people on it.
And for that he needed Kaden Lane.
13
BO TAT
Friday October 19th
Kade stared grimly at the road as Feng steered the jeep over bumps and around potholes. The headlights turned this narrow dirt road into a tunnel through a dark and foreboding wilderness.
>
Twice now. Twice the same code had been used for murder. Once in DC, when they tried to kill the President. And now in Chicago, to kill dozens more.
Twice was a pattern. This was a new PLF weapon, a new method of operation. They were going to keep at it, keep up with bombings and assassinations, in the name of posthuman freedom.
War. That’s what Su-Yong Shu had said. War is coming. Between human and posthuman. Millions will die.
No, Kade told himself. Not with my technology.
Kade closed his eyes, started reviewing every bit of data he had on Code Sample Alpha, looking for some way to track it back to its creators.
Kade felt Ling touch him as the first hint of color touched the horizon. Feng splashed the jeep over a narrow jungle stream and on down the winding road from mountain to coastal plain, and then she was in his mind, pushing away code windows and files and everything else.
Feng! Kade!
The world shifted the way it always did when she found him. He saw the world as Ling saw it. He could feel the primitive electronic brain of the jeep, of the phone in his pocket. He looked up and the night sky overhead was crisscrossed with violet beams of wireless data, pulsing with bits that he could reach out and touch. Beyond them, blazing yellow communication satellites wheeled in their orbits, brighter than the stars, chattering endlessly to the ground and one another. Data was everywhere, flowing through him right now...
Ling, Kade sent her. He felt Feng reply as well.
They’re looking for you, she told them. Both of you.
Who is, Ling? Kade asked.
Everyone, she sent him. Be careful.
Ling. Who? Kade asked. Where are they looking? What do they know?
I have to go, she sent. It’s time to get Mommy out.
Kade felt alarm rise from Feng.
Be careful! the Confucian Fist sent.
Ling, wait, Kade sent Who are they? Where are they looking?
But she was gone from both their minds.
It was an hour after dawn when they reached the outskirts of Ayun Pa village and took the tiny dirt turn-off to reach the monastery. The road took them up a jungle-covered hill. Kade let out a breath when they rounded a bend and the walled monastery appeared in front of them. He’d been half afraid they’d find only a smoldering ruin or bounty hunters waiting for them.
