Nexus

by Naam, Ramez

  Sam understood it as he spoke. She caught the sense of the linked thoughts behind his words. Semantic mapping. Sensory mapping. Emotive mapping. Calibration and assimilation. All the things they needed to enable mass Nexus connectivity.

  Because they'd made it, Kade and Rangan and a few others. They'd taken Nexus 3 and they'd cracked some of its code. They'd learned to program Nexus cores, to tell them what to do. They'd added on layers of logic and functionality. They'd turned it into a platform for running software inside the brain. They'd brought this thing in her mind to fruition.

  It took her breath away. She felt Kade's pride. She felt her own awe at his brilliance, at their accomplishment, at their audacity. She wanted him then. Wanted to swallow his mind up like the city inside her, experience all of him at once, know what he knew, feel what he felt, really understand what was happening inside her.

  And she felt fear. A chill up the back of her spine. A strong sense of foreboding.

  Sam brushed it off. She fought for words.

  "Kade. Kade. Show me the party. Take me out there to meet everyone else."

  Kade laughed. "You're just coming up. Want to practice this a little more with one person before you're out there with a hundred?"

  In his thoughts she read amusement, caution.

  "I'm ready," Sam replied. "I want more. I can handle it."

  I want it all, she thought.

  Kade chuckled. "Alright, let's do it. Party time."

  He stood up, smiled, and backed a step away.

  Sam took a deep breath, steadied herself, and rose to a seated position. So far so good. She could feel Kade watching, evaluating, taking mental notes on her responses, her equilibrium, her affect.

  She looked up at him, met his eyes, and held out her hand. Kade took it to help her rise to her feet.

  Their touch was electric, frank, revealing. She sought out his attraction to her, wanted it, found it buried beneath his scientific curiosity, his commitment to the experiment of which she was now a part, his cool observation of her. Sam blazed at Kade, showed him her hunger, her craving for more, her will to assimilate everything around her, starting with him.

  He was at once amused and impressed. And his mind was awesome, full of knowledge and experience she craved.

  Sam rose smoothly to her feet, Kade's hand still held but unneeded. She stood inches from him, face at his level in her tall boots.

  "Show me," she asked him. He knew what she wanted.

  He flushed crimson, let go of her hand, broke eye contact, laughed to hide a bashfulness that he could not possibly contain, and backed away again.

  "You're something else," he said. "A natural for this. It's not as easy as you think, though. Internal mapping is one thing. That level of depth with another mind just isn't doable right now. Not enough bandwidth. Not a rich enough protocol."

  Sam saw the truth of it in his mind, saw also that he was holding back from her. There was more. Disappointment. She'd be patient.

  "OK." She smiled, despite herself. "Out into the party?"

  Kade took her hand again, grinning, broadcasting excitement. "Sam, you're gonna love this."

  And she saw that she would.

  He led her out of the chill space and into the crew room, up to the heavy, shielded door that led to the main hangar.

  "I'm going to let you feel a little at first, then more and more over time."

  Kade opened the door. Music hit her. Electronic and tribal, rhythmic and trancedelic. The genre they called flux. Compelling enough to dance to, relaxed enough to not.

  At the same time a different kind of humming filled Sam's head. The sound of many voices, muted, distant, but all speaking at once. More than sound. Information. Meaning. Emotion. Excitement. Giddiness. Apprehension. Awe. Impatience. Heartbreak. Desire. Contentment. All there. All at some remove from her. Nothing like the experience she'd had within herself. But these were other minds!

  Kade led her through the doorway.

  The hangar had been transformed. The lighting was saturated with slowly changing colors now, shifting through the spectrum. The corner they were in was rich blue shifting to indigo and violet. Across the hangar from her it was red turning orange. To the left it was yellow turning green.

  Scattered across the hangar were people, scores of them. Enough to add life to what had been a large and empty space. They were dressed for a San Francisco party night: short skirts and tight pants; velvet and vinyl and faux leather; tattoos, piercings, and marginally legal biomorph body art that shifted and flowed as they moved. She felt them in her mind. Gay, straight, and bi; singles, couples, triads, more complex networks still.

  This boy-scientist had brought her into the heart of the counterculture. And the counterculture was dosed with Nexus.

  Above and around them, the smartfabric-covered walls undulated in time to the music now. Liquid silvers, reds, and blues flowed across the curving inner surface of the hangar, like ripples emanating from each tribal, elemental beat of the music Rangan was playing. It was transfixing, organic. She stared at it and knew that the track was "Buddha Fugue" by the group Apoptosis, the rhythms inspired by the sounds of Thai drumming meeting crashing surf as heard through the hashish-addled ears of band member Sven Utler, one hot summer night on the beaches of Koh Phangan.

  It came to her in a flash. She simply knew it as if she'd always known it. As if she'd heard this track a dozen times, heard the story behind it from Sven or Rangan or Kade already.

  Sam caught her breath. It was a great track, the kind her hips wanted to move to, but she didn't care. They just beamed that into my head! What she could do with that technology! What data archeology could be like! Education! Anything!

  She turned to Kade, mouth agape, eyes full of wonder. He grinned at her. He knew her thoughts and she knew his: infectious enthusiasm, excitement at her excitement, pride in his accomplishments.

  Like a boy showing off his toys, she thought, and he blushed and looked away and giggled.

  Kade took her by the hand then and led her into the crowd. They passed a pair of people, standing facing each other, arms moving oddly, clumsily, giggling and laughing out loud at each other.

  "What are they doing?" she asked Kade.

  He grinned at her. "We call it push/pull. They're using Nexus to move each others' bodies. Sending impulses to each others' motor cortices. Or trying to. It's not easy for most people."

  She stared at them.

  "Can we try that?" she asked.

  Kade grinned again. "Later."

  He led her further into the hangar, towards the circle of reclined couches. Something was going to happen there, she read from him. An experiment. And she could be part of it.

  "This is the closest we've come to people mapping each other. To the calibration experience across more than one mind. Want to try it?"

  Yes. God yes. She wanted to swallow them all whole.

  No, a small voice protested within her.

  She ignored it, nodded mutely to Kade.

  A half-dozen men and women were already reclining on the couches. There was room for a half-dozen more. As she and Kade approached the rest of the minds in the space faded. She could feel these six now, and clearly. She could feel Kade. The rest of the party was blanketed in mental silence.

  Kade was behind her. His hands touched lightly on her shoulders. He led her to one of the couches, helped her to sit. He crouched at her side.

  Others arrived, took their seats. A dozen of them on the couches and a few watchers nearby.

  "Ready?" Kade spoke aloud, pitched for her alone.

  Sam nodded.

  Something happened. Eleven more minds grew larger in her perception. They brightened, swam more fully into focus. They were so full. So alive with thoughts and memories, emotions and desires. Her breathing synchronized with theirs. She closed her eyes and she could see and feel their individual lines of thought.

  Eleven minds touched her at once in eleven parts of her psyche. Here was Brian'
s sheer joy at the crazy, meditative, ebullient madness of playing mind to mind with his friends. Here was Sandra's deep reservoir of calm and poise, her years of yoga, her pool of peace, anchoring those around her. This was samadhi to her. Here was Ivan's physicist's appreciation of the math and music in the interplay and dance and harmony and discord of the thoughts around him. Here was a vision in Leandra's mind, of protein shapes, folds and receptors and binding sites, of a dozen men and women connected in mind to decode them… Here were tears on Josephine's face, tears of a joyous memory of childhood, fireworks with her beloved Dad, lost to her. Lost like… like…

  There were tears on Sam's face now. She didn't know why. She could feel Kade watching her, concerned. She had no answer for him.

  Each person had not one thread, but many. They intertwined in parallel, each connected to the others. Thoughts and memories shifting and flowing. Sandra's first fumblings with other girls in her preteen years. Antonio's comprehension of quantum programming, the edges of understanding any of it just beyond what Sam could capture. Jessica's rapture in freefall dives from twelve thousand feet, the adrenaline of jumping, the calm of popping the chute, her bliss every time she hung below that fabric wing and steered herself to the ground, singing and breathing and soaring untethered.

  She knew Sandra's love of the stillness, the meditative, I-amin-my-body glory of her daily practice. It spiraled within Sam, found her memories of sparring bouts, the absolute beauty of a perfect strike or block or dodge. The serenity of perfect form, the adrenaline of a hard and close fight, the endorphic come-down bliss that followed. And… and…

  She felt Kade, still. He was with them, with her. And his mind… his mind… She knew the beauty of the Nexus core. The sublimity of its design that awed him, staggered him. She tasted the pure abstract space within him where he did his best work, apprehended a tiny bit of the protocol he'd built with Rangan, the semantic layer between individual neural connections and whole thoughts. It was a glorious thing, a map of all the kinds of pieces of thoughts, an ontology of consciousness. It existed in him in part of his mind beyond doubt or fear or even consideration of others. Part of him so beautiful and yet so distant and so alien and so very, very much hers for this brief time.

  Sam saw through his eyes. Saw the flows of thoughts and emotions and experiences as bits and packets and traffic patterns, not cold and dry, but gorgeous in a symphonic way, an orchestral way. They were individual instruments coming together to create a richly textured whole, greater than the sum of its parts. She saw his aspirations, to transcend the boundaries of individual minds, saw how Ilya had shaped his thoughts, saw a glimpse of the path he thought might just be feasible, his wonder at a future nothing like the past.

  She was crying then. Crying because Kade's mind was so crystal clear and his vision so pure and so awe-inspiring in its way and yet so terrifying to her. Crying with Josephine at shared loss, of parents ripped away in youth, of childhood lost. Crying at the loss of Kade's parents so recently. Crying at a memory of pain and fear that Sandra had uncovered, Sam wounded in the night, left arm hanging useless, blood dripping into her eyes, terrified, not sure if she would see the dawn, not sure she could get past the one last guard…

  She was confused, disoriented. Memories that made no sense were arising. Josephine experienced Sam's memories of her parents' last Christmas in San Antonio. Yet she also knew Sam's sorrow at the death of them, years in the past. At the horror of something not clean, not fast, not accidental…

  Leandra's experiences in proteomics touched Sam's identity as a data archeologist. Sam worked for corporations to unlock value from their legacy intellectual assets. Not Third World government databases… Not records of human and transhuman experiments…

  She felt their collective concern. Kade most of all. Felt them reaching out more tendrils to her, to soothe her, buttress her. Each contact triggered a memory. An all-nighter in college cramming for her differential equations mid-term. Her first triathlon, that place beyond exhaustion, beyond bliss, beyond anything but moving her body again and again and again… Pushing herself that hard in the Iranian Caspian, north-east of Sari, terrified out of her mind, trying to make that rocky beach in Turkmenistan, not knowing if backup would truly be there…

  Sam was losing her mind.

  She liked to bike. She swam. She'd graduated with a master's in DA with honors. She had two loving parents. She had a memory of a gun, huge in her young hands, the man she'd shot lying in a puddle of his own blood, slowly bleeding to death, deserving this and more for the horrors he'd inflicted…

  Yet Sam remembered her training for this mission. Another dose of Nexus, Nexus 3, the palest shadow of her current experience. A briefing. An assignment. A mantra that veiled who she was…

  Sam understood then. It overwhelmed her. She understood who she was, understood the betrayal of herself that this experience constituted. It came out in a jumble through the upper layers of her mind. Sam felt the bewilderment of the minds she was connected to, each of them seeing just a part of it. Felt their growing alarm. She had seconds to act.

  NOOOOOOOOO!

  It came out as a scream from her mind and throat, unforced, perfect for her needs. Sam wrenched her mind away from them, as brutally as she could, felt things tear inside her, saw and knew them stunned and disoriented.

  She remembered her name. Samantha. Samantha Cataranes. She remembered who she was.

  Tactical contacts came online, had always been online, dropped layers of threats and recommendations and escape vectors and supplemental information on her.

  [EXTRACT EXTRACT EXTRACT], her display read.

  Arrows pointed towards escape vectors. Alternate exits. Ceiling hatch seventy feet above her. Likely weak points in the wall. Back out the door she'd come in through. She chose the latter.

  Samantha Cataranes stood up. Force of will pulled her out of the chaos of the drug high. Years of training took over. She swept her vision across the scene around her. A score of names lit up, faces recognized, bios scrolling. All green or yellow. No gross threats.

  Her fingers found her slimline in her boot, tripped the emergency uplink sequence. Buffered data pulsed out instantly at emergency power. Everything she'd seen and heard going out to her watchers.

  The phone pulsed once, twice, three times, violating FCC power regs by a cool order of magnitude, expending a quarter of its fuel cell to get the message out.

  White noise shot through mind space, tearing up mental cohesion. Sam saw one or two go down with their hands to heads. Her own head ached. The music stopped.

  She turned towards the door then. The voices and minds around her were starting to burble, coming out of their stunned and pained silence. Few of them had caught what had really happened, but they had caught on that something bad had occurred indeed.

  That was sick. That was wrong. I can't believe I took part in that.

  Images of the mind meld she'd just experienced bounced through her, nauseating her, reminding her too much of… of… of what she'd killed to escape.

  Time for reminiscing later. She caught a glimpse of Kade on his knees, vomiting onto the floor. She felt a pang of pity, of regret. Time for that later, too.

  She strode towards the entrance, locked her mind down. Crowds parted. Then she felt a mind against hers, saw him move to block her path. Watson Cole.

  He felt hard, poised, resigned. Pacifist or no, he was not going to let her pass.

  [Combat Threat. Extreme Caution.]

  Alternate routes flashed on her display. Arrows towards other escape vectors. She could turn and run, beat him to an exit.

  But Sam was not in the mood to let some burned-out jarhead stand in her way.

  She blanked her mind, weaved towards him unsteadily on the floor, brought her left hand to her stomach, her right to her face, feigned a disoriented stumble to the left as she reached him, came out of it in a vicious right-hand backfist to his temple.

  Wats was unfooled. The big black Marine had a
nticipated the move or something like it. He brought his hand up to block, fell back, barely twisted the blow aside as he gave ground.

  Good. She was faster than he was. Her fourth-generation enhancements outclassed the Marine Corps' third-generation techniques. The ERD saved the best for its own.

  Sam's next two blows were already in the air in the close space between them. Hard jab to his solar plexus, low kick to his knee. Wats parried the first, still falling back, lifted his leg and let his raised calf absorb the damage of her kick.

  Cole was good. Experienced. Deadly. The Marine Corps' thirdgeneration viral upgrades had made him stronger, faster, less sensitive to pain than any normal man.

  Sam was smaller, shorter of reach, lighter of muscle, but she'd been taught by the best, and she had the better technology. Fourth-generation posthuman genetics gave her nerves like quicksilver, muscles like corded titanium, and bones of organic carbon fiber.