Nexus

by Naam, Ramez

  Now Kade was nervous. "So you're asking me to spy on someone who could, conceivably, have me killed or something if she finds out?"

  Becker smiled slightly. "Rest assured we'd pull you out immediately if we perceived you as being in any danger. And you'll have support with you at the conference. If something long-term emerges in Shanghai, you'd have support there as well."

  I don't have much choice, do I? he thought. Maybe Ilya was right. We could have gone to the press, to the public…

  No. It wouldn't have worked. How many stories like that had Kade heard about in the past? Had he done anything? He'd signed some online petitions. Had he rushed to people's defenses? Had scientists around the country risen up in protest? Fat chance. Everyone just kept their head down, massaged their research proposals, tried to skirt as close to the edge of what was allowed as they could without endangering their federal grant dollars. He felt sick, ashamed of himself, ashamed of his profession.

  Becker closed the cover on his slate and looked at Kade.

  "For the last topic, and for the technology briefing we'd like you to do for us, I turn to Dr Holtzmann. And now I must attend to other matters. Dr Holtzmann will see to your transport back to San Francisco. We'll send someone with you to confiscate any Nexus materials you have there. Aside from that, we'll be in touch shortly. We have two months until the ISFN meeting, and we'll be asking a fair bit of preparation from you, most of it to ensure your safety." With that, Becker got up, took his slate, and exited the room, closing the door behind him.

  Kade's head was spinning. Technology briefing. Confiscate Nexus materials. He was having trouble breathing again. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. They were taking Nexus away from him. They were taking it for themselves. He was handing them this power, and giving up on it himself. He had to find a way to limit the damage they could do.

  But how could he?

  He was dimly aware of Holtzmann saying something to him.

  He missed it for a moment. The idea came to him whole. Was it possible? Yes. Was there time? He had no idea.

  Holtzmann said something again.

  Kade snapped back to the room.

  "Sorry? I missed that."

  "I asked if you're well," the elder scientist replied.

  No. I'm not well. But I'm not going to roll over, either. "Umm, yeah. Sorry. It's just a lot to take in."

  Holtzmann nodded. "Do you need a break?"

  Kade blinked. What was done was done. He could only move forward.

  "No. I'm fine now. Let's go on."

  Holtzmann nodded again, opened his own slate, tapped on it for a moment, and the wall screen transitioned to a new slide, showing a single graph, labeled "Su-Yong Shu: Impact Factor of New Publications."

  Holtzmann spoke. "We have one last piece of background on your mission for today. It concerns Su-Yong Shu. She's an exceptional scientist. From the very beginning of her career that has been apparent. A number of years ago, however, something changed."

  Kade absorbed the graph as Holtzmann spoke. Shu's impact factor rose rapidly, solidly through her early career. Then there was a break, three years gone from science, while she took time off to raise her daughter. When the line reappeared, it was markedly higher than it had been when it dropped off. And it had a new, steeper slope – rising faster and faster every year.

  "As you can see, Kade, the career trajectories before 2029 and after 2032 appear quite different. Those three years represent a discontinuity. The early Su-Yong Shu showed every sign of a successful career. The Su-Yong Shu of 2032 and later goes beyond that. She shows signs of almost… superhuman brilliance."

  Kade considered for a moment. "Maybe she did a lot of thinking while she was at home? Came up with new ideas?"

  Holtzmann nodded. "That would produce a temporary boost upon her return. Instead, what we see is a long-term acceleration. Every year after 2032, she diverges further and further from her pre-2032 trajectory. This sort of change is unprecedented."

  Kade tilted his head. "You think something changed about her. That she got smarter. Augmented."

  "We have no proof…" Holtzmann said slowly. "But this is very suggestive."

  Kade nodded. Her work was indeed very very good. Awe-inspiring even. "The kind of augmentation you're talking about… That's not just a little memory boost or concentration aid. It's better pattern recognition. Better creativity. You're talking about enhancements beyond anything known about in the field today…"

  Holtzmann nodded. "Yes. She shows signs of being augmented in ways that surpass anything that we know of. That is something which concerns us." He paused, then continued. "And it's interesting that the first report of Nexus 1 came in 2033, just seven years ago… and one year after Dr Shu's return to science." Holtzmann let that hang in the air.

  Kade frowned. "You're saying Su-Yong Shu may have created Nexus? She's not a nano-engineer."

  "Do you know any nano-engineer who could have designed Nexus?"

  No. Not even close. "A team of engineers…" Kade suggested.

  "We've had teams of nano-engineers look at Nexus, try to reverse-engineer it," Holtzman said. "The Japanese, Germans, Brits, and Indians all have as well. No one has more than scratched the surface."

  "So what are you saying?" Kade asked.

  "I'm saying that Nexus may defy human understanding because it is not the product of normal human thought," Holtzman said. "It is the product of posthuman thought."

  And you're sending me spy on her? Kade thought.

  Holtzmann tapped his slate. The wall screen went dark and the room lights rose. "Now it is time for you to brief us on your Nexus 5 work, and transfer to us all materials you have on it – all design notes, experimental results, all of it."

  Kade swallowed. "The materials are in SF."

  Holtzmann raised one white bushy eyebrow.

  "It's a precaution we took," Kade said. "The master code is on a system that's kept offline."

  "Very well. We will do the first stage of the technology briefing now. And we'll send an officer with you back to your lab to retrieve this data. You'll hand all data and physical materials over to our officer, and he'll return them to us."

  Kade bowed his head in assent. Here we go.

  Warren Becker opened the door into the room where Sam stood, silently observing the briefing Kade was receiving through a viewscreen. Becker walked up to her, placed his hand on her shoulder.

  "Sam. How's that injury?"

  Sam nodded, put a hand on her side. "Healing, sir. The growth factors are doing their work. I should be fully fit for service in a week."

  "Good," Becker said. "What did you think of the briefing?"

  Sam shook her head. "There's a lot there. I wish I'd known the whole picture before the mission last night."

  "Some of it was need-to-know, Sam. We didn't expect things to go the way they did last night."

  Sam nodded. "Yes, sir. I understand." She paused for a moment, then continued. "Sir… I'm not sure that I'm the right person for the next phase of this mission."

  Becker snorted. "Sam, you're the perfect person for this mission. You have more experience with Nexus than any field agent. And you have a great alias that fits the mission needs."

  "I know. It's just…"

  Becker waited a moment and then prompted, "The failure of your memory implants was a valuable lesson, Sam. We'll improve the implantation process from that. You'll be better prepared for a Nexus 5 connection than any agent who hasn't experienced it."

  "That's not it, sir. It's that… It's that I… I enjoyed it, sir. I question my objectivity."

  Becker chuckled. "If drugs weren't enjoyable, people wouldn't abuse them. There's nothing new there."

  Sam looked down at her hands. How to get through to him? "Sir, when I was being held captive, and no longer part of the Nexus… connection that they'd established, I missed it. I wanted to be back in that loop. I wanted… something that goes against everything I stand for." Sam was faltering now.


  "Agent Cataranes." Becker said it in a tone of command.

  Sam snapped her eyes to him.

  "Samantha, I know how you were raised. I know what happened to you and your family at Yucca Grove. I know about Communion virus and the things you were exposed to. It's exactly because of those experiences that I have complete faith in you. You, among all people, understand the dangers of this tech. I know you won't falter in your duty. You're going on this mission because you're the available field agent with the best relevant experience and positioning. You're going because I have one hundred percent confidence in you. And you're going because it's an order. Is that understood?"

  Sam let go of the breath she was holding. "Yes, sir. Understood."

  Becker smiled fractionally. "Good. Now, we have an additional briefing for you. Tell me what I haven't told Kaden Lane."

  Sam turned her eyes back to the briefing room, where Kade and Holtzmann were finishing up. "At a guess… This mission isn't just to learn what we can from having someone close to Su-Yong Shu. If possible, you want more. You want her to try to turn Kade, with whatever techniques she's been using. So we can study them in depth."

  Sam paused for a moment, then finished her thought. "Which means that Kade isn't just a spy," she said. "He's bait."

  7

  EXPLANATIONS

  TRANSCRIPT: RANGAN SHANKARI, TECH BRIEFING, "NEXUS 5"

  Sunday February 19th 2040 0951 hours

  [NOTE: Subject should be considered hostile.]

  INTERVIEWER: OK. Let's start again. Tell us about Nexus 5.

  SHANKARI: [inaudible, likely profanity] Fine. Nexus 5 is Nexus, but with software layered on top.

  INTERVIEWER: What does that mean?

  SHANKARI: We found a way to program it. We found a way to get data in and out. To get instructions in and out.

  INTERVIEWER: What kind of data?

  SHANKARI: Neural data at first. We were using it as a way to measure neural firing in the motor cortex. Individual neurons, but millions of them at a time.

  INTERVIEWER: This was for your research?

  SHANKARI: Yeah. The goal was to get the data from the brain, decode it, and use it to control a robot arm.

  INTERVIEWER: Systems like that already exist. Why the research?

  SHANKARI: Existing systems get implanted surgically. That limits them. The procedures are long. You can get infections. And you can only tap into tens of thousands of neurons. The motor cortex has maybe ten billion neurons. With Nexus, we could tap into more of them. Millions. Tens of millions. We could get finer control over robot arms. You could catch a ball, write with a pen, do stuff you can't do with current systems.

  INTERVIEWER: Go on.

  SHANKARI: Well, we knew we could get data in too. Nexus nodes talk to each other by radio.

  INTERVIEWER: How do they talk by radio?

  SHANKARI: I dunno. Fucking nanotubes are little radios all by themselves, man. There's a lot of nanostructures in Nexus.

  INTERVIEWER: OK. Software.

  SHANKARI: Software. Yeah. So, anyway, they talk by radio. They sync up. Every node has some way of saying what part of the brain it's in. Every node listens for broadcasts addressed to its part of the brain, so it knows when to fire. If we could crack that, we could listen in on brain activity, and we could make neurons fire in whatever part of the brain we wanted.

  INTERVIEWER: Why would that be relevant to your work?

  SHANKARI: There's a million reasons. More than that. But for us it was about feedback. Sending the brain information on what the arm was touching, where it was relative to the body. Without that, an artificial limb is useless.

  INTERVIEWER: So again, systems like that exist. Why your work?

  SHANKARI: Same reason. More neurons. Higher bandwidth. Higher sensitivity, more precision, no surgery. Next question?

  INTERVIEWER: Software. How did this lead to software?

  SHANKARI: Yeah. Well, we dosed up some mice, started recording all the signals…

  INTERVIEWER: Where did the Nexus come from?

  SHANKARI: [pause] We bought it from a guy on the street.

 

  INTERVIEWER: Your pulse just shot up ten points, you're starting to sweat, and your systolic blood pressure just went up by five. Try again.

  SHANKARI: [sighs] We made it.

  INTERVIEWER: How?

  SHANKARI: We autosynthed it.

  INTERVIEWER: How'd you get past the censor chip?

  SHANKARI: [pause] We got access to an old one. It's out of date. The updates haven't been installed on it for years.

  INTERVIEWER: Who's the license holder?

  SHANKARI: [sighs] Crawford Lab. They've got a newer fancier one. Their old one mostly just sits idle. I've got access to their lab. They never knew.

  INTERVIEWER: Where'd you get the molecular structures?

  SHANKARI: We got the chemistry from Recipes for a Revolution. I smuggled a hard copy back from India.

  INTERVIEWER: And the source material?

  SHANKARI: All over. It's mostly innocuous. The only problem is there are so many different molecules in Nexus… sixty-three different molecular parts. The autosynth only had one chemreactor. We had to do sixty-three runs, then hand mix in the right proportions.

  INTERVIEWER: OK, back to the software.

  SHANKARI: Yeah. Fine. So we recorded the signals. It was a bitch. Way too much going on. We did more and more mice studies, tapered down the doses as low as we could go. We started injecting straight into the brain to get the lowest possible doses, simplify the traffic between the mice, simplify the analysis for us.

  INTERVIEWER: How long did it take you?

  SHANKARI: Most of a year. We would do the dosing before we left lab each day, then record activity overnight. The results made no sense. The signal traffic was chaos. Huge volumes of chaos. There was nothing that looked like the position of the nodes.

  INTERVIEWER: And then?

  SHANKARI: And then… and then we hit pay dirt, man. Kade figured it out. The nodes don't know where they are in the brain. They know where they are relative to other nodes in the same brain. How much position data they send depends on how many nodes there are around 'em. And it's not even really position data. They figure out what functional region they're in, send that in their signals. It's fucking amazing. [shakes head] Anyway, once Kade figured that out, the data miners cracked the encoding. We could listen to brain activity, and trigger new activity anywhere we wanted.

  INTERVIEWER: And this led to software how?

  SHANKARI: [drums fingers] It was the damnedest thing, man. Once we understood the encoding, we could tell there was room for a lot more data in those signals. There were unused bits. So we just started fucking around with it one day, on a lark.

  INTERVIEWER: And?

  SHANKARI: And… it would do shit. It would store the data we sent it. If that node sent out a signal again, we'd get the data back. If we sent specific modifier signals, we could tell two nodes to talk to each other, to add their values together, or subtract them. We could do logical operations. [Shankari stops talking, shakes head] It still blows my mind, man.

  INTERVIEWER: You'll share these codes with us, all of this data.

  SHANKARI: Like I have any fucking choice.

  INTERVIEWER: So you could make Nexus nodes perform logical operations and math operations. Go on.

  SHANKARI: Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted.

  INTERVIEWER: So that's what you did? You wrote the Nexus operating system on top of the instruction set that you'd discovered in Nexus nodes?

  SHANKARI: [shakes head] That would've been way too hard. We wanted to do neuroscience, not operating system development. So we port
ed something instead.

  INTERVIEWER: Which was…?

  SHANKARI: ModOS. It's free. The source code is all available. It's built to be portable, modular. It's built to run on any kind of hardware, down to the simplest possible instruction set. So we took that. We built a simple compiler to turn ModOS into a set of instructions that would run on a set of Nexus nodes.

  INTERVIEWER: So the Nexus OS is really ModOS, running on Nexus nodes as its hardware.

  SHANKARI: [nods] Yeah. You got it.