Nexus n-1

by Naam, Ramez

  She lay down, pulled him down next to her. His mind was full of curiosity, concern. What was going on?

  "Kade, Kade, Kade…" she whispered, her face inches from his. "Oh, Kade. Oh my god, Kade."

  "Hey, slow down there. You OK? What's going on?" Concern broke through. He was worried about her.

  How could she explain? How could she start? He didn't even know who he was, let alone who she was.

  "Robyn, talk to me…"

  She shook her head. "My name's not Robyn, Kade. I have to show you…"

  Sam wrapped her arms and legs around him, held him close. She wrapped her mind around his, sent comfort, peace.

  "This is going to be a shock to your system, Kade."

  Alarm. He started to squirm against her grip. She wouldn't let him.

  "Robyn, what the hell?"

  She whispered his counter-mantra, with her mouth, with her mind.

  Canyon, parakeet, cherry.

  She saw it, felt it. Awareness awoke within his mind. Denial. Confusion. Realization. He thrashed mentally and physically. She covered his mouth with her hand, held him tight, as gently as she could, blanketed his mind with comfort, with hushes, with reassurance. There was no danger. They were safe. Safe. She had to tell him something. About her. It was wonderful. It was awful.

  He quieted after a while. She pulled her hand away.

  "Sam… What the hell? What's going on? What are you doing?

  "Shhh… Kade… I'm sorry to pull you away. I just have to get this out. You're the only one."

  "Get what out?" He saw some of it then. The horror. The violence. The deaths. "Oh no… oh no… Sam…"

  She sent comfort. "No, Kade… It's OK. Really. It's all long long ago. It was awful. I was young. But… I'm better now. I'm the best I've ever been. I think I'm OK for the first time, maybe ever."

  He stared at her, not comprehending.

  "Kade, I just have to share this with someone, please. It's overwhelming. I have to get it out. Will you listen? Please?" She released her grip on him, opened her mind to him, sent him her need, her longing, the overwhelming urge to release the demons from her head, from her heart, to show him what she'd learned.

  He nodded, slowly, looking into her eyes. He felt troubled, surprised. The drugs were riding him hard with empathy as well. He felt compelled to connect, to understand.

  "OK. I'll listen."

  • • • •

  On the Boca Raton Jane Kim listened to the conversation. This was not good.

  "Sir," she said to Garrett Nichols. "We have a problem. Blackbird has dropped cover. The false persona is down. She's brought Canary's down as well."

  "What?" Nichols asked. He checked the time. There were still many hours of Nexus effects left for them. "Get her back in character."

  In the living room, old Niran rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The Lane boy had said many interesting things. Most of them were beyond his understanding.

  Still, the capabilities he'd hinted at were clear. And he knew someone who would be very interested in learning more. He considered, decided.

  Niran went into the other room, found his phone, made the call. The conversation was brief. Yes, the person he'd called was indeed interested. He understood that the boy was leaving Thailand in a few days. Yes, he was in Bangkok. He was occupied at the moment, but would come by in a few hours.

  Niran hung up the phone, smiled to himself. It would be wonderful to see Thanom again.

  35

  ROOTS

  "I wasn't born Samantha Cataranes. I was born Sarita Catalan. I grew up in southern California, in a little town near San Diego. My parents were Roberto and Anita. They both worked in bioinformatics, had met on the job. I had a sister, Ana." Sorrow welled up from her. Tears began to flow again, silently running down the side of her face. Kade felt troubled, concerned, empathic. He stroked her hair, sent kindness.

  "My parents were hippies. The kind of hippies who worked in tech but went camping with the family, had singalongs with friends. There were always a lot of friends around the first few years. I think my parents smoked pot." It made her laugh, even through the tears. Kade kept stroking her hair.

  "When I was eight, and my sister was four, the company where they worked was acquired by a bigger company. They had the option of relocating to Boston, or cashing out with a big severance payment. They took the latter." Her voice took on a faraway quality. She began to show Kade with her mind as she told him.

  "Some friends of theirs had moved to a place in New Mexico. They'd joined a kind of white collar commune. Everyone did some sort of work they could do remotely. Computer people, consultants, analysts, visual design people, some radiologists and lawyers. They all lived on this ranch. The idea was to raise kids together, to live in a place where they could share parenting duties, where they could be a little shielded from the law, maybe do some hippie things together."

  The images came across as bright and colorful. Kids running around in the New Mexico sunshine, smiling grownups picking them up and swooping them through the air, pushing them on the swings.

  "They had some shared rules and rituals. There was a Sunday night thing all the families had to go to. Somewhere between a church service and a town hall. It was a hippie thing." Her tears had stopped. She was trembling, though, anticipating something to come.

  Annoyance flashed across Sam's face. They were hailing her. Her superiors. Her eyes flicked to one side, silenced a notification.

  She looked back at Kade, became present with him again.

  "The place was called Yucca Grove." She swallowed.

  She saw Kade frown, the name familiar, reaching for the memory… "Yucca Grove? Isn't that where…?" His eyes went wide. Something chilled him. He pulled her closer. "Oh no, oh, Sam, I'm so sorry."

  "Shhhh. It's OK. I have to finish this."

  He held her as she spoke, as she showed him with her mind.

  "The first couple years were good. Really fun." Laughter. Carefully contained bonfires in the back. Two dozen "cousins" and playmates. Hiking in the green Sangre de Cristo mountains. And love, love, love. Her mother's kind face and melodic voice. Her father's mischievous sense of humor. Her sister's squeals of delight at each new prank and trick they played together.

  "Then it started to change." A listlessness in her parents. Laughter draining out. Smiles only during the rapture of Sunday nights. A rapture she didn't share. A rapture Ana didn't share. Then the bad men.

  "It was called the Communion virus. It tweaked the brain. It was supposed to bring people closer together, make them less selfish, more empathic. It did something to the temporal lobe, one of the circuits involved in religious experience. It was supposed to put people closer to God. It did that. It also made them slaves." Anger rose up in her. The bad men. The ones who were immune. The way they took over the enclave. The way they made everyone else serve them. Stole their money. Crushed their spirits. The control. The abuses.

  "Some of the survivors claimed that the whole commune had chosen to take it together. Some say they never took it, that someone used it against them as a weapon. I can imagine my parents trying it voluntarily. They weren't scared. They loved the idea of group living, of altruism, of harmony." It came out bitter. She was still angry with her parents. Angry that they'd failed to protect her. No… not her. That they'd failed to protect Ana.

  "I don't know. I can't ask them. They died." Kade was numb, horrified, concerned, just watching, listening, empathizing, trying to comfort her with his mind, with his arm around her and his hand stroking her face.

  "There were thirteen of them that ran the place after that." Their faces filled her mind. The memory of their cruelties, their abuses. The cigarette burn on her thigh. The blow that had knocked a tooth out of her mouth. Worse. Much, much worse…

  "The prophet and his twelve disciples. All men."

  She flicked her eyes to one corner to dismiss another message from her superiors, brought her eyes back to his.

  Kade swallo
wed. He wanted to look away, wanted to not hear this, not know this. He endured. He held her and listened, sent her what comfort he could.

  "The prophet. He was a bastard. He was naturally immune. It didn't drag him down. He figured out that he could make all the rest do what he wanted. He found the others, the ones with the most resistance, all men. Made them his disciples. Let them have anything they wanted, as long as they reinforced his control."

  "They set themselves up as gods. The Sunday night meeting… it became worship. The virus made everyone want to believe. They used every trick in the book to set themselves up as gods and everyone worshipped them."

  "Almost everyone. It only barely worked on me. It didn't work at all on my sister. We couldn't understand what was happening to everyone else. It was crazy. I tried to run away when I was eleven. They caught me – beat me. My mom and dad just watched. I tried again, and the prophet and his disciples beat me within an inch of my life. I tried to stab one of them with a fork, once, and they whipped me half to death, left me tied to a fencepost all night, burnt me with cigarettes." The memories were brutal and painful. Kade lived them with her. Sam was numb to it. Tears streamed down his face.

  "After that they kept a close eye on me. They didn't let me near any phones, any terminals, any knives. They used those people as cattle. Took their money. Took whatever women they wanted. Beat up the men for sport." She remembered it. Living in hell. In a prison camp. She knew it wasn't supposed to be this way.

  "They started using me when I was twelve."

  Kade moaned with the memory of it. Sam just stared off into space.

  "I fought the first few times." She'd clawed them, bitten at them, lashed out like a wild animal. "But they always won. It hurt less if I just let them." The pain and humiliation of surrender – of submission. The disgust of it. The self-loathing.

  "After that… I just gave in. I just started pretending that the virus worked on me. I told Ana to do the same." The act of dewy innocence. The complete submission to any request, any authority, the feigned enthusiasm at the Sunday night rallies. It killed Kade. The tears kept flowing. He was sending Sam love and compassion, not for the adult her, but for that twelve year-old child, helpless and alone and abused, utterly abandoned by the world.

  "I went two years that way. I thought about killing myself every day. I thought about killing one of them every day. What kept me going was Ana." Her sweet sister, also unaffected by the virus, confused, hurt, scared. How Sam had tried to comfort her, hold her, raise her, shield her, protect her, show her some small bit of joy in this godforsaken place.

  "It changed when I was fourteen. I'd gotten used to the abuse. I only got hurt when one of them was in a bad mood. Then one day, I was taking a walk with Ana, and one of them saw us, and he had this look, this leer on his face, and I was so used to that, and I didn't care anymore what they did to me. But then I realized he wasn't leering at me. He was leering at my little sister. And I thought, oh my god, if any of them touch you I'm going to kill them all, every one of them, with my own bare hands."

  She was crying again. The numbness was gone. Old rage and fear and impotence replaced it. She could be numb about the pain she'd endured. Not about her fears for her sister, for the one innocent human being she'd tried to protect in those years.

  "So I did what I should have done a long time earlier. One of them took me to his room. He used me hard. And after he'd spent himself, and he'd fallen asleep, I did the bravest thing I could imagine. I slid out from under him… I went out into the other room, where his phone was, and I picked it up. I hadn't touched a phone since I was nine. It beeped when I pressed the keys. I was so terrified he was going to hear me…"

  Kade felt her memory, that childhood terror. They would kill her for this. They would beat her. They would rape her sister. She would never escape…

  "…but I pushed 9-1-1 and it went through. And I told them where I was, and that the prophet and his disciples had made us slaves, and that they were about to hurt my sister, and that my parents had become zombies, and I didn't listen to any of their questions, and I hung up." Adrenaline was coursing through both their veins now, the memory of danger, of courage, of pushing her luck.

  "And then I put the phone back and snuck back into his room. And when I crawled back into bed with him, he started to wake up. And so I fucked him, told him I wanted him so bad, did anything I could to distract him." Kade remembered it, remembered it through Sam. The fear. The shame. The way she'd hated him as she did it. The way she'd imagined him bleeding and broken and dying as he'd taken her, the way he'd mistaken her hatred for passion.

  "A little while later there was shooting. A sheriff's deputy had rushed out to the site, and one of the disciples had shot him, killed him." My fault, she'd thought. I killed him.

  "No, Sam, no! That wasn't your fault!" Kade told her.

  She smiled sadly at him, put her finger to his lips. "I know, Kade. I know that now. I thought I knew that already. Now I do. Finally.

  "After that it was a siege. All the slaves… my parents, the other parents, even the kids. They all worshipped that man, the prophet. Every family had guns. He'd made sure of it. He told us all that Satan's forces were coming to take us to hell, and we had to protect ourselves. The feds arrived. The FBI's Bioterror Division. Someone had picked up on the word 'zombie'. It wasn't the first Communion virus outbreak. Just the worst.

  "The prophet told the feds that we'd rather die than go with them. That if they invaded we'd blow ourselves up, burn ourselves alive, all of us, including the kids.

  "The siege lasted three days. The FBI played loud music. They brought in preachers. They brought in shrinks. I'd never seen Ana so frightened.

  "On the fourth day I woke up in the middle of the night. It was 2.28am. I remember that on the clock. I'd slept maybe an hour with all the music and all the people running around. And I just knew what I had to do. My dad had a gun, like all the rest. I snuck into their bedroom. He was asleep. It wasn't his shift to be on guard. His pistol was on the nightstand. I took it, and I put on a pretty dress, the white one, the dress that the worst one, the prophet, liked to dress me up in when he fucked me. I hid the pistol under that dress, and I went to see him. People just chuckled when they saw me. They knew what that dress meant.

  "There was a guard at his door, one of the other parents, a fat one, not one of the disciples. The light was on underneath. I told the guard that he'd sent for me, that he wanted me to come to him in the middle of the night, that he had a 'blessing' for me." She spat the word out in disgust.

  "The guard understood. He didn't have any sympathy for me. He just saw me, and wanted me, and wanted to serve God and the prophet. He let me in.

  "The prophet was behind his desk, looking at his terminal. He looked up, saw me in that dress, looked me up and down. 'Sarita,' he said. 'What do you want?'

  "And I pulled out the gun. It was huge. The guard was already turning away to go back into the hallway. The prophet saw the gun, and he yelled." The memory was so fresh in her mind. She remembered every instant of it, the position of every piece of furniture, every sound, every moment frozen forever as a still image. "He tried to come at me, but his desk was in the way. I pulled the trigger and my first shot missed completely. The gun jerked up towards the ceiling. The guard was turning around, coming at me. The prophet was most of the way around his desk, coming at me to slap the gun away. " Sam remembered the huge boom of the pistol, the smell of it, how the gun's kick had shaken her whole body. She remembered the fear, the way he was growing larger in her sight, the knowledge that she was about to die and fail – and be beaten and be killed – and have her sister raped in front of her.

  "I panicked. I tried to jerk the gun down to level it and pulled the trigger again. I fired wild. The guard hit me at the same time.

  "He knocked me to the ground. He tried to kick me. Somehow I still had the gun. I pulled the trigger again and the guard fell on top of me. He was fat and huge. There was blood eve
rywhere, all over my dress. I tried to pull myself out from under him. I got part of the way but my legs were still stuck. I looked up and I saw the prophet. He was getting up on his feet. I'd shot him. There was blood on his shirt, his left arm. I'd shot him and knocked him down and now he was getting up. He had a knife in his right hand. He started coming for me and I pulled the trigger again, took him in the stomach, and he fell down to his knees."

  Sam stopped speaking. The scene played out for Kade in his mind. I hate you, she'd whispered to the prophet. He'd coughed up blood and she'd shot him again, in the chest, and he'd flopped backwards. And then there had been more gunfire, from everywhere. The FBI had heard the shots, taken it as their cue to enter. The defenders at the gate were firing back with shotguns, rifles, pistols. People were screaming. More gunshots, coming closer. More screams.