Crux

23 CAT AND MOUSE

Sunday October 21st

Saigon – Vietnam’s beating heart of commerce and culture and vice. Still officially known as Hồ Chí Minh City, it was universally referred to by its older, pre-unification name. It was a place Kade and Feng hoped they could blend in, lose themselves among the tourists and expats from all over the world, rather than risking the lives of more monks.

They had some money. A grateful father in Cambodia had sought them out at a monastery, pressed a thick bundle of bills into Kade’s hand, thanked him for the work that had pulled his daughter out of a coma. Kade had tried to refuse, but the father would hear none of it. Kade tried later to give it to the monastery, but Feng had insisted he keep the gift, just in case.

Feng drove them through the night now, south and east again, risking the main highways this time, opting for speed.

They reached Saigon mid-morning. Feng parked the jeep in a storage lot in the outskirts. They strapped their packs on their backs, and took a bus towards Bến Thành Market and the tourist hub of the city – just another pair of backpackers exploring what Vietnam had to offer.

From Bến Thành they walked to the backpacker district around Bùi Viện Street and lost themselves in the morning crowd. Even at this hour there were people about. The faces around them were mostly Anglo, but some Asian, some Indian. Whatever the face, the language on the street was English, with American accents, Indian accents, Chinese accents, German accents, Australian accents.

Signs offered hair braiding, custom tailoring, American food, Chinese food, all-night dance parties, body piercing, smart drinks, tours to the Mekong Delta, live sex shows.

And then there was the Nexus. Half the store fronts used cheap transmitters tuned to a Nexus band, broadcasting advertisements at them. Smells and tastes came at them. The feel of fingers kneading their shoulders. Tantalizing images of the entwined bodies they might see inside. Whiffs that hinted at pot for sale, at other drugs more exotic. The sensual feel of skin against skin, with more available for a price.

Feng spun around with his eyes and mind wide, taking it all in. Kade laughed, kept some distance from it, yet couldn’t help but take an interest.

There was Nexus in the minds around them as well. Kade kept his thoughts reeled in tight, and so did Feng. Others around them were less cautious. A pair of South African girls, tall and blonde, just coming down from their room for a late breakfast, giggling together, their thoughts on food and sun and last night’s debauchery. Three Indian boys, sipping tea in an open-front café, talking out loud, thinking of weed and girls.

This was a place where Nexus was used openly. A place where Westerners and Asians alike came and went, where Kade and Feng would not stick out. A place where they could disappear.

They passed advertisements for Nexus applications that could resculpt your personality – give you confidence or adventurousness or dedication or good humor or whatever it was you felt you lacked. Be who you want to be, they said.

Halfway down the street, Kade felt another advertisement, more sophisticated than the rest. He let it touch him, let himself absorb the sensorium it was pushing at him.

Welcome to HEAVEN, a seductive female voice spoke into his ear. And then he was inside the club, touring it, the laser lights and smoke machines and pearly gates décor and sexy dancers dressed like angels inundating his senses. And despite himself, he smiled. Rangan would have loved this.

“We’re here, Feng,” Kade said aloud. “This is the place.”

They took a room in the hostel above Heaven, then headed out to make what changes they could to their appearances. In a street-front stall, Kade had jet black extensions protein bonded to his scalp. The vat-grown locks fell down to his back in thick ropy braids. Feng dyed his own short black hair blonde. They bought melanin pills to turn Kade’s fair skin darker. They purchased marginally legal gene-hack tattoos to transform themselves further – silvery circuit-like patterns that covered Kade’s hands and arms, that shifted slowly as one watched; a pair of gold and black dragons that spiraled down from Feng’s shoulders to his forearms, and spat red flames onto the backs of his hands when he clenched his fists, an ironic barcode tattoo Feng loved for the back of his neck.

“Barcode!” Feng laughed. “Like a robot!”

Kade shook his head, then winced as the tattoo tech injected the tattoo into the back of his not-quite-human, not-quite-functional right hand. He watched in fascination as the living ink pattern drew itself up his arm. The silver circuits spread up from the injection point, past his wrist, up his forearm. He turned his hand over and watched as his skin transformed. When it was done, the pattern looked the same on his right arm as on his left. If there was any interaction with the gecko genes, it wasn’t evident. In thirty days he’d need to pay again, or the tattoo would fade and his normal skin would return.

They bought wooden rings and peace symbol necklaces and tourist T-shirts.

And at the end of it, they looked like any other backpacker tourists walking down Bùi Viện.

They caught dinner in an open-front restaurant with a sign that offered Real Fake American Food. Feng ordered sushi pizza while Kade had the 100% Real Cultured Beef Burger. After eating mostly vegetarian Cambodian food for months, the vat-grown meat was mouth wateringly good.

They watched the crowd go by on the darkening street, young people in their twenties, mostly. All off on grand adventures. They all seemed like kids to Kade now, though his own twenty-eighth birthday was still a few months in the future.

He turned back to look into the restaurant, and his eyes met someone else’s. A pretty brunette. She looked away quickly, laughing and chatting with her friends, and then her eyes came furtively back to his before flitting away once more. For a moment all he wanted was to smile, to flirt, to buy her a drink, to have a chance at a normal life and a new friend or something more.

But being Kade’s friend had been a losing proposition this past year. A deadly proposition. He turned away, and didn’t look at her again.

I’m not here to make friends, Kade reminded himself. I’m here to hide. To stay alive. And to work.

Work he did.

Nexus 6 called to him. That was his real project – his way to get ahead of things, to block off most paths of abuse, to make Nexus safe again at the most basic levels of the OS. In the long term there was no way he could keep fighting individual abuses himself. There simply wasn’t enough of him to keep up. He had to build something like Nexus 6 in order to solve this problem at scale.

But Nexus 6 was too far out. Kade had months more work to do before he could even start properly testing it. He couldn’t wait until then to deal with the PLF. He had to tackle them now, before they struck a third time and ignited the war Su-Yong Shu had seen coming.

Idiots, Kade thought. What are they going to accomplish? Every killing is just going to make things worse, just going to scare the public more, increase support for the Chandler Act, increase demonization of transhuman technologies.

He could see it coming. The PLF would make their own worst fears true. Bombings and assassinations would lead to crackdowns, police and ERD retribution, witch-hunts against scientists and activists, laws even worse than the Chandler Act, more loss of civil liberties in the name of “security”, another step towards a police state in the USA. And that would incense the PLF, draw numbers to their ranks, drive them to ever worse atrocities, until the whole thing blew up into a full-scale conflagration.

Wasn’t it always this way? When had terrorists ever accomplished anything but to enrage people, drive them towards greater security, greater sacrifice of freedom? They only gave their oppressors more excuses for oppression. And the oppressors just drove the oppressed further towards violent rebellion. Extremists on both sides gave power to the very forces they fought against.

He had to stop them. He hated the ERD and the Chandler Act, but the PLF’s approach was only going to make things worse.

So he went back to the DC and Chicago attacks, looked at them again, took them apart piece by piece.

His agents had spotted the coercion code used in the attack on the President four days before the attack itself. They’d never seen the source code. Instead, they’d detected it based on a pattern of activity. Disruption of the frontal cortex to lobotomize the subject, a motor control package that turned the subject into a remote-controlled robot. It was sophisticated software, far more complex than other abuses he’d seen. Whoever had written this had invested a lot of time to write the code, even more time to test it, iterate on it until it was reliable.

Narong was up on his feet, just a meter from Ted Prat-Nung, the ceramic pistol with its graphene-tipped rounds pointed at the older man’s head. “Everyone freeze. Thanom Prat-Nung, you’re under arrest.”

The memory came unbidden. The ERD had turned his new friend Narong Shinawatra into a robotic assassin as well. They’d used Kade’s technology in exactly the way the Chinese had used Su-Yong Shu’s, just as she’d warned him they would. The code he was hunting now was just as complex.

I won’t let anyone use Nexus that way, Kade thought. Not the ERD, not the PLF, not anyone.

You’re using Nexus that way, Ilya’s voice whispered to him. You’re the one enslaving people now. You’ve made yourself into judge and jury.

Kade ignored the voice inside his head. He had no choice.

He went back to the beginning. He pulled up logs taken from the mind of Secret Service agent Steve Travers, in the seconds before he’d died. They still mystified him. His agent had infiltrated Travers’ mind four days before the assassination attempt. It had spotted the coercion code immediately. But the agent hadn’t been able to alert Kade, because it hadn’t had network access until just before the assassination attempt.

That made no sense. If Travers had been running Nexus for weeks to connect with his autistic son, the agent should have jumped to the son’s mind, at least. And autistic kids running Nexus seemed had an endless appetite for network apps and experiences they could plug into.

What were the odds that for all that time, Kade’s software agent wouldn’t get word back to him, and that suddenly, just seconds before the assassination attempt, while on-duty, Travers would link his mind to the net, letting the agent contact Kade? It was totally improbable.

Kade checked more of the logs. The Nexus OS running had been Nexus 5 version 0.72. 0.72 was old, hardly more than a few bug fixes over the 0.7 version Kade had released. He himself was running Nexus 5 version 1.32 now, with quite a lot of special mods atop that. He pulled up a release calendar. The assassination attempt had been in late July. If Travers had installed Nexus in, say, late June, he should have been downloading 0.9, at least. Why such an old version?

He flipped to the Chicago bombing. Brendan Taylor had been an apparently mild-mannered accountant. Two daughters, both neurotypical. A financial planner wife who had tested clean for Nexus and sworn that Brendan wasn’t the type to have tried it. Kade checked the logs from that alert. The Nexus OS version was the same – 0.72. A Nexus OS version from early May, used in a bombing in October. And again, Kade’s agents had infiltrated the man’s mind a week before the attempt, had detected the coercion code immediately, but hadn’t been able to access the net to send a message back to Kade until just moments before the bombing.

What did that mean?

He tried to think like a PLF terrorist. His job was to program assassins. He’d want reliability, of course. That was why they were using an old version. They’d built code they knew worked. They didn’t want to mess that up by upgrading to a new version and potentially introducing new bugs.

And why wasn’t he finding these assassins until just before the events? The only thing that made sense was that they weren’t actually online until then. They’d be in some dormant state, just a tiny loader program running, perhaps. Not the full Nexus OS. Everything locked down. Waiting for a signal to activate. Then, when activated, they went online to receive instructions. Once online, Kade’s agents got word back to him.

He pushed himself back from the problem, rubbed his eyes, and took a deep breath. When he opened them, he saw Feng at the window, staring out into the night. It was nearly midnight. The sounds of raised voices and beat-heavy music came up from the street. He could feel scores of minds down below, dancing, partying in the club below them. He wished he could join them, lose himself for just a little while.

He dragged himself back to the problem at hand. If the people who were turned into assassins weren’t online with the version of Nexus that contained the coercion code until moments before the attacks, then he stood little chance of stopping them that way. That’s why he’d failed to stop Chicago. That’s why he’d fail again, if he stuck with the same strategy.

He had to go one step further. He couldn’t focus on just finding someone running the coercion code. No. He had to build an agent that would find the people writing that coercion code, the ones installing it in the minds of the human bombers, and stop them.

But were the code’s authors running Nexus themselves? And even if they were, could he find them and stop them before they struck again?