Crux

30 BONDING

Friday October 26th

Rangan spent most of the next three sleep cycles on the floor in the corner of his cell. He sat there when they had the lights turned up. He slept there when they turned the lights down. It was hard and cold. It left parts of his body numb and asleep. But it was where the connection was clearest.

Bobby. Bobby and a dozen others. They were on the other side of this wall, trapped like he was. Just kids.

There was a flaw in the shielding. A loose wire, maybe, in the conductive mesh wall that separated his cell from Bobby’s bunk and the room beyond it. A place where radio waves could get through, where those radio waves could carry thoughts between them.

The first night, when their minds had first met, Rangan’s thoughts had been selfish. He wasn’t alone. There was someone else here.

Then he’d realized what was going on, and his mind had turned to anger.

Kids, he thought. They’ve got kids locked up here. Motherfuckers!

What kind of fucking monsters locked up kids? Locked them up just because they had something special in their heads that made them better? That helped them cope with what was wrong with them? That might just make them smarter than the rest of us?

Rangan spent hours communing with Bobby, learning more about the boy, about the other boys over there. The kids took turns sitting in Bobby’s bunk sometimes. He got to know Alfonso, Jose, Parker, half-a-dozen more. They relived their memories for him. Being torn from their families. Seeing relatives arrested, beaten. Being beaten themselves when they resisted. He relived Parker being torn from his mother’s arms, seeing her dragged off. He relived Bobby’s arrest, seeing his dad gunned down in front of his eyes, then being beaten silly by the men who’d torn him from his father.

His fists clenched and he wanted to hurt someone. Hurt them badly.

Fucking assholes.

The kids were scared, lonely. He did his best to hide his own anger, his own disappointment with himself, and be there for them. It was hard through the tiny link. But he did what he could, comforting them, trying to send hope, and humor.

In exchange they amazed him. They were smart, hungry to understand the Nexus in their brains, understand what was going on around them. And the way their minds connected…

Ilya had talked about group mind. The experiments she’d convinced them to try at parties and at each other’s apartments had been aimed at trying to create some of that. And sure, they’d had their trippy moments, those times when the barriers had seemed to drop and they’d felt like they were turning into one person.

But it had all been short-lasting stuff, sometimes with the aid of Empathek or a little weed or whatnot. It’d felt cool as hell, but he’d never seen much practical coming out of it.

These kids, though… Maybe it was because they were younger. Or maybe it was the autism. Something. Whatever it was, they were connected more deeply. Thoughts leaked between them, without them even trying. He showed Bobby things about Nexus and he could feel those thoughts ripple out to the rest of the boys, fresh questions come back almost faster than he could parse. Then the boys showed him the tests the ERD was running, and it was clear. They were learning from each other, mind-to-mind. Bobby had learned Spanish without even trying to, just because the ERD had given him a test of Spanish, had primed him for it, and then his mind had pulled what he’d needed from the Spanish-speaking kids around him.

These kids were something else. This was a real step towards what Ilya had dreamed of. It was fucking awesome.

If they weren’t locked up here in jail, anyway.

There was one last thing he learned from these kids. It was obvious, really, but he poked around in their memories to be sure he understood it right. Nexus OS had gotten out, alright. Months and months ago. God only knew how many people were running it now.

And he had given the ERD the back door to all those minds.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Rangan stared at the dull gray wall of his cell and contemplated just how badly he’d screwed up.

– In Saigon

Friday October 26th

Nakamura stared again at the satellite image on his retinal implants. An open-top Tata jeep, on the road approaching Saigon, two shaven-headed figures in it. His hunch had been right. Kade and Sam had headed to Saigon. So Nakamura followed.

With Lane’s back door access to Nexus, the boy could easily have amassed whatever financial resources he desired. He could be hiding in an exclusive hotel, eating room service. Or he could be in the tourist districts blending in. So Nakamura had no choice but to canvas all the parts of the city frequented by Westerners.

He walked through the lobbies of the international hotels as an expensively dressed business traveler – gray suit, briefcase in hand, smart glasses feeding him financial reports and top news. He went around Saigon Square as a smartly dressed European tourist – expensive navy slacks, Italian leather shoes, a sharp white polo, trendy watch, and mirrored shades. He hung around Bến Thành Market as a backpacker – khakis, T-shirt, hair past his shoulders.

He saw Sam in the streets around Bến Thành. A tall slender girl in jeans and a tank top, strong shoulders, erect posture, long black hair down her back. She turned and Nakamura saw the line of jaw and nose. Her name rose on his lips, against all orders, against all protocol.

Then it wasn’t Sam at all. Just a young teen girl, coltish, fourteen maybe. Her parents emerged into the street and went off with her. Sam as a girl. Sam as he remembered her.

He shook his head at his sentimentality, at his evolution into an old man, searching for a girl that wasn’t his daughter, but was as near to that as he’d ever come. Then he went back to his walking.

Everywhere he went, Nakamura sprinkled smart dust. The micro-scale sensors dropped to the ground, spread on the wind, attached themselves to clothing, to shoes, to bags. And everywhere they went, they searched for Kade’s face, for Sam’s face, for a hint of either’s DNA, for the telltale emanations of Nexus. And then they meshed together, each quietly sending data to its closest neighbors, piggybacking until it eventually found its way to Kevin Nakamura.

He swam in that information, overlaid on his vision by his retinal display. Maps showed him the spread of the smart dust as it rode on bellhops and hotel guests to the upper floors of the Hilton and the Sheraton, as it blew through the mall at the heart of Saigon Square, as it was blown or washed into the river and the sewers beneath the city, as it was tracked by bicycles and shoes into the alleys of the maze around Bến Thành Market. A running stream showed face after face after face, flickering by, hundreds of faces so far, none noted as a high probability hit. Further to the side, another stream, of gene sequences this time, just as devoid of true hits.

A layer of the map showed him the Nexus emanations. The area around Bến Thành was inundated with it. Even a few of the less drug-soaked tourists near Saigon Square and the business travelers in the heart of downtown gave off Nexus frequency transmissions. Nakamura shook his head at their audacity, surprised at the prevalence of the drug.

A final map layer showed him police and emergency services data for the city, mined from CIA systems. If the prey can’t be found, he’d taught his pupils, hunt the hunters.

There was always the risk that Sam and Kade would move on, of course. He kept a National Reconnaissance Office AI busy, searching for more matches on that twenty year-old Tata jeep. It threw some at him every few hours, but all were false hits.

He’d love to point a dedicated NRO bird at Saigon. But queries were one thing, retargeting birds was another. The latter would alert the National Reconnaissance Office that CIA had a high level of interest in Saigon. And that was a no-no.

Why? he wondered again. Why so much secrecy?

One way or another, it was boots-on-the-ground time. His boots. And his dust. For five days Nakamura walked, and tracked, and analyzed. And still he had no matches on Sam or Lane. So he walked and walked some more.