Crux

65 A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE

Thursday November 1st

The guards fitted him with a Nexus jammer, then took him to the rooftop. The tiles were wet. Palm fronds were scattered around. Servants were busily cleaning up. The night sky was clear now, but weather had obviously gone through here recently.

Shiva was there, just the same, sitting beneath the stars, sipping chai and staring out at the last bit of color in the sky.

“Kade.” Shiva offered him a chair. “You viewed my files.”

Kade sat, took a mug of chai offered him by a server.

“Thank you for that,” he told Shiva. “It was an extremely generous gift.”

Shiva inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“And now are you inclined to work together?” Shiva asked.

“I am,” Kade said.

Shiva smiled.

“…but not to share the back door with you,” Kade went on.

Shiva’s smile disappeared. “I see,” he said. “And why?”

Kade looked the older man in the eyes, wished he could touch his mind, return a small fraction of what Shiva had given him.

“Are you wiser than all humanity?” Kade asked him.

Ilya woke in his mind, soaring, exulting.

Shiva frowned. “What?”

“I believe in your integrity,” Kade said. “I believe your goals are good. I’d love to work with you in a hundred different ways. I’d love to see you make your solutions real.” He paused. “I know how good it feels to do something right. How satisfying it is. But that’s a trap. Don’t you see? It’s an addiction. It just leads to more and more.”

Shiva opened his mouth, but Kade pressed on, letting the words pour out of him, holding the older man’s eyes with his own. “We’re only part of the world, you and I,” he told Shiva. “We’re only part of humanity. The solutions to our problems can’t be forced on the world. No one should have that kind of power. No one.”

“No one but you,” Shiva corrected.

Kade lifted his eyes to the darkened sea. “I’m done with it. You’ve shown me where this leads. If I keep the back door, I’ll use it more and more, in larger and larger ways. If you ever let me leave here, I’ll close it, instead. I’ll give up that power. People will have to solve their problems themselves.”

Shiva stared at him aghast. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m completely serious,” Kade replied.

Shiva leaned forward, his hands reaching towards Kade, almost beseeching. “We have a chance here, Kade. A chance to fix the world. This isn’t a game. This isn’t some philosophical exercise. This is the lives of billions we’re talking about.”

Kade looked calmly into the man’s eyes. “I won’t give you the tools to control people.”

“I don’t want to control people!” Shiva almost shouted, gesturing with his hands. “I want to SAVE them!”

“You wouldn’t stop there,” Kade told him. “You’d use that power, and every time you did, you’d find more reasons to use it. If I keep this, I’ll become you. And you? You’ll become a dictator.”

“Damn it!” Shiva slammed one hand against the railing. “There is no one else!” Spittle flew from his mouth.

“There’s them,” Kade replied softly. “Those billions of people. They have to do it for themselves. They have to come together. Nexus can help them. But it has to happen from the bottom up. They have to want it.”

He was in the club again, dancing, merging, choosing to become part of one grander organism.

Shiva shook his head, his jaw set angrily, his mouth working. His eyes went out to the darkened sea. His whole body was tense, coiled tight.

Finally he turned to Kade, and waved his hand dismissively. “Get out of my sight, Kade. Get out of my sight.”

Kade lay on his bed and contemplated his future. The Shiva he’d gotten to know in those files was an exceptionally patient man. He was also a man of incredible passion, willing to take extraordinary steps to achieve his goals.

Would he be patient with Kade, waiting for a change of heart?

Or would he try to force what he wanted to know out of him?

Kade had to be ready for either. He had to be on the lookout for escape. He had to be mentally prepared to be a prisoner for a very long time. And he had to be ready for torture, or drugs, or any other way that Shiva might try to get the knowledge out of his brain.

And when it came down to it, there was only one foolproof defense against that last possibility. Memory deletion could work in isolated cases, if a memory was fresh and new, if it hadn’t been integrated into a thousand networks across the brain. But that wasn’t the case now. That left only Ilya’s choice. To sleep, but not to dream. To die to keep what he knew out of others’ hands.

Kade felt no fear any more. He felt only clarity. The clarity of understanding where he fit in the world. The clarity of having decided once and for all what he believed in.

He wrote the script he needed, and pinned it to a corner of his mental field of vision. He could activate it with a second’s notice. Then he lay on his back and stared out the windows at the twinkling stars and the cloudless sky. If he had to die, this was as beautiful a place as any.

Shiva watched the stars wheel across the sky. Lane was so naïve. Such an idealist. He’d lived a comfortable life. He’d never seen real poverty, real death. He’d never learned the visceral lesson that good intentions and optimism weren’t enough, that you had to act to make what you wanted a reality, whatever the cost.

But the boy seemed certain of his decision. So be it. They would have to do this the hard way.