Crux

74 A LAST DEBATE

Saturday November 3rd

Kade came to slowly. There was an aching pain in his head, in his right hand. Light was shining in behind his closed eyelids.

He opened his eyes to find himself back in the room he’d occupied for the last week. A splint and bandages covered his right hand and most of his forearm. He didn’t even want to think about the damage he’d done to that.

Breakfast was laid out for him already. His body was hungry, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat.

So stupid, he thought. He played me so easily.

Now Shiva had one of the back doors. And with that… he’d become a tyrant. Kade had seen it. A well-intentioned tyrant, at first. But that sort of power. It would corrupt anyone.

Like you? Ilya asked in his mind.

Yes, he told Ilya. Like me.

Shiva came to see him an hour later, a Nexus jammer around his neck. Smart man. Even now, he didn’t think he’d plumbed Kade’s depths. And he was right.

“My hand is still extended to you, Kade,” Shiva said. “Join me. We can save the world together.”

“Don’t do it,” Kade pleaded with him. “This can’t work. People have to find solutions on their own. It has to be from the bottom up.”

Shiva shook his head. “You’re naïve, my young friend. The world has no time left. Your way is a luxury we can’t afford. My way is the only option left to us.”

Kade shook his head. “You can’t keep it a secret,” he told Shiva. “They’ll find out what you’re doing. They’ll catch you. They’ll hate you for it. You’ll go down in history as a monster.”

Shiva held Kade’s eyes. “Let them call me a monster. At least they’ll have a future to do it in.”

Shiva stood atop the roof of his home. His eyes drank in the magnificent sea and sky. He spread his arms wide and the cool breeze blew his white cotton robe behind him like a cloak, like the wings of some supernatural being.

The code he’d captured from Kade had passed every test. Now vast machinery, long prepared in anticipation of this moment, leapt into action. Data centers around the world began humming. Microsatellites in low earth orbit began transmitting. Software tools flipped into an active mode.

Shiva closed his eyes, his arms still spread, his robe billowing behind him, and savored the feel of the sun on his skin and the wind in his hair. His thoughts spread across the island, up through uplinks to the constellation of satellites above, and out into the minds of thousands, tens of thousands, more every moment as the software agents his team had built spread out, replicated, infected every Nexus mind they found.

He could feel them. He could feel their intellect, their need. His vast computing machinery processed their inputs, collated it for him, coalesced it into a gestalt that he could wrap his own mind around. They were him. He was them.

He was a god, entwined with a spreading congregation of humanity. He was the burning spearpoint of a new planetary intelligence, a new superorganism.

And together, bit by bit, they would save this world.