Nexus

7 EXPLANATIONS

TRANSCRIPT: RANGAN SHANKARI, TECH BRIEFING, "NEXUS 5"

Sunday February 19th 2040 0951 hours

[NOTE: Subject should be considered hostile.]

INTERVIEWER: OK. Let's start again. Tell us about Nexus 5.

SHANKARI: [inaudible, likely profanity] Fine. Nexus 5 is Nexus, but with software layered on top.

INTERVIEWER: What does that mean?

SHANKARI: We found a way to program it. We found a way to get data in and out. To get instructions in and out.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of data?

SHANKARI: Neural data at first. We were using it as a way to measure neural firing in the motor cortex. Individual neurons, but millions of them at a time.

INTERVIEWER: This was for your research?

SHANKARI: Yeah. The goal was to get the data from the brain, decode it, and use it to control a robot arm.

INTERVIEWER: Systems like that already exist. Why the research?

SHANKARI: Existing systems get implanted surgically. That limits them. The procedures are long. You can get infections. And you can only tap into tens of thousands of neurons. The motor cortex has maybe ten billion neurons. With Nexus, we could tap into more of them. Millions. Tens of millions. We could get finer control over robot arms. You could catch a ball, write with a pen, do stuff you can't do with current systems.

INTERVIEWER: Go on.

SHANKARI: Well, we knew we could get data in too. Nexus nodes talk to each other by radio.

INTERVIEWER: How do they talk by radio?

SHANKARI: I dunno. Fucking nanotubes are little radios all by themselves, man. There's a lot of nanostructures in Nexus.

INTERVIEWER: OK. Software.

SHANKARI: Software. Yeah. So, anyway, they talk by radio. They sync up. Every node has some way of saying what part of the brain it's in. Every node listens for broadcasts addressed to its part of the brain, so it knows when to fire. If we could crack that, we could listen in on brain activity, and we could make neurons fire in whatever part of the brain we wanted.

INTERVIEWER: Why would that be relevant to your work?

SHANKARI: There's a million reasons. More than that. But for us it was about feedback. Sending the brain information on what the arm was touching, where it was relative to the body. Without that, an artificial limb is useless.

INTERVIEWER: So again, systems like that exist. Why your work?

SHANKARI: Same reason. More neurons. Higher bandwidth. Higher sensitivity, more precision, no surgery. Next question?

INTERVIEWER: Software. How did this lead to software?

SHANKARI: Yeah. Well, we dosed up some mice, started recording all the signals…

INTERVIEWER: Where did the Nexus come from?

SHANKARI: [pause] We bought it from a guy on the street.

INTERVIEWER: Your pulse just shot up ten points, you're starting to sweat, and your systolic blood pressure just went up by five. Try again.

SHANKARI: [sighs] We made it.

INTERVIEWER: How?

SHANKARI: We autosynthed it.

INTERVIEWER: How'd you get past the censor chip?

SHANKARI: [pause] We got access to an old one. It's out of date. The updates haven't been installed on it for years.

INTERVIEWER: Who's the license holder?

SHANKARI: [sighs] Crawford Lab. They've got a newer fancier one. Their old one mostly just sits idle. I've got access to their lab. They never knew.

INTERVIEWER: Where'd you get the molecular structures?

SHANKARI: We got the chemistry from Recipes for a Revolution. I smuggled a hard copy back from India.

INTERVIEWER: And the source material?

SHANKARI: All over. It's mostly innocuous. The only problem is there are so many different molecules in Nexus… sixty-three different molecular parts. The autosynth only had one chemreactor. We had to do sixty-three runs, then hand mix in the right proportions.

INTERVIEWER: OK, back to the software.

SHANKARI: Yeah. Fine. So we recorded the signals. It was a bitch. Way too much going on. We did more and more mice studies, tapered down the doses as low as we could go. We started injecting straight into the brain to get the lowest possible doses, simplify the traffic between the mice, simplify the analysis for us.

INTERVIEWER: How long did it take you?

SHANKARI: Most of a year. We would do the dosing before we left lab each day, then record activity overnight. The results made no sense. The signal traffic was chaos. Huge volumes of chaos. There was nothing that looked like the position of the nodes.

INTERVIEWER: And then?

SHANKARI: And then… and then we hit pay dirt, man. Kade figured it out. The nodes don't know where they are in the brain. They know where they are relative to other nodes in the same brain. How much position data they send depends on how many nodes there are around 'em. And it's not even really position data. They figure out what functional region they're in, send that in their signals. It's fucking amazing. [shakes head] Anyway, once Kade figured that out, the data miners cracked the encoding. We could listen to brain activity, and trigger new activity anywhere we wanted.

INTERVIEWER: And this led to software how?

SHANKARI: [drums fingers] It was the damnedest thing, man. Once we understood the encoding, we could tell there was room for a lot more data in those signals. There were unused bits. So we just started fucking around with it one day, on a lark.

INTERVIEWER: And?

SHANKARI: And… it would do shit. It would store the data we sent it. If that node sent out a signal again, we'd get the data back. If we sent specific modifier signals, we could tell two nodes to talk to each other, to add their values together, or subtract them. We could do logical operations. [Shankari stops talking, shakes head] It still blows my mind, man.

INTERVIEWER: You'll share these codes with us, all of this data.

SHANKARI: Like I have any fucking choice.

INTERVIEWER: So you could make Nexus nodes perform logical operations and math operations. Go on.

SHANKARI: Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted.

INTERVIEWER: So that's what you did? You wrote the Nexus operating system on top of the instruction set that you'd discovered in Nexus nodes?

SHANKARI: [shakes head] That would've been way too hard. We wanted to do neuroscience, not operating system development. So we ported something instead.

INTERVIEWER: Which was…?

SHANKARI: ModOS. It's free. The source code is all available. It's built to be portable, modular. It's built to run on any kind of hardware, down to the simplest possible instruction set. So we took that. We built a simple compiler to turn ModOS into a set of instructions that would run on a set of Nexus nodes.

INTERVIEWER: So the Nexus OS is really ModOS, running on Nexus nodes as its hardware.

SHANKARI: [nods] Yeah. You got it.

INTERVIEWER: And on top of that you've built more software.

SHANKARI: [nods] Yeah. Well, we've ported other software. Anything that can run on ModOS we can compile to run on the version that runs on top of Nexus. And we've built software. We had to build the code to send the video output to the visual cortex, stuff like that. And we wrote brand-new neuroscience software. We've built programs that make it easy to interact with parts of the brain. Interfaces. Like, an interface to take body shapes, like for a VR app, and tells the motor cortex to put the body in that position. That sort of thing.

INTERVIEWER: This is how you paralyzed Agent Chavez.

SHANKARI: [Looks down] Yeah. Dumbshit move, huh? [shakes head]

[…discussion of Nexus OS continues for another 17 minutes…]

INTERVIEWER: Next topic. You and your co-conspirators give off extraordinarily strong Nexus signals, and they're not dropping. The drug isn't wearing off. How is that possible?

SHANKARI: The limit of how much Nexus you can have in your brain is mental. Your neurons fire and the Nexus nodes are trying to coax them to fire. If they're not getting coherence, some of them break apart and get flushed out. Over time, your brain adapts to having a Nexus network. Your Nexus coherence increases. Your maximum possible levels of Nexus go up.

INTERVIEWER: But why isn't the level dropping? It's been more than eight hours. Most of it should be out of your system.

SHANKARI: [shakes head] We call Nexus a drug, but it's not. It's a nano-machine. It doesn't flush out because some enzyme has broken it down. Nexus nodes decompose to their parts because some internal logic has told them to. And if you give them the right signal, they just don't break down at all.

[…interview continues for another 18 minutes…]