Nexus

10 CHANGES

Watson Cole sat on the rocks and stared out at the Pacific. This was a beautiful place in its own desolate way. The little town of Todos Santos was thirty miles south down the road. The beach was better there, more sand, fewer rocks. The tourists sunned themselves and sipped margaritas, delighting in their discovery of a quaint little paradise away from the hustle and bustle of Cabo San Lucas. Up here, further from Cabo, the beach was rough and narrow. The sea came in strong against the rocks and a thin strip of brownish sand. Some hardy scrub grass clung to the land. There was little reason for tourists to make it this far north.

He'd made it here to his hidey-hole two nights ago. It had been a tense escape. The contacts and face shapers had fooled the biometrics at the border, but there had been little he could do about his size. He was a conspicuous character. If the ERD relied more on human intel… Well, he'd made it.

The nightmares woke him every morning now. Arman, the idealistic prosecutor. The sight of his family dead in their home, murdered in retribution for daring to bring charges against the wrong corrupt nephew. Temir. The heartbreak of seeing his village razed by the army, looking for rebels that weren't there.

And Lunara. Her most of all. The last moments of her life… If it wasn't for Lunara, he wouldn't be a fugitive today. He'd be out there some place, across the waves. Somewhere in central Asia, probably. A "military advisor." Running special ops missions. Suppressing the rebels. Earning commendations. Maybe in Officer Candidate School.

Instead, he was a wanted man.

Wats had no regrets. He'd made his choices. Being captured in the Kazakh Mountains was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It certainly hadn't been the easiest thing. It had been the most painful, most confusing, most troubling six months of his life. But it had opened his eyes. And eyes, once opened, seldom closed again.

He remembered another beach. A dry beach. The dry bones of the Aral Sea. The desert where once there had been water. The inland sea the Russians had drained to irrigate their crops further north. Nurzhan had taken him on walks there, towards the end, after his captivity had turned into something else.

"Here is where the Soviets fucked us," the geologist had said, "before you Americans came to finish the job." He'd laughed, hard and bitter. "Communism, capitalism, all the same. The powerful want resources. Water. Natural gas. Uranium. The powerful see them, reach out their hand and scoop them up, and who cares who they crush in the process, eh? Dictatorships and democracies, all alike. Your precious democracy doesn't care about us, does it? All men are created equal, eh? We all have inalienable rights. Unless we live so very far away, perhaps? You Americans defeated your British king because he was a dictator. We are the same. We will defeat our dictator, even if you oppose us."

No, Wats thought. I'm sorry, Nurzhan. But you won't. You didn't.

Two years dead. All of them.

He tossed a rock into the sea. No way back. Only forward.

He'd come out of captivity to find a changed world. The rebels were beaten. The "president" in Almaty had secured his power. The natural gas was flowing. The uranium mines were purring. America had one more ally bordering China, containing it.

He came out to find that his enhancements caused cancers. They'd discovered that during his months of captivity. Not right away, of course. They just destabilized the genome a bit. The viruses that had given his cells extra copies of the genes for muscle mass and bone density and fast nerve conduction, and all the other ways he was enhanced, hadn't done their job quite cleanly enough. One in every few million of them had inserted the new gene in the wrong place, disrupting some other part of his cells' genetic instruction set. Not many. No big deal, really. Except that eventually… eventually those genetic disruptions would add up. Eventually the tumors would come. By the time he hit forty, they said, forty-five at the latest. After that… modern medicine could fight the cancers. They could zap tumors with gamma rays, reprogram them with even more targeted viruses, cut off their blood supplies with angiogenesis suppressors.

Eventually one would get through. A year. Five years. Ten. It depended on when they were detected, what part of his body they were in, how he responded to aggressive treatment. So many variables.

Someone before him had quietly threatened a lawsuit, threatened publicity. That was what the Corps couldn't abide. There was a quiet settlement offer for everyone who'd received his enhancement package. Enough that Wats could go home to Haiti and live like a king there for the rest of his – probably quite short – life. Enough that he could stay in the States instead, and live as an activist, speak out about the war he'd seen, about how his brothers bled and died and killed to prop up a killer, to keep in place a government of thieves, rapists, and murderers, as Temir used to say. Enough to get an education. Enough to wait, and hope, and get the checkups, and cross his fingers that they'd find a cure.

He tossed another stone into the sea.

Enough money to acquire a few extra identities and to buy his hidey-hole here, out in the middle of nowhere.

What now? Even if he could make it back to America, he had no home there. His stepfather had disowned Wats for his antiwar activism. He'd spoken too clearly about how the American war on drugs had created the narco-barons who'd destroyed Haiti. He'd said too much about how the war in the KZ propped up a dictator. He was no son of Frank Cole.

Back to Haiti? Return to the land that had birthed him? They'd be looking for him there. Make a small comfortable life for himself somewhere else? Live off his savings here in Mexico until the cancers killed him? He was meant to do something else, something bigger. Temir, Nurzhan, Lunara… they'd risked their lives to teach him something. He had to make that mean something. This wasn't over yet.

The cheap disposable phone he'd picked up in Cabo beeped at him. He glanced at it. His data miners had found something. A new mention of Kade on the net. That was rare. Since he'd had the data miners running, they'd come back with dozens of hits about Rangan's shows and music, hundreds of hits on Ilya's writings, but none about Kade.

He opened it. Conference listing. International Society for Neuroscience meeting in Bangkok. Abstract of a poster to be presented by Kaden Lane. Kade hadn't mentioned any trip to Thailand.

Bangkok. The city of vice. The modern Babylon. A city of temples and whores. He'd spent some memorable R&R time there during his two years deployed in Burma. You could buy anything in Bangkok. Flesh. Fantasies. Drugs.

Weapons.

If it was a trap, it was a perfect set-up. They would know he'd been there. Wats knew the seedy underbelly of that city. He spoke a little Thai. He'd imagine that he could get there, find Kade, get him free.

And if he got Kade free… Then Wats could keep Nexus 5 alive. He could hope to someday get it out into the world. And if it got out to the world… It could change people. The way Nexus had changed him. The way the touch of another's mind through Nexus had changed him.

There was no choice. Even though Kade might refuse him again. Even though it might be a trap. He would go in with his eyes open. He was a dead man anyway. It was only a matter of time.

We're all born dying, someone had said. What matters is only how we spend the instant we're given.

He wanted to spend his instant changing the world. He wanted to spend it opening the eyes of his adopted countrymen. He wanted to spend it paying forward the gift that Temir, and Nurzhan, and Lunara, and all the rest had given him.

He tossed a final stone into the sea. It was time to move. He had seven weeks.

Watson Cole rose to his feet and set himself in motion.

Sam waited outside Enforcement Division Deputy Director Warren Becker's office. She was angry. She wanted to pace. Instead, Sam ruthlessly clamped down on her body, forcing herself to sit completely immobile in the uncomfortable chair in his anteroom, spine erect, hands folded in her lap. The vision of calm, but seething inside. Surely this was a mix-up?

The door opened, Becker's previous appointment walked out. The man, someone she vaguely recognized from Policy, made eye contact with her and then hurriedly looked away.

"Come on in, Sam," Becker projected through the door.

Sam took a deep breath, ignored the secretary, strode into Becker's office, and closed the door behind her. Becker was behind his massive mahogany desk, emblazoned with the twin seals of the DHS and the ERD.

"What can I do for you?" he asked.

"Sir, Dr Holtzmann just set up lab time with me to dose me with Nexus 5, permanent integration. He says it's under your orders."

"Yes," the deputy director replied. "My orders."

"Sir," Sam said, fists clenched at her sides. "I think this is a very bad idea."

"Noted," he said.

"It's one thing to face the risk of trying Nexus during an op, sir, but Holtzmann's talking about me having it in my skull for weeks, maybe months… That can't be right."

"Sam, in this case, it's vital for the mission and potentially for more."

"I don't see how."

Becker started to tick items off on his fingers. "First, gaining experience in this will increase your ability to fool anyone else on Nexus as to your identity in the case of mind-to-mind contact."

"We have the hypnotic memory implantation for that," Sam retorted.

"…which didn't work last time you were in the field," Becker pointed out.

"I'll do better next time. I'll be more prepared," Sam said.

"Yes," Becker said. "You will. Because you will have had multiple weeks of practicing mind-to-mind contact with Nexus 5.

"Second," Becker went on, ticking off another finger, "it'll give you and Lane a backchannel to communicate via during the operation, without needing to speak. Third, it'll let you monitor how Lane is doing emotionally and perhaps bolster him. He's doing terribly in his training. His inability to stay cool is a risk to the mission."

"Then send someone else," Sam replied, as calmly as she could. She could feel her nails gouging painful half-moons in her palm. "My presence is going to agitate him, not stabilize him. And I'm the wrong agent to have walking around with this thing in her skull."

"We don't have anyone else who's suitable, Sam."

"What about Anderson?"

"On a deep cover mission, weeks to go at minimum, maybe longer."

"Novaks, then."

"Novaks doesn't have an alias that makes sense. You have an identity as a neuroscience PhD student already in place, and just two hops from Lane. Novaks doesn't."

Sam racked her brain.

"How about Evans? He has a neuroscience alias."

Becker kept his face still, but something changed in his eyes.

"Chris Evans was critically wounded last week." He sighed. "You'll get a memo about it soon. We wanted more data on his recovery before we let the word out. I know you were friends…"

Sam felt the blood drain from her face. More than friends. She and Evans had gone through training together. They'd been lovers once, before the challenges of the job and hiding their relationship from their colleagues became too much. He'd been so gentle with her…

"How bad?" she asked.

Becker's face fell. "Bad, Sam. He was infiltrating a DWITY ring. They figured out who he was somehow. He was off comms. They put twenty rounds into him. We didn't find him for two hours. He was flatlined when we got there. His brain valves and the hyperox saved him. He survived, but just barely."

DWITY. Do What I Tell You. The drug that turned humans into slaves. Slaves for sexual predators, for sex trafficking rings, for worse. The thought made her sick. That Chris had been hurt fighting that…

"Rehab?" she asked.

Becker nodded slowly. "The damage is extensive. He suffered major cell death in most organs. They're regrowing a heart right now so they can get him off the machine. It's going to be a long hard road for him. He may never recover fully."

Sam swallowed. She could feel bile rising up inside her. Had he been conscious for those two hours? she wondered. The fourth-gen corticovascular valves would have snapped shut as blood pressure dropped, sealing hyperoxygenated blood in his brain. Pain control would have kicked in. He might have stayed awake and aware through the whole thing. What would it have felt like to lay there, heart stopped, body riddled with bullets, blood seeping out, all of your body dying as your brain lived on, helpless… waiting to be found or to die…

That could be her someday.

Becker was talking to her again. "So you see, Sam, there really isn't anyone else."

Sam nodded. Against what Chris Evans had gone through, her own reservations paled.

"I know you have a deep revulsion to this technology," Becker said. "And I know why. And that's part of why I trust you. We all do hard things. We all take risks. Chris did. He put his life on the line. I know this is not going to be pleasant for you. I trust you more because of that."

Becker still didn't understand. It wasn't that it was so horrible. It was that it wasn't. That she had enjoyed the ability to touch another person's mind. That was what scared her. That was what felt like a betrayal. Sam felt the nausea rising higher.

But there was no one else. She would do her job.

"Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, sir. If you talk to Agent Ev… If you talk to Chris, please tell him I'm rooting for him."

Becker nodded. "I'm sure he'll be happy to hear that. I'll let you know when you can visit him. Anything else?"

"No, sir," Sam replied. She walked out, closing the door behind her. Her stomach was in full revolt. It was rising up at the thought of Chris Evans nearly dead. Rising up at the thought of what she was about to do in the name of her duty.

She held the bile down long enough to make it into the restroom, past the woman fixing her make-up, into one of the stalls, down onto her knees, and then to puke her lunch into the toilet.

Even after all these years, the memories were too fresh. Another wave of nausea hit her. She spasmed and heaved over the toilet again, retching up whatever little food still dwelt in her stomach. She would do her duty, she was certain. It was all she knew how to do. The ERD was the only family she had, the only family she'd had for years now.

She bent forward, heaved and heaved again, until nothing was left inside her.