Nexus

19 THE CONFUSION

Wats patiently watched from afar. Dinner was all smiles and ooohs and aaaahs. Then something happened. The smile left Shu's face. She shook her head slightly… And something happened to Kade. A worried look crossed his face, he closed his eyes, his head nodded – like he'd nearly fainted. When he opened his eyes again, something was different. He took a sip of water and his hand shook visibly in the scope. His body language changed. He slumped, seemed to withdraw into himself.

Shu seemed hyper-alert now. On a hunch Wats moved the scope down to ground level. There. The driver of the car that had dropped Kade off, walking briskly towards the restaurant.

Wats judged the distance. No way could he get there first. He reached into his pack, pulled out the highly illegal rifle, screwed on the barrel, slid the scope he'd been using into the groove on top until it snapped into place. He looked at the assembled sniper rifle for a moment. Was he willing to do this? Was he willing to kill? He just didn't know.

"…what were you saying?" Kade asked. He blinked again to try to shake this fog from his head.

Su-Yong Shu was looking at him, her head cocked to one side, lips slightly parted, eyes narrowed, studying him like a particularly puzzling scientific specimen.

"I was saying…" she spoke slowly, as if picking her words carefully, "that it's important to understand ourselves, and what makes us tick."

"Ummm, yes, of course." Whatever had just happened, it was passing. His head was clearing. He must still be jet-lagged.

Kade?

Kade blinked in surprise. Shu's mind had just touched his. She'd just sent him verbal thoughts. Was she using Nexus?

Kade, keep talking. Show no sign that we are communicating this way.

Show no sign? Why? "I agree completely," he said aloud. "It's important to understand ourselves."

How was she doing this? And what was going on in his head? Why wasn't Nexus OS running? How was she talking to him?

Kade, you can talk to me this way as well. Like….

He saw it. He felt it.

Hello? he sent to her.

Good, she continued. You've had some sort of minor… seizure, Kade. I'm trying to understand it. Relax for me. And keep talking as if nothing has happened.

A chill went up Kade's spine. A seizure? Was it a side effect of the Nexus? Had all their playing with fire finally burnt him?

OK, he sent back.

He felt tendrils of her mind touch him lightly, insinuate themselves into him.

He babbled something to her about his research.

As he did, Kade could feel her in his mind, going deeper, going broader, tendrils of thought branching and spreading throughout him. She felt unlike any other human being he'd ever touched through Nexus. Her mind was everywhere inside his.

Keep talking, she sent him. He rambled, distantly aware that she was nodding, replying.

Stay calm, he told himself. Shu's mind permeated his. She touched memory after memory. It frightened him. He should be resisting. There was something he couldn't let her see…

He was sweating. Her scrutiny was terrible. Her mind was vast, her tendrils everywhere.

Take a deep breath, Kade. Keep calm.

Calm. Yes. He took a breath. He had some way of calming himself… some software he'd written…

Kade, I think someone has been manipulating your memories. They're somehow hiding things from you.

His memories? Oh, fucking fuck. What the hell was going on?

Relax, Shu sent to him. Open to me fully. I think I can undo what's been done.

She exuded peace, compassion, tenderness.

It may be a bit disorienting, she went on, like waking from a dream.

Kade was confused. His memories were hazy. Things didn't make sense. What could have happened?

Shu chattered at him, covering the moment. Something about animal studies. He could barely follow.

I'm restoring your memories… Now, she replied.

He felt her expand even further within him then. She suffused his mind, touched every part of him at once. It was beyond anything he could imagine doing.

He could see links between his memories as she explored them. She was sifting through his thoughts and memories faster than Kade could follow. It was as intense an experience as a Nexus calibration. How was she processing so much information? How could her mind be so vast?

Wait… he remembered now. The memories started to flood back in as Shu unlocked them. The briefing with the ERD. The mission. The defenses Rangan had built. The training. False memories… The panic code. On his phone. A code to call in help. In case he was in danger.

He reached for his phone. Nothing happened. His hand refused to obey. He tried the other. No good. He tried to yell for help. Nothing. Shu had paralyzed him. He was under her control.

Kade, stay calm. We need to understand what's happened to you.

Oh no. He remembered why he was here now. If she saw what was in his mind, she'd know he was a spy. He had to get out of here.

He had one last weapon left. The weapon Rangan had given him. He needed Nexus up and running.

[restart]

Boot sequences scrolled across his mind's eye. As he drew his attention Inside, Kade became more aware of Shu's presence.

Shu had synchronized millions of Nexus nodes in his brain to hers. She'd configured them in thousands of complex circuits, each a sensor, each a manipulator. He could feel her fascination as she observed his transformation. Thousands of the circuits were trained on the Nexus OS, studying it, analyzing its parts.

The circuits were in his brain. His mind. He would take it back from her.

He remembered nights playing push/pull with Rangan, with Ilya, with Wats. They'd use the Nexus synchronicity between their minds to try to maneuver each other's bodies with their thoughts alone. Reaching out with Nexus to try to move Ilya's hand, blink Rangan's eyelid, make a word come out of Wats' mouth. If you could send enough of the right signals into someone else's brain via Nexus, if your signals could be stronger and more coherent than their own, then you could overcome the signals coming from within their own brain. You could control them. That's what Shu was doing to him now.

But no one was better at that than Kade.

He pushed at the circuits she'd built in his mind, aiming to disrupt them, to free his neurons from her invading signals. The circuits flexed, bent, but didn't break. He drew in a breath, pushed harder, gave it everything he had. Circuits snapped, frayed, decohered. Coherence from within his brain squeezed out her foreign signals. For a moment he was almost free of her.

Outside, Shu closed her body's eyes for a moment, continuing with some story. "It was a priceless moment, let me tell you. I find animal subjects just fascinating."

I'm not your enemy, she sent him. Stop fighting me.

He paused to get his mental breath, and in that break Shu's mind infiltrated his own again. Her circuits began to reassemble inside him. She was putting out an incredible volume of radio traffic, swamping the Nexus nodes in his brain with it. Sensors reformed. Manipulators reformed.

Kade gritted his teeth. If he gave in, she would discover that the ERD had sent him. And when she did…

He clenched his mind with all the effort he could muster, disrupted her circuits once more, pushed her fractionally out of his head. He grunted from the effort. Pain blossomed in the front of his skull. His vision wobbled.

Kade, she sent, stop. We have much to talk about.

He couldn't maintain the effort of forcing her out. His mental push faltered. Her thoughts bored back into him, spreading, expanding, going deeper. She was analyzing him, analyzing his thoughts, trying to get into his memories, trying to pry apart his mind, trying to absorb the complexity of the still booting Nexus OS.

How was that possible? Her mind was so vast. She was what Holtzmann had said – a superhuman intelligence, a posthuman. His life would mean nothing to her.

There. The OS was up. A sense of calm descended on him as the serenity package restored his equilibrium. The weapons Rangan had built were his to use once more. He had a momentary flicker of doubt. Should he be doing this?

He saw no other way. Attack her to break her hold on him. Pound the emergency code on the phone. Flee.

[activate nd*]

The Nexus disrupter signal blared out of his skull. Filters dampened it within him. Shu's mind recoiled, spasming. She flinched as if she'd been slapped. Kade winced at the pain inside his own skull. Even through the filters it was intense.

He tried to move his hand. Still no good.

He cranked up the disruptor and its matching filters, let them consume all the Nexus nodes they wanted. Static invaded his mind. Not so bad. He could handle it. Not so bad. He ground his teeth together at the pain.

A hand descended on his shoulder. It didn't matter. He could do this. He must do this.

ENOUGH!

Shu said the word aloud and inside him at the same time. He felt her mind shift. The signals she sent out cohered, a solid continuous pulse of data from billions of nodes at once, pulsing out at whole watts. It overwhelmed him. His control over the nodes in his brain faltered. They became Shu's. They pulsed, pulsed, pulsed…

All went white. Every sense overloaded, not in static, but in a single coherent wave. Everything was one single pulsing rhythm.

Thought evaporated.

Time evaporated.

Space evaporated.

Identity evaporated.

There was nothing.

Nothing

but

this

white

beyond

white.

Wats tensed. The driver with the all-too-familiar face came up the stairs to the roof. Kade's back was to him. The driver crossed the distance between them at a walk, careful to not alarm the serving staff. Wats flicked the safety off of his rifle.

The driver's back was square in the center of his sights.

If he did shoot… would one shot take him down? It had taken many, many bullets to take down the last man he'd seen with that face.

He had to decide. Fire now, on a bad hunch? Kill on incomplete data? Or watch the situation?

Wats took a deep breath. They were in public. Kade had been seen with Shu. If they were going to kill him, they wouldn't do it in plain sight.

He watched the driver's hand come down on Kade's shoulder. Wats tensed. Then… nothing. He exhaled, but kept the crosshairs on the back of the driver's head.