Nexus

31 FROM A FRIEND

Thursday dawned slowly. The alarm was beeping again. Kade slapped it off. Sam was in the shower. She felt pensive.

Kade felt numb. He'd left the serenity package on overnight. Everything about his situation felt distant, unreal.

He could see no way to avoid Friday without harming others he felt responsible for. The best he could do was play along with the ERD, and hope that nothing bad came of it.

The time would come when he would break free. He wasn't sure when or where or how, but it would come. He would bide his time, and watch, and wait, and be ready when the opportunity arose.

Sam came out of the shower, clothes already on. "Your turn."

He showered. His bruise was fading. He dressed. They ate in silence. A taxi driven by one of their escorts drove them to the conference. He attended sessions. Sam was with him constantly. One of their escorts was always in sight. When he went to the restroom, an armed man followed him in.

At 2.58pm, between sessions, Kade saw Somdet Phra Ananda approaching him. He felt Sam tense through the link, felt her awareness of the pistol concealed in the small of her back, the knives in her boots, the positions of their two support shooters, the ceramic guns loaded with graphene-tipped rounds concealed under their blazers.

He pushed her paranoia out of his mind, met Ananda's eyes with his own. Sam dropped the link. The senior monk and professor came close, nodded to him. Kade nodded back. He couldn't feel Ananda's mind. He had his own Nexus pulled in tight. He had no idea what the ERD would pick up on and what they wouldn't.

"Kaden, would you walk with me?"

"Of course, sir."

He felt Sam go even more alert.

"It's a beautiful day outside. Would you like to walk in the garden?"

It was incredibly hot and muggy outside. The rain had been on and off all day. It was anything but Kade's idea of beautiful.

"Wherever you'd like to go, Professor."

Ananda nodded again, then led the way. Kade imagined the Thai mercenaries rushing to keep him in their sights.

"I was sorry to hear about your mugging, young man."

"Thank you, sir."

It was drizzling outside. Kade felt damp and sticky instantly. The garden was a web of interconnecting stone paths winding around green ponds. Low bridges crossed streams. Small stone statues of Buddhas, demons, and gods flanked the paths. Lush green tropical plants filled all empty space.

Ananda pointed things out as they walked. A bio-engineered carbon sink species that provided ground cover. The symbolism of the patterns the paths made. A seven hundred year-old statue of a bodhisattva, carved by a fallen dynasty.

"Do you know the bodhisattva vow?" Ananda asked.

Kade shook his head.

"It's from the Mah y na school of Buddhism," Ananda said, "different than my own, but still beautiful. The most basic ex pression of it is 'May I attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings.' It's a pledge to keep being reborn into the material world of suffering, to put nirvana off indefinitely, until all beings in the universe have attained enlightenment and can also enter nirvana. It's perhaps the ultimate vow of placing others before oneself."

Kade contemplated that. "It's a beautiful thought."

Had Wats said something similar once? It was a gorgeous thought indeed.

"Another variant I like is 'All beings, without number, I vow to liberate.' Quite a commitment, eh?"

Kade nodded. "It is."

"It's been said that Buddhism is the most naturally democratic religion for this reason. The aim of Buddhist orders such as my own is not to control people, but to empower them. You understand?"

"I think so," Kade replied.

A memory of something else Wats had said came to him.

Buddhism suits me 'cuz nobody's in charge. Nobody's decidin' for me if I'm good or bad, goin' to heaven or hell. It's just me workin' on my head, you workin' your head, the friggin' Dalai Lama workin' on his head.

Democracy, indeed.

Ananda smiled. "Good, good. In Buddhism, as in, say, science, the goal is to empower people. To learn things of value and import, and spread them, so that as many men and women as possible can benefit from that knowledge, can use it to better themselves."

Kade thought of Shu. It would be like giving guns to children, she'd said. There will be a vacuum… You will always be one of the elite.

"What if people aren't ready for it?" he asked. "What if they'd hurt themselves with it? Hurt others with it? What if they're not wise enough for it?"

Ananda raised an eyebrow. "Are you wiser than humanity? All by yourself? Is it your place to choose?"

Kade shrugged. "No. And I agree that science should be used to serve the common good, to empower people. But… Maybe I can see harms that they can't. Maybe I've thought through consequences that most people wouldn't. Maybe I just know that a few people would abuse some piece of knowledge, even if the rest would use it for good."

"That is their karma, young man, not yours," Ananda said. Each of us must walk our own ethical path. And together, men and women of ethics can curb the damage of those without. But for you… if you keep vital knowledge from others, then you are robbing them of their freedom, of their potential. If you keep knowledge to yourself, then the fault is not theirs, but yours."

Kade mulled this. "I think I agree with you. Mostly."

A scientist is responsible for the consequences of his research, Kade thought. Both negative and positive. What good is my research if the world doesn't get the positive consequences out of it?

But can I do it without hurting people? Without making a tool to create slaves and assassins?

Ananda smiled. "I'm glad to hear that. Because it can be tempting to hoard knowledge, to use it as a way to gain advantage over others. But if we seek to serve our fellow man, we must spread the things we learn as far and wide as possible. To empower the downtrodden, we must put knowledge in their hands."

Kade looked around at the garden as they walked. "I'm not always sure I'm doing the right thing," he told Ananda.

"Only a fool is always certain," the monk replied.

Kade nodded again. "Thank you for the advice," he said. "I'll think about that."

Ananda nodded. "I'm sure you will, young man."

He led Kade back towards the conference center, pointing out more plant species along the way, talking about the complex web of life that connected them, telling the stories of every statue, every small bridge, pointing out the beauty in the way the drops of rain pocked the surface of the ponds.

When Ananda had gone, when he'd left Kade, slightly damp, slightly sticky, alone in the convention center, Sam opened the Nexus bridge again.

[sam] Interesting conversation. What do you make of all that?

[kade] I have no idea.

But Kade knew he lied.

At 3.19am local time, a lone CPU in a subverted cluster in a data processing center in Kuala Lumpur multiplied two 512-bit prime numbers and found that they were the factors it had been seeking for a 1024-bit number it had been assigned. It communicated its result to a system in Rio de Janeiro, which passed it to a cutout in Detroit, Michigan, which anonymously forwarded it to a machine in Johannesburg, South Africa, which finally delivered it to a server in Mumbai, India. The result was checked and rechecked. Everything fit. It was the final piece in the puzzle.

Three minutes later, at 4.22am local time in Bangkok, Thailand, Wats' slate chimed. It was a message from Mumbai. After twenty-nine hours of cracking, and more than a hundred trillion processor-seconds of computation, the key had been unlocked.

Sleep vanished from Wats' thoughts. He applied the key, and the data he'd copied from Tuksin's terminal and phone opened for him. It was in Thai. He invoked a translating filter, searched the data for Kade's name.

The first hit told him much:

From:Tuksin, Phra Racha Khana Chan Tham

To:Suk Prat-Nung

Sent:Tuesday 1.38am local time (GMT + 7)

Subject:RE: something of interest

Suk,

The first half of the payment has reached my accounts. Here is the information.

The name is Kaden Lane. Ananda detected immensely strong Nexus activity from him and tasked me to investigate. He believes Lane has absorbed it permanently, but at levels far beyond any we have seen. He is no meditator. He may have the technology you seek.

Well, well, well.

An hour later he pushed back from his slate, whistling softly, piecing it together in his mind.

The tall angular monk named Tuksin that he'd encountered twice now, the special assistant to Professor Somdet Phra Ananda, was secretly on the payroll of Suk Prat-Nung. And what Suk PratNung wanted, more than anything, was upgrades to Nexus. Ananda had sensed the Nexus in Kade's brain, and assigned Tuksin to follow him. Tuksin had sold that data to Suk Prat-Nung. And Suk Prat-Nung had used it to arrange the ambush in the alley, unaware of Samantha Cataranes and her abilities.

But it was the last message, from Suk to Tuksin, that worried Wats.

The same luck that placed him in our grasp on Monday evening is returning him on Friday. He has struck a friendship with people I know. We will grab him, and the girl, as they leave the event.

The girl is dangerous, but we are now prepared. She will be of value, either alive or dead.

Suk

So Friday night was a trap. Could he use that to extract Kade? No, too dangerous. But he couldn't let Kade just walk into it, either. His first priority had to be keeping his friend alive.

He connected to a distributed anonymization service through an entry node in Switzerland. His signal was bounced around volunteered nodes around the world until it re-emerged on the public net from a node in São Paolo. From there he jumped to a throwaway machine in the Cayman Islands. From there he created a fresh email account on an anonymous mail service in Sweden.

The Friday night event is a trap. They'll try to abduct you, with more force this time. Leave Bangkok. It's too dangerous for you. A Friend

He set up daemons on the email account, to inform him of any attempt to hack it. Then he sat back and waited.