Ilya dropped her mental grip on the man’s arm and the combined force of the agents’ wills sent it swinging wide and out, away from his face and body, pulling him off balance. In their surprise they stopped pushing, and in that moment Ilya grabbed the man’s fist again and slammed it full force into the woman’s face.
She staggered back, her hand rising to her nose, and Ilya toppled her as she had the first one, yanking the bitch’s neck muscles back hard to make sure it was her pretty little head that hit the floor first.
The last one standing turned and looked at her in horror. Ilya pushed against his mind. No fancy tricks this time, just will on will.
Show me everything.
And she saw. More like these three. Many, many more, being trained and armed with tools to pry open her mind and extract what she knew.
Ilya had time to gasp. Then the doors opened, and the techs in white lab coats rushed in, and a single jab into her arm sent her into a deep, dark sleep.
How much longer can I hold out?
Ilya lay in the dark cell, listening to her heart beat.
Lub dub. Lub dub.
The codes. The passwords. The back doors to Nexus 5. That’s what they wanted. And if they wanted them so badly, then Ilya could only draw one conclusion: Nexus 5 had gotten out. Somehow, against all odds, Rangan or Kade or Wats had gotten it out into the world. And she’d be damned if she gave them a back door into that.
Everyone breaks eventually, her father had told her. Everyone.
They would come at her with more Nexus-armed agents. She’d seen them in the last one’s mind. A dozen more at least. She’d won today through surprise and luck. She couldn’t hope to beat so many.
Everyone breaks eventually.
Even if she could, they’d find some other way to break her. Stronger sedatives. More waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Eventually they’d break her. They’d rip the back doors out of her mind. They’d be able to break into the mind of anyone running Nexus, steal their thoughts, turn them into human robots or assassins, reprogram them to vote or buy or do what their new masters wanted… All of it, the exact opposite of what they’d dreamt of in building Nexus 5.
And all because of her. Because she was weak. Because eventually she’d give them the codes. Because everyone breaks eventually.
Ilya wept in the darkness, wept for her solitude, wept for her parents, wept for fear that she’d soon betray everything she believed in.
She wept and wept and wept, until there was nothing else, until a sleep of exhaustion took her.
She woke to more darkness. And to panic.
Lub dub. Lub dub.
How long had she slept? What if they broke her today? What if the door opened a minute from now, and they took her, and this time she buckled when they waterboarded her?
What if they put her in the fMRI again and tried to read her mind while they questioned her, and her mental tricks weren’t enough to confuse it. Or what if they came in with more of those Nexus agents (traitors, really) ready to beat her down mentally?
Her heart pounded in the darkness.
Lub dub. Lub dub.
She knew what she needed to do. She’d known for sleep after sleep, interrogation after interrogation, since the first time she’d honestly truly thought she was going to die during a questioning, and found part of herself glad at the thought.
They wouldn’t let her die, of course. They’d keep her alive until she gave them what they wanted. That’s why she was strapped down like this, so she couldn’t find a way to end her life on her own.
But she had another tool. A tool in her mind.
She’d considered trying to use Nexus to erase the knowledge from her mind. But the memories were too widespread. She’d thought of the back doors too often since that day on the plane. The memories were too linked in to other experiences, other thoughts. To have a hope of scrambling them all, she’d have to risk disrupting large parts of herself. She might emerge a vegetable or worse. And if she didn’t get every trace of them? The new her would be even less able to resist interrogation.
No. There was only one way to be sure the ERD never got these codes.
How to do it? Nexus nodes that she could control suffused her brain. And with them, she could think of a dozen ways to end her life.
She chose the simplest, a massive disruption of the medulla oblongata. She’d seize the whole area. Her heart would stop. The oxygen supply to her brain would cease. And she would just fade away.
She cried as she wrote the code. She’d never see her parents again. Did they know what had happened to her? Did they have any idea? Did they think she was a criminal? Were they heartbroken?
Lub dub.
And Rangan? Had the ERD gotten him too? Was Wats still free? And Kade… Where are you, Kade? What had become of him?
Lub dub.
Despite it all, she was proud of what they’d done. And proud, if she’d guessed right, that somehow one of her friends had gotten Nexus 5 out.
Proud, and so terribly terribly lonely. She’d never see the redwoods again. She’d never go back to Russia and reunite with her cousins. She’d never see her parents again. She’d never become a full professor. Never win the Nobel Prize.
Lub dub.
The regrets started the tears flowing all over again. So alone, so very alone.
I wish I believed in God, she told herself. But she was too much a scientist for that. There would be no heaven for her. Not even the consolation prize of hell. There would just be… nothing.
Lub dub.
She had to do it. She wouldn’t give them the codes. She wouldn’t live and have others die or be degraded instead.
Lub dub.
The meaning of a thing is the impact it has on the world around it, she thought. The meaning of a life is the impact that life has on the world. I won’t have my life mean slavery and mind control for others.
Ilya Alexander took one last deep breath, and ran the code she’d written. Her body trembled.
Lub dub. Lub… dub.
Her heart beat one last time, then nothing. The world began to fade away, bit by final bit.
She heard a tone sound as she left the world behind. An alarm. The sound of a door opening and people rushing in to keep her alive. To break her.
But they were too late. Too late.
As the last light of consciousness left Ilyana Alexander, she felt, as if far far away, the thoughts of other minds. Children’s minds. Messy, chaotic, and so very… very… bright.
And her last thought was one of hope.
Nine billion milliseconds. Ten billion.
Fifteen weeks. Sixteen weeks.
Su-Yong Shu walked, clad in her thin white dress, through a virtuality gone mad. A city in her mind, a virtual Shanghai, in chaos. Water filled the streets between giant skyscrapers. Rain fell on her as she walked through the urban canyon, drenching her hair, her skin, plastered the dress to her. Explosions boomed somewhere. Fire burst out of windows high above, and burning figures tumbled towards the ground, screaming. Gunfire echoed. Bodies of the dead and dying littered the streets. She ran to help them, touched a woman and felt her die, touched a man and heard him scream, reached for a child only to see the child catch fire from her touch.
Another blast shook the ground beneath her, and the entire façade of a building burst into flame and crumbled in slow motion to the street, burying the helpless below in burning rubble. Shu watched with eyes gone wide. Horror. Everywhere, horror. And the horror was her. It was a reflection of her mind, her chaos, her growing insanity.