Information streamed into his mind. Software collated it, organized it.
First he surveyed the reports from the agents he’d sent searching for Rangan and Ilya. Small autonomous pieces of code, they used the backdoors he and Rangan had installed in Nexus – with the new passcodes Kade had set just hours before he’d released Nexus 5 – to search the minds of Nexus users, hunting, always hunting…
Ilya would hate this, some voice inside himself whispered. I’m invading privacy on a massive level.
Kade ignored it. He’d started down this path to find her. Her and Rangan.
It wasn’t easy to write a bot that would sift someone’s mind for knowledge of two individuals. What to key off of? Their names? Their faces? And if someone had heard one of their names? Had seen one of their faces in the news?
He’d had to endlessly fine-tune the variables. The face or name of either of them – spoken or read – in conjunction with a sense of captivity or imprisonment or prosecution or law enforcement. The person he was looking for would be an ERD employee, perhaps, or part of the wider Department of Homeland Security, or a contractor, or their spouse or lover or confidant. Someone who knew where Rangan and Ilya were, who would help Kade find a way to free them.
Over the last six months he’d gone through hundreds of false hits. Today there were dozens more, the consequence of his time in the wilderness between Cambodia and Vietnam. One by one he replayed the memories and discarded them. False positives, every one.
When he was done, he moved to the next category, the code updates. He’d pulled down hundreds from the most popular Nexus hub, the place where programmers and neuroscientists and others gathered to chat about, analyze, debug, and improve the Nexus OS that he and Rangan and Ilya had built.
Nexus OS was open source now. Anyone could change it. And hundreds did. The updates came thick and fast. Bug and crashes fixed. Security holes closed. New ways to share data, to write apps. Performance speedups. And deep neuroscience tools for working with memory, attention, emotions, sleep, and more, all the way down to raw neutotransmitter levels.
So much more than we could ever have done on our own, Kade thought. Hundreds of people hacking on Nexus now. Lots of them smarter than I am. The progress is amazing.
Kade lost himself in it, the sheer joy of the code and the windows it opened on his mind lifting him.
After an hour, regretfully, he pulled himself out. There was one more thing to catch up on. The one he hated – coercion software. Code for subjugation, domination, and torture. Code used to steal. Code used to rape. Code used to enslave others. He had agents out searching for it – searching for the signal of its use, searching for the patterns of its design.
The first time he’d found such code, he’d reacted crudely, destroying the repository, forcibly purging Nexus from the brain of the man he’d found working on the enslavement tech.
The rapist on his knees, screaming. The mixed sense of revulsion and power Kade had felt as he’d ripped through the man’s brain, deleting all the code he found, then forcing the Nexus painfully out of the slimebag’s skull.
But that was no solution at all. Code would be backed up, or if not backed up, could be recreated. Someone forced to purge Nexus could procure more later, dose themselves again.
He’d grown more sophisticated since then. He’d turned the tools of the subjugators against them. He stopped them, reconditioned them, made sure they weren’t a threat to anyone ever again. He took them down and neutered them and it felt so good, so right to stop those bastards.
Nairobi. The sex-slaver writhing on the dirt floor of the smoke filled room. Kade smiling in grim satisfaction as he mentally rewired him, as he crippled the man’s sex drive and cross-linked violent thoughts to body-racking seizures, made sure the bastard never hurt anyone again.
Yes. Take them down. Stop them. That felt good, at least.
You’re the one turning into a monster, Ilya whispered to him. He could see her face as she spoke. Pixyish. Earnest. Stern. You’re invading people’s minds, taking control of them. It’s the power you love.
I don’t have any choice, Kade interrupted the voice in his head. Not until I finish Nexus 6.
What did Ananda ask you? Ilya whispered to him. “Are you wiser than all humanity?” Are you, Kade? Are you?
You weren’t even there, Kade told the voice in his head. Then he ignored her.
One thing was true. He couldn’t keep up this way. He couldn’t stop them all himself each time. There were more people running Nexus every day, and still just one of him. He needed to make Nexus itself smarter, more resistant to abuse. Nexus 6, he called it. And every one of these abuses he stopped, every one of these chances to stop a monster, was also a lesson he could employ in Nexus 6, a type of abuse that wouldn’t be possible when he finished it.
He went through the finds his agents had made over the seven days he’d been offline. False positives, most of them. Bogus hits that weren’t really abuses.
Good. For once he was ahead of the game.
Twilight fell as Feng drove. Kade turned at last to the thing that moved him most.
His software agents were everywhere now, in hundreds of thousands of minds, searching for his friends, searching for abuses. His agents spread using the back doors in Nexus, using one of the codes Kade had updated in Thailand, just hours before the ERD’s attack on Ananda’s monastery had forced him to release Nexus 5 into the wild.
In most of the minds they entered, his agents found neither signs of abuse nor signs of his friends. But that didn’t mean that they found nothing. They found a human being, after all, a thinking, breathing, feeling person, a spark of light.
And as his agents sent pings back to Kade, he became aware of all those hundreds of thousands of minds, all around the world, and just the tiniest glimmer of what they were thinking and feeling.
He closed his eyes once more now, and let all that data pour through him. The software in his mind visualized it, placed those minds on a shadowy globe as points of light, the shape of continents visible in the diffusion of minds over the earth’s surface, a pattern like nothing so much as the night-time lights of civilization as seen from space.
Kade slowed his breath, opened his palms atop his knees, and let the minds of the Nexus users of the planet wash over him. It was like a sound, like the surf of the ocean against a long shore, like a rushing river nearby. But it wasn’t a sound. It was pure mind, pure thought, pure emotion.
That wash of mind was inchoate, formless, a white noise of thought. Kade breathed, and let himself sink into it, let his thoughts dissolve into that ocean of incipient consciousness, until it filled him, until there was nothing of him left, until he was just a vessel, filled up with the tiniest echo of the thoughts of humanity.
Then he slept, and dreamt of a day when that mind would not be formless, when Nexus would conjoin humanity into something more.
Kade woke in the darkened jeep. An alert was flashing in his mind, flashing, flashing.
He was disoriented. The alert was part of the dream, part of humanity becoming something else, something greater.
But it wasn’t.
[Alert: Coercion Code Sample Alpha Detected. Status: Active.]
Kade’s heart caught in his throat.
Code Sample Alpha. The code used in DC, in the attempted assassination of the President.
Kade shook off the disorientation as best he could. Now was his chance. He could stop them. He could catch them.