“We wait here till dark,” he told Kade.
Kade nodded. “It’s the back door,” he said.
“What’s that?” Feng asked.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking about the bounty, Feng. Why do they want me so badly? A ten million dollar bounty? And alive? They’ve already convicted me in absentia. They could just kill me.”
Feng turned and looked at his friend. “So what’re you saying?”
Kade looked back. “They want the back door.”
Feng thought this over. “It’s a dangerous thing.”
Kade nodded. “It’s funny, we put it in there as a safeguard against the ERD, so that if they misused Nexus we could stop them…”
“And now they trying to get it from you,” Feng said.
“I could close it,” Kade replied. “I have the code. Another bot. A virus. It’d spread from person to person, close the back doors anywhere it found them.”
“So why don’t you?” Feng asked.
“Because there are people I have to stop, Feng.”
He felt thoughts flit through Kade’s mind. Images. A glimpse of wires and a flashing red light in that building in Chicago, before white noise and then – nothing.
Feng mulled that over. “Maybe somebody else deal with those things?” he told Kade. “Not just you?”
Kade shook his head. “I made those abuses possible. I have to stop them if I can.”
They sat in the car and waited for night. The palm trees shaded them from the worst of the sun, but it was still brutally hot.
The news brought word of a fire in a remote mountain monastery. Chu Mom Ray. No fatalities were reported.
“You saved my life back there,” Kade said.
Feng turned and grinned at him. “Not the first time.”
Kade laughed. “No. Not the first.” He shook his head. “At this rate, not the last either.”
Feng shrugged. “It’s what Su-Yong would want. Save the boy, she said.”
Kade nodded.
“And you’re my friend, Kade,” Feng said, grinning again. “First one I ever chose for myself!”
Kade smiled at that, turned his head, and took Feng’s hand.
“Thank you.”
“Hey, don’t get all mushy now!” Feng joked. “I just don’t have so many friends I can lose them, is all.” But it was long moments before he let go.
“Why’d that monk sell you out?” Feng eventually asked Kade.
Kade shook his head again. “I’ve upset the order of things. It used to be that only the most experienced meditators could master Nexus and keep it in their minds indefinitely. But now anyone can permanently integrate it. And the young monks pick up Nexus 5 faster than the old ones. They don’t need the old ones as teachers. I’ve undermined their authority, inverted the hierarchy.”
“Fuck hierarchy,” Feng said.
Kade laughed aloud. It felt good to hear it. Feng smiled in return.
“Aren’t you a soldier, Feng? You grew up with hierarchy.”
Feng was the one to look away this time, his thoughts far away.
“Yeah. Never liked it.”
“Tell me,” Kade said. “What it was like.”
Feng watched a palm frond sway in the wind. Kade had asked before. Feng knew his friend meant well, but it wasn’t something he wanted to go back to.
“Please,” Kade said.
Feng sighed. It had been a rough few days. Kade needed something. Needed some perspective. Needed some hope. He leaned back.
“My first memory was pain.” Feng spoke quietly, but he opened his mind, let Kade feel it, let him remember it with him.
“I was four, maybe. Big. Strong. They engineer us to grow up fast. But not so much mind, yeah? Get big and strong fast, but smart just as slow.
“I was doing rings, yeah? Swinging one to the next, like a monkey.”
“Then I fell. No mat. No net. Just ground. It hurt. Bloody knee. Nothing bad, but I was four. Just knew it hurt.” He shook his head, and Kade felt it coming, the real pain.
“Instructor comes over, and he says, ‘Get up!’ And I say ‘It hurts!’ So he kicks me across the field. And now I’m screaming. And all my brothers. They all stop. Staring at me.”
Feng’s fists were clenched. He was that little boy again. Kade felt his stomach knotting up. Felt the pain and fear and incomprehension.
“Instructor walks over, and he says, ‘Get up!’ And I’m crying, cuz it hurts. Hurts real bad now. And I say ‘Can’t! It hurts!’ and he says ‘I’ll show you what hurts!’ and he kicks me again.”
Kade felt sick to his stomach. His face was hot.
“Instructor walks over one more time. He says ‘Get up! Get up, dog!’ And this time I try, but something’s broken inside. I fall down. But I know, I stay there, he’ll hurt me worse… So I crawl. It takes me long time. Hurts so bad. Feels like an hour. But I make it over to rings again.”
Feng was breathing heavily now, his chest heaving as he remembered. His face was flushed with it.
“And I try to get up, and it hurts so bad and I fall down. And I try to get up again and I pull up on the pole and get to where I can stand. I try to go up the ladder. But I slip. Arm not working. And I fall down again.
“And now I know I can’t say I can’t. So I say, ‘Help me!’”
Feng shook his head, and leaned out the jeep to spit. He pulled back upright, wiped the spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand. The wind rustled the date palms softly overhead. A bird called out somewhere near them.
After a moment, Feng went on, softly, more slowly.
“So I say, ‘Help me!’ and instructor says, ‘This what happens to boys who ask for help.’ And he kicks me, again and again. And I ask him to stop and I try to curl up and he just keeps on kicking me. ‘You see that?’ he asks my brothers. ‘You see what happen if you’re weak?’”
Kade bowed his head at the horror of it. A four year-old boy.
Feng’s body was vibrating now, his hands clenched around the wheel. He had to hold himself back from breaking it in two.
“They take me away to hospital. Two months. I’m a lesson for all my brothers.” Feng snorted. “Some lesson.”
“I’m sorry, Feng,” Kade said. “I… I’m sorry to make you relive that pain.”
Feng snorted again. “Yeah. Pain. You know why I tell you that?”
Kade shook his head, his mind still reeling from what Feng had shared.
“Because I want you to understand. You think Nexus making so many bad things happen. Your fault, yeah? But this all happens to me before Nexus. Nexus not bad. Just some people bad. You understand?”
Kade said nothing for a few seconds. Then slowly, he nodded. They sat in silence for a while.
“When did you first meet Su-Yong Shu?” Kade asked him.
Feng nodded. “All my childhood, lots of pain. Physical pain. They rig us with implants when I’m six.” His hand went to the back of his head. “Direct nerve stimulus, yeah? Pure pain. Pure.”
Feng shook his head, put his hand in his lap again. “They use pain to punish us, discipline us. Use pain when we’re too slow, too weak, when we miss targets shooting, when we lose fights sparring, when we don’t clean our guns fast enough, hold our breath long enough, make our beds neat enough.
“All they teach us is how to fight, how to kill. Weapons. Tactics. Strategy. Planes. Helicopters. Cars. Kung fu. Knives. Guns. All that stuff. For fun, we get war movies, fight movies.” Feng laughed. “Those we like.
“They make us fight each other, fist and feet and knives. And other kind of fights. Compete with our brothers. Whoever slowest, or weakest, or stupidest, more pain. And shame in front of other brothers. No dinner. No bed sometimes – sleep standing up.
“But doesn’t work so good after a while. We stop caring about pain. They built us too well. We get wild. Start to talk back. Show off to other brothers.”