Holtzmann reached for some explanation.
“And who’s Lisa Brandt, Martin? Wasn’t she a student of yours?”
Holtzmann’s chest caught in his throat.
“Is she who you went to visit in Boston today?”
“Anne…”
“I have access to the accounts and the phone records, Martin. I’m not stupid.”
“Anne, it’s not what you think…”
She stared at him. “What’s going on, Martin?”
Holtzmann’s head spun. What could he tell her? Jesus.
“Come with me,” Holtzmann told his wife.
He dragged her down to the basement, to the laundry room, past it, to the room with the old furnace, the room with no windows a laser could be bounced off of, the room least likely to be bugged. He closed the door behind them, and then leaned close to her, and whispered.
“Anne. Who had the most to gain from the assassination attempt? Who benefited?”
She frowned at him. “What the hell are you talking about?” Her voice was angry, impatient.
“The President, Anne.” He glared back at her. “You said it yourself! The PLF couldn’t shoot straight! And Stockton was losing!”
Anne scoffed. “You’re paranoid, Martin. You’re worse than Claire! Those were Stockton’s friends that died. Cabinet members.”
He took her by the shoulders. “Think, Anne! Think about it!” He needed to make her understand.
“You think, Martin. Didn’t the President overrule Barnes on killing those kids? Would a man who’d kill his own friends do that?”
Holtzmann stared at her.
“And why the bomb in Chicago? He was already up in the polls. So that wasn’t him.”
Holtzmann kept staring at her, a terrible feeling of disorientation washing over him. He’d been so sure… It made so much sense.
“And you’re running around trying to dig into this conspiracy? You need help, Martin. You need a psychiatrist. Get yourself together!”
Holtzmann sat in his office after Anne had gone to bed.
Something kept tickling at his head. Something she’d said. You’re worse than Claire!
Claire. Warren Becker’s wife. And what had Warren said? It had been the Spears kidnapping. The one the files blamed on the PLF.
Mexican cartels, Warren Becker had told him once over drinks.
Cartels. Not the PLF. Cartels.
So why did the official record read differently?
It was thin, very thin. But if the PLF wasn’t what everyone thought… Perhaps that one thread…
A notification chimed in his mind. From the Nexus board. A new message.
[Files look good. Get your friend to the ER at Vincent Gray tomorrow night, between 10pm and 4am. We’ll provide appropriate care.]
Holtzmann stared at the message, then deleted it.
Vincent Gray was the closest hospital to DHS Headquarters. Now all he needed was to get Rangan Shankari there.
58
ALONE TOGETHER
Tuesday October 30th
The bad men came for Bobby two days after Alfonso and he knew that if he let them take him away they’d take the Nexus from his head and he’d be no one he’d be dead he wouldn’t be a person anymore, so Bobby tried to KICK the bad men and BITE them and SCRATCH them, but they were too strong and one of the men slapped him in the head and it HURT and then they dragged him out, through two doors into the special testing room.
The door closed behind Bobby and then his friends were gone. They were gone from his head. He couldn’t feel them at all. The bad men put Bobby in a chair and they strapped his hands down to the arms of the chair which they’d never done before and which scared him and he knew this was it, they were going to push the Nexus out of his head like they had to Alfonso and things would be like they were before, before his daddy Derik had given Bobby Nexus and given himself Nexus and then Bobby could feel his daddy for the first time and know that he was a PERSON – a person like Bobby and not like all the other fake people who didn’t have anything in their heads at all. And since that day Bobby hadn’t been so alone. He could feel people now, his daddy and then the boys here Tim and Alfonso and Jason and Tyrone and the other boys, and for the first time he had real FRIENDS even if they were in a bad place; he had other boys he could feel and understand and who could feel him and understand him and now he was crying and crying – and he knew that only little boys cried only babies cried and he was twelve and he wasn’t supposed to cry – but he knew what was going to happen, they were going to make him like Alfonso and Alfonso was all alone now and Alfonso just cried, and Alfonso MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD because he’d never feel anyone again and no one would ever feel him and he was just empty like all the other STUPID PEOPLE who didn’t have Nexus and weren’t really people at all.
They lowered something metal onto Bobby’s head in the chair, and he cried and asked them please please please let me go please I need it to feel other people, please I need it to be real, please I need it to have friends please please please don’t be mean, don’t make me stop being real I’ll take a test, I’ll learn Spanish I’ll learn French I’ll do TRIGONOMETRY I’ll do anything, please please please he cried and cried and cried.
Rangan felt the chaos as the orderlies took Bobby from the room next door, and he knew what it meant. He was untied again, uncuffed from the gurney. He sat in the corner, head down, in defeat. The ERD didn’t have the real back doors. But that was academic. Eventually they’d succeed in reverse-engineering the code. It would be difficult, with the passcodes buried among hundreds of millions of parameters of the neural nets, among blocks of synaptic weights and neural interconnectivity graphs that looked like so much random numerical garbage, that would mask the passcodes for quite a long time. Deciphering that would be a harder problem than building Nexus 5 in the first place. But the ERD had resources. Sooner or later, after months or years, they’d crack it.
And even if they didn’t? They still had the guns. They could still arrest kids like Bobby, take them away from their parents, kill their parents. They’d found a way to force Nexus out of Alfonso’s brain. And now they’d do to the same to Bobby. They’d cripple a little boy because it didn’t fit their ideology.
Rangan shook his head. Tyrone came and lay down in Bobby’s bunk, reached out to Rangan, and Rangan did his best to send soothing thoughts, to try to calm the boys down, even when what he felt inside was despair.
Bobby cried and begged and then one of the men spoke to him.
“Bobby, that’s your name, right? Bobby, we’re not going to hurt you. We’re trying to help you, son.”
Bobby stared at the man. He was old and had a mustache and he was smiling like the teachers told Bobby to do to show that he was nice but there was nobody there in the man’s head and he had Bobby tied down to a chair with something on his head so he definitely wasn’t very nice at all.
“Bobby, you know how to run Nexus commands, don’t you?”
And even though the man wasn’t nice, Bobby nodded his head because there was always the chance that he was wrong and that they weren’t going to push the Nexus out of him – and maybe if he was good and did what they wanted they’d let him go back to the other boys and still have Nexus and still be a person and still have friends and…
“We need you to run a command, son. There in your Nexus. On the screen inside your head. OK?”
Bobby nodded again and this wasn’t so bad if they just wanted him to run some sort of command, which meant running some sort of program or executing some sort of script or changing some configuration and Bobby understood how Nexus was kind of a computer in his head because he’d learned about it from Rangan, and he understood about computers because they made sense they made way more sense than people especially the fake people that…