INTERVIEWER: Where did the Nexus come from?
SHANKARI: [pause] We bought it from a guy on the street.
<stress sensor indicates deception>
INTERVIEWER: Your pulse just shot up ten points, you're starting to sweat, and your systolic blood pressure just went up by five. Try again.
SHANKARI: [sighs] We made it.
INTERVIEWER: How?
SHANKARI: We autosynthed it.
INTERVIEWER: How'd you get past the censor chip?
SHANKARI: [pause] We got access to an old one. It's out of date. The updates haven't been installed on it for years.
INTERVIEWER: Who's the license holder?
SHANKARI: [sighs] Crawford Lab. They've got a newer fancier one. Their old one mostly just sits idle. I've got access to their lab. They never knew.
INTERVIEWER: Where'd you get the molecular structures?
SHANKARI: We got the chemistry from Recipes for a Revolution. I smuggled a hard copy back from India.
INTERVIEWER: And the source material?
SHANKARI: All over. It's mostly innocuous. The only problem is there are so many different molecules in Nexus… sixty-three different molecular parts. The autosynth only had one chemreactor. We had to do sixty-three runs, then hand mix in the right proportions.
INTERVIEWER: OK, back to the software.
SHANKARI: Yeah. Fine. So we recorded the signals. It was a bitch. Way too much going on. We did more and more mice studies, tapered down the doses as low as we could go. We started injecting straight into the brain to get the lowest possible doses, simplify the traffic between the mice, simplify the analysis for us.
INTERVIEWER: How long did it take you?
SHANKARI: Most of a year. We would do the dosing before we left lab each day, then record activity overnight. The results made no sense. The signal traffic was chaos. Huge volumes of chaos. There was nothing that looked like the position of the nodes.
INTERVIEWER: And then?
SHANKARI: And then… and then we hit pay dirt, man. Kade figured it out. The nodes don't know where they are in the brain. They know where they are relative to other nodes in the same brain. How much position data they send depends on how many nodes there are around 'em. And it's not even really position data. They figure out what functional region they're in, send that in their signals. It's fucking amazing. [shakes head] Anyway, once Kade figured that out, the data miners cracked the encoding. We could listen to brain activity, and trigger new activity anywhere we wanted.
INTERVIEWER: And this led to software how?
SHANKARI: [drums fingers] It was the damnedest thing, man. Once we understood the encoding, we could tell there was room for a lot more data in those signals. There were unused bits. So we just started fucking around with it one day, on a lark.
INTERVIEWER: And?
SHANKARI: And… it would do shit. It would store the data we sent it. If that node sent out a signal again, we'd get the data back. If we sent specific modifier signals, we could tell two nodes to talk to each other, to add their values together, or subtract them. We could do logical operations. [Shankari stops talking, shakes head] It still blows my mind, man.
INTERVIEWER: You'll share these codes with us, all of this data.
SHANKARI: Like I have any fucking choice.
INTERVIEWER: So you could make Nexus nodes perform logical operations and math operations. Go on.
SHANKARI: Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted.
INTERVIEWER: So that's what you did? You wrote the Nexus operating system on top of the instruction set that you'd discovered in Nexus nodes?
SHANKARI: [shakes head] That would've been way too hard. We wanted to do neuroscience, not operating system development. So we ported something instead.
INTERVIEWER: Which was…?
SHANKARI: ModOS. It's free. The source code is all available. It's built to be portable, modular. It's built to run on any kind of hardware, down to the simplest possible instruction set. So we took that. We built a simple compiler to turn ModOS into a set of instructions that would run on a set of Nexus nodes.
INTERVIEWER: So the Nexus OS is really ModOS, running on Nexus nodes as its hardware.
SHANKARI: [nods] Yeah. You got it.
INTERVIEWER: And on top of that you've built more software.
SHANKARI: [nods] Yeah. Well, we've ported other software. Anything that can run on ModOS we can compile to run on the version that runs on top of Nexus. And we've built software. We had to build the code to send the video output to the visual cortex, stuff like that. And we wrote brand-new neuroscience software. We've built programs that make it easy to interact with parts of the brain. Interfaces. Like, an interface to take body shapes, like for a VR app, and tells the motor cortex to put the body in that position. That sort of thing.
INTERVIEWER: This is how you paralyzed Agent Chavez.
SHANKARI: [Looks down] Yeah. Dumbshit move, huh? [shakes head]
[…discussion of Nexus OS continues for another 17 minutes…]
INTERVIEWER: Next topic. You and your co-conspirators give off extraordinarily strong Nexus signals, and they're not dropping. The drug isn't wearing off. How is that possible?
SHANKARI: The limit of how much Nexus you can have in your brain is mental. Your neurons fire and the Nexus nodes are trying to coax them to fire. If they're not getting coherence, some of them break apart and get flushed out. Over time, your brain adapts to having a Nexus network. Your Nexus coherence increases. Your maximum possible levels of Nexus go up.
INTERVIEWER: But why isn't the level dropping? It's been more than eight hours. Most of it should be out of your system.
SHANKARI: [shakes head] We call Nexus a drug, but it's not. It's a nano-machine. It doesn't flush out because some enzyme has broken it down. Nexus nodes decompose to their parts because some internal logic has told them to. And if you give them the right signal, they just don't break down at all.
[…interview continues for another 18 minutes…]
8
BACK DOORS
Kade came out of his tech interview stressed and shaking. It had been an exhausting two hours. They'd drilled deep into what he and Rangan had built. They'd spotted every evasion. They'd known every time he lied or tried to hold something back. Well, he would show them.
He signed the papers they gave him. An ERD lawyer watched him, then countersigned the documents. The deal was real now. He would serve as their spy, and in exchange no one would go to jail. He and Rangan and Ilya would stay in science for just so long as Kade's mission lasted.