"Nice to meet you, Kade. Dominique says you're getting your doctorate in brain-computer communication?"
Kade looked towards the back door. So close… "Yeah. Sanchez Lab at UCSF. What article was this?"
"Two monkeys, with parts of their brains wirelessly linked. One could see out of the other's eyes."
Warwick and Michelson. That one got some press.
"Yeah, that was a good paper," he said. "I work with those guys occasionally. They're over at Berkeley."
"Cool," Sam responded. "Is that what you work on too?"
Dominique made her exit.
Kade shuffled his feet a bit, keenly aware of the stain on the front of his trousers.
"A lot of our grants are for interfaces to control body functions – muscle control and so on."
Kade had a flash of his hips thrusting out of control at Frances's face. He hurried on.
"You know, to help paralyzed people move again. My thesis is on higher-level brain functions. Memory, attention, knowledge representation."
Kade paused, unsure how much she wanted to hear.
Sam picked up the thread. "Interesting. Did you see the one where they taught a mouse the layout of a maze, and other mice could learn it too, just by being wired up to its brain?"
Kade chuckled. "That was my paper. First one I wrote as a grad student. No one thought we could do it."
Sam raised an eyebrow. "No shit. That was impressive. Where are you going from there? Do you think that…"
Sam turned out to be surprisingly interested in neuroscience. She peppered him with questions on the brain, on his work, on what they planned next. Kade found himself forgetting the fiasco he'd just had and his plans of escape. And along the way he learned a few things about her. She worked in data archeology, helping companies mine old and disorganized systems for missing information. She lived in New York, and she was here in SF on a contract assignment for the next few months. She'd just arrived and was looking to make friends. She was funny, smart, and good looking. She laughed at his jokes. And it turned out that she shared one of his interests.
"So you're a brain guy. Have you heard of this drug Nexus?" she asked.
Kade nodded cautiously. "I've heard of it."
"They say it's some sort of nano-structure, not really just a drug. And that it links brains. Is that possible?"
Kade shrugged. "We can do it with wires and with radios. Why not with something you swallow? As long as it gets into the brain…"
"Yeah, but does it actually work?"
"I've heard it does," Kade replied.
"You've never tried it?"
He grinned. "That would be illegal."
Sam grinned back.
"Have you tried it?" he asked her.
She shook her head. "I had a chance in New York last year, but I missed it. It's all dried up on the East Coast."
A first-timer, Kade thought to himself. We could use more first-time females for the study…
He hesitated. "It's dried up out here too. A lot of busts lately."
Sam nodded.
Kade missed whatever she said next. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of something. Someone. Frances.
Oh, fuck.
"…total asshole. He was so rude."
Her back was to him. She hadn't seen him yet.
"…seizure or something. He needs help. Professional help."
The back door. He started to edge towards it.
"Kade? Everything OK?"
Sam. He looked at her. "I've got to go. Sorry. Hope I see you again."
He left her there as he hustled out the door.
Samantha Cataranes watched as Kaden Lane fled the party.
Did I spook him? she wondered. Must have.
Her eyes flicked to a readout at the corner of her tactical contact display. It was red. Off the charts red. The sensor on the necklace she wore had picked up clear Nexus transmissions. Whatever Kaden Lane might say, he had not only tried Nexus before, he'd been using it this very night, in quantities beyond any they'd seen in a human before.
How very odd to be using that drug here, when no one else was. What good was Nexus without another Nexus user for it to bridge a connection to?
Time would tell. She would find another way into their little circle. Rangan Shankari, perhaps.
Sam turned and looked for someone else to chat up. Her cover required it.
Kade soared through a three-dimensional maze of neurons and nano-devices. Nano-filament antennae crackled with life as Nexus nodes sent and received data. Vast energies accumulated in neuronal cell bodies, reached critical thresholds, surged down long axons to pulse into thousands more neurons. Code readouts advanced in open windows around him. Parameter values moved as he watched.
After the debacle of the party, debugging the code running in his own brain was bliss. His body lay safely in his bed. His mind exulted inside the Nexus development environment, tracing the events that had led to the fault. Here he was in his element.
He traced the events of the night through the logs, through the pulses of Nexus nodes and neurons in his brain, until he found the place where Nexus OS had faulted. He traced system parameters backwards in time until he understood what had happened. Nexus nodes had fired in response to excited neurons and triggered an uncontrolled cascade. They needed more bounds checking. It was a simple fix. The code opened itself to him, changed in response to his thoughts. He compiled it, tested it, fixed a new bug he'd introduced, repeated until he was done.
Reluctantly, he left the world inside his mind, and came back to the senses of his body. It was then that he remembered the other girl. Samara.
They could still use another first-time female subject for the study tomorrow to test out the changes they'd made to calibration. They had their minimum sample size, but another wouldn't hurt. Would she fit? Yes. Was that foolish? Perhaps. But they really could use another first-time female…
And she did happen to be smart, funny, and good looking…
He pulled out his slate, projected it onto the wall, and paid a reputation bot to look up everything there was to know about Samara Chavez of New York City.
There she was. Samara A. Chavez. Reputation green.
He drilled into the details. Two degrees of separation from Kade. A Brooklyn address. Thousands of pictures of her online. Mentions of her at various data archeology conferences and online forums. A business license for a private consultancy. No mention on narc sites. No face match against suspected narc photos. The bot summarized her as legit and reputable.
Always use a second source, Wats had said.