Kade contemplated that. "It's a beautiful thought."
Had Wats said something similar once? It was a gorgeous thought indeed.
"Another variant I like is 'All beings, without number, I vow to liberate.' Quite a commitment, eh?"
Kade nodded. "It is."
"It's been said that Buddhism is the most naturally democratic religion for this reason. The aim of Buddhist orders such as my own is not to control people, but to empower them. You understand?"
"I think so," Kade replied.
A memory of something else Wats had said came to him.
Buddhism suits me 'cuz nobody's in charge. Nobody's decidin' for me if I'm good or bad, goin' to heaven or hell. It's just me workin' on my head, you workin' your head, the friggin' Dalai Lama workin' on his head.
Democracy, indeed.
Ananda smiled. "Good, good. In Buddhism, as in, say, science, the goal is to empower people. To learn things of value and import, and spread them, so that as many men and women as possible can benefit from that knowledge, can use it to better themselves."
Kade thought of Shu. It would be like giving guns to children, she'd said. There will be a vacuum… You will always be one of the elite.
"What if people aren't ready for it?" he asked. "What if they'd hurt themselves with it? Hurt others with it? What if they're not wise enough for it?"
Ananda raised an eyebrow. "Are you wiser than humanity? All by yourself? Is it your place to choose?"
Kade shrugged. "No. And I agree that science should be used to serve the common good, to empower people. But… Maybe I can see harms that they can't. Maybe I've thought through consequences that most people wouldn't. Maybe I just know that a few people would abuse some piece of knowledge, even if the rest would use it for good."
"That is their karma, young man, not yours," Ananda said. Each of us must walk our own ethical path. And together, men and women of ethics can curb the damage of those without. But for you… if you keep vital knowledge from others, then you are robbing them of their freedom, of their potential. If you keep knowledge to yourself, then the fault is not theirs, but yours."
Kade mulled this. "I think I agree with you. Mostly."
A scientist is responsible for the consequences of his research, Kade thought. Both negative and positive. What good is my research if the world doesn't get the positive consequences out of it?
But can I do it without hurting people? Without making a tool to create slaves and assassins?
Ananda smiled. "I'm glad to hear that. Because it can be tempting to hoard knowledge, to use it as a way to gain advantage over others. But if we seek to serve our fellow man, we must spread the things we learn as far and wide as possible. To empower the downtrodden, we must put knowledge in their hands."
Kade looked around at the garden as they walked. "I'm not always sure I'm doing the right thing," he told Ananda.
"Only a fool is always certain," the monk replied.
Kade nodded again. "Thank you for the advice," he said. "I'll think about that."
Ananda nodded. "I'm sure you will, young man."
He led Kade back towards the conference center, pointing out more plant species along the way, talking about the complex web of life that connected them, telling the stories of every statue, every small bridge, pointing out the beauty in the way the drops of rain pocked the surface of the ponds.
When Ananda had gone, when he'd left Kade, slightly damp, slightly sticky, alone in the convention center, Sam opened the Nexus bridge again.
[sam] Interesting conversation. What do you make of all that?
[kade] I have no idea.
But Kade knew he lied.
At 3.19am local time, a lone CPU in a subverted cluster in a data processing center in Kuala Lumpur multiplied two 512-bit prime numbers and found that they were the factors it had been seeking for a 1024-bit number it had been assigned. It communicated its result to a system in Rio de Janeiro, which passed it to a cutout in Detroit, Michigan, which anonymously forwarded it to a machine in Johannesburg, South Africa, which finally delivered it to a server in Mumbai, India. The result was checked and rechecked. Everything fit. It was the final piece in the puzzle.
Three minutes later, at 4.22am local time in Bangkok, Thailand, Wats' slate chimed. It was a message from Mumbai. After twenty-nine hours of cracking, and more than a hundred trillion processor-seconds of computation, the key had been unlocked.
Sleep vanished from Wats' thoughts. He applied the key, and the data he'd copied from Tuksin's terminal and phone opened for him. It was in Thai. He invoked a translating filter, searched the data for Kade's name.
The first hit told him much:
From:Tuksin, Phra Racha Khana Chan Tham
<Tuksin@thaibuddha.th>
To:Suk Prat-Nung <SukPN@tmail.th>
Sent:Tuesday 1.38am local time (GMT + 7)
Subject:RE: something of interest
Suk,
The first half of the payment has reached my accounts. Here is the information.
The name is Kaden Lane. Ananda detected immensely strong Nexus activity from him and tasked me to investigate. He believes Lane has absorbed it permanently, but at levels far beyond any we have seen. He is no meditator. He may have the technology you seek.
Well, well, well.
An hour later he pushed back from his slate, whistling softly, piecing it together in his mind.
The tall angular monk named Tuksin that he'd encountered twice now, the special assistant to Professor Somdet Phra Ananda, was secretly on the payroll of Suk Prat-Nung. And what Suk PratNung wanted, more than anything, was upgrades to Nexus. Ananda had sensed the Nexus in Kade's brain, and assigned Tuksin to follow him. Tuksin had sold that data to Suk Prat-Nung. And Suk Prat-Nung had used it to arrange the ambush in the alley, unaware of Samantha Cataranes and her abilities.
But it was the last message, from Suk to Tuksin, that worried Wats.
The same luck that placed him in our grasp on Monday evening is returning him on Friday. He has struck a friendship with people I know. We will grab him, and the girl, as they leave the event.
The girl is dangerous, but we are now prepared. She will be of value, either alive or dead.
Suk
So Friday night was a trap. Could he use that to extract Kade? No, too dangerous. But he couldn't let Kade just walk into it, either. His first priority had to be keeping his friend alive.
He connected to a distributed anonymization service through an entry node in Switzerland. His signal was bounced around volunteered nodes around the world until it re-emerged on the public net from a node in São Paolo. From there he jumped to a throwaway machine in the Cayman Islands. From there he created a fresh email account on an anonymous mail service in Sweden.