"What are they doing?" she asked Kade.
He grinned at her. "We call it push/pull. They're using Nexus to move each others' bodies. Sending impulses to each others' motor cortices. Or trying to. It's not easy for most people."
She stared at them.
"Can we try that?" she asked.
Kade grinned again. "Later."
He led her further into the hangar, towards the circle of reclined couches. Something was going to happen there, she read from him. An experiment. And she could be part of it.
"This is the closest we've come to people mapping each other. To the calibration experience across more than one mind. Want to try it?"
Yes. God yes. She wanted to swallow them all whole.
No, a small voice protested within her.
She ignored it, nodded mutely to Kade.
A half-dozen men and women were already reclining on the couches. There was room for a half-dozen more. As she and Kade approached the rest of the minds in the space faded. She could feel these six now, and clearly. She could feel Kade. The rest of the party was blanketed in mental silence.
Kade was behind her. His hands touched lightly on her shoulders. He led her to one of the couches, helped her to sit. He crouched at her side.
Others arrived, took their seats. A dozen of them on the couches and a few watchers nearby.
"Ready?" Kade spoke aloud, pitched for her alone.
Sam nodded.
Something happened. Eleven more minds grew larger in her perception. They brightened, swam more fully into focus. They were so full. So alive with thoughts and memories, emotions and desires. Her breathing synchronized with theirs. She closed her eyes and she could see and feel their individual lines of thought.
Eleven minds touched her at once in eleven parts of her psyche. Here was Brian's sheer joy at the crazy, meditative, ebullient madness of playing mind to mind with his friends. Here was Sandra's deep reservoir of calm and poise, her years of yoga, her pool of peace, anchoring those around her. This was samadhi to her. Here was Ivan's physicist's appreciation of the math and music in the interplay and dance and harmony and discord of the thoughts around him. Here was a vision in Leandra's mind, of protein shapes, folds and receptors and binding sites, of a dozen men and women connected in mind to decode them… Here were tears on Josephine's face, tears of a joyous memory of childhood, fireworks with her beloved Dad, lost to her. Lost like… like…
There were tears on Sam's face now. She didn't know why. She could feel Kade watching her, concerned. She had no answer for him.
Each person had not one thread, but many. They intertwined in parallel, each connected to the others. Thoughts and memories shifting and flowing. Sandra's first fumblings with other girls in her preteen years. Antonio's comprehension of quantum programming, the edges of understanding any of it just beyond what Sam could capture. Jessica's rapture in freefall dives from twelve thousand feet, the adrenaline of jumping, the calm of popping the chute, her bliss every time she hung below that fabric wing and steered herself to the ground, singing and breathing and soaring untethered.
She knew Sandra's love of the stillness, the meditative, I-amin-my-body glory of her daily practice. It spiraled within Sam, found her memories of sparring bouts, the absolute beauty of a perfect strike or block or dodge. The serenity of perfect form, the adrenaline of a hard and close fight, the endorphic come-down bliss that followed. And… and…
She felt Kade, still. He was with them, with her. And his mind… his mind… She knew the beauty of the Nexus core. The sublimity of its design that awed him, staggered him. She tasted the pure abstract space within him where he did his best work, apprehended a tiny bit of the protocol he'd built with Rangan, the semantic layer between individual neural connections and whole thoughts. It was a glorious thing, a map of all the kinds of pieces of thoughts, an ontology of consciousness. It existed in him in part of his mind beyond doubt or fear or even consideration of others. Part of him so beautiful and yet so distant and so alien and so very, very much hers for this brief time.
Sam saw through his eyes. Saw the flows of thoughts and emotions and experiences as bits and packets and traffic patterns, not cold and dry, but gorgeous in a symphonic way, an orchestral way. They were individual instruments coming together to create a richly textured whole, greater than the sum of its parts. She saw his aspirations, to transcend the boundaries of individual minds, saw how Ilya had shaped his thoughts, saw a glimpse of the path he thought might just be feasible, his wonder at a future nothing like the past.
She was crying then. Crying because Kade's mind was so crystal clear and his vision so pure and so awe-inspiring in its way and yet so terrifying to her. Crying with Josephine at shared loss, of parents ripped away in youth, of childhood lost. Crying at the loss of Kade's parents so recently. Crying at a memory of pain and fear that Sandra had uncovered, Sam wounded in the night, left arm hanging useless, blood dripping into her eyes, terrified, not sure if she would see the dawn, not sure she could get past the one last guard…
She was confused, disoriented. Memories that made no sense were arising. Josephine experienced Sam's memories of her parents' last Christmas in San Antonio. Yet she also knew Sam's sorrow at the death of them, years in the past. At the horror of something not clean, not fast, not accidental…
Leandra's experiences in proteomics touched Sam's identity as a data archeologist. Sam worked for corporations to unlock value from their legacy intellectual assets. Not Third World government databases… Not records of human and transhuman experiments…
She felt their collective concern. Kade most of all. Felt them reaching out more tendrils to her, to soothe her, buttress her. Each contact triggered a memory. An all-nighter in college cramming for her differential equations mid-term. Her first triathlon, that place beyond exhaustion, beyond bliss, beyond anything but moving her body again and again and again… Pushing herself that hard in the Iranian Caspian, north-east of Sari, terrified out of her mind, trying to make that rocky beach in Turkmenistan, not knowing if backup would truly be there…
Sam was losing her mind.
She liked to bike. She swam. She'd graduated with a master's in DA with honors. She had two loving parents. She had a memory of a gun, huge in her young hands, the man she'd shot lying in a puddle of his own blood, slowly bleeding to death, deserving this and more for the horrors he'd inflicted…
Yet Sam remembered her training for this mission. Another dose of Nexus, Nexus 3, the palest shadow of her current experience. A briefing. An assignment. A mantra that veiled who she was…
Sam understood then. It overwhelmed her. She understood who she was, understood the betrayal of herself that this experience constituted. It came out in a jumble through the upper layers of her mind. Sam felt the bewilderment of the minds she was connected to, each of them seeing just a part of it. Felt their growing alarm. She had seconds to act.
NOOOOOOOOO!