Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (20 page)

T
uesday 2040.11.13

Sam woke to the sound of crying, crying in the darkness.

Aroon. It must be Aroon.

“I’ll get him,” she told Jake, reaching over to touch him.

Empty bed.

Sleep peeled off her in layers.

Jake.

Her heart pounded.

This wasn’t Thailand.

Oh god, Jake. Jake with a bullet punched through his chest. Jake with a drop of her blood dripping onto his face. Jake coughing up blood.

Jake whispering, “I wish I’d known you…” when he had. He had!

Jake’s mind falling into a million pieces that no one could ever put back together.

There were tears on her face.

Aroon cried again.

She pushed herself up. He needed her.

Tug on shorts. Pull on shirt. Out the door. Into the nursery where they’d put the three youngest. All three were awake, staring at her. Aroon was upright, tiny hands clinging to the side of his crib, holding himself up, his mouth open and his little face scrunched up as he wailed with all his small might.

“Hush,” she said with a smile, reaching for him with her hands, reaching out with her mind to soothe him.

And finding nothing. Nothing in her own mind to reach out with. No Nexus.

She put her hands around Aroon, pulled him up out of the crib, held him.

He cried and cried.

“Shhh…” she said. Always before her presence had been enough. Being near her had soothed him, since that first night, since she’d sung to him, in word and mind.

She sang again, hoping her lungs and her arms around him would do the trick.

“Hush little baby, don’t you cry…”

Aroon cried louder, harder.

She closed her eyes, bounced him, still singing, tears in her own eyes.

She could just take Nexus again, let her mind touch these kids. An image of a silvery vial came into her mind. A memory of the touch of Aroon’s mind, the magic of his young thoughts, the world a place of such vivid shapes and colors and surprises. The joy of
vipassana
when her thoughts were intertwined with the children’s.

Sam smiled. Maybe it was time.

Then she heard Shiva in her mind.
Kill them.
She saw Kevin swim into her target sights. Felt her own horror as she pulled the trigger to put the first burst into his face. Now it was Jake’s face, blood gurgling out as he coughed his last breath, and she’d killed them both.

Aroon yelled louder.

“I’ll take him,” someone said in Thai.

Sam opened her eyes. Sarai was standing in front of her, hands on Aroon.

“You have to let go,” Sarai said. “You’re holding him too tight.”

Sam blinked. She loosened her grip, and the girl took Aroon out of Sam’s hands.

She was breathing hard. Her chest was pounding.

“Shhhh…” Sarai said, her eyes closed, her lips brushing the top of Aroon’s head.

And the boy started quieting.

Tears filled Sam’s eyes, tears of loss and pain. She fought them back, smiled at Sarai with pride, forced her breathing to slow. This girl was amazing.

Sarai looked at her, over Aroon’s head.

“I miss you,” she whispered in Thai.

“Oh Sarai,” Sam said, her voice low. She stepped closer, put a gentle arm slowly around Sarai, doing her best to not jostle the infant. “I’m right here.”

Sarai smiled sadly. “It’s not the same.”

Aroon snuffled into Sarai’s shoulder, his sobbing growing quieter, weaker.

“Come back to us,” Sarai said, her eyes searching Sam’s face.

Sam’s heart was still pounding. She could see that silvery vial, could imagine downing it. She could see her bullets punch into the green outline of Kevin’s face, hear Jake’s last whisper.
I wish I’d known you.

“I will,” she told Sarai, meaning it, squeezing the girl’s shoulder. “I will. I just need to heal a little first.”

“We can help you,” Sarai pleaded.

Sam smiled at Sarai, stroked the girl’s hair. “Sarai, I don’t think…”

I don’t think you should see the hole in Jake’s chest, she thought. I don’t think you should feel what I felt, then or now.

“I don’t think children should have to help adults heal,” she said. She smiled. “I think it should go the other way.

“But I am
not
going anywhere,” she said, looking into Sarai’s eyes. “And I will heal. And I will be back in here,” she tapped her temple, “with you again soon.”

She waited until Sarai nodded.

Then she pulled the girl as close as she could without jostling little Aroon, kissed her on the brow, and held them both.

W
ednesday 2040.11.14

Kade swam in an ocean of light. His body sat on the floor in Delhi, eyes closed, legs crossed, hands on knees, breathing deep, placid breaths. His heart beat slowly and surely. His mind was open, touching a thousand others, being enfolded in them, enmeshed with them, so that where he ended and they began, where
I
ended and
we
began, he could no longer say.

The greater self drew breath into a thousand sets of lungs, then slowly released that breath out of the same. Its thousand-fold heart contracted, expanded.

Thoughts arose in one corner of its web, rippled outward from human mind to human mind.

The greater self inhaled again, observed those ripples, those tiny human thoughts, and allowed them to pass, without attachment, without judgment, without grasping that would have created more chaos.

Bit by bit, the noise of monkey mind, the chattering of incessant chaotic thought, faded away.

All that remained was light.

K
ade opened
his eyes as the meditation ended.

That had been… something. Ananda and his monks had come a very long way in the past several months. He’d been blown away the first time he’d encountered dozens of monks, their minds linked, meditating as one. Now they’d folded in the technology he’d brought, linked monasteries together across thousands of kilometers, were folding in hundreds of monks at once, sometimes thousands. There had been monks in that session in Thailand, in Nepal, here in India, even a few in the US.

Bits of a thousand other men and women’s thoughts and memories, dreams and ideas, knowledge and experience, had flowed through him, and into him. And that was just incidental, as they’d allowed those thoughts to rise to the surface and clear, to make room for pure, uncluttered attention.

He leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes again, and he could feel a million minds out there. If he chose he could visualize them, a thin layer around the earth, denser in some areas, sparser in others. He had a flight of fancy, a thought of reaching out to them all, multiplexing a message to them, bringing all those minds together at once, into a union orders of magnitude greater than any yet. He’d had the same thought in that dance club in Saigon, high off the music and the dancing and the other joyous minds and Lotus’s amplifier-assisted mental feedback loop of the crowd’s ecstasy back onto itself. He’d wanted every mind in the world to be part of that, just as much as he wanted them all to feel the serenity of
vipassana
, the loving compassion of
metta
.

And now he had better tools to do it with. Shiva’s tools.

Memories swirled again. Architecture diagrams. Capability maps. Command parameters. Passwords.

Kade shook his head. Shiva’s, not mine.

That he laughed out loud at himself. There was no way that reaching out to a million minds would turn into anything but chaos.

Even with Shiva’s tools to filter and route and connect. A million minds!

All those minds were running Nexus. A million of them that he had an address for. They weren’t even close to all the Nexus users in the world – just the ones his bots had reached.

He’d closed the back doors, but he hadn’t thought to disable the bots he’d already unleashed. They were out there, no longer able to spread, no longer able to make root-level changes or peer into people’s thoughts (thank god) but still sending back pings.

A million minds. What could you do if you could connect a million people together?

“Kade-ji! Kade-ji!”

Kade chuckled and rose to his feet.

If it wasn’t
Dr Kade
it was
Kade
-
ji
around here.

A hell of a lot different than grad school.

He opened the door to his room on the top floor. Peered down. It was Nitya, the house manager, at the bottom of the landing.

“There is news, Kade-ji! Very big news!”

Next to Nitya was a smiling Lakshmi Dabir.

She grinned up at Kade. “India is leaving Copenhagen, Kade. The last leak did the trick.”

Kade felt his own grin grow wider. Well hot damn.

“And,” Dabir went on, “we’d love to invite you and yours to move to a new and more permanent location. Our research facility in Bangalore. Where we can really get started on this work.”

Kade closed his eyes, still smiling.

Maybe this was really going to work.

T
hursday 2040.11.15

The message arrived on Wednesday, and Aarthi herself first thing on a Thursday morning.

Sam smiled as one of the guards opened the door to the New Delhi compound, and the woman entered. It had been years. Three of them.

“Aarthi.” Sam stepped forward and embraced the woman.

Her old colleague looked cool and professional in khaki pants and a smart matching jacket over a pale blouse. Her black hair was cut short, yet stylishly. Her face had a dusting of makeup.

Sam felt drab in the ill-fitting clothes a Ministry of External Affairs staffer had found for her. Clothing had been the least of her concerns. Maybe after they moved to the new location in Bangalore.

“You look good, Samantha,” Aarthi said, standing back, her hands clasped in Sam’s.

“You’re a damn good liar, Aarthi,” Sam said. “And you look
fantastic.
”

“It’s been too long,” Aarthi said. “Since Kashmir.”

Sam nodded. “Too long.” Five years, it had been, since they’d met on a joint Indian-US mission, tracking a bio-weapon find in the US to Pakistani extremists in Kashmir. The bond had been nearly instant – two women in a male dominated field, both at the start of their careers, both intent on proving their worth, and willing to work twice as hard as anyone to do so.

“You ready?” Aarthi asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” Sam replied, and off they went.

The guards opened the door, let them out onto the grounds. Children were out here, on the large lawn surrounded by the armed and manned outer walls. The Indian government was taking no chances with security.

Arinya waved shyly at them, and Sam waved back. That girl had been at Shiva’s compound when Sam arrived. She’d come from a remote village in the Thai north, near Chiang Rai. Twenty-two of the twenty-five children Shiva had kidnapped had come from Thailand. Only eight of those had come from Sam’s home. She’d made getting to know the rest a priority. It would have been easier with Nexus, but that would come, she told herself. The children all learned from one another, at any rate. They’d all learned from the children she’d known that Sam was family. She was their family.

Sam and Aarthi rounded a corner and, speak of the devil, there was her family. Sunisa and Mali, and Kit and Sarai, and Ying and Tada and Kwan as well. Feng was with them. He had them running in circles and falling and rolling. There were smiles on all their faces, and giggles emerging from them.

No doubt they were all sharing even more, mind to mind.

Her heart swelled.

Soon, Sam told herself. I’ll be back. Really back. I’ll be past this.

She smiled and patted heads and gave hugs. Then she and Aarthi kept on walking.

T
he trip
to the village took four hours – by car, then helicopter, then car again.

The place they arrived at was poor, poorer even than Mae Dong, where she’d found the children.

“
W
e have
about a dozen of these pilot programs,” Aarthi said.

They were seated on a small hillock, watching a class a few dozen meters away. Eighteen children sat outdoors with their slates, divided up into four circles. They varied in age. Each circle seemed to have some older children and some younger, ranging from perhaps six to twelve. A single teacher, a woman in her late twenties, perhaps, went from circle to circle, spending a few minutes with each, before moving on.

“They all have Nexus?” Sam asked.

Aarthi nodded. “Nexus 5 plus some modifications our programmers have made,” she said. “We’re experimenting with different ways to use it in education.”

Sam felt anxious just watching, just being here. She’d been told for so long that this was wrong.

But then she looked at that teacher, and saw the smile on the woman’s face, saw the excitement and attention on the children’s faces, saw their eyes light up and their heads turn to look at each other even when they hadn’t said a word that she could hear.

And she could imagine being there with them. And feeling entirely differently about it.

“How’s it working out?” Sam asked Aarthi.

Aarthi picked at the grass next to her. Sam wondered idly if she was getting grass stains on those fancy khaki pants.

“From a technical standpoint,” Aarthi said, “it’s working amazingly well. We’re concerned about safety, of course, but everything looks very good. And the impact is incredible. Groups of children with Nexus learn faster. They have higher retention and faster absorption. Dramatically so. They process problems together. They learn from each other instinctively, unconsciously, without even knowing it. They explain things to each other in ways that go beyond language. If the teacher has Nexus too, and truly understands the material, so much the better.”

Sam turned to look at her colleague, her friend. “But…”

Aarthi smiled. “Socially and politically, it’s more complex. All these young people – if we can boost how fast they learn, we know it’s good for them, it’s good for India. They’ll get better jobs. They’ll make more discoveries that benefit everyone. But not all are convinced.”

Sam raised an eyebrow.

Aarthi went on. “We thought, at first, that the brightest children would gain the most from Nexus.”

“Were you right?” Sam asked.

Aarthi shook her head. “No, actually. They do benefit of course. Quite a lot. But the largest benefit comes to the children who’ve had the least enrichment in life, who’ve come from the poorest families,
especially
if they can touch the minds of children who
are
gifted or who at least have had the benefit of a more intellectually stimulating childhood.”

Sam chuckled. “So you want to put rich kids and poor kids together.”

Aarthi smiled ruefully. “It’s even harder than you might imagine. The caste system is still alive and well. Upper caste parents don’t relish the idea that their children might ever link minds with the lower castes.” She sighed. “And lower caste families – who have the most to gain – are among the most superstitious and suspicious of this sort of technology.” Aarthi shook her head. “There’ve been backlashes.”

Sam shivered. She remembered Thai teens throwing bottles and stones at the house outside Mae Dong.
“Sat pralat”
, they’d yelled. Monster children. And then there was the horror that had befallen Shiva Prasad’s orphanage in Bihar, here in India.

Sam looked around, and now more of the layout here made sense. The reinforced fence. The security guards they’d passed, with their weapons, unobtrusive enough to not frighten children, but still there, and at the ready.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” she said to Aarthi.

“No,” Aarthi said. “It’s going to be messy. It’s going to take a generation.” She paused. “But it’s going to happen, Samantha. The world changes.
We
change
it
.”

Sam said nothing. They sat on the hillock, watching the teacher and the students.

“Samantha,” Aarthi said. “I know you care about these things. I know enough about where you grew up.”

Sam leaned back, put her hands on the hill behind her. “Why am I here, Aarthi?”

Aarthi turned and looked her in the eye. “We’re rebooting Division Six. The rules are all changing. Our job isn’t going to be to stop advanced technology any more. It’s going to be to channel it in safe ways. Stop abuses and threats, but permit legitimate and careful applications. And also to stop backlashes. Keep people like these students safe.”

Sam broke Aarthi’s gaze, looked back at the teacher and her four circles, at those happy, intense, completely unselfconscious faces. At that woman, helping them grow, helping them become something more.

“We want you in on the ground floor, Samantha,” Aarthi went on. “You have the skills. You have first-hand experience that almost no one does. You could put it all to use here.”

Sam took a deep breath.

To be back in the job.

Protecting the little girls. Setting up an organization focused on protecting the innocent instead of focused on killing. In a job that still allowed her to touch the children she loved.

As soon as she had the balls to take Nexus again, anyway.

Is that what she wanted?

She closed her eyes. She felt the appeal. Felt joy at the idea of being
useful
again.

Then she opened her eyes. And saw something she wanted even more right in front of her.

“Aarthi,” she said, “thank you.” She turned and looked at her friend. “I’ll help you. I don’t think I can be in the field. But I can help you get your new organization off the ground. Temporarily.”

She paused.

“Temporarily,” she said again. “Because I think what I really want,” she turned, and gestured with her chin, “is to be like that teacher down there.”