Nexus (17 page)

  Kade's own room was small but nice, with a view of Bangkok's neon-lit downtown. He stood at the window for a moment, soaking in the tall towers, neon signs, and rivers of foot and vehicle traffic. Bright lights, big city, he thought. He tossed his slate and phone onto the charging plate atop the nightstand and collapsed into the bed, clothes still on.

 

Sam let the smile fall from her face as the door closed behind her. Spending time with Kaden Lane was more tiresome than she'd expected. She closed both layers of curtains to block exterior visual surveillance. Then she walked through the room, inspecting it, methodically opening every drawer, searching every nook and cranny and corner, inspecting phones, terminal, viewscreen, electrical outlets. Implants scanned for the telltale transmissions of active surveillance devices, trace molecular signatures of explosives, giveaway echoes of false walls or panels that could hide a monitoring device or worse.

  She pulled out her slate, and used it to view status from the infiltration daemon the CIA had planted in the hotel's net. The cameras in the hallways and elevators were hers now, as were the locks on the doors, the fire alarms and sprinklers, the motion sensors in the crawl spaces, the discreet metal and explosives detectors in the lobby, the local network access points, the registration and booking database, the cleaning schedule, the phones, and more.

  There were no known hostile agents registered at the hotel. No signs of infiltrations of the hotel's network. Which might mean that she and Kade had attracted no special attention, or might only mean that any other infiltrators were armed with tools as good as hers.

  She turned her attention to Kade's room. The countersurveillance device she'd attached to his bag showed no sign of any bugs aside from hers. A composite view from the handful of bugs sprinkled across his clothes, devices, and luggage showed Kade sprawled across the bed, clothes still on, curtains wide, bags unopened. Across the Nexus link she could feel him drifting into sleep. Good. The slate would wake her at any major change in his room. If his mental state changed too much, that would wake her as well.

  She instructed the daemon to continue trawling the hotel's net, to alert her if Kade's door opened, if the power draw from his room changed abruptly, if he accessed the net or used the phone, or if anyone loitered in front of his door or hers. In the meantime it would capture the faces of every person seen by any of the surveillance cameras in the elevators or hotel lobby, and especially anyone on their floor, feeding them to another CIA database for pattern-matching against known foreign agents.

  She sent a clone of the data feeds off to her support team. There would be an operative awake and monitoring the feed twenty-four hours a day, ready to wake her or initiate action if any threat was detected. There were ground forces assigned as backup should they be necessary. Local contractors vetted by the CIA for trustworthiness.

  The perimeter was as secure as she could make it. Sam unpacked her bag, hung her clothes out for the next day, and spread her discreet, nearly undetectable weapons out where she could reach them. She set a wakeup call for 7am, and put herself to sleep.

 

Across Bangkok, in a shabby rented room off Khao San Road, a slate chimed. Watson Cole paused from checking and rechecking his weapons to see what information he'd received. It was a message from his man at the Prince Market Hotel. Kaden Lane had arrived and was checked into room 2738. He'd arrived with a woman named Robyn Rodriguez, in room 2731. Photos from a lapel camera showed both in the lobby, waiting to check in.

  Wats zoomed in on Robyn Rodriguez's face as he pulled up information on her in another screen. Same build. Same nose. Same chin. Eyes, hair, lips, and cheekbones were different, but those could all be altered. In all likelihood, that was Samantha Cataranes. That, in turn, confirmed that this was either an ERD mission, or a trap for Wats.

  It was no matter. He had a mission. Cataranes would be a complication, but he had expected as much. She wouldn't catch him by surprise this time. He would still achieve his goal, despite her and whatever other operatives she'd brought with her.

  He sent a message to the maid at the Prince Market whose services he'd purchased.

  2738. Tomorrow.

  His hand went to the data fob on the chain around his neck. If he could just connect this and Kade…

  But would Kade accept his help? Should he even ask? He had to. Kade wasn't just a tool. He was a friend. The boy had his own decisions to make, his own concerns to weigh. Wats didn't know what they'd offered his friend or what they'd threatened him with to get him here. He didn't know what task they wanted Kade to complete.

  In the end, it was Kade's karma at stake. Wats could hold out his hand, but Kade had to take it. If he had any sense, he would.

  Wats went back to inspecting his equipment. His life, and that of Kaden Lane, might very well depend on it.

 
 

Morning came too soon for Kade. He and Sam ate in the hotel restaurant and then headed out for the conference. The heat hit them like a solid object as they exited the lobby to find transportation. The sky was a ceiling of cloud or smoke or both. The air was thick with humidity. A warm drizzle came down onto the street. No wonder they held conferences this time of year. No one would want to come to Bangkok on vacation when the weather was this oppressive.

  Sam flagged down a tuk-tuk at random. The bright yellow three-wheeled vehicle veered over to them. "Queen Sirikit Convention Center," she told him.

  "Convention center," the driver replied. "A hundred baht!"

  "Fifty baht," Sam replied.

  "Fifty baht! Cloudy day! No sun!" He gestured at the solar panels on his roof, the low-hanging clouds above them. "Have to use engine. Fifty baht no pay for gas! Ninety baht!"

  Sam shook her head and turned to go, tugging on Kade's forearm to follow her.

  "OK, OK, eighty baht!" the driver called.

  Sam turned "Sixty baht, no more."

  "Seventy baht, can't go no lower, lady!"

  Sam nodded. "OK." She dragged Kade into the open air vehicle.

  The driver took off almost before they were both in the tiny seat. The little three-wheeled vehicle darted into traffic, zipped around a taxi and between two private vehicles, dodged a motor scooter that cut obliquely across their path with three people on it, and then tucked in behind a bus and sucked its biofuel fumes. Kade scrambled for a seat belt. There were none. Nor were there any doors. They were basically on a high-speed rickshaw with an engine and a partial roof. Kade gripped the small side railing tightly. At least the roof kept the drizzle off. Small blessing when he was about to be spilled out into traffic to be run over by some other insane driver.

  Sam put her hand on his forearm, and only then did Kade realize that he was gripping her leg for dear life.

  "Relax," she said. "They do this all the time. Enjoy the ride."

  Easy for her to say. She could probably get hit by one of those cars and bounce right back up.

  Kade nodded to himself, and tried to enjoy it. He almost succeeded.

 

Registration was a zoo. There were fifteen thousand people expected in person at this event, and another fifty thousand virtually. The convention center covered a giant city block. The registration hall was larger than a football field, and even so it was packed. People queued up to pick up badges. Exhibition tables showed off research instruments, neuroinformatics packages, infrared neural scanners, next-gen MEG brain-scanning caps, psychiatric diagnosis AIs, brainwave-controlled robots and wheelchairs, nervous-system integrated prosthetics, and more. Jobs tables had recruiters for pharma firms, for biotechs, for neural device manufacturers, for software companies, for savvy advertising and marketing firms, for banks and hedge funds that wanted the quantitative skills of neuroscientists. A dozen nonprofit societies had booths lining one wall, from Neuroscientists for World Peace to the Thai Neuroscience Students Association. Interestingly, there were quite a few shaven-headed men walking around in the orange robes of Thai monks.

  Kade made it through the registration queue, got his badge and packet. Sam was still halfway back in her line. 

  [sam] I'll catch up with you later.

  Kade nodded. With the Nexus link over their phones, they could always keep in touch. He headed into the massive plenary hall, grabbed a seat near the back, and pulled out his slate.

  A moment later the lights dimmed and a voice boomed out over the loudspeaker. "Please welcome His Royal Majesty, the King of Thailand, Rama the Tenth."

  WTF?

  Kade looked down at his slate, tapped into the conference program.

  
Buddhism and Neuroscience: From Singular to Connected Paradigms of the Mind and Brain. His Royal Majesty Rama X & Professor Somdet Phra Ananda, Chulalongkorn University

  At the end of the plenary hall and on giant screens to either side, a smiling forty-something man in an immaculate white suit with an embroidered golden sash took the stage. Monks in orange robes throughout the audience came to their feet, applauding, as did other Thais, and then the entire audience. Kade followed their lead.

  Rama X held up his hands and motioned for the crowd to be seated.

  He spoke in English, welcomed them to Thailand, praised the organizers and attendees, remarked on the history of the conference center which his grandfather had erected. And then the talk turned in a direction Kade had not expected.

  "I am a Buddhist," the king said, "as are more than ninety percent of my countrymen. As is the custom of young men of my nation, I spent a time in my youth in the orange robes of a monk."

  Interesting.

  "I learned many things through the experience of serving as a monk. Two of them are relevant today.

  "The first is that the most essential Buddhist practice – meditation – is a practice of investigating the mind. Through that investigation we gain peace, freedom from attachments, reduction in suffering, and compassion for others. And most relevant to today, we gain tremendous insights into how our minds actually work."

  We do with Nexus too, Kade mused.

  "The goals of neuroscience and Buddhism are nearly the same, while their methods are both different and complementary to one another.

  "The methods of science are statistical, quantitative, reproducible, reductionist, and, as much as possible, objective."

  He paused.

  "The methods of meditation, on the other hand, are qualitative, subjective, reproducible often only through hard work disciplining and quieting the mind, and yet equally profound."

  Drugs are faster, Kade thought. Mental tools.

  "I have a deep respect for the scientific method," Rama said. "Decades ago, the fourteenth Dalai Lama was asked: 'What if neuroscience proves that Buddhism is in some way incorrect?'

  "'Well,' he replied, 'in that case we would need to change Buddhism.'"

  The crowd laughed. Rama X smiled.

  "What I would ask you to consider is the complementary idea. What if Buddhism shows that some of the basic assumptions of neuroscience are imperfect? That a new paradigm would prove superior? Then I would hope you august scientists would be willing to change your scientific approach."

  No one laughed this time. There was silence.

  Rama X smiled wider.

  "Let me put one idea in your minds as to what this new paradigm might be. And here I turn back to the second thing I learned as a monk."

  He paused for effect.

  "We are all one."

  More silence.

  The King chuckled. "I am not hearkening back to the Woodstock Festival of North America."

  There were a few answering chuckles.

  "Nor have I been smoking hashish."

  Nervous laughter rippled through the room. Kade found himself chuckling out loud.

  "What I mean is that we all exists as parts of groups and collectives larger than ourselves. Tribes. Communities. Organizations. Institutions. Families. Nations. We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. We are their components."

  He's right, Kade thought.

  "For the experienced meditator, this connection is intuitively grasped. The process of meditation pierces the illusion of solitary individual existence and reveals to us that we are all part of things much much larger than any individual."

  Wow, Kade thought. The King of Thailand is a hippie.

  "Here neuroscience can take direction from Buddhism. Individual minds matter. Yet in an age where billions of minds are webbed through technology, where information can travel from one person on one side of the globe to a billion on the other side of the globe in a heartbeat, there are other layers of cognition which matter.

  "Everything important in our world requires the efforts of large numbers of individuals. Indeed, to overcome our planet's most pressing problems, we are required to think not as individuals, not even as nations, but as a single humanity."

  Like Einstein, Kade thought. The problems we currently face can't be solved at the level of thinking that created them.

  Rama X went on, "Yet the dominant paradigm of neuroscience is still that of the individual brain. That is only the beginning of the understanding of the human mind, not the end product.

  "If I have one wish for this conference, it is that a few of you would rethink your work through a new lens, a new paradigm – that of the connectedness of all brains and all minds on Earth, both the connectedness that already exist," – here, the king paused – "and the even greater connectedness that we'll develop in the coming years as neuroscience and neurotechnology progress."