Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (22 page)

“I want to be ready, in case the Supreme Court rejects the case, or rules for Stockton.”

The Nigerian nodded at that.

“No,” Kate said. “If the court rules for Stockton, or if Kim wins, and he’s on the wrong side after all, then I’m all for direct action, but only against
enemies
of the cause.”

She stopped, took a deep breath, visibly calmed herself, brought her hands together in front of her on the table, looked at the Nigerian and then again at Breece.

“I will put bullets between the eyes of any who deny humans freedom over our own minds and bodies,” Kate said. “I will set bombs beneath their buildings. I will burn down the homes of any who try to limit our rights or use force against us.”

She took another breath.

Breece opened his mouth to speak, to say something calming.

She raised a hand, cut him off.

“What I won’t do,” Kate said, her eyes locked with his, “is use force, or coercion, against people who are fundamentally on
our side
. Who are
the same as us.
”

The Nigerian went frosty at that. “They’re not the same as us. They’re sheep, most of them, letting it happen to them. We’re wolves, taking the risks, taking on the fight that they won’t.”

Breece raised his hand to forestall his friend, to stop him from triggering Kate further.

Kate sliced her hand through the air in frustration. “Don’t start with that fucking separatist sheep and wolves
bullshit
with me, Akindele!”

“You may not call me that name.” The Nigerian started to stand.

“Whoa, whoa!” Breece held out both hands, placatingly. “Easy, both of you.”

Kate turned to him. “Cancel the op.”

The Nigerian sat back into his chair. “You’re turning soft, Catherine,” he said. “Like I’ve never seen you before.”

Breece looked at his friend. “Shut it for a minute, OK?”

He turned back to Kate. She was still staring at him.

“This separatist bullshit isn’t right,” she said.
“Everyone
has the potential to upgrade. We’ve been arguing it for years. But we’ve never attacked people on
our
side.”

Breece sucked in a deep breath, let it out again. “It’s not an attack,” he said. “It’s an encouragement. We’re pushing them to fight for their rights.”

Kate scowled.

Breece went on. “Kate, if you want to sit this one out… No problem at all. You’ve done plenty for the cause. You’ve more than earned a break.”

Kate’s frown deepened. “I don’t want to sit this out. We cancel the op. Let the protesters go their own way. You saw what we did out there. Those people lost their minds. That’s
offensive action
, and that’s for use against our
enemies
.”

Breece shook his head silently.

Kate leaned back. “What happened to unanimity for ops?”

Breece looked down at the surface of the table. “This is our chance.” He looked back up at Kate. “I know it rankles. I wish we didn’t need it. But it’s a little nudge. It’s temporary. It gets them fighting for their rights, the way they
should
be. And that little, temporary nudge drives a
huge
positive change, that expands their freedoms, that benefits them
and
millions of other people. Maybe
hundreds
of millions.” He paused for breath. He’d been raising his voice he realized. Kate was looking at him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. God what he’d give for some Nexus in their brains right now. “Kate,” he went on, his voice calm now. “You’re right. This might be grey. But there’s so much upside. I’m willing to cross a few lines to do that much good. We won’t get a shot like this again anytime soon.”

“Breece…” Kate said, her voice low and steady. “Don’t do this. Don’t change like this.”

“Nothing’s changing.” He leaned towards her, reaching out one hand across the table for hers, trying to touch her, trying to make her see. “We’re so close to what we’ve wanted…”

“I thought we wanted to lift people up,” she said. She didn’t take his hand. “You can’t do that by betraying your allies. Cancel the op.”

Breece stared into her eyes, beseeching.

“I can’t, Kate. The opportunity’s too big.”

“Damn it,” she cursed.

Kate jerked up out of her seat.

Breece pulled back in alarm, his chest pounding.

She strode out of the kitchen, not looking back.

“Kate!” he yelled.

She disappeared from sight. He heard her go into the room they shared, heard footsteps, heard the front door open. Then heard it slam shut.

Across the table, the Nigerian breathed hard, his hands clenching and unclenching.

M
onday 2040.11.18

Kade met his new team on Monday, in Bangalore. The Indian government had moved Kade, Feng, Sam, and the children over the weekend, from surprisingly calm Delhi to chaotically raucous Bangalore. Ananda and a group of five monks, done with the summit, had been allowed to come with them. After five hours of flying, it had taken three hours on the roads in an armored bus, flanked by police, to make their way through a traffic melee of cars, scooters, rickshaws, mobile restaurants, and suicidally brave pedestrians. At one point a twelve foot tall animatronic Hindu god on wheels passed them, and turned its head to stare at Kade with its third eye set in its blue-skinned god-droid head.

Kade stared back.

The eye blinked.

The children loved it, their minds taking in everything, shooting observations to each other thick and fast, faster than Kade could follow, giggling, laughing, drawing insights and recognizing patterns he never would have noticed.

Now, at last, they were in an oasis of calm, a wide, green, secure research campus run by some secretive sub-ministry of the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology, walled off from the rest of Bangalore, with housing in a cluster of colonial-era homes surrounded by palm trees.

And it was time for Kade to go to work.

Lakshmi Dabir gave him a tour of the campus, sketching out what happened in various buildings, though she seemed rather evasive on one or two. Then she led him to the building where he’d be working, a hypermodern glass and carbon structure set among the lush trees, and he met the men and women he’d be working with.

The names came thick and fast. Srini, Gopal, Pratibha, Rohit, Amit, Ashanti, Girish, Deepak, the other Amit, the other Rohit, and Anusha.

And those were just the team leads.

The overall project was under the direction of Lakshmi Dabir herself.

Kade’s job, as she explained it to the team leads, was to be a technical advisor. Which was as poorly defined a role as he’d ever heard.

Kade smiled at these men and women around him as Dabir talked. The coders had all built more software than he had. The neuroscientists had years more experience than he did. There were nanoscientists and biomaterial specialists and medical ethicists and educational neuropsychologists. They were all running Nexus. Everyone was putting up a front of polite enthusiasm. Beneath that he felt a whole range – from resentment, to curiosity, to outright awe.

Well, this’ll be interesting, he thought.

Kade kept smiling, kept trying to project humility and a desire to learn.

When in doubt, someone had told him, try to add value.

T
he next several
hours were an awesome blur of technical achievements that dispelled any doubt in Kade’s mind.

This was a rock star team.

They gave him a tour of the work they’d done over the last few months. Their idea of a tour was linking up via Nexus to the experts in the area, and plunging him right into demos and direct neural assimilation of their project plans, architectures, experimental results, and code structures.

There was too much. Waaaaay too much. It was like drinking from a fire hose. If the hose was the diameter of the moon.

Kade fucking loved it.

Pri 1 was education. They had plenty of other goals down the road: use Nexus to boost productivity in engineering and the sciences, to help in mental health, and so on. But from the PM down the message was clear: their job was to make India’s students – child
and
adult, able to learn faster.

And they were building a heck of a platform. On the research side they’d coded tools for analyzing communication, learning, and retention. They were building adaptive systems that used Nexus to see right away when a lesson
wasn’t
getting through, or
wasn’t
going to be retained, diagnose why, or just repeat it. They had libraries of mental lessons, curated first-hand memories that kids could absorb, live through. And for the coders themselves they were beefing up the developer tools – better environments, better debuggers, virtual whiteboards and shared coding spaces.

Awesome. It was all so awesome. Kade asked question after question, kept telling people how cool their work was.

Eventually they seemed to get that he wasn’t just faking it, that he was genuinely excited.

The excitement was echoed back.

Security was another major prong. Hunting down security bugs, looking for ways malicious code could enter and exploit Nexus to spy on or control an unwitting person. They’d already found and fixed quite a few vulnerabilities, and checked their fixes back into the major code repositories around the net. They had ambitious plans here to build more provably secure sandbox layers and simpler models to prevent users from accidentally giving away too much control.

Kade loved what they were doing. He came within inches of telling them about his work with Nexus 6… but he stopped himself, for now.

The last big pillar was safety. What was the impact of Nexus on a brain over multiple years of life? Even decades? And here they were in the wilderness. They’d done whole-lifetime testing on multiple generations of fruit flies and nematodes, with no obvious ill effects, but that could only take you so far. What about mammals? Mice lived two to three years.

“We’d love to do some testing – all very safe, of course – on the children who came with you,” Lakshmi Dabir said. “It’d be to their benefit – we’d do very thorough checks and find any health issues that may be cropping up. And it’d help us get more early warning of any issues that may prevent deployment in India.”

Kade considered that. It made sense.

“We’d also,” Dabir continued, “love to do more analysis of how they do collaborative learning. We can see that their learning rate is off the charts, beyond that even of children who take Nexus at the elementary school age. We may be able to learn something from that which we could then use in software.”

The same thought had occurred to Kade.

Even so…

“I’ll have to talk to Sam,” he said. “She’s also their legal guardian.”

Lakshmi Dabir inclined her head. “Of course.”

“And,” Kade said, “I want the kids to understand the request – and to agree to it.”

Dabir nodded at that as well.

A
fter his first
day of work, there was a reception for the various staff at the complex, who worked on a wide ranging set of projects in computing, neuroscience, computational biology, and related fields.

Kade was, he learned, the guest of honor.

Lakshmi Dabir took him around by the elbow, introducing him to various researchers and administrators, professors at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and so forth. He met a General Singh in the Indian Air Force, a tall man, with a thick Bollywood mustache, who Dabir said had given the order to save their plane.

“Thank you,” Kade said, as sincerely as he could.

Singh nodded at him. “Do good work for us. That will be more than thanks enough.”

Lakshmi Dabir led him around to meet yet more of the people here. Kade caught a glimpse of Sam, talking and smiling with an Indian woman in the corner, of Feng, his left arm still in a sling, gesticulating with a spoon in his right hand, making a crowd of young Indian men laugh and gasp in amazement, of Ananda deep in conversation with an Indian academic.

Almost everyone here was running Nexus.

He wished he’d worn his DJ Axon shirt.

He wished he still had it.

J
ust before 8.30pm
the wallscreens came to life. The United Nations emblem appeared – two white olive branches surrounding a stylized map of the globe against a background of solid blue.

Silence descended on the reception. Kade could feel a rapt attention come to the minds of the men and women around him. This was the moment they’d been waiting for.

The map faded out, showing the General Assembly chamber.

UN Secretary General Beatriz Pereira was at the podium. A Brazilian. It was 10am in New York.

She struck her mallet ceremonially to bring the session to order.

“The Assembly will now hear from the Ambassador from India, regarding the motion to come before us,” Pereira said.

The Indian Ambassador to the UN, Navya Kapoor, took the stage, at the podium below the Secretary General’s.

She was younger than Kade had imagined, forty maybe, dressed in a grey business suit instead of a sari. She had no notes in evidence. But there was something in her eyes.

“Madame Secretary,” she said, and her voice was strong and clear. “Fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen. I come before you to speak of truth and deception; to speak of injustice done and the remedies that must be sought; to speak of oppression, and the equality we must replace it with.”

Kade felt his heart beating faster. He’d read the motion. He hadn’t read her speech. He felt excitement growing in minds around him.

“For the last decade, we have
violated
the principles of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. We have
oppressed
those who are different, out of
fear
. And this fear has been based on
deception
and even the
murder
of innocents.”

Kade’s breath caught in his chest. He felt the same in a dozen others nearby. The UN Assembly burst into noise, into simultaneous applause and loud boos. The camera zoomed back to show delegates on their feet, some bringing their hands together, others getting up to walk out.

Beatriz Pereira banged her gavel hard, again and again. “Order!” she cried. “The delegate from India has the floor! Order!”

The Assembly quieted, bit by bit.

As the camera zoomed back in, Kade could see the determination on Navya Kapoor’s face, see that her chest was rising and falling as well.

You love her, yeah?
Feng sent him in a tight band from across the room.
I think she’s already married…

Kade laughed out loud. People looked at him funny. He turned around, found Feng looking at him from across the room, and winked.

“Thank you, Madame Secretary,” Navya Kapoor went on. “The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights states that, and I quote, ‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude’.”

A mind near Kade twitched nervously at that, then tried to calm itself. Six months ago he would have missed it, but he’d spent so much time in so many minds. Kade turned, looked, saw the side of the man’s face. Varum? Varam?

Navya Kapoor pressed on, her voice impassioned, drawing Kade’s attention back to her. “The Declaration states, and I quote again, that
everyone
has the right to recognition everywhere as a
person
before the law. That
all are equal before the law
.”

Kade felt the excitement rise all around him, felt the room in Bangalore grow in passion to match Kapoor.

Navya Kapoor looked around the Assembly room in New York and spoke again, her voice carried across the world at the speed of light.

“We have violated these principles. In our fear, based on false information, we have denied the recognition as a person to those who most clearly
are
persons. We have denied equality before the law.”

There was silence in the Assembly, hope and solidarity in Bangalore.

“Today,” Navya Kapoor said, “India introduces a motion to the United Nations General Assembly that recognizes all thinking, feeling beings of human origin or human descent as persons, and explicitly grants
everyone
the full protection of all international laws and human rights accords, and classifies laws and crimes which unfairly target individuals based on their genetic, neurobiological, or other differences, as the discrimination and hate crimes that they are.”

She took another breath.

“Madame Secretary, delegates, people of the world! I urge you to look into your hearts. Understand that our daughters and our sons will be better than we are. Do not hate them for it. Love them for it, and vote for this measure which grants them the rights and freedoms they deserve every bit as much as you do yours!”

There was wild applause, then, and as the camera zoomed back, Kade saw that it was from the observation galleries, to the sides of the Assembly, where people were standing, clapping ferociously, whistling.

And also from the Assembly itself, where there were at least twenty delegates on their feet, applauding.

And applause in this room in Bangalore as well, everyone clapping and cheering, every mind exulting.

Kade whooped and clapped and laughed. There were tears in his eyes, he found.

There was no chance it would pass, of course. Too many nations would be afraid of pissing off the US and China. And even if it did pass the Assembly, the US would veto it in the Security Council.

But this, this moment, with delegates of twenty countries on their feet applauding.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, felt Ananda’s mind behind him.

“You’ve done well, young man,” his teacher told him.

Kade laughed. He’d been just a tiny part of it, just the irritation in the oyster.

Ananda picked up on the thought.

None of that, my boy. You did a very good thing, and that’s the end of it.

Kade turned and grinned. Around them, drinks were being passed out in celebration. Musicians were taking their places. This would soon become a full blown party.

“Thank you, Ananda,” he said out loud. “Now I have a question.”

The eminent Buddhist scholar and neuroscientist raised an eyebrow.

Kade grinned wider. “Do monks dance?”

S
am cheered through the speech
. There were tears in her eyes.

Jake. Jake would have loved to see this moment. He would have loved to see the kids safe here. To see even this voted-down gesture acknowledging the humanity of Sarai, and Kit, and Aroon…