A huge fraction of it was sex, of course. But there was other stuff. Athletes. Adventure sports – ride in a thrill-seeker’s head as he illegally free climbed up a building you’d swear wasn’t climbable. Or shit he didn’t understand.

There were weird, abstract streams. Synesthesia. Sounds crossing into his sight. Colors he could touch. Presences sensed that he didn’t see. Spinning, without any sight or sound. Trippy ass shit. People must have been generating it through code.

And there was one guy who just raked sand. Every day. An hour. No words. No thinking that Rangan could tell. Just… raking patterns in the sand, slowly, and then erasing them.

That guy had thousands of followers on the mindstream sites.

Rangan felt lost. He should feel excited about what people had done with the platform they’d built.

Instead, he felt left behind, obsolete, no longer relevant.

Six months. Six months and he was an old man, behind the times.

How did things happen that fast?

And they expected him to help them. To help them improve Nexus 5, add features, when the world had already passed him by.

Angel’s particular project right now was to add mesh networking capabilities.

“You designed these hardware repeaters,” she said, pointing at a diagram on the screen they both sat before, “so you could extend the range of Nexus transmissions to hundreds of meters, right?”

The blue spiky hair he’d seen on Angel during the riot was gone. Another disguise. Something striking to catch the eye. She had a black bob, angular features. He didn’t know much about her. She’d described her background as community organizing.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, we had some pretty specific scenarios in mind. But you could do that.”

Angel nodded. “We want to bake that ability into NexusOS itself, so anyone can act as a repeater. So if you were across the room from me, at the end of my range, your NexusOS could pick up my transmissions, boost them, retransmit them, effectively extend my range.”

What you want to do is make the year I spent on the repeater hardware completely obsolete, Rangan didn’t say.

“You already have your high gain antennas,” Rangan said. He looked around, pointed at one of the devices that Cheyenne, they’d said, had designed and built. “You can already get long range.” He paused. “Heck, everyone has the apps now to proxy Nexus traffic over phones and net ports. So you can get any range you want.” He looked at her. “So why this?”

Angel looked at him thoughtfully. “There are scenarios where phone and net traffic get blocked, or just turned off wholesale,” she said.

Rangan considered that. “Protests,” he said.