Angel nodded. “And there’s something else. It’s not just about range. It’s about coordination. In a big group, like a protest, communication is a bitch. Mostly people hear what the people right around them are saying. No one knows what’s happening a block away. Messages get distorted like a game of telephone. Anger spreads really easily. Stupid things happen. You can get a mob – like what was starting to happen a week ago.”

“How does this help?” Rangan asked.

“With the Mesh,” Angel said, “the idea is that signals can bounce mind to mind to mind, any number of hops, in milliseconds, completely unaltered. So there’s no game of telephone. You’re getting unaltered data, not something that’s been twisted. And people can subscribe to whatever minds inside the current mesh they want to – like the public net mindstream sites, but locally.”

Rangan took a deep breath. It was all nice in concept. But building this to dive into those protests…

The riots of election night had mostly ended by dawn. Cops had moved in. Tear gas and water cannons and rubber bullets and sonic weapons had quelled crowds. And Stan Kim had made impassioned video pleas to Americans that violence was not the way. That protesters had to remain peaceful to give their side legitimacy. That police had to show restraint to retain their own legitimacy. That he was confident that the Supreme Court would hear the raft of cases working their way towards it, and would declare him the winner.

The violence had largely ended, but the Supreme Court had yet to announce that it would hear any case.

So now new protests were being born. Sit-ins across the country. And the largest was here, on the National Mall, where thousands were camping out, peacefully so far, demanding the Supreme Court hear the case, calling for Stockton’s resignation, calling for a Special Prosecutor, calling for impeachment, calling for any number of things…

And across a thin plastic fence from them was a counter protest, where a smaller but equally fervent set of Stockton loyalists were waving signs in his defense, accusing Kim of dirty tricks, calling the protesters crooks and vandals.

Both camps were swelling by the day.

And Angel and Cheyenne and Tempest wanted to dive into that. With Nexus. With their signal-boosting antennae and their mesh-networking code that didn’t quite work yet and their hippie ideas of self-organizing democracy somehow coming out on top.

I thought like that once, Rangan thought. Ilya thought like that. Wats thought like that. Kade thought like that.

What he really wanted was just to get someplace safe. He’d told Tempest and the others that he would. That he’d move on. Hell, he couldn’t live in their tiny room forever.