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.

The 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.