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 they’re 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, if we honest.

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.