“Someone freaking out, maybe,” Cheyenne said. “A first timer. Bad trip. Maybe high on meth or something else. Couldn’t hack it, overprojected.”

Angel shook her head. “No. There wasn’t any sense of self. No identity. No thoughts. No stream of consciousness. Just urges. Not a hack, either. It wasn’t at the level of the operating system. It was just talking directly to Nexus nodes, just an emotional projection, incredibly simple. And incredibly loud, turned up to .”

Rangan chewed his lip. He had a flash of a late night, passing a pipe around at Ilya’s place in SF. Wats going on about world peace, about what would happen if everyone could touch each other’s minds, about mutual understanding, about empathy, about an end to war.

What if you wanted the opposite?

What if you wanted to incite violence?

He turned, and looked around, let his mind relax and feel the edges of the thousands of other brains running Nexus out there. He thought of the Nexus handoffs he’d seen. He got a flash of the high end chemreactor at the Bunker, churning out Nexus at high speed now, the sudden appearance of a hack that had cracked the crypto on seventeen different models of modern chemreactors at once.

He had a bad feeling about this.

He turned back around, to the place where the fight had broken out.

Tempest was there, looking at him. He wasn’t broadcasting, but she knew what he was thinking.

No.

She’d worked it out for herself, already.

Her paranoia about the chemreactor hack…

“They’re all connected,” she said. “Someone’s spreading Nexus intentionally. So they can spread chaos. Last week was just a test, just a rehearsal, for something bigger.”

Rangan nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “And we have to stop em.”

45
Mindful

Sunday 2040.11.25

Laughter is the best medicine.

Sam laughed and played with the kids every chance she got. Body time. Play time. Laugh time. They could get so pulled into their brains, and each other. She made it her job to get them into their bodies. Feng helped.

Tumbling in the grass. Tag. Summersaults and cartwheels. Patty cake. (Hide and seek turned out to be a total flop, alas, unless Sam was the one who hid. And who could hide for long with a bunch of posthuman kids all linked together looking for you?) Little tiny bits of self-defense and kata.

The eight who knew her well were always happy to play. The seventeen who’d come to Shiva’s island from other sites were… not wary, really. But they took some time warming up. They didn’t know her mind the way the others did. Without Nexus they didn’t have that bond. But they learned about her from the others. And they grew to love body play time.

And at the end, she’d force one or two or three to play her favorite game.

“What am I thinking?”