They’d been working non-stop for days, on this new project that had pushed aside the Mesh, pushed aside work for paying clients, pushed aside improvements to their anti-teargas masks, pushed aside everything else on their collective plates.

Rangan’s head hurt from the continuous exertion. There were bags under his eyes. Cheyenne was quietly cursing at a carbon composite printer in the corner. Angel was holding a probe over a freshly printed circuit sheet and frowning. Tempest seemed frustrated to the point of anger by the network calculations she was checking and rechecking.

But the room was also buzzing.

Rangan could feel it, coming off of all of them, bouncing back and forth from mind to mind, amplifying and re-amplifying, a feedback loop of adrenaline and excitement and fear and hope and the raw satisfaction of building something.

Or rather, some things.

Four of them, at least. One for each of the C3 and one for Rangan. More, if they could, for spares, and for some additional recruits the C3 had in mind.

Tempest called them NANCies. Nexus Active Noise Cancellers.

The riot-cast, as they were calling the thirty-seven-second-broadcast that had struck on the 17th, was a Nexus transmission.

It wasn’t a hack. It didn’t use any back door. It didn’t operate at the level of NexusOS.

It was a broadcast of emotion, at the hardware level, below the operating system.

It was like the game of push/pull they used to play. Like being cooped up with someone using Nexus who was having a bad trip, being bombarded by their overwhelming emotions.

Regardless, like any other Nexus transmission, it was a radio signal, a series of precise electromagnetic pulses. Thus it was subject to all the same laws of physics as any other radio signal.

Those laws of physics said that with two simple receivers, or better yet, three, they could locate the source of the transmission. And by surrounding the transmission, and playing back its inverse, they could cancel it out.

Nullify it.

Now all they had to do was make it work.

Seamlessly.

Against just one broadcast.

In an environment where thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of people were broadcasting with Nexus.

And soon.

50
Self Discovery

India, Su-Yong thinks. Is it possible?

Her intent is to improve the connection, to improve her sanity, but she’s immediately distracted by this question of where she is, and when.

She reaches back to the memories of vomiting, in that first horrible moment when she’d realized what she’d done to Ling. The staff who’d entered in their white environment suits. The clear faceplates. The white surgical masks behind them.

Freeze the memory.

Extract the image.

Zoom in on what she’d seen behind the nearest faceplate.

Brown skin. Dark eyes. Indian facial features.

India.

She reaches back into the mind of the woman whose brain she was inhabiting. Jyotika. That is her name. Jyotika.