The work was engrossing, intoxicating, consuming. It sucked him in, challenged him, left him spinning with new ideas. The team were from all walks of life – they were mostly older than he was, and probably more conservative – but damn they were smart. And they had fun together. He came in every day full of ideas. He had them challenged, taken apart, improved on. And on the best days he improved the ideas of others. He left reluctantly, pulled out only because he had to.

It was the most fun he’d had since the heady first days when he and Ilya and Rangan had turned Nexus 3 into Nexus 5.

How he wished they were here now. There was an ache where they should be. Ilya dead. Rangan missing. No one knew where Rangan was. ERD still had a manhunt on for him. Kade clung to that. It was hope.

And there was hope here too. The kids were learning to code. They’d insisted on being part of the team. So Kade found himself teaching CS101, taking turns with Rohit and Pratibha and Anusha.

The joy on Kit’s face when the little agent he’d written successfully traversed the maze. You didn’t get much better than that.

Ananda and his monks had also agreed to be studied, had sat and meditated again and again while monitors and loggers and debuggers traced the patterns of individual neural activity and of traffic from mind to mind

They’d done similar monitoring with the children as they’d played games, as they’d meditated together, as they’d solved puzzles alone or in groups, as they’d learned words in Bengali and Telugu.

Together they were finding things, finding patterns. Working memory was being shared across minds, deep connectivity forged from pre-frontal cortex to pre-frontal cortex. Attentional networks were being linked in new ways.

He came to work early each morning excited, left late each evening fulfilled.

In the other hours, he trawled the net, trawled message boards and mindstreams, searched for Rangan, finding only false match after false match.

And he remembered that night with the children, the last time he’d let himself go so deep.

Something else is going on, they’d said. And with it had come images of the protests, of the chemreactors hacked, of Nexus 5 flooding the market.

Kade watched the news, watched the stories of the protests across the US, the protests bubbling up elsewhere around the world.

He pulled down more mindstreams from the aggregator sites, sucked in the real-time feeds of emotions and sensations protesters on the National Mall were broadcasting, letting himself see the world through their eyes, hear what they were hearing, feel what they were feeling.

What he felt was thousands of minds, minds filled with passion, minds crying out for justice, minds hooping and dancing and juggling and making music, minds hopeful and determined and exulting. Optimism. Community. All shared, mediated by Nexus.