The integration of active firewall features into Mesh was coming along. They had it mostly operational. Rangan had seen it work in the simplest states, at least. With three or more people running Mesh on top of Nexus, they could automatically compare signal inputs, find identical signals, and fire up a basic firewall pattern to keep the signal from affecting the user’s mind.

Tempest and Cheyenne were hard at work on improving it, getting the code stable and fast, adding fast peer-to-peer setup so they could spread the feature rapidly to others in a pinch, adding active counter-signaling, so a group of people running the firewall code could not just shield themselves, but also suppress the effects of a hostile signal for those around them.

Rangan had moved on to a different part of the project.

“I saw the crowd as one organism,” he’d told Angel, one night, shortly after the riots. He’d shared the flash he’d had when he touched that monk’s mind. He’d had more like it since then, when he’d touched Kade’s, when he’d lived through some of the things Kade had experienced. Groups really could be single minds.

“It turned into a mob,” he went on. “Just like you said crowds do, when I was first helping you with the mesh…”

Angel nodded. She moved her finger in the air, drew something in the virtual whiteboard between them, a shared hallucination in their mind created by Nexus, an app in their shared library.

“Here’s the network structure of a crowd running Nexus,” he said.

It was little more than a grid, with short lines radiating in a star from each person, everyone able to talk to their nearby neighbors, everyone with roughly the same number of connections, if the crowd was of even density. Signals hopped from one mind to another, but along the way they were reinterpreted. It was a game of telephone, losing and distorting meaning at every step. Simple, dumb emotions travelled best.

“And here,” she said, “is what it might look like with the whole crowd running mesh… if we finished it.”

The second network structure was different, many short lines, but also medium length lines, long lines, and super long lines. Some minds had tens of connections to others. Some had hundreds. Some had thousands, or tens of thousands.

Signals could hop directly from one side of the crowd to another. No game of telephone. No distortion. Subtle ideas could spread. Complex ideas. Whole thoughts. Not just urges.

Rangan stared at it.

“You know what it reminds me of?” he asked. “It’s the network structure of a human brain.”

Angel nodded. “They’re both power law distributions. Same with the net.”