And he’d done the same for the most popular shared memories from a week in October, from before the chemreactor break, from before the near quadrupling of the Nexus user base that had happened in the last two months, from one million minds to four million.

Compare and contrast.

He pulled up the visualizations.

It was a more rapid switch than he’d expected.

Two months ago, sex had topped the list. After that had come athletic feats and recreation, a host of first hand experiences of beautiful places and events, music, humor, and even some actual transfer of knowledge from mind to mind.

Now… Now it was rage, or outrage, that dominated. Scenes from protests, from clashes with police and the military, of witnessed brutality, even sometimes of brutality done to authority figures, topped the list. Sex had been pushed to number two.

Do I have the causality wrong? He wondered. This doesn’t prove that someone’s using Nexus to create chaos.

But then he thought again of the chemreactor hack, released just in time to fuel high quantities of Nexus to the protests in the US. He thought of Breece, and the Nexus-based chaos he’d wreaked on the National Mall.

Rangan had shown him memories of the trial run for that. Breece or someone had tested that attack on a small level, before taking it to a higher scale.

What if the National Mall was itself a test for a higher scale attack?

Something else is going on, the group mind of the children had said.

He pulled up the global map again, the hot spots scattered across so much of it.

What if the National Mall was a test run for a global attack?

Kade grimaced, and turned back to the even more paranoid tools he was building.

Tools that integrated Shiva’s systems, and more.

Tools designed for battle.

Tools designed for war.

70
Call of Duty

Saturday 2041.01.05

Bai’s fist whipped out at Quang’s temple in a blur, faster than any human could react. His clone brother darted to the side, a ferocious grin on his face, on Bai’s face, on all their faces, a low kick snapping at Bai’s knee. Bai lifted his leg, took the kick on his shin, turned the backfist into a grab for Quang’s short hair, jabbed forward with his other hand in a rigid finger strike at his brother’s plexus. Quang turned his kick into a half-spin, sliding out of Bai’s way, then coming at him with a vicious fist to the head.

<behind you> Li-Jiang’s mental projection showed an image of Peng coming at Bai from behind.

Bai dropped to the ground, both hands shooting out to catch himself, his right foot lashing back and up. Quang’s fist sailed through the air where his head had been. And his own foot slammed solidly into his brother Peng’s midsection.