The tracks brought back memories. Memories of other parties, other events. Memories of one party in particular. One eventful party, where he’d played Apoptosis by Buddha Fugue.

Ilya loved that song.

The relentless chaotic pressure of madness subsided. He felt threads of joy, threads of beauty, of people experiencing how gorgeous Nexus could be, how amazing the calibration phase hallucinations could be, the glory of self-discovery.

He picked the threads up, grabbed them, rebroadcast them out, amplified through the high-gain antenna he wore.

NJ, he realized. I’m acting like an NJ. A Nexus Jockey, weaving together thoughts.

He felt minds hear that thought. Felt minds touch his, felt minds realize that he wasn’t wearing a mask, felt minds realize who he was.

He took a deep breath and pushed on. He was doing what had to be done. If this was the last thing he did as a free man, so be it.

They’d gone past some tipping point without him noticing, he saw now. The people around him were coming up, many struggling still, fighting or crying or raging, but more easing into it or finding wonder, many confused, but at least as many of them understanding, now. More of them realizing they were still alive, they hadn’t been chemically attacked, hadn’t been biologically attacked, not really.

They’d been drugged.

They’d been enhanced.

They’d been connected to one another.

Whether they liked it or not.

He could feel some of them roaming his mind. He let them see who he was, what he knew about Nexus, about how to center themselves, how to have a positive experience. He pushed aside any thoughts that might lead to anyone who’d helped him.

He could feel more of them connecting to each other now. He could feel emotions and ideas and memories and abstractions flitting from person to person, feel them intermeshing, chaotically, out of anyone’s control, unpredictably, tripping hard on each other, looking deep into each other, or shying away, fleeing from showing themselves, or fleeing from seeing each other.

People stumbled to their feet as he watched. They were moving around, now, self-organizing, finding each other, their colleagues, their political allies, finding the friends they wanted to connect with, sobbing together, or talking, connecting, planning.

They were helping each other, too. The ones who were coping were reaching out to the ones who were still having a bad time, soothing them.

Stan Kim reappeared, plopped down on the ground next to Rangan, tripping, smiling.

And Rangan understood now why the man had been touching so many of his colleagues. Ballsy, when they’d all been tripping so hard. Rangan shook his head.