Nexus 6 called to him. That was his real project – his way to get ahead of things, to block off most paths of abuse, to make Nexus safe again at the most basic levels of the OS. In the long term there was no way he could keep fighting individual abuses himself. There simply wasn’t enough of him to keep up. He had to build something like Nexus 6 in order to solve this problem at scale.

But Nexus 6 was too far out. Kade had months more work to do before he could even start properly testing it. He couldn’t wait until then to deal with the PLF. He had to tackle them now, before they struck a third time and ignited the war Su-Yong Shu had seen coming.

Idiots, Kade thought. What are they going to accomplish? Every killing is just going to make things worse, just going to scare the public more, increase support for the Chandler Act, increase demonization of transhuman technologies.

He could see it coming. The PLF would make their own worst fears true. Bombings and assassinations would lead to crackdowns, police and ERD retribution, witch-hunts against scientists and activists, laws even worse than the Chandler Act, more loss of civil liberties in the name of “security”, another step towards a police state in the USA. And that would incense the PLF, draw numbers to their ranks, drive them to ever worse atrocities, until the whole thing blew up into a full-scale conflagration.

Wasn’t it always this way? When had terrorists ever accomplished anything but to enrage people, drive them towards greater security, greater sacrifice of freedom? They only gave their oppressors more excuses for oppression. And the oppressors just drove the oppressed further towards violent rebellion. Extremists on both sides gave power to the very forces they fought against.

He had to stop them. He hated the ERD and the Chandler Act, but the PLF’s approach was only going to make things worse.

So he went back to the DC and Chicago attacks, looked at them again, took them apart piece by piece.

His agents had spotted the coercion code used in the attack on the President four days before the attack itself. They’d never seen the source code. Instead, they’d detected it based on a pattern of activity. Disruption of the frontal cortex to lobotomize the subject, a motor control package that turned the subject into a remote-controlled robot. It was sophisticated software, far more complex than other abuses he’d seen. Whoever had written this had invested a lot of time to write the code, even more time to test it, iterate on it until it was reliable.

Narong was up on his feet, just a meter from Ted Prat-Nung, the ceramic pistol with its graphene-tipped rounds pointed at the older man’s head. “Everyone freeze. Thanom Prat-Nung, you’re under arrest.”