He tried to think like a PLF terrorist. His job was to program assassins. He’d want reliability, of course. That was why they were using an old version. They’d built code they knew worked. They didn’t want to mess that up by upgrading to a new version and potentially introducing new bugs.

And why wasn’t he finding these assassins until just before the events? The only thing that made sense was that they weren’t actually online until then. They’d be in some dormant state, just a tiny loader program running, perhaps. Not the full Nexus OS. Everything locked down. Waiting for a signal to activate. Then, when activated, they went online to receive instructions. Once online, Kade’s agents got word back to him.

He pushed himself back from the problem, rubbed his eyes, and took a deep breath. When he opened them, he saw Feng at the window, staring out into the night. It was nearly midnight. The sounds of raised voices and beat-heavy music came up from the street. He could feel scores of minds down below, dancing, partying in the club below them. He wished he could join them, lose himself for just a little while.

He dragged himself back to the problem at hand. If the people who were turned into assassins weren’t online with the version of Nexus that contained the coercion code until moments before the attacks, then he stood little chance of stopping them that way. That’s why he’d failed to stop Chicago. That’s why he’d fail again, if he stuck with the same strategy.

He had to go one step further. He couldn’t focus on just finding someone running the coercion code. No. He had to build an agent that would find the people writing that coercion code, the ones installing it in the minds of the human bombers, and stop them.

But were the code’s authors running Nexus themselves? And even if they were, could he find them and stop them before they struck again?

Chapter 24: Angry Daddy

24

ANGRY DADDY

Sunday October 21st

The policemen came to Ling’s door an hour after the lights went out. She could feel them as they climbed up the forty stories from the ground floor to hers. In the near data-vacuum of the crippled city, their electromagnetic presence shone like a beacon. She peered out of their lapel cameras as they climbed the red-lit emergency stairwell. She followed their data links back over the airwaves to the precinct house, and from there to Shanghai police headquarters.

The city was a mess. She could see it in their information systems. Fires. Floods. Car accidents. Looting. Deaths. Police stations and emergency services were limping along on emergency power.