Rangan felt the chaos as the orderlies took Bobby from the room next door, and he knew what it meant. He was untied again, uncuffed from the gurney. He sat in the corner, head down, in defeat. The ERD didn’t have the real back doors. But that was academic. Eventually they’d succeed in reverse-engineering the code. It would be difficult, with the passcodes buried among hundreds of millions of parameters of the neural nets, among blocks of synaptic weights and neural interconnectivity graphs that looked like so much random numerical garbage, that would mask the passcodes for quite a long time. Deciphering that would be a harder problem than building Nexus 5 in the first place. But the ERD had resources. Sooner or later, after months or years, they’d crack it.

And even if they didn’t? They still had the guns. They could still arrest kids like Bobby, take them away from their parents, kill their parents. They’d found a way to force Nexus out of Alfonso’s brain. And now they’d do to the same to Bobby. They’d cripple a little boy because it didn’t fit their ideology.

Rangan shook his head. Tyrone came and lay down in Bobby’s bunk, reached out to Rangan, and Rangan did his best to send soothing thoughts, to try to calm the boys down, even when what he felt inside was despair.

Bobby cried and begged and then one of the men spoke to him.

“Bobby, that’s your name, right? Bobby, we’re not going to hurt you. We’re trying to help you, son.”

Bobby stared at the man. He was old and had a mustache and he was smiling like the teachers told Bobby to do to show that he was nice but there was nobody there in the man’s head and he had Bobby tied down to a chair with something on his head so he definitely wasn’t very nice at all.

“Bobby, you know how to run Nexus commands, don’t you?”

And even though the man wasn’t nice, Bobby nodded his head because there was always the chance that he was wrong and that they weren’t going to push the Nexus out of him – and maybe if he was good and did what they wanted they’d let him go back to the other boys and still have Nexus and still be a person and still have friends and…

“We need you to run a command, son. There in your Nexus. On the screen inside your head. OK?”