He looked over at the locked box. He’d moved it to the writing desk. It would be so easy. Open his mind to it. Let Shiva persuade him. Agree to hand over this burden to someone else.

He thought of all the benefits it would bring. More resources. Giant server farms spread around the world, orbital communication satellites, teams of programmers. They could nip Nexus coercion in the bud, stop the rapists and thieves and assassins. Shiva’s coders could help him finish Nexus 6, integrate the safeguards that would make it difficult to use Nexus that way.

They could rescue Rangan. They could stop the assassination set for Saturday. They might find Feng, still alive, if he was lucky.

They could bring all those Nexus-carrying minds across the planet together, into something greater.

All he had to do was give Shiva the key that would open a million minds.

Kade sat at the writing desk. He put his hands on the armored case. It was cool to the touch. Inside was a device, a transmitter, loaded with thoughts and memories.

Kade went Inside, and turned Nexus OS’s file sharing back on.

Shiva lay sleepless on his hard cot in the narrow cell he allowed himself. Lane was softening. He could see it in each conversation. The boy was tired of his burden, was tired of being alone, was increasingly persuaded of Shiva’s good intentions. Soon, days or weeks, he would consent.

Shiva took a deep breath.

Am I worthy? Is this just? Is this moral?

Now, as the tool he’d sought was almost in his grasp, he had his doubts.

Nita would hate this, he mused. Hate it more than anything I’ve ever done. Hubris, she’d call it.

The gods punish hubris, he told himself, in every religion, in every mythology.

But he had only to think of the world outside, of the multiple precipices that humanity and this world teetered on, to hear the opposing view. That humanity needed saving. Needed it desperately. And could not do the saving itself.

“I’m doing this for the world, Nita,” he whispered in the darkness. “And if not me, then who? If not now, then when?”

Kade inspected the available data. It was huge. Shiva was offering him giant swaths of thought and memory.

He analyzed the files, ran them through virus checkers and security sweeps, made sure there was no embedded code in them. It was one thing to be persuaded. It was another to be tricked.

He found nothing untoward.

Even so, he instanced a sandbox inside his mind, and another, differently configured sandbox within the first, and only in that secure environment did he allow the files to play.