He was engrossed, immediately, sucked in to what Shiva was sharing. This was more than his plans. It was his life, his childhood, the events that had formed him, the triumphs and tragedies he’d been through. The fears he held deep inside, fears for the whole world. And the hopes he held onto as well.

Kade devoured the thoughts, the memories, the experiences, the knowledge. He bent all his Nexus CPU cycles to the task, cranked up his assimilation rate far beyond real-time. He slipped into a near trance, immersing himself in this person, in what he knew, in what he’d done. The mask of maya slipped away, and for a time he was Kade no longer. He was Shiva, and so much more.

He came back to himself hours and hours later. It was fully light outside, late morning, approaching noon. He had a vague memory of the serving girl coming and going. The wheeled cart was still here, loaded with food.

Kade ignored it.

He got up, went to the window, looked outside at the gorgeous water down below, the multicolored sea with its bands of jade and emerald and sea-green and lapis lazuli and a dozen more colors he couldn’t name.

He understood these waters, now. He knew their chemistry. He knew their ecology. He remembered diving off the coast of India, Shiva diving there, guided by his wife, examining the dying corals, despairing at their fate. Kade had read about ocean acidification. Now he understood it intimately – the horror of seeing once vibrant reefs reduced to a deathly gray. The intimate comprehension of their vulnerability, how even after Shiva’s viral hack they teetered on the edge, how their death threatened all the fish and other species that depended on them.

North, near the poles, the tundra of the Arctic, melting, decaying, giving off methane. He’d been there. Shiva had been there, at Nita’s insistence. Bundled in sub-zero gear, he’d seen the methane belching from thawing permafrost. He’d seen the mile-wide plumes of methane bubbles rising from the decaying slush of carbon ice just below the warming Arctic Sea.

He understood the risk, at last. It wasn’t just an abstraction to him, anymore. It was a visceral threat, as Shiva felt it, as real as the fear he felt looking down from a great height. A few more hot summers could destabilize those fields, send up even more massive bubbles of heat-trapping gas that would bake the Earth, scour the fields where food grew with drought and storm, wither away the rainforest, destroy humanity’s food supplies and shelter in the span of months or years, bring human civilization and the biosphere both to their knees.