Kade looked out further west. Beyond that horizon lay India, his homeland. Shiva’s homeland. The third largest economy on the planet now. Yet he had vivid memories of holding a dying child in his arms, of watching villagers starve just kilometers from the homes of the newly wealthy kings of technology.

He knew the count and position of thousands of nuclear warheads there, pointed at nearby Pakistan, at China, at Iran, even at Europe and the United States. He knew all about the three secret times that India and Pakistan had come within millimeters of going nuclear, had almost killed millions in the matter of minutes, almost ignited war that would kill hundreds of millions.

He looked across those waves and he remembered his childhood as an orphan, an untouchable orphan, the lowest of the low, struggling to eat, to survive. The beatings. The vicious street gangs that he’d barely escaped. The conviction that violence must be met with violence, that those who hurt you must be punished. And later, when ignorant villagers had killed orphans under his protection, the rage he’d felt, the screams as his men had nailed the perpetrators to those crosses, as the flames had brought him justice.

Further west, Europe, North America. He knew more than ever about the treatment of humanity’s successors there. The secret purges. The viral weapons lying in wait, ready to deal death down on the genetically enhanced. The Nexus detectors to find the enhanced. The work to create a vaccine against Nexus, to create a “cure” that would purge it from the mind, even from the minds of those who’d lived their entire lives with it. The backup plans. The concentration camps for the expected wave of Nexus-born children, the hundreds of thousands of them that might be born in the next decade.

There was so much wrong with the world. There were so many precipices. So many cliffs humanity could fall off of. So many crimes being committed, so many risks being taken.

And Kade understood why. They were a tribal species. They’d evolved in a world where a few dozen men and women made up a tribe, and virtually all others were enemies, threats. They lacked the cognitive capabilities necessary to collaborate on this scale. They’d done their best with democracy, with capitalism, but those had reached their limit long ago. They’d been corrupted, twisted to the interests of a few individuals, when the greatest problems the world faced were problems of collective interest.

He could fix those systems. He could nudge the world, could pull strings from behind the scenes, could direct scientists and engineers towards the right problems, could link their minds together to make them even more effective, could manipulate banks and corporations to provide resources, could twist politicians to enact the laws needed to save the world and benefit the people on it.