Kade lost himself in it, the sheer joy of the code and the windows it opened on his mind lifting him.

After an hour, regretfully, he pulled himself out. There was one more thing to catch up on. The one he hated – coercion software. Code for subjugation, domination, and torture. Code used to steal. Code used to rape. Code used to enslave others. He had agents out searching for it – searching for the signal of its use, searching for the patterns of its design.

The first time he’d found such code, he’d reacted crudely, destroying the repository, forcibly purging Nexus from the brain of the man he’d found working on the enslavement tech.

The rapist on his knees, screaming. The mixed sense of revulsion and power Kade had felt as he’d ripped through the man’s brain, deleting all the code he found, then forcing the Nexus painfully out of the slimebag’s skull.

But that was no solution at all. Code would be backed up, or if not backed up, could be recreated. Someone forced to purge Nexus could procure more later, dose themselves again.

He’d grown more sophisticated since then. He’d turned the tools of the subjugators against them. He stopped them, reconditioned them, made sure they weren’t a threat to anyone ever again. He took them down and neutered them and it felt so good, so right to stop those bastards.

Nairobi. The sex-slaver writhing on the dirt floor of the smoke filled room. Kade smiling in grim satisfaction as he mentally rewired him, as he crippled the man’s sex drive and cross-linked violent thoughts to body-racking seizures, made sure the bastard never hurt anyone again.

Yes. Take them down. Stop them. That felt good, at least.

You’re the one turning into a monster, Ilya whispered to him. He could see her face as she spoke. Pixyish. Earnest. Stern. You’re invading people’s minds, taking control of them. It’s the power you love.

I don’t have any choice, Kade interrupted the voice in his head. Not until I finish Nexus 6.

What did Ananda ask you? Ilya whispered to him. “Are you wiser than all humanity?” Are you, Kade? Are you?

You weren’t even there, Kade told the voice in his head. Then he ignored her.

One thing was true. He couldn’t keep up this way. He couldn’t stop them all himself each time. There were more people running Nexus every day, and still just one of him. He needed to make Nexus itself smarter, more resistant to abuse. Nexus 6, he called it. And every one of these abuses he stopped, every one of these chances to stop a monster, was also a lesson he could employ in Nexus 6, a type of abuse that wouldn’t be possible when he finished it.