And the women. God, how he loved women. And they’d loved him. Woman after woman after woman. He could leave a club most weekend nights with a party girl, sometimes two. He’d jerked himself off to sleep so often the first few weeks here, calling up memories of their faces, their bodies, the kinky things they’d done for him. Memories remembered naturally. Memories he’d recorded with Nexus, without ever asking their permissions.

Such an easy life. Rangan Shankari, international playboy.

Yeah, right.

He was pathetic, he saw now. What had he ever done for anyone else? He’d lived his whole life as a taker. Taking money from Mom and Dad. Taking sex from girls whose names he barely remembered, girls that he honestly didn’t give a fuck about, except that they were hot and fun in bed and good for his rep.

The only thing he’d ever done that was worth a damn was Nexus. His one impact on the world. And had he fought for that? When they’d busted the party in SF he tried to run. And now, in this stinking cell, they’d given him a second chance. He could show this time that he had the strength of his convictions. But no. They tightened the screws a bit and he folded, just like that.

What did it even matter that he was going to die here? His whole life was a self-obsessed joke. He’d been so goddamn self-centered that he might as well not have existed at all.

Fucking pathetic.

Fuck!

Rangan slammed his hand against the concrete wall of his cell and then swore as he felt the pain.

Then he felt something else.

Another mind.

Faintly. A young mind, weird and warped, and reaching out for him…

Bobby closed his eyes and he could feel his new friends in his head – Tim and Tyrone and Alfonso and Pedro and Jason and Jose and Parker and all the rest. They were like him, autistic. But more than that. He could feel them in his head. They were real.

There were grownups here who came in and gave them tests, but he couldn’t feel the grownups in his head at all and he knew why it was because they didn’t have NEXUS and so they were stupid and they weren’t real people at all.

Sometimes the grownups took one of his friends away to give them a test, but Bobby and the others could still feel whoever they’d taken, like when they took Nick and gave him tests on Math and English and Bobby could feel him taking the test and even though Nick didn’t know some of the answers, Nick got them right because he had his friends there in his head.