On screen 2, a running stream of tagged identities of attendees. Every vehicle arriving was having its registration quietly interrogated. Every person who stepped out of a vehicle was being optically faceprinted. Their profiles streamed across the screen. Almost every one was an associate of targets Alpha through Delta.
Screen 3 showed the status of their two ground units and the squads within them.
Screen 4 showed the status and location of California Highway Patrol and Mountain View Police units standing by to assist.
Screen 5, where the stream of data from Agent Blackbird should be, was blank. It would update when she left the EM shielding and her surveillance devices uploaded what she'd seen and heard in the intervening time.
Being out of contact with a field agent always made Nichols nervous. Tonight was no exception.
Sight and sound slowly faded back into Sam's reality. She heard her own breathing, first. Then saw the tiniest hint of light. Shapes. A wall. She blinked, and the world came back more strongly. She was still in the same room. Kade was here, slumped in a chair. No sign of Wats, Rangan, or Ilya.
She tried to wiggle her toes. Nothing. Fingers. Nothing. Still paralyzed.
Nichols and his team watched the hangar closely, waiting for Blackbird to emerge. It might be hours yet until the Nexus party wound down.
On scope, a small number of people came and went from the party. A cluster of smokers emerged around the east exit. Three couples snuck out to find private time outside the structure. A dozen stragglers arrived late and were let into the building. Seven individuals left in the same timeframe. All groups were faceprinted. None were among the primary targets.
A young man emerged in a hoodie, his face hidden from the aerial camera, his body glowing in infrared. There was a tense moment as he crossed towards the neighboring golf course. Then he pissed on a bush and strolled back to the party.
Just after midnight another couple emerged and strolled in the same direction. Faceprinting identified one as Tania Wellington, a martial arts instructor residing in San Francisco. The other's face was shielded by a hooded sweatshirt. He was a large man, tall and broad. Could that be Cole?
The two figures crossed slowly across the golf course, making no move towards the road or Sunnyvale. Eventually their stroll led them to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. IR showed their forms entwine, their faces meet, their clothes begin to come off.
Three individuals came out the east entrance, walked past the smokers, headed towards a car. The first two were ID'd successfully. The third kept his face in the shadows of the hoodie. The car door opened, and light momentarily illuminated him.
Rangan Shankari.
"Get CHP on that car," Nichols ordered. "Just follow. I want to see where Shankari goes."
"Roger that," Jane Kim called out.
"Why'd you do this to us?" Kade asked. He was slumped in the chair across the room once more, the ice pack to his head.
Sam took a breath before answering. "What you're doing is illegal. My job is to uphold the law."
Kade shook his head. "That's no answer. Why'd you choose this job?"
"Because what you're doing is dangerous. That's why I care. You're playing with fire."
"This isn't a weapon. It's a new way to communicate. It connects people. You saw that. You felt it."
Sam had felt it. She'd loved it, until she'd been horrified by it, by the discovery that she was not who she thought she was. She dodged the topic.
"It can be abused. Maybe you wouldn't use it to hurt people, but others would."
"It's not like that," said Kade. "It's a way of bridging the gap between people. It makes us smarter together than we could be apart. It can raise collective intelligence, collective empathy. Ilya talks about…"
Sam cut him off. "Ilya talks about creating things that aren't human, Kade. Non-human intelligences."
"Groups of humans," Kade retorted. "Human networks."
"Hive minds. Borgs. Super-organisms," Sam spat out. "What if they don't like us?"
"How could they not like us? They'd be us." Kade was getting heated now.
"And what if I didn't want to join a hive? Would I be forced to? Assimilated? Could I keep up if I didn't? Would there be a place for ordinary humans?"
Kade exhaled in frustration. "Look, that's all paranoia. There are positive effects too."
"It's not just paranoia, Kade. You have me under your thumb right now. You can make me do whatever you want. Rangan could too. That's coercion, Kade. You've built a coercion technology. A way to control people. And you tell me this isn't a weapon?"
Kade shook his head. "It's just a safety precaution. This is still experimental."
"Just a precaution, huh? Do other people have this back door in their heads? Can you paralyze any of your friends out in the party? Can you read their minds?"
Kade said nothing, just looked down at his hands.
"You can, can't you?" Sam continued. "Do they know? Have you told them that taking part in your little experiment hands you and Rangan the keys to their heads?"
Kade shook his head, still not looking at her. "It's a safeguard, that's all. We'd never release it like this."
"How can you be so naïve, Kade? You're a good guy. I've felt that. But what about other people who get their hands on this? You think they won't reverse-engineer it? You think they won't make slaves out of this? Suicide troops? Sex slaves? Worshippers?"
Awful memories were rising up inside of her. The ranch. The cult. The way her parents had become cattle, or worse. She wanted to push them at Kade, couldn't. He was opaque to her. She was cut off from his mind.
Kade bristled. "This is stupid. You can hurt people with guns. You can get them to do awful things with words. Books are as dangerous as anything I'm doing. We need this. 'Our current problems can't be solved by the level of thinking that created them.' Einstein said that. This can take us to a new level of thinking."
"Kade, it's going too fast," Sam replied. She fought down the pain and despair of old memories, hardened herself. She despised the longing she felt to touch his mind and show him. Hated the weakness of it, the wrongness of it. Damn this drug. Damn this mission.
"You're talking about changing everything about people, the way we've been for a hundred thousand years, in a heartbeat. You can't know the consequences, you can't understand how people will abuse this, you can't know that humanity will survive this. We have to slow down the rate we're becoming something that's not human."
Kade glared at her. "You're one to talk. You're not quite baseline human yourself, are you?"