They had it mostly operational. Rangan had seen it work in the simplest states, at least. With three or more people running mesh on top of Nexus, they could automatically compare signal inputs, find identical signals, and fire up a basic firewall pattern to keep the signal from affecting the user’s mind. Tempest and Cheyenne were hard at work on improving it, getting the code stable and fast, adding fast peer-to-peer setup so they could spread the feature rapidly to others in a pinch, adding active counter-signaling, so a group of people running the firewall code could not just shield themselves, but also suppress the effects of a hostile signal for those around them. Rangan had moved on to a different part of the project. “I saw the crowd as one organism,” he’d told Angel, one night, shortly after the riots. He’d shared the flash he’d had when he touched that monk’s mind. He’d had more like it since then, when he’d touched Kade’s, when he’d lived through some of the things Kade had experienced.
