by Sean Platt
Leah felt her need for Chinese noodles swell and then subside in a pulse, as if her brain and body were trying to remind her that that part of the memory was important, too. Then the need for noodles faded to a memory of memory, and Leah realized that she no longer precisely wanted the noodles; she was simply experiencing nostalgia. Was this what it had been like for Crumb when she’d entered his mind? Because she didn’t like it. The sensation was intrusive, like someone sticking their fingers into her mouth. The memory wasn’t hers, and she had no context for it, whatever it was. Still, Leah found herself wanting to revisit the time and place in the memory (or at least mull fondly upon it), but how exactly did that work when she’d never experienced it in the first place?
“Canvas, switch off connectivity to this compartment,” she said.
A chirp, and the memory vanished.
“Canvas, resume connectivity.”
The memory returned.
So it was coming through The Beam. But how? Leah wasn’t plugged in. The Beam didn’t communicate directly to the cortex. That’s not how it worked. Except that it kind of did, seeing as how entering an intuitive, dreamlike fugue was how Leah did her best hacking. She entered a haze then lost track of time and released control over the details of what she was doing. Beam-related problems, approached that way, had always resolved themselves. She always knew where to go. And hadn’t she come here looking for something?
Leah closed her eyes and allowed the memory to fill her. She stepped into its shoes, scrolled backward in time, and found one memory inside another. Entering, she knew there’d been a red roof. And in the back room, there was…
“Canvas,” said Leah. “Has Quark or a Quark subsidiary ever owned a restaurant in District Zero’s Chinatown?”
The canvas trilled, indicating a positive search.
“Show it to me.”
Leah walked from the mag train station. She had plenty of credits for a cab or could have rented a hoverskipper, but she wanted to use her feet. If nothing else, she felt she needed the fresh air. But secondly, she was also starting to feel dumb. The memory of the Chinese restaurant had faded as quickly as it had come, and after it was gone, Leah had come up with a list of reasons why it had never been genuine in the first place. She’d decided that her port implant was malfunctioning after all. True memories, in any real sense, didn’t exist on The Beam. They certainly didn’t project themselves into the heads of other people, especially if those people weren’t even plugged in. The only explanation for Leah’s spontaneous burst of strange thought (and a strange, compulsive craving that had hit her like a brick) was an implant malfunction.
But she hadn’t been able to let it go and hadn’t headed to a clinic or a dealer immediately upon arriving in DZ station. Instead, she had set out on foot toward Chinatown. She felt stupid doing it, but despite common sense about memories and malfunctions, the experience had contained too much coincidence to ignore.
For one, the odd thought slotted neatly into her current mission. Leah had set out in search of Crumb and had done so on blind faith that she’d be able to find his path on The Beam. The Chinatown scene, she’d been sure, somehow involved Crumb. Secondly, when Leah had been inside Crumb’s mind back in the burned-out house, she’d seen a vision a lot like she’d experienced on the train: the building with the red roof. And thirdly, what of West? If the memory was entirely a product of her own malfunctioning mind, why had she pictured Noah West in a way she’d never seen him before? West had died before Leah was born, and she’d known him only as the voice of The Beam. Avatars and projections of West used inside The Beam were very different from the young man she’d “remembered” an hour earlier. Her usual conception of West was older, with longer hair, giving off a more serious bearing. And lastly, there was the way the memory had led Leah to a rather obscure and strange bit of knowledge: namely, that one of Quark’s earliest holdings had been a restaurant in Chinatown. Who knew something like that, and who could possibly care? And how could Leah explain the fact that she’d known it if her experience on the train had simply been the work of a faulty implant?
It took her a long time to cover the distance to Chinatown on foot, but she didn’t mind. She needed time to convince herself that even if she was being stupid, she had no other leads and was blind anyway. She’d planned from the beginning to hook in and Beamwalk around without any deliberate strategy. Only after getting her feet metaphorically wet would Leah start the work that Leo thought of as true hacking: trying to plunder the trail Crumb might have left in moving from the hospital to somewhere else, searching for whispers of a John Doe who fit his description. But it was the Beamwalking, not the searching of records, that was most important. The Beam had stopped being an archive of information a long time ago. True virtuosos today understood that navigation was an art rather than a science — and that you had to treat The Beam like a brain rather than a databank. Just as smell could conjure vivid memory inside the human mind, the oddest bit of recalled data could open floodgates inside The Beam. You had to intuit your way to what you needed if what you needed wasn’t concrete and defined.
So, Leah reasoned, following this stupid but strangely compelling errand wasn’t as off-track as it seemed. The air was nice and smelled clean thanks to the filters, the day was warm, and the sun was bright enough in the sky to almost entirely obliterate the appearance of the lattice covering the continent. If Leah closed her eyes as she walked — a bad idea, seeing as she’d be run over by people on foot and hoverskippers, or maybe a car or cab with faulty collision sensors — she could almost pretend she was still in the mountains. A loud part of the mountains, filled with the sounds of people.
Leah took the long route, heading down Old Bowery and through the neighborhoods, avoiding the ganglands that ruled SoHo and passing the expensive, high-rent towers in Big Italy. She meandered around the bomb crater, never rebuilt and left as a monument from the skirmishes. Then, as Chinatown drew nearer, Leah wandered farther and dawdled more until finally heading back toward Old Bowery, down Canal, and into the small streets that (save the hovers in the street) were among the few that hadn’t changed much since the days when DZ had been Manhattan. Leo, old enough to have known New York as New York, loved Chinatown and had shown Leah 2-Ds of it from his youth. As she stared at the small, narrow streets now, it was as if those old 2-Ds had come to life.
Leah knew the address the train’s canvas had given her and didn’t need to re-access The Beam. She found the building easily, right where the map had said it would be. The red roof was still there, unchanged, like the rest of the street. But it wasn’t a restaurant, and it was no longer open. The front windows were soaped, and the door was locked tight. There was no sign to indicate what the small building might now be (or had been, before being closed up), but Leah could see bolt holes and a lighter swatch of paint where a sign had once hung.
She looked up and down the street, feeling like an intruder. People milled behind her, unheeding. Chinatown had become very ethnically pure around the time the lattice went up — citizens clustering together with those like themselves out of fear, seeing as one of the NAU’s largest antagonists at the time had been China — and most of the people she saw were Chinese. Leah, an Organa white girl with bright-pink dreadlocks, couldn’t have stood out more.
What am I doing here? she asked herself.
But as she stood in front of the building from her memory, the door clicked and then slowly swung open. A black square similar to a Beam hand pad circled briefly with a dull-white glow, indicating that it had just been accessed. But Leah hadn’t pressed her hand to it. She hadn’t even spoken.
“Welcome, Leah,” said a voice she recognized. It was the default voice of any canvas, modeled after the creator of the network that powered it: Noah West.
And somehow, the canvas knew who she was.
The place had scanned her. That was the only explanation, and it wasn’t legal. You couldn’t scan a person who didn’t willingly access a panel or r
equest information that required a scan. It was an invasion of privacy, permissible only by DZPD sweeperbots whose AI had probable cause. The place, when it had illegally scanned her, had read her Beam ID, confirmed her identity, and given her access. And the only problem with that theory was that she shouldn’t have access to this door, this building, or this canvas. And also, she didn’t have a Beam ID.
“Canvas,” she said, regarding the open door with suspicion.
The voice of Noah West answered. “Yes, Leah?”
Behind the door, the building’s interior lights came on. What she saw looked clean, and not at all like a restaurant.
“Why do I have access to this building?”
“You were given access on oh-six-one-two-two-oh-nine-seven by Stephen York.”
“What is today’s date?” Leah asked. She knew, of course, but wanted to see if the system’s time was correct.
“Oh-six-one-two-two-oh-nine-seven.”
“Who is Stephen York?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
“What is this place?” she said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
Leah stared at the pad and the door as if it might offer more, but of course it didn’t. The canvas’s voice was a program, not a person. She couldn’t ask it if she should be scared, why the man whose journal she’d seen in Crumb’s head would have given her access to a restaurant in Chinatown, and how it had happened today — possibly a few seconds before, as she’d stood out front lightly tugging at her dreadlocks. The whole thing had the feeling of someone watching her then buzzing her in.
“What the fuck is going on?” Leah asked.
The polite voice said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
Not at all sure that she was being wise, Leah stepped inside. The door — an ordinary, old-fashioned shop door from the front — closed behind her on a pneumatic hinge to reveal a solid Plasteel backside. The place had a small entrance foyer, but behind a partial wall was what had once been the interior of the restaurant she’d seen on the train. Today, it wasn’t remotely similar. The main room was bright and mostly white, with everything alight from wall to ceiling to floor. The place seemed to be covered in old-model Beam-enabled surfaces, back before they’d developed IntelliResin and started mixing it into paints to create the subtler surfaces most new homes used today. Once upon a time, this room — sparkling clean and dust-free, apparently maintained by bots — had been beyond state of the art. It was now an antique, but thirty years ago it had been the best of the best…of the best.
There were countertops along the walls and a pair of what looked like immersion rigs near the room’s center. The rigs (if that’s what they were) had the clunky look of old technology, but unlike the Beam surfaces, Leah couldn’t shake the feeling that even as old as the rigs seemed, they were well beyond anything she had ever known or tried. The place looked like a white and sterile high-end lab. But amidst all of the lights and geekery, there was one thing that didn’t fit. Along one wall was a large king-sized bed with a white comforter that appeared slept in and unmade. The bed’s frame was heavy wood.
Leah thought about the security that had kept this place safe, realized it must be formidable, and wondered if she’d be allowed to leave or if she’d be locked in forever to die here. From the outside, the soaped-over windows had seemed to be glass, but now, inside, Leah grew certain they would be transparent steel. The walls would be soundproofed, locked down with electromagnetic bolts as big as her fist. She’d walked into a monster, and it was up to the monster if she would be allowed out.
She crossed the room, watching as the strangely soft surface underfoot glowed to follow her footsteps. Lights chattered in small clusters on the walls. As she approached one of the workbenches, the light over the bench lit to greet her. Instruments Leah didn’t recognize turned on and came to life. She touched the wall behind the bench, trying to swipe a window open, but the walls either weren’t equipped to create windows or weren’t willing to give her access. She could try speaking, but the room’s silence seemed almost holy. She had the feeling of being in a temple, and of speech here amounting to sacrilege.
On a shelf, standing on end with a few other volumes, Leah found a book with a leather cover. On the cover was the single word JOURNAL. She opened it, already knowing what she’d find: an attribution that read, Stephen York.
Leah flipped through the journal, finding entry after entry from decades in the past. The name Noah West appeared throughout — usually as Noah, as if Stephen York had known West personally. As she flipped through the handwritten pages, something fluttered out from the journal’s back pages. She stooped to pick it up. It was an old 2-D, printed on actual paper. Strange, the idea of putting a 2-D on paper, but it actually made sense coming from a man who’d wanted to record his thoughts on paper, in a paper book, using an ink pen. It felt like a ritual to Leah. Leo was like that, too. Sometimes, he did things the old way not because it made sense, but because he simply wanted to experience the ritual of doing it. As a Beam-native, Leah had no attachments to such inefficient methods of communication as some older people seemed to have, but she did understand it. She had just walked all the way from Midtown rather than taking a faster, easier method of transport. It was the same way of thinking: Sometimes, the harder way was the better way, and just because you could do something didn’t mean you had to or even should. Sometimes, the act of putting foot to concrete (or, she supposed, pen to paper) was a tiny act of rebellion, showing the world that you refused to be owned.
She looked at the paper in her hands. The 2-D showed a handsome young man with round-framed glasses sitting in a restaurant she recognized with a plate of noodles in front of him. Beside him — beside Noah West, circa 2030s — was another attractive man with a square jaw, long brown hair, and a neatly trimmed beard that had to be Stephen York. The two men had their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera like great friends.
Leah recognized the second man’s eyes, which hadn’t changed in all the years that had passed since the 2-D had been taken.
It was Crumb.
Leah looked around the room — around the converted restaurant-turned-elite-lab hidden in Chinatown — and then down at the photo of the crazy vagrant she’d known all her life with his arm around the most famous man who had ever lived.
Aloud, she said, “What were you part of, Crumb?”
The lights on the workbench and in the panels above, below, and directly to Leah’s sides faded, becoming an unresponsive gray. Surprised, she stepped backward, out of the dark. As soon as she did, another ring of lights went black. She turned and stepped forward again, and more lights dimmed. She was being herded forward, toward the foyer. One by one, the lights went off in rings around her until she stood in the small area where, a long time ago, customers had sat and waited for a table to sit and eat their noodles.
The front door opened on the pneumatic hinge.
The last of the interior lights clicked off.
Leah, with Stephen York’s journal in her hands, stepped into the street.
The door closed behind her, and Leah turned to look at it.
She could try to re-enter, but was sure that if she did, she’d be told that her access had been revoked by Stephen York, oh-six-one-two-two-oh-nine-seven.
EPISODE 5
Stephen York’s Journal, Selected Entries:
Dec 22, 2032
Dad got me a journal. He called it an early Christmas present. He said, “Stephen York, you’re going to be someone someday, and any life worth living is worth recording.” Totally a Dad thing to say. I asked him if he’d just quoted Tony Robbins again. He does that. He went to see Tony live last year. Tony has to be in his seventies but still jumps around on stage like in Dad’s old videos. I don’t get it. But whatever.
So Merry Christmas. I got a book. And not even a book I get to read, but one I have to write in myself.
Dad
said, “What do you want instead, Stephen? A toy? A video game?” I got his point. That’s what most of my friends want, but only the rich kids are still dicking around with that kind of stuff these days. I’m lucky my parents can give me a book, that nobody in our family has been sent to the wars, and that we haven’t been drowned in the floodwaters that would have covered the whole island if not for the levees and hovertech to hold them.
Anyway, I got employee of the year today. Pretty fucking boss, considering how hard it was for me to even land the job. They gave me a plaque. Wilson gave a little speech, said it was for “excellent work integrating nanotechnology into fluid gaming environments.” I can’t believe this is my job. I could be working at Sloppy’s to help my family pay the bills, but instead I get to play video games. Javier was pissed, by the way. He was twenty-four when he won last year, and they made such a big deal about his being so young, and I beat that by nine years. He said I got lucky. I called him an old man.
Dec 23, 2032
I got, like, ten calls today from recruiters. Apparently, Javier got them too when he won, but he turned them all down because he said he had a secure, steady career at Zenka Games. He said he used the other offers as leverage to land a big raise, but that going to a new company felt too risky. He said that when you’re the new guy, you’re the first to go if the company gets into trouble. He said times were too uncertain, and that if the east invaded or if global war broke out or even if people just got afraid, the economy could collapse. He didn’t want to end up in the rabble. Jobs are precious, and he’d built up a few years of seniority at Zenka.
I told him that was stupid and that playing it safe was the way to end up accomplishing nothing. He said I was fifteen, so what the fuck did I know? I told him that I’d check back with him when I was twenty-four, and we could compare notes. Either I’d be dirt poor because the world collapsed, or I’d be famous and rich because I had balls and went for what I wanted. I told him that if the world collapsed, it wouldn’t fall into recession. It would COLLAPSE. If that happens, seniority won’t mean anything anyway so we’ll all be fucked. It’s not like Zenka will keep making video games after Armageddon. Why not aim big?
