The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  Anyway, I don’t want to play it safe at Zenka. I like what we’ve done with nanotechnology, but there’s only so much you can do with it in games. The biggest advances are in other fields.

  I got a lot of calls and four solid job offers. One was from Google, which is supertempting given what they’re doing with omniarchiving and global cyberenvironments, but the one I got really excited about was from Quark. QUARK! If Quark made fan posters, I’d plaster my walls with them. In the end, I think Quark’s focus inward, on improving the interface between people and technology networks, is a better direction than Google’s external, data-driven approach. The Internet is getting bigger and bigger, but we already have more data than we can assimilate. We need better ways to use and interact with the data we already have.

  I mean, WOW. Yes, I’d probably make a ton of money at Quark (I looked it up…their number of employees per dollar in earned profit is by far the highest in the industry, AND they offer profit sharing and a stock program), but really I’m most excited just because they’re Quark. They’re the biggest company in the world for a reason. They’re visionary, and they get where the world is really going. They took the ashes of EverCrunch and made something from that shit heap in like a week BECAUSE they understood that unlimited data means dick until you tie it to data that people actually care about — something EverCrunch missed.

  Fingers crossed. I’m meeting with a woman named Carol Wok after the holidays. She’s talking press coverage and everything, and of course she’s giving me that crap people do where they tell you how excited they are. Maybe they’re excited and think I’m a prodigy, maybe not. We’ll see.

  Jan 3, 2033

  Second day of interviews at Quark. I can’t decide if they’re paranoid or just really thorough. So far, the skills tests are stupidly simple, but there have been a million hours of them. I kept wanting to ask if they were screwing with me, but it’s possible they think the tests are hard and that I’d come off as cocky by asking. So I just did them. I hope they’re almost over, because I’m getting bored.

  Jan 4, 2033

  Okay, I take back what I said about the simple tests. Today’s were INSANE. What I did the last two days was all simple coding, but now that I think about it, it reminded me of doing times tables in school, where you had to do simple multiplication over and over and over until it got stuck in your head. Wait! I know what it really made me think of. Dad has a rip of this old movie (old enough that he had to rip it from a DVD…and because we don’t know anyone with a DVD player, he had to take it to a place and pay for the conversion) called The Karate Kid. The tests were like “wax on, wax off.” They just wanted me to do simple stuff over and over until I was a ninja.

  But today’s tests were insane by comparison. Data stream manipulation, combinatorics, numerical analysis. It was almost like codebreaking and advanced encryption. When I said that, one of the guys testing me admitted it used some of the classified EverCrunch algorithms. I actually got lost working on it, and after a while I thought I might be spouting garbage, but they said I did well. Really well. Even though I barely remember doing it — like I was in a trance.

  I’m nervous for tomorrow. Carol told me that the next round of tests are psychological, but I can’t decide if that means they’re going to mess with my head or not. They can’t do that, can they?

  I also asked about the job. She wouldn’t tell me any details but did imply that I’m pretty much hired once I get through these tests. She also said the pay was “ridiculous.”

  Jan 5, 2033

  Holy shit! Today was awesome.

  No reason to sweat the psych tests. They were actually sort of fun. It was all what-if stuff, but they shot them at me really, really fast. I guess the idea was that I wasn’t supposed to think about the answers — just answer off the top of my head. Some sort of a reaction-versus-logic thing. I asked about it, but they wouldn’t elaborate, just said they “need to know how I think.” It was superhard and stressful at first because they’d give me something really complex like “What would you do if you encountered an if-then loop in a string of code that hung in a situation that numerically occurred only 0.001 percent of the time but resulted in total data loss when it did” and expect me to answer it in literally one second. I wanted to know the details. Had the code been shipped? What other systems talked to it? What was the error? Was there something particular and predictable that happened that 0.001 percent of the time? But I couldn’t ask; I just had to answer. I felt like I’d give the wrong answer, because it was totally ill-informed. They said it didn’t matter. After about ten questions, I was getting freaked out, so the guy came in and explained that it was no big deal, that I wouldn’t be held to my answers, and that I would be assessed based on the psychological implications of my answers, not their accuracy. After that, I eased up, and it got a lot easier, even fun. They asked those questions for hours, with only one break for fifteen minutes. There may have been ten thousand questions, I don’t know. They weren’t all about work, either. A lot were either totally random or moral, like “Would you kill one person to save fifty” and “Which color is the most upstanding and honest?”

  After the tests, they took me into an empty room with one table and no chairs. I asked if the room was part of the test, like an interrogation. Carol was sitting on the edge of the table. She said they would be hiring me. I asked if I’d done well, and she said that “well” wasn’t really relevant to the psych tests, but that I was “hand-picked.”

  Then she told me that I’ll be WORKING DIRECTLY WITH NOAH WEST! She told me that he’d been watching me since I won the NYC science fair three years ago with my desalination project that got the write-up on the Times site. I didn’t have the guts to ask, but I almost get the impression that I wasn’t being pitted against other Quark applicants at all. I think I was the only one tested, like they just wanted ME.

  I’m so going to make Javier Cortez eat it.

  Aug 20, 2033

  After eight months working with Noah West, I’ve decided that he’s barely human, if at all. The man is astonishing. He never stops thinking and never gets tired. I thought I was good (working with the best in the world at sixteen, rah-rah), but Noah makes me look like a punk. He’s not really that much older than me, just in his twenties I think, and he runs an empire that’s taking over the world…AND doing it while the planet collapses and everyone else whines. Maybe I’m just isolated and coddled, but it’s like the world never stopped from where I’m standing. I’m dimly aware that the coasts (save NYC, of course) are flooded, that millions (maybe billions) are homeless or dead, that there are riots and fires and little civil wars and all of that, but it’s true what they say about ivory towers. I almost never leave Quark, and the only people I really talk to are my family, who I set up in what’s becoming a very fashionable, high-rent area in — of all places — Little Italy. So I don’t even see the rest of the world. From where all of us stand, the future’s never been brighter. Everyone at Quark feels that way. They say it’s like it’s 2025 again, with the world still rising in the New Renaissance. Maybe it makes us apathetic, but what the hell, Quark gives a ton of money to restoration and recovery projects in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Nobody wants to say it, but it seems as if the rest of the world may be beyond saving. Quark still funds groups who do what they can to help, but it’s like spitting on a fire. People think there’s anarchy in America, but I hear Europe is terrible, and they’re even talking about cutting off totally, trying to make us self-sufficient.

  But still, it’s like none of that exists at Quark or in my new circles. Everyone is upbeat and excited. It’s hard not to be uplifted by Noah. He’s exhausting but totally inspiring. Every idea is brilliant, and he’ll explain each if you let him — talking a mile a minute so you can’t follow along.

  We’ve been working on this latest project since I was hired, and I can’t keep up. I’m exhausted but exhilarated. I barely sleep. I wish I could blab on about the new project (we’re “
laying the blanket” for it, in Noah’s words) but I’m afraid to, even in my own journal. It’s THAT secret, and I don’t want to be the guy who fucked it up because his apartment was robbed and his journal got stolen.

  But it’s astonishing. The most amazing thing I’ve ever seen — maybe the most amazing thing anyone has ever seen.

  Noah says it’ll be done in maybe five years. I’d figured ten or twenty at the very least. But it’s hard not to believe Noah West when he says he can do the impossible.

  March 25, 2035

  Work with Noah West continues to be beyond nuts. The Crossbrace Project (I think it’s funny that the press uncovered the name but not what it is…their guesses are hilarious) is insanely over budget. But it’s not just over budget…it’s costing Quark a half million dollars per day. Noah says he doesn’t care and keeps repeating the same words: “better and faster, better and faster.” Carol always seems worried, and the board of directors keeps telling Noah to slow down or speed up — whichever will balance the company’s bleeding against actual, finished product the soonest. The board says that Quark, even as rich as it is, can’t afford to sustain Crossbrace development. But Noah keeps saying that it can’t afford NOT to.

  Then, because he’s Noah Fucking West, he usually adds that the world can’t afford not to have Crossbrace, either. I wish I could say more, but I will say that I tend to agree, especially now that the borders are closed. This continent needs to de-globalize and become self-sufficient.

  Now that I think about it, the notion that “the world” needs Crossbrace might be overstating things.

  Oct 26, 2040

  MAJOR breakthrough today. As always, I wish I could elaborate if for no other reason than that repeating things, even to myself, helps me to clarify, but I can’t. Not yet.

  But yes, we’ve had an absolute breakthrough…and about damn time! This project is a monster — a monster I believe in fully, but a monster nonetheless. It seems laughable now that Noah thought this would all be done in 2038 “at the latest, young Stephen!” It’s been so frustrating to slave and slave, to get yelled at constantly by the board, but also to know our sunk costs are so deep that there’s no way out other than to keep going forward. The only way to save this project is to complete it, and it’s stressful and frustrating to know that until that happens, we’re only digging in deeper.

  But I feel, despite this major step today (one I still can’t commit to the page…hopefully I’ll remember what it was if I ever read this back), that we’re on borrowed time. It troubles me. Not just with the project, but with the world at large. There were a lot of murmurs when the borders were first closed and people started to wonder how the US could ever be self-sufficient. Conversion to hovertech and Stimulin’s development of Pocket Fusion helped because at least the oil monkey was off our back, and the discovery of the riches under the ice up north helped a lot more. But…to cut off from the world? It hardly feels stable, especially considering the “hyperconnected” nature of what Quark is trying to do.

  A lot of people felt relief when we dropped the US/Mexico and US/Canada borders and formed the NAU because we at least had a few other hands and minds in our camp, but the world still feels like a powder keg, and I can’t help but think that everything we’re working on will be missing the point if that keg blows while we’ve still got our hands in our pockets. There’s too much desolation and fear in the rest of the world. It’s too polarized. I do feel that the NAU’s formation was a good thing, but just think about it: the three richest countries in the world following the collapse (and also with the least internal strife, relatively speaking) getting together to form the world’s only truly stable government? Hell, we might as well paint a giant target on our backs. How long until we the world stops fighting with itself and comes here to take what’s ours? Look at us. That pill, EndLax? It’s a fuck-you to the starving people of the world. Or look at the Ryan brothers. I saw Isaac Ryan the other day at a participatory Internet VR event, and I’d never noticed before that his title is the Directorate’s Czar of Internal Satisfaction. How can we not think we’re in trouble…worrying about our “satisfaction” enough to have appointed a czar for it while the rest of the world burns?

  Even the NAU’s situation feels like a house of cards. There’s a ton of potential in what we’re building to bridge the gap between the upper and lower classes (not that I’m a socialist — far from it!), but until it’s rolled out? It troubles me. We have a system where the upper class pops EndLax at endless, gluttonous banquets, living at the top of skyscrapers that keep growing taller and lusher. More fortified, like castles. Meanwhile all that old Park Avenue real estate keeps crumbling to shit, Central Park East and West are going to gangs, with robots using hovertech keeping them in line rather than anyone working to solve the problem…oh, hell. I could go on forever. People say I think too much for someone my age, but that’s been the case since before the Fall, when my parents belonged to Stonegate Country Club and wouldn’t let me invite Jimmy Swinton to the pool. “He’s not our people,” they said. And this, today? People around me are full of optimism, saying things have never been better — but I just think they’re being willfully blind to the world around them.

  Okay, stopping with the downer stuff now.

  The new project will help close the gap, and we’re finally getting close to rolling it out. I DO think too much. Maybe this new world CAN survive. It’s true that the “us versus the world” feeling inside the NAU has reduced internal turmoil. The new Senate? The Directorate? The Enterprise? All good. Give people a choice, and they’ll feel satisfied even if both options are equally lousy; the jam study proved that decades ago. The Senate is shaking all the right hands in appointing Noah the Secretary of Practical Advancement. When Crossbrace rolls out, that might actually mean something.

  Deep breaths. We’re in the home stretch.

  Nov 14, 2040

  Still going strong. It’s hard to maintain enthusiasm (well, not for Noah; he hasn’t slept in seven years, I swear), but the scope of Crossbrace is insane, and even as the days drag on, I keep reminding myself that things are moving quickly if you look at the big picture. The board keeps bugging Noah for a schedule, but he says no one can make a schedule for changing the world. They press him, and he grudgingly commits that within two years, the new technology will be rolled out nationwide. That will change everything. It’ll touch everywhere in the NAU and be affordable for even the lowest classes (though not at a very sophisticated or immersive level).

  The Beatles said they were bigger than Jesus, and that became a problem for them. Crossbrace won’t be bigger than Jesus, but that’s just about all it won’t be bigger than. The printing press? The telephone? Cellular technology? The Internet? Tablet computers? The Internet’s evolution into 3-D, VR, and immersion? This new emergent AI shit? Crossbrace will dwarf them all.

  Now, Noah West? He’d tell you that HE will be bigger than Jesus.

  Feb 24, 2041

  I’m twenty-three. Noah is…wow, I don’t even know. In his forties? He has to be, but I swear he hasn’t aged since I met him. That’s crazy.

  But whatever, he has to be twenty years older than me, and he’s firing on three or four hours of sleep a night. I’m falling asleep at my workbench. I’m making mistakes. Noah is making them too, but don’t tell him that. He needs to sleep but won’t. And I simply can’t understand how he’s doing it. It must be the fire in his gut.

  We’re essentially roommates. We both live at the office and lab. I’m his prisoner, in a way. Noah moved in, first with a blanket and a pillow, and before I realized it he was sleeping there every night. He was there when I showed up early and stayed after I left late. One day, he gave me a guilt trip about leaving, laying the burden of both company and world on my shoulders, so I stayed. It was late, so I slept on the reception couch. The next day, a pillow and blanket arrived, and I realized that I was living there too. Now we leave just once a week, and I can only leave when Noah does. He’s cranky
. Angry. Getting sloppy. Still a genius, but overeager. He needs to slow down. We both do. I’d like to date, maybe one day start a family. Call me selfish. But right now, having a life takes a backseat to Crossbrace. The project is getting close. Noah says everything is there, and that we only have to “untangle the knot.” We try — me, him, the other team members and techs who have lives but still work eighty-hour weeks — but the knot is tight, with too many loose ends. Too many knots. Every time we untie one, another is there, often two. It’s taking forever, and I can’t help but feel like we’re chasing a ghost. Something is running away from us. Whenever we sleep, it gets farther ahead.

  Noah snaps all the time. Setbacks make him furious. When we talk, I’m always wrong. He says I’m trying to solve problems with the same thinking that caused them. He acts like I’m in his way. I FEEL like I’m in his way. Where is that desire they had for my “prodigious genius”? They recruited me like no other I’ve seen since. I literally have more money than I could ever spend. I called Noah on it, asked him why, if I fuck up all the time, he keeps me around. Let me go, I say. Let me have a life, if I’m such a liability. But he only says that mistakes are opportunities to learn. He says that mistakes, frustrating as they are, are gifts. Then, insultingly, he thanks me. He thanks me for all the gifts that I give him.

  Sep 18, 2042

  I should be elated, but I’m just too fucking tired. Now that we’ve popped the cork, I’m planning to sleep for weeks — to bunker myself in and refuse to come out. Then I plan to drink heavily. Make up for the college experiences that I hear, via mail but never in person, that my friends have had but that I have not.