The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  Colin Hawes, founder of enormous online mega-store Granite Quarry.

  Alexa Mathis, an erotica writer whose first work in the teens revolutionized the way people consumed stories…who then parlayed her readership and income (plus a rumored stake in Olivia Gregory’s “Wellness Spas” company) to cofound O — now a dominant presence in the rapidly changing (and increasingly mainstream) sex industry.

  Shannon Hooper, a sort of marketing savant, widely respected today but nearly burned at the stake in the ’20s for what were considered “invasive” conversion practices. Shannon’s methods were now the cornerstone of the commerce that Quark expected to dominate Crossbrace and its forest of new biological add-ons. Reading Hooper’s Omnipedia page, York found himself amazed at how, as with Alexa’s sex company O, genius was always considered heresy at the start. Even before Crossbrace launched, the idea of “pushed” sell offers had become standard — but once half of the NAU had Crossbrace-enabled eye implants and cloud storage ports in their brains, merchants would be able to push directly into people’s heads. Maybe that was intrusive, but it was already accepted…and Hooper had started the ball rolling.

  York didn’t realize how much time he’d spent falling down rabbit holes until a window appeared in the screen’s corner, indicating the street-level door opening. York stared up at it, feeling guilty, simultaneously glad that he’d thought to set the alert and fearful that he’d be caught.

  Even as he stared at the door notification, he wondered: Caught doing what, exactly?

  It didn’t matter whether he was poking into Noah’s private business or using unapproved, undisclosed, unlicensed software to tunnel through the Internet. It didn’t really matter if he was investigating his boss, idol, and partner as if he were a suspect in a crime. What mattered most was that he hadn’t been working.

  York reached up, feeling his pulsing neck, and clawed his hand at the screen as if preparing to rip down a tarp. One swipe tossed the web into the trash and blanked the screen.

  The building’s elevator was fast, so York worked fast. He scampered to his twin machines, dumped the Bully data into his encrypted, hidden archive, then cleared the histories on both machines and pulled his tunnel away, re-stowing the software for later use. He was lightly sweating when the lab door opened behind him and Noah walked in.

  “You’re back early,” York said, trying to sound casual. The corner of his current screen (again showing his shell and the Crossbrace code, because Stevie was a good little worker) caught his eye, and he realized it was after midnight.

  “Important meeting.” Noah walked over and, quite suddenly, plopped into the chair beside York. His breath smelled like juniper.

  “What were you meeting about?”

  “Above your pay grade.” Noah looked at York then at the shell window visible on his screen. Noah’s eyes hardened. Mildly drunk or not, the man could see through code like a smudge-free window. “Is that the same sector you were debugging when I left?” he snapped.

  York kept his eyes on the screen. “I was working on the interface.”

  “Why would you work on the interface when the interpreter is buggy? You’ll take in perfect data, then the program will eat it and shit it out wrong. Are you an idiot?”

  “I was getting code-blind. I wasn’t trying to use the interface, just making a few changes that we’d already agreed would need to be made anyway. As a break.”

  “A break?” Noah sounded aghast. Other than these infrequent nights out — apparently to discuss the world with industry barons while downing a few cocktails — Noah never stopped working. He was tireless. York wasn’t sure he slept. When York finally surrendered for the night, Noah was still working. And when York awoke, Noah was already in motion. Both when York signed off and resumed his position, West gave him dirty looks worthy of a traitor.

  “Yes, a break,” said York, feeling like Noah could see through his veneer. “Like the one you just took.”

  “Crossbrace is not begun and finished in this room,” said Noah.

  “Really? You sure act like it is.”

  “Beginning to regret our commitment, Stephen?”

  “Just the team spirit.” York could hear his own petulance but was unable to help it.

  Noah looked at him for a long time. Then he stood, walked across the room, and began to type at his usual terminal. He hadn’t grabbed a glass of water. He hadn’t gone to the bathroom. He’d simply walked through the door, had a few words with his lazy and ungrateful underling, then went to work. He wouldn’t stop to sleep. Noah seemed to feel that sleep was for the weak.

  York watched Noah from the corner of his eye for a few extra seconds then returned his attention to the screen. It took a few minutes for his mind to settle on the code, but eventually it did.

  Untie the knot, Noah always said. That was what the two of them did day after day, trying to stay ahead of the rapid proliferation of bugs that riddled Crossbrace as it neared its rollout. They slashed and slashed, chasing knots as they tied themselves over and over, forever into eternity.

  In his mind’s eye, York saw a different knot. One he’d recently been tumbling onscreen, telling tales about the world’s most powerful people.

  York looked over at Leah. Again, she was fiddling with her handheld as they sat in the bullet train compartment on their way out of the city. She’d been doing it every few seconds, frustrated, almost furtive.

  “Hey, Leah.”

  Leah looked up, her pink dreadlocks swinging.

  “There was a course that Quark paid for me to take once I started working for them. Do you want to hear about it?”

  “I thought you didn’t remember stuff like that.”

  “It’s spotty. This, I remember.”

  “Okay. What?”

  “It was about the science of addiction. Specifically, Quark wanted me to know how best to create it.”

  Leah said nothing. York looked down at her handheld.

  “You’re Organa, right?”

  Leah looked out the window.

  “That’s not a judgment. I’m just pointing something out. I understand everything you told me, about how in order to subvert the system you must understand it. It makes sense. Organa needs its hackers and its tech-adepts. But as much as you dip your toe into The Beam, you should know you’re being trained.”

  “I’m just checking something,” she said, slipping the device into her pocket.

  “That’s exactly the point. We were trained to make people eager to check things. See if X was ready yet. See if they could make their daily allotment of moves in a game. See if mail had arrived. I remember checking in with Facebook as a kid. You probably don’t know Facebook.”

  “I’ve heard about it.”

  “Hmm. Well, same deal. You had to check in all the time because if you didn’t you might miss something.”

  Leah looked out the window for a moment, seemed to consider what he was saying, then looked back at him, shaking her head.

  “Steve,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m just trying the name out. It’s hard to think of you as ‘Steve’ instead of ‘Crumb.’ I’ve known you my entire life…but as someone else.”

  York nodded. “I know the feeling. Crumb is still in here for me, too.” He tapped his head at the temple. “Not in the way I was trapped inside Crumb, but as a memory. I was him, and while those memories are all kind of foggy, they’re deep in my head, as entrenched as identity. I keep finding myself thinking about squirrels. But not just thinking about them. Obsessing. Like I’m paranoid. I feel brainwashed.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to say. Like I said, I know I helped develop the technology that walled me off, but I don’t remember why we created it, what it was supposed to do, or how I built the back door — or even if I put it in during development or somehow created it once the firewall was in place.”

  “You seriously don’t know?” Leah shuffled on the train seat opposite
York, tucking one leg up under herself.

  York shook his head. “I feel like a spectator to my own life.” Then he sighed. “It’s almost as if I missed my life, really. I was Crumb for a long time. I remember the days of Stephen York in the way you’d remember your distant childhood. It’s almost as if the crazy old bum was more real to me than I am to myself.” He touched his lined face. “Of course, I guess I still am the ‘old’ part of that equation. They could have at least kept me young. It seems like it would have been fair.”

  “I don’t think they cared about you getting old. Whoever ‘they’ are.”

  York tapped his leg with a single finger. “See, that’s what I can’t figure out. I do think they cared, because they let me live. Why am I even alive?” He chewed at his lower lip, looking away. He saw Leah from the corner of his eye as she pulled her handheld partway out of her pocket, glanced at the screen, and re-stowed it.

  “So you created The Beam,” she said after she’d scratched her technological itch.

  Instead of responding straightaway, York looked around the compartment.

  Leah watched him. “You’re thinking that someone might be listening,” she said.

  “I was thinking it seemed possible.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You dare to tell the man who created The Beam — who cocreated The Beam, rather — his own business?” he said, smiling.

  Leah shrugged. “A lot has changed since you left for crazy town.”

  “Okay, hotshot, tell me. What has changed?”

  “Geometric growth,” Leah said. “To put things simply — and this is something Leo refuses to understand — the network has simply gotten too huge for most of the information within it to matter. Humanity has stored pretty much everything it’s ever done since the dawn of the digital age on The Beam, but in reality, most of what we’ve done is more like hoarding than archiving. Except, instead of being unable to part with possessions, today’s humanity can’t bear to part with its data, no matter how innocuous it is. Instead of renting storage units for all of our shit, we have cloud drives filled with archived, EverCrunch-compacted information. But like hoarders, we’ll never look at that data again, and it wouldn’t really matter if the whole office park burned to the ground.”

  “That’s almost philosophical.”

  “It’s practical,” Leah countered.

  “You’re ignoring AI and its ability to search efficiently.” York had laid her a little trap and wanted to see if Leah took the bait. She did.

  “I’m not ignoring it at all,” she said. “If it’s artificial intelligence, it’ll know even more than stupid data crawlers about what’s worth not paying attention to. If someone wants to find us, they’ll pattern-match us as two people without Beam IDs boarding a train leaving DZ. We’ll be off the grid soon enough, but for now, we’re visible no matter what we do if anyone cares to look. Nobody will, but only because they don’t have a reason.”

  “What about the people I said were after me?”

  “They already know you created The Beam.” Leah gave York a small taunting smile. “So tell me all about it.”

  He almost laughed. He looked toward the window again then back to Leah opposite him. “I don’t know. The journal you showed me is in my handwriting, but it reads like fiction. It feels like a book I might have read years ago, but not like something I wrote. Or lived.”

  “You don’t remember any of it?”

  He frowned. It was hard to explain.

  “It’s not that I don’t remember. It’s that I remember it differently. I have to fight for some memories, but other memories surface as a total surprise. The things that pop up are random and usually useless. For instance, I know that I had a Scour nanobot-enhanced toothbrush. It was red and had this big rubber spike on the handle I could use for picking my teeth. I distinctly remember the time I caught part of a nut in between these two teeth here so firmly that I had to see a dentist.”

  “That’s great information. You should write a book.”

  York shrugged. “The important things come and go. Before we left, I remembered something that had been trying to surface on its own. It’s like there’s a second me inside of my head, and that second me knows everything but is still slogging past the obstruction of that firewall in my mind. It felt like I needed to remember this one thing — something about a ‘panel.’ Serenity helped me get it out. But I still don’t know what this ‘panel’ means, even once I’d realized what it was. Can you imagine how frustrating that is?”

  In truth, it was more than frustrating. It was infuriating. They’d been in a hovercab for twenty minutes and on the train for around an hour, and already York had vacillated no fewer than five times between thinking that heading to the Organa compound was the right choice…and the opposite option, which was to stay with SerenityBlue so he could try and uncork his mind. He’d be safer in the mountains. But what did it matter if his mind was useless?

  “‘Panel’ like a piece of wood or Plasteel?”

  York shook his head. “I think it was a group, like a board of directors. It involved Noah in some way.”

  Leah looked suddenly starstruck. “Noah West?”

  “No. The guy who built the ark.”

  She leaned forward, her eyes wide. “What was he like?”

  When they’d entered the compartment, Noah’s voice had greeted them then given them safety instructions. That was the way everything was now. Noah West was the world’s friend, easily the most famous and most trusted personality ever to exist. Leah was a disruptor and a skeptic in her way, but she couldn’t help her adoration for the man that was so beloved by the world — the man who, according to the official record, was to thank for life as the NAU knew it.

  “He was driven,” said York. “Obsessed.”

  “Visionary?”

  “For sure. He was my idol. Fresh out of school, I was working for a game company. Quark recruited me after I won an award — I guess the award you already know about; I forget you’ve read the diary and know me better than I know myself.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It was hard not to love Noah. But he loved his work most of all. He wanted to change the world, and he did. Twice. He was a genius the likes of which nobody has seen before or since.”

  “The voice when we first got onto the train. Was that him? Like, for real him?”

  York made a condescending face.

  “Okay, fine,” said Leah. “Obviously, it wasn’t really him. But I can’t help but be a fangirl. This is Noah Fucking West, and you’re telling me he’s still actually out there, for real. A literal ghost in the machine.”

  “I didn’t tell you that.”

  Leah tapped her dilapidated canvas pack, which held York’s diary. “This did.”

  “Yeah, well. That was the work of another Stephen York. What’s in there is largely news to me.”

  “You really don’t remember it?”

  “Largely news to me. I remember bits and pieces. Like a puzzle. It’s maddening.”

  “So what about this panel?”

  York shook his head. “I’ve been trying to riddle that out for the…” He stopped then made a face at her. “Seriously, Leah. Do you need to be alone with your lover?”

  Leah paused, looking down. York was still staring at her mobile, which she’d pulled from her pocket yet again. She was looking at it, fussing with buttons. The screen was lit with an incoming message. She looked up, face guilty, then returned her attention to the mobile when it buzzed in her hand.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s so vital?”

  “Messages. I’m sorry.” Again, the thing buzzed.

  York laughed. “Can I be an old man for a second?”

  “Why not? I’m used to it from Leo. And you’ve always been an old man to me, albeit one with Cap’n Crunch in your beard.” Leah gave York a small smile.

  He considered saying what had been at the edge of his lips — that he remembered
writing the journal by hand in part because it was a fuck-you to the omnipresence of the networks he was helping to create — but decided not to. She wasn’t kidding about being used to it from Leo. York only had a small non-Crumb impression of the Organa leader from his visits to Serenity’s school, but that was enough to see that Leo was much older than he looked, and that he could out-geezer York any day of the week. That plus Leo’s granola bearing meant that any tech-lashing York could give her would feel like feathers compared to the heavy hippie sack being swung by Leo Booker.

  “Never mind.” He saw movement, noticed Leah’s handheld light up again (the vibration and sound were off, but she was still getting silent notifications), and decided to say nothing. “I was saying that ever since the ‘panel’ idea popped into my head, I’ve been trying to pick it out and have a look. But I can’t. I only know there was a body called Panel, that it was ‘Panel’ but not ‘a panel’ or ‘the panel,’ like the name of the group itself. I feel so irritated about not being able to get at my memories of it, as if I am — or once was — irritated by Panel itself.”

  “How can you be annoyed by something and not know why?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you’re saying it was…like a committee or something.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “And you were on it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know anyone who was on it, other than Noah?” Again, Leah slapped her pack. “Anyone from the journal, that you worked with?”

  “I can’t figure it out.” He shook his head, agitated. “I don’t know. I almost do, but I can’t get at it.”

  “Well, what did they do? Maybe you’re thinking of Quark? Could we look up the Quark board of directors at the time, and…”

  “I don’t know!” York blurted.

  Leah looked stunned. York raised an apologetic hand, and she returned a dismissive gesture, neither of them saying a word or needing to. York felt one more set of internal controls crumble as he reset. His mind was full of holes, his temper showing through all of them.