by Sean Platt
One of the other precinct’s captains had forwarded a story to Dominic so he could get a sense of Beam Headlines’ current flavor. Dominic absorbed the mood as he scanned the story in the cached message. It was not good. Both the Enterprise and Directorate parties were out of hand (somehow the reporters put themselves above reproach, even though they belonged to one of those out-of-hand parties), and DZPD was sitting around with its hands in its lap — or, maybe true to tone, with their thumbs up their asses.
The message from the other captain that came with the story was curt: “They’re making it look like we stomped these kids ourselves. Get the fuck back here ASAP.”
Dominic circled the dirt, trying to grab a signal to check Headlines. He wasn’t able to get any connection at all, and every passing second made his temperature rise. The riots had been stressing him out for weeks. The constant demonstrations — really just neutered riots — had been equally irritating. None of it was DZPD’s fault, but with both parties fighting, DZPD was the easiest scapegoat. Dominic felt like he was trying to wrangle hyperactive children but wasn’t allowed to use his belt to correct them. And that wasn’t the worst part. The worst was that the parties — at least as personified by their mouthpieces, Micah and Isaac Ryan — were only adding fuel to the fire. Their words said, “Calm down; let’s be reasonable,” but their between-the-lines message to the citizenry was clear: Everyone else is the reason you’re miserable.
Right now, Dominic could imagine the rhetoric spewing from the twin Ryan machines and onto the first page of Headlines. They’d be using the kids as showpieces, each publishing one heart-wrenching story after another. There would be scads of crying-parent interviews, all designed to make it obvious how cruel the other side — and the police — truly were.
“That thing do something to offend you?” said a voice at Dominic’s side.
The voice was so smooth that Dominic didn’t recognize it but turned to see Crumb (né Stephen York) standing beside him, watching as he pounded on his phone.
“Sorry. All hell is breaking loose in the city. Apparently, the police are responsible for a bunch of tragic children’s beatings. And by the way, we also kill puppies.”
York gave him a quizzical, head-shaking look.
“Never mind. Just…I’m sorry, but I have to go.” He reached out a hand and grabbed York’s arm briefly, as if to assure himself that the man was truly there. “Although believe me, I’d prefer to stay and catch up.”
“You can’t stay a little?” York shrugged. “I kind of owe you my life.” He paused. “At least, that’s the way I seem to remember it.”
“I wish. I don’t want to head back into the city and get egged.”
“Egged?”
“Probably not literally. But maybe. ‘Shit upon’ is more likely. Possibly literally. By the mothers of these kids. Because we police officers clubbed their children and are responsible for the parties fighting, at least according to the Ryan camps, and…”
“It’s okay, Dominic. Handle what you need to. Come back when you can.”
Dominic looked down. York’s hand was braceleting his arm, exactly as Dominic’s hand had been doing to York’s a moment earlier. Dominic didn’t remember the switch. He thought of the long ride ahead — a ride that would crash-end in a heap of PR crap — and felt his head swim. No wonder he couldn’t pay attention.
“Okay.”
“Don’t let it get you,” said the stranger in front of him.
“Sure.”
“Because you’re a good man. And a good cop.”
Dominic paused then met the old man’s mesmerizing eyes. He remembered meeting those same eyes when they’d been staring at him from a dirty face, buried beneath a gnarled beard. Even then, they’d seemed to carry a seriousness that the rest of Crumb couldn’t, as if the true Stephen York had always been behind those eyes like prison windows, banging on the glass and screaming for release.
“You don’t know that I’m a good cop.”
“I know enough.”
Dominic nodded, unsure how to respond to flattery he didn’t currently deserve, then plodded toward the village. Before heading to the barn for one of the horses (and he really, really hoped that someone had prepped one with a saddle and reins because he sure as shit didn’t know how to do it himself), Dominic detoured toward Leo’s.
Leo greeted him looking calmer than he had earlier, thanks to the Lunis. He couldn’t have much further to go in his withdrawal plan. Leo would make it. Dominic, thinking of his own silent addiction, felt an odd mixture of hope and jealousy.
Leo stepped aside and let Dominic in then resumed his position in the chair. He looked at Dominic as if urging him to sit. They hadn’t said anything yet, and the whole moment had the feel of an awkward silent play, or a game of charades.
“I’ll just be here for a minute, Leo. I have to head back.”
“Oh.” Leo looked less in-charge than he usually did. The new bolus of moondust had given him a partial return to control, but the sparseness of that bolus had made his return to control only partial. His hands twitched a bit, and his eyes seemed uncertain.
“I’m just going to say it,” Dominic said, standing in the middle of Leo’s living room. “The dust shipment didn’t make it down. It was stopped on the moon.”
Leo seemed to want to rise but fought the urge. “So there will be a delay in…in our future supply?”
Dominic shook his head, wishing he could give Leo the assurance he wanted. “No. It was the current shipment, Leo. The one you’ve been waiting for.”
Leo stood. He looked equally panicked and angry. Of the two, panic was the stronger emotion.
“The one you told me was coming immediately? Because what you brought me today was…was…”
“It was supposed to be a holdover. And yes. I’m really sorry, Leo.”
“You’re telling me that nothing is coming. That this tiny bit is all we have.”
“That plus your reserves.”
Leo’s calm split in the middle. “We have no reserves! We used them waiting for your last botched shipment!”
“You’re weaning,” said Dominic. “Maybe the others can wean, too.”
“It’s too goddamn late to ‘wean,’ Dominic!” Leo cried. He said “wean” like the word was poison. “Do you know the doses that this village — that the entire Organa culture — is used to? I’ve got them as raw as they’ll go. How can I wean them off a drug after I’m already out?”
“You’re out?”
“Yes! We have a tiny bit here and there, and there’s what you brought. But how far will that go? I’ve gotten myself nearly off the shit, and my fair allotment could last me weeks or longer. But for the others? Dominic, they’ll…I don’t know what they’ll do after they’re cold! How did this happen? You took responsibility for our supply! You cut Omar out and stepped in! I didn’t like it, but you assured me it was for the best. This isn’t just about me, Dom! This is about the lives of dozens of…”
“It’s nobody’s fault. I was told the runner was top-notch, but apparently there have been some changes to moon customs that no one saw coming and…well…” He sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Omar’s operation isn’t compromised, and that’s good news because it means that future supply isn’t necessarily cut off. But there’s no dust right now. All they can do is regroup and try again.”
“When?” Leo began stalking the room, his body language fiery and furious. “Well, shit, it doesn’t matter, now, does it? Unless it’s tomorrow or the next day. But you wouldn’t be telling me if that were the case, would you?”
“I imagine it will be a week at least. I figure there’s more to the complications than I’m being told. I’ll call Omar once I can get a signal and trust my privacy. I’ll find out and let you know when I do. But I have a feel for Omar by now. He promises the world because he’s slick then yanks the rug from under you. That’s what I smell here. I can tell his bullshit promises from truth.”
Leo continued to
stalk. “We can’t last a week, Dominic! What am I going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Leo’s normally peaceful face turned and looked toward Dominic. Suddenly, the captain believed every word that NPS Agent Austin Smith had told him. This was the face of rebellion. The face of violence. This, pushed hard enough, was the face of Gaia’s Hammer.
“You don’t know? Figure it out! I’m not asking a rhetorical question here. I actually want to know: Just what the hell am I going to do when the supply runs out and we have nothing to prop up decades of addiction? How will I tell them? They’ll panic. And it’ll get worse from there!”
“I’ll figure something out,” Dominic said.
Leo made a face. “Oh, well, now I feel better.”
“I will, Leo.”
Yes, he could figure something out. What it might be, Dominic had no idea. But he’d been in plenty of tight situations before, and there was always a way if you had a strong enough will.
“What about in the meantime, before you grow boosters and fly to the moon for us? Some of these people are already dry. They come to me for rations. I’ve been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and what you brought today will buy me a day if things go perfectly. But too many people coming at once, and soon…”
“Do you have any incapacitating weapons?” Dominic asked. “Anything at all?”
“We’re motherfucking hippies living in the mountains!”
“I’ll figure something out, Leo,” Dominic repeated.
“When?”
“I’ll report back when I get to DZ. By then I’ll…” The corner of an idea scraped at his brain. Dominic paused to consider.
“You’ll what?”
He was thinking of the DZPD station, confiscated narcotics evidence, and the fact that as captain, Dominic could walk in and touch whatever he wanted. There was a big difference between touching the station’s Lunis and leaving with it — fifty years in a Flat prison’s worth of difference — but it was something. It was something he doubted he could pull off, and it was a line that he wasn’t sure he was prepared to cross, but it was a start, and everything had to start somewhere.
“I need to go,” said Dominic. “But there may be a way. Dire circumstances and all.”
“What am I supposed to do if they riot?”
“You’re their leader. Tell them about the need to see past the bullshit. Be nonconformists about their drug like they are about everything else.”
“And question ‘authority’?” said Leo, pointing at his own authoritative chest.
Dominic found himself becoming angry. He was being attacked by everyone in District Zero, attacked by the Directorate, attacked by the Enterprise, attacked by the smear campaign determined to make the police look like the bad guys about those injured kids. He didn’t feel like being attacked by Leo, too. Leo had led an army of revolutionaries once upon a time, hadn’t he? Well, maybe it was time to grow some of those balls back and take some fucking responsibility.
“Tell them an inspiring tale of overcoming your addiction,” Dominic suggested. “And if they don’t listen nicely? Here.” He reached down and unholstered Grandy’s ancient snubnose .38, which he kept strapped, not quite illegally, but definitely ill-advisedly, to his right leg. He tossed the weapon to Leo, enjoying the Organa leader’s flinch as he caught the heavy metal weapon.
Leo looked at the old gun as if it were an alien artifact. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” he said.
Dominic turned toward the door and said, “Point it at whatever you want to die.”
In the 2050s, Aiden Purcell invented a Doodad app — later adapted for Apple and other handhelds — called AcUity. Not coincidentally, AcUity was released just as Crossbrace was nearing middle age. By the midpoint of Crossbrace’s dominance in the NAU, people had gotten used to biological implants and internal nanobots…and past the resistance that had slowed full Crossbrace adoption in the ’40s. By the early ’60s, however, most of the NAU population (those who could afford it, anyway) had some degree of biological enhancement and the previous decades’ delight had started to sour. The Beam was on the horizon, and its arrival came none too soon. Crossbrace, so enthralling at its release, was in danger of being outgrown by its users.
In other words, AcUity came out when the field of mind/technology interfacing was mature enough to no longer be scary…but still new enough to not yet be boring.
AcUity promised that it would train users’ brains to interface better and more efficiently with the Crossbrace network. The human brain was used to working in isolation, said the AcUity marketing copy, and although hive thinking had been a part of the collective human psyche throughout the twenty-first century, the sluggish biological brain had hundreds of thousands of years of DNA-based (not chip-based) evolution bogging it down. The Crossbrace network was amazing, said AcUity’s creators, and it wasn’t an understatement to say that Crossbrace and its inevitable successors were the very future of human thought. But in order to truly optimize use of the network, the human mind had to be responsive enough to keep up. (“It’s like using a Scion screen to view a movie made of flip-cards,” explained one of the company’s early commercials.)
AcUity worked so well it was eerie; it was almost as if the developer had a crystal ball for technology. As word spread about AcUity success stories — people running their households without lifting a finger; users who were able to craft mnemonic triggers to recall entire swatches of cloud memory at will — the app’s popularity skyrocketed. For a few years, you couldn’t walk through a public place without seeing a dozen people playing AcUity on their mobile screens, tapping at flashing icons and dragging puzzle pieces into place.
But what Isaac Ryan forced himself to remember as Aiden Purcell’s avatar materialized in front of him in the library simulation for their second meeting was that it was a mistake to take anything Aiden said at face value. Some people occasionally said one thing while actually meaning its opposite, but with Aiden, deceit was almost something you could count on.
AcUity’s true purpose, it turned out, was to mine data from the people who played it. Its inventors hired addiction experts who’d learned from early online role-playing games and the first mobile apps built on the in-app purchase model. What was true then was doubly true with AcUity: The primary goal, above all else, was to keep the user playing. The more time people played, the more the app could extract about their behavior, their neural firing patterns, their preferences and hidden motivations, and what they truly desired versus what they claimed to desire. AcUity was free and had no in-app purchases. Immediately addictive, it spread throughout the NAU. Users experienced phenomenal mental growth and told friends. And the more people who used AcUity, the more data Purcell’s company added to its database.
According to the stats that bought Purcell’s way into Panel (stats which Isaac and his brother knew about from their mother, despite being outside of Panel themselves), AcUity had amassed behavior analytics on 81 percent of the NAU population — including those below the line who played the free game on their cheap Doodads. Purcell made his vast fortune selling that data. At the time, only O’s covertly gathered user data was remotely comparable. But O’s data was highly specific (mostly sexual), and O wasn’t sharing. Purcell was always willing to — for a price.
“Isaac,” said Purcell’s avatar, walking past him to sit in the library simulation’s big leather chair. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Aiden.” Isaac nodded. He almost wanted to say that the feeling was mutual, but it wasn’t. Getting a visit from Purcell was like getting a visit from the devil in a fancy suit. You knew you were playing with fire, and both parties knew that you were only there because you hoped to throw that fire on someone else before it burned you alive.
“Have you decided on how you’d like to proceed?”
Isaac swallowed. He’d known the question was coming but was reluctant to volunteer his proposition. Purcell held a very important positi
on within Panel and was in many ways the opposite of Isaac’s role within the Directorate Party. Isaac’s title was Czar of Internal Satisfaction, which basically meant that he was in charge of keeping the cattle sedated, happy enough to hold still for their milking. The joke in both parties (among those who knew about Panel, anyway, which was an almost nonexistent subset), was that Purcell was the unofficial Czar of Dissatisfaction. Purcell, in essence, was always holding a sharp blade. The question wasn’t if he’d cut someone, but rather who it would be, and the depth of the ensuing gash.
“Natasha’s decided to stage a new concert,” Isaac said. “The beauty is that it’s before Shift, so a sabotage there will effectively handle the other concert — the one after Shift — as well.”
Purcell, sitting in the large chair with his legs crossed, smiled. He had perfect dark-brown hair, combed straight back with a widow’s peak. He was wearing a dark suit with wide pinstripes, a red tie, and a white pocket square. His shoes were polished to a mirror finish, his teeth white like chalk. But what chilled Isaac most was the knowledge that while avatars could be dressed and appointed any way the user wanted, Purcell’s required none whatsoever. He was looking at the man as he’d appear in life — always stylish, always young, always immaculate in appearance, with a crocodile’s smile.
“Two for one.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Isaac.
Purcell nodded as he weighed Isaac’s request. Anyone who knew of Panel’s existence could request a meeting with the man, but the ensuing meetings always had the feel of a bargain for one’s soul. You didn’t tell Aiden Purcell to do anything. You didn’t even request that he do anything. You pitched him ideas, like an angel on his shoulder. If he liked the idea, he’d adopt it and take credit for it. If he didn’t like it, nothing happened, and there were no appeals.
