by Sean Platt
Leah didn’t care. She slipped lower and lower and lower.
Her online information caches felt like limbs on her body as she settled. Her cloud storage was an arm. Her mail inbox was an arm. Her add-ons — and the new senses they gave her — were arms. Her own buffer memory was an arm. She reached out with the arm, clinging to bits sent by Shadow since their Diggle exchange. She dug without question, sure that the information he’d sent her was as true as Shadow himself believed it to be. He’d uncovered Nicolai Costa’s Beam ID because he was nearly as adept as she was, but via a totally different modality — a species of tech-nativity that, to Leah, felt jittery and manic. Through that jittery familiarity with The Beam, though, Shadow had uncovered the trailing identifier code that he claimed marked members of the so-called Beau Monde. He’d found it because he — or someone like him — had looked somewhere she hadn’t even thought to look.
With that thought, Leah realized something both profound and troubling: She could pull almost anything from The Beam, but she, like anyone, was a prisoner of her own preconceptions and worldview. She couldn’t see what her beliefs caused her to favor or to miss, such as the interconnected nature (a web in itself, really) of Beam IDs. She’d never even considered they might form their own patterns because Leah didn’t have a Beam ID, and neither did many other Organas.
Shadow’s findings, in and of themselves, neither surprised nor alarmed Leah as she floated in the immersive haze, her hands manipulating the web almost without her awareness. On the contrary, the fact that Shadow had found and shared what he had raised the mysterious man’s esteem in her eyes. Seeing his data, Leah was suddenly certain he could be trusted. She could see his hands’ impressions on data he’d handled (they left a residue, like oils in skin) and his intentions in how the data should be parsed and passed forward. It introduced her to Shadow in a way that hyperforum threads and his Beam page never could.
For one, Leah saw that as paranoid as Shadow seemed, he definitely believed what he was saying. And there was something else — something that surprised her immensely. Shadow, despite his intense online persona and bullet-quick neurosis, was rather sensitive. He wasn’t only paranoid. He wasn’t only leading an army of potentially dangerous Null into battle (a community Leah had always distrusted, signing her posts with n33t as a subtle jab at culture of anonymity). She saw how he was genuinely bothered by what he saw wrong in the world, not just reacting as a knee-jerk. He didn’t want chaos for its own sake, like so many Null. He was concerned, and fought, because he felt that his work might somehow right a few wrongs. A crusader more than a revolutionary. An exposer rather than an exploiter. Shadow was someone who wanted to fix the balance of power…but didn’t care to take any of that power for himself.
Shadow’s impressions left an aftertaste of nobility. Unlike Integer7’s.
She’d mostly brushed off Shadow’s first mention of the yang to his yin, but his renewed discussion of Integer7’s “plan” at the Prime Statements tomorrow felt troubling to Leah — as troubling as the fact that n33t had been Shadow’s second choice of contact, meaning he preferred the blunt force that hallmarked Integer7’s style. He’d only settled for n33t’s thought-out, well-reasoned approach to persuasion when the first hadn’t responded. As part of her mind searched The Beam for Nicolai Costa’s ID, Leah felt a concern wanting to surface. Shadow, by seeking Integer7’s masculine energy first and settling for n33t’s feminine energy second, seemed to want more direct help than Leah felt willing to give — and, judging by his cryptic series of messages, might actually have already gotten it. He’d twined his path with Integer7’s already, for better or for worse.
As she floated, Leah saw the holos and pages (projected both in the web around her and on her corneal heads-up displays) as a swirling vortex, more symbolic than literal. She knew that thinking too much while doing this kind of work was always folly, so she let her hands move where they wanted, feeling them as extensions of her mind rather than the heavy meat sticks they were. She let her internal chips process the information in a way that was more intuitive than analytical, trusting a kind of emergent awareness of Beam activity in the chip over the sifting and sorting that would have shown up on an activity log.
In time, she saw Costa’s Beam ID surface in a cool blue hue, flat rather than glossy, with the texture of antique gunmetal. Her mind felt it as cold — not only in temperature, but temperament. The ID itself was a sequence of numbers, but as Leah reached into The Beam and sorted the locations that ID touched, she began to get a picture of Nicolai Costa. How he looked. How he moved. The temperature of his eyes, and the way he seemed to be looking not just into the camera, but into the eyes of the person viewing the images and vidstreams at the other end. She found digital avatars that Nicolai had used then hung on virtual hooks like fine suits. She could sense his presence in those empty shells and records. She could almost smell his skin.
Leah was shocked to find herself very attracted to Nicolai Costa.
Her mind moved fast, sorting the in-stream response to a tunneled search query. She imagined piles forming then closed her eyes to watch them grow and wondered if she was closing her human eyes or a sense that was more abstract. There was a pile of Nicolai as he related to Isaac Ryan, a pile that pegged him as a closeted should-be-Enterprise artist. The best pile was the one that pegged him as something primitive — an earlier form of human despite obvious nanobot and add-on augmentation. The AI seemed to see him as a kind of outdoorsman or hunter. A hard man with a soft exterior. A ruthless man covered in refined culture.
Costa wore spectacles as some did in a day where all of the wealthy could see perfectly, but they didn’t come across as presumptuous. Nicolai’s glasses, by contrast, seemed to pay tribute to an earlier age and vintage style. They were homage, not hollow imitation.
She found restaurant chits and grocery charges, and saw how he ate. She found photos and saw the company he kept. Her mind, speaking with the canvas’s AI, parsed billions of words of text and spoken word, drawing three-degree-removed profiles of those around him. Who did Nicolai know, who did they know, and who did those friends of friends know? Who did Nicolai seem to surround himself with by choice, who was bound to him by work, and how often did he seem to desire being alone?
The AI — the deep AI, which lived as old souls within the Beam’s original data neighborhoods — didn’t feel that Nicolai truly liked the people he was around most often. If the AI had to guess (which it did), it pegged two of his closest true friends as being a high-end escort named Kai Dreyfus and one Thomas Stahl, missing and believed deceased, both of District Zero.
A secret artist who did what he had to do while never losing his soul or truly becoming the phonies who surrounded him. A scrapper who had clawed his way upward with persuasion rather than aggression. A man with tough, fighter’s eyes but a polished (if seemingly disobedient) exterior. Yes, Leah liked this man plenty.
Just as Nicolai’s information was flooding through Leah, the stream changed. Her subconscious mind claimed her hands and her output, steering the search to where it wanted to go. Leah saw the Beau Monde “trailing identifiers” Shadow had keyed her to look for as an orange-pink color, and they fluttered around Nicolai’s gunmetal blue like fireflies as information coalesced into meaningful deductions. Natasha Ryan had one of the identifiers. Isaac Ryan had one. Micah Ryan had one. Many others around Nicolai — almost exclusively those in politics or entertainment, following branches led by Natasha and Isaac — had them. When Leah emerged, she’d want to analyze that data. Shadow was right; the Beau Monde was real. Nicolai was surrounded by them, but he was always alone.
Link to link to link, Leah saw the colors. Nicolai was matte blue. Then orange-pink, orange-pink.
Red.
Leah felt something like a blink, though she doubted her human eyes had moved. The colors in here weren’t real; they were artifacts placed on the information by her deeper mind as it spoke to The Beam. That part of her consciousness had turned
something red amidst the lighter colors as it had seen something the shallower parts of her mind had not.
She backed up, feeling a breath inward that brought the information swooping toward her like exhaling smoke in reverse. Her hands moved, swapping and arranging. She didn’t pay attention; she manipulated. Once finished, she’d uncovered the red corner she’d seen earlier, tied to a circle of orange-pink, like beads on a colorful necklace.
The orange-pink balls to each side of the red anomaly were Micah and Isaac Ryan.
The one in red was Rachel.
Curious, Leah picked up the red bead in her mental hands then pulled it closer in her mind, digits and bits flying about her like the shadows of ghosts. Rachel’s digital signature grew larger, taking on pulsing life. Leah’s mind turned it then peeled the Beam ID like skin from a nectarine. She saw the Beau Monde identifier then wondered again at the color.
She pondered the information, floating in the Lunis haze like a woman suspended in a tank of viscous liquid. The human mind was a puzzle box, with nested layers of increasing complexity, and Leah’s was no exception: somewhat of an enigma even to her. She knew that a part of herself had thought to pull Rachel’s ID out as being different, but she had no idea why. She found herself engaged in a silent quiz, with herself as both officiant and contestant.
It’s the same.
But it’s not.
It’s Beau Monde.
Obviously.
But it’s more.
Also obviously.
So what? What is different?
Leah pulled a packet of cyphers from her mental back pocket like a building superintendent removing an enormous keychain. Her mind slotted cypher after cypher into the puzzle, turning the visual metaphor into a key and a lock. First came the simple base substitutions: binary, hex, base-8. She turned the sequence, end-on and top-on, spinning one part of the puzzle after another. Then she saw it: how the sequence matched the Beau Monde key while also conforming to a pattern in itself. A subset within a subset. An ID within an ID. Two pieces of a coherent whole folding inward to make something entirely different.
If Micah, Isaac, and Natasha Ryan’s Beam IDs identified them as being more than Nicolai and most NAU citizens, Rachel Ryan’s ID clearly placed her beyond even them.
Leah sighed then backed away from the information and allowed herself to float. If an observer had been able to see a recreation of Leah’s visual metaphor at the moment, they might have seen her floating in blackness, lying on her back as her body was on the couch in her external world, her hands folded on her chest. To that observer, it might have appeared that Leah was doing nothing, but the reality was deeper. The transfer of information between Leah and The Beam was invisible because she was inside it. One with it. She breathed in data that the AI breathed out. Her exhalations were taken in by the Beam AI, sifting and sorting, making wholes from pieces.
Circles within circles.
Subsets told the story. Nicolai’s activity (not his ID) had placed him in a circle within the larger population. He was rich. He could do everything those below him could do, and more. The Beau Monde, by both Null’s estimation and what Leah could see through the trailing identifier, had access to everything Nicolai had access to…plus, yet again, more. Beau Monde stood above Nicolai, but the numeric reconfigurability of Rachel’s ID suggested that she stood above even that chosen group. It was math, not supposition. The Beau Monde identifier was a specific key, meant to unlock a certain set of technological privileges. Rachel’s key was far, far less specific. Rachel’s was a kind of skeleton key. It looked like it could unlock everything.
What are you, Rachel Ryan?
The Beam’s complete dataset was many orders of magnitude too large for Leah to even remotely consider grappling, but if she restricted her query to Rachel Ryan, she might be able to reconfigure it in her head/canvas and think/compute her way into…
Yes. That did the trick.
The search gave her enough data without being overwhelming, and when it returned, she folded edges and twisted facets until her mind had made the thing into a giant puzzle lock, keyed to fit Rachel Ryan’s identifier. The exercise wouldn’t tell her what Rachel’s code was made to open because Leah had fabricated the lock herself, but it might just shake some similar keys from the dataset.
In other words, Leah knew she wasn’t going to be able to determine the nature of Rachel’s high-level access. But with luck, she might be able to get an idea if anyone else shared it.
Keys fell. Leah’s eyes and mind watched them, turning numbers, symbols, and pages into Lunis-altered representations that her lower mind could manipulate into definite meaning. She couldn’t tell what was what; the data was incredibly complex, incredibly well masked, and obscured from individual identities. She’d seen that in The Beam before: The right hacker, if she was a good artist and knew what she was looking for, could often find amazing things. But if she didn’t really know what she was looking for? Well, there was an old expression for that: “garbage in, garbage out.” You couldn’t find gold if you didn’t know what you were seeking…or even that the precious metal existed.
She pulled back up to the surface of awareness, desperate to ground herself. A tweak of perception and focus allowed her to again feel the couch under her back. A refocusing of her eyes turned visual metaphors back into the holographs making up her hybrid immersion. She was again a young woman in a run-down apartment overlooking the park in District Zero. She could smell burning from another apartment — either food or genuine fire, equally likely.
What are you looking for?
She looked at the ceiling, seeing its cracked plaster through the holograms. She’d come here on Shadow’s lead to find information on Nicolai Costa. As so often happened on Beam excursions — for Leah, at least — her starting point had been nothing more than that, and the true target, unseen at first, had only surfaced by accident. The problem was that such things always appeared out of context. Leah had been looking for unusual circumstances surrounding Costa and had found a special club involving his employer’s mother. A very secret, apparently very privileged club.
She inhaled, closed her eyes again, and dove. There was a sensation of falling, and when Leah opened her eyes, the code had again become symbols and edges.
The dataset had shaken out three people who shared the red tag she’d seen on Rachel. Three people who were somehow tied to Rachel Ryan. How? In what capacity? The configuration was tricky, but the data was there, and Leah’s mind worked to make sense of it.
A subset.
A subset within a subset.
That was it: an even smaller group inside whatever Rachel Ryan was involved with. Three Beam IDs with the special identifiers, in their own secret club, nested in the secret club within the secret club. Not a higher level of access, though. To Leah, it felt like a sidebar conversation within a larger group. Three people who belonged to a larger mass of ten or twenty or thirty people, but who’d stepped aside, in relative secret, to conduct their own discussion.
Then she saw it — why this felt like a meeting to her yet wasn’t a meeting at all.
It was a technology Leah didn’t understand. Something she’d never seen. Based on the rows and columns within the raw data, she intuited channels not just for visual information (red, green, and blue color primaries translated to a variety of other matrices including CMYK — a print standard that didn’t make sense in a digital environment), but for audio and tactile as well. Tactile immersions, as far as Leah had ever seen, were clumsy and meant for novelty: Grip an apple in a simulation, and responsive gloves press into your hands to make it seem as if you’re holding the fruit for real. Why did the record of this group’s conversation involve tactile data? And what were the other two channels in the same bundle? In real life, the grouping would have suggested taste and scent. But who tasted and smelled in a simulation? Simulations were fancy A/V experiences, yet these three people had conducted an entire meetup using what seemed to be all five s
enses.
A next-level immersion?
It hardly mattered, whatever it was. Even if she’d had the cypher, Leah couldn’t have opened the full record, including what appeared to be highly immersive sensory information. It had been erased then clumsily zeroed. It had the feeling of a rushed bulk erase, which even kind of made sense. If these three people were meeting in secret — away from Rachel and whatever others there were — then they wouldn’t have their full toolsets available. They’d have to bulk erase because they were off-list, perhaps outside their authority.
But the data was gone just the same. All Leah could see was its skeleton: the record of something that had once been there, but had since been hollowed out.
Now what?
Now you come out of it. You end the holo immersion and get something to eat.
She really should. Leah hadn’t eaten since the train. Going into a Lunis fugue in a semi-fasted state had always helped her to quickly find clarity, but it was a fine line. Without nourishment, the moondust in her system acted more potently. If she didn’t surface soon to refresh and refuel, she could burn herself.
Before Leah returned her attention to the holographic nature around her (reminding herself that they were projections rather than interpretations made by her mind), something scratched at her senses. Something she was forgetting.
Backups.
Everything was backed up on The Beam at least five or six times. Maybe the troika who’d met in secret had forgotten to delete the backups. Leah looked, and saw how ridiculous her idea had been. Companies who made bulk erasers knew what their clients were using them for. Bulk erasers, of course, left no trace.
Caches.
That, too, was a good idea. But Leah couldn’t see any kind of cache memory. For the most part, caches would be on the users’ individual canvases, not out on The Beam. And of course, a bulk eraser worth its salt would hit all of the caches as well.
