by Sean Platt
Leo hadn’t wanted deaths. But after Meyers Dynamics, it’s not like he’d stopped planning new sacrificial targets.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Not for her kids.”
“Meyers was going to beat Quark to market in the gaming sims niche,” Leo told the agent. “They’d laid layers over most of District Zero and had shot geo beacons into the concrete across half the city. They had a highly addictive reward architecture and did nothing to blunt it after that mass suicide when a prominent player in the virtual world had his score knocked to zero. People were losing the ability to see the difference between fantasy and reality, so we felt we needed to intervene.”
“That’s still going on today, Booker! The Beam is one giant Layer! Layers on Layers on Layers. You’ve seen those idiots they call ‘Beamers,’ right? You’ve read tracts from the Church of West? Noah Fucking West, Booker — you didn’t change anything! More people today believe in SerenityBlue than Albert Einstein!”
Leo felt his face go slack — something that without question didn’t escape Smith’s attention. There were two assumptions in what the agent had just said that Leo hadn’t seen coming. The first was that unless SerenityBlue was a common name, he’d actually met someone that the connected world considered to be a mere fantasy. The second was that despite apparently following Leo’s movements long enough to plan this sting, Agent Smith, at least, had no idea what he’d done.
Leo tried to recover. “You’re making my point for me. Beamers, the Church — the unreal world is still real to too many people.”
“Why is that for you to decide? If they want to live in nullspace, why should Leo Booker say different?”
“It’s not real!” Leo felt his heat rising. He pushed it down. He’d do nobody favors by letting NPS get under his skin. Not when the arrests had all been Leo’s intentional doing.
“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. I won’t get religious on you. But just because I don’t always like the way the Districts — and hell, most of the people in the sticks — depend on The Beam doesn’t make it okay for you to bomb and kill.”
“Those crimes were forgiven in exchange for our retirement. When Gaia became Organa.”
“But you’re not retired, are you? I have you on record, voice printed and verified, admitting to planning an outage. A sustained outage today would be far more damaging than even an explosion would have been back in your day. Today, it’s not just amusement. People need The Beam, Mr. Booker.”
“Call me Leo.”
“Oh, that Beam outage would prove your point, all right. Same point as you were trying to prove in the ’30s and ’40s. But an outage in DZ today could result in a user imbalance, not unlike a bank panic when everyone wants their money back at once. And that’s not even considering the economic repercussions, both from Beam-based or Beam-resident businesses, the latter of which you would literally be forcing out of existence for the outage’s duration. That’s not even considering what happens to those who transact mostly through ghost currencies like beem. Just the outage itself would have grave social consequences. A core network failure undermines faith in just about everything The Beam touches…which, I’ll remind you, is everything, period. I don’t give a shit if you like technology. We’re in a Gordian knot. You fail the network, the network fails us.”
Leo sat back, crossing his arms, keeping his face vaguely pleasant. All of what the agent was saying was true. It was the main reason that Leo had stopped trying to sabotage the network when he’d promised NPS he would. He didn’t like what Crossbrace had been even when he was hooked into it every bit as indelibly as the rest of them, and he really hadn’t liked watching Crossbrace become The Beam. Some of what Leah had told him about The Beam — and specifically, the differences between the two — chilled his blood. Man had made Crossbrace, but the AI birthed by Crossbrace had made The Beam. Today, humanity was just a guest in a world it still thought it had created.
Leo watched the agent’s eyes. Without the mesh, he could see them clearly, only slightly distorted by the field’s interference. Whatever Agent Smith thought Leo was planning, he was taking it as personally as what Leo and his group had already done.
The stare, as it was meant to, loosened Leo’s bolts. He found himself thinking of the other Organas now traveling beside him in carrier hovertrucks. Their hands and legs would be shackled or frozen in an immobility field — or if they were lucky, NPS might have equipped its transports with a pacification immersion, so they might be skipping along virtual shorelines, their violent need temporarily forgotten. But whatever they had, it was only a spot solution. When the group reached the city, Leo would surely be unloaded beside all the people he’d spent his life shepherding, seeing their tortured faces, how badly they were hurting and how much they hated him.
The idea prickled Leo’s own need. He was mostly through his own weaning period, but not entirely. The sudden realization that he couldn’t get any dust at all now just made him want it more.
But whatever twinge Leo felt, the others — who’d been forced by circumstances to go cold turkey — would be feeling it a thousand times worse.
“Nothing to say for yourself then?” Smith asked.
“I always do what my conscience tells me.”
“Including killing to get what you want. Including addicting your people to a dangerous drug. Including betraying those people, leaving them dry.”
“I’m not betraying them.” He said it straight, but it was getting harder to keep the smug smile on his lips.
“That’s right, Leo,” said Smith. “Keep telling yourself that.”
Leo snapped. He shot his bound hands forward, aiming for the agent’s throat. He was right about the force field; it was only a partial barrier. He managed to get through it to the wrists before the current hit him and his muscles seized. He fell back, breathing heavy. The metal under his skin was designed as a heat sink, serviceable for dissipating current as well. But in the closed flying car, there was nowhere to ground himself. But of course, if he’d been grounded, the shock might have stopped his heart.
Which would be the easy way out.
“Sit back, old timer,” Smith said, turning to front and placing his hands on the steering fork. “We’ll be there soon.”
Leo, breathing heavy, reminded himself why he’d lied for the NPS bug to hear and report. Why his own false confession had got him arrested, and all of Organa with him.
He reminded himself that this was for the best, no matter how it looked.
He reminded himself that he had a plan.
And he reminded himself that, appearances to the contrary, he was no longer a son of a bitch.
He thought of Leah.
And hoped she could do what he’d so recently felt sure she could, before the doubts had begun to creep in.
Leah sat in a meadow. The grass under her palms, hanging at the sides of her crossed legs, was cool and soft. She could feel the moisture beneath her, possibly wicking up through the legs and seat of her canvas pants. She might stand up with a wet ass. The only thing saving her, she tried to remember, was that the grass didn’t exist. And, she felt somehow sure, her pants didn’t exist either.
There was a tap, as if of a fist on a door. Leah looked up, staring across the meadow’s recently mowed grass and into the blue sky above a gently sloping hill.
“Yes?”
A vertical and horizontal slice appeared in the blue sky, meeting in a corner. The opening widened, and the face of a young boy with big ears stuck his head through it.
“Sorry to interrupt you while you’re outside,” said the boy.
Leah laughed. “Right. Outside.”
The boy’s face seemed confused. Around his head, the blue sky began to wobble and lose focus. He must have seen it happen on the other walls of the simulator because his confusion turned to something more certain, and the world resolved. Again, Leah saw him standing in an impossible doorway, offering entry to the school’s hallway without
any building in between.
“Did you do that?” Leah asked.
“What?”
“Stabilize the simulation.”
“I helped you remember,” the boy said.
Leah sighed. She didn’t have the brainpower for this discussion right now. Later, she told herself. She pretended it would make more sense later, which of course it wouldn’t.
“What is it, Alias?”
“We’re having dinner.”
“Oh. Thanks.” She waited, but the boy didn’t move. So she added, “I’m not hungry right now.”
“Sure.”
“Where is Serenity?” Leah asked. “Is she with you?”
“She’s with you.”
Leah looked around then realized what the boy was saying. But the question of SerenityBlue’s general incorporeality was just one more of five thousand things Leah could think about later.
“I meant her body. Is she in the cafeteria…like, standing there, on her feet, with her arms and stuff?” It was the oddest question Leah had ever asked.
“Maybe. I haven’t checked. Do you want me to find her for you?”
“No. It’s fine. I need to practice this.”
“You just need to remember it,” said the boy.
“Oh. Right. Of course. I’ll try to…well, to remember that.”
The boy turned to go. The dark slit through the pure blue sky narrowed behind him.
“Alias?” Leah said.
The gap widened again. The boy’s face watched her.
“What does SerenityBlue look like to you?”
“Like SerenityBlue.”
“But who else? When you look at her, does she look like me?”
“She looks like you. Like your friend Leo looks like you.”
“Leo looks nothing like me.”
The boy smiled.
“Did you know about her? Before you came to this school, did you know SerenityBlue actually existed…before you met her for real?”
“I’ve always known her. We all have.”
“I don’t mean knowing of her, like she’s famous or something. I mean knowing her like you know me, here, in person. Like you talked or something, had conversations. Or that you could, if you stood in front of her.”
“I always knew her just like you always knew her.” He looked confused by the question and delivered the answer as an obvious absurdity.
“So you haven’t always known her.”
The boy smiled again.
“Okay,” said Leah, giving up. “Thanks for letting me know about dinner.”
Alias gave a small nod and left. Leah heard the closing door’s tiny echo as the simulator again became a meadow. The coexistence of stimuli was strange. This place shouldn’t have echoes. Or doors.
Her focus slipped, but this time the room didn’t waver. Leah didn’t understand why, but there was nothing about this she truly understood. The children at Serenity’s school acted like The Beam and the real world were interchangeable, and the first time she’d been here that same small boy had turned a non-simulator room into a simulated reality true enough to step into. She’d asked how to learn to do the same, but the answers had taken days to understand. The way everyone had spoken to her, it was as if Leah had asked how to hold a rock while already holding it.
But the more she’d just accepted and tried, the more she’d found a quiet place inside herself that knew what to do. The building must have Fi, and that Fi must be able to interact with thought. It wasn’t unreasonable. Biofeedback had been doing similar things since before the turn of the millennium, and anyone with an early generation artificial smartlimb crossed thought and Fi every time they reached out to pick something up.
In a simulator, without moondust, she’d been able to create objects that evaporated when she tried to touch them. Then she created backgrounds. Vistas. And finally, like now, immersive realities.
There was another knock.
“What is it, Alias?”
But the door in the sky didn’t open. Instead, Leah watched as a tall, dark figure appeared before her. It grew like a pool of congealing mist, swirling toward a center from nowhere. A few seconds later, she found herself looking at the back of a broad-shouldered man in a long black coat, black trousers, black shoes, and a brimmed black hat. His hair was dark brown, and he had a thin strip of Caucasian skin visible below a neatly trimmed hairline.
The specter, once formed, remained where it was, still facing away from Leah. The head shifted minutely, causing the hat’s brim to tip like the profile of a banking flying saucer.
“End simulation,” Leah said.
Nothing happened.
“Canvas. End this simulation.”
The dark figure stayed where it was, shifting slightly. If the room was responding to her thoughts, maybe this thing was part of her. A Freudian reflection, showing Leah her own darkness as if through a mirror.
“Canvas. Force quit, and restart. Force clear buffer memory.”
A small white butterfly flitted between them. A light breeze stirred. Leah felt the flyaways in her dreadlocks lift away from her face and then settle, tickling her skin. She felt suddenly sure that if she were to throw something into the distance, it wouldn’t strike a wall as it should. The children were right. When things became this real, there was no way to tell what was outside and what stayed in.
“You are n33t,” the man’s back said. His voice was deep and authoritative.
“Who the hell are you?”
“You know me as Integer7.”
Leah felt a shiver, glad that the phantom couldn’t see it. There was no way the man was really Integer7, mostly because Integer7 had never been seen and because nobody knew Leah was n33t. He had to be a figment of her imagination. A trolling thought. A bit of darkness stirred up because whatever remembering it took to power this simulation, she’d finally got the hang of it…and her subconscious had immediately butted its way in.
She walked toward where the boy had peeked in earlier. She put her hands out, waving them like a blind person, feeling the empty air for the simulator’s wall. But there was nothing. She kept glancing back, watching the still and silent figure. His arms must have been clasped at his front, because to Leah, his silhouette was streamlined: feet together without any gap between them, the shape of an armless jacket, shoulders, a head wearing a hat. He looked like a large, vaguely human-shaped peg. A strangely dark chess piece in the middle of a sunny meadow.
“Canvas. Force quit.”
Nothing.
“A situation has come to my attention that you will need to intervene upon,” the shape said. “My resources are limited, but my informational sources are not. You must be ready to act.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I told you who I am.”
Leah circled the man, determined to look him in the eye. But when she came around to his front, she only found more of his back. She circled him twice, but from every angle she saw only the pressed-together legs, the suit coat’s rear, the armless shoulders, the back of a hairline, and the tip of a hat.
“How did you get in here?”
“I knocked.”
“How did you find this place?”
“Everything is a matter of degrees. Near and far mean little. You have authored posts for Null that say as much.”
“I was talking about The Beam. Not geographic places.”
Her mind went to Crumb-slash-Stephen-York, who’d hidden in this building because he’d thought it was off-grid. What did it mean for York’s invisibility if Integer7 could enter the school? York hadn’t even touched the real Beam since emerging, and if he was up in the mountains with Leo, that would still be true because there were no connections up there. York should be a ghost. And yet here was her contradiction.
“Where do you think you are?” Integer7 asked.
“I…” But Leah didn’t know how to answer.
“A man named Leo Booker has recently been taken into NAU Protective Services cust
ody. For reasons I don’t care to divulge, it’s in my best interests that he does not remain so.”
“Leo? Why would NPS have come for Leo?”
“Irrelevant.”
“Not the cops? Not narcotics?”
“NAU Protective Services. It is not relevant for me to tell you more.”
“How did they…”
“He was betrayed. Then he betrayed himself. There is something about Leo that you do not know, that nobody knows. And now he needs assistance.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“There is no downside to believing me. Belief is irrelevant. Leo is in custody. He cannot be freed without your intervention.”
Leah reached for the man and used her hands to wrench him around. Again, she found herself looking at the back of his head, the back of his shoulders, the back of his black hat.
“You have a choice,” Integer7 said. “You may choose to disbelieve my report or to disbelieve that I am here with you now and telling you the truth. In that case, you will remain where you are and try to call Leo. You will not reach him because he is in custody, but you may decide he is simply out of range. You will ride out of the city. You will make your way to him, to see him in person. You will find him absent then retrace your steps to do what I have already suggested you do. Or you may choose to believe me and act. I leave it to you, but consider for a moment that there is no downside to simply accepting and activating your eyes to find out for sure.”
Leah’s eyes — activated or not — scrunched halfway closed. He talked like a robot. “Activating your eyes” wasn’t something that made a modicum of sense to Leah, but the intruder was as enigmatic as Serenity’s children.
