by Sean Platt
“If you know so much, why don’t you help him?”
“There are reasons.”
“Such as?”
“You will act as you will regardless of my reasons.”
“What makes you think I can do shit?” Leah demanded, infuriated by the fact that he wouldn’t look at her — maybe that he couldn’t look at her and actually had no mouth or eyes or face.
“You are n33t.”
“I am Leah.”
“You are n33t. I see your fingerprints and footsteps. You spoke to Shadow from node 14342-B, Harlem-Bontauk. Transcript as follows — ”
“We spoke via Diggle.”
“Time is short, n33t.”
“Diggle is untrackable.”
“If you insist.”
“How do you know Shadow?” Leah said.
“Like I know you.”
“What did you do to him? What trick did you pull?”
“Every pawn has its place.”
“And after you talk about pawns, I’m supposed to do as you say?”
“I have told you what you need to know. You will do as you will do.”
“Noah Fucking West,” Leah said, rolling her eyes.
“There is a house of cards. Shift is near. Shadow failed to disrupt Shift, but that does not mean disruption did not occur. There is dissent in the inner circle. It is not required that I explain more. But it is not only Leo Booker who is threatened.”
“Who are you?” Leah yelled, her nerve starting to crack.
“I am gone,” said the specter. Then the faceless peg in Leah’s serene world dissolved like ink in water, swirling into the air the way it had come.
A moment later, Leah found herself in the middle of the meadow, feeling the light breeze, listening to the light chatter of insects and birds, more unsure than ever of what was real.
Serenity felt the change like a bump in the road. She was sitting in her room, thinking about nothing in particular, when something shifted.
She set her hand on the wall to orient herself in space. Then she looked inward. In through her local mind. In through her node. In through the hub. To the center and out again, now seeing through another set of internal eyes. There was a nonlocal phenomenon — something that had just altered from one phase to another. A situation she’d finally squared that was now popping out of line.
It was hard to see through the changes. Her perspective tended to view things holistically, meaning that circumstances in the past were roughly the same as circumstances in the present and that circumstances here were the same as circumstances there. It didn’t matter how something had begun when its later form made that first form irrelevant.
But that was the thing about change. It required consideration of time. Remove past and present from the equation, and nothing really changed. Things just sort of were what they were.
There was still the future to contend with, though. And as much as Serenity could see (not always through her own senses, but through the reports of all those she spoke to and appeared in front of), the future couldn’t be predicted. At least not infallibly. The more she knew, the better her predictions were. But nonlocal or not, distributed or not, Serenity was still just a person, albeit one with an origin she herself didn’t entirely understand. She couldn’t factor everything at once. She couldn’t know everything at once. Even AI couldn’t do that. Even The Beam couldn’t do that.
Sometimes, the Internet of Things was complete and up to date, and still everything went unexpectedly. The re-creation of the physical world in The Beam was complete enough that it was almost its own duplicate, but even that archive of knowledge couldn’t account for a motorist’s desire to turn suddenly right. And that could screw up a whole predictive matrix.
Not that Serenity concerned herself with traffic. She could peek in on the movement of cars and pedestrians if she wanted, sure, but she didn’t care. Nor did she care about throughput to the cloud servers, the function of redundant storage, or behavior algorithms that appeared as their own emergent entities when enough people were aggregated. There were sectors of The Beam that amalgamated individual behavior of humans into a whole, and the AI there sometimes theorized that humanity, taken in aggregate, behaved like one massive organism. The same way a flock of birds or a school of fish sometimes behaved as if it were many bodies, one brain.
And that made sense, too, seeing as that’s how The Beam and humanity worked together: one brain, many bodies.
So when something changed, it wasn’t really change. It was just Serenity discovering something she hadn’t known before.
So what was this thing she’d discovered about Leah just recently? Was it something to do with Leo? Serenity didn’t know.
There was a theory, she knew, that all of existence was a hologram, wholly contained in every particle of existence. That meant you could look at the smallest things and see everything. It also meant you didn’t need to look at everything to see it all. And with The Beam duplicating reality in order to understand reality (that “Internet of Things” again, redrawing the human world in ones and zeros so those digital parts could be shuffled to serve), the world did indeed feel like a hologram to Serenity.
There was reality.
There was the way The Beam saw reality.
There were thousands and thousands of backup copies of the way The Beam saw reality.
And because backups endured in a way normal time did not, the history of the backups was sort of like The Beam literally preserving the past. She could look through the old backups and see history unfold as if it were happening now. If you were digital — which Serenity sort of was, sort of wasn’t — you could go back in time. You could walk up to yourself and say hello, and it would cause none of the paradoxes so common in time travel movies.
Contradictions could exist, if you entered backed-up history. They were realities within realities within realities.
But still, despite the mental gymnastics, Serenity couldn’t entirely buy her high-minded notions. Maybe nothing did change. Maybe things were as they’d always been, and maybe what she saw as change was just something unknown becoming known.
But what was coming felt different.
This time, the change at Shift felt to Serenity like it heralded real change. The kind of change that even the most stalwart philosopher would have to admit was a real thing.
Her students were growing older. She could feel their changes, like flowers nearing their time to bloom. And by peeking out through her portals on The Beam (by allowing herself to be seen, though always as a ghost), she could catch the scent of the connected population, ranging from the gutter poor who knew her through ancient hotwired Doodads all the way up to the richest of the rich. Anyone who knew Serenity’s name left a trace she could follow, if she knew to look for it.
And what she saw told her something else: those people were changing, too.
It had been happening slowly. When Serenity had first felt her own consciousness, humanity had been more organic than it was now. But then little by little, they began to feel more digital. More connected to one another. At first, they’d shared memories, sending images from their lives for others’ enjoyment. Lines had blurred as bandwidth and storage had become better and faster and free, and the life-logging trend had gathered steam. People subscribing to others’ streams, slipping into those borrowed lives like a foot into a shoe.
Serenity, watching them from the inside, found the edges harder to define. Where did one person end and another begin? The meat of organic life started to matter less. A class moved inside The Beam and reinvented themselves. They became slimmer, more attractive, faster, more agile, stronger, better. The only thing that couldn’t be swapped in a Beam avatar was the mind, but these days even that hard fact had softened.
Feeling it now, rolling Leah’s recent change between virtual fingers with a curious pout on her virtual lips, Serenity tried to make the pieces fit.
Where did Leo Booker fit in the grand puzzle? Was Leo chan
ging? Was Leah?
And what about Stephen York? When the children had first seen York’s signature on The Beam, it was like recognizing someone from long, long ago. She’d known him from somewhere. From the Beam’s heart. Because just as Serenity had melted from Leah, something in The Beam had melted from York.
And now York was…in danger?
The pieces refused to fit. Serenity didn’t know. But she could feel the weight of the evolving network on her shoulders, and the weight of humanity’s new birth cries above it. She could feel her followers looking for her the way she’d looked for York, but she hadn’t asked for followers and had never offered advice. She’d tried to stay hidden. And yet so many called her name.
She focused on York. Tried to see him on The Beam.
But there was nothing. He’d gone up into the mountains, which was where he’d been all those intervening years. There wasn’t access up there, so he was hidden from her. He hadn’t returned to The Beam.
Although come to think of it, he’d be returning as Stephen York, whereas before, he’d only been Crumb. She would see it, whenever it happened. She’d recognize him, shining like a beacon.
It meant York hadn’t gone online yet.
She didn’t want him online, though.
There was no answer to that unasked question. No reason why York shouldn’t go online. She’d helped him peck through his confining shell. She’d helped him to recover his trapped mind at least a little. Helped him make sense of the panel image that had so plagued him, whatever that was. There was no reason he couldn’t go free. No reason he couldn’t connect, no matter where he managed it.
Except that there was a reason.
It was something to do with Leah. Something else that had changed with Leah. Something she’d found, or discovered. Something to do with others out there who knew Serenity’s name. Something to do with others who believed.
A threat.
Danger.
Serenity folded in, folded out. Came back to exterior reality, to her body, to the fluxing particles that had chosen to give her form. She felt her corporeal hand on the corporeal wall to orient herself and knew where she was.
But the idea was gone.
There was a knock on the door. Serenity came fully out and answered, and one of the children entered. A small girl named Sapphire.
“Leah is gone,” she said.
Serenity nodded. “Thank you. I know.”
She hadn’t realized until she’d said it, but Serenity really did know.
That was something else that had changed.
Stephen York rode to the Bontauk home’s shell on the back of a horse named Aristotle — a twenty-year-old gelding few would ride because he was always cranky and tended to buck. York got along with the horse just fine, though, and on arrival, he looked back at the trail and wondered why Leah had said Aristotle was even a problem. She claimed it was because the horse was old and resented exercise, but having shared some time with him, York thought it was more likely that he was simply pissed at being named Aristotle, and at having had his balls removed years ago by people who wanted to sit on his back today.
York could relate.
He’d spent his own youth buried in books and the Internet. The Internet hadn’t been big enough to keep him away from the outside world, so he’d teamed with Noah, and together they’d made Crossbrace, which had consumed the years most young men spend partying or building a life. York had done neither. He’d been too busy. His reward should have come next, but it hadn’t. Crumb had come next.
York dismounted, tied Aristotle to a tree, and took a moment to meet the horse’s eye as if in commiseration. Then he walked to the home’s remaining structure and found the fiber line exactly where Leah had said it would be. It was strange to think that she’d been giving directions to a person who’d been here so recently using this very connection, but York chose to see his vague memory as a good sign. He’d spent decades forgetting Stephen York, so forgetting Crumb’s life little by little had to be an improvement.
He raised the fiber line, looked at the connector Leah might have added last time, and then blew the dust from it. It looked clean, and Leah had stored it in a way that had kept it mostly protected.
York pulled the small laptop canvas from his bag and plugged it in. The thing was slate gray and featureless — an early model Beam canvas that any adept hacker like Leah would surely laugh at today. It would still work fine. Fine wasn’t exactly a definition rich with technical specifications, but the main difference between Beam and Crossbrace hardware was that Crossbrace hardware did something whereas Beam hardware was mostly passive, doing little more than giving the network the tools it needed to do its job. Crossbrace consoles had been hard to build; York remembered the years of R&D that went into them. Beam canvases had been simple to develop by comparison. Given the way AI itself had built The Beam, canvases were just varying ways of giving the ever-evolving AI a voice that humans could understand.
The old canvas wouldn’t offer the various immersive toolsets that people today probably took for granted. But it would be good enough for York, whose expertise was as old as the machine itself.
York keyed the device then waited. While waiting, he looked at the thing. He’d been against the machines’ plain designs from the start. They looked like old Internet-age computers. There was a panel where those old computers’ screens would be, flat and plain. That had been York’s chief complaint: Why model an old device then make its usage defy the old conventions? Why put in a screen panel then not add a screen?
Noah hadn’t listened. He’d said the design was elegant and beautiful, as befitted The Beam itself. Depending on the user and what the node (or the canvas itself) learned of that user’s preferences, the panel could be turned into a screen. He also said that any device needed an active and inactive mode, and flipping open a lid made that switch, telling The Beam something of the user’s intentions as well as a host of biometric data that could only be conveyed, at the time, through touch — in this case, fingers and thumb against the cool hybrid surface.
York had thought Noah’s logic was idiotic, but by the ’60s he’d learned not to argue. Noah was his friend, and also a bastard.
After the requisite handshaking sequence, a holographic globe flicked to life above the open machine. It was a startup that York would have called “noncommittal,” as if the canvas were hemming and hawing and clearing its throat, unwilling to admit that it had no idea who he was.
“Okay then,” said York.
He breathed slowly then reached down inside himself and began picking at his growing cache of Stephen York memories like a scab. This was something SerenityBlue had suggested, though he’d yet to try it on the open Beam, accessible outside the school’s protected connection. It was a way of reminding his firewalled mind who he really was and who he wasn’t — a trick that, when exploring with Serenity, had always been useful in getting his protections out of the way. Reminding Stephen that he was Stephen. And, if his hunch was right, allowing The Beam to read his ID just enough to unlock his access…but, with care, not quite enough to make his incursion obvious to anyone who might be watching.
Wary, he moved his hand toward the holo globe to cue a rescan.
Did he really want to do this? He’d been hidden for a reason, and people were out there looking for him. He’d been hidden by Serenity, who’d somehow found him the last time he’d been here, online with Leah. After that, he’d been hidden again by the Organas. Showing his face on The Beam now felt dangerous…but what was he supposed to do, hide forever? He needed to tunnel to the protected archives he’d set aside at Quark. Places where (and the concept was valid, if admittedly strange) the AI had always liked him and still owed him a favor. Places where, if he was careful, the AI would keep its digital mouth shut and shield him from clerics and snoopers, like a criminal hidden by the residents of an ethnic ghetto.
The hand hesitated, slightly shaking.
He could be quick, couldn�
��t he?
He could stay hidden, couldn’t he?
Hidden enough, anyway. Unless someone was staring at this exact sector, watching for his ID, he’d simply vanish in the noise of daily activity. And even if he was seen, Leah had told him about all the protections she’d installed here: rerouters, anonymizers, spoofs as blunt and effective as homemade pipe bombs. Even if someone was watching closely enough to see (as ridiculous as that was), they’d never know where York was or be able to find him.
York breathed slowly, unable to make his hand touch the globe.
Because all the anonymizers in the world hadn’t kept SerenityBlue from seeing him.
And because what he’d learned and remembered of Noah’s secretive Panel proved there were levels of access — and then there were levels of access. Even the canvas in front of him, which had once been beyond state of the art, had landed in the laps of the privileged years before the wider world knew it existed. Alexa Mathis had used a model just like this to train her escorts, for shit’s sake, while searching the infant Beam for her anthroposophic gods.
But still, he’d be fine. Nobody could possibly find him up here, and he couldn’t just sit and wait. He couldn’t hide forever. If he was being stalked, he had to stalk back. If he was being chased, he needed weapons to face his pursuers.
York shoved his hand into the holo web as if into a hive of wasps.
The sphere blinked away. He was left holding his quivering hand above the open device, the partial room darker without the web’s illumination. He squinted, as if what he was doing wasn’t interfacing with a network but clipping a wire to disarm a bomb.
But the home’s shell was quiet.
Bontauk, save the chirping of birds and rustling of branches, was quiet.
The canvas looked like nothing more than a hinged piece of brushed steel. It was inert. Nothing whirred. Nothing lit. Nothing at Quark had ever whirred or lit, but still York almost craved those ancient noises of moving parts. Anything to confirm or deny his pending pursuit, one way or the other, just to get it over with.
