by Sean Platt
“Don’t be an asshole,” Kai told herself. She was still Kai, and Kai was formidable. Rachel had surprised her, but so what? She’d been in Micah’s employ for years. She’d seen it all. She’d assassinated Beau Monde before. It didn’t take technology, or the skills of an expert cat burglar. She’d entered Isaac’s apartment just fine. She’d bent over Natasha’s form as she lay in her immersion rig, ignoring every part of her that wanted to squeal like a fangirl and wake the star to ask for an autograph. It wouldn’t have taken guile to slit Natasha’s throat. A simple ghetto blade would have done the trick.
“Yes, dear,” said Rachel’s voice. “That’s right. Don’t be an asshole.”
Kai passed through the doorway, flinching against a surety that the strange force field was still active and would cut her down. But nothing happened, and a moment later she was in one of the finest rooms she’d ever seen. The door closed quietly behind her.
The woman at the counter was so immaculate that at first Kai thought she must be a Beam-generated hologram.
“Welcome to Alpha Place, Miss Dreyfus. May I get you anything to eat or drink before you head up to visit Mrs. Ryan?”
Kai didn’t know how to respond. She just shook her head.
“Perhaps a cocktail?”
“No thank you.”
“If there is anything I can get you, please don’t hesitate to let me know.” She smiled wide, saccharine sweet, friendly enough to be vicious. “Anything at all.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“The elevators are to your left.”
“Which floor?”
“The elevator will deliver you to her door.”
“How did you know I was coming?”
The woman smiled even wider, full of servility. “Because it’s on the schedule.”
“What schedule?”
“To your left, Miss Dreyfus.” Again, she gestured to the elevators.
Kai began to move, but instead of walking into the elevator bank (one was open as if waiting, a plush couch along its back wall and an open champagne bottle in a silver bucket), she walked past it. The elevators were in the lobby’s center, the shaft rising through a triple-tall ceiling high enough to give the room the feel of having its own weather. Enormous chandeliers dangled above conversation pits pocking the huge space.
A few well-dressed men and women populated the couches, all in evening wear and sporting white hair. Most of the men had white mustaches, and several had top hats on the tables beside them. Some of the women had black bands around their heads, many stuck with feathers or bows, most wearing long black or white gloves. The men were drinking amber liquid from old-fashioned glasses filled with spherical ice cubes. One of the women was smoking what smelled like a genuine cigarette through a long black holder.
The pianist was along the back wall, sitting at a piano that looked like Nicolai’s, with the lid propped up. The pianist ceased playing, and Kai heard trumpets and trombones, soft and somehow distant. This despite the fact that she could now see the band clearly across a polished dance floor. One old couple, dressed like the others (a tuxedo for the man, a gown and long gloves for the woman) but youthful and dancing to what sounded like a 150-year-old big band-era tune. The man’s oiled hair was combed so close to his skull that it looked painted on.
“May I get you anything, Miss Dreyfus?”
Kai spun. She didn’t realize until coming face to face with the woman who’d been behind the desk that her heart was beating hard in her throat.
“Anything at all,” the woman elaborated. She had yellow hair that Kai hadn’t noticed until now was piled high in the same style as the older women around the room. And she wasn’t wearing a uniform after all; she was wearing a long black evening gown and a choker with an oval stone in its center.
“What is this place?” Kai asked.
“This is Alpha Place. Luxurious graduation living for elite citizens.”
“‘Graduation living’?”
“Yes, Miss Dreyfus.”
“Graduation from what?”
“From life.”
“You mean it’s an old folks’ home.” But of course it was. Kai had known all of this coming in. But something about Alpha Place was making her skin crawl. She’d been to an old folks home; her own grandmother had expired below the line in one. It had smelled like ointment and death. This looked like a scene from one of Grandma’s favorite movies.
The woman smiled. Kai noticed she was wearing a name tag that read Miss Trudy. “It’s a bit more than that,” she said.
“Did Rachel…did Mrs. Ryan tell you to expect me?”
“I expected you because Mrs. Ryan expected you.” Not really an answer, or even a restatement of the question.
“I think I will take a drink after all,” said Kai, feeling uneasy.
Miss Trudy’s hands had been behind her back. Kai had assumed they’d been clasped in a butler’s farce of servility. But now the right one came out, and Kai found herself looking at a Manhattan, two ice cubes, one olive. Exactly the drink she’d have requested if given a chance. The woman was holding it in long fingers hidden beneath the silk of a long black glove.
“How did Mrs. Ryan know to expect me?” Kai asked, taking the drink with shaking fingers.
“Do you like the band?” Miss Trudy asked. The music had changed again, and now there were three young couples dancing instead of just one. This time, Kai recognized the ancient hit: Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
“They’re very talented,” was all Kai could think to say.
“They’ve been practicing all their lives,” said Miss Trudy. “As long as a week now.”
“Are they artificial?”
Instead of answering, Miss Trudy gave Kai another smile. “You should head upstairs.”
“Why?”
“Mrs. Ryan is getting bored.”
Kai looked at the woman’s ears. Was she wearing a headset? No. She must have a cochlear implant, or be wired into a shared mind network. Such things must be much more advanced than even Kai knew among the Beau Monde, at their Beau Monde facilities.
“She is?”
Kai squinted. Suddenly, Miss Trudy seemed very familiar.
“Yes.” She patiently noted Kai’s stare. “Is there anything else I can get you?”
“Do I know you from somewhere?”
“I don’t believe so, Miss.”
“Were you…?” Kai didn’t want to say it, but she realized where she knew Trudy from, down to her name. She forced the words. “Did you ever dance at Club Galaxy?”
“I don’t recollect that, no.”
But Kai was sure. This was Trudy, the stripper who’d stolen thousands of credits from Kai before running off, back when Kai had been nothing. She had the same mole on her neck, even. But Kai had heard she was dead.
“Right this way, Miss Dreyfus,” Miss Trudy said.
She took Kai by the arm and led her to the elevator. Then she nodded toward the still-open box with its comfortable couch — which Kai now noticed had a blood-red stain in its middle. Kai turned to say something to Miss Trudy about the couch needing cleaning, but when she looked back, the stain was gone.
“I’m sure I know you,” said Kai.
“Have a pleasant visit,” the woman said as the doors closed.
The elevator began to crawl. It gained speed and was soon exploding upward fast enough to make Kai unsteady on her heels. Her knees wanted to buckle from the force. She was about to succumb to the couch’s support (and wondering how the elevator was still accelerating; the spire hadn’t seemed that tall from the outside) when the movement stopped. It happened suddenly enough that the momentum caused Kai to hop off the ground. When she landed, her heels finally failed her, and she collapsed to the floor.
The doors opened. Kai found herself looking down a long hallway with only one door at its far end. The arrangement didn’t make sense. If Rachel’s room was the only one on this floor, wasn’t the hallway needlessly bisecting her space? W
hy not a short hallway?
Kai found her feet, brushed off, and ambled out on unsteady legs. She barely reached the lush carpet before the elevator snapped shut behind her and Kai heard it scream away.
She paused. Forced herself to breathe. Blinked once, hard.
Kai walked toward the room, but it took too long to reach. Or maybe she was that disoriented, that tired, that baffled by the magic tricks that Rachel Ryan had lined up for her would-be assassin.
She reached for the knob.
The door opened before she could touch it, and Kai saw an old woman in the opening.
“So,” Rachel said, “you’ve come to kill me.”
Listening to Micah, Nicolai found himself thinking back to his one-sided discussion with another Ryan — Micah’s mother, Rachel. That was one thing the Ryan matriarch and her younger son had in common: They soliloquized under the guise of conversation. They pretended to speak with a person then proceeded to speak at them.
And on the heels of that thought, Nicolai found himself doing something he thought he’d never do: missing the stupid, gullible, weak simplicity of Isaac Ryan.
“I know you’d rather not work under me,” Micah told Nicolai, “but really, it’s something you were almost born to do. You could try to find fulfillment being creative, but your mind is going to keep coming back here either way.”
Nicolai kept his face neutral — easy, given that Micah was enamored enough by the sound of his own voice that he probably didn’t even remember that he was speaking to someone, and that the big leather chair near the office’s middle wasn’t empty of one bored former speechwriter. Everything about Micah’s monologue was subtly insulting. And of the phrase subtly insulting, both words were equally important. Nicolai had made his living manipulating words, and Micah was a master. Everything he said had a primary and secondary meaning, leaning as heavily on subtle as insulting. It wasn’t just the presumption of this entire scene that burrowed under Nicolai’s skin. Even the intonation Micah gave the word “creative” was a slap across his face. It was Micah’s implication that Nicolai would fail to be creative while being both cute and pitiable in his attempt.
Nicolai watched Micah, his mind continuing to roll thoughts of Rachel like an old euro coin across the backs of his fingers.
What will happen if Enterprise gains majority at Shift? Nicolai had asked Rachel, back when he’d naively thought he’d been controlling that conversation.
But given the bomb Carter Vale had dropped at the Prime Statements — his futile but optimistic plans to dig up the pie-in-the-sky Project Mindbender then offer its brain-uploading services as a Directorate social service — there was no way Enterprise would be winning majority now. For a while, it had looked like the advent of digital beem currency would make Enterprise thinking accessible to everyone and win some hearts and minds. But the pipe dream of living forever in the cloud? That was far more interesting.
Shift was now just days away. More people would shift from Enterprise to Directorate than the other way around. The Senate wouldn’t just keep its Directorate majority; it would magnify it. Nicolai’s question to Rachel would be moot.
What will happen, Rachel had turned around to ask Nicolai, when the old get older, the rich get richer, and the rest of the world has no way to keep up? What will happen when what happened with Noah West begins to happen with everyone at the top of both parties?
What happened with Noah West?
Oh, but that’s the most delicious secret of all.
It was a pyramid of games. Rachel, Nicolai had thought at the time, was an old woman whose power was circling the drain. But after talking to Sam Dial, he had his doubts. Sam might be Beamsick, his mind forever torn like a fraying rag. He might believe in spooks and digital saviors and men in black come to steal him away. But Nicolai’s ear had learned to discern the kernel of truth when he heard it, and he’d heard plenty from Sam.
Nicolai hadn’t wanted to talk to Rachel then any more than he wanted a conversation with Micah now. He wasn’t a free-agent employee of Micah’s Department of Capital Protection. He wasn’t a contractor for Ryan Enterprises. And yet the Ryans had stolen from Nicolai’s father to build their empire. They’d grabbed Nicolai by invisible strings, and the independent fighter inside him resented every bit of it.
What makes you think this is about politics? Nicolai had asked Sam.
And Sam had answered with his most biting, poignant bit of truth yet: Isn’t everything?
Micah sat on the chair’s arm beside Nicolai. Nothing Micah did was by accident, and his body language told Nicolai two things: I’m your buddy, and you can trust me, and You understand who’s in charge here, don’t you?
“You’re being awfully quiet,” Micah said.
Nicolai looked up at Micah’s too-handsome, forever-young face. “I don’t think it’s awful at all.”
“But do you understand? Do you agree with me? Even if you don’t work with me, you’re working with me, in a way, regardless. Not because I want you to but because Enterprise is who you are and can’t help but be — and because you’re like me, not like my brother. And if I may be presumptuous, it’s also because the real art you’ve created in the world is the technology my family licensed, which made the largest revolution in history possible.”
Again, Micah gave the word “art” that insulting little emphasis, pandering so Nicolai would understand. Like explaining complex concepts to a toddler with a doll.
“I don’t agree with you, no.”
“About working in Enterprise?”
Nicolai felt battered enough by Ryans lately to risk speaking plainly. “About pretty much everything.”
Micah watched Nicolai with those piercing gray eyes of his for a few long seconds. Then he smiled, laughed, and stood. He crossed to the bar and poured two glasses of red wine from a bottle that had smelled recently opened when Nicolai had passed it earlier, as if Micah had always intended to let it breathe for this particular moment. The cultured snob who’d grown inside Nicolai had been eyeing the bottle for a while now. It seemed to be a Rococo ’89 and was subtly perfect. Not showy and nowhere near lowbrow. If there was one wine that Nicolai might consider sharing with Micah and would never be able to find on his own, this was it.
Micah returned with two glasses. He held one out to Nicolai. Nicolai kept his hands where they were and stared, but then Micah rolled his eyes.
“Oh, just fucking take the glass, Nicolai. I know you don’t like me much, but I also know you’re not this rude. You and I, we’re like brothers. Same as Isaac and I are brothers, except that I have far more in common with you than with him. Isaac and I don’t get along most of the time either, but in the end we’re still blood.”
Nicolai looked at the rich red liquid.
Micah pushed it a centimeter forward. “Don’t tell me about how you’re not my brother. It’s so predictable.”
Nicolai took the glass. Micah chuckled and said, “That’s the problem with being a rugged individual, isn’t it? We do the opposite of what everyone else thinks we should do then run into a paradox when what someone expects is for us to be contrarian.”
Nicolai hated himself for taking the glass, but Micah was right. About many things. Nicolai wasn’t that rude. He didn’t like the idea of doing what Micah expected, even if the thing he expected was to refuse. And like it or not, he was more of a brother to both Ryans than he liked to admit. He’d known them both for sixty years, and they’d shared an uncountable number of meals and drinks and nights of room and board. They’d been through good and bad, thick and thin, friendship and betrayal. Their history went back too far not to be complicated. It would be easy for Nicolai to hate Micah because sometimes, that’s what brothers do.
Nicolai still felt he needed a victory, so he settled on saying, “That’s not really a paradox.”
Micah clinked his glass against Nicolai’s and said, “That’s why you’re the writer.” Then he sipped. Reluctantly, Nicolai joined him, his mind torn as to
whether or not he should appreciate the wine’s bold taste and rich bouquet or find it repugnant on principle.
“So,” said Micah.
“So what?”
“If you’re willing, I have something I’d like you to do.”
“I don’t work for you, Micah.”
“I know that. But I also know that you keep coming here when I invite you. Not as a subordinate, but as a guest. If I had to guess, I’d say that you want to avoid me, but find yourself unable to resist the pull of…oh, hell…destiny? Is that too thick?”
“A little.”
“Like it or not, your past is tied to my family’s. And like it or not, both of our histories are tied to development in the present. Few people know this, Nicolai, but according to some of the eggheads at Xenia reporting to me, there’s sentiment out there that The Beam’s nature is changing.”
This was news to Nicolai. He found himself interested despite his best efforts to remain indifferent. “Changing how?”
“At the same time,” Micah went on, ignoring Nicolai’s question in a way that was in no way accidental, “the world itself is changing.”
“The world?”
Micah gestured, still half-sitting on the arm of the chair. “All of this. The city. The way we live. Not just us at the top, but everyone all the way down to the poorest kid below the line. In the same way Xenia talks about a coming change in The Beam, the people I’m connected to in politics talk about this Shift marking a change in the world.”
“Politicians always talk like that,” Nicolai said. But in the back of his mind, he heard the paranoid, Beamsick voice of Sam Dial: in the past it was a choice between one color and another name for the same color…but this time it actually matters.
“I suppose we’ll see,” Micah said. “But if you ask me, it seems like quite a coincidence. Two separate groups — and authoritative groups who’d know, not gossipers — talking about coming change. So, destiny? Maybe it’s not that far-fetched after all.”
“Just because nanobots rode here on my back doesn’t mean — ”
