by Sean Platt
In the time it took for Leah to respond, a thousand horrors replayed themselves in front of Dominic’s inner eye. In the past half hour, he’d seen one of the captive Organa women hook her fingers through a man’s eyes. He’d seen an old man in braids rip an arm clear off some hapless teenager. The medics would fix it all, of course, just like the police would eventually get their way over the lawyers and restrain the Organas for their own protection. It was flat-out necessary if any of them were to survive, given that the arm pulling was something Dominic wouldn’t have thought possible — and if he needed proof that some in Organa today had once been mechanized warriors from Gaia’s Hammer, that one provided it in spades.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have been ignoring my calls if you’re so eager,” Leah said, an edge in her voice. She sounded like Dominic felt. Maybe something stressful was amiss on Leah’s end of things, too.
“I ignored the calls because I thought it was another of the DZ captains I’ve been dodging. There are still riots happening out there, and everyone wants a piece of me. Nobody seems to understand why a bunch of hippies being brought into the station requires my full attention.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you for forever.”
Dominic decided not to bite back, as thin as his nerves felt. What Leah said wasn’t really about the calls. It was about her oft-stated opinion that Dominic, as a DZ citizen and police captain, should have a cochlear implant or corneal heads-up display at the very least. It was strange to hear a supposed Organa argue for augmentation, but Dominic was in many ways more Organa than Leah — and at times like this, when the urging of AI could have made sure they connected earlier, it was hard not to see her point.
“So they’re there?” Leah went on, sparing Dominic the indignity of responding. “Leo and the others?”
“They’re at NPS holding.” Then: “How did you even know they were brought in? Leo seems to think you were away, in the city.”
“It’s not important. I know you need my help.”
Dominic started to bluster. Then he let that go, too, because it was the reason he’d wanted to talk to Leah ever since he’d left the wing where the increasingly violent Organas were being held.
“I do. How fast can you get down here?”
“I’ve been standing right outside for twenty minutes. The same amount of time I’ve been trying to call you. If you had any sort of add-on to access Beam Social while you’re — ”
“Don’t start, Leah.” Dominic spun on his heel and began marching back to the compound. “Meet me at the station. NPS, not DZPD.”
“No way, Dom. I said I’m outside. I need to stay outside.”
“You need to come in, Leah,” Dominic countered. “Leo and the others are out of their fucking minds. There are no Organas left to speak rationally for them, except you.”
“Exactly. No Organas left except me.”
Dominic sensed a double meaning behind Leah’s words but didn’t pause to figure it out.
“Without an advocate, it’s just the fucking NAUCLU lawyers in there. All they can do is read the playbook. A literal book because these are Organas we’re talking about. It’s like the lawyers learned about Organa from vidstreams and films. They might even believe they ride around town in horse-drawn carriages.”
“Well…” Leah began.
“You get my point. I was just there. NPS doesn’t have as much capacity as we do, but they won’t send the Organas to DZPD because they’re state prisoners, and I don’t think they — NPS, I mean — trust us. Over there, they only have six private cells with bars between them. The rest is quasi-gen-pop.”
“What does that mean?”
“Why don’t you come inside and see?”
“Use your head, Dominic. They just arrested the entire village. If I waltz in there, as an Organa they missed, do you think they’re going to offer me a cup of coffee?”
“I’ll vouch for you.”
“How’s that going so far? Trying to vouch for anyone else? Are you having much luck getting NPS to take your suggestions?”
Dominic was going to ask how Leah knew he wasn’t getting his way with the NAU Protective Service, but the answer was straightforward. Bureaucracy was bureaucracy. You didn’t need insider info to guess that the agencies had already spent significant time measuring dicks.
Dominic sighed. “Not well,” he admitted.
“So what’s quasi-gen-pop?”
“It’s a huge holding area that can be subdivided by semi-opaque force fields. Repellant ones, not shockers. It should be easy to give every one of these freaks their own cell inside the larger space so they can’t get at and hurt each other, but the lawyers won’t let NPS enact the force fields. They say that because the detainees are Organa, separating them with Beam-facing fields is like spitting on a Christian’s Bible.”
“That’s insane.”
“That’s lawyers,” said Dominic. “I need you to talk some sense into them. You’re Organa, but you haven’t lost your mind yet.”
“I told you, I can’t.”
“Then call in and speak to them that way. I’ll put you on with the guy in charge. Or even better, do a holo, so he can see your face.”
“They’ll track me. Don’t pretend you can’t requisition City Surveillance to do facial recognition if you have reason to believe someone you’re after is inside the core network. The only thing keeping me free right now is my lack of a Beam ID.”
Dominic opened his mouth to retort, but Leah was right and both of them knew it.
“Then why are you wasting my time?” he snapped, his thin patience snapping like a twig. “Why did you come all the way down here if you’re too chickenshit to do anything? I’m trying to put out fifty fires at once!” And that doesn’t even include the twenty illegal fires I’ve got brewing with Omar Jones, his mind added.
Leah was quiet. Then she said, “There’s something else, Dominic. Something you need to know. About Crumb.”
“Crumb?”
“You remember Crumb?” The way she said it seemed guarded. They’d all mostly trained themselves to refer to the man as Stephen or Steve or York by now, so Leah’s using his old, more-public name now meant she didn’t trust their connection’s privacy.
“I don’t see how he’s relevant right now.”
Leah paused then said, “It’s complicated. If you come out here, I’ll tell you what’s bugging me.”
“I’m not coming out. You come in. We deal with Organa now then deal with Crumb later.”
“I think they may be related somehow.” Leah sighed. “There’s a lot to this. I don’t know where to start. Some stuff I’ve found, Dom…it just feels like there’s too much entanglement between Crumb and the Organas and everything else. Even the way you were called to deal with Crumb when you first found him and then brought him to Leo bugs me. It all feels very coincidental. Almost too convenient.”
Dominic was again about to argue but then remembered some of the coincidences he’d just pointed out to Kate. He fought a constricting feeling, blinking hard to stay present.
“That doesn’t change the here and now, Leah. I don’t know or care what’s bugging you about Crumb because the people I just saw are ripping themselves apart. Pretty soon, I imagine NPS will send in immobilizers, but that’ll only handle things temporarily. They need to be sequestered. Every one of the detained Organas needs to be locked in solitary.”
She inhaled, exhaled. “Look, I had a thought. I’m pretty sure I can get them out, but…”
“How?”
“It’s moot until we know what to do with them once they’re free. You say they’re violent?”
“Holy shit, yes. It’d be like freeing wild animals.”
“And there’s no way to get them more dust to calm them down. Not from your coffers, nothing?”
“Believe me, I’ve tried. There’s a…let’s just say, ‘a supply chain problem.’”
“West,” Leah swore. “You don’t by any chance know some top-
secret, cops’-eyes-only cure for Lunis withdrawal, do you?”
“Sure I do. Wait it out. See who survives. But that’s the catch-22 about all of this: Bars are all that’s keeping them safe, so getting them out scares me, too. But what else can we do? If they stay in unrestricted custody, all but a few of the strongest will be dead by day’s end.”
“Just ‘wait and see who survives.’ That’s it? That’s the only option?”
“As far as I can figure, yes.”
Leah fell silent. Dominic thought she might be thinking. Either that or giving up.
“There was something Leo mentioned,” she finally said. “He was figuring out how to kick the habit.”
“Figuring out how to defeat biology? I don’t think so, Leah. Leo knew what he was getting into when he got the first Organas hooked on that shit. Everyone knew the rumors about how addictive it was before it hit the streets. And Leo knew what he was doing when…”
Dominic trailed off.
“What, Dom?”
“Hang on.” Dominic put his finger in the air as if he were talking to Leah in person.
He was about to say, When he got them all busted by NPS.
But Dominic had got Organa busted, not Leo. And still the idea wouldn’t leave Dominic’s head now that he’d had it, obeying layers-deep cop instincts.
Dominic was sure that Leo had disbanded Gaia’s Hammer years ago. Agent Smith could say all he wanted about their continued activity, but Dominic knew better, deep down. It’s why he’d been willing to plant the bug under Leo’s table: Anything Leo would say in the bug’s presence, Austin Smith already knew. Because Gaia had once been insurgent but was dormant today. Leo was peaceful now. Dominic knew it as surely as he knew his own name.
And yet the bug had caught Leo red-handed. According to Smith, Leo had given a perfect confession in his living room, tying his noose clear as day.
“What, Dominic?”
“Leah,” he said. “Do you really think you can get them out?”
“Yes, I do. But unless we figure out how to address their withdrawal, they’ll — ”
“I don’t think we need to worry about that. I think Leo already has a solution to the Organas’ moondust withdrawal in mind.”
Leah hesitated a moment before speaking.
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
Dominic rubbed his forehead, a headache brewing.
“Because he got them arrested on purpose,” he said.
May 31, 2093 — DZTech
The drug’s effects, in the real world, lingered as Leah became the other entity. She felt herself disembodied — now disembodied twice.
She’d floated from her body (not in a literal, cliché sense, but in a now I see it all kind of way) not long after the purging stopped. That had been interesting, and for a while, after slaying some inner demons with something that felt to Leah like a sword of fire, she’d merely drifted. She’d seen herself as if from above — again, not literally, but as if she herself were universal understanding. Then she’d begun to understand the NAU and its relationship with the Wild East: not enemies, but like quarreling siblings who couldn’t quite get along. After that, she’d understood the planet: the connections between ecosystems both natural and man-made, all of which had eluded her before taking the drug. Leah was aware enough of her own presumption to laugh a little at that: little old Leah solving problems that the best scientists couldn’t. But presumptuous or not, it all made sense as she floated in the medicine’s haze.
Then she’d pulled back farther. She’d seen the solar system. The planets revolving around the sun: balls of rock and gas held by invisible tethers, gravity and centripetal force having fallen into perfect balance. It occurred to Leah that if the Earth were moving just a bit faster, it would fling off into space — but if it were bit slower, it would spiral into the sun.
Everything out there in the universe was coincidentally perfect. And right now, the whole idea of coincidence felt bogus.
So Leah had pulled back one step farther. And from out here, she saw the system as a whole. The Oort cloud beyond it, filled with ice chunks that occasionally dove toward the impossibly distant sun in a daredevil celestial snowball fight. She saw the galaxy and the way it spun around its core of supermassive black holes in the same way Earth revolved around the sun.
All those abstract notions that had always eluded her — time and space, connection and disconnection, genesis and destruction — seemed to make sense now.
The drug pulled her back one step farther.
She saw trillions of galaxies, each as insignificant as a single speck of sand. But then she thought: If planets revolved around a sun and the stars and bodies inside galaxies revolved around black holes, what did the galaxies all revolve around?
What was the universal axis?
Leah saw herself floating, content, feeling a strange balance of otherworldly intuition and common sense. She couldn’t know any of this, or be seeing any of it. The drug that had caused her to puke into that little red bucket was in her head, and nothing more.
And yet her new understanding was everything.
Leah was making peace with the obvious, intuitive, right order of the universe when she felt a jolt and pulled back one step farther.
Beyond the whole of the universe.
Beyond the horizon line marking the farthest reaches of what the Big Bang had supposedly churned out all those years ago.
Beyond the limit of existence. Beyond all that humanity understood — or what it had the capacity to understand.
And out here, beyond it all, Leah saw The Beam.
Her eyes opened.
She was on the floor, surrounded by pillows and blankets. The room was dark. Few were moving around her, but there was someone in the other room.
She looked around. Mussed her hair.
Then, following her strangely clear senses and the strong pull from her gut, Leah walked to the alcove behind the large wall screen and sat.
She pulled the head rig from a shelf and put it on.
This time when she donned the rig, instead of seeing the inside of a helmet or an imitation of a virtual world, Leah saw nothingness. Not just disconnected nothingness, but deliberate nothingness. The absence of reality, waiting to be filled.
She powered up. Lowered every one of her firewalls and protections, dancing dreamy fingers across code as if they belonged to someone else.
Then she felt herself disembodied again. Now out-of-body twice over. First from the drug, and now from The Beam.
Leah sighed and allowed it happen.
She didn’t raise any dashboards or issue commands. She fell into this new reality, letting her unknowing fingers, internal presets, and something like intuition guide her.
She went into a kind of core in the network before her. Out. In. Out. At the smallest levels, there were still ones and zeroes. Bits and bytes. On and off, like alive and dead. But even those hard-and-fast, there-or-not-there, black-and-white ones and zeros were, to Leah’s floating eyes, only probability.
Things weren’t on or off on The Beam.
They were maybe.
They were intention.
And at the core? That was intention at its root. That was the realm of souls. The place where the stuff of life found digital homes then lived and grew on its own. It was where life force was born, like elements cast from stardust. An internal supernova, never ceasing, never pausing, effortlessly self-perpetuating.
She wondered why The Beam had safeties.
Some people feared getting lost inside The Beam, but Leah couldn’t imagine it…or rather, she could imagine it but didn’t know why it wasn’t something everyone would want. Sometimes, people got stuck in here — either wholly or just a bit, as part of themselves recognized a digital home.
Just like real life was digital.
Ones and zeros.
On and off — but not. Really, everything in the universe came down to intention and probability.
When people feared getting stuck in The Beam — loops, nests, holes, other human-conceived traps — that fear came from a lack of understanding.
Leah felt herself sinking deeper. Melting. Shedding skin. Coming home. The world she saw was the hot soup of creation, and Leah was becoming it as it became her.
A spoon made of chocolate. Stirring. Melding. Joining.
A voice behind her, real as any sound in the outside world. Leah heard it with digital ears, more real than the ones attached to her flesh-and-blood head.
“n33t.”
Leah’s digital head turned. She could see everything, the way she’d seen the network of existence. Above them all was the universe. And above that was The Beam.
Her internal eyes saw the newcomer as a constellation of numerals. Her own conception. Correctly, the voice belonged to someone who looked different than Leah saw him, and her interpretation was just that: an interpretation. But even more correctly, he was only energy and looked like nothing. Just as Leah — now more accurately present in this virtual space than she was present in her body — was only energy.
Not as a metaphor, but for real. Because energy was the stuff of life, and why the network was more real than reality.
“I’m Leah.”
“You’re n33t.”
For a moment, she misunderstood. “You’re neat, too.”
The voice didn’t respond. The numbers making up its cyberbody continued to swirl. A face formed, made of digits. An upside-down seven formed a chin, another formed a nose. Her mind designated him as male: another bit of binary data that, in reality, was but the flip of a coin. A construct and nothing more.
Not neat, as in tidy. n33t. N-three-three-T. It was the digital man’s name for Leah, and as she floated, saw it as fitting.
“You’re Integer7,” she said, her digital core recognizing his.
Of course he was. She’d known about him forever. Just as she’d known about SerenityBlue. Or had SerenityBlue and this man just come into existence seconds ago? Leah wasn’t sure. Past and present and future felt fake — but not just false; naive-fake — the kind of falsity others feel pity on people for believing.
