by Sean Platt
This was reality…except that in reality, chairs didn’t evaporate.
Nicolai walked to a low table along one of the walls. He touched the wall, finding it substantial — indistinguishable from the real wall in the real room. The echoes of his footfalls were real. The subtle interplay of light was real.
Nicolai picked up what looked like a beverage coaster from the table. Then he went to the door Ryu had exited from and opened it, finding it unlocked with no one in the room beyond.
“Can you make it outside?”
Kai concentrated. He could almost imagine her pulling up a dashboard, keying whatever Rachel Ryan had given her.
And then, in a blink, they were in a mown meadow, the air filled with the scent of freshly cut grass. Nicolai looked down at his coaster then threw it as hard as he could. It soared into the distance, not striking a simulator’s wall, and puffed soundlessly into a clump of weeds.
“Is this what it was like? With Whitlock?”
Kai nodded.
“We’re still in chairs?”
“I think so. The nanobots have shut off our real senses. This is all coming from his link to The Beam.”
“So Ryu built this place.”
Kai shook her head. “No. This is what Rachel’s key opened. The sequence she added to my ID. My day pass to the Viazo.”
Nicolai took a minute to look around. Kai and Doc had told him how real the simulation from Isaac’s rigs was, and apparently Ryu had managed to cobble together rigs that could mostly do the same. But if Kai was right, only the place could make it this real. The restricted Viazo, above even Ryu’s pirated access, open to Kai’s new key.
“Why are we here?”
But somehow, Nicolai already knew. It couldn’t be what Kai intended or Rachel had wanted, but his sense of disorientation had vanished. The old version of Ryu’s room felt like home. So did the meadow. Nicolai couldn’t remember if he’d been here before, but the place — any version of the place — was too familiar for denial.
“She said there was someone we were supposed to meet. Someone we couldn’t meet in the real world.”
“And you took it at face value?”
Kai turned to Nicolai with irritation. What Kai trusted tended to be worth the faith. She was in control. Rachel wasn’t leading her; the old woman had merely granted her entry. They were in Ryu’s rigs, in Ryu’s place. Doc hadn’t trusted Ryu, but he’d believed in the man’s wares. If the best in the business said this was safe, it probably was.
Except that Ryu never said any such thing. Not to Nicolai, anyway.
“She said he’s a ghost. Something that’s stuck here. Something that got trapped. She told me a lot, Nicolai. I’m not an idiot, going in blind. This was something she couldn’t say where there might be ears, but something that I had to see before I…well, before I kill her. Because she said this will be my responsibility, after she’s gone.”
“West, Kai,” Nicolai said. It was dumb, unnecessary beyond belief. “In what world did this make sense to you?”
“She knows that Micah sent me after her. And she said this was a way for us to have something to use against him. A detached mind of some sort who — ”
“It’s Doc,” Nicolai said. “She’s talking about Doc.”
Kai looked over. The room’s reality flickered as Kai’s attention faltered. Now they were in an all-white room, walls lined with benches and cabinets.
“I talked to him,” Nicolai told her, sighing. “Or rather, I talked to Kate.”
He wanted to sit, but there was nowhere to do so. Then a lush bed appeared in the room, and he sat on its top.
“You talked to Kate?”
“She’s playing you, Kai. Rachel. I already know what Kate’s trying to do. In fact, she wants my help with it. She even told me all about Doc’s ghost — a kind of shell she plans to use to get at Braemon. But Kai, if Rachel knows about that, it just means she’s planning to — ”
Before Nicolai could finish his sentence, a third person blipped into existence at the far end of the room. It was a man of medium height with brown hair and calm, quiet eyes. A verification sequence streamed past Nicolai’s display, several unknown tags appending his ID. This wasn’t AI. This was a person, like he’d imagined Doc’s ghost would be in the digital flesh. Except that this was different. It wasn’t just a ghost. It was a mind. An autonomous mind, locked in this place by endless streams of permissions now streaming through his immersed eyes — and, judging from appearances, through Kai’s as well.
“Hello,” the man said.
“Hello,” Nicolai echoed, blinking.
“My name is Stephen York,” he said. “And if you’ve come to this place with the backdoor sequence, there are only two possibilities.”
Kai stepped forward, not speaking, waiting for the man to continue.
“Either you’ve found my body and have come to erase me, or you’ve come for the boson I carry.”
“Boson?” said Kai.
York’s mind nodded. “The lost piece of Project Mindbender.”
With even a little bit of moondust in his blood, Sam found he could navigate the connection better than expected.
Better, yes, but still dirty and littered as shit. The line must have been split five hundred times — and not just split; merged, too. In buildings this old, the electrical wiring was copper, only the most recently replaced appliances powered by Tesla Inductive. The fiber lines, more often than not, weren’t actually fiber. And when you skewered metal lines that many times, taking them into pieces to feed that many apartments and bundling them closely with so many non-Beam wires, the current between the walls stopped being discreet signals and instead became an absurd electromagnetic stew. Sam had heard someone’s waffle iron on the way in. How did that make sense?
Still, he found his personal firewall intact. He was able to tunnel through the native lines and out into the secondary hub near the park, trusting his brother’s hardware to keep him safe instead of having to jump through his usual hoops.
There was a beeping. Sam’s head pricked up, turning toward the kitchen. His coffee was ready. Time was short — almost up, really — and this was no time to be getting the cup he’d planned when starting the pot. Still, the wires in the old thing were as questionable as the copper lines he’d been using to (apparently) hear waffle irons. He’d forgotten the pot before and nearly set the apartment on fire.
Sam got up, clicked the pot off, and rushed back to his seat.
He didn’t want to admit that Nicolai Costa may have been right, but Lunis really was a wonder.
Still, Sam was inclined to be careful. The small, surely covert supply Nicolai had sent to his door (he hadn’t used a bot; Nicolai really did understand paranoia) wouldn’t last long, but Sam didn’t want to become an addict anyway. Because what he’d read about other wonder drugs, when researching them from the history of distractible minds, was a mixed bag. Ritalin. Adderall. Focusin. ’Nuff said.
With the coffee pot off, Sam returned to the desk and immediately found his place. His mind effortlessly returned to what he’d been doing then went back further, to the verified ping Shadow had received in his Null inbox and the conversation on Diggle that followed. Integer7 had begun the exchange with one of his trademark too-knowing statements then had done something to the connection to allow Sam to save what should have been a self-destructing sequence, probably as a reminder:
> costa has been corrupted
>> i just met with costa. he believes. not corrupted. his motives are our motives. will disrupt as instructed
> its a lie
>> like prime statements were a lie? like u turned null on me and made me a fool?
> unavoidable. irrelevant. costa not corrupt. corrupted by another. your instructions have been twisted
Even now, as Sam used the building’s native connection to poke through to Shadow’s nomadic Beam page and beyond to Null, he bristled at Integer7’s gall. He (she, it, whatever) was acting like the Prime Statem
ents had never happened. Like there hadn’t been a rather frightening and emasculating joke played on The Beam’s favorite masked man. Like that joke wasn’t still playing out — as if Shadow’s credibility with The Beam’s underbelly wasn’t on seriously thin ice. The only reason most among Null seemed to be giving Shadow a second chance had to do with Costa…and now Integer7 was telling him that Costa had been turned? That seemed convenient.
But with the moondust in his system, Sam’s head wasn’t merely a little bit clearer. He was also a tad less paranoid. With the worst of his usual fears and neuroses departing, Sam started seeing himself as if through a grimy window with a sole clean spot: There was an intelligent, ambitious, upwardly mobile young Enterprise man inside him somewhere. Back before his botched Braemon investigation made him start running (before fear fed on fear, making him increasingly paranoid in a self-perpetuating loop), Sam had been a true Beam native. A kid who heard The Beam’s constant presence around him like a cherished childhood totem. Without it, he was lost. But even now, with only a bit of dust inside him, he could see some of the old Sam again. And he missed him.
Stay focused, Sam.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter if Integer7 was playing games with him or not. A good reporter neither took intel as gospel nor ignored it wholesale. Sam, both when he’d been connected and sharp and since he’d become disconnected and scattered, had never stopped being an excellent reporter.
Maybe Integer7 was still playing games. Maybe Integer7 was the enemy he’d seemed to be when the debacle at the Prime Statements had happened. But that didn’t mean Nicolai shouldn’t check in on what he’d said.
So Sam, as Shadow, had pinged n33t. Shadow — lubricated with calming moondust even as he fought a sense that something was wrong and the clock was ticking — had told n33t more than nervous Sam ever would have. And, with trust growing between them, n33t had spilled a few things, too.
For one, n33t had uncovered a tier above even the Beau Monde.
For another, n33t had found a transcript somewhere on The Beam that pointed to a plot within that group. Something about hiding secrets and hiring killers. It was a group that, according to above-Beau-Monde tags on their Beam IDs, included Rachel Ryan…who, coincidentally, Costa had mentioned as well.
Be careful, n33t had told Shadow, assuming Shadow meant to post an inflammatory write-up for Null, all about the group above the group. But Sam had no intention of writing anything — not for Null, who’d turned so fickle, and not for Integer7, whose loyalties could lie anywhere.
But the loose ends didn’t fit. And after a while of poking and prodding with the help of dust, Sam had reached an interesting revelation that neither n33t, Integer7, nor Nicolai Costa likely knew because each of them only had part of the story.
With the Panel ID tag n33t had shown him as proof of the story, Sam was able to formulate a backdoor AI search — not for members of that group, of course, but for its imprints on The Beam. And through the search, he’d found evidence of a dual murder back in the ’60s wherein two tagged IDs had simply stopped, as if severed.
He’d poked at the story Integer7 had told him about Costa. That had led him to a level of access he couldn’t breach, of course — but that he could see Costa pinging into, sure as he’d watched Costa’s ID ping in and out of his apartment in the days before he and Nicolai had shared their first words.
Not long ago, Nicolai had gone into a place on The Beam that his ID shouldn’t have let him into. But it wasn’t just a Beau Monde place. It was, according to the configuration of its locked door, a Panel place made to look like Beau Monde.
How had Nicolai managed to get in? Sam couldn’t touch it, and it was buried so deep he could barely even see it. If he hadn’t known what he was looking for (the trace on Nicolai’s ID), Sam wouldn’t even have known that place existed. And once discovered, it didn’t make a bit of sense that Nicolai, along with someone else, had been able to enter.
Unless they’d been allowed in.
And as much as Sam didn’t like Integer7 right now, he had to admit it that his warning might be true.
Costa is in danger. I’m telling you because his danger bears on my goals.
What was in that place? Sam felt nervous even trying to snoop it from his current distance, but he was already trying to grapple with an inevitable, unfortunate conclusion: Nicolai’s location within the city was irrelevant and could be masked so as to appear anywhere. All Sam knew was that he was somewhere with an excellent anonymous line. If Sam was to catch and warn Nicolai, he’d have to do it on The Beam.
Whatever they’ve sent Costa, Integer7 had told him, it’s a trap.
To get to Nicolai, Sam would have to trundle across his apartment’s hideous, faulty lines and expose his substantial (and rather soft) digital underbelly to the glitchy nullspace between here and there. There were read errors everywhere. The virtual sky was filled with fragmentary rogue software. Sam wouldn’t need to immerse; he’d take this journey behind a rather ordinary (and rather obsolete) console screen. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be digitally mugged seven times along the way. It didn’t mean he couldn’t end up in a hole and not even know it until it was all over — when Shadow was exposed, and Sam Dial and Nicolai Costa were both forced on the run.
Going to the place where Nicolai was scared him, but Sam kept rereading Integer7’s words — preserved in Diggle’s destructive space only because Sam’s pen pal had let him keep them:
Whatever he’s being told, it’s a lie.
“At least I’ll have company when I go back on the lam,” Sam said aloud, finding no humor in the quip.
Before cracking the seal, Sam remembered his coffee. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup, easily remembering to add both cream and sugar.
Dominic watched Leah walk through the door of the old Flat control room with her thumbs buzzing across her handheld’s screen then sit in a rolling desk chair that was approximately five thousand years old. She tried to roll back and failed because the wheels were frozen with rust. She tried rotating to raise her feet, but the thing’s central spindle was petrified. She tried to tip back, and the chair’s spine sheared off, causing her to nearly spill onto the floor.
Leah, shocked and narrowly avoiding impalement on the chair’s rusty remainder, stood. She looked down at the thing and said, “Fucker.”
Dominic shrugged. He had little sympathy. He’d already crushed two less substantial, non-wheeling chairs. It was like the Noah West avatar from the station’s Quark hallway had followed them here, judging him for being too fat.
When Leah didn’t get a reaction from Dominic, she sat on the countertop and kicked her heels back. Behind her was a long wall of unbroken Crossbrace glass. If the electronics in here still worked, that single wall would be broken into screens displaying all the relevant places to surveil in the prison. But given that the Flat had been entirely forgotten, they were lucky to have hacked a fair connection and a light or two.
“How are the Organas?” Dominic asked.
“Amusing,” Leah said. “Turns out the safest way to calm the rest down before waking them is simply to release a security swarm. Early-ass models, too. I swear those nanos were as big as gnats. Bunch of tiny black dots climbing all over all those hippies, into their ears, noses, and mouths. I patched over to this place’s Stone Age Fi and created a rudimentary network once they were all inside.”
“What does that mean?” Dominic asked.
“It means that those big old nanobots don’t really count as bio add-ons, but they can at least talk to each other. With a dozen or so inside everyone’s head, and all the nanos forming a dead simple Fi network, it was like taking a single canvas and splitting it into enough pieces then putting one in everyone’s brain.”
“Sounds sick,” said Dominic, glad for once that he’d never augmented.
“A little. They’ll all hear some of the others’ thoughts. Scooter will inherit a few of Leo’s whims. Denise might like ice cream even t
hough she’s vegan, just because Tom likes it. But it’s basic. Just enough to make them listen.”
“Did you leave Leo in charge?”
Leah nodded. “There’s actually a shit-ton of old tech in a guard locker down there, plus all the confiscated hardware they were able to remove from processed prisoners, holed up in a room whose door lock seems to have died of embarrassment.”
“Guard locker,” Dominic repeated.
“Yes. A lot of it’s weaponized, but it requires a warden network to activate, and that’s been dead forever now. I hotwired a node that woke up the comm functions, like powering a clock’s memory but cutting off its ability to tell time. What Leo’s equipping them with will be open to Fi and let them connect to The Beam. It’ll scratch the itch.”
“Is this related to what Leo was saying about methadone?”
Leah nodded. “Lunis was developed to help with connectivity withdrawal, so pretend that being connected all the time and consequently letting some of your neural pathways atrophy is like being addicted to heroin. Do you know heroin?”
“Oh yes,” Dominic said. He’d dealt with plenty of winners running on that poisoned fuel during his time as a cop.
“Lunis is addictive, but connection is, too. So the idea — and really, it’s as brilliant as it is sick — was to trade one addiction for the other. When we couldn’t get dust, Leo figured he could forcibly confine the group by getting everyone arrested then find a way to re-addict us to all to heroin, thus making our dangerous withdrawal from methadone irrelevant. That means we need to reactivate the implants of those who have them using the flat’s old canvas then use the locker contraband to equip those who had minimal or no enhancements to begin with. And it means establishing lubricants for the group as a whole, like the nano network I mentioned.”
