by Sean Platt
“Look,” Sam said, now audible, “I can’t go to your apartment.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason I won’t ride a mag train. Or take a cab. It’s all trackable.”
“Trackable by whom?”
Sam ignored the question and asked one of his own: “Do you know Little Harajuku?”
Nicolai almost laughed. “Are you kidding? No, if you want to meet off-site, we stay in Midtown.”
“I’m not comfortable discussing what I need to discuss in Midtown.”
“I thought I was the one discussing?” said Nicolai, annoyed.
“I know you know what I don’t,” said Sam, “but this might be bigger than you realize.”
“If you’re that uncomfortable meeting in person, we don’t need to meet in person at all. I own a digital neighborhood. Have you ever used a Layer Sim?”
“You want to meet in a sim?”
“A Layer Sim. Like a layer on top of the real city. I’ll send you the key sequence. That way, you can enter and see that it’s secure. I own it, so nobody can snoop.”
“Are you kidding? I’d have to get all the way back to my place to do that, and even then I don’t have a compatible rig. Forget about security; I wouldn’t have the fidelity needed. I’d be begging to get stuck in a hole!”
Nicolai sighed, wondering if this had all been a terrible idea. He’d tried to get Gibson’s help with the story Nicolai was bursting to tell — and Gibson, predictably, had refused. Sam Dial was his recommendation for what Nicolai needed. Sam was the uncredited source behind most of Gibson’s book Plugged, he’d added in a whisper. Nicolai trusted Gibson, so he should probably trust Sam. But Sam, so far, had turned out to be a paranoid pain in the ass.
“You won’t get stuck, Mr. Dial.” Nicolai heard his own exasperation. He was tired of this conversation. He was also suddenly nostalgic for his little piece of digital real estate. Nobody bought Layer Sim neighborhoods anymore after the craze had begun and ended a decade earlier, and Nicolai hadn’t visited despite having spent many an idle hour building it to a fantasy version of the life he’d wished he had. It had been both an artistic outlet and a pathetic substitute for having the guts to leave Isaac’s employ. But the nature of all Layer Sims meant that they endured even if nobody accessed them. The place, though secure, would surely have been overrun by transient AI by now — most of it probably ancient and quaint. If he didn’t get back in there soon, all of Nicolai’s personalization would be washed away like an eroded shoreline.
“I know a place,” said Sam.
“I’m not going to Little Harajuku.”
“Starbucks.”
Sam didn’t trust mag trains, but he trusted Starbucks? Nicolai didn’t ask. It made a strange kind of sense, really. Starbucks had once been a coffee chain, but its real business these days was anonymity. The company’s focus on Beam-related security was well documented and virtually unassailable. Thinking of it now, Nicolai was reminded of the role Swiss banks once played for people wanting to keep their business and finances secret.
“Where?” Nicolai asked. Then he sighed, again telling himself this would all be worth it if Dial had the connections and guts Gibson swore he did.
Sam told him.
So Nicolai went.
Chapter Six
In theory, Nicolai was supposed to be the source, and Sam was supposed to be the interviewer. But Sam wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
They were sitting in a private room in a Starbucks near the mall. Nicolai, with some resentment, had needed to make up most of the distance between them because Sam wouldn’t take any form of transportation that didn’t involve his feet or a rolling death train. Nicolai didn’t share his compunctions. He’d taken a cab. He’d paid the fare. Then he’d arrived to find Sam already there. The reporter had been waiting by the entrance with a hat on and pulled halfway down over his face.
Sam had demanded a private room for their discussion. Predictably, Nicolai had paid.
He’d wondered if they should get drinks. Sam had agreed as if Nicolai had offered, and then Nicolai had paid again.
Now Nicolai was sitting back in a soft leather chair that wafted the distinct auto-cleaning scent of Permaguard whenever he shifted his weight. He sipped his latte and tried to decide if he was more entertained or irritated by his companion.
The idea — from both Nicolai’s perspective and Sam’s — had been for Sam to interview Nicolai about things the world’s rank and file weren’t supposed to know: the Beau Monde, the Ryans, the Beam’s secret life. Nicolai knew he’d need to carefully curate which secrets he told Sam, but he had plenty and was willing to share so long as Sam could do as Gibson suggested by obscuring the rumors’ source. Nicolai wanted the information out. He wanted to play the Ryans for once instead of the Ryans playing him. He wanted to shove a splinter under the skin of both parties as Shift approached. If there were puppet strings ruling the world (and clearly, there were more than Nicolai had realized just a few weeks ago), he wanted some of them to begin showing.
But despite Gibson’s assurances that Sam Dial was dying to expose the same things Nicolai was dying to divulge, Sam hadn’t really asked any questions, and Nicolai hadn’t uttered more than a handful of words. Once the room’s privacy lock had shown impervious Starbucks green, Sam had announced his intentions to “frame the conversation and explain his intentions.” That had been fifteen minutes ago, and Sam showed no signs of stopping.
Nicolai’s attention kept drifting, but he was more fascinated by the strange, eccentric, tattooed kid than he’d anticipated. Sam was all over the place. But it was shocking how familiar so many of his conspiracy stories sounded to Nicolai’s ears.
He tuned back in, catching the animated young man mid-rant.
“…always known that there’s an upper class because when hasn’t there been? But not just upper, secret-upper, like there’s the rich people we see, but then there’s some above them, and that doesn’t even consider the idea of an upper-upper, like above them, like who will police the police? Only not with police. With Beau…oh, what the hell, with Beau Monde? It’s real, I’m sure of it, I’ve found evidence. Well, not me. Others. It’s hard to explain. Don’t ask me who. I can’t say. Not yet. Except that there are a lot of them. Not Beau Monde; there aren’t that many of them, like maybe 1 percent. I meant the ‘lot of them’ who figured this out. My sources. Do you know the Beau Monde? Don’t answer that. I know you do. I mean, I think you do. I anticipate you do. Which is kind of why I wanted to talk to you. Did I tell you about the ID sequences? I have someone I’ve talked to who found another set of identifiers, and no, I can’t tell you who…”
Nicolai settled back and took another slow sip. Sam kept fidgeting as he spoke. He scratched his head, stood, sat, crossed his legs one direction and then the other. He kept glancing at the door. Every few minutes, he’d get up and actually cross the booth, then tap the green privacy seal as if testing to see if it was really there. He barely breathed when he spoke. His legs bounced. He nibbled at his fingernails between rushed words.
“…and I mean Shift always matters in a way, I guess, but this time it actually matters, like in the past it was a choice between one color and another name for the same color, like there’s really not a difference, so for instance — oh, shit, I guess I can just tell you, right? Otherwise, why would you trust me? Isaac. Isaac Ryan. I know you work for him. Or worked. Some people say you defected.”
Sam didn’t pause to confirm. A few minutes ago, Nicolai had tried to interrupt to verify or refute what Sam was saying, but he’d already given up, waiting for a pause that never came.
“But Isaac? Or you? Maybe you. We don’t think you’re Beau Monde. You’re pre-Beau Monde. No offense.”
“None taken,” said Nicolai, wondering why it would be offensive to begin with.
“When people switch Enterprise to Directorate, Directorate to Enterprise, nothing really changes. The dole at those positions in Directorate is so high that it�
��s basically unlimited, like Enterprise, and it feels like a shell game. Are the parties working together? Don’t answer that yet. We’ll circle back. Did you see the Prime Statements?”
Nicolai waited to see if he was expected to respond. He nodded.
“And the wall behind the Presidents? Did anything show up on it?”
“Like what?”
“Exactly! Nothing! So now I’m wondering if he’s working with them. If he’s on my side or not.”
“Who?”
“Once you see the ID tags, you can follow them and watch their patterns. I know someone, he — she? There’s no way to know — made a behavior-matching algorithm to sift the public Beam and watch the visible movements of any ID-tagged people, and do you know about that guy who died a few years back? Or not died — vanished, and I mean come on; we all know he’s dead.”
“What guy?”
Sam nodded as if Nicolai had just said something profound. “That’s right. Had the tag. And you know what some people say? They say it was an assassin. Like someone where, if you watch the tags and sort by Enterprise and Directorate and follow this inner circle, it starts to look like maybe he didn’t just vanish but is dead, and not just dead but killed, and that it was the work of an assassin. But not just an assassin; if you look at the possible assassins, there’s no previous criminal activity, and it’s like they didn’t even know they were assassins, like they were being controlled? Like maybe they’re clerics? That’s one idea that’s been advanced: that Beam clerics — and you know they’re all Quark-controlled, right? You know they’re never handed off to other sectors of service, and that Quark always holds the reins? — that a lot of the political backstabbing does happen through assassins, and that maybe the assassins are clerics, but maybe they’re kind of made clerics, like they didn’t sign up to be clerics, and I know that’s supposed to be impossible, but if you believe there’s really a SerenityBlue out there, then there might be all sorts of things, and yeah I know how that sounds but — ”
“Sam…”
Sam’s eyes darted to Nicolai’s. For a moment, Nicolai thought the other man might leap at him for some reason, but then the sense of mania departed and he seemed to listen.
“Why are you telling me all of this?” Nicolai asked.
“I told you. As background. If you’re going to trust me, you have to know you can trust me. And I know some of the things you might have to say, Sterling sort of indicated, I mean not really but in that way he does where he’s, like, wink-wink he might tell you this, and I can’t run with it but maybe you can Sam, and so since this is about politics — ”
“What makes you think what I have to say is about politics?”
“Isn’t everything?” Sam’s mere two-word reply was disarming after his verbal diarrhea.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Sam nodded. He looked toward the door. He reached into his pocket but came out with nothing.
“Can I ask you a question?” Nicolai asked. “In the spirit of background, and helping me trust you before telling you my story?”
Sam nodded. The movement was closer to a spasm.
“What happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
What did he mean? Nicolai had made it through the East mostly due to guts and a particularly acute ability to judge people. People seldom surprised Nicolai. He could see through subterfuge like a superpower. He hadn’t seen the worst of Micah’s manipulations while they were happening, but he’d never trusted the man. Ironically, he trusted Isaac completely because Isaac was too weak for invisible deception. And even though Sam Dial was clearly Beamsick, Nicolai trusted him. He seemed incapable of keeping secrets. He seemed a peculiar breed of naive — naiveté that had managed to survive knowing (or suspecting) many of the world’s darkest secrets.
“What made you like this?” Nicolai held up a hand, realizing he’d been far too blunt. Sam’s diarrhetic honesty was contagious. “No offense.”
“Like what?” Sam looked like a man who didn’t realize his fly had been open and was now trying to cover.
“You’re sick. Why haven’t you been treated?”
“I’m not sick.” Comically, he put the back of his hand to his forehead.
“Not like that. How old are you?”
“Fifty.”
Nicolai raised his eyebrows.
“Fine. Younger than fifty.”
“And you grew up in the city. Probably right in the heart of it.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a keen observer of human nature. Human nature has accents. I can tell how addicted you are, but it’s different from someone who grew up in the past twenty or thirty years upstate. Your accent feels like someone who’s not just used to checking a handheld every few seconds. I figure you had hardware in you very young, and it was fed from ultra-high-capacity pipelines only available right here.”
“Starbucks?”
“Old Manhattan.”
Sam looked up at Nicolai, chewing his cheek. What Nicolai had said was close to guessing the color of a woman’s underwear. This was the gauntlet. If Nicolai was going to trust Sam, Sam had to know that Nicolai could see right through him. He might run. But if he stayed, Nicolai would spill. If Sam stayed, it meant he was Nicolai’s man, damaged as he was.
“I grew up in SoHo,” said Sam.
“But not in the middle of it. You didn’t grow up in gangland.”
“Fringe. Just on the edge.”
“And your first implants. The connectivity ones. Age seven?”
“Five.”
Nicolai wanted to shake his head, but doing so would cross a line. This poor kid never had a chance. He’d grown up half cyborg. No wonder he couldn’t function without the Beam access he was clearly working so hard to avoid. He’d gone through his formative years with The Beam as part of his mind, body, and soul. Cutting it off would be like Nicolai giving himself a lobotomy.
“But those implants are all inactive now.”
“I don’t trust the network.” Sam swallowed but kept his eyes on Nicolai’s. Nicolai saw strength enter his gaze. What this kid was doing every day of his life took tremendous guts. It would be like going through withdrawal from a horrible drug…but no matter how long he stayed clean, the withdrawal symptoms would never, ever improve.
“Why?”
“I have my reasons.”
Nicolai decided not to push further. Sam’s responses had gone from rambling and incoherent to terse and focused. He could fight it off, if he tried.
Nicolai watched him for a few seconds longer, wondering if he should bring up the idea of pharmaceutical intervention. Living as Sam did must be excruciating. But he decided not to say anything because every person needs their pain, and all that had failed to kill Nicolai over the years had only made him stronger.
“Okay,” said Nicolai. “What would you like to know?”
“What did you want to tell me?” Sam countered. His gaze was holding, but his leg was back to bouncing on the ball of his foot. His fingers had resumed drumming atop his knee.
“I’m not sure where to begin.” Nicolai could tell Sam everything, if he wanted. When he’d investigated Sam, it hadn’t taken much digging to see that while he still held valid press credentials, he hadn’t reported to the Sentinel or any other news outlet for years. His public credibility was shot. If Sam was cornered and told others that Nicolai Costa had blabbed, nobody would believe him. But on the other hand, if Sam wasn’t reporting to the Sentinel, he might be reporting to someone — or many someones — even more influential.
“Tell me about the Beau Monde.”
“It’s real,” Nicolai answered, surprising himself with his bluntness — followed by a spiteful appendix: “But I’m not in it.”
“I know that,” said Sam. “But maybe you can tell me about how it’s influencing Shift.”
“I only know that Isaac and Micah Ryan — ”
“According to my sources, a lot of decision
makers from both sides — not just the Ryan brothers — will be at a pre-Shift event in two days,” Sam said.
“Craig Braemon’s Respero event for the Violet James Foundation,” Nicolai recited. “What about it?”
“Are you going?”
“No.”
Across from Nicolai, Sam stood. He crossed to the door, touched the privacy seal, paced, then scratched his head like there were bugs in his hair.
“Tell me what Sterling Gibson wouldn’t publish,” said Sam. “And afterward, let’s see if I can change your mind.”
“About going to Braemon’s thing?” Nicolai shook his head. “No way. I’m not in politics anymore.”
Sam sat again, both legs bouncing, all fingers drumming.
“I’ll bet you are,” he said, “whether you realize it or not.”
Chapter Seven
June 16, 2049 — Grid-Neutral Appalachian Territories
“Leonidas,” said the man with the big arms. Well, big arm. The other — all exposed machinery — was more accurately an armature.
Leo turned the rest of the way around, moving Gregory from his peripheral vision to front and center. He’d been standing with his arms crossed, overlooking the mountain valley. Appearing properly pensive, he hoped. Penitent maybe. Like a man finally growing old, questioning everything he’d always been so sure of in the past.
“I’m just Leo up here, Gregory.”
“Okay,” Gregory said, his face contorting. The face looked strange to Leo, who’d got used to Gregory in his usual backdrop, down in DZ. But Gregory had recently replaced the metal-and-glass eye he’d had since ’37 with a quasi-organic replacement like the ones hospitals gave people who got their eyes poked out somehow — or possibly by buffoonish plumbers like in the black-and-white Three Stooges reruns Leo watched on the Old Time Channel growing up. The thought was depressing instead of funny. If The Three Stooges had seemed ancient to young Leonidas Booker, younger people like Gregory wouldn’t even know them. That would have been true even if there hadn’t been a decade of environmental chaos and decimation between Mo, Larry, and Curly and the kids of today.
