by Sean Platt
“They know they’re disconnected,” Leo said.
“Of course they know. But they don’t know their withdrawal is being blunted by Lunis. They don’t know how much worse raw connection withdrawal — for people as wired as they are — is supposed to be. It’s like a lobotomy. Shit, Leonidas. Have some compassion.”
“This coming from you? ‘Have some compassion’?”
Hector’s eyebrows flicked as he gave Leo a Well fuck you, too look. “I’m not the one who got them hooked on connection and told them it was ice cream. We’re supplying you with Lunis because it’s not in our best interests if you devolve into mass murder up here as you all lose your shit. But it’s a patch. You’re going to need to find a steady supply because like it or not, you’ve swapped one drug for another, and they’re just as addicted now as they ever were.”
Hector leaned one hand on a pew. He looked hot and uncomfortable. Some of the reproach left his face.
“Look. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Maybe you don’t want them addicted to Lunis, but it’s either that or they fry because of the withdrawal from collective, hyperconnected living. So if they need Lunis, at least be upfront about it. Let them understand their need so they’ll be able to fend for themselves if they move outside your circle of protection — or shit, go off on a hike for a few days and drink from streams. They have to know about the knife at their throat, or they’re going to get cut.”
“It’s not that easy.” Guilt was heavy. Leo felt buried, suffocated.
“Make it into a ritual,” Hector suggested. “You can smoke moondust, same as you can smoke weed. But most practitioners put it under the tongue, so do that. Get into a fucking circle and jerk off as you all rock together, I don’t know. Just make it part of life here: ‘You want to be Organa, this is what we do.’”
Leo’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. As little as he wanted to admit it, Hector had a point. And a possible solution.
“You did this to them, Leonidas. You got out of all the shit you pulled without hanging yourself, but don’t pretend because you’re up here about to sing Kumbaya that this is all just peace and love. They’re fucked up, and it’s because of you. Because they trusted you. Right now, your refusal to man up and admit it is putting every one of them in danger. Don’t stack asshole on top of asshole. Be a leader to these people one last time.”
“I’m not through being their leader,” said Leo. “This isn’t an act. This community is what I always wanted Gaia’s Hammer to be, once the need for violence was over.”
Hector laughed, making no attempt to hide his scorn.
“That’s right, Leonidas. Just keep telling yourself that.”
Chapter Eight
“You ready to talk to me about how Organa has been an act all along?” said the man behind the steering fork.
Leo was in the back seat of the black NPS hover, clasping his bound hands so he wouldn’t be tempted to try smashing through the Plasteel mesh between himself and the driver — an agent who’d identified himself as Austin Smith. Leo knew he couldn’t break through Plasteel and that the makers of police and government hovers planned for frisky passengers like Leo, but he still kept wanting to try. After the raid on the mountain community, Leo’s adrenaline had shot up high enough to slice his age in half and send him back to the good old days.
He’d watched every Organa in the village get loaded into high-capacity raid shuttles. He’d seen them stunned and restrained and frozen with slumberguns. He’d watched the looks they’d given him, too. Almost everyone living in the Organa compound had been born into it, or born in the city and arrived after some sort of life-changing epiphany. The current group wasn’t fighters. They were, Leo thought as his mind reeled back to what had recently erupted in the hall before NPS had arrived, the opposite of fighters. They were layabouts. Slackers who masqueraded as people who cared enough about the world to leave it.
But, Leo thought now, he shouldn’t think those things. They'd played into what the agent kept accusing him of. But after watching how all those ungrateful people had turned on him and Scooter, Leo could only feel resentment. He was supposed to be their leader, able to rise up and always be the bigger person. But he was only human.
“It was never an act,” Leo told Smith.
“The record says that officially, Gaia’s Hammer was erased from history in ’48,” the agent said, turning fully, letting the hover’s autodrive do its work. “It also says that as far as you’re concerned, NPS kept no records. But did you really believe that, Mr. Booker?”
“Call me Leo.” He felt a smile grow on one corner of his old man’s mouth. It was Leonidas’s smile — one he’d forgotten but now felt pushing its way out from the inside.
“We have you cold, Leo. We have you not just explaining what Gaia was and is, but confessing to crimes we didn’t even know you’d committed. The GroSure plant sabotage. The murder of Charles Murphy.”
Smith turned farther. Despite the mesh, the hover was almost a luxury vehicle. The agent could probably swivel the seat fully around if he wanted and could surely play back all that Leo had said to intentionally incriminate himself. Instead, he merely turned, his face incredulous.
“Now there’s the man I knew was there deep down all along,” said Smith. “Do you really not know how cold we have you? There’s a bug in your office. I could play you back everything you said this afternoon. Not just the shit in the past, but about what you have planned for Shift.”
“What do I have planned for Shift, Agent Smith?”
Smith shook his head then touched a button to lower the Plasteel barrier for a proper look. Leo could feel the charge coming from the force field between them, but if he hit hard enough, Leo bet he could push most of the way through it and likely strike the agent. That was why the Plasteel was there. But still, Smith wanted to meet his prisoner’s eyes.
“This is all just a big joke to you, isn’t it?” he said.
“What use is life if you aren’t having fun?”
“You’re going away forever. Forever. And based on what I’m seeing now, you’ve got a lot of life left in you. A bouncing baby boy at only 121 years old, isn’t that right? With all the gear you used to have, I wouldn’t be shocked if you lived another forty. You can live those years out in Flat 4, where life is always fun.”
“I do enjoy travel.”
The tiny smile was still on Leo’s face. He didn’t understand why he was tempting fate. Why he was, even now, considering testing the force field’s resilience. Why he was going out of his way to annoy the agent? Leo knew his fate was far from certain — or rather, he was confident of its direction and was able to approve — but still this man held enough sway to make life easy in the meantime…or difficult.
“A lot of good men and women died because of you,” Smith said. “I had a second cousin who was killed heading in after Hammer bombed Meyers Dynamics. She wasn’t a cop. She was a tech. Her job was to check fidelities on Crossbrace boards. The way my mom tells it, she thought of herself as a trainer. Or a teacher. AI wasn’t much back then by today’s standards, but it needed to be primed and loaded with its initial logic, and that’s what my cousin did. Terri took a lot of pride in her work. She was Directorate, doing her honest day’s work. Had two kids. Until some fuck dropped the roof in on her.”
Leo remembered the Meyers bombing. The facility was supposed to be empty. The only expected casualties were the developing technologies. The plan was to cut the hard lines, roll in a Gauss generator to jam any outbound transmissions that might result in data backups, then level the place for good measure. They’d already loosed a worm in that sector of the Crossbrace cloud, destroying a few thousand people’s inane photo diaries in the process. But the Gaia crew in charge of that initiative had been overzealous and a bit too committed to the cause. They’d only seen the need to retard the out-of-control network. They’d only seen the need to kill production and slow the exponential growth curve that, in the minds of H
ammer, was but a few years away from repeating the Fall.
Leo hadn’t wanted deaths. But after Meyers Dynamics, it’s not like he’d stopped planning new sacrificial targets.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Not for her kids.”
“Meyers was going to beat Quark to market in the gaming sims niche,” Leo told the agent. “They’d laid layers over most of District Zero and had shot geo beacons into the concrete across half the city. They had a highly addictive reward architecture and did nothing to blunt it after that mass suicide when a prominent player in the virtual world had his score knocked to zero. People were losing the ability to see the difference between fantasy and reality, so we felt we needed to intervene.”
“That’s still going on today, Booker! The Beam is one giant Layer! Layers on Layers on Layers. You’ve seen those idiots they call ‘Beamers,’ right? You’ve read tracts from the Church of West? Noah Fucking West, Booker — you didn’t change anything! More people today believe in SerenityBlue than Albert Einstein!”
Leo felt his face go slack — something that without question didn’t escape Smith’s attention. There were two assumptions in what the agent had just said that Leo hadn’t seen coming. The first was that unless SerenityBlue was a common name, he’d actually met someone that the connected world considered to be a mere fantasy. The second was that despite apparently following Leo’s movements long enough to plan this sting, Agent Smith, at least, had no idea what he’d done.
Leo tried to recover. “You’re making my point for me. Beamers, the Church — the unreal world is still real to too many people.”
“Why is that for you to decide? If they want to live in nullspace, why should Leo Booker say different?”
“It’s not real!” Leo felt his heat rising. He pushed it down. He’d do nobody favors by letting NPS get under his skin. Not when the arrests had all been Leo’s intentional doing.
“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. I won’t get religious on you. But just because I don’t always like the way the Districts — and hell, most of the people in the sticks — depend on The Beam doesn’t make it okay for you to bomb and kill.”
“Those crimes were forgiven in exchange for our retirement. When Gaia became Organa.”
“But you’re not retired, are you? I have you on record, voice printed and verified, admitting to planning an outage. A sustained outage today would be far more damaging than even an explosion would have been back in your day. Today, it’s not just amusement. People need The Beam, Mr. Booker.”
“Call me Leo.”
“Oh, that Beam outage would prove your point, all right. Same point as you were trying to prove in the ’30s and ’40s. But an outage in DZ today could result in a user imbalance, not unlike a bank panic when everyone wants their money back at once. And that’s not even considering the economic repercussions, both from Beam-based or Beam-resident businesses, the latter of which you would literally be forcing out of existence for the outage’s duration. That’s not even considering what happens to those who transact mostly through ghost currencies like beem. Just the outage itself would have grave social consequences. A core network failure undermines faith in just about everything The Beam touches…which, I’ll remind you, is everything, period. I don’t give a shit if you like technology. We’re in a Gordian knot. You fail the network, the network fails us.”
Leo sat back, crossing his arms, keeping his face vaguely pleasant. All of what the agent was saying was true. It was the main reason that Leo had stopped trying to sabotage the network when he’d promised NPS he would. He didn’t like what Crossbrace had been even when he was hooked into it every bit as indelibly as the rest of them, and he really hadn’t liked watching Crossbrace become The Beam. Some of what Leah had told him about The Beam — and specifically, the differences between the two — chilled his blood. Man had made Crossbrace, but the AI birthed by Crossbrace had made The Beam. Today, humanity was just a guest in a world it still thought it had created.
Leo watched the agent’s eyes. Without the mesh, he could see them clearly, only slightly distorted by the field’s interference. Whatever Agent Smith thought Leo was planning, he was taking it as personally as what Leo and his group had already done.
The stare, as it was meant to, loosened Leo’s bolts. He found himself thinking of the other Organas now traveling beside him in carrier hovertrucks. Their hands and legs would be shackled or frozen in an immobility field — or if they were lucky, NPS might have equipped its transports with a pacification immersion, so they might be skipping along virtual shorelines, their violent need temporarily forgotten. But whatever they had, it was only a spot solution. When the group reached the city, Leo would surely be unloaded beside all the people he’d spent his life shepherding, seeing their tortured faces, how badly they were hurting and how much they hated him.
The idea prickled Leo’s own need. He was mostly through his own weaning period, but not entirely. The sudden realization that he couldn’t get any dust at all now just made him want it more.
But whatever twinge Leo felt, the others — who’d been forced by circumstances to go cold turkey — would be feeling it a thousand times worse.
“Nothing to say for yourself then?” Smith asked.
“I always do what my conscience tells me.”
“Including killing to get what you want. Including addicting your people to a dangerous drug. Including betraying those people, leaving them dry.”
“I’m not betraying them.” He said it straight, but it was getting harder to keep the smug smile on his lips.
“That’s right, Leo,” said Smith. “Keep telling yourself that.”
Leo snapped. He shot his bound hands forward, aiming for the agent’s throat. He was right about the force field; it was only a partial barrier. He managed to get through it to the wrists before the current hit him and his muscles seized. He fell back, breathing heavy. The metal under his skin was designed as a heat sink, serviceable for dissipating current as well. But in the closed flying car, there was nowhere to ground himself. But of course, if he’d been grounded, the shock might have stopped his heart.
Which would be the easy way out.
“Sit back, old timer,” Smith said, turning to front and placing his hands on the steering fork. “We’ll be there soon.”
Leo, breathing heavy, reminded himself why he’d lied for the NPS bug to hear and report. Why his own false confession had got him arrested, and all of Organa with him.
He reminded himself that this was for the best, no matter how it looked.
He reminded himself that he had a plan.
And he reminded himself that, appearances to the contrary, he was no longer a son of a bitch.
He thought of Leah.
And hoped she could do what he’d so recently felt sure she could, before the doubts had begun to creep in.
Chapter Nine
Leah sat in a meadow. The grass under her palms, hanging at the sides of her crossed legs, was cool and soft. She could feel the moisture beneath her, possibly wicking up through the legs and seat of her canvas pants. She might stand up with a wet ass. The only thing saving her, she tried to remember, was that the grass didn’t exist. And, she felt somehow sure, her pants didn’t exist either.
There was a tap, as if of a fist on a door. Leah looked up, staring across the meadow’s recently mowed grass and into the blue sky above a gently sloping hill.
“Yes?”
A vertical and horizontal slice appeared in the blue sky, meeting in a corner. The opening widened, and the face of a young boy with big ears stuck his head through it.
“Sorry to interrupt you while you’re outside,” said the boy.
Leah laughed. “Right. Outside.”
The boy’s face seemed confused. Around his head, the blue sky began to wobble and lose focus. He must have seen it happen on the other walls of the simulator because his confusion turned to something more certain, and the world resolved. Again, Leah saw
him standing in an impossible doorway, offering entry to the school’s hallway without any building in between.
“Did you do that?” Leah asked.
“What?”
“Stabilize the simulation.”
“I helped you remember,” the boy said.
Leah sighed. She didn’t have the brainpower for this discussion right now. Later, she told herself. She pretended it would make more sense later, which of course it wouldn’t.
“What is it, Alias?”
“We’re having dinner.”
“Oh. Thanks.” She waited, but the boy didn’t move. So she added, “I’m not hungry right now.”
“Sure.”
“Where is Serenity?” Leah asked. “Is she with you?”
“She’s with you.”
Leah looked around then realized what the boy was saying. But the question of SerenityBlue’s general incorporeality was just one more of five thousand things Leah could think about later.
“I meant her body. Is she in the cafeteria…like, standing there, on her feet, with her arms and stuff?” It was the oddest question Leah had ever asked.
“Maybe. I haven’t checked. Do you want me to find her for you?”
“No. It’s fine. I need to practice this.”
“You just need to remember it,” said the boy.
“Oh. Right. Of course. I’ll try to…well, to remember that.”
The boy turned to go. The dark slit through the pure blue sky narrowed behind him.
“Alias?” Leah said.
The gap widened again. The boy’s face watched her.
“What does SerenityBlue look like to you?”
“Like SerenityBlue.”
“But who else? When you look at her, does she look like me?”
“She looks like you. Like your friend Leo looks like you.”
“Leo looks nothing like me.”
The boy smiled.
