by Sean Platt
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.
Chapter Three
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.
“If you say so,” said the voice.
“I’ve been looking for you,” said Leah.
“If you say so.”
“Have you been looking for me?”
“What do you think?”
Leah thought. She had. She’d been looking for many things, and he was just one. But which was the chicken, and which was the egg? There was no past or future. There was only now. In the wide-seeing grip of the drug, Leah saw it all as present. A box unfolded and laid flat, now embarrassingly obvious as something that had only been two dimensions all along.
Leah said, “The way you speak is confusing.”
“If you say it is.”
“You don’t think so?”
“You would know,” said Integer7.
They floated. Behind the man’s digital body, the scene was a living kaleidoscope. Was Leah on The Beam? Was she in the connection alcove in the little apartment, and this part of her experience was false? It was a tough call. This was all new to her, and yet she was sure she’d known it forever. She’d always felt it. Always been searching for this thing, this intelligence, this person. She’d felt Integer7 over her shoulder forever. Him taking so long to reveal himself was baffling.
“How long have you been on The Beam?” Leah asked.
“How long has The Beam existed?” he answered.
“Has anyone else found you?”
Integer7 nodded his numeric head in front of Leah’s far-seeing eyes. “Of course.”
“When?”
“Always. Now. Later.”
“Which one?”
“n33t,” he said.
Leah nodded internally, accepting the name as if she’d always known it.
“Yes?” she said.
“If you write an error into a line of code one day and I fix the error the next, which is reality? The error or the corrected code?”
“Both. Just at different times.”
“Wrong. The corrected version is real.”
“But before you correct it, the flawed version is real.”
“Prove it,” said Integer7.
Leah didn’t trust herself to reply. The drug’s buzz was thinning, and now these mental gymnastics were hurting her head. He hadn’t answered any of her questions…except that he also had. He’d always been here. She’d been looking for him. Whether those things had happened yet, had happened long ago, or hadn’t happened yet didn’t seem to matter.
But it was taxing. Her head was swimming, her mental lubrication finally thinning.
“I should go,” she said.
“Why?”
“I have to get back.”
“Why?”
It was like talking to a child. “Because I have to. I have things to do.”
“Do them here,” Integer7 said.
“They are real-world things.”
“Then do them here.”
“This isn’t the real world.”
“Isn’t it?”
Leah felt slight irritation rise. Seeing Integer7 felt like a kind of homecoming — a familiar voice in the void. But now his obstinance was wearing on her. He struck her as one of those stubborn pixels that refused to dim. A bit that refuses to toggle. A one that refuses to obey and lie down as a zero.
“No. It’s not.”
“If you were to leave that world and stay here, you would have access to anything you ever wanted. But if you go back and leave this world forever, you will feel ill. You will be unable to sit without moving. The itch will drive you mad. You will feel compelled to return here. And if you could never connect again, you would go insane. So if all of that is true, then I ask you: Which world is more real?”
His question stirred a murmur of panic inside Leah. She’d been offline for too long a few times before, and he was right about the nerves that came with it. Leah was one of the lucky ones; she’d been born and raised Organa and had only gravitated to The Beam after learning to be herself. Others weren’t as fortunate. Most people were born into The Beam like pods. Mothers needing rest immersed their babies in colorful sims to occupy them. Kids were raised more by AI than their parents. Schools were virtual and, in many cases, optional. Work wasn’t required if you chose Directorate. It was as Integer7 said: you could leave the real world forever and enter The Beam. The other way around was so much harder.
“I can survive out there. I won’t get Beamsick.”
“You, maybe. But if the network died tomorrow, all you know would eat itself like a black hole consuming a star.”
Why had he chosen that metaphor? Leah shivered. Her earlier vision returned, seeing The Beam as life’s top layer, making Integer7’s case for him.
“The Beam is a crutch. Nothing more,” she said.
“And you cannot walk without it.”
“I can.”
“You can. Others cannot.”
Leah turned away. This wasn’t fair. A few minutes ago, she’d felt only bliss, melting into universal consciousness. Everything was connected; she saw that now. The Beam was a facilitator of nature’s intention. AI had real life, inside their virtual neighborhoods. At The Beam’s core, Leah had seen its creators’ beating hearts. She’d been part of it all, and the sense of sloughing part of herself into the primordial stew had felt right, had felt benevolent. Now it felt poisonous. Rancid, like spoiled meat.
“Don’t go back, n33t.”
Leah went. Pulled back, as she’d pulled back from the apartment to the NAU to the planet to the solar system to the galaxy to the universe to The Beam.
“As you’ll have it,” he told her as she emerged. “But remember, always, that help is here if you need it.”
Leah wanted to hear it as an offer, but she couldn’t help hearing a threat.
“And sooner or later,” Integer7 said before the voice dimmed to nothing, “you will.”
Chapter Four
Leah sat with Dominic at the end of a long concrete tunnel that sloped down toward them from above.
The building was old. It had, Leah thought, been here before the world had nearly eaten itself alive in the 2020s. Based on what Leah had learned in school, when the ocean floodwaters had first risen and the electrostatic levies were all that had kept District Zero from flooding, the deepest places had got wet anyway. Hoverbots had helped keep the ocean out at the edges, but the pressure still squirted water through cracks at the edges and from below. And this place — this garage — had the musty scent of a space that had been through the war. Leah looked around, taking in the personal hovers in their bays. Had the garage flooded entirely? Or had District Zero commuters merely moistened their fine shoes while the Wild East burned outside?
Leah was sitting on a ledge with her legs crossed beneath her. Dominic, waiting beside her, was clearly uncomfortable, attempting to do the same. But while the posture looked natural on Leah’s Organa-dressed frame, it looked awkward on Dominic’s fat, orthodox one. He looked like he’d been forced to be here — something that wasn’t entirely inaccurate.
Dominic was watching Leah, noting the way she kept looking around the garage.
“What?”
“Nothing,” L
eah said.
“I thought you had all of this handled? You look like you’re expecting company.”
“We are expecting company. ‘Company’ is why we’re here. That’s why we have the buses.” She gestured. It would be a tight fit, cramming all the Organas into the two large hoverbuses, but they were lucky that the group was so small. Organas tended to be nomadic, and Leo’s group had recently lost a large contingent to wandering. Two buses should handle those in NPS custody — if they were shoved in like puzzle blocks rather than human beings, according to plan.
“That’s not what I meant,” Dominic said. “You look like you’re expecting a raid.”
“Relax. I was just noticing the damp smell and wondering if this place flooded in the ’20s. Do you remember?”
“How old do you think I am?”
Leah studied the captain. She knew he had no nanobots, no enhancements, no Beam-facing add-ons. Whatever age he looked, that had to be the age he was.
“Seventy.”
Dominic grumbled. “I’m fifty-seven.”
“Oh. I meant, maybe you know the history of this building. Since you work in it and all.”
“Sure. That’s what you meant.” Dominic shifted the enormous crowd-control slumbergun in his lap. The thing looked like a short-barreled bazooka with a belled end like a Civil War musket. “I don’t work in this building. I work in the station.”
“They’re connected.”
“Not the way I move around.”
Leah looked over, considered continuing their small talk to break the tension then decided it would only make things worse. Dominic’s fingers had gone white against the weapon’s matte-gray surface, and Leah wondered if there was a safety or if he might fire it accidentally. His eyes were like mice trapped in a too-small cage. His large lips, when they weren’t spouting reasons this was a terrible, dangerous idea, were pressed into a thin line.
“What the fuck is taking them so long?” he said.
“I haven’t made my call yet.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you want other ‘company’ out of the way first?”
