by Sean Platt
Iggy paused with a hand raised, thinking. Then it dropped.
“What?” Noah asked.
“I was thinking that might be an angle. Escape as a story. But evasion is way less compelling than moving toward something. Again: too hegemonic or maybe just cowardly. But what about…wait, this could be it. Hang on.”
The hand went back out. A finger went up, pensive.
“Okay. Ascension. Or maybe evolution is better. You see what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“You can’t just argue for building a better network, whether you’re dying or not. Because that’s what I figure we do to kick this off: you die.”
“Now wait a minute…”
“And so you’re the test case, but…well, you can’t just call back down from the cloud and tell everyone it’s great from up there. What about…oh, wait, this could be great. How do you feel about being a ghost story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, do you really think you can just upload yourself to Crossbrace? For real?”
“Not Crossbrace. The Beam.”
“You really think that’s possible? Like, in your lifetime?”
“Of course I do.”
“It’s fine,” Iggy said, clearly not buying it. “You don’t need to actually pull it off. You just need to be working toward it. To save your own life because you’re terminally ill.” Then, excitedly, Iggy snapped in Noah’s face. “Oh! And because you want the NAU to evolve away from the East. Get it?”
“I just want support to get The Beam online,” Noah said.
“Right, but you won’t. Not anytime soon. You’ll need to use your own money. I’ll invest, and let’s face it: You can siphon right off York’s account because he’ll never spend it. I think we can do some creative bookkeeping to divert some of Quark while keeping the right public face. Eventually, you’ll admit to working on this Beam project, but it can happen around the time you admit that you’re dying. You and York will already have a big head start by then. And the official line — on the level of a rumor, of course — becomes not just that you want to make a better network, but that you’re trying to get all of humanity online. All of the NAU, at least. What’s the project name? Mind Game?”
“‘Mindbender.’”
“Perfect. We leak the name. We don’t connect the dots. We seed the deep web forums, like Null. Get them putting the pieces together the way we want them to, and they’ll decide that because you’re dying, you’re trying to save your own life with Mindbender. But like all good selfish efforts, it’s being commercialized and ultimately brought to everyone’s use via the free market economy. ‘Mindbender is a reality for everyone.’ Meanwhile, officially, everyone denies it all — which will be easy, because only a few of us will know it’s a fabrication. Rumors hidden in rumors. Everyone starts to believe it’s true because it’s being so vehemently and believably denied. Make sense?”
“Shit, Iggy. Sounds so complicated.”
“Says the man who wants to rebuild Crossbrace, again, better. Don’t worry about it. You handle The Beam. I’ll handle the story.”
“And Eli. Eli should really be able to help.”
Iggy shook his head. “No, Noah. Just you and me. Panel can’t know.”
“Why not?”
“They’re part of the story. Especially Alexa. And they’re shit actors.”
“How are they part of the story? And what with Alexa?”
Iggy smiled. “Again, Noah. This is my territory.”
“So…you think I just begin?” Noah wasn’t sure, but Iggy was right: He’d come to the storyteller without thinking because something inside him believed that Iggy — and Iggy alone — could help him pull this off. If what he’d implied was true about his work behind Alexa, Clive, and maybe the NAU itself through Rachel, then it would work. If only he was sure of his own role — and if he, too, wasn’t just part of the story, blind to the storyteller’s tricks.
Iggy nodded. “Just start working. Assume the funding will keep coming and that you’ll get public support when you need it. We’ll wait a while then leak the idea of Mindbender. It’ll be a speck of a thought, so amateur hackers everywhere will 1: start attacking Quark to get more information, which I’ll have in place for them to discover ahead of time and 2: begin working on the problem themselves. The hive-mind, crowd-sourced culture is already entrenched; they’ll share like they did for the lunar base, but underground. You can skim the best for your own project. It won’t matter if you pull it off. It’s the idea of evolution — for everyone — that’s key.”
That didn’t sound right. Evolution (and yes, The Beam seemed to almost require and pave the way for evolution) meant “survival of the fittest.” If everyone evolved, that meant evolution was broken.
“It’s just a story,” Iggy said, seeing Noah’s face. “There’s the story, and then there’s the truth.”
“Which is which?” Noah asked, a bit lost down Iggy’s rabbit holes.
“The story is that you died as The Beam went online. That you were Mindbender’s first attempt, but that something went wrong. Only a lot of people think nothing went wrong at all, and that you’re still out there. Waiting. Watching.” He smiled. “Do you see why Alexa can’t know?”
“But what about — ” Noah began, ready to list the first of a thousand loose ends Iggy had failed to consider. It wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever was.
Iggy cut him off, still smiling. “The thing you’ll learn about telling a good story is that in the beginning, even the storyteller doesn’t know how it will all turn out.”
Noah sighed. He was hardly new to uncertainty, and he did trust his own abilities. His vision was firm and had been from the start. Did it really matter what web of lies Iggy spun to make it happen? Not really, so long as the funding stayed fresh and nobody stood in his way.
“I’ll tell Steve about The Beam project on Monday,” Noah said, already imagining the crestfallen but obedient way York would react to the news that their work together was far from over.
“Good. Steve is your ally.”
It was such an obvious thing to say that Noah, having turned away, looked back to meet Iggy’s eyes. There was more to what Iggy had to say, but like a true dramatist, he was waiting for the gravitas of a proper reveal.
“What? Of course you need allies,” Iggy said, smirking. “Because surely you realize The Beam will need enemies, too?”
Chapter Two
Leo woke with a world-ending headache.
Opening his eyes was difficult. Rolling his head to the side was even harder. He rolled a few times anyway, tolerating the pounding and the way his neck tendons seemed to creak in an attempt to unfreeze frozen joints. He squinted the entire time, fighting the feeling of a lance stabbing his brain.
It wasn’t until Leo was sitting upright that he realized something interesting: his head hurt, but it was more or less clear.
“Leo? You hear me in there?” came an echoey voice.
Leo took a few moments before responding. The voice was coming from somewhere high up, and when he craned his pained head to look, Leo saw it was coming from an ancient speaker that looked something like a bullhorn.
“Is that you, Dominic?” Leo asked the speaker.
There must have been an input somewhere, because the voice seemed to hear him.
“Yeah. Are you…are you okay?”
The hesitance in Dominic’s question made Leo’s eyes narrow. He’d known Dominic forever. He’d practically raised him. He’d accepted one Respero refugee from him early in Organa’s history, then another, in Crumb, later on. Sometimes, Leo had a hard time seeing Dominic as more than the kid he’d been when Leo had been the teacher and Dominic had been the student. And now, look where they’d ended up: with Dominic sounding tentative, as if Leo were a bomb about to explode.
“My head hurts.”
“And your hand?”
The question caught Leo by surprise. He looked at his hand (the left, re
sting on his leg) and was about to respond with a question of his own when he saw the blood. There were great pools of it along the walls, tracked around as if someone had paced through it. He was in some sort of a concrete room with a metal door. It couldn’t be Plasteel because there was a wrinkled dent in its middle that looked recent. In the dent’s center — and, now that he looked, in the heart of several pits around the room’s block walls — were splats of crimson.
Leo’s left hand felt fine, but his right was aching. He assumed it was because he was still halfway sitting on it and it had gone numb, but when he fished the hand out, the sight of it almost made him pass out again. His fist hurt to flex. His flesh was mostly gone, turned to mashed hamburger squeezed between bright chrome-plated metal fingers. Caked blood covered the appendage and his sleeve almost entirely.
“We’re limited on first aid here,” speaker-Dominic said. “I gave you a shot of repair nanos, but I don’t know if it’s enough for the job you did on yourself.”
“Where are you, Dom? Come in here so we can talk face to face.”
After a moment of hesitation Dominic said, “Let’s just keep talking this way for a bit, if that’s okay with you.”
“But where are you?”
“There’s a control room. For monitoring.”
“I mean, where are we?”
Leah’s voice, small, as if beside Dominic but not talking into the microphone: “Just tell him. What’s he going to do?”
“Flat 1,” Dominic said.
“I thought Flat 1 was destroyed.”
“The subbasements are still accessible through the old subway,” Dominic told him.
“I thought the subway was destroyed.”
But rather than answering, Dominic asked another question.
“Do you remember anything that happened? After you left the compound?”
“Of course.”
“You weren’t too far gone?”
Dominic’s question raised one inside Leo. Forget about how far gone he’d been when Agent Smith and the NPS had brought him in; why was he not far gone now? The heavy feeling of withdrawal had sat atop Leo’s shoulders for weeks, but now he couldn’t feel it at all. He hurt, but was clear-headed with no withdrawal or hangover.
“What did you do to me, Dominic?” Leo asked. The absence of Lunis withdrawal symptoms suddenly seemed very, very interesting. He’d ached all the way into the city, then even more after NPS had tossed him into the old, bars-and-bricks cells appropriate to Organa prisoners. As the organization’s leader, he’d been given a cell to himself, but he’d hurt plenty even then, watching the others in their communal cells beating each other nearly to death. But beyond being in the cells (probably the “do you remember” that Dominic was referring to) was lost in a fog.
“Leah got NPS out of the way using the nanos she left behind the Quark firewall. Maybe you owe her an apology for yelling at her about that.”
“Yeah, you owe me an apology,” said Leah’s voice, both sarcastic and happy.
“And you broke me out?”
“All of you,” Dominic said.
“Where are the others?”
“Gassed. There was a suppressor system we managed to get operational again, meant to quell prison riots back when the Flat was in use.”
“But you didn’t gas me.”
Leo looked at the speaker when there was no response. Then he craned his head around the room, trying to find whatever visual device they might be using to watch him.
“Hell, guys. It’s hard to talk to you when you won’t just come in here and look me in the eye.”
Another moment of silence. There was a sigh, and then Dominic said, “Hang on.”
Several minutes dragged by. Leo used them to assess himself and try to recall all that was missing. He held his obliviated fist to his face, eyes flicking to craters in the wall and door, deciding the painted picture was perfectly clear. At some point when Leo had been awake and alone, he’d punched his way around the room, ruining his surgical work and baring his old Gaia fist beneath. The idea made his stomach swim. There had been a day when Leo hadn’t been a stranger to violence, but that day was long past.
He listened to Leah and Dominic for a while, waiting, before realizing that he wasn’t listening to them at all. They’d left their station by the microphone, but he could still somehow hear their approach. After a while, he got it: Leah was broadcasting something from her implants. Through something inside himself, he could sense her connection reaching out to him. To Leo, what Leah was mulling felt like worry. Dominic, on the other hand, was a black hole.
The door opened. Dominic entered first. Leo took a step forward before registering the large weapon his old friend had leveled at his chest. Leah followed and stood behind Dominic, quiet. She closed the door, and they both waited, looking at Leo as if he were something to pity. Or fear.
“What’s this?”
“I’m sorry, Leo. I love you like a father, but the last time we were this close, you tried to kill me.”
“Leo,” Leah said, cutting him off before he could reply. “Dom thinks you intended to get caught by NPS. He says you knew I could use the nanos I’d left behind to get you out. What I don’t know is why.”
Then, below her breath and without moving her lips, Leo heard Leah say, “handshake 0419 flat 1 protocol prisoner record F107 dash 343 enter — ”
“Leah,” Leo said. “I can hear you.”
Leah squinted then looked at Dominic.
“Not your voice. I mean I can hear your feed. You’re entering me into the prison system’s roster.”
She looked back at Leo. “What do you mean?”
“Prisoner F107 something. That’s me, right?”
Leah’s forehead bunched. “How did you know that?”
Leo tapped his head. “I had an add-on installed a very long time ago that could break coded wireless transmissions. Not new codes, I’m sure, but codes this prison’s canvas might use.”
“You have a code breaker?”
Leo looked down at his fist. Even if Dominic hadn’t told her everything he’d learned about Leo’s past and Gaia’s hammer, she’d be able to see plenty of evidence in his alloy knuckles.
Screw it, he thought.
“Why are my augments coming back online?”
Dominic looked at him. “I thought you didn’t have any add-ons left in you?”
“Too much trouble to remove some of them,” Leo said. “But I had them deactivated forever ago. They’re supposed to be inert.” Then he shook his head, realizing just how much he could hear now that he was focusing. He could hear some of the other Organas — not through their own unaugmented heads but through the prison’s network itself. He could hear The Beam beyond. His old memory buffers, in fact, felt like they wanted to upload and sync. His repair nanos, which he’d had flashed decades ago and should be long dead, were waking up, taking cues from a distant medical database. A heads-up display kept wanting to pop into place. Leo had mostly forgotten the trick of banishing it, so he blinked until it slid out of his field of view.
“Maybe it’s the prison’s canvas that’s somehow reactivating them,” Leah said. “We had to open the Fi to crack the cells.” But Leo knew bullshit when he heard it, and he could see the strange look on Leah’s face.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
“Contained. Separated. There were enough cells left here to give them each their own.”
“How?” Leo asked.
Dominic answered. “During renewal, a lot was processed quickly just to get things done and outrun the threatening collapse. The Flat’s sublevels were blocked off but left in place. Most of it flooded, but nearby reclaimers have sucked a bunch of the water out since. The cells don’t smell great, but they still hold prisoners.”
“Are the other Organas…”
“They’re fine. Just gassed, like I said. We tried to let them up once they were in their own cells, but when we did, they proved to still be…unstable.�
�� Dominic nodded around the room at the smashed walls — walls Leo had punched into submission when he’d been unstable. Which, for some reason, he wasn’t anymore.
Before Leo could ask, a data clot came loose and surged through Leo’s mind. It lit up everything for the briefest of moments — and in that flash, it felt as if he’d just regained use of forgotten limbs. He felt like he could do anything — maybe that he could see the future. Old images discharged from partially blanked storage in his ocular add-ons, and in an instant Leo saw friends who’d died and family he’d all but forgotten. The nostalgia, delivered by technology he’d turned from decades ago, almost knocked him to his knees.
It should have been disorienting — but instead of feeling disoriented, Leo wanted more. How had he thought his old add-ons were dead and deactivated? He could already feel himself rejoining the worldwide collective as they lit up. He could sense hundreds and thousands of other people gathered around, whispering in his ear.
The more he felt, the more he wanted to feel. He had to get out. He had to leave this place. There were things he needed to do. There were places he desperately needed to go, people he needed to find. The new sense of connection filled all his old gaps, filling his previously torn mind with a million soothing voices.
“Put down the gun, Dominic,” Leo said.
Dominic lowered the barrel but kept the weapon at the ready.
“I’m safe now. Can’t you tell that just by talking to me?”
“You’re still in Lunis withdrawal.”
“I was. But now I’m on Lunis’s version of methadone.”
“What the hell are you — ”
Leah cut Dominic off, speaking to Leo.
“Is that why you did it? Is that why you got yourselves caught? Why you got all of them caught and hauled in to NPS?”
Leo nodded.
“What?” Dominic asked, still not getting it.
“Lunis is the cure for technology withdrawal — for the confusion that comes when highly connected people come to disconnected places,” Leo said, now advancing with his palms up. “So when we ran out of Lunis up in the village, something struck me: With NPS’s help, we could return to the city and to the center of the network, for forcible processing. And if we did that — ” he glanced at Leah, “ — we could stop chasing the cure and instead go back to the disease.”
