The Beam: Season Three

by Sean Platt

  > 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 Statements 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.

  Chapter Nine

  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 o
nce 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 though 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.”

  “What about you?” And, Dominic thought but didn’t add, what about me?

  “I had a small supply of dust. But I also connected all the time, so I was never truly without both.” She looked at Dominic, and suddenly he was sure she knew about his Lunis habit, shameful as it was. Sparing him and answering his latent question in the same breath, she added, “The only people who’d find withdrawal easier were those who’d never been highly connected to begin with. Like you.”

  Like you.

  Dominic indicated the handheld Leah was holding, deciding to diffuse the awkward moment.

  “Did you reach your man?”

  “Yeah. That was interesting.”

  “Why?”

  Leah looked like she might be deciding whether or not to broach a topic. Finally, she said, “Have you ever heard of Shadow?”

  “I know the kind that follows me around when it’s sunny.”

  “The Beam guy. Kind of an underground rabble-rouser. Like a whistle-blower.”

  “I don’t really dig drama,” Dominic said. He found people like that annoying. They were almost always deluded do-gooders with unrealistic conceptions of what real life was like. Those who wanted to scrub corruption didn’t understand that greased palms could also be used for good, or applied as leverage. Those who wanted to solve poverty didn’t get how many of the poor were there by choice, seeing as they were Enterprise and merely wanted success their way rather than getting it through honest work. Groups who crafted exposés about crooked companies seldom thought to consider all the Directorate families those companies kept afloat. The problem with do-gooders wasn’t their intention. It was their naive belief that anything was ever black and white.

  “He’s in some of the hacker circles I orbit,” Leah said. “Solid guy, if a bit paranoid and scattered. He contacted me a while ago with something about the Beau Monde.”

  Dominic rolled his eyes. “Oh, right. This conspiracy shit I’ve heard of.”

  “We’ve been talking lately. He had some issue with the Prime Statements. It’s more than you’d want to hear about, but it’s opened some questions. Questions that bother me, too.”

  “Because you’re into conspiracy theory?”

  Again, Leah looked like she might be deciding whether to continue. “Because I think I’ve been affected.”

  “Affected how?”

  “Remember my story about taking that drug in college and surfing The Beam afterward?”

  Dominic shook his head. That didn’t ring a bell.

  Leah half laughed, running a hand between her eyes and the roots of her thick pink dreadlocks. “Shit, I really am tired. It was Leo I told.” She waved her hand. “I won’t bore you with all of it. I just felt like I had some insight into The Beam’s core — to a center of intention; that’s the only way I know to put it — at the middle of it all. Crumb was part of it somehow because I think I sensed him in there as the man he is now…as Stephen York…because he was one of The Beam’s creators. But there were more, and bits and pieces have been slowly coming back ever since I had that talk with Leo. I know now that I saw others inside, too. There’s another guy, with dark, serious eyes, such that I can see things on The Beam. He’s as important to The Beam’s core as York, almost. I’m not sure who he is, only what he feels like. I imagine him as rugged. The kind of guy who’d use a bow to hunt; I’m sure of it.” She held up a finger. “Wait. No. A crossbow.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” Dominic asked.

  “I’ve started to remember other things, too. Like SerenityBlue.”

  Dominic laughed. But when he looked back at Leah, she seemed serious.

  “Really, Dom. She’s real. We’ve met her, me and Leo. Crumb has too.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “But there’s more. I think she and I are…related somehow. She looks different to everyone. To Leo, she looks like me. And I think I know why.”

  “You sure you’ve run out of drugs?” Dominic laughed, but Leah was still dead serious.

  “I think I created her.”

  “What the hell does that mean, Leah?”

  “I think she melted off of me. I left something behind when I was swimming The Beam. And I can’t shake the feeling that she matters to all of this. Sometimes, it’s like I feel her right behind me. Watching. And maybe she’s always been watching me, if for no other reason than we’re connected.”

  “Mmm-hmm. By The Beam.”

  “Maybe and maybe not. Or maybe, but in a way different than you’d think. I’m dosed heavily on Lunis when I do my best Beamwalking. I think it works because it does what Lunis does, and pushes the need for connection out of my way. Tech connection, I mean. So that when I walk, I’m walking a different kind of connection.”

  “Maybe you should start over, about this Shadow guy,” Dominic said, making an effort to keep the disbelief out of his voice. Leah was one of his few remaining friends. Leo had burned a lot of trust when he’d tried to kill Dominic, Omar was a slippery shithead, Kate might be playing either side, and the entire force had been charmed right out of its panties by Quark PD. Dominic didn’t want to believe Leah was losing it, too. Maybe this was just a necessary bit of hippie garbage, and he could get past it to keep her as an ally.

  Leah seemed to recalibrate. “Before Shadow contacted me, he reached out to someone else. Someone I’ve seen over and over but have never trusted for a reason I can’t even say. He goes by the handle Integer7. But the reason I told you the thing about SerenityBlue?” Leah paused, and Dominic sensed her biggest hesitation yet. “I wonder if ma
ybe I created him, too.”

  This time, Dominic did laugh. It was too much.

  “He’s in my head, Dom! I think I saw him that first day — the day I mentioned, in college. But I shut him out. Until these past few days, I thought he was just some asshole online. Now I’m remembering that I may have known him all along. That he might be…part of me, like maybe Serenity is.”

  Dominic held up his hands. He wanted to be gentle, but he had to say what was on his mind.

  “Leah. Listen to me. You’re tired, like you said. But do you hear what you’re saying. SerenityBlue? She’s real…but also you created her? And now this guy…you created him, too? Don’t you think it’s possible that this whole thing with Leo and the Organas has been incredibly stressful, and you really just need some sleep?”

  “I forgot about him! I forgot that I met him years ago, floating on The Beam!”

  “How do you know the thought that ‘I met him years ago’ isn’t the one that’s bullshit? Why are you so convinced that all you’ve always believed has to be what’s wrong? It’s a faulty memory, not a cover-up.”

  “I don’t think so, Dom.” Leah was trying to speak reasonably, but he’d made her both angry and defensive.

  “Okay. Just set that aside. Put a pin in it. What did Shadow have to say, and why do we care?” Dominic realized that might sound dismissive of her story, so he clarified: “I mean, does what he said have anything to do with what’s happening now, with us, with our current problems?”

  Leah bobbed her head, making an obvious effort to focus. “Maybe. I didn’t think so, but the more I consider it: maybe.”

  “How?”

  “He’s all worked up about some big event that’s just around the corner. He tried to do something with the Primes, as I mentioned — ”

  “What did he try to do with the Primes?”

  Leah cocked her head. “Are you being a cop right now?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Nothing. It didn’t work anyway. He wants to understand Shift is all. And to tell you the truth, so do I. So do a lot of people. And this event seems important to figuring that out.”