by Sean Platt
“All right, Dom,” Leo said, fighting his impulse to hurry and get this over with so he could get out of this place. “Let’s just face it, shall we? You’re worried we’ll cause trouble. Bunch of wild maniacs, now armed and dangerous. Is that it?”
Dominic shrugged, not saying yes or no. Although the look was clearly the first.
“Look around. Ignore all the new hardware. What do you see?”
“Armed Organas.”
“Enhanced Organas. But still Organas.”
“Just like the ones that came at me with bared teeth.”
Leo sighed then put an arm around Dominic’s shoulder. The police captain flinched. It was a bold move, but calculated. Leo had probably been more of a father to Dominic than his real father. He’d certainly taught him more practical lessons — such as when to be skeptical, when to investigate, and when not to trust. They were skills for societal fringe dwellers and cops alike.
“Moondust heals the damage technology does,” Leo said. “Then it gets its hooks in you like any drug. I knew it back then, and it was a mistake. But it felt like the only way.”
Dominic looked over, his stoic face now interested.
“I knew all about the problems with Lunis back then, yes,” he said. “Introducing it was one of the many hard choices I had to make, and I was alone in the decision. When we made our deal with NPS to disarm and go underground — and here I’m talking about old Gaia, not new Organa — we had to make a home in the mountains, away from it all. There’s no good connectivity up there and never has been, which is why we went. If we couldn’t be disruptors, we’d be secessionists. But there was just one problem: When we got up there and could no longer hear each other on our implants, the air seemed too quiet. Gaia wired up as much as it did with the idea of using technology to fight technology, but we all enjoyed the benefits. My people were used to seeing new mail the second it came in. They were used to constant pings, to shared POV vidstreams, to meeting virtually, to knowing anything they’d ever want to know without having to consciously ask the question. They’d all offloaded memory to the cloud. They all crowdsourced mental work and opinion.” Leo laughed. “None of us could choose a restaurant without dipping into the pool of experience about every eatery in the area.”
Dominic said nothing. Leo went on.
“When all of that was gone, the group that wanted to become Organa — sincerely wanted it, after all our fighting and struggling — had a hard time. Same for the city dwellers who came to Organa after we were established, wanting a simpler life but unsure how to pull it off. You don’t get violent when you disconnect like you do when you pull from Lunis, but you do get Beamsick. You can’t focus. You get hyperactive and highly distractible. You get depressed. Despondent. Even suicidal. So I made my hard choice, and I laced our water supply with moondust provided to me by the NPS itself. And because that wasn’t sustainable, I began making it part of our culture. We took our drug just like fringe groups always seem to take something, and it became ritual. So it’s my fault, Dom. I did this. I made them this way. It’s because of me that we’re in this situation, and because of me that all of us have had to betray all we thought we stood for.”
Dominic’s lips pursed, reluctantly seeming to relax. To see the situation for what it was. To feel sorry for Leo and the burden he had to bear.
“So, Dominic, I’d like you to relax about all of this,” Leo said, sweeping his arm around the room and its occupants. “I’d take it as a personal favor. Because as badly as you want us not to be unstable or dangerous, I want the same thing ten times as badly.” He shook his head. “I haven’t just ruined these people’s lives. I’ve done it twice, at least.”
Around them, the Organas were beginning to rise and file through the door. Leah stood by it, looking as uneasy as Dominic, waving them forward and out — where Leo, thanks to that irresistible compulsion, very much wanted and needed to go.
“None of what we’ve added to the Organas today — and I’ll remind you, Leah oversaw it all, policing the Autodoc’s settings as faithfully as you would, but with a tech-adept’s eye — is more than a bunch of Beam chips. They have hardware that makes the host body aware of itself and makes The Beam aware of the flesh. Their minds, too. When we are out and after we acclimate, we will all visit dealers and pay from the Organa coffers to have our old, neutered prison enhancements swapped for proper ones. I promise you, Dominic. This is just another patch, to get us through. You’ve trusted me before. I won’t disappoint you again.”
A flicker of emotion crossed Dominic’s features. The captain had never been a soft man, but Leo saw softness now. This hard cop had once been little Dom Long, and he’d believed Mr. Booker back when Booker had been a two-faced liar, doing his best between a rock and a hard place.
The Organas were mostly out of the room, so Leo and Dominic rose to follow. Leah was in the doorway, one hand on a modified body scanner that had been installed in the portal’s frame. She’d explained that the scanner wouldn’t just categorize each add-on the Organas carried, but would deactivate any potentially harmful functions in all of them. Leah didn’t trust them, and Leo could hardly blame her. Until they visited dealers as Leo had promised, they’d all have limiters in their bodies. Thanks to the scan and its modifications on the add-ons’ software, Leah would be able to freeze any of their enhancements if she felt it was necessary.
Leo stopped short of the scanner. The others were already through, waiting for their leader. Then Leo walked through the doorway. The machine beeped, and a screen beside Leah displayed a list of all the non-native hardware and software now in his body. Not just Leo old Warrior’s Fist and reinforced bones, but the AI that ran it, electrifying his nerves like a dance.
“Now I’m leashed,” Leo said, looking back at Dominic with a smile.
Something seemed to be bothering Dominic. He shook his head and said, “So you’re not Organas anymore? You’ll get new add-ons and try to hide from NPS if you can, but you can’t ever go back?”
“Maybe you’ll find us more moondust,” Leo said. It was almost a joke…or maybe not.
“All right,” Dominic said. “Then let’s get out of this shithole.”
He followed the Organas through the doorway. Leah turned to follow, but they both stopped short when something beeped behind them.
The screen beside Leah read, LONG, DOMINIC. ONE RESULT, RESTRICTED. SECTOR 7 ACCESS REQUIRED.
Leo looked at Dominic. Dominic looked at Leah.
“I thought you didn’t have any enhancements, Dom?” Leo said.
Dominic’s handheld trilled. His flustered attention went to the noisy thing, and in a moment the confusion on his face turned to urgency.
“Motherfucker,” he muttered, “it’s Omar, and something’s gone wrong.”
Chapter Six
While Omar was in the other room, calling Dominic to panic about Carter Vale’s appearance at Braemon’s and the consequent increase in security, Kate sneaked into the closed office, booted up the Doc Stahl shell, and slipped it on like a glove.
Nicolai picked up the call without friction, as if his channel had been left open. That immediately put Kate on guard. Nicolai never left his connection open.
Kate’s screen lit with Nicolai’s face. His almond eyes were shocked behind his only-for-show spectacles. He jabbed at something until the screen blanked.
“Oh, come on, sugar,” Kate said. “Don’t you hide those baby browns from me.”
There was a pause on the other end of the now audio-only connection. Slowly, Kate heard Nicolai say, “Who are you?”
“Don’t you recognize my sweet, sweet voice?”
“It says this call is coming from someone…someone it can’t be coming from.” But Nicolai wasn’t stupid. Surely, he’d put two and two together; he just didn’t want to be the first to say it.
“It’s me, Sancho. It’s…Kate.”
“Kate.” Flat, without inflection.
“We talked yesterday. You know.”
“Doc?”
Kate closed her eyes and sighed. “You suck at espionage, Nicolai.”
“You’re calling me from Doc’s ID. How are you doing that?”
“I told you how I’m doing it.”
“But last time you called from DZPD. On a secure line. Is this line secure?”
“Probably. It’s Omar’s”
“The guy you don’t trust? That’s whose line you’re using?” Then: “Wait. You said we wouldn’t talk before today’s event. Is something wrong?”
“Listen, hotshot,” Kate said, now sitting behind Omar’s huge desk. “This is dicey enough. First time I try Doc back on, it ain’t gonna be inside the hornet’s nest, so you get to be my trial run. If this thing with Doc’s ghost isn’t gonna work, maybe I should know before my dick’s in the wind at the fundraiser.”
Kate looked down, noting her current lack of a dick, but Nicolai said nothing.
“You’re not doing a great job of maintaining your cover,” Nicolai finally said.
“I’m calling you through Doc. Did his ID come up for you?”
Nicolai paused. “Yes.”
“So, someone wants to come for Doc, they’ll come for Doc. Good to know it works. Do I look like Doc across the board?”
“Actually, you look like a supermodel.”
“Thanks, sexy. I meant on the traceroute. The meta. You see anything there that says I’m not Doc, other than my voice, my face, and my fine set of tits?”
“No. I’d believe you were Doc.”
Kate nodded, satisfied. She’d sent the call through Doc’s old apartment, too, through Ryu’s still-connected router, then out through another two anonymous proxies. She’d already decided to do the same at Braemon’s, if they could get in. If Doc’s non-status truly opened the doors that Omar thought they would, she should be able to fool the system into believing the request was coming from the outside as well as sliding under on-site permissions.
“Hey,” she said, “how’s your access been lately? Spotty at all?”
Nicolai’s voice seemed to shrug. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Why?”
“My connection hung a long time before finding yours. Had a few glitches before I got through. For a while, I couldn’t get you at all, and now you’re…well, I don’t know what the shit you are.” She looked down at the open screen on Omar’s desk. It showed the call’s duration, but if she toggled for additional info, her connected party didn’t read as Nicolai Costa.
“It’s hard to explain,” Nicolai said.
“I’m curious.”
“I was sort of offline for a while. In a…a restricted place.”
Kate felt a burst of resentment. “You aren’t going behind my back, are you?”
“West, Doc. Relax. No. It’s…I’ll tell you later.”
“And now? You don’t even look like who you are.”
“Also complicated. Also, I’ll tell you later.”
“Maybe you tell me now. We had a deal, Nicolai.”
“Look…you wanted to get into Braemon’s system, right? That’s the whole idea?”
“Yeah.” Now Nicolai had her attention.
“I think I may have a key. I’m…I’m kind of wearing my own ‘Doc’ right now, too. You saw it when the call connected with video instead of audio-only like usual. I think it’s defaulting to the shell’s settings instead of mine.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You’ll see. But there’s a bonus. Something I got that could really turn things end for end. You know this stuff with Mindbender?”
“What President Vale said at the Primes?” Something clicked, and Kate added, “Wait. You know Vale’s supposedly going to this thing? Does it have something to do with him?”
“I don’t think so.” But then Nicolai paused too, as if only now considering it. Doc was used to duplicitous assholes and double-dealing, whereas Nicolai, despite his tough-guy stories of traveling through the East with a crossbow, wasn’t one. If there was now another party in the mix pretending to give Nicolai keys and Mindbender gifts, Kate didn’t trust him to riddle out the motives on his own.
“But now you do, huh? Tell me more, Nicolai. Who’d you talk to? This reporter guy?”
“No. Not him. Someone else.”
“Then who?”
“I’ll tell you in person.”
“This line is secure as it’s gonna get,” Kate said, growing annoyed. The knot had got tangled enough already without adding new loose ends
“In person. Look. I’ve gotta go. Anything else I absolutely need to know?”
“Maybe you can tell me what you had to say about this Mindbender thing.”
“I’ll tell you that in person, too. But the more I think about it, after checking out your Omar character, the Mindbender wrinkle seems like the kind of thing that might make a good ulterior motive.”
“Something Omar wants to get and sell?” Kate said. “While selling us out?”
“I’m just considering all the options.”
Kate nodded in the empty office. Nicolai was right. If this event somehow involved both Mindbender and Vale, that was the kind of perfect storm Omar Jones might be very interested in, if he’d seen it coming in advance and not bothered to inform his so-called partners.
“Okay. Fine. But there’s another wrinkle, if you want to tell me anything at all in person. Omar’s currently up his own ass about it, which maybe makes me think he’s not as mad-genius as I’ve been afraid of. Looks like, with Vale coming to the event as some sort of Directorate emissary, there’s going to be an extra layer of security. I guess Captain Long might be able to get us in as planned, but if people start looking into it and wonder why he allowed some hustler and his whore into the year’s biggest party…”
“Hang on,” Nicolai said. “I want to try something.”
Kate waited. On the other end of the line, she heard tapping, as if Nicolai was using his canvas. After thirty seconds, she was about to ask him what he was up to when there was a commotion outside the office, at the other end of Omar’s long hallway. Kate could hear footsteps quickly approaching.
“Did that do it?” Nicolai asked.
Kate’s attention was on the footsteps. If Omar caught her talking to Nicolai — or, West forbid, whoever’s shell Nicolai was wearing like a disguise — her advantage would be gone. And maybe Omar would find he had no use for her after all.
“I gotta go,” Kate said, already slapping at the screen.
“But did that work? Did you get a notice that you’re — ”
The call ended as Kate looked up at the opening door, her face surely guilty.
Omar’s expression, as he came in, was puzzled. “What you doin’ in my office, Katie?”
“Nothing,” Kate said, fooling no one.
But, shocking her, Omar didn’t press. A wide white smile slit his dark complexion in half.
“Get your best dress on, sweetheart,” he said, holding up his handheld. “Our temporary security issue is solved. I just got an official invitation to the shindig from my old buddy Craig, and I’m allowed a plus one.”
Kate was about to ask Omar if the last-minute arrival of an invitation struck him as suspicious, but his eyes seemed firmly on the prize. If he’d been telling the truth all along, they were all on the cusp of Beau Monde at long last. If he’d been lying, his eyes were wide for a bigger reward.
A last-minute invitation.
Whatever key someone had given Nicolai, it looked like it unlocked doors after all.
Things were looking up, and maybe everyone was about to come out smelling like roses.
Chapter Seven
“Canvas! BEAM CENTRAL SUPPORT!”
Sam was experiencing a strange sense of doubling. On one hand, his previously wired, newly reconnected mental hardware was caught in the hole he’d somehow stumbled into, The Beam’s rough edges holding him in a curious and looping gravity well. This part of Sam’s mind wanted to believe the reality he saw and fel
t around him: his apartment, permanently at 4:16 p.m. on the day before the big Respero fundraiser, and following a Nicolai Costa trail that never got closer. But on the other hand, Sam was fully aware that he was stuck…and that if he didn’t keep trying to rock the boat, he’d be stuck until his money ran out or he died of dehydration in a Starbucks cubicle. And that part of him didn’t like this one tiny bit.
For one, Sam’s mind was trapped, and that was bad.
But for another, Nicolai Costa was heading — or, depending on how much time had passed, had already headed — into a trap, and that was worse. Integer7 had said it, and now Sam’s own intuition was screaming. He’d spent the last six years paranoid, sweating unseen eyes and conspiracies. Now that one such conspiracy had borne authentic fruit, Sam’s and Shadow’s usually loud and disruptive mouths were stuffed with cotton, unable to escape a Beam loop.
A terminal window opened on Sam’s small screen and filled with hex code — another splinter of microfragment AI, belching its garbage his way. A halting, artificial voice crackled through his cochlear implant. “Access support with the command, ‘Beam central support.’”
“That’s what I’ve been saying, you shitter!” Sam yelled, seeing his room and trying to force his mind into recognizing it as a Starbucks cubicle. “BEAM MOTHERFUCKING CENTRAL SUPPORT!”
“This is Beam support.” The new voice was either a human woman or a realistic-sounding AI support agent.
“I’ve encountered a loop,” Sam said, fighting a sense of relief, trying to stay calm and collected. He wondered if last night’s Lunis hit was wearing off. He felt scattered, like he usually felt. Not nearly as in control. Not nearly as cool.
“Please state your name and specific error.”
So formal. AI, not human.
“My name is Sam Dial, and I’m stuck in a hole.”
“Mr. Dial, I’m showing your line as fully functional. But if you’d like to double check the following troubleshooting steps, I can walk you through them. First, I’m showing that your canvas unit is hardwired, so unplug it now, and then re-plug it. You will lose contact with me but once you reconnect — ”
