by Sean Platt
“Do you know about this big Respero event? They’re shutting down half of the East Side. Dominic is being promoted to commissioner for the day to manage security.”
Leo shook his head.
“I’ve been following it on Beam Headlines. It keeps growing. Now the presidents are coming in. Well, Vale, anyway.” She stopped again, wondering how much of the knot Leo could understand.
“What, you think Steve is going to pop in on some big political event?” Leo tried a smile. “That’s a bit dim if he’s on the run, don’t you think?
“If he decides to enter the city to follow up on something he finds, he might get caught in it whether he means to or not. Besides, Serenity sees him orbiting it somehow.” Yes, almost like he’s attending the thing. But Leah wouldn’t say that to Leo because the notion was absurd.
Leo slapped Leah’s leg and stood. He’d put in his time massaging her fears, but her neuroses weren’t the issue.
“Look,” Leo said. “The only question is whether or not you believe Steve York is Crumb. Meaning: Do you believe he’s running around with no idea where he is, smelling bad, warning people about plots by the Central Park squirrels?”
“No, of course not. But — ”
“Then he’s smart enough to take care of himself, Leah. You read the journal, same as I did. The man isn’t just a genius, he’s the genius. He and West, and now West is dead.”
That bugged Leah, too. The end of York’s journal, where he claimed to have done what Carter Vale had promised the nation as a naive pipe dream: uploaded a mind to The Beam, where it could live forever. The master admin behind the entire network, pulling all the switches.
“But if there’s someone after him…”
“He knows there’s someone after him. He’s not a fool. He’ll be okay.” Leo looked back at the tunnel and muttered, “More okay than us, maybe.”
Leah still didn’t stand. She wasn’t finished, even though she suspected Leo was right.
“Okay.” He sighed. “Go after him if you insist. But what can you tell him that he doesn’t already know? If someone’s still after him, how do you plan to identify an assassin? How would you have any idea who it is — then intercept the killer without getting killed yourself?”
Leah finally stood. This was a dead end. Leo was trying to help, but his mind was clearly divided. Of course she didn’t plan to storm in, jump in front of slamshots, and save the day. And the only thing she’d surmised about what might identify the assassin by checking into Serenity’s clues was worse than useless. The person following York seemed to be locked down the way York himself had been. Maybe she should watch everyone, everywhere in the city, while high on Lunis. Then she could hack every person’s privacy filters and wait to see if an internal firewall fell and sent repressed memories streaming back. It wasn’t the most practical approach.
“You’re right,” Leah said. “Of course you’re right.”
After a nodding glance at Leah, Leo looked down one of the fork’s tunnels then the other. “So?”
“You go on without me. I created a temporary blind spot through the Quark network at the old grate I showed you on the map. Do you remember where it is?”
Leo nodded. His eyes flicked toward the waiting Organas, who seemed almost entirely pacified as they milled and waited, their minds adjusting to the new peripherals. The Beam, Leah thought, a better opiate than drugs.
“I’m going back up here.” Leah nodded toward the opposite tunnel. “I have something I need to do.”
Leo didn’t ask what it was. Leah was glad because the answer was as simple as it was stupid and useless: There was nothing at all she could do to stop what her gut felt certain was coming. And so instead of acting, Leah planned to worry.
Chapter Ten
The Organas were halfway down the long, dark tunnel when Scooter, in the lead, raised a hand.
“Hold up, Chief.”
Leo waited a moment, giving Scooter the quiet seconds he seemed to need. But after a half minute, he began to feel like the big man was stuck in a loop.
“What’s up, Scooter?”
Behind Leo, the others jostled. They rattled a bit with their antiquated hardware installed, and the journey through the subway with the illegal after-market wares had sounded like the progress of a troupe hauling appliances. Leo had realized a while ago that the plan would require modifications or they’d never get away clean. They had barely-held-at-bay criminal records and looked ridiculous. Half the assembly had visible metal body parts. Who looked like that in this day and age? Prisoners — especially those from a long time ago — had had to improvise add-ons the way they’d improvise a shiv or toilet wine. But the same wares on civilians emerging from the blocked subway tunnels might attract some attention.
Leo didn’t like the idea of deceiving Leah, but he was glad she’d taken her own path and left them alone. Thanks to her already-tech-adept status, she hadn’t suffered as they had and wouldn’t understand certain necessities. But there were levels of greater goods and evils at play now, and they weren’t all things that Leo could control.
“I’m reading,” Scooter said.
“Read on your own time,” a woman at the back yelled.
“I’m reading about something going on ahead,” Scooter replied, an annoyed edge in his voice.
“Scooter,” Leo said. “What’s the issue?”
“I think traffic’s been diverted.”
Leo resisted the urge to instruct Scooter on how to set his preferences. Leo had spent many years wired, whereas Scooter, like many of the others, had merely been conditioned to Beam life as children. Scooter didn’t realize that reading Beam Headlines on his HUD wasn’t the most efficient way to let his environment respond to him, but now wasn’t the time to say so.
“Okay.” Leo took a step.
Scooter held out a hand to keep Leo from passing, still facing forward. “It’s diverted to the street we’re supposed to come up in.”
“So we’ll take another grate,” said a woman at the group’s rear.
Leo felt his mind turning. “That’s the only one Leah cleared. It won’t last long. It has to be that grate, and it has to be quickly, or else The Beam will register and report us.”
Scooter turned. Leo could tell that half of his attention was still on Beam Headlines. That was something the Organas would need to learn if they kept their add-ons: You didn’t read The Beam the way you read a book. The process was deeper, skipping the interpretation step where eyes met brain. Although maybe they were too old to learn that trick. Yet another difference between Beam natives and the older generation — or corporeal holdovers like the Organa.
“Leo, we have a problem. They’ve barricaded every other side street to control the traffic through one checkpoint. Says here it was going to be somewhere else, but they moved it at the last minute.”
“What’s going on?” a man asked.
“It’s a big city event,” Leo answered. “A political thing masquerading as charity.”
“I didn’t know anything about that,” a woman said, sounding entitled, as if she resented being left out of the loop.
Scooter was still reading, still relaying. The digital-to-analog process was hard to watch. Leo didn’t know why, but ever since his long-dormant peripherals had woken up, he’d found himself slipping into The Beam with sickening ease. It was as if he’d never been Organa at all, and the network had held its hooks in him all along. Leo could see past data to its meaning, the way Leah sometimes described. He’d watched his old pathways unlock. Leonidas of Gaia’s Hammer rises again, digital as his birthright.
“The checkpoint is right near the subway entrance,” Scooter said, his voice almost sad. “We’ll never get up that way without being seen.”
“Maybe we can go through the grate now then hang out in the old subway station until the event is over?” the man behind Leo said.
“The sensors will see us in the station,” Leo answered.
“Call Leah. Have her open another
one for us.”
“She can’t do any more with the nanobots she has inside. She said the encryption’s already cycled.”
Leo heard the words leave his mouth. The encryption has cycled? That was how Leah spoke, not Leo. And he wasn’t really answering questions, either. He was giving orders like he used to, momentarily disguising them as answers. Supposedly, smell evoked memories. Leo was finding that familiar scents of The Beam’s Fi did the same.
“Maybe we can stay in the tunnels. Live like trolls.” Scooter laughed, but it wasn’t funny.
“The tunnels are watched, too.”
“Then the prison. Can we go back there?”
Leo found himself becoming annoyed. A rudimentary hive was already forming among them, yet everyone was still using their mouths. They were syncing like any group connected to the same hub, but these idiots couldn’t see it. They kept asking questions the hive already knew the answer to.
Leo didn’t bother to respond. Of course they couldn’t go back. Even if there weren’t unspoofed sensors or crawlers down there now, they’d be heard by any one of millions of auditory pickups as they moved around in the prison’s shell, probably getting caught in less than an hour. Leah had bought them some time, but the network couldn’t be fooled forever.
How were the Organas not seeing the hive? Why were they not tapping it? Why didn’t they see the full picture? The hive had all of their eyes, ears, and brains. Just like the Hammer days.
The stream was still coming at Leo. The sensation was strange and welcome. He’d forgotten the way Beam-offloaded processing could make the mind faster. Two engines, churning the same data. Or millions online, if you set your permissions to allow it.
And then he saw it.
There was a way. It was as outside-the-box as the way he’d solved the Lunis problem by getting them all arrested, and he was afraid Leah wouldn’t have liked it one bit. But it was Leo who saw the solution, not any of the others. And if he was reading the new hive mind right, he could probably show them. Forcibly, by resetting preferences they were too dumb and slow to realize they should change themselves. If he did that — in the name of efficiency, if nothing else — then he could make them see.
The solution to their problem was simple: They were going to be discovered? Then let them be discovered.
Leo could feel the force that had awakened his implants percolating from his body, into the cloud, into the hive. He could feel it crossing the Fi to the prison hub and accessing the code Leah had used to neuter their cobbled-together, prison-confiscated add-ons. Then he felt that same force undo the safeties Leah had given them all when they’d passed through her detector. Doing so was easy. Easy as pie.
Inside, that same old, hidden code began to dismantle an internal firewall, and Leo felt repressed memories streaming back.
He pushed into the hive, changing preferences. Infecting the group’s hive mind like a virus.
Something clicked.
Old weapons rebooted.
Within a minute, they all understood what Leo realized he’d known for a while — what a strong compulsion, like instinct, had been urging him to understand. His buried directive had become theirs. It was now something they shared, the decree crawling across Leo’s cortex firmly in command.
If they couldn’t get out without making noise, Gaia’s Hammer was bound to make as much disruptive noise as it could, in the right place, at the right time.
Leah had confirmed what Leo’s internal compass had already told him: he had a party to attend.
And at that party, thanks to a long-buried order, Leo had a friend to kill.
Chapter Eleven
Dominic was looking at his handheld, wondering if he could get away with ignoring Isaac’s call, when he felt the strangest sensation. It was like a memory, but not quite. Like a Lunis fugue, but not quite. Like a dream, but not quite.
There was a moment of clarity, as if something Dominic couldn’t identify suddenly made sense. He seemed to see himself standing in the middle of the prison detector, just before Omar had called with his short-lived crisis. Leah’s and Leo’s heads were turning, the device alerting Dominic to something inside himself, though he knew it was only a glitch. He didn’t have anything unnatural in his body. He was a fat, prematurely old cop. If he had rogue software somehow inside his organic, oversized frame, his many scans over the years would have detected it.
Unless it was masked.
Dominic got a flash of the Organas, suddenly sure they were in trouble.
He got a flash of Leah.
And then he was walking the street again, shaking his head, wondering what the shit Omar’s last batch of dust must have been polluted with to give him such nasty, out-of-body aftershocks.
The handheld lit, and Isaac’s annoying voice was shouting at Dominic.
“I can fucking see you!”
Dominic’s knee-jerk reaction was annoyance. For a bit there, he’d felt connected to something higher, like a seconds-long epiphany. The way the Organas probably felt, based on how Leah talked. But now he was the same old working-class Joe he’d always been, like his father had been, like his father before that.
But Dominic wasn’t sure what to shout back at Isaac for first: forcing a connection on his handheld after Dom hadn’t answered, or spying from…from West knew where…to flex his impotent party-head muscle against his supposed allies.
Fortunately, Isaac eliminated the need to choose by shouting again.
“You have to call me in for something, Dominic! Immediately!”
Dominic looked around the street, wondering which City Surveillance camera Isaac had co-opted. If he could figure it out, he could flip Isaac the bird. Instead, he slowed his gait in feeble rebellion. Isaac wanted to be a dick? Fine. Dominic could be late to the station. He’d just suffered through the worst twenty-four hours of his life — the worst week of his life, maybe — and neither the stupid fucking Violet James event nor Shift was even here yet.
He didn’t bother to reply delicately, and damn his job if Isaac had a problem with it.
“What the hell are you talking about, asshole?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Isaac. You peek over my shoulder, you burst onto my handheld, you yell at me. If you have a problem with anything I’m saying, you can go fuck yourself.”
“I’m sorry?” Isaac was trying to sound pompous and indignant, but to Dominic he sounded weak, like always.
“You have a problem with what I’m saying, Isaac? Fine. Fucking fire me. Call the commissioner. Bust me down to booting illegally parked hovers. I don’t fucking care.”
And the beauty was, he honestly didn’t. He was a simple man with a boring life. He didn’t need a captain’s dole to live the life he wanted. He was Directorate; he had savings; he’d always garner at least an at-the-line dole. It would be nice to be done with the stress of being captain. It’d be nice to not be hounded by Isaac and every other tinpot dickhead all day long. He couldn’t retire from Omar without fear of retribution, but Isaac was worse than pathetic. Isaac could have photos of Dominic sucking the president’s cock while murdering children and he still wouldn’t have the guts to say anything.
There was a long silence on the line. Finally, Isaac must have spied Dominic’s expression through his co-opted cam because he said, “Should I say I’m sorry?”
Dominic almost laughed. It wasn’t even a power jab. It was an honest question.
“What the hell do you want, Isaac?” Dominic sighed.
Quieter, less demanding, Isaac said, “You have to bring me in. You’ve gotta help me.”
“Bring you in where?”
“To the station. You know, arrest me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to kill the president.”
Dominic laughed.
“I’m serious! I can get a knife through security. Or I’ll just take one out of the cake and use that.”
“You’re going to murder the president. Which
one. Vale?”
“Yes!”
“Your own president.”
“Yes!”
Dominic sighed. “What’s really going on, Isaac?”
“I’ve got to trust you, Dominic. There’s nobody else I can talk to. Natasha’s about to turn on me, and Micah…well, Micah won’t even turn me in; that’s the problem. He’d find some other way to torture me.”
“And so you’re going to kill President Vale. With a cake knife.”
“Or a meat knife; I don’t fucking know! I’m telling the truth, Dominic! I was told to kill him!”
Dominic didn’t have time for this bullshit. Isaac didn’t cry wolf; Isaac just cried mercy. He had all the money and power in the world — everything Dominic would never have — and yet he did no real work. Even if Isaac wasn’t being his usual fool self, the premise didn’t make sense. Someone told him to kill Vale? He might as well have been commanded to find Atlantis. It wasn’t just that all major political figures were implanted with military-grade defenses. It was also that assigning anything to Isaac Ryan was a guarantee of getting it wrong.
“I’ve gotta get to the station, Isaac.” He moved to hang up, but Isaac’s voice pulled him back.
“Wait! Hang on. Seriously, Dom. Can I call you Dom?”
“No.”
“You don’t believe me. Fine. But you know my family. And I know you’ve heard about the Beau Monde.”
That stopped Dominic’s feet. Not only was Isaac confirming what was supposed to be a secret; it was the main objective that Omar, Kate, and Dominic supposedly were after in today’s scheme.
“Yes, it’s real,” Isaac’s voice teased. “It’s real, and I’m in it. You know I am. So is Micah. So are most of the people at this event.”
“Okay,” Dominic said, his voice neutral.
“I got myself into something, and I don’t know how to get out, Dominic. Help me, and I’ll tell you more.” A long pause in which Dominic got a mental image of Isaac crying. Then: “Okay?”
“What are you into?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
