by Sean Platt
Micah laughed, at least being courteous enough not to validate Isaac’s thought. There was no question the most famous illusionist in history didn’t trust Isaac Ryan to keep his secrets.
“He’s a magician. We only need to know enough to let him do his thing.”
“But you’re the one making me disappear.”
Micah flinched hard toward Isaac as if trying to frighten him, then made swooping magic hand gestures in the air.
“Ooh, magic!” Micah rolled his eyes then looked condescendingly at Isaac. “Hate to break it to you, but you won’t actually be vanishing. Unless we’ve been lying to you all along and I have access to experimental new technology and plan to teleport you into nothingness.” He laughed. “Look, Isaac. Gray is doing whatever’s being done. I’ve got my part, you’ve got yours, Natasha has hers. But it’s still Gray’s show.”
“What has he told you? I don’t even know what to do.”
“Well, what has he told you?”
“I’m just supposed to ‘clear my mind.’ Oh, and he injected me with some nanos yesterday when we were working on particulars.”
Micah nodded. “Okay, I can fill in a few of those gaps. We’ll whisk you off with some sort of swarm invisibility cloak, but when you return, it’ll be a holographic Isaac. A special kind of hologram since the lights are really bright in here and you’d be able to tell with a normal one — see dust motes running through your head or something.”
“What does that have to do with nanobots?”
“Permissions, I’m sure.”
This was the first Isaac had heard of permissions for the trick. It was just one word, but he didn’t like it.
“Permissions for what?”
“West, Isaac. Some trick of Gray’s will — don’t ask me how; he won’t share — recreate you onstage after the act is over. It’s the only way he can prove you’re not really there before you appear.”
“Prove how?”
“I’m not sure. Shove blades through a box at you, like in the old acts?” Then, when Isaac felt himself pale, Micah rolled his eyes again. “Oh, relax. You’ll be long gone with your invisibility cloak. But you know AI can’t just replicate living people, according to the official law about — ”
“Replicate me!” Isaac blurted.
“Of course, Isaac. Replicate your image. How else could he pull this off?”
Isaac considered retorting, but he was in too deep — and as much as he disliked the idea of Jameson Gray’s show, it was the least of his current concerns. He’d been talking to Micah too long already, and apparently there wasn’t any business to transact (about Vale, Rachel, or otherwise) other than the usual business of brother belittling brother. He needed to catch up to Natasha. She was a diva; it would take her a few minutes to cross a room filled with admirers to find this Godfrey woman. He might still be able to catch her.
But replication, even in hologram? The idea twisted something in Isaac’s gut.
“Oh, relax. Xenia has known the technology to selectively circumvent The Beam’s fifty layers or so of identity safeguards has existed for years. You honestly didn’t?”
“It’s not a matter of the technology existing. AI can’t mimic people in image or manner, living or dead. It’s a civil rights issue! Or an identity theft issue. If AI can pretend to be me…”
Deep sigh. Micah continued patronizingly.
“It’s a thirty-second permission window that won’t do much more than smile, take a bow, and leave the stage. You’re giving that permission through the nanos Gray injected you with.”
“How is that possible?”
“Maybe it’s not, whatever,” Micah said, again rolling his eyes.
But it was possible, and it wasn’t fine. Isaac had been trying to figure out how the trick would work for days. His return, after disappearing, had always been the part that seemed most impossible. If, on the spot, one of Gray’s assistants planned to simply keep Isaac backstage while a slightly better-than-normal hologram impersonated him onstage, that was the only thing that had made any sense. But the safeguards were supposed to be stacked and impenetrable. Watchdog groups had been picking at the issue forever and had thus far declared it safe. AI couldn’t “pretend to be any person, living or dead, in manner, image, or voice.” Just about the only way it’d even be a little bit possible would be if some dumbass used above-Beau-Monde technology to intentionally drop his own identity firewall. Someone like Isaac Ryan, who had a history of being a dumbass when it mattered most.
“If you’re so damn worried about it, I’m sure Braemon has a Gauss wand. Go get yourself waved down, and kill them off.”
Isaac saw the bait but refused to take it. If he killed off Jameson Gray’s illegal nanos now, there would be hell to pay — from Micah, from Natasha, from his social peers, and from Gray himself, who Isaac suspected might be part of the supersecret group his mother belonged to.
No, it’d be okay. He could do it after the show. It’s not like an AI clone could keep impersonating him after he’d wanded himself. And it’s not like the nanos would help Micah zap him off into places unknown, as he’d joked.
“Well now,” Micah said, indicating a tall man across the room. “Look who’s arrived.”
Isaac’s eyes were on a recently spotted group of people who, it turned out, had indeed stopped Natasha to admire her. All were men. Isaac didn’t know what Shelly Godfrey looked like, but unless she had testicles, it didn’t seem like Natasha had found her just yet.
Isaac didn’t reply. He began pushing through partygoers instead, headed where Micah had indicated.
Yes, he needed to reach Natasha before she located Godfrey.
But first, he needed to have a chat with President Carter Vale.
Chapter Nineteen
“Harper,” Dominic said. “Were you ever a mall security guard?”
“Captain?” the officer replied.
Dominic pointed at the Beam wall displaying its many rows of video feeds, including the one showing Isaac Ryan’s corner that had been bothering him. Quark PD, probably knowing the importance of good PR leading up to Shift, had let DZPD use their surveillance wall to monitor the fundraiser and had been deferring to DZPD cops for hours now. If Dominic didn’t know better, he’d think he was in charge in this big white room.
“Have you ever spent mindless hours staring at a bank of screens like this?”
“No sir, but…it’s just looking at screens, isn’t it?”
“You’re a smart cop, Harper.” Dominic stood and slapped the other man on the back, motioning for him to take Dominic’s chair.
“Are you leaving, sir?”
“I need to run in. You can watch the event from here.”
Harper became instantly nervous. “But sir! You’re the commissioner right now! I’m just…”
“You can watch monitors the same as me. I’m still the commissioner. For today, anyway. I need to go on-site but will remain in command. No worries. You’re just eyes.”
“But sir! What do I do if something goes wrong?”
“Ping me. Tell me.”
“But…”
But nothing, apparently, because Dominic took a final glance at the troubling screen and walked away, leaving Harper to blubber.
There wasn’t much to like about tonight. Dominic didn’t like being in bed with Omar — and although parts of him would very much like to be in bed with Kate, she was still a dust runner and an unknown quantity. She had the shell of a strange man in her — a man who didn’t have a good record, but did have connections to Omar. That man seemed to have gone suspiciously missing as if his life had hit an abrupt dead end — whose end, interestingly, hadn’t come from death. Dominic hadn’t managed to get much on Doc Stahl, blocked both by maddening erasures and by high-level permissions that even a commissioner’s access couldn’t touch.
Dominic didn’t like that he was more or less breaking the law. He didn’t like the way he’d left things with Leah — not just for her sake, but th
e way she’d been left to deal with the Organas when he’d been called first by Omar and then to the station.
He didn’t like that all of a sudden President Vale had decided to make an appearance, necessitating all sorts of new security and protocols.
He didn’t like the way the feeds had been glitching a lot lately — something that had got him thinking he’d need to head in keep an eye on things in person for a while now.
But he really, really didn’t like the way the feed of Isaac Ryan and Carter Vale set off all his internal alarms. Dominic, gray-area dalliances aside, was a good cop, excellent in ethics and great at his job. He knew, despite what Leah had or hadn’t found, that someone, somewhere, was walking around with a bogus Steve York in his pocket. And he knew, just by looking at Isaac, that Isaac was keeping a secret of his own.
Maybe he shouldn’t have dismissed Isaac’s earlier call. But still, watching Isaac and Vale onscreen, it sure didn’t look like an assassination in progress. The two were talking feverishly, below the conversational privacy tolerances’ ability to overhear. It wasn’t just Isaac. Both were keeping this secret, and Isaac looked…
Well, he looked guilty.
Dominic crossed the Quark station, wanting to hurry without having to admit that a lot of people might be in trouble.
Why was this whole fucking sector of The Beam glitching? Why were entire nodes overworked, as if caught up trying to process a massive backlog of files? That kind of thing happened on Dominic’s shitty little DZPD console canvas, but now it was happening on The Beam itself. What could The whole fucking Beam be chewing on? And why did it have to happen tonight, while Isaac and Vale were swapping secrets and Omar was trying to pull a rabbit out of Dominic’s ass without Dominic knowing? He could practically see the slippery son of a bitch trying to undermine everything with his own agenda. It might just be time to storm in there and stop it.
Because really, fuck this whole plan. Dominic’s benefit, back when he’d made his deal with Omar and Kate, was supposed to be an uninterrupted Lunis supply chain. But now that the Organa problem was more or less solved, who needed Lunis? Certainly not Leo and the others. Dom was an addict, yes, but he understood the solution. He just needed to get enhanced a little. Get some nanobots or something. He’d rather do that than have a monkey forever on his back.
“Good evening, Dominic,” said a voice.
Dominic looked up, recognizing the voice coming from all around him as Noah West’s. On his way out, he’d entered the white, Beam-surface hallway between Quark and the main DZPD station. The stupid motherfucking, judgmental, all-knowing hallway. He didn’t have time for its henpecking, righteous assessment.
“Not now, Noah,” Dominic told the avatar’s disembodied voice.
“How is your back?” Noah asked.
“It’s fine. And also, fuck off.”
“I notice you’re carrying a lot of stress in your shoulders. Would you like me to book you a therapeutic massage?”
“No.”
“How about a therapeutic nanobot treatment?”
“No. I’m just trying to get out of here.”
“Suit yourself,” the voice said. “Let me know if I can help you with anything else.”
Something swooped into Dominic’s mind. His feet stopped moving in the middle of the long, pristine hallway as his thoughts turned to his last few moments in the ruins of Flat 1, just before Omar had called in a panic.
“Noah,” he said.
“Yes, Commissioner Long?”
“I don’t have any nanobots and shit in me, right?”
“No, Dominic. According to my records, you never have.”
“So why did Leah’s gadget say I did?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“What does ‘Sector 7 Access’ mean?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that, Dominic.”
“Can you scan me for…” He tried to think of what Leah’s scanner might have been looking for, and why this intrusive hallway, through all these years, had missed what Leah’s box had found. “For, shit, I don’t know. Anything at all that I might not have been born with?”
“You have a carbon nanotube patch on your right radius, from when — ”
“I don’t mean when I broke my arm as a kid.”
“Your stomach currently contains a large amount of — ”
“I don’t mean my lunch either, dammit,” he huffed. Then, with a sigh, Dominic resumed walking. Stupid fucking worthless technology. The one time he wanted insights into his own body, Noah had nothing to offer.
When Dominic was near the end of the hallway, Noah’s voice said, “Would you like to hear something interesting?”
“No.”
Noah’s voice went on anyway. “Noah West is the only exception to the law restricting AI from being able to impersonate human beings. Did you know that?”
“No,” Dominic said, acutely uninterested in trivia games.
“The early Beam created custom avatars for new users. Those avatars replicated people those users knew and trusted. But that was the first clue that The Beam — at first, anyway — didn’t understand humans because it turned out people weren’t comforted by their avatars. They found them to be a violation of privacy. So since the ’60s, many layers of safeguards have been put in place that now make it impossible for AI to mimic a person, living or dead. Except for Noah West.”
“Fascinating.”
“Normally, I wouldn’t point any of this out. But I know I can trust you, Dominic.”
Okay, that was a bit creepy. Dominic walked faster. He reached the hallway’s end then waited for the door to open, to let him exit into DZPD station.
“I can trust you,” Noah said, “with your forgetful ways.”
Dominic sighed, deciding to ignore the voice, creepy or not. He didn’t have time for this. He was needed on-site. That had probably always been necessary — what with Omar’s plans and his need for Dominic to creatively direct security and open a few locks with his temporary commissioner’s access. But Dominic (forgetful or not, according to the Quark hallway’s electronic opinion) didn’t like all the new variables in play. There was Vale. There was Isaac’s idiocy. There was whatever Vale and Isaac had been discussing…maybe hiding. What other surprises awaited him — right now, at this worst of all possible times, as the usually rock-solid Beam coughed and stuttered?
“If you practice a few mental exercises,” Noah said from the air around Dominic, “you could probably improve that memory of yours.”
This was obnoxious. It wasn’t the first time Noah had prescribed exercise for Dominic.
“Just open the goddamned door, Noah. I’m clean.”
“Maybe,” Noah said, “and maybe not.”
Dominic turned as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder. But still he saw only saw the long, surround-lit Quark hallway, its door back into Quark PD now closed as firmly as the one into DZPD.
Dominic’s senses prickled. That wasn’t normal.
“Why are the doors closed, Noah?”
“Quarantine,” Noah answered placidly.
“Quarantine of what?”
“Of the software inside you that I’ve been ignoring for twenty-four years.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dominic demanded. He didn’t like this at all. Not with both doors closing him in. Not with The Beam acting funny, and currently in charge. Not with the only AI permitted to mimic a person as Dominic’s only company, according to recent trivia.
“I think,” Noah said, “that if you’d practice a few mental exercises, you’ll remember that you know all about Sector 7.”
Dominic’s mouth opened then he slowly shut it.
Of course he knew: 2063. That crime scene. Where there had been two men found suspiciously dead where they didn’t belong, a worm discovered trying to erase them.
A worm Dominic had picked up and held in his hand, and that had maybe been infectious even through his partner’s protect
ive pouch.
A worm that, just maybe, had backwashed some rogue software into Dominic’s nerves. Software kept alive by perhaps a single nanobot, blinking binary, ignored by every scan he’d ever had for reasons unknown.
A worm that two Quark agents had been very interested in gaining possession of.
Two agents who, now that Dominic’s mind finally connected the dots, had been from an entity Dominic had never before heard of.
From Quark Sector 7.
“Open the doors, Noah,” Dominic said, feeling cold.
“I’m sorry, Dominic,” Noah said. “I can’t do that just yet.”
Chapter Twenty
Sam had stopped slamming himself into the walls. It seemed counterproductive. His divided mind had ceased fighting itself, and now there was really no question as to his whereabouts. He’d accepted that he was in a Starbucks at some time in what seemed to be the future rather than in his apartment at 4:16 p.m. That wasn’t the problem.
Sam was stuck in a hole.
And he had no idea how to get out.
Since that realization, Sam’s sense of unreality had only increased. If Sam understood what he’d heard about Beam holes, he wasn’t in some sort of an immersion. It was, instead, a particular kind of schizophrenia. His mind was split, and the part that knew it was time to move on wasn’t shaking hands with the part that knew how to do so.
Since he’d come to grips, his pet microfragment had become even more talkative, offering useless and likely perilous advice, repeating his name almost on a loop.
Sam had been visited by Nicolai Costa, his head decimated.
And now, there was this girl. This girl that Sam seemed to recognize, even though he didn’t know from where.
“I’m not like the others,” she told him.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sam replied, waving his hand.
“You’re in a loop,” she said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You can’t give up. I can’t reach him. I’m being kept away.”
Sam looked up at that. It didn’t sound like something that garden-variety dumb AI would say, or like the machinations of his subconscious mind.
