The Beam: Season Three

by Sean Platt

  Across the room, Violet James’s mother had her hand over her open mouth.

  Isaac cringed, but the next thing the recording said wasn’t he’d expected it to — what he remembered the real Vale saying in life. Instead, the specter shifted on its feet and said, “Given what we do with Respero’d minds, we should at least give people the dignity of pretending we didn’t want them to die.”

  In front of Isaac, Vale’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. His jaw hung open. The reporters, who’d been respectfully keeping their distance, moved forward in the chaos and surrounded Vale, shoving wands in front of his face, yammering questions.

  Vale pushed past them and put his hands flat on the stage, his expression furious. Isaac stepped back, his clothing held tight by those who’d so recently been volunteers. He tripped and half fell. Beside him, Micah still held the sword. Jameson Gray and Natasha had gathered around the techs, shouting and berating, yelling profanity while the techs pressed useless buttons.

  “I may be required to keep my mouth shut about Respero and Mindbender,” holo-Vale said, “but I refuse to pretend it’s all just flowers and daisies.”

  The real Vale found himself trapped by two aggressive reporters, their Beam eyes whirring with focus, wands held high. Isaac could hear them begin to shout questions. But then Vale elbowed one away and looked right at Isaac to shout, “I didn’t say any of that!”

  “Your family works with Xenia, Isaac,” holo-Vale went on. “Do you have any idea what the stick rate is these days? How many Respero’d minds even have anything worth filtering rather than just blowing apart?”

  “I didn’t say any of this! It’s a lie! Someone made this up! A fabrication!”

  At the back of the room, Rachel Ryan was laughing.

  “You’d know, Isaac. You have access to those records, right?” The recording glitched and recycled to just before Vale’s last word. Again, the room watched him say, “Right?” And again, and again, and again, Vale blipping from one position to a subtly earlier one, caught in a loop.

  “You have access to those records? Right? Right?”

  “Tony!” The real Vale shouted, stabbing a finger at one of his dark-suited guards. Vale’s finger moved to Isaac once the guard looked over. “Arrest him!”

  The room surged. The crowd, disoriented, was beginning to churn. Agents moved toward the stage, but half a dozen new techs had joined Matthew and the others. Jameson was shouting at them all. Micah had dropped the sword, stepping back, finally surprised. There was a loud bang somewhere toward the back as if something had broken or a door had been slammed, but the shouting and murmuring quickly buried the sound.

  All eyes were forward. Moving from one Vale to the other then finally to Isaac. Watching one president spill counterfeit secrets while the other lost his cool.

  Isaac broke free of his captors and stumbled back. He caught Natasha’s eyes and saw hatred fill them. Her green irises spoke one word: Coward. But Isaac didn’t have a chance to prove her right or wrong because the second he broke away and turned to run — to sever this horrific mental hijacking, if nothing else — three things happened in quick succession:

  There was another loud bang from the room’s rear, wood splintering, Plasteel rending.

  The techs yelled something about a shutdown and a dangerous surge of data coming across The Beam, forced across Quark’s node from Xenia Labs.

  And the holographic Carter blipped out of existence, replaced by the crouched form of a girl in a flowing blue gown, like a nightdress.

  The noise from the rear continued, but nobody seemed to hear it. The entire room’s attention was on the girl — and Violet James’s mother, who came running forward.

  “That’s…” a woman in the front row began, looking at the girl in the nightdress.

  The girl stood up. She watched the older woman rush to the stage then flinched as the woman fell through her. It was as if the girl were trapped in digital form, projected as a hologram…but still very much alive.

  “That’s…” the woman repeated, still watching the girl, seemingly unable to finish.

  “Violet!” Violet James’s mother shouted, her voice full of desperate tears.

  “SerenityBlue,” the woman in the front row finished in a whisper.

  Isaac looked at his wife. Natasha looked back, her hatred eclipsed by shock — at the Directorate president’s behavior, at the reappearance of the NAU’s most famous Respero case, at all it implied about Vale’s mind-bending promises.

  “Did you always know that Respero was — ” Natasha started to ask.

  Another crash came from the rear, and the room filled with a spill of highly armed, highly enhanced bodies.

  First came the warriors.

  Then came the blood.

  Episode 18

  Chapter One

  February 19, 2053 — IggNite Productions

  “Forget it,” said Iggy.

  “But — ”

  “No, Noah. Alexa can’t know. She believes; that’s her strength. That’s good enough. When it’s time for your story to pop its top, you’ll need faith, not knowledge. Knowledge is hard-edged. It gets in its own way. When people know something, it fixes them into one way of acting. Obstacles come, and they’ll doubt what they know. Faith isn’t like that. The steadfast can’t be dissuaded from their faith. And if you doubt me, let’s go down to St. Matthew’s and take a contingent over to the Seventh Street mosque. I’ll start explaining how to tell who’s right. Think we can walk away with everyone agreeing?”

  Noah shifted on Iggy’s couch. They were clearly in Iggy’s wheelhouse tonight, spinning the yarn that would become Noah’s legend, and Noah was trying to keep up. But the lack of support — from anyone on Panel, and especially the woman who had technology Noah needed — felt like an oversight rather than poorly constructed storycraft.

  “Look, Noah. Alexa has been looking for God in the machine for as long as any of us have known her. It’s her quirk. Rachel mocks her and the rest of us indulge her, but right now she’s your best friend.”

  “Exactly. And with the dispositional data O has been gathering since — ”

  “Forget O’s algorithms. They’re for Alexa, not for you.” Iggy didn’t seem to like Noah finishing sentences. The man was tall, lanky, and overly energetic. In his own element, Noah was used to being the tireless one, but he and Iggy had been constructing a curious brew of vital and boring — and here, it was Iggy who never shut up. Noah didn’t have the head for it, and Iggy didn’t take dissenting opinions for an answer.

  “She’s been looking for God in the machine,” Iggy went on, “so it’s your job to give it to her. Not for a long time, but eventually. The rest of us will be around Alexa after you’re gone. We’ll keep cajoling and nudging her deeper into her faith with the excellent tool of mockery. When it’s time, Alexa will need a way to connect the dots and follow the breadcrumbs. If you’ve used O tools to do what we need you to do, she’ll see those tools’ hallmarks…and then the jig will be up.”

  Iggy stopped pacing and looked at Noah. Then, with an air of chastising, he said, “Do you have any idea how tricky it is, in a story, to lead a character to realize something without actually telling it to him?”

  “No,” said Noah, “considering the storyteller is in control.”

  Iggy laughed as if Noah had told an obvious joke. Then, seeming to consider the matter closed, he said, “I’m not a tech guy. This is your ball, your court, your everything. Define the problem for me. And don’t lean on O’s mined user data as your solution.”

  Noah sat up. “Mindbender is tricky in a very specific way. We’ve been able to interpret and reproduce most of the electrochemical impulses from a brain. That part isn’t terribly difficult, and a lot of the same technology is already live on Crossbrace. So it’s just copying data. The problem is what I think of as a dislocation paradigm.”

  “Mmm-hmm. That’s the philosophy stuff.”

  Noah considered splitting hairs ag
ain, but Iggy hadn’t understood the difference the first time and probably wouldn’t now.

  “Sort of. It’s a question of which mind is really the mind. If I’ve duplicated my mind online, there’s…” Noah paused. This part made him uncomfortable. He’d never been religious, but working on Mindbender made him wonder if he maybe always had been. “There’s something that seems determined to only recognize one or the other mind as primary, but not both.”

  “In other words, as long as you’re using your mind and soul and spirit within your earthbound body, the Mindbender mind you’ve copied onto Crossbrace — ”

  “Onto The Beam.”

  Iggy rolled his eyes as if the difference wasn’t crucial, which of course it was. “As long as the mind in your head is still in use, someone out there keeps treating the other as an archive. Just files, and nothing more.”

  “Right.”

  “You know, I have a doctor I should introduce you to.”

  Noah sat up.

  “Real old-world kind of guy. Works in a castle.”

  Noah sat back then rolled his eyes again.

  “Name’s Frankenstein. He’ll give your Crossbrace brain the spark of life.” Then, when Noah didn’t react favorably, Iggy slouched and added, “And you think Alexa can help? Alexa Mathis. The erotic writer turned porn mogul.”

  “She was gathering biometric and behavior data since before she hooked up with the rest of the Six and formed O. Since then, that’s what the company does: gathers user data. Did you ever hear the adage about how McDonald’s is actually a real estate company?”

  “No.”

  “O’s like that. They’re a data company, and sex just happens to be the most lucrative thing to sell — once the data shows you what people want. Innovation at O has always outstripped Quark’s in highly focused areas because it’s directly driven by things O can manufacture and sell. O’s profile aggregates and predictive models are the best out there. Because here’s the thing: Some parts of our Mindbender uploads do light up, as if parts of the upload are willing to consider themselves independent. So what we need is a way to figure out what makes those parts special, and that’s what I’m hoping O’s information can show us.”

  “Independent parts of an upload? Isn’t the idea to have one cohesive mind, not a bunch of little bits of intelligence, like random AI?”

  Noah shook his head. He’d thought so for a long time, too, but as usual, breakthroughs tended to come when assumptions were tossed out the window. Inside a human head, the brain’s wetware had to be kept in one central place. But in computing, power had always come from distributed parallel processing. As early as the Internet days, even human tasks hadn’t been immune to the same idea. Recaptcha and mechanical turk had proved that huge groups of individual people, used efficiently, could parallel-process large tasks in no time if enough people shared the load.

  Processing in pieces wasn’t the problem. The trick was in perfecting the system. You needed an efficient way to break a whole into pieces then a reliable way to bring those pieces together in the end.

  “It’s so much harder to maintain the integrity of an archive — and by ‘archive,’ I mean a discreet mind that used to live in a discreet skull without other minds touching it — than it is to allow that archive to fragment and live in bits that communicate with each other.”

  Iggy frowned. “You want to upload your mind…then let it break apart?”

  “It’s the way the network wants to work. ‘All for one, and one for all,’ in a way. Trying to create discreet clusters not only violates entropy, which moves much faster in the new world — ”

  “You mean online.”

  “Right. It not only violates entropy; it’s also just totally inefficient. Fragmentation isn’t the problem so long as you have a way of keeping track of all the pieces.” There was more, but Iggy wasn’t technologically inclined. And there was something else, too: Just as intelligence moved faster if it was allowed to work in parallel chunks, Noah was loath to put 100 percent of his trust in Iggy’s hands. There were parts of this plan that only Noah should know existed, for insurance.

  For example: Iggy shouldn’t know that one piece of the fragmented puzzle (the master cypher, which unlocked the code) actually needed go into another person’s mind entirely rather than being stored with Noah’s. Or that another piece (the coalescence engine, which showed the pieces how to defragment and reform) would need to be stored inside yet another.

  But for Iggy’s purposes, this was good enough. A smart man always kept a back door open, and aces up his sleeves.

  Noah stood from the couch, crossed to Iggy’s bar, and opened a crystal decanter of scotch. He smelled it. Noah barely drank, but liquor’s scent was intoxicating.

  “I need O’s user data,” Noah said, restoppering the bottle, “because with a large enough data pool, I can model mind uploads, predict outcomes, and run experiments. If I know Alexa, O has probably done some of the analysis already. You’ve hear the way she talks about sifting her sex workers’ key talents so O can build their avatars. It really is religious with her. But an avatar…why, that’d be most profitable for O if it truly resembled a human mind. When you think about it, Iggy, O growing an avatar from user data is a hell of a lot like what we’re trying to do with Mindbender.”

  Iggy snickered. “No wonder Alexa believes. But the things that make her able to figure some of this out for herself make her more important as a believer and a future ally, not someone who’s in on the story’s truth from the start.” Iggy shook his head. “I’m telling you, Noah: O’s data is off limits, and we cannot tell Alexa what we’re up to. Trust me on this. You’ll need to find another place to get your mind data.”

  “Where the hell am I going to find that large a pool of intelligence data?”

  Iggy tapped his chin. Noah watched him then turned his search inward. The issue mattered, and Iggy was strategic enough to understand. At first (and maybe for a long time), making Mindbender click would only matter to Noah West. But once the model was proven, anyone with means would be able to upload, live digitally, even build new bodies for themselves and create utopias in the sky to live like gods. Until then, official word even among Panel would need to be that Mindbender had met a dead end. Iggy, out of them all, was patient enough to keep the secret and wait.

  “What about Respero?” Iggy said.

  “Respero?”

  “You’re the computer guy. Would that work?”

  “Would what work? I don’t even understand the question.” Noah blinked hard. Maybe he understood it after all. And worse: He wasn’t nearly as repulsed as he should be because Iggy’s off-the-cuff suggestion was right. It fit the bill far better than O’s data pool ever could.

  “Never mind,” said Iggy. “It was just a thought.”

  Noah held up a finger. “No, that could work. A Respero chamber is essentially just an evaporator. Who do we know in Respero? High up.”

  “Everyone.” Iggy laughed. “You do know the strings that Panel can pull, right, Noah?”

  “Okay. Then we start immediately.”

  “Start what?”

  “Start on a new Respero unit design.” Noah began pacing, now making Iggy look stationary. He’d need to entangle the changes with patents and decoy technology so that anyone who cared to investigate would believe the new units were merely enhanced reclamation chambers. “Two-stage cycle. The second is evaporation, same as now. But the first is a high-bandwidth Fi upload.” He tapped his chin. “This won’t be easy. Can I talk to Eli?”

  “Only if you want him figuring out the rest.”

  Noah paced. And thought. “Okay. I’ll push pause on Beam development to make time. The units won’t be able to upload that quickly, though, to get it in before the evaporation cycle begins. So we’ll need the subjects mapped beforehand.”

  “You mean just follow Respero cases around with scanners before their time comes, painstakingly making a brain map so the upload can go quickly?” Iggy made a
sarcastic smile. “I think they’d figure out something was up.”

  “More than that,” said Noah. “The cortex needs to be primed to create the map. So we’ll also need subjects reflecting during the scan.”

  “Reflecting?”

  “Thinking about their pasts. Reliving memories.”

  “So in the hours before their deaths,” Iggy said, frowning faux-thoughtfully, “you want state-mandated euthanasia victims to look through photo albums and remember the good times. While being scanned. Sure. That’s easy.”

  Noah’s mind was churning, pieces falling into place. If this could be done, Respero could be revitalized from the ground up. New units in every Department of Respero would, with proper maps made ahead of time and multiple overlapping scanners working in parallel, be able to conduct Mindbender uploads in the seconds before the subject was evaporated. Uploads made in such a rush would be messy, and that was a problem because Noah’s own experiments proved that even meticulously collected uploads tended to crumble. But hundreds of people were Respero’d every day in the NAU, so the pool of uploaded minds would rapidly grow. Within a year, even accounting for losses due to rushed uploads, Respero would create a database larger than anything O could possibly have.

  Once the database was formed, Noah could experiment all he wanted. Respero subjects were officially dead and gone, and nobody went looking for them. With hundreds of thousands of new minds to sift every year, Noah suddenly felt confident that it was all just a game of numbers. He could suss out what made some archives stick and others fall apart. His estimates right now predicted that at current failure rates, only 0.002 percent of minds would be able to maintain the level of data integrity required for Mindbender viability. But given the numbers involved, Respero would still give him plenty of success stories to choose from — many solid minds he could study to learn how to make it work.

  Noah looked at Iggy, who was still waiting for an impossible answer. In order for a quick upload in the Respero chamber to have any chance of holding together, the machine would need a neural map. And in order to get a complete neural map, scanners would need hours of deep-memory activity to lead the mapping software in the right direction.