by Sean Platt
“Maybe Sam Dial Sam,” said the microfragment.
Sam slapped the microfragment. It was a digital projection and shouldn’t have been touchable, but Sam’s mind was finally clawing its way up. Unplugging from his old enhanced brain’s rote circuitry, from before he’d gone underground and become Shadow. The microfragment — possibly a representation of whatever had locked his mind into this loop — spun like an assaulted cartoon character.
“My name is Sam Dial, and I’m kicking your ass!” Sam shouted.
“Sam.”
“My name is Sam Dial, and I’m stuck in a hole!”
The microfragment started to pulse as if planning to respond, so this time Sam kicked at it. The something inside him gaining strength must have landed a kick too because the thing shot across the room, struck the wall, and made a stylized splat, complete with sound effect.
Giddy, Sam rushed forward then did a little dance in front of the assaulted microfragment. The loop wanted something unexpected? Sam could do unexpected.
He pushed his rear toward the slowly reassembling microfragment and gyrated.
“My name is Sam Dial, and I’m wagging my butt!”
A second wall fell away, again becoming white. There was a strange sucking sensation, and Sam, who’d been quite sure he was standing, found himself sitting in a molded Beam chair. He’d surely been here all along, but now he could see it. He could feel it, pressing into the butt he’d so recently wagged.
Sam looked around the room. Saw the room. Believed.
And it shattered, becoming nothing, and then he was again in his rented privacy carrel. The table beside him, as he watched, delivered the latte.
Sam threw his hands in the air, knowing how ridiculous he’d look if anyone was watching. But they weren’t. And he didn’t care. And there was still time. Just as Ebenezer Scrooge realized at the end of Dickens’s tale, there was still time.
“My name is Sam Dial, and I finally got out!”
Sam expected the canvas to blip in acknowledgement, but instead the microfragment reappeared for a split second in his hazy inner eye. It seemed to say Sam Dial Sam Sam then was gone forever.
Sam bolted from the chair. Checked the time. Checked Beam Headlines to watch streaming video of the Respero fundraiser at Craig Braemon’s place, where Nicolai would be.
Something was going wrong. A commotion, which would let Sam sneak inside, just as the young woman had told him.
It wasn’t too late.
Sam ran. He watched a huge sum tick out of his account in his heads-up display — the fee for his rental. He pushed through the front door then ran and ran.
Chapter Five
Leonidas saw only the cloud.
All of his old augments had activated. Every single one. Just as all of the others’ augments and new add-ons had activated. It was laughable, with Leo’s current perspective, to think he’d ever believed himself dormant. And really, for as smart of a girl as Leah was, it was laughable that she’d thought her detector would be able to circumvent his programming. He’d felt the commands unlock one after the other: new knowledge coming to him like a string of epiphanies.
He didn’t need to understand how to reactivate the refurbishment nanos that would lubricate and restore composites in his Warrior’s Fist.
He didn’t need to understand how to reboot the hardware in his eye — which, come to think of it, he was pretty sure he’d had mostly scooped out when his nanobots were supposedly flashed.
The hardware understood enough to do the job. Or rather, the software understood enough to tell the hardware how to pick up where it had left off. Dead nanobots must have come alive; Leonidas had felt it like a shot of adrenaline. His old arms again felt young. His fist again felt strong. As the things re-tinkered the old configuration of his eye — not the same as it was, but improvising with what his body still had inside it — he’d again been able to see his heads-up display.
At that point, he’d begun to see the cloud. They were networked, so he’d pushed it out. All the old prison augments had a few nanobots still inside them, and of course those nanos had been reproducing, on an exponential curve, for hours. Now that the cloud fell upon them, Leonidas found that his will (his compulsion, his directive) belonged to the group. Leah’s limitations had snapped like nothing. Weapons had replenished. Bone had been stolen and fashioned into native shivs — appropriate given the add-ons’ prison origin. Those who’d had metal in their bodies would surely find it rerouted.
The intelligence took care of it all.
The cloud took care of it all.
The software — which felt to Leo like buried memories — easily stepped right over Leah’s barriers. It was of a higher mind, like Gaia’s Hammer had always been. Now they were all of a higher mind.
As the last of the group climbed through the hole they’d blown in the gathering’s floor, Leo’s tracker began to search. What had been an urge became a compulsion.
His target was here. Just as the Beam signature promised, York was here.
A man came at Leo with a firearm — something kept concealed for just such an emergency. It was a slamgun, not a slumber.
The man fired. Leo felt the sting of splitting skin, but the man had struck an under-skin component, nothing vital. He looked up from his blood-spattered, shredded shirt, staggering forward after rocking on impact, and met the man’s eyes.
Leo loosed the swarm.
Within seconds, the man was clutching his head. Grabbing his ears. Leo walked away, not caring to see the man’s eyes burst, which might happen. The swarm would do damage until vital signs ceased. Sometimes, that damage was invisible. Plenty of times, it wasn’t.
He marched forward. There was something happening onstage in the large room. He could see several well-dressed people fleeing after Scooter blew a hole in the wooden platform. Scooter fired again, and Leo watched a woman fall, but despite his compulsion and directive, Leo found his eyes drawn to a girl who’d been beside the woman. A girl who was now screaming as Scooter fired shot after shot — shots, which, it seemed, were flying right through the girl as if she wasn’t even there.
Leonidas knew her. Somehow, he knew her.
But the tracking arrow was blinking, and Leo felt himself wanting to turn. His fist clenched. His target was near. The signal was confused. It kept seeming to blink around. But he could still home in on it. He could still see it. And it was close.
Leonidas turned. He saw a woman who, in another life, had shared a garden with the man that Leonidas had temporarily become, after implantation and before activation. He seemed to recall that she’d specialized in growing carrots. Leo watched as she overloaded a nearby man, forcing her signal across The Beam and into his inputs.
York.
He hadn’t realized it until recently, but the need to find and end Stephen York had been beneath his skin for a long time, like an itch. And now was the time to scratch that itch.
A new blip. A fresh direction.
Leonidas turned, sensing the cloud. Screaming and shouting continued behind him.
He walked on, heavy metal ready for action.
Chapter Six
None of what Leah was seeing made sense.
All it was making right now was Leah nervous.
For most of Leah’s life, she’d been both a conscientious observer and an action taker. That, she’d always thought with a small amount of pride, was what had differentiated her from the other Organas. They talked about peace and simplicity and fighting The Man. But Leah, often with Leo’s help, actually fought. She’d found Null, then become a force within it — not as an anonymous drone like the rest, but as someone with a name and an online face. She’d gone to school to hone her hacker’s tools. While the other Organas discussed The Beam’s evils, Leah had got herself in front of a pair of Quark PD clerics then dropped nanobots and their keyhole AI behind the firewall. She’d used those nanobots to pop the other, more-content-to-braid-flowers-and-bitch-than-do-anything Organas out o
f NPS custody. Leah had taken it upon herself to dig deep, to snoop, and to eventually uncover the cabal’s transcript, pointing to some sort of bizarre assassination plot against…against Crumb, of all people.
If Leah had been like all the others, she’d have done dust, worn rainbow clothing, and maybe participated in an occasional sing-along. But she wasn’t, and never had been.
And yet right now, Leah had to admit there was nothing she could do.
The sensation was horrible. It was like being on the back of a screetbike driven by a maniac. What she saw on the small console screen made Leah’s heart skip beats, and yet her hands were tied. Someone else was driving this catastrophe, and she could do nothing as they headed toward the cliff — or into a growing fireball.
Leah paced the hotel room Leo kept in the city, her feet heedlessly kicking her small pile of belongings as she passed. She’d been here over a week and hadn’t spread much beyond her small circle around the couch. It was a decent metaphor for Leah in life: she’d always left a tiny footprint.
She picked up her handheld then reopened the Undercover app even though she already knew what she’d see. It was still all fragments. All noise. All chaos, as if the app wasn’t looking at The Beam at all but was instead facing a raw dump. It didn’t look like that on the surface; she could watch the canvas’s console and see that much. But the fragmentation made the entire sector feel like thin ice. One misstep, and anything could happen.
And none of it made sense.
She tried to ping Shadow. The ping returned an echo — an automated response proving that Shadow, wherever he was, had received it. After Dominic’s paranoia about Shadow, Leah had crawled through Undercover’s belly (before the app had begun showing nothing but garbage) and applied a temporary geotag. Shadow was here, in DZ, not far away, and on the move.
Shadow — whoever he was in life — had been in a Starbucks parlor for hours. Now he was rapidly moving toward the Braemon event, refusing to answer her ping.
When that made Leah feel an uncomfortable itch, she’d called Dominic. But the captain was nowhere to be found, so either The Beam obscured policemen’s locations beyond Leah’s abilities to find them or he was…well, dead. But she couldn’t hear or see any evidence of Dominic communicating with the event, so the idea of him being somehow hidden didn’t quite square. Wasn’t he supposed to be in charge of this whole thing? Wasn’t he the interim police commissioner? If so, why wasn’t he paying attention?
So Leah had called Leo. No dice there. Leo wasn’t visible, probably because Leah no longer knew what his Beam signature looked like now that he was carrying all that deactivated Beam-facing hardware. She’d deactivated most of it, but the network components were still up, and even the dead parts in the Organas were sort of noisy.
But Leah saw no Leo. No amorphous new collective stumbling through the city.
Where were the Organas?
Where was Leo?
Why was Shadow hauling ass toward the fundraiser? What business could he possibly have there?
And where the hell was Dom?
Feeling ridiculous — like a control freak robbed of her control, maybe — Leah had even tried to ping SerenityBlue. When Serenity hadn’t answered, Leah had gone snooping. But what she’d been able to see of Serenity had been somehow different. She’d felt different. And then Serenity had more or less vanished, too.
Leah paced, faster and faster. She picked up her handheld and sent Shadow a Diggle, tagged Urgent. Nothing came back, and on Leah’s display, the dot showing Shadow’s disintegrating tracer continued to move.
She should dose with her tiny remaining amount of Lunis. She should dive deep then try to make sense of the nonsensical mess she was seeing at the node that seemed to be forming in the core network. But there wasn’t time, and no way she’d be able to relax fully enough to let the drug do its meditative work.
Leah sat. Went to a wireframe. She overlaid her platform-stripping app and looked beneath the Beam-level language, under the architecture, down deeper than any programmer who valued her efficiency would bother to go. Leah zoomed in and out, removing and re-placing the stripping filter.
It almost looked like SerenityBlue was part of this. Almost, but not quite.
There was a halo around it all. Fragmentary code that carried many of the same quirks — either a programmer’s peculiar way of commenting his code or something the AI wanted to center on the same key identifier, like a Beam ID.
Bigger shards of something broken. To Leah, who still had some dust in her blood, these looked like pieces of a broken vase that someone was intent on trying to reassemble.
Leah couldn’t see the contents of what she assumed was Craig Braemon’s canvas, but she’d learned enough tricks to peek into the cycling buffers and see that one of them was vastly overloaded. There was an enormous amount of data in Braemon’s system, doing nothing but checking its own integrity, over and over again.
And there was something else, too. A file fragment that had been dragged away and was being drawn forward like driftwood toward a waterfall’s edge. A short primer sequence that someone seemed to have forgotten, sequestered in a different system. Leah had been watching that last one since she’d seen someone, somewhere, beginning to pick its lock — a hacker out there who wanted that code and was scratching at scabs, trying to free it.
Leah sat. Stood. Watched. Fretted.
She switched to Underbelly to watch the local Beam node shatter below the surface.
She looked at the map, at Shadow running toward the event he had no business attending. The event that…
“Oh, shit.”
Leah had been looking at everything but the obvious. The rest of the world only had one way to observe what Shadow was hightailing for, and Leah, whose nose had been buried in code, hadn’t thought to check.
She dragged open a new screen and tuned to Beam Headlines. The top five spots were all about the Respero fundraiser in DZ’s heart. Leah picked the top one — a video stream — then found herself watching a from-the-ground view of the event, shot by a unit that someone had dropped.
Leah saw the chaos and then something else.
Finally, she understood.
Chapter Seven
Violet watched the stage wall flash with the words:
Incoming call from:
JUST ANSWER NOW!!!
But this wasn’t her house, so whoever was calling, it wasn’t for her. Answering would be rude. And besides, Violet had other things to worry about.
The slamshots, fireballs, flashing blades, and general melee in front of her, for starters.
Her mother being dead, for another.
But as much as Violet knew how badly those things should upset her, she’d only had a few seconds of screaming terror before the moment had passed. Because this wasn’t real. If Mom was gone, she’d feel sad. But this was all too odd to be reality.
For one, no one in the chaotic room seemed to be able to touch her. Violet had been shot a few times, and a few Samaritans had tried to drag her off the stage after the well-dressed people had run away in a panic. But everything went right through her, as if she were a ghost.
And second, Violet was quite sure that she, herself, was dead. That had taken some getting used to, but part of her mind seemed elevated, as if she was looking down from below. That part of Violet (a part she didn’t remember from before her death; it seemed rather angelic) viewed things like Mom’s death as part of the natural cycle. It also didn’t have a problem with Violet being dead because that part of her had figured it out a long time ago, and made peace.
Third, she really did seem to be in two places at once. The sensation was like a dream she couldn’t shake off — but instead of falling apart in her mind like a normal dream, this one grew stronger.
She was herself, as she’d always been before she’d been wheeled into her Respero chamber and forced to say her final goodbyes. But she was someone else, too. Someone who had her own memories that Violet knew she
(as Violet, anyway) had never experienced.
There was a filthy man with a beard who’d been somehow very important.
There were children. Children that the other part of Violet thought of as Violet’s children, even though she had none and was barely old enough to marry.
Strangest of all, there was the man across the room intent on killing many people. Normally, Violet didn’t like people who killed others. But she liked this man. Somehow, in a way that went deep — below the killer, perhaps.
Violet stood. Her feet obeyed the wooden stage, as if she were actually walking on it. She went where others had fled, behind the curtain and down a set of two steps, her feet obeying the steps as well. She couldn’t feel anything, but that was okay. Her higher part said it was okay, normal, this was how it would be from now on. Integrated and split, but somehow still just a part of the natural order.
That part of Violet could also sense someone beside her, even though she was alone with only the sounds of chaos for company. It was a feeling like being squeezed between two overweight passengers on a mag train.
“Who’s there?” Violet’s voice, to her own ears, sounded present. But with nobody to hear, she couldn’t know if she’d made a sound.
Keep moving, a voice inside seemed to whisper.
Violet came out from behind the curtain, now moving into struggle and bloodshed, passing through all of it like a specter, looking for the deadly man with the gray braids.
Chapter Eight
Micah finally shook Natasha away when he realized he was essentially leading a conga line: Micah in the lead, Natasha holding his hand, and Isaac holding Natasha’s other hand. Jameson Gray had vanished. Good. A three-person conga line in the middle of a massacre was plenty, and Micah still wasn’t sure Jameson hadn’t caused all of this in some way, anyhow.
