The Beam: Season Two

by Sean Platt

  “How can you be annoyed by something and not know why?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you’re saying it was…like a committee or something.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “And you were on it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know anyone who was on it, other than Noah?” Again, Leah slapped her pack. “Anyone from the journal, that you worked with?”

  “I can’t figure it out.” He shook his head, agitated. “I don’t know. I almost do, but I can’t get at it.”

  “Well, what did they do? Maybe you’re thinking of Quark? Could we look up the Quark board of directors at the time, and…”

  “I don’t know!” York blurted.

  Leah looked stunned. York raised an apologetic hand, and she returned a dismissive gesture, neither of them saying a word or needing to. York felt one more set of internal controls crumble as he reset. His mind was full of holes, his temper showing through all of them.

  “It’s not the Quark board. It’s maddening to think about. I have memories of emotions, but not the memories themselves.”

  Tentatively, making her body language helpful rather than prying, Leah said, “Could you say…you know…what kinds of emotions?”

  “Annoyed, like I said. Maybe frustrated. Resentful? But also awed. I remember awe.”

  “Maybe you were awed by Noah.”

  York nodded his head slowly. “I definitely was. But this was more. So was I awed by the group itself? By someone in it? I seem to remember a sense of discovery. Finding something, and being amazed.” He shook his head, the gesture almost spiteful, as if he wanted to punish his brain by rattling his skull. “Damn. You can’t imagine how obnoxious this is. If this is what it’s like to get old and go senile, I want to die young.” He looked down at his wrinkled hands. “Oops, too late for that.”

  On the seat beside Leah, the handheld’s screen lit. Her eyes flicked toward it. She slipped the phone back into her pocket. Again, York decided to say nothing. If the diary and his piecemeal memories were any indication, he was largely responsible for Leah’s dependence on the network. Same for the entire NAU.

  The rest of the trip passed mostly in silence. The quiet felt deliberate — different from a natural absence of discussion. York felt himself holding his lips because he had nothing worthwhile to say (nothing that wouldn’t spin him in frustrating circles and rile him up) and got the impression that Leah was trying to avoid salting his memory-related wounds. She excused herself twice to use the bathroom, but the trips were too close together for legitimate visits, and she returned wearing the same frustrated look that he himself felt. He guessed her mobile was to blame for the obsession, but didn’t want to ask. Each of them had a thorn in their shoe, and drawing attention to either now would only remind them about something they were trying to let go.

  They switched trains then rode the second to the end of the line in silence. They found Missy still in her stall, but two adults riding double would be an uncomfortable squeeze. Still, the weather was nice, so they set out on foot. York didn’t mind. He’d been bedridden for a few days after Leah had blown his gaskets, and even though he’d had some time to get back to his feet, his legs still felt slower and heavier than they used to. Like it or not, life as Crumb had kept him in good shape. Crumb had been crazy, but Crumb had without question been an outdoorsman. He’d lived in a mostly tech-dark compound, had spent his days outdoors, and, York suspected, probably slept outside a good chunk of the time. Crumb could hike into the clearing on foot, so it was Stephen York’s duty to make himself do the same.

  By the time they’d walked down the road between the fenced-in pastures fronting the compound (the gate where Crumb once stood guard screaming out with familiarity in York’s mind), his legs felt like noodles. He wanted to get somewhere comfortable, plop into a chair, and stay seated for hours, or days.

  But before he could, an overweight man with a lined face and salt-and-pepper stubble emerged from a hut and gawked at their approach, mostly ignoring Leah. His wide eyes were fixed on York, and his mouth was hanging open like a door on a broken hinge.

  York found himself recalling Times Square. He remembered milling through a crowd, feeling himself locked down and unable to control his ranting. He remembered a contingent of approaching police. It was as crystal clear as any memory, as if it had been cut from the foggy backdrop and polished to a shine. He could see every detail. He could see how the man in front of him had aged, but how his hard, steely eyes had stayed the same. And as in the memory, he could see the duality in those eyes. They were hard. But soft, too, beneath the surface.

  “Holy shit,” said the man, walking closer.

  “You’re Dominic,” York said. “Capt. Dominic Long.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure how I know that.”

  “Holy shit,” said Dominic, closing the last of the distance between them. He grasped York’s arms just above the wrists, like a parent reuniting with a child who’s been away, and who’s grown in their absence.

  “You saved my life,” said York, memory blooming like a flower. “You’re the reason I didn’t go to Respero.”

  “Holy fucking shit, Crumb,” said Dominic, shaking his head. “What’s happened to you?”

  Chapter 3

  Sam couldn’t get comfortable.

  He was sitting in a Starbucks chair, in a private cubicle near the back, using his own laptop canvas rather than one of the Starbucks access points. He didn’t need coffee (hypercaffeine made his obsessiveness and distractibility worse), but he’d accidentally ordered a full-octane brew anyway when he’d come in, flustered for no good reason, and had sipped it compulsively once it arrived through the Warp delivery table. The mug was now beside him, mostly empty. He could feel the drug running around inside his head, bouncing between skull and cortex.

  After sending the Null forum message to Integer7, Sam had lapsed into a panicky stew, alternating between feeling that he was doing what needed to be done and feeling that he’d tossed a lit match into a pool of fossil fuel.

  Something was fishy with Shift. He needed help to get inside, and that meant adding flies to the ointment. The only body large enough and anarchical enough to disrupt Shift was Null. Getting them to move would require the arm-in-arm efforts of both Shadow and Integer7. And so back in the park, he’d taken a necessary step in contacting the man (or woman, or kid in his basement, or brain in a vat, or whatever), but it’s not like Integer7 was stable. Integer7 had a history of saying some pretty crazy shit. Just like how Shadow had his own history of saying crazy shit.

  “It’s cool, man.” Sam shifted in his chair, trying to convince himself. “Be cool.”

  But no matter what Sam said to himself, he refused to listen. He couldn’t be cool. He’d never been cool…except when he was Shadow — because Shadow was always in control. Shadow was everything that Sam wanted to be. Shadow said what he meant and never thought about it twice. Shadow could stand (digitally) in front of a large audience and lead them boldly forward. Shadow didn’t burn soup or let baths overflow. And if Sam had to guess, Shadow probably didn’t have to convince himself, out loud and alone in a Starbucks cubicle, that everything was cool.

  It had been three hours since he’d messaged Integer7. After sending the message, Sam had immediately switched over to his masked mail account and had waited for a reply to arrive, any messages there having been routed through six different anonymous remailers. The page refreshed automatically, but Sam still clicked reload over and over. This went on for 120 seconds, and then the panic started.

  Integer7 always responded immediately to queries. Clearly, he’d gotten the message but thought that Shadow was crazy. Or he thought Shadow was a problem and was quietly rallying his own Null group to bomb Shadow’s page at its newly relocated address, to expose him for the insurgent (or fraud) that he was. Somehow, Sam began to feel, Integer7 even knew who Shadow was. He knew that Shadow wasn’t a large, intimidating r
evolutionary with a chiseled jawline. He knew he was actually a scrawny kid in his twenties — a Generation N with glasses and tattoos that fooled nobody into believing he was older.

  The scenario opened inside Sam’s imagination like a blighted blossom.

  Once Integer7 figured out who Shadow was, he’d of course start pulling Sam Dial’s news stories from his days with the Sentinel, collecting vital information to use against him. Or (and this was far more interesting) perhaps Integer7’s Null troopers were altering those stories to make them something new and profane — or authoring new stories as Sam, verified with Sam’s own Beam ID — so that soon, Sam Dial would be the subject of ridicule and remonstration. A target. A whipping boy. Ousted and alone.

  Or perhaps Integer7 was a deadhead NPS agent, hiding on the Null forum and waiting for Shadow to show his true colors so he could pounce. That one kind of made sense. Everyone was after Shadow, trying to find out who he was, where he was, and how to stop him. Leave it to Sam to blow his own cover.

  Sam forced himself to stop pacing the small room’s floor. This was stupid. His paranoia was stupid. It was the hypercaffeine.

  Renting the private Starbucks cubicle had cost him a small fortune relative to his current finances, and he couldn’t afford it at all. Starbucks connections ran the gamut from open-floor Fi in the middle of the public room to carrels, partitioned environments, and private rooms like the one he was in now. Prices climbed steeply once you could close a door because people who insisted on privacy were usually here to beat off. Sam could even see the port where you could plug in the dongle for a wireless orifice attachment. Or, for the ladies, a wireless thruster.

  The thought of ladies coming to Starbucks and getting a private Beam room for a rendezvous with projected porn and a thruster peripheral was arousing for maybe two seconds. Sam felt himself stand at momentary attention, and for those seconds, it was nice to have a respite from fear. But it didn’t last, and soon after Sam was back to being a paranoid man in a sealed room, pacing like a caged animal.

  His laptop was open, along with his mail window.

  Three fucking hours.

  He could have gone home. Probably should have gone home. Home was paid for by the month. But in spite of Sam’s many precautions, he’d begun to suspect that his apartment wasn’t secure. He was registered there as Sam Dial, if anyone followed his trail far enough and had the access required to look. How could he not be registered as himself? That’s who he was; it was what the ID in his body read to scanners; it’s the identity The Beam paired to his 2-D image when his landlord had looked him up to rent the place. Shadow was a master of disguise and evasion, but Sam, on the other hand, was a few steps removed from an intrepid reporter banging out 10-credit stories. There were places you could get an apartment with no scan and no questions asked outside of DZ, but Sam was always in an ironic catch-22: he had to avoid The Beam yet had to stay right in the middle of its nest — in the heart of the city — if he wanted to be able to do his work.

  If someone like Integer7 discovered that Shadow was actually Sam, how hard would it really be to find Sam’s apartment, hack in, and then watch or listen to everything he did? Was it really impossible to believe that Null had ways to hack his encrypted, scrambled signal and see what he was looking for on The Beam?

  Yes, of course that was impossible.

  But also no, it wasn’t.

  Sam had gone to the park so he could be in the open. But if you stayed in any one place too long, it seemed possible that someone could triangulate your position.

  So he’d moved from where he was sitting. Safer that way.

  Maybe there was a body that monitored all activity into and out of the Null forum. It almost made sense; NPS had tried before to shut them down but couldn’t pull the plug on the forum. They’d tried until it was declared unconstitutional, but even before the cease-and-desist, the forum had spoofed its existence, creating a doppelgänger of itself, like a hologram. NPS had stared directly at the forum and at its connection, had yanked, and then had found that contrary to everything they seemed to be seeing, the forum wasn’t really there. That had been one of Null’s great victories. Many memes had been birthed and circulated afterward, filled with lulz over the NPS’s stupidity and Null’s triumph.

  Maybe Sam was being paranoid.

  But could you ever be too careful?

  So Sam had gone to another section of the park but was unable to find a location with a sufficiently protected rear so he couldn’t be approached from behind. He’d eventually gone to another park entirely and settled beside a kids’ jungle gym. He’d obsessively watched his inbox until several women began to eye him and their adjacent playing children, likely assuming Sam to be a freak or a pedophile.

  So he’d returned to Central Park, putting his back to a dry fountain.

  That hadn’t lasted.

  Back and forth, he’d hauled his bag. The thing was unwieldy and heavy, and he got looks whenever he opened it. Everyone else in the world accessed The Beam on native canvases or on some sort of mobile, but Sam didn’t trust native canvases, and the anonymizer wouldn’t hook to a mobile. Besides, mobiles could be easily tracked. Laptop AirFi was harder to follow.

  Finally, he’d decided to cough up the money for a private booth at Starbucks. At least he’d be away from prying eyes. Sheltered by his anonymizer, he’d be invisible.

  There was a chance the Starbucks room might be watching his activity despite the company’s claims of privacy, but it was still safer than his apartment. Nobody knew that Sam Dial was in the booth because you didn’t have to be ID tagged to rent one. People balked at the idea of required ID for a booth. How could you rent a place to rub your parts if your ID was giving you away?

  Sam paced. And paced. And paced.

  Things were doubly troubling now.

  It had only taken Sam an hour to decide that Integer7 was 1) planning to betray him, 2) in federal custody with Sam soon to follow, or 3) a federal agent him(her?)self.

  So Sam went to Plan B, and reached out to n33t.

  n33t wasn’t as connected or well known as Integer7 by a long shot, but he was a regular on the Null forum who’d led some of the place’s most thriving, thoughtful discussions. Integer7 was unquestionably the best choice for what Sam needed, but n33t made for a solid number two. Most of the Null forum was immature humor, gross-outs, and inane exchanges and taunts (not to mention the many hilarious memes), so the fact that n33t, with his almost philosophical threads, managed to survive as a respected member of Null was impressive.

  Most members who tried to be serious (or, correspondingly, to steer an off-the-rails discussion in a sensible, mature direction) were called quills, but that didn’t happen with n33t. Sam had even seen someone come at n33t once, attacking one of his threads then watched as thousands of Null descended on the topic and assumed his defense.

  There was another thing about n33t that intrigued Sam. n33t used his screen name on the forum. As with anything else, all of n33t’s posts showed as being authored by “Null,” but while that couldn’t be changed, n33t signed every one of his posts, writing -=n33t=- at the bottom of each. Sam had seen others try that, but it never lasted. As a community, Null wanted to stay anonymous. For some reason, n33t alone had earned an exception. He seemed to have grabbed the community by the collar and demanded respect. Null, shockingly, had listened.

  But n33t, like Integer7, hadn’t replied to Sam’s message.

  It had now been two hours since Sam had first contacted n33t via the PM system. Only after sending both private messages (to both possible revolutionary assistants) had Sam thought to consider that he had maybe made a mistake and might be playing into the hands of the NPS or whoever was obviously after him.

  Maybe Integer7 wasn’t the problem. Maybe someone had compromised the Null PM system, and Sam, like a big idiot, had used it twice. Now he’d be nabbed for real. If only Integer7 had failed to respond, that would be one thing. But n33t too? Sam had contacted n33t be
fore, and n33t, like anyone else, had always responded immediately.

  “It’s cool. It’s cool. They’re just busy.”

  But that was absurd. How could they both be busy? Nobody waited this long to reply. A quarter hour was about as long as you could expect to wait for a reply to an asynchronous communication like text mail. A lot of people didn’t even bother with mail. Pretty much all of Generation N (N for “Natives”) had chips, and most of their parents had them as well. At this point in history, society had moved at least a few generations away from letting messages sit in inboxes, molding until someone finally happened upon them. Com chips were the most bargain-basement of upgrades, affordable even by the failed Enterprise living on the streets. People who couldn’t buy food had them, just like they had mobiles to ensure the chips always had a point of access. If Sam had been a typical kid, he probably wouldn’t even bother with mail. He’d do what most people did, tapping on mental doors only as a courtesy before using his Beam connection to enter. You could open a window to a friend while they were on the toilet these days, and no one seemed to mind. It’s not like you could see anything above the waist anyway, and the chips all knew to enter DND mode when clothes were off or sex was being had.

  Fifteen minutes was an eternity. Two and three hours were decades’ worth of time. And here Sam was, trying to reach two hackers — two Beam adepts, who spent their lives submerged — and hearing from neither.

  He sent a new ping to n33t. He’d just sent one two minutes ago (and one three minutes before that), but what the hell.

  It was too strange to be a coincidence. The only explanation was that something — or someone — had been compromised.

  NPS was probably coming after him right now. Raiding his apartment. He wouldn’t be able to go back. Where would he sleep? And what would they find that might incriminate him?