The Beam: Season Two

by Sean Platt

  Leah entered the barn and, casting a glance at Missy, looked one final time at her handheld’s screen. She saw the pings but couldn’t even open them. A ping only delivered a header. It was a notification and nothing more. Each was tied to a message (a ping had to be about something, after all), but she couldn’t access any of the messages without a connection. But the messages themselves were only part of the issue. If the matter was as urgent as it seemed to be, she might need video or port-to-port communication, and she couldn’t get that here.

  She slid Missy’s saddle onto her back and mounted up then nudged the horse onto the trail toward Bontauk.

  Almost two hours later, Missy walked into the back end of Vance Pilloud’s overgrown field, and Leah, on her back, guided the horse around the fence remnants and toward the house’s shell. Leah looked at the place with its few standing walls and couldn’t suppress a chill. The last time she’d been here, she’d knocked down a barrier inside Crumb’s head — now York’s head — that had felt as fragile as Pilloud’s old walls.

  She found the FiGlass line where she’d dropped it after unplugging from Crumb’s hat in panic. It was in an untidy jumble, completely open to the elements. She hadn’t been thinking; she’d only been trying to get Crumb away so she could hopefully save him.

  She picked up the line, brushed dirt from the coupler, and blew on it. Satisfied, she plugged the end into her handheld. Immediately, the device lit up, its screen coming alive. It was a sort of Frankenstein moment for Leah every time she plugged it in. Handhelds weren’t supposed to have hardwire ports, but Leah had needed one more than once. She had a hard time believing the Beam AI (or AI in the handheld; she wasn’t sure if it had its own resident nanos) stood tall and declared “IT’S ALIVE!” whenever she plugged in her jury-rigged monster of a device, but Leah liked to imagine it anyway. It added to her mental image of lightning striking around her, illuminating the day.

  As the connection established, the text color within the pings changed from gray to black. Leah clicked on the first one.

  Her mail app opened and showed an encrypted message in her inbox. Before reading it, her eye was drawn toward the I/O history at the bottom, where a long list of pings was listed. Several dozen new pings had arrived between the time she’d lost her connection on the trail to the compound and now, and she saw them lined up like eager soldiers. A quick glance confirmed what she’d already suspected — that every one of the pings pertained to this same message. Someone wanted very badly for her to see it.

  Leah cleared her ping history and, before reading, used her finger to fling one of the notices toward the top of her screen. Let her tormenter get the return ping. It was shorthand for, “I’m on it, so hold your fucking horses.”

  This done, Leah read the message.

  n33t —

  have uncovered s/thng you need to hear to do with shift and your post abt party affiliations. reply.

  shadow

  “Shadow?” Leah squinted at the screen.

  She remembered her post on the Null forum about Enterprise and Directorate Party affiliation and how the Senate always seemed to equilibrate after Shift regardless of which way things went, but the message didn’t make much sense. Her point was that the Senate had the power it wanted regardless of which party had majority stake, and that Enterprise and Directorate Senate initiatives really weren’t as different as people pretended. It was a hardly novel or profound thought, and Leah had written it with a feeling that she was recapitulating the history of politics like a pretentious poseur. Politicians looking out for themselves regardless of their declared stance. What else was new?

  Re-reading the message, Leah found herself assaulted with conflicting sensations. The first (hardly fair or on point, but the strongest within her) was a loss of respect for the famous Beam vigilante. The message wasn’t exactly time-sensitive, making the constant pinging feel obsessive. It also seemed inappropriate given that the two of them had never interacted directly. It was almost unheard of to interact directly in the Null community, given how paranoid the group was. But now, not only had Shadow messaged her (and it was the real Shadow; she could tell by the authentication token); he’d then ceaselessly pinged her about the message. She found herself transported back to her teens, when she’d been courted by several awkward would-be boyfriends. They’d been like this when she’d expressed less-than-intense interest in them: both pathetic and desperate.

  Leah’s other immediate impression about the message was that even if Shadow was being a little pathetic, he seemed to think that his issue was one of great importance. The gravity he’d put behind it made it feel like a hot potato.

  Leah felt conflicted. Really, she felt almost caught. Being n33t gave her an unassailable wall of protection from her true identity, but still Shadow’s direct contact made her feel naked. She wanted to be read-only, posting but not being queried. But then, if she didn’t want to engage, why was she active within Null in the first place?

  She looked down at the message, reading it again.

  Who was Shadow? He could be a plant. Or NPS. He claimed to move constantly to evade detection, and his messages were filled with anti-establishment rhetoric. He’d been railing about the Ryans last Leah had seen, and something about an employee of Isaac’s. He said a lot of questionable things about important and popular people, but did that really mean he believed them? Was he truly an irritant on the Beam’s underbelly as Leah herself was, or was he an agent? He might not even be real. He might be autonomous AI. He could be a Beam cleric. There would be no way to know without either meeting him or deciding, on faith, to trust him…but Leah would never meet him in person because she didn’t know if she could trust him.

  She pulled up the encryption patch on her handheld, verified that her access point would be masked, and replied.

  what? hmb.

  It was the most noncommittal, borderline brush-off reply she could make, but noncommittal was as far as Leah was willing to go. Asking the simplest of inquiries then simply telling Shadow to hit her back with a reply would put the ball in his court. It didn’t commit her at all, and there was nothing in the message that even NPS could object to or pin on her. He was the one who wanted to play? Fine. Then he could be the first to show his hand.

  The reply was instant, as if Shadow had been repeatedly refreshing his inbox. Based on the obnoxious nature of his pings, he probably was.

  have information on nicolai costa as in my page posts. need to disrupt.

  Leah looked at the message, annoyed. They were like two blushing teenagers, each unwilling to lean in and go for that first kiss. Disrupt what? What information about Nicolai Costa? She vaguely recognized the ethnic-sounding name as the one he’d been going on and on about across both Null and his own page, but it otherwise had no meaning to her. She replied:

  you contacted me. spit it out.

  Not twenty seconds later, a new message popped into Leah’s handheld. She wasn’t even sure how he’d had enough time to receive her mail, read it, type a reply, and send it back. The Beam’s processing of simple mail was basically instant, but each of them was sending messages through a car wash’s worth of scrubbing that required a second or three on each end. Shadow seemed too eager, too quick.

  hard to explain. found beam id tracker designating secret upper class of society, called beau monde, again as in my post. stories about it never make beam headlines, votes are being suppressed, getting signs that headlines and shift are being manipulated. need to test with scientific method. (tmwsd)

  Leah reached the end of the message just in time, seeing the classic paranoid hallmark “tmwsd” (a callback to an old video series that stood for “this message will self destruct”) just as the attachment cannibalized the mail and left her inbox empty. Leah would have liked to read the message again just to make sure she fully understood it. Something more than vaguely understood ideas of Beam Headlines and Shift being manipulated.

  Not that any of it was news. Clearly, Beam Head
lines were being manipulated. She’d read Shadow’s page posts on the topic and had participated in many Null forum threads about it. There was no surprise or shock to it; Beam Headlines was the most visited page on the entire network, and there were thousands of so-called systems out there about how to game the subpages and get your story’s (usually your for-profit venture’s stories) headline to the top of those subpages. It had been clear for a while that Quark or some other body was working hard to reverse the gaming of headlines even in subpages and local subpages because they wanted the results to be as relevant, as organic, and as true to life as possible. Algorithms operating behind the visible vote counts could only be theorized about, but the days of hiring vote farming companies to send moneymaking scams to the top of the charts were long gone.

  The front page, unsurprisingly, seemed to be watched more closely. There were many in Null who found the idea of anything other than votes affecting the rankings repugnant and intolerable, but Leah didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Right now, it was true that all of the pre-Shift rioting and demonstrations were what people cared about most, and they were certainly the stories that were being organically voted onto the first page and into the top slots. She’d seen Shadow’s posts about trying to vote up stories on his pet term “Beau Monde,” but of course nobody cared about a supersecret nut job’s obsession as much as they cared about the five thousand-person parade two days ago that had turned into a burning party in Brooklyn, and how the riot police had been forced to knock hundreds of people down using not just slumberguns, but eventually an Oxygen Bandit force field bubble. So what if the algorithms were kicking “Beau Monde” stories down into the hundreds, many pages back? It simply didn’t matter, in Leah’s opinion.

  But before she replied, she thought of the destructed message’s last lines. Shadow had claimed that Shift, not just Beam Headlines, was being manipulated. He’d mentioned the scientific method, which is how Null spoke about experiments they conducted within systems. The method was always the same. As in the classic scientific method, hackers made a hypothesis then conducted an experiment to see if that hypothesis was correct. In Null, the “experiments” were always disruptive, like cutting open a pithed frog to find out what made it tick.

  Leah made herself comfortable on the wood flooring, looked at her handheld’s screen, and sighed. Thanks to Pilloud’s FiGlass connection, she had plenty of bandwidth for a video call. She could even plug herself in so her avatar could meet his in a low-res simulation, but she wanted an arm’s distance between them. If Shadow was really managing to find members of his so-called Beau Monde via their Beam IDs as he claimed on his page, Leah didn’t want to chance what he might be able to find out about her through an avatar. Because really, who could find Beam IDs? One answer was extremely gifted and/or well-connected diggers and hackers. Shadow could be one of those, but two others who could find Beam IDs — clerics and NPS agents — seemed equally likely.

  She replied:

  hit me in diggle

  Leah swiped away from mail and opened the Diggle app. Diggle had been developed by a Null named ZION (it was amazing how many members of a supposedly anonymous community couldn’t resist taking credit where credit was due, Leah/n33t and Shadow included) and bundled the code from scrambled mail communication into a transparent open-source chat environment. Each message, even within an exchange, was threaded through a handful of routing servers with co-optable space and re-routed based on a rotating cypher that Diggle essentially tossed back and forth to itself like a lone person juggling from one hand to the other. The resulting communication was faultlessly secure and based on NPS-level cryptology, but the keys were generated and exchanged within Diggle on the fly then exploded after use.

  If Shadow was on mail now and Leah was on mail now, there was no reason not to streamline the process and do it in real time.

  Leah inputted the coded mail identifier from Shadow’s last message into Diggle and waited. Moments later, the same node, as per protocol, popped a message at her:

  > yt?

  Leah looked at the “you there?” prompt, felt vulnerable, and replied anyway. She posted extensively on the Null forums, tagged with her handle as if begging someone to follow her breadcrumbs. A walled Diggle chat wasn’t any more dangerous.

  >> yeah I’m here whats up

  He replied, and suddenly Leah found herself following along. She kept trying to allow Shadow to impale himself more than she was impaling herself, but as the dialogue unfolded, the dance grew too awkward, and her guard began to fall.

  > i have to trust you

  >> ??

  > i need help and don’t know if I can trust you. don’t have a choice

  >> oooookay…

  > you follow about nicolai costa?

  >> saw the posts

  > his connection was off all day yesterday. not down, off. he was there, was off for hours. i started digging. he met isaac ryan at the border. hes from w.e., came over in 30s

  >> i don’t know anything about him or where hes from.

  > italy.

  >> ok

  > last group over before borders closed. i think i.r. was waiting for him for something

  >> so what

  > found another trailing code while looking for beau monde. costa has it. found a few others who have it. not beau monde code, but has a lot of the same strings. looks like there’s a code dongle that serves as an authenticator, meshes with code quark is thought to bake into cs trackers.

  Leah stopped and thought. It wasn’t universally agreed upon that City Surveillance had baked any sort of recognition criteria into its trackers beyond those used (obviously) to keep an eye out for overt criminal activity. There was no evidence at all and the system seemed to be unhackable, but Null acted as if it were an absolute truth because Null was paranoid. The theory was that before you crossed a street, City Surveillance knew your number of jaywalking tickets and whether they should watch you with one eyebrow raised. Outrage followed the proposition, with shouts that “the system” and “the man” were judging people guilty in advance of evidence. As with most of Null’s rants, though, Leah didn’t see the big deal. Did these people think that a body called “City Surveillance” wasn’t judging everything people did within the core network anyway?

  But what Shadow had just said about the authenticator code was a relatively new theory that had been gaining popularity within the community. The idea was that certain people, when scanned, caused the CS trackers to do the opposite of what other tags did, essentially prompting the snoopers to look away. Something tied to these people’s IDs, the theory went, was giving them a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  >> you’re saying costa is…what?

  > tracked like the others. but it’s different and subtle. if I had to guess id say he doesn’t know hes being given a pass

  >> paranoid. i don’t believe the code shit

  > do you believe that there’s an upperclass? beau monde

  >> theres always an upper class

  > systematized though. not like an old boys network but in the network itself.

  >> conspiracy. but maybe. i don’t like to lump in with null. its why i identify myself.

  Leah looked at the last line, wondering if she was opening herself too far. It was true, though. Null’s inherent anonymity could make them very powerful, but it was also a crutch. The smallest and most cowardly person could act like the biggest shit when hidden behind a Guy Fawkes mask. It became hard to tell the sincere revolutionaries from the hangers-on, the bullies, and those who joined movements because they weren’t secure enough to contribute on their own.

  > just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  Leah chuckled.

  >> so what do you want to do about it?

  > we need to tinker. again I have to decide to trust you. if you’re nps I’m fucked.

  >> im not nps

  > good. we need to meet irl.

  Leah felt her heartbeat
quicken. That was out of the question. Shadow was clearly in DZ, and Leah went into the city all the time, but Null wasn’t a group who got together “in real life” for coffee or tea. They were faceless for many reasons, and a deep suspicion that their closest compatriots might be NPS plants was just one of them.

  >> not happening

  > i can’t explain over diggle

  >> try

  > sigh. shift is being manipulated. too much to say. i have an idea to disrupt it. okay? see if enterprise and directorate are really holding hands. come and arrest me. GE?

  The last bit meant “good enough?” — roughly equivalent to a pouting reply like “you happy now?” But it almost was good enough, Leah had to admit. Diggle messages all self-destructed after ten exchanges or sixty seconds, but that wouldn’t matter if Leah were an agent. She’d have screencapped what he’d just typed with any one of many visual add-ons, and suddenly NPS would become much more interested in the underground personality known as Shadow. They were looking for him now, but only with a few groping fingers. If his last message fell into the wrong hands, The Beam could be made to empty its pockets, shaking him out as if his protections were nothing. It was his way of putting himself at her mercy in an effort to engender her trust.