by Sean Platt
“What is this about?” she said. “Is this Stanford’s doing?”
The Beamer held his hands up, his dark form watching her through the strange immersion visor. The last man’s skin was black, and amidst his dark clothing, he seemed to almost disappear.
“We were told to bring you in. That’s all I know.”
“Is that reality?”
“Yes!”
But it wasn’t, so Kai reached up with her free hand and pulled off the man’s visor.
“This is reality,” she said.
His eyes looked around, panicked. He looked like he was drowning. “My visor!” he yelled, scrabbling at her hand.
“You’re useless,” Kai said, then shot him in the chest and sent him into a snoozing heap in the corner.
Kai looked at the fallen Beamers, gun in hand and satisfied. Then she realized she was cold. She looked down to see that she’d never lowered her shirt and that she’d just defeated three assailants with her small tits out and swinging. Not her first time.
Kai composed herself, then sprinted down the hallway toward the stairs. She had no idea what had happened, but Doc’s vanishing act would have to wait. Either Stanford had turned them in or something equally shitty had gone down, but regardless, they were in trouble. More troops could be coming. DZPD could be coming. She’d have to grab Doc and go. They’d come in on foot, and that was unfortunate because it meant they’d have to leave on foot. Doing so cleanly if the cavalry was coming would take some fancy maneuvering.
Kai burst through the stairwell door on the ground floor, ran through the lobby, and dashed into the sunlit afternoon. Too late, she realized that the men in the hallway had brought friends. There were another three Beamers outside, hovering in front of the building on screetbikes. Each held their bike by one hand so that they could level their slumberguns with the other. Doc was nowhere.
Kai, facing another three-on-one and knowing her fists and feet wouldn’t help her unless she got closer, dropped her gun and held her hands in the air.
“Let’s discuss this,” she said.
But the Beamers, of course, were wearing visors and had seen everything that had happened upstairs. They didn’t want to trifle, bargain, or talk.
The front biker raised his gun and fired. Kai fell to the street.
Chapter 6
Kai woke in a bed, her head throbbing, her hands and feet shackled, presumably tethered to the bed she was lying on. The room was dark, with one light overhead. She heard a strange humming — a generator? Machinery in the next room? — and felt a warbling vibration, as if her mattress had been set atop an old petroleum engine. Consciousness came slowly. She could make no sense of what little she could see or feel. She knew her head hurt and that she was vaguely nauseated, but not why. Then, slowly, some of it came back: she remembered the Beamers and their slumberguns. And maybe someone else had been there? She wasn’t sure. It was all so fuzzy.
Then she slipped back into the blackness.
An unknown time later, her eyes reopened. This time, things came to Kai more quickly. She could see that the room she was in was small, almost tiny, and that the door on one end wasn’t the kind with a knob. It was a rolling door, like in an equipment bay or a garage. She could still feel the vibration beneath her and could still hear the odd humming. Both of those things seemed to mean more now, but her head still hurt and she still felt blurry. She told herself to forget it, that she could figure it out later.
She rolled her head to the side and suddenly remembered what she’d been unable to grasp before, about the person who’d been with her. Doc. Doc Stahl had been with her. And then, with her fog clearing, she noticed that Doc was still with her, now about ten feet away, shackled to a bed the same as she was, his arms up and his legs chained to the bed’s foot. Or maybe it was a cot that he was on. Whatever it was, it looked industrial and was bolted to the metal floor.
“Doc!”
But he was out cold. His chest rose and fell in a slow, hitching rhythm.
Kai rolled her head to the other side, trying to get a feel for the room. The ceiling was metal too. The overhead light wasn’t hanging; it was affixed to the ceiling inside of a small metal cage. When she tried looking at the other wall, she felt wetness on her cheek and realized that she could now make sense of an acid smell that had been bugging her. She’d rolled into her own vomit.
She winced, then shoved the thought from her mind. It was what it was. And as the fog cleared, Kai slowly put the puzzle’s pieces together: the metal room, the vibration, the humming, the rolling door at the far end. She was in a vehicle of some sort. Maybe a train, or a high-speed cargo shuttle. It was impossible to estimate their speed because whatever her room was, it wasn’t accelerating or braking. If it was a mag train or a shuttle in open country, she could easily be moving at three hundred miles per hour, maybe more.
Where were they going?
But she still wasn’t feeling all that well. Her headache and nausea reasserted themselves, and again she lost consciousness.
When she woke again, she found herself squinting into blinding sunlight. The door of her conveyance had opened, and outside she could see what was either brownish cracked concrete or baked land. She squinted, trying and failing to block the sun with her chained hands. She didn’t have to suffer the light for long, though, because Beamers began tromping inside. One of them blindfolded her, and another seemed to be blindfolding Doc when her vision was obscured. Her hands and feet were unshackled, and then her hands were re-secured behind her back.
She allowed herself to be led from the vehicle onto a floor that clicked underfoot like polished stone. She thought briefly of running, but that would be stupid. The Beamers surely had guns, and she was blind and had no use of her arms. If she could be sure that there were only one or two men watching her, she might have tried fighting blind (her hearing upgrade was outstanding; she could nearly echolocate like a bat), but based on the voices she heard, there were at least six of them.
She was shoved into a room with a smooth floor, then tumbled to her knees. Unable to stop her fall with her hands, she almost smashed her nose into the floor but was able to roll away and took the blow on her shoulder. Someone unshackled her hands and yanked the blindfold from her face. But before she could consider fighting again, the door of her new quarters swung shut, closing her in and her captors out.
Kai looked around, not rising, not turning, economizing her movement and taking in what was in front of her eyes. The room was pure white, perfectly cube-shaped, maybe fifty feet across. The walls were divided into smaller cubes by thin off-white lines.
Beside her, Doc was moaning. She could see that he’d taken a beating. Kai was lucky; she’d only been slumbered. Doc appeared to have been punched and kicked and pummeled with batons. One of his eyes was puffy and half-shut. Blood had crusted under his nose and around his mouth. Kai crawled over to him and said his name, but he just rolled his eyes up at her and vomited.
For some reason, it was the final straw. She grew angry — not at her captors, but at the only person within range for her to yell at.
“Get the fuck up!” she spat.
“Jesus, darlin,’ ” said Doc, blinking. “Give a guy a minute.”
“Noah Fucking West, Doc! I took out three Beamers all by myself. You couldn’t do your part?”
Doc winced as if the light was painful. “My head hurts,” he said. Then, with puke still on his lips, he gave Kai a perverse smile. “Did we just do some rough fuckin’?”
“Wipe that shit off your mouth and get up!” she yelled. “Who are these people? What did you get me into, Doc?”
“Well, isn’t this a motley crew?” said a voice from behind them.
Kai spun, sensing a trap and feeling stupid. She’d been so focused on Doc that she hadn’t even looked behind her. Her blindfold had come off and immediately, she’d taken the easy route, choosing to lash out rather than think. She almost wanted to laugh. Now there were Beamers behind her wit
h batons, and she’d learn her lesson.
But Kai didn’t see Beamers when she turned. Instead, she saw a man with dark, messy hair wearing small round glasses. He, like Doc, appeared bruised and lethargic.
They weren’t the only two prisoners in the white room.
Behind Kai was Nicolai Costa.
Chapter 7
Kai’s toes dug into the gritty sand of what she suspected was the Mallorca coastline. The sun was bright. The sky was deep and blue.
A few moments ago, Kai had been in a forest filled with big, thick-trunked trees. An hour before that she’d been in a rain forest hung with creeping vines and topped with a thick, lush canopy. Before that, it had been an underwater habitat, where she’d found herself inside a pressure bubble. Once she’d been in a cabin by a lake. Once she’d found herself in an empty city. There were only two things that all of Kai’s various and shifting surroundings had in common, and they were that all of their varied surroundings had been empty save two other people, and that those people, in every instance, had remained Doc and Nicolai.
None of the environments were real, of course. The white, featureless room Kai had found herself in with Doc and Nicolai turned out to be a simulator — and a good one at that. If they all stayed together and if they ignored their gut feelings that something wasn’t quite right, it was almost possible to believe, right now, that they were in Mallorca. The room’s temperature had adjusted upward, and the “sun” even seemed to be mimicked by a strong radiant UV lamp. The imagery and sound were damn near perfect.
They’d been stripped of their belongings. Most of Kai’s best weapons were inside her body, but their captors seemed unwilling to eviscerate her — or Doc, who she knew had several defensive add-ons of his own. She no longer had her handheld, or anything else that might broadcast time. However, according to what was normally a fairly useless enhancement Doc had in his right wrist, nearly eighteen hours had passed since they’d been tossed into the room. Kai had seen sunlight when she and Doc had been pulled from the transport, so she supposed it was nighttime now.
Beamers had been coming and going at regular intervals the whole time they’d been in the simulator. All were dressed head to toe in black and all were men, all about the same size. All but one of them were white. Because the Beamers all wore visors and hats, it was nearly impossible to tell them apart and know how many there were in total.
According to Doc and his timekeeping wrist, their captors had been showing up to subject Kai, Nicolai, and Doc to pain pods every one and a half hours on the nose. Both the cruelty and precision thereof seemed very like Beamers. Beamers felt that The Beam’s reality was superior to actual reality, so Kai began to see their captivity as a lesson. They were being trained, like dogs. They were allowed to revel in the luxury of The Beam’s beautiful simulated worlds, but the only appearance of “the real world” for the three captives came when men in black entered to beat them. The Beam was benevolent. Earthbound reality was cruel. Yes, that sounded like Beamer thinking.
They’d slept in shifts. They’d been given containers in which to relieve themselves. They’d eaten, but all of their food had been simulated — parodies of foods assembled from raw materials by the room’s compilers. Nicolai had protested, saying that by eating, they were giving the Beamers what they wanted. Doc had countered, pointing out that accepting the Beamers’ pain but not their food was the product of stupid pride. After enough time, Kai and Nicolai had joined Doc and eaten. The food, though lacking in flair, was real enough to sustain them.
They’d tried attacking the Beamers twice. Neither time had gone well. Since, they’d fallen into reluctant acceptance, telling themselves that they were biding their time and taking their beatings as they were doled out.
Nobody had explained anything to them about their captivity. At all.
Kai hated the uncertainty. Why was she here? Why were Doc and Nicolai here? What did their captors want from any of them, and why weren’t they just getting down to whatever it was? If they were a threat to someone, why hadn’t they just been killed? What was the point of toying with them?
But despite the uncertainty and the hate and the fear and the disorientation, there was little point in asking unanswerable questions. So time passed. The environments changed. The three of them adapted, waiting and talking, steering their discussion away from forbidden topics in deference to the attention of unseen ears. Between incursions by the Beamers, they accepted what they were given. They became just three people on a beach, three people in a forest, three people in an abandoned downtown.
Now, during a quiet interlude, Doc was lazing on his back in the sun, his tan, nano-sculpted muscular arms and chest and flat stomach on display. Nicolai, who Kai felt had a similarly impressive body, was more modest, sitting in the shade of a palm tree. Kai sat between them with her toes in the sand, watching the water and waiting.
“I could go for a harem of lithe eighteen-year-olds right now,” said Doc, propping himself up on his elbows. He looked around, waiting to see if the room would respond to requests. It did not. Doc swore and laid back down.
Kai rolled her eyes. “You’re disgusting.”
“Said the lady who sells it,” Doc retorted. “That’s the second time you’ve accused me of being a pervert, but it’s how you earn credits.”
“I’m fucking with you,” said Kai, annoyed and not fucking with him at all. She didn’t want to hear his blather. She was assessing. Her add-ons and training made her strong and fast, and she had enhancements that gave her what amounted to extra senses, but she needed to find her chance to use them. She wouldn’t see it while bantering with Doc.
“What about you over there, Tonto?” Doc said, looking at Nicolai. Kai followed his gaze, wondering if Doc was referring to Nicolai’s stoicism or if Doc had honestly mistaken Nicolai’s Italian complexion for native NAU blood. “How’s the haps for you? Enjoying your vacation? C’mon, two to one. You start talking about naked gals with me and maybe they’ll hook us up due to sheer numbers. Kai might join in on the fun once they give us chicks. You know she’s into it. She’s just being uptight.”
Nicolai looked off into the distance, not rising to Doc’s jocularity.
“I’m waiting,” he said.
“Waiting for what?”
“To see what happens next.”
Doc scoffed, then laid back on the sand just as the beach disappeared and was replaced by cool black dirt pocked by tufts of rough grass. The blue sky darkened to black until the only light and warmth was coming from a campfire that had appeared between them.
“Great,” Doc said, sitting up and pulling on his shirt, shuffling closer to the fire’s warmth. “You get vague with ‘what comes next’ and they give us a campfire. I could have some girl hanging off my knob right now, but now all I can do is make s’mores.” As he said the last, a red box containing graham flats appeared at Doc’s side along with a bag of marshmallows and a cube of chocolate discs. Doc laughed in spite of himself.
Camp chairs materialized beside them. They climbed onto their seats, then dragged the chairs closer to the fire.
“You know,” said Kai, “we’re just doing what they want, behaving as if this is a real fire out in the real wilderness.”
“I’ve never been in the wilderness, hon,” said Doc. “I just know that that thing is hot and I’m cold.”
Nicolai nodded. “I doubt they’ve been in the wilderness either,” he said. “This is a caricature of camping made by someone who’s never been. There are no stars overhead. In the wild, you can still see a few through the lattice. The tiny noises are missing, too, and the sounds I can hear are echoing wrong, as if bouncing off walls that are…” He stretched down, picked up a rock, and threw it into the blackness. Where the rock struck an unseen obstruction, the night rippled like a pool of ink. “… right there, no matter how open it all looks.”
“What are you, a boy scout?” said Doc.
Kai looked at Doc. The two men — two of her favorite
clients, but for different reasons — had known one other before their internment because Nicolai was also Doc’s client, but they hadn’t known until today that they were both Kai’s clients. It was easy to forget that everything wasn’t already out in the open, given Doc’s unflappability and his salesmanlike ability to become overly familiar with everyone instantly.
“I spent a lot of time in the wilds in the thirties,” said Nicolai. “I came up from Italy and across Europe on foot with only a backpack, a crossbow, and more blindly stupid guts than you can believe.”
“The thirties? How old are you?” said Doc. Nicolai looked like he might be thirty-five or forty, but appearances, more than ever, were often deceiving.
“Old enough.”
“How the hell did you get into the NAU from the Wild East?”
Kai already knew the story, but as with all Nicolai’s stories, she loved hearing it. She had traced her long, manicured fingers across Nicolai’s chest many times in a post-coital haze as he recited her favorites. Most men today were soft. Nicolai, artistic appearances to the contrary, was hard. Today, in the civilized west, a man displayed his power in terms of wealth. But there had been a time when survival had come down to brute strength.
“I went up into France from Italy, avoiding Switzerland for obvious reasons, staying as far west as I could. Made my way to Paris, then hiked north until I hit the English Channel. I wanted to score a ride through the Chunnel into England, but I didn’t know about the Chunnel Crew, or the fires. Today I might have turned back when I couldn’t find a conveyance that hadn’t been ransacked, but I was young and stupid enough back then to just start walking right through with an air converter and my crossbow out. Most of the Chunnel, save the infernos, was pitch black… and I do mean pitch. I had IR goggles, but they failed halfway through and I had to go through two sections — including the corpse of a stalled train — by feel.
