The Beam: Season One

by Sean Platt

  Isaac wound up and threw the award hard at the window. It bounced harmlessly off, leaving a tiny scratch. A cleaner scrambled from its garage on the floor, climbed the window, and began repairing the glass.

  “Mature,” said Natasha, watching the bot.

  Isaac stared at his wife, furious but unsure what to say. So he turned toward his office and stalked off.

  “Good idea,” she said from behind him. “Keep avoiding your problems.”

  “Go buy some more enhancements, Natasha!” he shouted back. “Keep trying to make yourself feel young and beautiful and vibrant! Make yourself feel alive for five more seconds!”

  “Canvas!” she screeched, furious. “Beethoven! Full volume!”

  Music blasted into the living room as Isaac closed his office door, shutting it out. His heart was hammering. He was so angry that it took several minutes of stalking in circles and drawing deep breaths before he trusted himself not to trash his shelves, his equipment, and everything else in frustration.

  When he calmed down, he sat.

  Fuck her. Fuck Micah. And fuck Nicolai.

  Nicolai wanted to abandon him in his hour of need? Well, he could eat shit. Isaac wasn’t a puppet, or a PR tool of his brother’s — a punching bag for the always-in-control Micah Ryan. Isaac was his own man, who could write and give his own speeches. Isaac Fucking Ryan was a man who could make his own decisions.

  Chapter 10

  Dominic woke up sprawled on the floor, trashed, in his apartment on the twenty-second floor of the Lycos building, head on fire and mouth filled with cotton. He was still fully dressed and his mouth was actually full — not with cotton wadding, but with his neckband tie, which he’d removed at some point. That wasn’t good even if it made sense, which it most certainly did not. He could choke on it. And if there was a close second to choking on your own puke until you quit breathing, it was choking to death on a symbol of civilized slavery — the workingman’s noose, killing him from the inside of the throat rather than the outside.

  Dominic managed to roll over, still feeling nauseated and like choking on puke wasn’t yet an unlikely scenario. Even the small motion hurt, tearing his core muscles as he made them work, crushing his arm under his side as if it were made of glass. His vision was splintered, almost literally; he saw two versions of his bedroom (where he apparently was) and they seemed to be cracked apart from one another with a sharp edge, like a knife’s.

  He wanted to call for help, but Dominic was a bachelor and lived alone. He had no one to help him. If he died with his drooling lip plastered to carpet, they’d find him that way — another moondust junkie dead. But as he thought about it (insofar as he was able to think with his throbbing brain), that made no sense. Moondust users didn’t OD. Moondust addicts died plenty, but only from withdrawal. Moondust itself was mellow. Even after a bender, the worst you could expect was to wake up mildly dehydrated with hours gone missing. Or you could die in a car accident because you were blitzed, or step in front of a mag train because you thought Jesus was coming to hug you. But you didn’t get fucked and wake up feeling like this.

  What the hell kind of dust had Omar sent him?

  Dominic forced himself to his hands and knees, felt something swell in his gut, and heaved onto the floor. His puke poured out brown and gray. Gray. What the hell had been gray? Or was it the dust? Dominic imagined the tiny moondust rocks turning into literal moon dust in his stomach, as if he’d eaten handfuls of ash from a fire pit. The thought churned his gut, and he threw up again. The smell made him want to start back up, but Dominic couldn’t think about the puke now, or waste any more time in surrender. His housebot could handle the mess while he was at work… if he survived. He didn’t have enough strength to call for his canvas, so he hoped the bot would find the barf while on patrol without his pointing it out, like a parent discovering a kid’s wet bedsheets after the kid ran off embarrassed. The housebot would probably find the various puddles just fine. The thing had sucked up his copy of Yankees slugger Brian Morgensen’s autograph and the cigar Dominic had bought to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, so it didn’t miss much. Although given the idiot nature of AI, it seemed equally to Dominic that the bot would suck up the important paperwork on his desk and ignore the vomit entirely.

  Dominic stepped into the shower, hoping it would make him feel better. It did not. He threw up again, at least satisfied that the drain would clear the liquids away. His canvas then spoke up, asking if he was okay. Dominic said he wasn’t, and requested a light scan. The scan reported that his vitals were fine, which was as deep as a noninvasive scan went. So Dominic asked for music, entertainment… anything to distract him. He asked for warm towels and a warm floor mat, which he never asked for. He put the news on his mirror, then had it follow him back into his bedroom. He put on new clothes with fingers that were clumsy and painful. He’d taken some Novril tablets and used the never-used accupressure bot while he’d been brushing his teeth, but the usually quick fixes were taking their time to kick in.

  Dominic stumbled to the balcony, barked at his canvas for a mag shuttle, and took a hoverskipper to the mag line. He got a private shuttle, not wanting to wait for a cheaper group transport because feeling like he might die and fall to the city streets below was too horrible to consider. So he forked over the twenty extra credits, clicked off the robotic driver’s voice, and rode to the station (which the mag line ran directly through) in silence.

  By the time Dominic arrived, his headache and pain were both mostly gone, but his mood was still foul. His skin was apparently also gray and hanging in all the wrong places — or so he was told by a scan port that some asshole had placed in front of the station’s door.

  The scan port was essentially a small section of the long hallway that led into the Quark wing, and it was just as judgmental. Noah West’s voice told Dominic that his toxin levels were quite high and asked if he needed anonymous help with any addictions. It told him that his breath was foul and slid a small mint at him on a tray. It told him that his shirt was wrinkled and that his shirt cuffs were uneven and that his shoes were dull and scuffed. Without asking, a robotic armature reached out and tried to comb his hair. Dominic, knowing exactly what he was doing, reached up and hit the thing hard enough to break half of it off, leaving it to dangle by a cable. The assault left his hand bloody, but the release he felt was worth the blood, the repair fee, and the reprimand he’d face later.

  Noah’s voice, in its unperturbed and polite way, asked after the armature-breaking incident if Dominic would like a bandage and a squirt of repair nano ointment. Dominic refused, knowing full well that nano ointment would return his skin and capillaries to knitted within fifteen minutes. Instead, he wrapped a napkin around his fist, and when Noah gave him the all-clear and a green light and told him to have a nice day, Dominic told him to fuck off and die.

  Dominic took a few irritated steps and put his hand on the shoulder of Damian Prince, the rookie who was manning the scan port’s monitor.

  “What is this bullshit?” Dominic snapped, jerking his head toward the scan port.

  “Captain Long!” said Prince. “I’m sorry, sir. We’ve been trying to contact you all morning, but your canvas wouldn’t ping you.”

  Dominic had installed a little hack that was quite useful for moondust junkies. He didn’t have to manually put his canvas into Do Not Disturb. Instead, his apartment’s sensors monitored his movements and turned calls off automatically when he was unconscious or in a trance, seeing as calls during trances were always a drag.

  “I was in an important meeting,” said Dominic.

  “Well, sir, we had a brief outage here at the station last night. Just a system reset.”

  Dominic was aghast at Prince’s nonchalance. “Just a system reset? Are you kidding me?”

  The station’s data was all fed directly into The Beam despite the station’s shitty Beam connections at the user level. (Police data was considered vital while police officers were considered city budget
expense items.) Unfortunately, a significant side-effect of the city’s schizophrenic attitude toward DZPD was that there were no good redundancies in place. When the connection failed, as it sometimes did, the station went totally offline. And with it, Dominic and a few others knew, went most of its security. Wireless hackers trying to access the routers while the hardline walls were down needed only to cross a few layers of encryption. Because most of the hackers used hacks employing EverCrunch compression algorithms, all they needed were thirty seconds. It was an unforgivable and short-sighted gap that Dominic had been complaining about for years.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It was brief. But HQ wanted this security checkpoint set up until all of the lights are green.”

  “Are they green now?”

  “E.O.D., sir. After all staff has cycled through.”

  “Noah Fucking West. And the servers?”

  “Secure, I believe, sir.”

  “According to who?”

  “Officer Harper, sir.”

  Dominic pinched the bridge of his nose. Harper was smart, but was almost a rookie himself. Harper didn’t know about the glaring security gap. He probably did actually think everything was fine, even if it wasn’t.

  “How long did the system reset take?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Around one-fifteen A.M., sir, give or take.”

  Dominic thanked the kid and left, but he didn’t like this at all. There was an old axiom about computers that said, “Garbage in, garbage out,” and it was supposed to refer to the fact that computers only made mistakes when people made mistakes programming them or giving them data — i.e., when the inputs were “garbage.” But in Dominic’s experience, The Beam had mostly evolved beyond that quaint expression. With the advent of AI and increasingly sophisticated algorithms, The Beam could, in most cases, either find its way around bad data or make what were essentially educated guesses. There were system outages due to failures in the lines or inferior incidental technology, but The Beam itself seldom made mistakes. What Prince had described sounded to Dominic like a hard reset or a bug, not an outage. Outages were possible, but hard resets were caused by people or intelligent programs like clerics. Bugs, as far as The Beam was concerned, were things of the past.

  Harper might think the fault was accidental, but Dominic didn’t buy it.

  His anger now turning to concern, Dominic crossed into his office, started up his console, and began checking the system logs. His sector of the station’s canvas, being the chief’s sector, had an extra layer of security. Its logs were independent from and duplicated off of the server, then stored in protected memory. This memory was physically shuffled every half hour on a device called a data carousel that was sometimes a pain in the ass, but for which Dominic was suddenly thankful.

  He went to the wall behind his office chair and removed a panel. Behind it was a large wheel with vertical slots that reminded Dominic of an ancient slide carousel Grandy had used to project family photos onto the wall until the day he died. There were forty-eight slots in the wheel, and each held a data card representing a half hour’s worth of everything in the station from surveillance to logs to bookings. Every thirty minutes, a mechanical arm removed the card from the backup drive and placed it in a slot in the wheel, then replaced it with the next half hour’s card.

  The device was clunky and non-compact by design. Everything the carousel did could have been handled digitally and without moving parts, but as The Beam became more and more ubiquitous, the only way to truly isolate data was via its physical removal. Unless someone walked into Dominic’s office and used human hands to remove or alter the data cards, it would be safe from hackers.

  Dominic removed his handheld, turned off its wireless connectivity, then wrapped the thing in digital foil just to be sure it couldn’t broadcast. He removed the card from the carousel slot marked 01:00-01:30 and slid it into the handheld. He quickly scrolled through the logs and found what he was looking for:

  01:13:02 SYSTEM FAIL

  01:14:12 SYSTEM RESET

  There was no data at all in the seventy seconds between those two entries. Normally, the entire system’s activity was logged six times a second using EverCrunch compression, collapsed for easy viewing and expandable by anyone with sufficient access to view the 360 backups made each minute. But at 1:13am, there had been a reset, and it had taken seventy seconds to restore logging — an eternity in which any skilled hacker would be able to remove or copy any files they wanted without leaving a trace.

  “Shit,” he said aloud.

  He compared the file tree before and after and found no significant difference between the two backups, meaning that nothing seemed to have been deleted. No files other than the self-referential meta logs had changed modification dates. So if someone had been inside, they’d been snooping, probably copying. Someone searching for information.

  “Chrissy,” he said, talking to the handheld.

  The handheld, recognizing his voice, chirped.

  A soft female voice — not Noah’s; Dominic had changed that default immediately — said, “Validation, please.”

  Dominic said his name, pressing his thumb onto the handheld’s screen.

  The handheld, recognizing his voice and thumbprint, chirped, then said, “Thank you, Dominic. What can I do for you?”

  “Compare the three minutes of logs prior to system failure entry at oh-one-one-three-oh-two.”

  “What would you like to know about the comparison?”

  “Project the file trajectory of any activity during that period.”

  File trajectory wasn’t a term Dominic had ever heard anyone else use, but he’d been working with this particular handheld long enough for it to know what he meant. He wanted to know what people had been up to, where they’d been snooping, and where they’d probably been headed — and hence what they might have done while the lights were out.

  “There were four users during that time period,” said the handheld in its soft feminine voice. “One was officer Harper, doing his hard backups. One was an outside access port, 048390, labeled as Brooklyn sub-PD, searching for a suspect in recent bookings named Dotson, Wyatt. The third was the Quark daemon. The fourth was anonymous FTP, looking at…”

  “FTP?” Chrissy might as well have said someone had ridden into the office with the Pony Express and sent telegrams while listening to music recorded on phonograph cylinders.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “FTP hasn’t been used in eighty years,” Dominic said.

  “Records show IBM 286 processor, connecting at 1200 baud…”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “No, Dominic. Serial of Lima-three-three-tango.”

  “Noah Fucking West,” said Dominic. They weren’t even being careful. Everything about the entry was spoofed and clearly designed to be found, because someone had thought it hilarious. 286 processors and 1200 baud modems weren’t much newer than his great-grandfather’s slide carousel. And the serial? L33t, the old hacker dialect? Yes, someone was having a shit ton of fun while committing high crimes.

  “Where were they going? Can you predict their trajectory?”

  “Your files would be my guess, Dominic,” said the soft voice. “They opened files all over the system prior to the outage, but it looks to me like misdirection. The pattern suggests intentional subterfuge intended to make it look like they went for arrest records, but if they’d been after arrest records, they wouldn’t have…”

  Dominic killed the voice, in no need of details. If Chrissy intuited that they’d been after his files, he believed her. He removed the data card, slipped it into his pocket, and returned the handheld to broadcast mode. Before shutting it down, he thanked the voice, wondering what it said about him that his most cordial relationship was with an artificial person.

  There was plenty in Dominic’s files that an intruder might have been after, but only one thing he cared if anyone found. He pulled up
his console, then clicked through to bookings and cross-referenced those against the tracker in his uniform shoe. Being careful not to open any files and disturb the footprints, Dominic pulled up a window containing one particular tracking set and another containing a single day’s booking records. He closed his eyes, whispered a prayer, and looked at the open dates for each. Both files had been opened the previous night, meaning that the intruder had been looking for exactly what he’d feared.

  Dominic slumped into his chair. “Shit,” he said.

  The vagrant. The fucking vagrant, and his own fucking compassion that had made him act in a way he shouldn’t have.

  Once upon a time, Dominic had had a sister who was four years younger than him. They’d not always gotten along because she’d required so much of his parents’ attention. At the time, Dominic hadn’t understood why; he hadn’t known what Down’s Syndrome was or that unregistered clinics were the only hospitals that still permitted Down’s births. He hadn’t understood why, after his father died and his mother had gotten an actual paper letter under the door, she had spent two weeks crying, then three years taking his sister to special doctors, special schools, and finally special people who would only do business in abandoned places that made Dominic, then sixteen, nervous. Even after their mother died in a car accident, Dominic hadn’t stitched it all together — not until six full years later, when he found himself his sister’s guardian and received her final Respero decision. The board referenced the letter that Dominic’s mother had received nearly a decade earlier and said that the board was very sorry, but the subject had reached age eighteen and her brain was still not growing to spec. A summons to her Respero dinner was attached.