by Sean Platt
“What’s this big opportunity?” Paige asked. Beside her, Natasha wasn’t paying attention. She was smiling devilishly at Nicolai, drunk and uncaring. She was also slouching down in her chair and, Nicolai suspected, probably reaching her foot toward his under the table. But the table was as large as she was lubricated, and Natasha was unable to know. Or care if her husband noticed, which he very much didn’t.
“It’s a big secret,” said Isaac, planting a finger on his lips.
“It’s not a secret,” said Micah, who’d had very little to drink.
“Then why are you trying to stop me from telling everyone?”
“Because you’re drunk.”
“No I’m not,” said Isaac. But then he dropped his wineglass onto the table. It didn’t shatter (it was made of some sort of new synthetic glass), but it did spill. A few waiters were hovering around the table and one stepped forward, but Isaac managed to snap at him to clean up the mess before the waiter could do it himself.
Micah turned to Nicolai, who he seemed to regard as the only one at the table left worth speaking to. Natasha and Isaac were getting sloppy despite the EndLax’s dilating effect and Paige was just something he’d brought along to fuck later. “It’s not a secret,” he repeated.
“They’re raping the arctic,” Natasha added matter-of-factly.
Micah threw a look at his sister-in-law, then smiled a somehow unperturbed smile at Nicolai. “You’ve seen it on the news, I’m sure. You could pull it up on your cell right now. There’s no ‘raping.’ North America must operate in isolation now, and most people don’t know just how hard that’s been, on a macroeconomic level. It takes a while for various stores to run dry — for ‘rationing’ to turn into ‘nothing left.’ That’s what happened to much of the East. But we got lucky. Ryan Industries was one of the big players investigating the thawing arctic, and we were the first to start discovering things as we did. Now it’s like we’ve discovered a hidden treasure, and there’s no competition for it. The news has hinted at natural resources being uncovered under the ice up there, but they’ve not given the public the full picture yet because we’ve not released it, though of course we will shortly. There are a lot of natural resources up there waiting to be found, including stuff we haven’t seen or thought of before. Plasteel, for instance, wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t found pockets of a naturally occurring alloy up there last year. Notice how quickly it went into production? That’s because it was damn near ready for use as we found it and needed only to be shaped, which we did in our existing steel mills. Something about space and freezing and the time when the solar system was just a bunch of hot rocks ramming into each other trying to stabilize… I don’t understand it all myself. The upshot is that, given time, the NAU will be fine — and once the barrier is up to protect us, it will stay fine. A lot of the arctic is simply ice over water, but a lot of it in the NAU is land as well, and much easier to mine. Thank God for Canada. Alaska had a lot of ice, but the Yukon has more.”
“What about Siberia?” Nicolai asked. There was plenty more arctic land in non-NAU territories, too. Greenland. The Nordic countries. The EU and Asia might be able to heal themselves with an infusion of raw materials. If the same was available in the southern cap, the existence of land in Antarctica meant there was more than enough to go around.
“They’re too far gone,” said Micah. “Who’s going to organize mining operations? The Russian Mafia?”
As platters of food were stripped from the table, the hole reappeared in its middle and spilled downward, seeming to reel the five diners closer to one another again. Nicolai watched the table’s surface descend into the hole as if it were liquid rather than wood. Was this a material that had been manufactured from something found under the ice in Northern Canada? Was this how the NAU’s coming wealth was being spent — to create gorging tables in high-end restaurants?
Now that they were closer, Nicolai could feel Natasha’s leg brush his. He looked over, not as annoyed as he should have been. She was truly stunning. He was a fan of her music, too. She was so raw, so emotionally charged. Natasha had a way of making a person feel, just as Nicolai was feeling against his will as her bare foot touched him.
“What he means,” Natasha said, “is that nobody from the NAU has bothered to tell them to look for riches under the ice.”
“Because they’d just fight over it and make things worse,” said Micah, annoyed.
Natasha rolled her eyes for Micah, looking at Nicolai. Micah watched her. Nicolai felt certain that Micah was restraining himself from hitting her. She was sloppy, Isaac was sloppy, and both were making fools of themselves, making a fool of Micah in the process.
Nicolai didn’t ask further. He’d pry information from Isaac in the morning, if he was still curious. It all made sense. Still, Ryan Industries had thrived throughout the turbulent times, and Micah said that they’d discovered the precursors of Plasteel just one year before. There would have been a lot of upfront expense to get it ready for prime time. Soon, Ryan Industries would be astonishingly wealthy, but how had it survived in the meantime?
When the bill arrived, Micah paid in full, using dollars. The waiter told him that the restaurant only accepted universal credits, but Micah replied that he’d not had time yet to convert. The maître d came to the table and apologized in an underhanded way, perfectly balancing sycophancy and condescension as he explained that the restaurant was no longer equipped to accept dollars, indicating that the gentleman had been pre-warned about the change for months. Micah told the waiter (who had a French accent) that the universal language was English and that the NAU was mostly America and that the NAU only spent money within its own borders, and that a wholesale conversion to the same currency as the Wild East was idiotic.
The maître d’s European pride seemed to unravel his composure, but then Micah slipped something into the man’s palm to calm him. Then the maître d bowed and walked off, a moment later a waiter returned with an old fingerpad, and Micah paid for their meal with dollars.
On their way out, Nicolai took on the burden of keeping an eye on Natasha. She needed it. Micah and Paige had both sipped at a few drinks but were more or less sober, and Isaac was drunk but at least wearing flat shoes. Natasha, on the other hand, was in high heels (which made her taller than Nicolai) and looked like a baby giraffe trying to walk. Isaac was ignoring her, tagging along behind Micah like a sidekick. So Nicolai walked with Natasha, ready to catch her if she fell. Soon it became apparent that he had to actually hold her, which she took as a come-on.
They were a few steps behind the others when she said, “You like me, Nicolai.”
“I like you both,” said Nicolai, looking toward Isaac. The official version of their collective story said that Isaac had saved Nicolai. It was bullshit, because Nicolai had always saved himself and always would. But he was appreciative for the Ryans’ help (he certainly wouldn’t have all of those credits in his account after only a few years in the NAU without Isaac), and he was loyal, with an acute ability to see the good in everyone. He liked Isaac and Natasha, and parts of what he saw in Micah. But he also saw how badly Isaac and Natasha needed someone’s help, though neither would ever admit it.
“You think I’m beautiful, even though I’m fat.”
“You’re hardly fat,” he replied. Natasha had entered new levels of celebrity spotlight since her first album was released a year ago. One year, it turned out, was just enough time to start thinking of five-ten, one-fifty as fat. Natasha pretended to be above the gossip sheets, but they were clearly getting to her. If you couldn’t see a woman’s ribs, Natasha was coming to believe, then she was too fat.
Natasha smiled at Nicolai. He held her arm as they walked toward the cars. Nicolai had told the valet to bring the cars around, but Micah had wanted to walk. Nicolai had also told Natasha to remove her heels, but she’d refused, saying the ground was filthy.
She stumbled. Despite his disadvantage in leverage, Nicolai managed to catch her. He ended up
with her breasts pressed into his arm and looked down to see that the top button of her blouse was open. He raised his eyes to find her green eyes already watching his brown ones. He looked away, toward the retreating backs of Micah, Paige, and Isaac. None had noticed.
“You’re such a gentleman,” she said.
“I’m just trying to keep you alive.”
“You’re still a gentleman. You stayed with me.”
“Come on,” he said, trying to right her.
“Why are you in with us, Nicolai? You’re better than us rich assholes.”
Nicolai hadn’t bothered to tell the Ryans that, back in Italy, his family had had much more money than the Ryans. He saw no need to tell them now.
“You’re not assholes.” She was fishing for compliments and he was throwing them right back, not knowing what else to do. Ignoring her would be rude, and as confident as Natasha pretended to be, he knew how fragile she was inside.
“I made the wrong bet with Isaac,” she said.
Nicolai looked at her for a moment, but that was one he didn’t — couldn’t — respond to. He pretended he hadn’t heard and started helping Natasha to her feet, ignoring the something inside him hungry to parry.
“Come on. Get up. They’re getting away from us.”
Nicolai pulled Natasha to her feet and they stumbled after their party, his thoughts filled with arctic treasures, wealth, and betrayal.
Chapter 2
“Leah.”
Leah looked up, saw Leo standing above her, and gestured for him to sit. Leo lowered his old body into an ancient red plastic seat that looked like a bucket beside her. He didn’t moan, and his body didn’t crack or pop. Yet she knew Leo was ancient. It all went to show that everyone these days needed at least a few tiny bites of synthetic assistance to get by, whether they admitted it or not.
“Thanks for calling,” he said.
“They have phones here. Can you believe it?” She gestured toward a white device mounted on the wall by the nurse’s station.
The rustic mountain hospital had Beam access, but diagnostic machines were the only systems directly wired into it. Admittance and billing were done on a manual console and batched in, and once Leah had told the nurse she was from the Organa village (along with the safe version of what she’d been doing with Crumb up at the house in Bontauk), the nurse had taken Leah and Crumb even further offline, recording their account in a large book using a pen. Crumb’s visit to the hospital was more off-record than off-record, and taking them off-record had been done with a conspiratorial, “it’s us against them, sweetheart” air. Out in the sticks, city technology was often regarded as sour grapes. If the people of the hills couldn’t afford the best connectivity, they mostly declared it to be no good and worth opposing. So when Leah had wanted to call Leo, she’d started to use The Beam… and the nurse, seeing this, had shown her the phone instead. Leah was amazed that the phone system even handshook with The Beam when she used it to contact Leo (who, Organa as he was, didn’t have access to a true phone), but then again, what didn’t handshake with The Beam these days?
“I used to have one of those in my house,” said Leo, nodding toward the phone.
“You’re kidding.”
“I had a gasoline car too.”
“Just how old are you, Leo?” Leah asked.
“Let’s just say that when diagnostic and scavenger nanos came on the market and rich people started using them to keep themselves young, I was already old. So I settled for using them to stay alive.”
Leah looked over at Leo, taking in his headband and gray braids. Tech knew tech, so Leah had long ago decided that Leo had had nano treatments, but this was the first time she’d heard him admit it. She could imagine him the first time he became an old man, a decade from his grave, accepting an injection that would hit the pause button on his aging. She found herself newly impressed. Even the best nanos couldn’t keep a body from decaying forever, and usually couldn’t keep up at all if the recipient was too old by the time of their first treatment. That meant that before Leo had gotten those first treatments, he must have been in prime shape. Even when he was purely biological, he must have been eighty going on twenty-five.
“How’s Crumb?” Leo asked.
“In a coma. They say there’s no brain damage, thank West, and that he should be fine. They dosed him with some cleanup nanos and will apply stimulation once those nanos show green. He should wake within a few hours at most.”
“Did you find anything?”
Leah stared at the hospital tiles under her feet. All was well that ended well, but she still felt guilty. She’d nearly killed Crumb by rooting around inside his head. Or at best, she’d nearly burned him. He could have woken up as a vegetable, or never woken up at all. She remembered not wanting to hook him up, then remembered Crumb saying he wanted to see the Wizard — as if he knew exactly what was happening and was giving her the thumbs-up to proceed.
“I found something small. I’ll tell you later.” She looked around, trying to tell Leo without words that even as rustic and disconnected as the mountain hospital was, the walls here might have ears.
Leo stood. He rose easily. If Leo was old enough to have owned a wall phone, he must have maintained himself fantastically to stay as spry as he was.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
“A walk?”
“I want to meditate, and we need a spot that’s not here. You said Crumb will be out for a few hours? Let’s not lose any more of our life to these uncomfortable seats. Let’s find a nice place to clear our heads.” He looked down at her and smiled knowingly. “I can see guilt all over your face.”
“I could have burned him,” she said.
“But you didn’t.”
Leah nodded.
“You handled this perfectly, Leah. Like a grownup. You weren’t rash or impetuous, you got him the care he needed, you let me know, and you’re not your usual cocky self right now, making excuses. You’re respecting the gravity and reality of the situation. You’ve done well. I’m proud of you.”
Leah twirled a pink dreadlock. “Thanks.”
Leo held out his hand. “So come on. Let’s meditate.”
Leah took Leo’s hand and they left the hospital together. They walked through the grounds until, leaving the hospital’s small oasis of civilization within the mountain wilderness, they found themselves surrounded by trees. The woods’ silence immediately helped to soothe Leah’s guilt and fear, and after a short time hiking by Leo’s side, she felt herself settling in to nature’s rhythm and as eager to meditate as Leo. Meditation was a sort of safety valve for Leah — and, strangely, it felt a lot like navigating The Beam. Leah could hack code and hit keys better than most, but at its best, steering through The Beam’s hive mind (or the minds of those willingly attached) felt more like a trance or a dream than pushing buttons.
Once out of ear and eyeshot of the hospital, Leah told Leo about her nugget of discovery: the book, the name of Stephen York, and the building with the red roof somewhere in District Zero. She asked Leo if any of it meant anything to him, and he shook his head. Then he repeated that she’d done well, and agreed that the level of complexity in Crumb’s mind made the fact that she’d gotten anything at all was amazing. As to the complexity of Crumb’s mind, Leo only shook his head. He said there was clearly more to Crumb than they’d thought, and reiterated that hooking him up had been the right decision. As loud as Leo’s instincts were about Crumb before he’d sent Leah on her errand, they were louder now. He was more certain than ever that it all meant something, and that the book and Stephen York were both worth finding.
They found an open area in the trees and sat down a few feet apart, facing each other, on a bed of brown pine needles.
Leo closed his eyes and placed his hands palm-up on his knees. But instead of doing the same, Leah studied Leo. He seemed old and not old at the same time. His skin was wrinkled around his eyes and mouth, but it was smooth on his forehead and arms. H
e had a glow about him, rather than the fading light you saw around most of the oldest people. He moved like a man of biological fifty, yet looked at first glance like a man of biological eighty. Yet based on what Leo had said, he had to be older than that.
“Seriously, Leo. How old are you?”
Leo blinked. His brown eyes opened and peeked at Leah.
“I can keep a secret. You’ve pretty much told me anyway. I could figure it out.”
“Go ahead,” he said, his body unmoving.
“Ninety.”
“Sure,” said Leo. His eyes closed.
If he were ninety, Leo would have been born in 2007. But hadn’t phones — the kind that hung on walls in houses — already been on their way out by then? Leah wasn’t sure. She wasn’t good with history. She was born in ’68, and The Beam was mostly everywhere by then. She’d lived all her life in ultra connectivity, and had always had to leave the city to pull any of those plugs.
“Older?”
Leo’s eyes opened again. “You’re making it hard for me to find inner peace.”
“A hundred? Are you a hundred?” Nanobot technology had blossomed in… what? Maybe mid-century? If Leo was in that first wave (which she didn’t know) and had been old when he’d done it (which she couldn’t be sure of), then he could be…
There was too much she didn’t know.
“I’m over a hundred. Satisfied?”
“Were you around before The Beam?”
Leo nodded. After Leah nodded back, he closed his eyes again.
“Before the early Beam? Cross… whatever?”
