The Beam: Season One

by Sean Platt

  “— know anything, you motherfucker! I keep telling you! It was a mistake! Let her…”

  He stopped, seemingly surprised by his voice in the quiet room. Of course, it couldn’t have been this quiet a moment ago, could it? Kai assumed she’d been screaming, but she realized she had no idea. Her experience on the Orion was fully immersive — more immersive than even she, as an expert in sensation and sensation-enhancing technology, thought possible. She hadn’t just imagined her fingers peeling like bananas to show the bleached white bone beneath. She’d felt it as if it were happening. She’d seen it. She’d heard it. She’d even smelled it, and she’d tasted blood in her mouth, metallic like copper. She’d felt as if she had screamed, but she might have been doing so into the black, bloody room in which she’d been sequestered a moment ago. As far as the others were concerned (and she had to believe Nicolai was over there somewhere too, equally muted), it might have looked like she was peacefully napping.

  Doc said, “Why is she bleeding?”

  Kane reached down and ran a finger along Kai’s neck, below her ear, then pulled it away and looked at a fat line of red blood. Kai felt sure he would lick it.

  “We don’t understand that,” said Kane. “The eggheads say it’s something like stigmata. But it’s the reason the table has holes. Sometimes their bodies believe the pain so intensely that they’ll bleed through their clothing. It can get … messy.”

  “What were they doing to you, sweetheart?” said Doc. As pissed off as she’d been at him earlier and as steely as she herself had been, Doc’s use of the word touched her in a strange way. It almost made her want to cry. But she couldn’t answer. She could only shake her head.

  Doc turned to Kane.

  “She doesn’t know anything, and I don’t know anything, either. I told you. It was a mistake. They thought I was this other guy, Greenley. I had no idea that stuff existed. I went home and tried to look it up afterward, even. I have a secure router. I’ll tell you where I got it; I don’t care. I hacked into a dozen high-end upgrade stores, but couldn’t find anything like the stuff at Xenia. I haven’t told anyone other than Kai what I saw. I swear. Go ahead, Gauss us all, problem solved.”

  “It’s not enough,” Kane said. He didn’t seem angry. He just seemed unfinished, or perhaps unsatisfied.

  “It’s all there is. Please.”

  Kane looked at Kai, his small white head haloed by the overhead light, creating a haze around his face. He raised his own handheld and made a show of preparing to push a button. He wanted Kai to see it coming.

  “Wait!” she yelled.

  “Yes?” said Kane.

  “Don’t. Please. I don’t know anything. I’d tell you if I did. I would.”

  Kai saw Kane press something, and like a light switch had been flipped, found herself again in the black room that smelled of sour meat. She felt a spear strike her middle, then flower out into a slow moving circle, tearing a hole through her body’s center. Her flesh burned and her throat was slit, her neck contorting and breaking. She wanted to scream but there was no air, and when she managed to inhale, Kai found her lungs filled with acid, burning and devouring and…

  “Jesus!” Doc blurted as the room returned. He stared at her, his face ugly. So apparently she’d done something visible or audible after all. She may have screamed, or bled. But now, returned to the white room and feeling logic want to leave her, she hardly cared. Her head was too foggy to care. The white room, with Doc and Kane, was becoming peaceful. Not just because there was no pain, but because here, Kai’s mind seemed to want to surrender and forget. While the Orion was on, she was totally present. But in the real world, her mind could drift. She felt it wanting to unhinge, drift away and vanish. She wondered if the Beamers could see her. They’d feel vindicated. The Beam’s world really was more vivid and alive than the foggy false environment she assumed was still known erroneously as “reality.”

  Kane raised his handheld again, finger poised. He was putting on a show for Doc, but it was Kai who responded.

  “It was my fault,” she whispered, her heart starting to flutter. She did not want that button pushed, not again, no matter what. “I told Doc to go to Xenia.”

  Kane’s handheld gave a low buzz. Doc had already started to protest, but the buzz beat him to it. “Lies won’t help,” Kane said to her, like a teacher relaying a lesson.

  “She doesn’t know anything!” Doc bellowed. “What do you expect to get? Let her go! I’ll tell you whatever you want. Everything. Anything. I’ll talk until you hear something you want. When I was twenty, I robbed a homeless guy. I’ve scammed half my clients. I fucked my neighbor, who was thirty years older than I was and looked every year. I’ve got hundreds of thousands in illegal equipment. Whatever. Xenia. Anything I have! Just let her go.”

  Kane stared at Doc, uncertain. He looked down at Kai, then at the Orion.

  Reluctantly, Doc added, “If you’ve got to put me on that thing, do it. But me, not her. She can’t help you.”

  Kane pursed his lips, then gave a small nod and looked up at the Beamer holding Doc, then across the room at something Kai couldn’t see.

  “Take her down,” he said.

  Another Beamer came forward and unstrapped Kai’s arms, legs, and head. He removed whatever was under her hair, then rolled her up to a sitting position. She found she couldn’t stand, so the Beamer pulled her from the table and dropped her unceremoniously onto the ground. Kai watched floor and ceiling trade places as she rolled, her body limp and unresponsive. She couldn’t feel the Orion’s pain in her body anymore, but it must have left its mark on her mind because she couldn’t feel the pain of striking the floor, either. Dissonance between her nerves and memory was jarring. Her body didn’t even want to try. Something in Kai’s brain said it was beyond dead, cut to its constituent pieces. She decided, body and mind, to surrender, then rolled onto her back, able to see the men above her. If she’d found herself staring at the floor (which she couldn’t believe wasn’t painted in blood), she’d have been just as content.

  Kane looked at the Beamer who had pulled Kai from the Orion. His sleeves were black, but Kai thought she could see wet spots shimmering, and assumed it was her blood. Not that she had it within her to care.

  “Get him an injection and strap him on,” said Kane. Then he looked at Kai. “Her, you can kill.”

  Kai, from her spot on the floor, thought this was a brilliant idea.

  Chapter 6

  Feeling like a cliche and not caring, Isaac stared at his reflection in the convention center’s green room mirror, slapping his chest and taunting himself.

  “You don’t need anyone else, do you, motherfucker?” he yelled at the Isaac in the mirror.

  The first time he’d asked his reflection a rhetorical question, a voice had answered him. Before asking again, he’d turned off the mirror’s verbal interface so that he could be awesome without being disturbed. His mirror at home was a plain mirror. The mirrors at the convention center would, however, have to be Beam-enabled. VIPs using the green room would want to follow news stories, get updates on their financials, or have the room’s sensors provide feedback on their appearance or their body language. Isaac, trying to pump himself up for his speech, found this all very annoying. Sometimes, a mirror should just be a fucking mirror.

  The reflected version of Isaac didn’t respond re: this particular motherfucker needing anyone else.

  “You rose to greatness on your own, didn’t you?” Isaac continued, staring daggers at his reflection. “Not because of Micah. Not because of Nicolai. And definitely not because of Natasha. You’re your own motherfucker, aren’t you?”

  The man in the mirror offered no opinion as to whether or not he was his own motherfucker. So, knowing that it would ruin his makeup, Isaac slapped himself across the face in order to give himself even more shit.

  “Wake up! You got this! You don’t need anyone! Fuck Micah! Fuck Natasha! And fuck your speechwriter! He wants to go off-grid and leave you
, then fuck him! You can do this on your own, because you are Isaac Fucking Ryan! Aren’t you?”

  The man in the mirror did not reply. However, his stare seemed to indicate that he was, indeed, Isaac Fucking Ryan.

  Isaac held his own gaze for five long seconds, then broke it with a feeling of, That’s what I motherfucking thought!

  He stepped back, reasonably full of testosterone, wondering if a Beam-enabled mirror could be programmed to mimic a regular mirror in order to give you a lifelike reflection, then break from its mimicry and cause your reflection to start yelling back at you. He decided that was indeed possible. In a world where you could book a week-long virtual vacation that you could fully experience in a single night while sleeping, getting into an argument with your mirror sounded like playing with blocks. Isaac tried to decide if it would freak him out to have his reflection yelling back at him, or if it’d be awesome. He had just decided that it would be awesome (and was about to tell the mirror to grow a motherfucking spine and give him some motherfucking lip) when the green room door opened and a page stuck his head in.

  “Five minutes, Mr. Ryan.”

  “Did I not lock that fucking door?” Isaac yelled. The fact that the page had nearly caught him in a symbolic dick-measuring contest with his own reflection made a furious blush creep up under the collar of Isaac’s starched white dress shirt.

  “Well, it’s a privacy lock, sir, but because it’s Beam and because there’s always a clock ticking, we need to have access to…”

  “GET THE FUCK OUT!”

  The page retreated, and Isaac found himself almost glad he’d intruded. Yelling at the kid had further bolstered his feeling of cruel badassery. He wasn’t just going to deliver a kick-ass speech to that crowd out there; he was going to fuck every one of those people up the ass with a cock made of plutonium while smoking six cigars, and when it was over, they’d all look up, wide-eyed, awed by whatever immense and awesome shit Isaac Motherfucking Ryan had just laid on them.

  On impulse, Isaac spun to face the mirror, turned the verbal interface back on, and said, “Canvas, have my reflection insult me.”

  He was unsure whether the mirror would be able to comply, but immediately he saw his reflection meet his eyes and say, “You’re ugly.”

  “RESPECT THE COCK!” Isaac screamed. He plowed his carbon-nanotube-reinforced fist into his wiseass reflection, his shoulder seeming to dislocate as the Beam glass in the mirror detonated.

  The moment of adrenaline lasted for six or seven seconds, and then his fist began to bleed and his entire arm started to ache. He wanted to feel stupid, but it was better to feel powerful and badass. So he wrapped a towel around his fist to keep the blood off of his suit and went to the bathroom. On the way, Isaac used his good hand to fish a small pen-like device from his briefcase and pressed it to his wrist. Immediately, the high-end scavenger nanos began tuning down sensory nerves in his arm while conducting emergency repairs. By the time he had removed the glass from his knuckles and washed away the blood, his lacerated skin was mostly knitted. The adrenaline remained. Isaac balled his hands into fists, not feeling whatever had gone wrong in his shoulder thanks to the anesthetic. His badass nanos would repair his badass shoulder while he delivered his badass speech.

  The page didn’t return. Instead, he chirped Isaac from the overhead speakers. Isaac took one final look into the mirror’s remaining shards and marched through the door and onto the stage. He owned this stage. Isaac looked out at the people in the hall waiting to hear him, knowing he owned them too. There were Beam cameras everywhere, and he owned every motherfucker watching, too.

  Isaac didn’t need Nicolai. He had written every word of the new speech himself. Once onstage, he delivered it with his chest out, chin high — the esteemed Czar of Internal Satisfaction, the perfect, immutable, unshakable symbol of the strength of the Directorate party. He told them that Shift was less than a month away and urged everyone listening to stand up from their everyday ruts and really consider what that meant. It was easy to see Shift in the same way you’d see the election of an official who’d been in office for decades and would never be ousted, but Shift wasn’t like that at all. Shift wasn’t like voting, because Shift was about you and no one else. It was said that a person couldn’t choose his or her own destiny, but Shift was a chance to do that exactly. At Shift, you’ll choose to be Directorate or Enterprise, he announced to the crowd. It will define not only what you receive (or, in the case of Enterprise, what you DON’T receive) for six years, but also who you are. Do you want to be one more body in the Enterprise gutter, always fighting for your life but never being part of a team that always has your back? Do you want to spend the next six years living in fear of dying in the street while your children starve because you chose selfishness over security?

  Isaac told the crowd about the new Beam-based currency that Enterprise was trying to push. Every person in Enterprise was another vote for Enterprise in the senate, and a predominantly Enterprise senate would ratify “beem” currency for sure.

  “And who do you think will earn the most beem?” Isaac asked his audience. “Will it be the Directorate, who do the jobs we’ve been assigned for the greater good? Will beem be given out equally, as it is in the Directorate? Or will beem instead subvert our system, and turn the entire network into a marketplace? Who will benefit when the entire Beam begins to side with one party over the other? Will it be you? Or will it be those who control The Beam and would never design a system that wasn’t to their benefit, as greedy, cutthroat capitalists?”

  Isaac felt power surge through him as every word he’d written — that he’d written, not Nicolai — crossed his lips with the force of a bludgeon. Nobody could argue with what Isaac was saying. Anyone who chose to become or remain Enterprise after listening to this speech was an uncontested idiot. The next time he spoke, Isaac would repeat the key points from this speech, ramming them home. When Shift came, Directorate would win by a landslide, and inter-party solidarity would be at an all-time high. Enterprise defections would set records.

  Isaac ended his speech. The room cheered. Then they stood, applauding him in a roar. Isaac thought he saw tears. He had done this. Isaac. He wouldn’t have to split credit with Nicolai this time.

  This was Isaac — all Isaac, and no one else.

  He returned to the green room to find that while he’d been kicking ass, someone had replaced the mirror. It had probably been a bot that had done it, but Isaac preferred to think of a person doing the job instead, quailing at the thought of a man who held such fury and strength. He looked at the mirror, eyed his reflection to see if it would flinch (it was just a reflection now, and didn’t), and then, with a cheek-stretching smile on his face, said, “Canvas, give me Beam top stories.”

  Isaac’s reflection faded into the front page of The Beam’s news feed. His speech hadn’t been voted to the top, as he’d suspected. Instead, it was number two. Isaac frowned, wondering if his public triumph might take another minute. He wanted to get in there and read his praise, but wanted to see it rank at the top first — a validation that said, for once and for all, that Isaac Fucking Ryan did not need a speechwriter to prove his greatness.

  But his speech didn’t rise; instead, the top story hung in place above it, racking up votes faster and faster. He pulled it forward, confused by the headline (“Ryan Proposes Hybrid System”) and felt himself bolstered. He hadn’t proposed any hybrid solution, really, but at least he had grabbed the top spot after all.

  But when he exploded the story, he realized that the Ryan in question wasn’t Isaac. It was Micah.

  Fifteen minutes before Isaac had given his speech, Micah had delivered one of his own while Isaac was in here yelling and breaking mirrors. And Micah, of course, had done it better. He’d managed to answer each of Isaac’s objections — to beem, to Enterprise, to the system in general — in advance.

  Isaac swore. The Ryan brothers, with their famous rivalry, were news celebrities, so of course most viewers h
ad watched them both. Isaac’s speech, badass though it was, had said nothing new; he’d simply raised complaints… unknowingly after the same complaints had been effectively addressed by Micah. Worse: mutual relevancy between the two speeches would be high because so many people would have watched and indexed both of them. So how had The Beam arranged them in a playlist? Why, with Micah’s speech first, of course. Isaac thought he’d conquered, but in reality he’d only made himself look stupid and ill-prepared, redundant and a day late.

  “Canvas,” said Isaac, already feeling his mood crumble to dust. “Send in that stupid little page.”

  The room’s Beam connection must have known which page Isaac meant because a moment later the same kid knocked on the door. Isaac had to tell him to enter twice before he did so, looking nervous.

  “Yes, Mr. Ryan?” he said.

  “Did you see my brother’s speech?”

  The kid looked around the room, helpless.

  “Tell me the truth. I won’t yell at you.”

  The page nodded slowly.

  “What do you think about beem? Again, honestly.”

  “I’m unsure, sir.”

  Isaac sighed. “Don’t make me have the canvas run a truth assessment.”

  The kid furrowed his brow, which was now beaded with sweat.

  “Well, it just seems like it might be the best of both worlds,” he said. Then, when Isaac didn’t snap his head off, the page continued, seeing the reluctant Go on in Isaac’s eyes. “I mean, sir, it’d be great for Enterprise of course, but maybe for Directorate too. Because you could open a virtual business on The Beam and trade in beem. If it was legal tender, you could spend that beem rather than having to use it for virtual upgrades and dumb tokens like you do now.”