by Sean Platt
Isaac sighed.
“No offense, sir,” the page added.
Isaac dismissed him, then reopened both of The Beam’s top pages, watching comments filter in on both speeches.
He looked at his fist, remembering how bloody it had been and how powerful he had felt, as he watched himself become more and more hated in real time.
Chapter 7
“This isn’t necessary,” said Doc.
Alix Kane smiled. “I know.”
The small, white-haired man circled Doc as he was strapped to the Orion, Doc’s head cradled in the black, helmet-like device at its top end. Somewhere past his feet, Nicolai was watching the scene, unable to speak. Doc couldn’t see Kane at all times because he couldn’t move his head, and that was a sort of torture in itself. Kane hadn’t laid a finger on him in real life, but even the real-life experience was already terrible. Doc kept feeling as if, when Kane was out of sight, he’d push a button and Doc wouldn’t be ready, and he’d suddenly find his soul being ripped to pieces without warning.
Doc said, “I’ve told you all I know.”
“I don’t think so.”
Doc insisted: “Really, I have.”
Kane scratched his chin, thoughtful. “You must understand. This isn’t exactly the scientific method. I don’t come in here with an open mind, ready to discover an unpresupposed truth. I’ve been told in advance that you know something, and I’m here to find out what that something is. This isn’t ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ I’m afraid, Mr. Stahl, that your guilt is assumed.”
“That’s a bullshit way to do things.”
“It assures we’ll get what we want, if it is there to be gotten at all,” Kane said. “Try to see it from our perspective. Even if you really do know nothing, if we torture and kill you, what have we lost? Nothing. But consider the alternative: What if you do know something? Well, I can’t give up so easily. The sort of people who authorize something like this aren’t terribly understanding people. As little as you want to be on the Orion, Mr. Stahl, I really don’t want to be on it. So to be totally certain, it’s best that you tell me what I think you know, or you die.”
“If you’re going to kill me anyway, why should I tell you dick?”
In response, Kane pressed a button and Doc found himself in a pit, buried in the dirt and compressed into an impossibly tight ball. Every muscle screamed because the ball wasn’t tidy; his joints had all been bent the wrong way, ripping sinew and tendon and muscle and bone. He couldn’t breathe; his lungs were filled with dirt. His spine was ripped open and exposed and his spinal column at each vertebrae was being slowly impaled by a dull, serrated spike. He felt his eyes pop and run down his cheeks, igniting rockets in his brain. His teeth came out slowly; bones erupted through skin, his jaw hyperextended, then sheered off entirely as every nerve screamed in…
It stopped. Doc stared at Kane, panting, his heart racing fast enough to burst through his chest.
“To answer your question,” said Kane, “the reason is because if you tell me what I need to hear, we can move on to the part where they kill you rather than having me continue to serve you nightmares. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“I don’t know anything!” Doc screamed, spittle flying from his lips. “What the hell do you want? There’s nothing in my head!”
“Tell me again how it started,” said Kane.
Doc had told Kane the story over and over and over in the time that had passed since Kai had been taken away by the Beamers. He’d come to Xenia. He’d been late, but had been told by the receptionist that he was early. His name hadn’t been taken. They’d simply come in and escorted him into the room with all the high-end goodies. Kane asked why nobody had recognized him — and hence known what he should and shouldn’t see — if he’d been there so often. He asked how Killian could have not realized he wasn’t Greenley, seeing as Killian was a professional and would know his salesmen. He asked why Doc’s Beam ID hadn’t been checked at reception or at the secret door. Doc replied that the receptionist was a temp and it seemed like Greenley was new. As to the rest, Doc suggested Kane put Killian on the Orion — a suggestion Kane seemed to like.
“You went to great lengths to protect your memory,” said Kane. “Why would you do that if you hadn’t come to Xenia to collect information you thought someone might later wish to erase?”
“Why wouldn’t you have a Gauss chamber if you wanted to be so goddamn sure about erasing memories?” Doc countered.
Kane reached for his handheld, but Doc blurted out for him to wait. He told Kane that he’d been in many sticky situations before in which people had wanted him to forget, but that for a scrapper like Doc, information was power. So he’d gotten the implant, and had had it for years — long before his trip to Xenia.
“Where did you get the implant?”
“I told you!”
“Yes. Mr. Ryu. You surrendered his name quite easily.”
“Everyone knows Ryu is a double-dealing asshole! He’d turn me in without blinking. Screw Ryu! Yes, he sold it to me. He also sold me a hot router and an ID spoof for my car. Just let me off this, okay? It was a mistake.”
Kane shook his head. “But then you kept the memories, Mr. Stahl. And you investigated. We know about Mr. Ryu. His protections are excellent, but nothing we can’t hack. We with our ‘superior technology’ as you saw. As you intended to see, and as you refused to forget.”
Doc jerked his hands against the restraints. “Of course I investigated! I was curious. And refusing to forget? Are you fucking kidding me?”
The room went black. Doc screamed as something enormous slammed into his gut, crushing his organs and ripping an aperture in his abdomen that began to spill his intestines. He looked down and realized he could see into his own chest cavity. Whatever had struck him was like an enormous club, laying waste to his insides. He saw his heart try to flutter, his intestines split like pulverized sausage casings, his unprocessed shit oozing its way of them out, mingling with gore. The pain was astonishing, but the smell was almost as bad; Doc watched the bag of his stomach heave and he threw up, looking down, filling his shattered chest cavity with bile and blood. Then something large was slowly pressed against his face, advancing steadily. His skull shattered with a snap, sending shards of bone through his ears and cheeks and…
It stopped, and the white ceiling appeared above him.
“I DON’T FUCKING KNOW ANYTHING! I’D TELL YOU, NOAH FUCKING WEST, I’D TELL YOU! I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING YOU SICK FUCK! THERE’S NOTHING IN MY HEAD FOR ME TO TELL YOU!”
Tears painted the sides of his face. Panic welled inside him. But there was no way out until Kane decided to end it.
“You thought the information was valuable,” said Kane, his voice calm and thoughtful, as if they were just having a friendly chat.
“Of course!”
“As it turns out, it is. Quite valuable, Mr. Stahl. Are you sure you wish to stick to your story? Are you sure you still insist that you didn’t know what you would find at Xenia? I’ll end this if you tell me what I need to know. But don’t lie. The room will know if you simply tell me something in order to make me stop, and I’m afraid that the Orion’s level of agony will go much higher if you do that.”
“Then you know I’m telling the truth about knowing nothing.”
Kane seemed to think. “Maybe. But concealment and fabrication are third cousins at best.”
Something leapt into Doc’s mind. A witness. A way out.
“Call Nero!” he said. “Nero will tell you! I come in at the same time every week! I came to meet him last week too. They gave me Killian, and Killian fucked this up. Not me — Killian! Xenia had some issue with a nano storm, and they said Nero wasn’t available. Call Nero! Ask him about me!”
Kane shrugged. “Nero is indisposed.”
“They said he was dealing with the police over a break-in they’d had.”
Kane chuckled. “Is that what they said?”
“Then you know? You kno
w about Nero?”
“Nero, yes. You? Not so much. But alas, I can’t ask him right now. Tell me, Mr. Stahl. How do you know Omar Jones?”
Kane’s change of topic was so sudden that at first Doc had no idea what he was talking about, and certainly not how to respond. Omar had once — and only once — made a purchase from Doc. But how did Kane know, and why did he care?
“Um…” Doc thought about lying outright, but the room would be able to read the lie in his voice. Or would it? Doc had plenty of practice lying, and could maybe beat it. But evasion and delay felt safer, so he pretended to think, waiting to see what Kane might reveal to help him.
Instead of revealing anything, Kane said, “Let me show you.”
Kane raised his handheld and touched its surface. Doc felt himself respond immediately, his muscles tensing, his body bracing for pain. But instead of being sent to the torture chamber, he found himself in a park, standing behind a hot dog cart. There was a merry-go-round in the background with several kids circling on it, one being dragged as he tried to push, laughing as his feet raised brown clouds of dust. A man stood near the merry-go-round in a fine suit coat, jeans, and boots, seemingly waiting for something. Doc looked down and saw hands that were too dark to be his own and felt a substantial gut pulling on his back. Apparently he was in someone else’s body — the body of whoever had recorded the immersion he was experiencing.
Then Doc realized that the man he was watching was himself.
It was bizarre, seeing himself from a distance. He could feel the breeze on his new skin, could smell the foreign scents of his new alien shell as he watched his usual body cross an expanse of grass twenty feet away. He recognized the scene, but when he’d last seen it, he was looking at the surroundings from behind a different set of eyes. It had been just a few weeks ago, in the southern part of Central Park. He knew what was coming, but he wasn’t in charge of this body’s motor controls and had to wait for the fat man to turn his head. When he did, Doc saw a thin black man approaching. That would be Omar.
The two men shook hands, then started to chat. Something passed between them: a slip of paper. Doc remembered the paper. On it had been the number for a part. Doc had searched for the part, ordered it, then burned the paper in his fireplace. In a world where data was everything, Doc always marveled that paper and its secrets still burned just fine.
The vision seemed to accelerate, as if under the thumb of impatience. Then the immersion ended and Doc was again strapped to the Orion, staring up at Alix Kane’s white head.
“I guess I know him,” said Doc. He said it lightly, even though he was beyond shocked. There was nothing about what had just happened that he would have believed likely or possible a few hours before. Doc had met Omar in the park because, thanks to the trees, it was the one place City Surveillance didn’t see well unless it sent in fliers, which it never did because the intrusion pissed people off. He didn’t know it was possible to record a man’s senses, and had had no reason to think he was being watched. Or was Omar the one who was being watched? He’d had his doubts about dealing with Omar, and now they resurfaced. In a way, it was starting to make sense. It was fucking Omar who’d gotten Doc into this mess.
“Why were you meeting him?” Kane asked.
“We’re having an affair.”
Doc suddenly felt his leg torn from his body at the knee in slow motion. It was a new species of terrifying because he hadn’t gone to the torture chamber; he was still staring at Kane. Was this happening for real? He couldn’t lift his head to check. He screamed out, then clenched against the seething torment, but it was already gone.
“Why were you meeting him?” Kane repeated.
“Noah Fucking West! Fine, we were talking shop. He’s an add-on dealer. I’m an add-on dealer. We hit the same circles.”
“You’re not rivals?”
“I’m everybody’s buddy,” said Doc. He wiggled his toes and felt them move in his shoe, his leg apparently still there. But of course he knew that; the pain had shut off like a switch.
“What did he hand you on that slip of paper?”
“Nothing!” Then, realizing more pain was coming and wondering what he owed to fucking Omar, who it seemed had gotten him into this, Doc cried out, “Wait! It was the number for a part. For an upgrade.”
“Not the name of anyone at Xenia. Not instructions.”
“No! It was an order.”
That was true, at least. The part number scrawled on the paper had been for an add-on Doc had access to through Ryu. It was a parasite — a specialty of Ryu’s and something illegal enough that Ryu would never sell to anyone other than trusted dealers, like Doc. Omar had needed a way to smuggle a few meterbars of moondust back from the moon elevator, and customs had grown wise to most mechanical means of concealment. More and more often, customs scans were stopping anyone with an add-on that created a compartment within their bodies so that agents could search them. But the scans wouldn’t so much as see the seven-foot engineered tapeworm Ryu had later sold to Doc and that Doc had later marked up and sold to Omar. And even if they did see it and had reason to suspect it, enzyme pockets inside the thing would dissolve the rocks in its gut long before anyone could extract it.
“Why were you using paper for an order? Why didn’t you use handhelds?”
“People still use paper.”
“When it’s people in the Beau Monde or Presque Beau, like you and Omar, paper is usually only used to conduct illegal business.”
“I still use Post-It Notes,” said Doc. He did, too. There was something about the feel of a pen rolling on paper that couldn’t be replicated by even the very best stylus. It was an expensive eccentricity. The only pens he could find were antiques, and Post-It Notes were almost entirely extinct. Doc had found a guy on Marketplace whose grandfather had stockpiled them for some reason, and was selling them off for fifty credits per brightly colored pad.
“What was he ordering?”
“I think it was a brain thing. A kind of wetchip, like N…”
Doc’s head was wrenched in a circle. He felt skin tear, then his neck broke and became knives of bone. He felt his esophagus and windpipe twist, like a swallow in reverse, yet still somehow he found just enough air to scream.
“I’m not lying!” he gasped when the pain ended. “Nicolai has a wetchip! Ask him! Scan him!”
“You expect me to believe that the biggest add-on dealer in the district came to a Presque Beau scrapper like you for a wetchip? He sells them. Why would he come to you?”
Doc could answer the question truthfully, but the answer was just as damning as if he’d actually gone to spy on Xenia at Omar’s command, as Kane was suggesting. Xenia was very, very careful not to deal with dust runners, and Omar worked with Xenia. Telling Kane about the dust-smuggling tapeworm would get them both Respero’d at best, Orion’d into oblivion at worst. Maybe Omar knew about the fancy add-ons Doc had seen and maybe he didn’t, but regardless of whether Omar had deliberately sent Doc in (which he hadn’t), Xenia thought they were in cahoots. And in a way, they were — but over moondust smuggling, not industrial espionage. But it hardly mattered; both would be offensive to the people in charge.
“It was a special wetchip! A creativity booster. Nobody sells those. Omar wanted one. I had one. That was all there was to it!”
Kane looked toward Doc’s feet, toward Nicolai. He seemed to consider, then turned back at Doc.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We’ll scan your friend over there. See what kind of a chip he has in his brain. If it’s something we know Omar to sell, I’ll turn this device up as high as it goes and leave you here overnight. Because, Doc Stahl, I don’t believe you were selling Omar Jones a wetchip. I believe you were meeting with him to plot what you claim was an accident. I believe you heard rumors about what was available at the tier above yours and got greedy. Maybe you didn’t know what you were facing. Maybe you simply thought you could boost your profits by black-marketing some wares above your
pay grade. Maybe you had no idea about the implications of what such high-end technology could do, and hence maybe this is all an accident in a way, and maybe now that Xenia’s cards are all on the table, maybe you’d like to amend your statement.”
Kane leaned in. Doc could smell his skin. The scent was somehow organic and artificial at the same time, like Plasteel covered with a film of algae.
“Maybe if you tell me the truth,” said Kane, his breath in Doc’s face, “I will allow you to amend it. Maybe you were only curious. Maybe you never knew, ahead of time, what you would find. And if that’s true, then maybe you aren’t dangerous, and maybe this can all end. Maybe you never met me. Maybe you don’t know a device such as this Orion even exists. Maybe you can wake up in your own bed tomorrow without memories of this unfortunate incident, and suffer the loss of only one client… and one whore who knows entirely too much.”
“It was a tapeworm,” said Doc. “Omar wanted me to order him a tapeworm, so he could smuggle moondust past customs.”
Kane straightened upright as something shifted in his expression, but not for the better. “So you still expect me to believe your encounter at Xenia was an accident?”
“It was, goddammit!”
“But now you’re also telling me that one of our best men is a dust dealer.”
“Look,” Doc yelled, “I told you the truth!”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Kane touched the handheld, and returned Doc to Hell.
Chapter 8
Kai’s head hung backward, limp like overcooked pasta. As the pair of men hauling her body by the arms and legs walked, her vision was upside down, swaying rhythmically back and forth. She had a strange thought (This is what it must be like to be a metronome) and in a way it was hilarious, and she laughed, the sound far off even to her own ears.
