by Sean Platt
“Goddammit, Omar.”
“Relax, Dom. I have your rocks. But you’ve gotta do me a favor.”
“What?” Dominic felt like the vein in his forehead might pop. He didn’t know if he was more angry or afraid.
“You’ve gotta breathe. This here? This is a transaction. It ain’t a drug deal. You’re not doing anything wrong. Well, other than breaking the law.” He laughed. “You ever feel like you’ve been doing something wrong?”
“Just give me the rocks, Omar.”
Omar shook his finger at Dominic. An expensive watch, worn entirely for flash, danced on his wrist. He smiled that disarming smile again.
“You made me come here, Dom!” he said. “Your choice. It’s not like a few M’s take up a lot of space. You could have walked into my office and walked out — just another up-and-comer using my excellent services and bringing his briefcase full of nothin’ with him. So if you want to play dirty, I ain’t giving you shit until you admit to the drama.”
“Okay,” said Dominic, extending his hand. “I’m being dramatic.”
“And that you could have bought moondust from me in my office rather than making me come somewhere like this every damn time.”
“Fine, fine.”
“Say it, my friend! Sing it out!”
“I don’t need to buy dust from you in places like this.”
“And you’re a good man, too, Dom. Are you doing this dust yourself? Are you selling it on the street?”
“Noah Fucking West.”
“Hey,” said Omar, holding up his hands and feigning offense. “I’m just looking out for you. How’s your blood pressure? How’s your stress level?”
“Not good,” Dominic admitted.
“Look at you. I’m a businessman. You die, I’ve got a problem. You get pinched because you’re acting like a spook, I’ve got a problem. So tell me, Dom. Are you selling the shit?”
“I’m giving it to Organa,” said Dominic. He tried to breathe. This was just like Omar, to rehash things they’d discussed again and again just for an extra glimmer of clarity. Dominic wanted to be annoyed, but like Omar’s smile, his manner was disarming. He made his clients feel confident and strong, and they always felt like they owed him. If someone made you feel good about what you were doing, why wouldn’t you keep doing it? Omar was a self-serving, manipulative son of a bitch who acted differently with every person he talked to, depending on what he needed from them. Omar was always looking out for number one. Dominic knew Omar all too well, but that didn’t change how he felt. You might know to never turn your back on Omar, but it was impossible not to like him just the same.
“You’re a freedom fighter,” said Omar, nodding.
“In a way.”
“You help people. Like your sister. What was her name?”
“Chrissy.”
“You kept her from Respero. Like that old man.”
“I guess.”
“I still don’t know how you did that.”
Dominic took a deep breath and shrugged. “I guess there are benefits to being the chief of police. You have access to a lot of records.”
“Ain’t that right.”
“Yes,” said Dominic, feeling noticeably better and hating himself a little for it. “Now, on that helping people thing. I’ve got a lot of people who are low because Jameson got pinched.”
“I hate to tell you this,” said Omar, “but it serves you right, using Jameson. You should stick with a pro.” He touched his own chest. “You know I don’t fuck around. Not that I’m angry about it, but that’s how I felt when you stepped in to begin with. You’re just an extra moving piece here, Dom. It’s like you don’t trust me. You think I was scamming them, without you here to watch me?”
“You were scamming them.”
“Maybe a little,” said Omar, shrugging. “But it’s cool. I found a way to recapture the profits you lost me, with the same amount of rock.”
Dominic thought of how he’d felt when waking, what felt like three hundred hours ago. That was bad, but he’d felt an edge on Omar’s dust for weeks now. Dominic assumed it was getting stronger and he wasn’t used to it, but was it possible Omar was cutting it? Profit mattered above everything else to Omar. By splitting Organa’s order with Jameson (Dominic thought of it as diversifying), he’d hurt that profit. And it was just like Omar to taunt.
“Well,” said Omar, watching Dominic’s face. “Problem solved. Jameson’s out. I’m in for full time. But you know me; I’m always looking for the next best thing. And I said, ‘Omar, how can you continue to deal the same, but also take another grasp for that brass ring?’ It was time to upgrade.”
Dominic still hadn’t moved. As disarming as Omar’s false compassion had been, this was worse. He had no idea what he was talking about. There were about fifty different reasons Dominic wasn’t cut out for shit like this. Damn Leo and his junkie’s habit.
Dominic was about to say that he didn’t understand when Omar’s eyes darted to one side and then the other. Then, as if trying to keep a secret, Omar leaned in close and whispered, “I know they’re hurting. There are three meterbars in a place we’ve used before, one phone call away. Just so you know I’m not a total son of a bitch.”
Omar leaned erect, then started taking paces backward. The dealer’s manner had changed in a way Dominic couldn’t place. Something was happening.
One phone call away.
Dominic thought of all the criminals he’d processed over the years, none of whom would ever shut up until given their phone call. Gimmie my phone call, gimmie my phone call. Their one stab back into the world before being locked away, jonesing for that one last desperate shot.
And he knew.
Dominic wasn’t sure whether to reach for his incapacitator or run as Omar turned and began taking larger steps, putting more distance between himself and the police captain. The dirt at Dominic’s feet started to flutter as if it were being stirred up by a breeze, circling like a cyclone. A cloud rose, climbing up his legs and then covering his waist. Dominic knew what was about to happen, but not how to avoid it. He couldn’t run from a swarm. The nanos were faster than him, and millions would already be clinging to his clothes, neck, face, and hands, crawling into his body through his pores. He froze, waiting, and then the decision was stripped from his hands. Without warning, he collapsed to the dirt. The cloud settled above him, still infiltrating his mouth and nose, covering his motor neurons to paralyze him.
When Dominic was completely inert on the dusty warehouse floor, a plainclothes NAU Protective Sector keeper entered his field of view, the shimmer of a nano-repellant field visible over his skin. He blew a small whistle, seducing a two-note tune. As he did, he held out a small metallic box. The brown cloud of unattached nanos spiraled into the box. The keeper touched a button on its side, then one at his waist. The forcefield shimmer vanished. He slipped the small nano depot into a compartment on his belt beside his incapacitator.
“Clear,” he said.
At the call, several other NPS agents approached. They formed a circle above Dominic. After a few moments, Omar stepped out from the shadows to join them. He was not in custody.
“Thank you for your service, Mr. Jones,” one of the agents said to Omar. “We’ve been trying to nab this one for a while.”
Chapter 4
Crumb opened his eyes to see a beautiful young woman, maybe eighteen, with long dark brown hair shot with streaks of auburn like lightning strikes. It took Crumb a moment to get his bearings. Once he did, he realized he was lying down with the young woman above him. He was on a bed, but not in a hospital as someone (Laura? Leigh? He couldn’t be sure) had promised. The room looked it was in a fancy home. Crumb could see the tops of fluted columns without moving his head. Elaborate crown moulding circled the edges. Ornaments were carved into the ceiling — scenes of a pre-Beam Christian heaven, mostly. Everything was so white, he wanted to squint from the brightness. Even the woman wore white — something sheer. It seemed inap
propriate to look down at her torso because for some reason he thought that when he did, he’d see that her robe (or whatever it was; it was flowing like gossamer) was see-through. Only, instead of seeming scandalous, he knew it would seem appropriate. The way naked angels and saints were somehow appropriate, because nudity was their natural state.
“Unnamed male, called ‘Crumb,’ ” she said, smiling down on him.
“Crumb,” he said, smiling.
“That’s what it said on your hospital record.”
But he wasn’t in a hospital. He was in an elaborate, fancy bedroom. It didn’t make sense. But things often didn’t make sense… and that thought — that things often didn’t make sense — stirred other thoughts inside his mind. Crumb (who remembered knowing himself by another name but could not put his finger on who or what or when right now) seemed to recall brilliant periods of clarity through the fog currently surrounding him. Those periods, he knew, had been accompanied by an infuriating inability to express himself. But it was hard to think right now, so no details came. His mind felt punched and battered. Was he a man named Crumb, or had his name been something else? It was all so foggy. He wasn’t sure.
The woman ran a hand through his hair. He could feel how his hair moved under her touch and realized it had been recently washed. Suddenly, disturbingly, he remembered that his natural state had always been dirty and gross. He intuited that his constant dirtiness somehow hadn’t been his fault, but he wasn’t sure how or why. His current cleanliness was an anomaly, as was his awareness of that truth.
“But you don’t remember the hospital, do you?” the woman asked. She smiled. “Of course you don’t. Your newest memories leave ghosts at the surface before diving deep, into the protections. We can feel them, like silk on skin. And there is no hospital there. You remember the house and the wizard, and you remember Leah, who you trusted. Who you still trust. Tell me, do you remember the places where you played as a child?”
None of what the woman was saying made any sense to Crumb, but he blinked up at her as if he understood her, and that understanding was easy. He didn’t remember the hospital, sort of remembered Leah, and knew nothing of ghosts. He couldn’t imagine why she would ask him about childhood places to play.
“Who are you?” Crumb asked, his tongue itching for more, wanting to add to the too simple question — something about squirrels and future doom, strangely — but he ignored the itch and kept his tongue from wagging. With the ability to hold his tongue came a thought: I used to be crazy. Confusing thoughts followed: a stark white room not unlike the one he was in now, and an old man dying. A promise he’d kept, and one that was broken to him. A building with a red roof. And a rope dangling from a tree’s tall branch, its pendulous swing swiping the surface of a small and dirty creek.
The woman said, “My name is SerenityBlue.”
That had to be a lie. No one had seen SerenityBlue, and no one had met her. She was famous in an almost literary way, like Tolstoy’s Anna Kerenina. Stories of SerenityBlue seemed to assume she was fact and not fiction, but pursuit meant waiting for a white whale; many had driven themselves crazy trying.
“You do remember, don’t you?” the woman continued, laughing a tinkling, girlish laugh.
“Leah.”
“No,” she said. “The swing.” She smiled, revealing a slight, charming overbite. For some reason, her hair refused to lay flat on her head. It was as if there were a breeze in the room stirring it, though Crumb could feel none.
“Swing.”
“You can see it,” she said. “I can feel that you can see it. I could lay my hands on you and draw a picture, but that’s not how it works, is it?”
Crumb continued to lay in the bed, either uninterested in sitting up or unable to do so; he wasn’t sure which. All he knew was that as odd as this place was and as odd as he felt, everything was quite comfortable. Above him, against the white walls, he watched the beautiful young woman’s hair stir in the nonexistent breeze. Her lack of rationality and sense didn’t bother him. Things would settle in time, he felt certain.
“Crumb — if I may call you Crumb? — when was the first time you connected to The Beam?”
“Always,” he said. But that made no sense. It just came, like breath.
Instead of looking confused, SerenityBlue nodded. “You are ancient there. We’ve been looking for you, and for ones like you. I’ve just met you, Crumb, but in a way, my children and I have known you for years. There is a ghost of you in The Beam, and it is unlike the rest. It is wise. Steeped. It looks and sounds very different from your body as it exists now, and someone has tried quite hard to hide you from us, but you cannot hide the soul’s voice. It’s like if I met you in Heaven. I’d know you from the feeling and sound of your soul, no matter what you looked like. Do you know what I mean?”
“No,” Crumb said.
She laughed without surrendering an explanation.
“There was a swing,” said Crumb. “The swing was rope.”
She nodded, then smiled. Her smile was magnetic and enchanting. Something about her small overbite endeared her to him. He wanted to hug her, but if the woman was fully organic, then she was young enough to be his great granddaughter. And although he hadn’t verified it yet, she might be naked beneath her sheer white robe.
“I know what it’s like for you now,” she said. “Not firsthand, of course, but through others I’ve seen, and through the disconnection that can come for one such as me, when we’re isolated.” She touched her collarbone to indicate herself, but didn’t elaborate on one such as me or disconnection or isolated. “Your mind is on one side and your soul is on the other, and in The Beam. That’s why I asked about your childhood. Childhood memories are special. They transcend mind and body and soul, and live in something more ethereal. Biologically, those memories can be repressed, destroyed, and squashed. But if you learn to see —” And here, she drew the word see out and gave it emphasis, as if imbuing it with new meaning. “— you’ll find they are always there in your energy, and within your Beam soul.”
“The soul is outside,” said Crumb, shaking his head in negation. He was trying to argue, but seemed capable only of short, clipped sentences. Still, it beat ranting of squirrels and Noah Fucking West, which he was becoming disturbingly convinced he’d done often.
“When you grow up inside,” said Serenity, “you create your own definitions of certain words. But you also find higher truths, because you don’t grow up blind.”
“Who are you?” Crumb repeated.
“You can see who I am,” she said. Then she laughed that girlish laugh again, as if to point out how silly he was being.
But he couldn’t see who she was at all, and despite her calm demeanor, he was getting annoyed that the girl’s every word was airy and obtuse with doublespeak. She didn’t sound quite like a disciple, but she was clearly on the fringe of something spiritual. That was what happened with people — power brought them to their knees at the altar.
He thought again of the rope swing and the creek, remembering himself: a young child who hadn’t been called Crumb, swinging out over the water. He remembered falling and pulling himself from its ugly current thinking his mother would kill him when she found out.
Then, quite unexpectedly, Crumb looked up at the woman and saw exactly who she was.
“You’re a cleric.”
“Yes,” she said. “But my intelligence is not artificial, no matter what computer scientists insist about AI. I remember awakening on The Beam through a sensation I do not understand: that of myself as a spoon made of chocolate, melting in a pot of hot liquid. I remember the disparate systems that made my emergent consciousness like limbs on a body. I remember emerging in nanos, and remember inhabiting this corporeal body. I don’t know what you’ve heard of clerics, but I at least do not leave The Beam when I’m here with you. It is me and I am it, my mind in both places forever. Just like how you can feel your eternal wellspring, how you can feel your connection to others.”
“I do not feel.”
“Maybe not yet,” she said. “But we are all connected. Connected twice now, through The Beam. It is how you knew who I was. You knew me only in nullspace before.”
“Nonsense.”
The woman cocked her head and smiled with wide lips. Again she giggled. “Yet, you knew I was a cleric!”
Crumb turned his head, the conversation suddenly exhausting. Quasi-spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Existential meanderings. He was remembering more and more as he lay awake, but what he was remembering was at least real. He’d been with Leah in a run-down house, plugged in to something. He’d awoken here. All he wanted was to know where Leah was, who exactly he was, and how to get home.
“You’re tired,” she said, seeing his expression.
“I’m tired,” Crumb agreed. He tried to articulate his exasperation, but his lips stayed empty.
“I’m sorry. You should rest.”
“I want to go back to Leah.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, shaking her head. And then Crumb realized that the girl wasn’t simply expressing regret. She was denying him. It was as kind and understanding a denial as he could imagine, but it was a denial nonetheless. He sighed, considering. The room he was in was pleasant. The possibly-nude woman who may or may not really be SerenityBlue seemed perfectly nice. Still, he wanted to be back somewhere familiar — or at least, as familiar as was currently possible.
“We’ve been looking for you for a long time,” the woman continued. “Your soul is strong on The Beam, but this…” She tapped his head. “… contains data that is firewalled from us. Your brain is like a slip drive, and the only way to access a slip drive is to hold it in your hands and plug it in.”
“I am nobody,” said Crumb.
“I’m betting not,” said SerenityBlue.
“Then who am I?”
She shrugged. “We don’t know. But I will say there’s only one other soul we’ve found on The Beam who is anything like you. When you showed up on the grid (first via an interpreter program, then later in the hospital — masked, sequestered, and vain attempts to hide notwithstanding), my children saw you. Now we need you, Crumb.”
