The Beam: Season One

by Sean Platt

  Leah recognized the second man’s eyes, which hadn’t changed in all the years that had passed since the 2-D had been taken.

  It was Crumb.

  Leah looked around the room — around the converted restaurant-turned-elite-lab hidden in Chinatown — and then down at the photo of the crazy vagrant she’d known all her life with his arm around the most famous man who had ever lived.

  Aloud, she said, “What were you part of, Crumb?”

  The lights on the workbench and in the panels above, below, and directly to Leah’s sides faded, becoming an unresponsive gray. Surprised, she stepped backward, out of the dark. As soon as she did, another ring of lights went black. She turned and stepped forward again, and more lights dimmed. She was being herded forward, toward the foyer. One by one, the lights went off in rings around her until she stood in the small area where, a long time ago, customers had sat and waited for a table to sit and eat their noodles.

  The front door opened on the pneumatic hinge.

  The last of the interior lights clicked off.

  Leah, with Stephen York’s journal in her hands, stepped into the street.

  The door closed behind her, and Leah turned to look at it.

  She could try to re-enter, but was sure that if she did, she’d be told that her access had been revoked by Stephen York, oh-six-one-two-two-oh-nine-seven.

  EPISODE 5

  Chapter 1

  Stephen York’s Journal, Selected Entries:

  Dec 22, 2032

  Dad got me a journal. He called it an early Christmas present. He said, “Stephen York, you’re going to be someone someday, and any life worth living is worth recording.” Totally a Dad thing to say. I asked him if he’d just quoted Tony Robbins again. He does that. He went to see Tony live last year. Tony has to be in his seventies but still jumps around on stage like in Dad’s old videos. I don’t get it. But whatever.

  So Merry Christmas. I got a book. And not even a book I get to read, but one I have to write in myself.

  Dad said, “What do you want instead, Stephen? A toy? A video game?” I got his point. That’s what most of my friends want, but only the rich kids are still dicking around with that kind of stuff these days. I’m lucky my parents can give me a book, that nobody in our family has been sent to the wars, and that we haven’t been drowned in the floodwaters that would have covered the whole island if not for the levees and hovertech to hold them.

  Anyway, I got employee of the year today. Pretty fucking boss, considering how hard it was for me to even land the job. They gave me a plaque. Wilson gave a little speech, said it was for “excellent work integrating nanotechnology into fluid gaming environments.” I can’t believe this is my job. I could be working at Sloppy’s to help my family pay the bills, but instead I get to play video games. Javier was pissed, by the way. He was 24 when he won last year, and they made such a big deal about his being so young, and I beat that by nine years. He said I got lucky. I called him an old man.

  Dec 23, 2032

  I got like ten calls today from recruiters. Apparently Javier got them too when he won, but he turned them all down because he said he had a secure, steady career at Zenka Games. He said he used the other offers as leverage to land a big raise, but that going to a new company felt too risky. He said that when you’re the new guy, you’re the first to go if the company gets into trouble. He said times were too uncertain, and that if the east invaded or if global war broke out or even if people just got afraid, the economy could collapse. He didn’t want to end up in the rabble. Jobs are precious, and he’d built up a few years of seniority at Zenka.

  I told him that was stupid and that playing it safe was the way to end up accomplishing nothing. He said I was fifteen, so what the fuck did I know? I told him that I’d check back with him when I was 24 and we could compare notes. Either I’d be dirt poor because the world collapsed or I’d be famous and rich because I had balls and went for what I wanted. I told him that if the world collapsed, it wouldn’t fall into recession. It would COLLAPSE. If that happens, seniority won’t mean anything anyway so we’ll all be fucked. It’s not like Zenka will keep making video games after Armageddon. Why not aim big?

  Anyway, I don’t want to play it safe at Zenka. I like what we’ve done with nanotechnology, but there’s only so much you can do with it in games. The biggest advances are in other fields.

  I got a lot of calls and four solid job offers. One was from Google, which is super-tempting given what they’re doing with omniarchiving and global cyberenvironments, but the one I got really excited about was from Quark. QUARK! If Quark made fan posters, I’d plaster my walls with them. In the end, I think Quark’s focus inward, on improving the interface between people and technology networks, is a better direction than Google’s external, data-driven approach. The internet is getting bigger and bigger, but we already have more data than we can assimilate. We need better ways to use and interact with the data we already have.

  I mean, WOW. Yes, I’d probably make a ton of money at Quark (I looked it up… their number of employees per dollar in earned profit is by far the highest in the industry, AND they offer profit sharing and a stock program) but really I’m most excited just because they’re Quark. They’re the biggest company in the world for a reason. They’re visionary, and they get where the world is really going. They took the ashes of EverCrunch and made something from that shit heap in like a week BECAUSE they understood that unlimited data means dick until you tie it to data that people actually care about — something EverCrunch missed.

  Fingers crossed. I’m meeting with a woman named Carol Wok after the holidays. She’s talking press coverage and everything, and of course she’s giving me that crap people do where they tell you how excited they are. Maybe they’re excited and think I’m a prodigy, maybe not. We’ll see.

  Jan 3, 2033

  Second day of interviews at Quark. I can’t decide if they’re paranoid or just really thorough. So far, the skills tests are stupidly simple, but there have been a million hours of them. I kept wanting to ask if they were screwing with me, but it’s possible they think the tests are hard and that I’d come off as cocky by asking. So I just did them. I hope they’re almost over, because I’m getting bored.

  Jan 4, 2033

  Okay, I take back what I said about the simple tests. Today’s were INSANE. What I did the last two days was all simple coding, but now that I think about it, it reminded me of doing times tables in school, where you had to do simple multiplication over and over and over until it got stuck in your head. Wait! I know what it really made me think of. Dad has a rip of this old movie (old enough that he had to rip it from a DVD… and because we don’t know anyone with a DVD player, he had to take it to a place and pay for the conversion), called “The Karate Kid.” The tests were like “wax on, wax off.” They just wanted me to do simple stuff over and over until I was a ninja.

  But today’s tests were insane by comparison. Data stream manipulation, combinatorics, numerical analysis. It was almost like codebreaking and advanced encryption. When I said that, one of the guys testing me admitted it used some of the classified EverCrunch algorithms. I actually got lost working on it and after a while I thought I might be spouting garbage, but they said I did well. Really well. Even though I barely remember doing it — like I was in a trance.

  I’m nervous for tomorrow. Carol told me that the next round of tests are psychological, but I can’t decide if that means they’re going to mess with my head or not. They can’t do that, can they?

  I also asked about the job. She wouldn’t tell me any details, but did imply that I’m pretty much hired once I get through these tests. She also said the pay was “ridiculous.”

  Jan 5, 2033

  Holy shit! Today was awesome.

  No reason to sweat the psych tests. They were actually sort of fun. It was all what-if stuff, but they shot them at me really, really fast. I guess the idea was that I wasn’t supposed to think about the answers — just ans
wer off the top of my head. Some sort of a reaction-versus-logic thing. I asked about it but they wouldn’t elaborate, just said they “need to know how I think.” It was super hard and stressful at first, because they’d give me something really complex like “what would you do if you encountered an if-then loop in a string of code that hung in a situation that numerically occurred only 0.001 percent of the time but resulted in total data loss when it did” and expect me to answer it in literally one second. I wanted to know the details. Had the code been shipped? What other systems talked to it? What was the error? Was there something particular and predictable that happened that 0.001 percent of the time? But I couldn’t ask; I just had to answer. I felt like I’d give the wrong answer, because it was totally ill-informed. They said it didn’t matter. After about ten questions, I was getting freaked out, so the guy came in and explained that it was no big deal, that I wouldn’t be held to my answers, and that I would be assessed based on the psychological implications of my answers, not their accuracy. After that, I eased up and it got a lot easier, even fun. They asked those questions for hours, with only one break for fifteen minutes. There may have been ten thousand questions, I don’t know. They weren’t all about work, either. A lot were either totally random or moral, like “would you kill one person to save fifty” and “which color is the most upstanding and honest?”

  After the tests, they took me into an empty room with one table and no chairs. I asked if the room was part of the test, like an interrogation. Carol was sitting on the edge of the table. She said they would be hiring me. I asked if I’d done well and she said that “well” wasn’t really relevant to the psych tests, but that I was “hand-picked.”

  Then she told me that I’ll be WORKING DIRECTLY WITH NOAH WEST! She told me that he’d been watching me since I won the NYC science fair three years ago with my desalination project that got the writeup on the Times site. I didn’t have the guts to ask, but I almost get the impression that I wasn’t being pitted against other Quark applicants at all. I think I was the only one tested, like they just wanted ME.

  I’m so going to make Javier Cortez eat it.

  Aug 20, 2033

  After eight months working with Noah West, I’ve decided that he’s barely human, if at all. The man is astonishing. He never stops thinking, and never gets tired. I thought I was good (working with the best in the world at 16, rah-rah), but Noah makes me look like a punk. He’s not really that much older than me, just in his twenties I think, and he runs an empire that’s taking over the world… AND doing it while the planet collapses and everyone else whines. Maybe I’m just isolated and coddled, but it’s like the world never stopped from where I’m standing. I’m dimly aware that the coasts (save NYC, of course) are flooded, that millions (maybe billions) are homeless or dead, that there are riots and fires and little civil wars and all of that, but it’s true what they say about ivory towers. I almost never leave Quark, and the only people I really talk to are my family, who I set up in what’s becoming a very fashionable, high-rent area in — of all places — Little Italy. So I don’t even see the rest of the world. From where all of us stand, the future’s never been brighter. Everyone at Quark feels that way. They say it’s like it’s 2025 again, with the world still rising in the New Renaissance. Maybe it makes us apathetic, but what the hell, Quark gives a ton of money to restoration and recovery projects in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Nobody wants to say it, but it seems as if the rest of the world may be beyond saving. Quark still funds groups who do what they can to help, but it’s like spitting on a fire. People think there’s anarchy in America, but I hear Europe is terrible, and they’re even talking about cutting off totally, trying to make us self-sufficient.

  But still, it’s like none of that exists at Quark or in my new circles. Everyone is upbeat and excited. It’s hard not to be uplifted by Noah. He’s exhausting but totally inspiring. Every idea is brilliant, and he’ll explain each if you let him — talking a mile a minute, so you can’t follow along.

  We’ve been working on this latest project since I was hired, and I can’t keep up. I’m exhausted but exhilarated. I barely sleep. I wish I could blab on about the new project (we’re “laying the blanket” for it, in Noah’s words) but I’m afraid to, even in my own journal. It’s THAT secret, and I don’t want to be the guy who fucked it up because his apartment was robbed and his journal got stolen.

  But it’s astonishing. The most amazing thing I’ve ever seen — maybe the most amazing thing anyone has ever seen.

  Noah says it’ll be done in maybe five years. I’d figured ten or twenty at the very least. But it’s hard not to believe Noah West when he says he can do the impossible.

  March 25, 2035

  Work with Noah West continues to be beyond nuts. The Crossbrace Project (I think it’s funny that the press uncovered the name but not what it is… their guesses are hilarious) is insanely over budget. But it’s not just over budget… it’s costing Quark a half million dollars per day. Noah says he doesn’t care, and keeps repeating the same words: “better and faster, better and faster.” Carol always seems worried, and the board of directors keeps telling Noah to slow down or speed up — whichever will balance the company’s bleeding against actual, finished product the soonest. The board says that Quark, even as rich as it is, can’t afford to sustain Crossbrace development. But Noah keeps saying that it can’t afford NOT to.

  Then, because he’s Noah Fucking West, he usually adds that the world can’t afford not to have Crossbrace, either. I wish I could say more, but I will say that I tend to agree, especially now that the borders are closed. This continent needs to de-globalize and become self-sufficient.

  Now that I think about it, the notion that “the world” needs Crossbrace might be overstating things.

  Oct 26, 2040

  MAJOR breakthrough today. As always, I wish I could elaborate if for no other reason than that repeating things, even to myself, helps me to clarify, but I can’t. Not yet.

  But yes, we’ve had an absolute breakthrough… and about damn time! This project is a monster — a monster I believe in fully, but a monster nonetheless. It seems laughable now that Noah thought this would all be done in 2038 “at the latest, young Stephen!” It’s been so frustrating to slave and slave, to get yelled at constantly by the board, but also to know our sunk costs are so deep that there’s no way out other than to keep going forward. The only way to save this project is to complete it, and it’s stressful and frustrating to know that until that happens, we’re only digging in deeper.

  But I feel, despite this major step today (one I still can’t commit to the page… hopefully I’ll remember what it was if I ever read this back), that we’re on borrowed time. It troubles me. Not just with the project, but with the world at large. There were a lot of murmurs when the borders were first closed and people started to wonder how the US could ever be self-sufficient. Conversion to hovertech and Stimulin’s development of Pocket Fusion helped because at least the oil monkey was off our back, and the discovery of the riches under the ice up north helped a lot more. But… to cut off from the world? It hardly feels stable, especially considering the “hyperconnected” nature of what Quark is trying to do.

  A lot of people felt relief when we dropped the US/Mexico and US/Canada borders and formed the NAU because we at least had a few other hands and minds in our camp, but the world still feels like a powderkeg, and I can’t help but think that everything we’re working on will be missing the point if that keg blows while we’ve still got our hands in our pockets. There’s too much desolation and fear in the rest of the world. It’s too polarized. I do feel that the NAU’s formation was a good thing, but just think about it: the three richest countries in the world following the collapse (and also with the least internal strife, relatively speaking) getting together to form the world’s only truly stable government? Hell, we might as well paint a giant target on our backs. How long until we the world stops fighting with itself and comes here to take wh
at’s ours? Look at us. That pill, EndLax? It’s a fuck-you to the starving people of the world. Or, look at the Ryan brothers. I saw Isaac Ryan the other day at a participatory internet VR event, and I’d never noticed before that his title is the Directorate’s “Czar of Internal Satisfaction.” How can we not think we’re in trouble… worrying about our “satisfaction” enough to have appointed a czar for it while the rest of the world burns?

  Even the NAU’s situation feels like a house of cards. There’s a ton of potential in what we’re building to bridge the gap between the upper and lower classes (not that I’m a socialist — far from it!) but until it’s rolled out? It troubles me. We have a system where the upper class pops EndLax at endless, gluttonous banquets, living at the top of skyscrapers that keep growing taller and lusher. More fortified, like castles. Meanwhile all that old Park Avenue real estate keeps crumbling to shit, Central Park East and West are going to gangs, with robots using hovertech keeping them in line rather than anyone working to solve the problem… oh, hell. I could go on forever. People say I think too much for someone my age, but that’s been the case since before the fall, when my parents belonged to Stonegate Country Club and wouldn’t let me invite Jimmy Swinton to the pool. “He’s not our people,” they said. And this, today? People around me are full of optimism, saying things have never been better — but I just think they’re being willfully blind to the world around them.

  Okay, stopping with the downer stuff now.

  The new project will help close the gap, and we’re finally getting close to rolling it out. I DO think too much. Maybe this new world CAN survive. It’s true that the “us versus the world” feeling inside the NAU has reduced internal turmoil. The new senate? The Directorate? The Enterprise? All good. Give people a choice and they’ll feel satisfied even if both options are equally lousy; the jam study proved that decades ago. The senate is shaking all the right hands in appointing Noah the Secretary of Practical Advancement. When Crossbrace rolls out, that might actually mean something.