The Beam: Season One

by Sean Platt

  Still, Leo was uneasy. He didn’t know what to expect, but he wasn’t willing to settle for ignorance. His lack of expectation only made him more curious. What was Leah trying to do? She’d implied that she could track Crumb despite his lack of a Beam ID, and the way she’d said it had reminded Leo of a mother animal’s almost psychic ability to track her offspring. Or of one twin feeling the other’s pain from a distance. Or — and Leo found this one so much cooler — of the way quantum-entangled but separated particles could synchronize across distances as if they were two sides of the same particle. Leah made her quest sound like that — like she’d sampled part of Crumb in Bontauk, and would now forever feel his mind through The Beam no matter where he tried to hide. As if they were now one.

  As Leo paced, two voices fought to be heard in his restless mind.

  She said she’d call as soon as she had something to report. She hasn’t called, so there’s nothing to report.

  But what if she’s in trouble?

  She’s not in trouble. She’s done nothing wrong.

  That you know of.

  Somewhere, in a distant part of Leo’s mind, he knew he was being unreasonable — and not just about Leah. He’d had that unreasonable feeling that Crumb, who’d been a quirky part of the Organa community for decades, was evolving from crazy rants to (Go ahead and admit it, he told himself) prophetic rants. That hadn’t been unreasonable enough, so he’d sent Leah to Bontauk to take the rather unreasonable and dangerous step of trying to hack Crumb’s mind. Unreasonably, they’d then let Crumb vanish, and now Leo had sent Leah into the city on an unreasonable psychic flim-flam journey. And all of this unreasonability was happening at the worst possible time, too — while fights were continuing to break out in the village over the moondust shortage and with Dominic, as their dust savior, now MIA. The only news he’d had that remotely involved Dominic was that anonymous mail he’d gotten this morning indicating that Dominic had called in a parcel for Leo. This “parcel” hadn’t yet arrived, but the whole thing stank to Leo. It felt like everything was starting to change, as if they were on the lip of a cliff and about to spill over. Things were changing, rotting slowly from the inside.

  Maybe the Quark police picked Leah up again. Maybe they decided her stunt last week was more than Digital Trespassing. Maybe they discovered the way Dominic had covered for her, and maybe that was why Dominic wasn’t responding to Leo’s mail. What if the Beam clerics had discovered the nanos Leah had fabricated behind her little fingernail factories and loosed in their system?

  Leo, out loud, told himself to get a fucking grip.

  Across the room, Leo’s handheld trilled. He picked it up. The call didn’t show a Beam ID, but half of the people Leo knew didn’t have an ID. He remembered back when everyone had called everyone using their cellular phones, and the phone numbers themselves would tell you who was calling. These days, when you could call from almost anywhere — from a desktop to a high-end toaster — the device itself gave the recipient little information of its own. Apparently technology didn’t always improve with time.

  Leo set the handheld down on his desk, propping it up, and told it to accept the call. Leah’s pink-dreadlocked head appeared on the small screen. Leo suppressed a relieved gasp, then touched the handheld’s corners to activate the magnifier. Leah’s image, now projected in front of the phone in a hovering square, grew to life-size.

  “Leah. Thank goodness.”

  Leo realized what he’d said, but it was too late to take it back. He felt dumb for being worried, but Leah didn’t seem to have heard. She was practically bouncing, and smiling broadly.

  “I know who Crumb is,” she almost squealed.

  “You found him?”

  “Well, I haven’t exactly found him yet, no. But I found something else. Something much more interesting.” She held up a leather-bound book.

  “A book?”

  “One to rival your collection, Leo. This one isn’t just paper; it was written in with pen.”

  Leo paused. “Is that the journal? The one you saw in Crumb’s head?”

  Leah was nodding, still grinning widely. “Yes. And like I said, I know who he is now, and you’re not going to believe it.”

  “Is he Stephen King?”

  “What?” said Leah.

  “Sorry. I meant ‘Stephen York.’ I was reading Stephen King earlier.”

  “Who is Stephen King?”

  Leo waved at the screen, refusing to get into another debate over Leah’s refusal to sample classic literature. This wasn’t the time.

  “Never mind. So that’s the journal of Stephen York. And York is Crumb.”

  “I think so, yes. The journal was inserted into the honeycomb metaphor as a backdoor, meant to be found by someone and meant to be significant to whoever found it. And I have a 2-D you’ll want to see that came out of the book.”

  “A photo?”

  “Yes, but 2-D. On paper.”

  Leo, who still thought of two-dimensional paper photos as the default and not worthy of specifying as such, nodded.

  Leah appeared to be in a private cubicle at a Beam parlor. If she was smart, which she was, she would have already verified the place’s Privaseal so she could be sure that no one could see her stream or hear her speaking. She was sitting, staring straight ahead at either a Beam-enabled wall or a dedicated screen. But now, as Leo watched, she pulled a small piece of paper from the journal and set it face-down on the desk. She used her finger to trace a rectangle around it. There was a chirp, and Leah continued to grin up at him like a lunatic.

  “Well?”

  “You’re going to shit, Leo.”

  “Just show me.”

  So she did. A small paperclip icon appeared in the lower-right corner of the magnified communication screen. Leo touched it, wondering if the software’s developer had ever used or even seen a real-life paperclip. A photo unfolded from the icon. Leo dragged it into the center of the screen, then used his fingers to drag it larger. He could still hear Leah behind the photo, chuckling.

  “This looks like Noah West,” said Leo.

  “It is.”

  “So?”

  Leah tittered. “Who’s with him, Leo?”

  To say Noah West was famous would be a vast understatement, so when Leo had looked at the image, his eye had been drawn to West like a moth to a flame. But of course there was another man in the picture with him. A lanky man with sharp features and fiercely intelligent eyes, a man who, now that Leo thought about it, looked an awful lot like…

  “Holy shit.”

  “I know, right?”

  “Holy shit. Holy shit, Leah.”

  “I ran a bunch of searches on Stephen York after finding that easter egg in Crumb’s mind, since we sort of figured at first that he might be Stephen York. But the name is too common, so I couldn’t narrow the results to one specific York who was definitely our man. But once I had this image, I was able to pattern-match the face in that photo and repeat the search from the other direction, using a bit of software I picked up and that you are hereby not allowed to bitch at me about. The man in that photo is definitely Stephen York, and unless I’m imagining things, the man in that photo is also definitely Crumb.”

  “You’re not imagining things,” said Leo. He looked more closely at the image, still listening to Leah. He could see her shoulders articulating beneath the picture.

  “Stop staring at me, Leo,” she said.

  “I’m staring at the photo.”

  “Close it, then. You’re creeping me out.”

  Leo pinched the photo closed. If he were anywhere other than in the mountains with only a shamefully hidden handheld for access, he’d have dragged the photo to one of the walls. Then, with the photo out of the way, he looked into Leah’s eyes. That was one way technology had improved: Leo remembered a day when the cameras never quite lined up, and the person you video-chatted with always seemed to be looking in the wrong place.

  “So who is Stephen York?”

&
nbsp; Leah said, “According to The Beam’s official version, he’s nobody. I found some social profiles, nothing special. Says he worked at Quark a while back as a low-level guy, up through the sixties. Then he died.”

  “But you feel differently.”

  Leah again held up the book. “This feels differently. You should see what’s in here, Leo. Crumb is York, and York worked with West. Closely. Unless he was crazy when he wrote this, which he pretty obviously wasn’t, he was one of two fathers to The Beam. The father who’d had heavy reservations about what The Beam would be able to do and what its implementation might mean for the world. It reads like they must have had some heavy NDA shit in place to kept York’s name off of pretty much everything. He let West take all of the credit, while he worked just as hard in anonymity.”

  Leo trusted Leah’s research and hacking implicitly, but her claim was immense. West was The Beam’s unquestioned genius. And now their crazy old mascot was supposed to share West’s spotlight? It was insane. Try as he might, Leo couldn’t make himself believe it. He remembered back when a politician named Al Gore had implied that he’d more or less invented the internet. That became a joke that had lasted as long as the net itself.

  “You don’t buy it,” Leah said, looking at Leo.

  “It’s hard to,” he replied. “Very hard.”

  “Later I’ll tell you where I found the journal and how I got in to get it, and you might change your mind. The pieces fit, even though they’re hard to believe. York either co-created The Beam or was a very involved, implicitly trusted assistant of Noah West’s. Either way, he was there for the whole thing. I recorded the place where I found the journal for you, but when I came out and tried to unspool the video, it was blank. It wouldn’t let me record. So you’ll have to trust my judgment and memory.”

  Stuffing down his doubt, Leo asked Leah to read from the journal. She told him that although her end of the connection was secure, his might not be. Leo said his connection was plenty secure and that he used it regularly to call Dominic because it was secure. Leah laughed, and again told him to trust her. He’d have to hear the rest in person, or at least via a totally secure connection — the kind not available in the mountains. They’d probably said too much already.

  Leo asked if Leah knew where Crumb was now — because as important as it had felt before to find him, it now seemed a hundred times more important — and she told him that she was working on it. She said she thought she’d have an idea in a few hours.

  Leo said he could think of a good way to kill those hours, then asked where he could meet her.

  Leah laughed with surprise. Leo hadn’t been into the city in Leah’s lifetime, and she was probably already imagining all sorts of hilarious fish-out-of-water scenarios wherein Leo could embarrass himself. But he wanted to go. He had to go. This was too coincidental. Captain Dominic Long of the DZPD had brought the Organas Noah West’s partner. No one had ever known who was guarding their gates and ranting at them through every day of sun. Did Dominic know? Leo doubted it. Dominic claimed to have saved Crumb from Respero when he’d shown up ranting in Times Square, and said he’d done so because something in the vagrant had compelled him. Much like something in the same vagrant had recently compelled Leo to send Leah to Bontauk for an unreasonable hacking.

  Dominic was meant to save Crumb.

  The Organas were meant to have Crumb.

  Which meant that at all costs, they needed to find Crumb.

  Leah didn’t argue, as amused as she seemed by the thought of Leo coming to District Zero. For all Organas, everything was interconnected… but for the hacker elite, the sentiment was almost literal. When you combined Leah’s intuitive, borderline spiritual approach to navigating The Beam with the Beam’s ubiquity, fate started to look like a mere side effect of hyperconnectivity. Complex networks were like vast, living brains. At a certain point, you could stop talking about the airy will of the universe and start talking about the calculable will of the system itself.

  Chapter 4

  The NPS agent sharing the room with Dominic was at least a public servant. That made Dominic more comfortable, despite his newly found shitheap of trouble. Quark wasn’t running this operation, and the agent was just a regular Directorate Joe like Dominic, earning a (probably decent) dole for doing an honest job. Dominic decided he could live with whatever was coming. He might be going off to a domestic prison or to one of the prison islands outside the lattice, and there was even a fair chance he’d be going to Respero. But as long as Dominic was being judged by public sector humans instead of posturing Quark insiders and clerics, he would try to accept his fate with a smile.

  “Come on, Captain Long,” said the agent. “Just look at this cap.” He gestured to the wall, which displayed a nearly life-sized recording of his earlier encounter with Omar in the abandoned glass warehouse. The agent cranked the volume with a gesture. Dominic listened as he incriminated himself. The cap couldn’t have been more perfect for the NPS’s case against him. Either Dominic had subconsciously known he was being set up and wanted to get caught trafficking moondust, or Omar was an exemplary theatrical dialogue partner. Watching the cap was like watching a scene from a movie — the scene where the bad guy confesses using all of the oddly perfect words.

  “We’ve got you up one side and down another,” the agent continued. “You’re a smart guy. I’ve reviewed your service record. It’s exemplary. You deserve to be captain. If I may be so bold, your salary — your direct, real, legit salary — has got to put you in the Presque Beau, notches from the top. You’ve worked hard for a long time and have earned your success. So let’s not do the thing where we posture back and forth. You know we’ve got you. You know what you did. So let’s talk.”

  It sounded reasonable to Dominic, but the agent had toggled between being a nice guy and a total cock so far, seeming to take on the roles of both the good and bad cop. Although, Dominic decided, even when he was being a dick, Dominic couldn’t help but like him. He was kind of a lovable asshole.

  “If I did anything wrong, discussing it with you would just get me to tell you things you don’t already know,” said Dominic. “That’s how I’ve landed some of my best leads.”

  The agent — whose name was Smith but who wanted Dominic to call by his first name, Austin — rolled his eyes so far up into his head that they nearly vanished. He sighed loudly, his level of exasperation exaggerated for Dominic’s benefit.

  “Cop to cop, Dominic,” said Agent Smith (Austin), still angling for a first-name trade, “you don’t have much left to expose that we don’t already know. Hell, you let it all hang out on this cap, so we don’t need to know more.” He indicated the video, still playing as a two-dimensional rendering on the wall, muted and on a loop. Dominic watched Omar verbally bend Dominic over, his bright white suit making him look like an angel, a player, or both.

  Dominic shrugged. He was sitting. Agent Smith (goddammit if he wasn’t starting to think of him as Austin) was standing, occasionally sitting on the edge of the table in front of Dominic. The two couldn’t have been more of a cliche. If not for Beam surfaces (which could see into a room as easily as they could display information), Dominic knew there’d be a large two-way mirror at the end of the room to complete the tableau.

  Austin stood. “You bought dust from Mr. Jones and sent it to the Organas. If I may be totally frank, we know that unless you are very, very, very good at covering your tracks, you haven’t made any money at this. None whatsoever. You have received money from the Organas and have paid the exact same amount to Jones. And I do mean exact. To the point-credit.”

  Dominic watched Austin Smith circle the table, still like a cliche. Apparently the agent didn’t realize how transparent all of this was to a seasoned cop like Dominic. The familiarity, the air of confidence, the use of first names, the small room, the pacing and the causal sitting on the table — all of it obvious… unless, Dominic supposed, Smith’s openness was actually genuine.

  “Actually,
it was the other way around,” said Dominic, unable to help himself. “I paid Omar first, then got money from the Organas.”

  “Like reimbursement for expenses when you work for a company.”

  “Exactly like that,” said Dominic. And it was. Leo even had a form Dominic filled out. He used a pseudonym, of course. He signed the forms “Dick Huffington.” The forms didn’t matter anyway, seeing as the monetary transfers were more obvious than digital paperwork. Besides, Organa record-keeping was a joke. They did half of it on paper.

  “So essentially, you’re a courier. Why would anyone do that, Dominic? You’re a police captain, well respected, bringing down a hefty legit dole after so much time and seniority with the force. Your family has a history right here in DZPD. We know you don’t even spend all you make from your dole. So why deal drugs?”

  “I’m not dealing them,” said Dominic. “Like you said: I’m a courier.”

  “Why?”

  Dominic said nothing, watching the agent.

  “Let me make a supposition,” said the agent. “We’re friends, right?”

  “Since that’s what the ‘good guy’ script says, sure.”

  Austin pulled something from inside his jacket. It looked like an old-fashioned bottlecap. He set it on the table, then pushed down with one finger. It separated and sprung up into a long, thin stalk with one bottlecap on the tabletop at the silver stalk’s other end. Then the stalk spread out into thin limbs that were anchored to the center, turning the device into something like a giant, ten-legged spider. The device sprung from the table and began circling the room’s periphery, touching the walls. When it reached the wall that was replaying Dominic’s encounter with Omar, the image flicked off and the wall went back to being just an ordinary wall.

  Dominic was watching the thing, aghast. “Those are illegal,” he said.

  “As illegal as shuttling moondust?”