by Sean Platt
“Why do you use corded phones?” Noah blurted.
Stone was halfway to standing. He paused, one arm propping him up, his right leg on the mat, his left leg in a squat.
“I’m sorry?”
Noah reached over and flicked at the cord hanging from Stone’s desk phone. “Cords. Your phones have cords.”
Stone sat. “Yes, they do. Why does it matter?”
“Tell me why you have corded phones,” said Noah. He was out of line, but it looked like he’d blown the interview already anyway.
“The office just came that way,” said Stone.
“But you pay for the phone bill. It’s not bundled in.”
“Right…”
“Well, you’re the world’s biggest technology company. And you’re not fucking paying attention.”
Stone shook his head. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re using technology that no one uses anymore ‘because it’s the way things have always been done.’ You want a sign that you’re not innovating and just got lucky with one big hit? That’s it. You aren’t asking why or how. You got into the lead by luck, and now you’re just coasting. You’re following.”
“I don’t see the big deal. It’s nickel-and-diming. What would we save? A few hundred bucks?”
“It’s not about money,” Noah snapped, suddenly angry. “It’s about blindness. You discovered you could take data and make it very, very small. Good for you. But that’s not enough. Remember Dropbox? You’re Dropbox 2.0. That’s great until someone else comes up with a 3.0. You’re thinking one-dimensionally. Who gives a shit if you can make data small? Storage is already dirt cheap. What are you going to do when people figure out that small doesn’t mean much in a world where storage is unlimited?”
“Now wait a minute. We do more than just compress data for storage…”
“Oh, sure. You sync it. You make data small, and then you sync it. People everywhere who enjoy things that are small and synchronized rejoice! Just imagine the sponsorship opportunities in midget water ballet!” He made jazz hands. “But all you’ve done is nudge our same old way of thinking a bit further down the line. For a while you’ll be ahead… until someone smarter catches up. You haven’t change the paradigm. Google changed the game. Amazon changed the game. You’ve taken the same game and made it better.”
Stone looked angry. From where Noah was standing, it felt great to see the Zen flee his eyes.
“How the hell are you going to change the game?” he said.
Noah lowered his tone, made it more conversational. “You need to use the network. Don’t be Dropbox 2.0. Be the Internet 2.0. What would happen if you applied EverCrunch compression to data packets on the net? You can compress and decompress on the fly, so what’s to stop you from baking that into the fabric of a new network that could ride on the current one’s shoulders? Right now, data people — that’s you — want to make information smaller. Network people — that’s the ISPs and the G10 companies — want to make transfer faster. But what I’m shocked that you of all companies can’t see is that there are two ways to effectively make things happen faster. One is to move the same amount of data faster. The other is to move at the same speed, but shuttle a lot more data.”
Stone’s mouth hung open. “Holy shit.”
“Think of what could be sent using a data stream that’s as compressed as you could make it. Holography. True VR. Maybe, some day, teleportation. And that’s just transfer across distance. You’ve heard this new stuff with nanobots? You know the problem with nanos, right? They’re tiny, but the atoms needed to make them up don’t get any smaller. Trying to build nanobots is like trying to make a highly detailed six-foot-tall sculpture with Legos the size of my torso. They can’t have many moving parts because until mankind manages to shrink atoms, the building blocks are just too damn big. But what if what they lack in brawn could be made up for through intelligent cooperation?”
With that, Noah stopped. He’d already given Stone one trillion-dollar idea, and he’d almost handed him a second. If Stone hired him, the first idea was worth the surrender. Later, when Noah started his own company, he could develop the second. And the other was a doozy. Data compression and highly coordinated transmission could make nanotechnology infinitely viable and applicable — much, much more than was currently thought possible. Once engineers could stop worrying about freezing a nanobot into one configuration forever and sending it out into the world as a one-function drone, the world’s potential would split like an over-ripe coconut.
Stone stared at Noah. He lowered his head, then raised it again.
“When can you start?”
“Are you offering me the job?” Noah asked, trying to bury his growing elation.
“Yes,” said Stone. “Absolutely.” He appeared shell-shocked.
Noah raised palms to ceiling. “You haven’t told me what the job pays.”
“All the money in the world,” said Ben Stone.
Chapter 2
Leo arrived in the city, out of place and looking mystified. Leah couldn’t help but laugh. She knew he used to visit the city semi-regularly back before the wars and the bombs, before the second Renaissance people called the Renewal, when it had still been called New York. Leo, in Leah’s mind, had the same tendency as most old people — a peculiar way of seeing things as they used to be. Old people never stopped being surprised that Beam walls lit when you touched them, no matter how many years they’d been seeing it. And in the same way, Leo had apparently never stopped seeing District Zero as it had been in the first part of the century.
“You look like the country mouse,” Leah said, watching him approach.
Even in a city as diverse as District Zero, Leo seemed out of place. He looked around at everything; he sniffed the air; he seemed amazed by the hoverskippers and hovercabs that jammed the streets like a sprawling Tetris puzzle. If Leo had had an ocular implant, he’d probably have been raising his hands in front of him like a picture frame to indicate images for capture, like a tourist. He’d told Leah that he’d been active in old New York during the 2030s turmoil, and Leah had gotten the impression that he’d even led a group — perhaps a precursor to Organa. But that was a long, long time ago.
“It smells here,” said the old man, still standing while Leah remained seated.
She had waited for him in a Soho cafe. Soho could be a dangerous neighborhood, but it was a sunny day and Leah had taken the precaution of sitting outside. She hadn’t wanted to stay in Chinatown. For a reason she couldn’t explain, doing so felt like a jinx, like staying at the scene of the crime. It had taken a while for her to shake the feeling that Crumb, who seemed to have somehow let her into and out of the secret lab, was right over her shoulder. She hadn’t stopped walking until the strange sensation had gone away. That had happened near Houston. She’d stared at the burned out boutiques and the gang tags, shrugged, and figured that good luck and fate had been on her side so far. So she’d sat.
“You mean that it doesn’t smell,” said Leah. “You haven’t been here since they added the air filtration, have you?”
“Air filtration?”
“Read a feed article or two, Leo,” she said, laughing.
“I read plenty,” he said, apparently uninterested in hilarity at his expense. “I read every word of the distillation sheets that come to the co-op. But there’s a lot more to the NAU than District Zero, you know.”
Leah held up her hands. “Okay, okay. I hereby retract my mockery about you not reading The Beam and will focus any new mockery on you being an insufferable hermit. How long has it been?”
“Since they added air filtration, apparently,” said Leo sniffing. He sat in a wrought Plasteel chair opposite her. “Did you find Crumb?”
“I think so, yes. Or at least, I know which direction to go.”
“You know ‘which direction’?” said Leo, puzzled. Then he nodded slowly. “So you don’t know where he is.”
“It’s hard to explain. I think he wants m
e to find him, though. I’m confident that if I head in that direction and access along the way, I’ll find the trail.”
“What, like a map?”
“No, not like a map. And not a series of clues on the Beam either, like a scavenger hunt.”
It was hard to explain the sense she had — that a cloud of intuition was floating above her across the whole city like a low fog, and that all she’d need to do to access it would be to stand up into it. So in order to break Leo in, Leah told him how she’d found the building in Chinatown, how Crumb’s mind had seemed to let her in, and how she’d felt him behind her all the way to Soho. Leo, who couldn’t help thinking of The Beam as a super-internet despite knowing better, didn’t seem to get it at all. So Leah sighed and repeated that it was hard to explain and that he’d just have to trust her.
Leo asked to see the diary. Leah showed it to him. Then Leo read it from start to finish, taking his time, while Leah sipped on a soda. Finally he looked up.
“This is amazing. Do you believe it?”
“Oh yes. I was in the lab. If Stephen York isn’t who that diary claims he is or if Stephen York didn’t write that diary, then whoever did is a very smart, very creative impostor. There’s stuff in there about The Beam that I never realized, but that I recognize as true now that I’ve heard it. The fact that there’s a subtle wireframe beneath it, for instance. If you just ‘use’ The Beam, you’ll never see its layers, but if you hack, you’ll find yourself delving into its guts. And now I can see the way the modern Beam was built on something older that must be Crossbrace. The old internet is there too, even further down. The Beam infrastructure touches pretty much everything, but did you know there are still sectors where the systems use TCP/IP? Some of the AI clusters use it to talk to others, like a dialect. And it’s not just protocols, either. Sometimes you can find stuff in l33t.”
Leo shook his head. This was common when she talked to him about pretty much anything. At first she’d thought it was simply a Leo affect, but she later realized he pretty much only did the head-shaking thing to her. Maybe it was because Leah — enhanced and technically gifted — was such an oddity amongst the Organas. She just had a way of talking over his head.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
“AI has personality, is all I’m saying. At a certain point, you have to stop thinking about The Beam as a computer network and start thinking of it like a community. It’s like DZ itself. There are digital neighborhoods inside of The Beam’s programming. Different AI appropriates different elements from its environment to create its ‘culture.’ The oldest structures inside are relics of our earliest attempts at connectivity. The oldest ones harvested Compuserve and AOL to build their neighborhoods. Some seem to have learned from 1980s hacker forums, and do things like speak in l33t.”
Leo kept shaking his head.
“You never understood,” said Leah. “Just trust me.”
“Of course I trust you,” said Leo. “When it comes to The Beam, it’s all you all the time. I don’t say this enough, Leah, but Organa can’t survive without you. It’s one thing to sit in the mountains and smoke dust, but another to understand the system enough to make our way within it.”
Leah smiled, touched.
“I try to understand,” he said. “But to me, what’s in this journal is simultaneously troubling and unbelievable. Don’t get me wrong; I believe it just fine. What I mean is… West’s mind is on The Beam? We know he’s out there, because he’s the default on every canvas. Go into a public building and a Noah West holo will probably be there to greet you. Hell, on my train ride over, Noah West came into the compartment and insisted I watch a safety demonstration because I don’t have a Beam ID, so it couldn’t confirm that I’d ever been on a train before to see the demo. But this is different, isn’t it?” He tapped the journal’s leather cover.
Leah sighed. There was something she could tell Leo that might help him to understand, but she’d never told anyone before and didn’t really want to open herself up that much, even to Leo. But then, Leo had his own secrets, didn’t he? Everyone did. Leo didn’t like to talk about his old days in New York. It was a soft spot for him. But they were embarking on a long, strange trip together, and so Leah figured she might as well be the first to roll over and expose her underbelly.
“Leo,” she said, “have you ever heard of anthroposophy?”
He shook his head.
“It used to be a kind of scientific approach to spirituality, but once people started getting so connected to The Beam and everyone on the network got used to its presence 24/7 as if it were part of them, it started being about the The Beam’s reality instead. I guess the original idea of anthroposophy was to discover the real, objective world of spirituality, and what has happened is that modern anthroposophists believe The Beam has given us access to that world.”
Leo looked at the journal, then at Leah. “Is this like what happened with the church?”
Leah felt slapped. “Oh God no. This is closer to… well, like the alternative spiritualists you’ve told me about from back in the day. Where people would take cocaine to get in touch with themselves?”
Leo laughed. “Cocaine didn’t exactly get you in touch with anything other than hyperactivity.”
“Well, whatever. Drugs. Hallucinogenics. Head trips. Like us with moondust, only real.” Leah wrinkled her nose. She was as addicted to dust as the rest of the Organas and loved the glaze it gave her, and there was some truth to the idea that moondust showed you a deeper truth from reality. She needed dust for hacking, but in the end it still felt like a poseur drug. Leah had never liked doing something that everyone else did (mainly because she wanted to be unique, even among a group of people who all insisted on being unique in the exact same way) and a part of her resented that she used dust, given that it was exactly what people expected an Organa girl with pink dreadlocks, piercings, and various bright sarongs to do.
“Not that moondust isn’t real,” she charged on, not entirely sure if Leo, who kept the village supplied, might take offense. “I just mean… more real.”
“It’s okay,” said Leo. “I know what you mean.”
“When you sent me into DZ for training and I was away from the community for a while, I started meeting people at the college. Some of them were into this old drug that was supposed to purge you in a way and show you the truth.” She looked up at Leo to see his reaction. He nodded. “It was super expensive, but some of the kids in DZ? Well, they have good money. Anyway, you were supposed to drink this stuff. Like shots. Then you purged.”
“Purged?
“Barfed. They even started you with a bucket. The buckets were red.” As if that mattered, but the red in Leah’s memory was as vivid as the black that came later. “After that, you’d experience something unique to you, and you’d have to overcome it. Flushing your demons, I guess. Purging bullshit the world had laid over you.”
“Then what?” Leo asked. He was watching her closely. It dawned on Leah how strange it was to be teaching Leo anything. He was a spiritual yogi. He’d done his share of drugs, plus plenty of other people’s shares. Little old Leah finding something he’d not done, didn’t know about, and that she could guide him through was downright surreal.
“For me, I felt this deep sense of connection. I don’t know how to describe it any other way. It’s like the earth was my body. I could feel everyone at once; I could feel the trees; I could feel the sun and the sky and the clouds. Is this making me sound like a total spaced-out idiot?”
Leo shook his head. “No. But I’m really curious about what the hell it has to do with Crumb and The Beam and West.”
“Once I was in that place, Leo — once I’d gotten past some of the worst of the darkness inside me, mostly having to do with my mom and being abandoned, I guess — I started to think about The Beam. I hooked in, through my port, which I’d installed not long before. The idea to do it was just there. And once I’d hooked in, I started seeing t
hrough the infrastructure, code, and hardware. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was like I went into The Beam. I didn’t feel like I was plugging in and surfing or even Beamwalking. I didn’t feel like I left my body, but my body became like only part of me, as if it were just my leg or something. The rest of me, I realized, was something more. I could feel The Beam as if I were all of it, and a part of everyone connected to it. And The Beam was its own thing, too, quite separately — complete with its own identity. I saw how we’re all connected, and that while The Beam wasn’t necessary for that connection, it was like a lubricant. A facilitator. The Beam gave us a new way to feel the connection that was already there.
“I explored for what felt like days, though it was really only hours. I reached out with what felt like new arms and could see the entire whole world at once. There are old, barricaded data pipelines leading out of the NAU on The Beam, and I could see right through their obstructions. I experienced the Wild East. I experienced the sky, where the data goes out to satellites. I took parts of it into me and felt like I left pieces of myself behind, like you would leave something behind if you stirred a pot of hot soup with a spoon made of melting chocolate. And while I was in those many places, I realized that wherever I went, The Beam was a thing within a thing within a thing. And at the very core, like the center in a piece of candy, was something I can only describe as human will. It was like the first networks had been started with an idea, and the creators had left that idea inside. They had wanted to connect people, and the idea had remained as if pieces of those creators were still there. Every layer added to the technology has been a bigger and better attempt to fulfill that original idea, but the thought has always been there at the core, realized to a greater or lesser degree. To me, that core of human will felt like a pond with a bunch of straws poked into its surface. The oldest straws — to the first systems connected to the pre-internet — were small. The newest straws, leading out to The Beam, were like giant pipes. At the time, since I felt so connected to everything, the solution to fully realizing that core idea seemed so obvious, and it was something that the internet, Crossbrace, and The Beam have all missed — at least in their original, tangible construction.”
