The Beam: Season One

by Sean Platt

  Serenity didn’t seem remotely troubled by Leah’s tone or the undercurrent of her words. She circled Crumb’s bed, adjusting his covers. Beneath her hands, he stirred. Leah thought he might be waking.

  “No, it didn’t stop us,” said the girl. “We saw him and we went to him. I have followers everywhere, and we’ve been looking for minds like his. When his surfaced, we went to it. I went with the others, in my body. We asked his mind to go and it agreed. So we moved the rest of him. We did not seek to disturb others, and the children wished for them to stay unbothered. We left no trace, each going our own way. Now we’re here.”

  Leah didn’t know what to make of any of it. She thought of the kid they’d met earlier, how he had turned the lobby into a beach, and his casual disregard for any line between a person’s native senses and the extra ones provided by The Beam. She’d decided he must have been an intuitive. If they all were intuitives, then at least Serenity’s logic would make sense to her. Whether it agreed with the normal rules of reality was something else entirely.

  “What is this place?” Leah asked.

  “It’s a school. For children who find themselves out of place, born into a world they can’t control.”

  Leah thought of the NAU, the Wild East, the impervious lattice covering the continent, the rich in their spires and the Enterprise poor in their gutters, and the billions in the middle, poor but pacified.

  “None of us can control the world.”

  Serenity said, “But my children can control their worlds in other ways.”

  “The Beam.”

  Serenity shrugged, as if Leah were splitting hairs.

  “Becoming proficient on The Beam isn’t reality,” said Leah.

  Serenity looked at her and smiled — a kind smile that was somehow apologetic.

  On the bed, Crumb’s eyes began to blink and open. He looked around, seeming to be momentarily confused by either his location or the presence of the two women — his old friend and his new guardian — here together. He stirred and propped himself up on his elbows, looking at Leah. The crazy was gone from his eyes. He looked like a man who’d seen a lot and had lived long without ever blunting his edge.

  “Leah,” he said.

  It was only one word, but the way he said it chilled her to the bone. His eyes were steady and steely, his voice calm and sedate and in control. This was not the same man who had wandered the Organa community her entire life, guarding the gates and chasing squirrels and talking about conspiracies with a beard full of garbage. Whatever Leah had started back in the burnt-out house in Bontauk, it had clearly peaked, crested, and rolled on to completion. The wall she’d seen in his mind must have collapsed and fallen, leaving Crumb as the man he was supposed to be.

  “Crumb?”

  “I suppose,” he said. “Though Serenity helped me somehow reach out to you, I dreamed that you found a journal. I think it belonged to me. Did you?”

  Leah, finding herself unable to speak, held up the journal.

  Crumb looked at Serenity. Her replying look said, I told you.

  “Then you know my real name,” he said.

  “Stephen York,” said Leah.

  Crumb looked around the room, looked down at his open hands. His eyes rolled back. Then he said, “Yes, that sounds right.”

  “Do you remember?”

  “I remember remembering.”

  “Do you remember Noah West? Quark?” Leah had to rein herself in. She was blabbing too far out of line, revealing too much. She still didn’t know who this strange girl was or what she wanted. She clamped her lips shut and waited.

  “No,” said Crumb.

  Leah looked at Serenity. For the first time, she wondered where Leo was. Was he really just filling a pitcher of water? He’d looked freaked out enough to run, to head all the way back to the mountains and dismiss his ill-advised return to the city as one long, bad trip. Leah found herself able to sympathize.

  “Why are you interested in him?” she asked Serenity.

  “I don’t know. His mind feels different on The Beam. It’s stronger, wiser. Maybe you know.” She looked at Leah. Wasn’t Leah supposed to be the guest? She was hardly the guide.

  “He worked on The Beam,” said Leah. “He helped create it.”

  Serenity nodded. “Thank you. Then what I’ve felt makes sense. The Beam was birthed from the same wellspring we all draw from, when we are inspired and create art. Every artist leaves a splinter of himself in everything he does. Every painting is a self-portrait. Every character in every story is the creator in disguise. Every song is the sound of the singer’s soul.” She turned to Crumb. “If you worked on The Beam, you left a part of yourself in it. We’ve sensed your echo. What’s in this bed is the corporeal piece of yourself, but there may be many others. Those parts may seem separate, but they are all connected beneath the surface. You are like a chain of islands in the ocean. We see many distinct drops of land, but they only appear separate because we can only see their tops. Beneath, they’re all part of the same thing.”

  Leah’s skin prickled. Serenity’s message reminded her of what she’d felt during that strange trip in college, after taking the drug and purging into the red bucket. She’d felt that same sense of under-the-surface connectivity, as if she and the trees and the planet and all the other people around her were strands of the same energy, apparently separate but actually connected. She remembered an abiding feeling that it would all be okay, because it always was and could never be otherwise. She remembered feeling as if she’d left part of herself behind in The Beam in the way Serenity had described Crumb doing the same — that strange sense of herself as a spoon made of chocolate, melting pieces of her soul into a pot of hot soup as she stirred.

  Serenity, without further word, turned and paced to the far end of the room and began staring through one of the false windows. Leah looked past her, to the glasses on the endtable. She was thirsty. If Serenity was as intuitive as she seemed to be, she’d pour Leah a glass of water from the full pitcher and bring it over.

  Leah turned to Crumb. There was probably no reason to keep her voice low but she did anyway, wanting to exchange a few words with the new Crumb while SerenityBlue was out of earshot.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him. Leah tapped her own head. “In here, I mean? You’re so coherent. But do you remember the shack in Bontauk?”

  “I remember that, yes. I also remember being erratic, but my mind never went away. I was just trapped.”

  “I thought I might have killed you. Or burned you. Whatever wall you had inside… it started to buckle. It had an intentional failure point. It was as if your mind had decided it would rather self-destruct than let anyone in.”

  “I’ve felt the wall. But I think I’m fine now.”

  “Who did that to you? The wall, I mean? Why? When? Do you know? Do you remember?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “So now you’re just going to lay here like a convalescent and let a pretty young girl take care of you, huh?” she said, ticking her head toward SerenityBlue. She smiled. “I see how you are.”

  Crumb shrugged. It was so odd. Leah had looked at this man hundreds or thousands of times, but she’d never really seen him. The man in front of her was totally new. The face was the same but the spark in his eyes was different. Leah realized she should start to think of him as Stephen York, but her mind refused to think of him as anything but Crumb.

  “She seems so familiar,” said Leah. “I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been here or that I’ve met her before. Is it just this place? Do you feel it?”

  “I feel something,” said Crumb.

  “She reminds me of my friend Alison, from years ago,” Leah whispered. “The sense of familiarity is so intense.”

  Crumb said, “She reminds me of my mother.”

  Leah looked at Crumb. His hair was mostly gray, peppered with the rare strand of stubborn brown. She remembered the 2-D from the journal, showing Noah West beside a you
ng Crumb with long, brown hair. She looked at Serenity, puzzled.

  “Your mom was a redhead?” said Leah.

  “No,” said Crumb, furrowing his eyebrows.

  Leah looked at Serenity again. Her hair color wasn’t ambiguous. It wasn’t strawberry blonde or reddish-brown. It was red, as in red-red. Like Alison’s.

  “She looks like your mom other than the hair, you mean,” said Leah.

  “No,” said Crumb. “My mother had long, dark brown hair with light streaks in it.” He pointed. “Just like hers.”

  Leah looked from Serenity to Crumb, from Crumb to Serenity. At the endtable, the girl turned. She’d picked up the pitcher and was pouring a glass of water, turned slightly so that Leah could see that she really did look like Alison — Alison, who Leah had last seen the night she’d swallowed drugs and purged in a bucket, whose hand she’d held as she’d realized they were all connected. She thought of how she’d felt later, when she’d dove into The Beam. The way everything had, for a while, made sense. Leah melting inside it. The feeling that she was touching everything, that everything was touching her. The feeling of unsettling a balance, of stirring, of leaving a part of herself behind.

  Serenity finished pouring the glass of water and returned the pitcher to the end table.

  “Wait,” said Leah, watching her. “Didn’t Leo…?”

  But Leo could answer for himself, because he’d appeared in the doorway, holding a pitcher of water. He looked at Leah, then at Serenity, who hadn’t been there when he’d left. His mouth hung open as the pitcher — the same one he had taken from the endtable to fill — slipped from his fingers and crashed to the floor.

  “Noah Fucking West,” he said, still flitting his eyes back and forth between Leah and SerenityBlue. “You two could be twins.”

  Across the room, Serenity blinked, then smiled. A flash of understanding crossed her face, as if something had finally snapped into place.

  “So that’s why you seem so familiar,” she said to Leah.

  Chapter 8

  “You want to know about Leo?” said Dominic.

  He blinked in the room’s dim light. NPS Agent Austin Smith had thrown him for a loop. He’d thought the agent was going to ask him about the vagrant he’d picked up in Times Square back in the 2060s and shuttled up to the Organa community instead of sending him to Respero as ordered. But no, Smith was throwing him this curve ball about Leo.

  “Leo Booker,” Austin repeated. “And let me be honest with you, Captain Long. We’ve been after you for a while. We took you instead of your buddy Omar (who flipped the minute we were able to make him a good enough deal; so eager for his own advancement, that Omar) because we were after you more than him… but the good news for you is that we’re after Booker more than you. It’s like I said: yes, you’ve done things that aren’t by the book. We all have. But your intention has, as far as I can tell, always been honorable. So if you’ll help us get Leo, you can go. Remember —” he gestured at the privacy jammer still idling in the corner, “— this is all off the record. This arrest won’t even show on the books. It didn’t happen.”

  That was appealing, but it wouldn’t solve Dominic’s problems. The Organas still needed their moondust (the bunkered supply Omar had stashed and enabled Dominic to ship with his phone call wouldn’t last forever), so he wouldn’t be able to retire as a trafficker unless he wanted blood on his hands. Besides, he was still all but incriminated in other ways. The Beam would have records leading up to the pickup itself, just lying around for someone else to find and use to pull Dominic’s puppet strings.

  “What do you want with Leo, anyway?” Dominic asked. “He’s not hurting anyone.”

  “Not yet, maybe. But what happens when his group decides to stage a revolt? We have reason to believe they’re planning a Beam outage — maybe a long and rather disruptive one.”

  “So what if they are?” Dominic didn’t think Leo was staging any outage, but he didn’t see the big deal if he was. So people would have to open their own doors and beat off to stored pictures instead of holo shows. Big fucking deal.

  Austin stood and began circling the table. “Dominic,” he said, “do you realize just how essential The Beam has become to most people… to the NAU in general? Not only does its AI run practically every system we have; it’s also plugged into just about every citizen. Not literally, of course, but think about all of the people out there who lean on The Beam for the simplest of daily tasks. How many people in the city do you think know how to use a stove? A radiant cooker? How many people know how to open a can? What about the cold climates and the hot climates? Most people don’t know where their heating and cooling controls are, or what settings are appropriate… and that’s assuming their systems would work without The Beam, which they usually wouldn’t. Did you know that in an unmodified hot climate, you should drink a lot more water to keep your body from shutting down? I didn’t. I grew up poor in the north, so I do know about cold, though. Most people don’t. People with internal heaters would walk out after the heaters stopped working and freeze to death in their shorts and tees. Literally to death, because they wouldn’t know what cold feels like and wouldn’t recognize the source of their discomfort. Most people don’t know how to drive or navigate. If they get in trouble, they wouldn’t know how to call for help. And what about the veggies who sit in one place all day, plugged in and walking The Beam, watching holos and filling their heads with obscure trivia that doesn’t matter to anyone? Do you think those people know how to read a plain old paper book to keep themselves from going nuts? Assuming they could even stand without their assisters, do you think they know how to go out and socialize, use a non-Beam communication device, play non-Beam games, or just sit and think? Those people aren’t used to being alone with their thoughts. They don’t know how to handle the inputs of unplugged daily life. They haven’t built any internal defenses or filters. They’d go mad. The chaos that would come from a widespread, sustained Beam outage would be catastrophic.”

  Dominic shrugged. “Are you trying to convince me?” he said. He knew how dependent the NAU was on The Beam. It was just one more reason to be disgusted by people, and Dominic had been bitching about it to bored friends for years. Grandy had had a cabin in the woods with no electricity or plumbing. He could head up there with a bow and an axe and live for weeks, hunting and cleaning and eating his own game. Grandy could survive Armageddon, and in the 30s, he almost literally had. Most folks today could barely survive through the interruption of a pop-up ad. Dominic wouldn’t feel bad for the people who would have to learn in a trial by fire just what humanity was all about.

  Austin shrugged. “Just making my case about what would happen if Organa got their way. If you’ll help us get Leo Booker, then…”

  “Are you kidding me?” Dominic interrupted Austin with a laugh. “Leo isn’t planning a revolt. Leo just wants to sit up in the mountains and do moondust and think about the good old days. He’s a hippie.”

  “Is that why he sent his girl Leah to some of the best schools to learn about networks and systems and how to bend them to her will? Is it why he sent her into Quark?”

  “Leo distrusts The Beam. He wants to be prepared, to know his enemy. He talks like the world might be better without The Beam. But as far as actively doing anything about it? Forget it.”

  Austin shook his head. “You’re being naive. What he has up there is a cult.”

  This time, Dominic laughed harder. “A cult? I’ve been up there. It’s a group of people who want to be unique, so they all got together in order to be different in the same way at once. There have always been fringe groups. Organa is harmless. They don’t have a stockpile of guns and I’ve never once heard or smelled a hint of revolution. Quark has its panties twisted over Organa too. It’s cute. You’re all so worried about a bunch of junkies with beards and colorful clothes.”

  Austin pulled the chair from under the table and sat on it backward, his upper arms crossed over the chair’s back.
/>   “When did you meet Leo, Dominic?”

  Not knowing what else to do, Dominic shrugged and played along. He told Austin about how Leo had been his high school biology teacher and how he’d taught young Dominic, who had wanted to be a cop, how to track biology-based evidence. He taught Dominic how the scientific method applied to everything, not just to problems in his courses. He showed the boy how to form hypotheses, how to test them, how to see pieces of the puzzle that others couldn’t. Dominic had aced biology and wrangled a two-year virtual university scholarship thanks to Leo Booker. He’d then risen through the ranks of DZPD quickly once his superiors had taken note of his “natural” skills. There was more, of course, but Dominic didn’t want to volunteer it. It was too personal — like how when Dominic’s life had started to fray, when his parents got divorced and his father was killed in the line of duty, it had been kindly Mr. Booker who’d helped him pick up the pieces.

  “So,” said Austin, eyeing Dominic and weighing his story, “that was… what? Mid fifties?”

  “Fifty-five, I think,” said Dominic. He’d graduated in ’57 at age 17, and he’d been in Leo’s class as a sophomore.

  “How old would you say Mr. Booker was at the time?”

  Dominic thought. “Maybe 40? Late 30s?”

  A sly smile crawled across Agent Austin’s lips. “In 2055, Leo Booker would have been 79.”

  Dominic tried to hide his shock. His first thought was that Austin was lying, but to what end? It was a hell of a thing to toss an age out there and be so specific. Dominic knew all the tricks, but this didn’t feel like one.

  “It’s the truth, Dominic. He was born on March 23, 1976. He’s 121 today. Still think you know this man, given what he’s been hiding from his good friend Captain Long?”

  “Bullshit.”

  Austin reached behind him, toward a counter at the back of the room. He removed a folder filled with papers, then opened it and rifled through the contents. After a few minutes, he pinched a piece of paper and extended it toward Dominic.