by Sean Platt
“I’m out of politics, Micah. No offense, but I don’t want to work for you.” He thought of Kai, Doc, and the blood on Micah’s hands. “I don’t want to work for Enterprise at all. I just want to shift to Enterprise.”
“I understand,” said Micah. “I figured as much. But again, it doesn’t matter. Do you remember how hard I lobbied to get you to join us all those years ago? I know how much it tempted you, too. But you were too loyal. You were like a mouse who feels he owes something to the trap because it gave him cheese.”
“I remember you lobbying,” said Nicolai, sidestepping Micah’s conception of his loyalty to Isaac as a trap.
“You were meant to be Enterprise, Nicolai. It was a crime seeing you in Directorate. I’ve seldom known anyone more naturally Enterprise than you. Except for me, of course. And your father… had he lived to see the birth of Enterprise.”
Nicolai felt his hand slip on the piano. He slid backward, ramming his hip into its side. Something inside the great instrument tinkled on impact.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your father. Salvatore. It broke my heart to watch you slowly die in Directorate, Nicolai. I know you don’t want to work for me, and that’s okay. It’s enough that you’ll be where you should have been all along. Maybe the things you’ll be able to do in Enterprise will change the world, like your father’s inventions.”
Nicolai, feeling dizzy, slid along the piano’s length and slumped onto its bench. He felt levels of vertigo stack high above him. He hadn’t breathed a word of his father since seeing him dead on the ground. He hadn’t told the Ryans (or anyone else in the NAU) about his father’s business, his immense wealth, or even his name. And nobody knew about his inventions. Nicolai himself hadn’t even known about them for more than half his time in Italy, and had only found them by accident because sometimes an inventor’s teenage son manages to gain access that even the AISE (or the American CIA, for that matter) can’t get. He’d been told his father was a professor, and even after he’d learned that his father worked for Allegro Andante (but not what he did for them), Nicolai had been told to keep telling the professor lie to his friends. Only decades later did Nicolai manage to piece the puzzle together, finally understanding the gadgets in his father’s usually-locked study and in the so-called “arsenal room” his father had explained he’d only be able to access in an emergency. As best he could tell, Allegro had had an ironclad NDA with his father. Salvatore invented, and Allegro Andante would publish (once the technology was ready) without giving him credit. The untold millions of Euros in the family’s bank account must have been Allegro’s way of making up for stealing Salvatore’s rightful fame.
But then the chaos had begun, and his father’s inventions had never been released. Salvatore had died in his living room, and Nicolai himself had burned the mansion and all it contained. When he later saw hovering objects in the NAU, he assumed Allegro Andante (which had burned to cinders too; he’d trekked to Rome and seen the shell) had leaked some gadgets before expiring. But regardless of how those gadgets had made it overseas, Salvatore Costa’s name wouldn’t have been on any.
“What do you know about my father’s inventions?” said Nicolai. He felt weak. It had been seventy years since he’d found his family slaughtered in their mansion on the hill, but now it was as if he could see their bodies laid out in front of him. He closed his eyes. Behind his lids, blood flowed. A house burned.
“I know they don’t get the credit they deserve,” said Micah.
“You mean he didn’t get the credit he deserved,” said Nicolai.
“That too, yes. But also the inventions themselves. They were more than just hovering bots, you know. Your father suspected the potential of hovertech. I never knew him, of course, but my grandfather did. My family had ties to some powerful people in Italy at the time, and I’ve heard the stories. Making things float!” He laughed. “Yes, it’s a neat little novelty. Think of all of the kitchen floors saved from the ravages of scraping chair legs! Think of the advances in sweeping under ottomans! And finally: flying cars. How long have we been promised flying cars, Nicolai? Every science fiction film I’ve found from the twentieth century promised us flying cars, and finally we got them. The world rejoiced. Am I right?”
Nicolai felt blind-sided and punch-drunk by the line of discussion. He’d seen the flying cars, the hovering ottomans, and all sorts of other things that floated. He’d been secretly proud of each, but only in his own little way. Those things hadn’t exactly changed the world.
Micah, not waiting for a response, went on.
“But what not a lot of people know — but which I know because my grandfather’s company was among the first to work with hovertech in the States — was that hovertech nanobots were the first to use an intuitive distributed network. See, your father didn’t just want things to float. He wanted his nanobots to be able to respond to commands, to move around, to float various different objects as needed. Simple to solve, right? Just add processors. But the problem is that nanobots are just too damn small, and when people tried to give them more than the most rudimentary processors — and I do mean rudimentary, on par with using a rock as a can opener — they became way too large to do their jobs. So your father asked a question: what if he modeled the human brain? The brain isn’t just one big chunk; it’s a collection of discreet neurons that all work together to create thought. So to make his bots compute, Salvatore found a way to spread the processing functions out over many bots instead of giving a complete processor to each bot. Just like neurons in a brain. A single neuron isn’t very useful, but if you get a ton of them together and they work in harmony with each doing a little bit of the work… well, then they can become damn intelligent. Intelligent enough, in hovertech’s case, to come up with their own intuitive goals. Intelligent enough to farm raw materials from their environments and build other kinds of nanobots to help them as those goals demanded.”
Nicolai fought to keep his bearing. Micah might be bullshitting, but in general, Micah Ryan didn’t bullshit. He lied, but he didn’t bullshit. There was a difference.
“Without your father’s work,” said Micah, “we’d have been sunk. Literally, in some cases. Hoverbots kept the levees in place so that District Zero could be saved when the oceans rose. Bots ran the desalinators, giving us clean water. But I don’t need to tell you about all the things that intelligent nanobots do today, Nicolai. You’ve got plenty in your own system. You should be proud, my friend. Salvatore Costa’s work saved the NAU and made our way of life possible. Hell, even The Beam’s evolution was facilitated by the pollination effect.”
Nicolai remained silent. Micah had won. Nicolai wasn’t even sure what game they were playing… but whatever it was, Micah had the medal. He felt all of his moments collapse into one disorderly pile. And to think: he’d believed he was in control of his life all along.
“You still there, Nicolai?” said Micah.
“Of course.”
“You’re so quiet.”
“I’m just… my father’s work was very secret. His name wasn’t supposed to be on anything. The work itself wasn’t even supposed to be released because they never quite finished before the riots and wars broke out. I’ve looked it all up. The company was run by a bunch of isolationists. They had this vision of turning Italy into the next Japan, wanting Italy to command hovertech the way Japan commanded the electronics market at the time. I don’t even understand why they released it. Did they release it to your grandfather?”
Micah laughed a bitter sort of laugh. “Oh, no. They were very protective of it. It was like you said: nothing for the Americani until it was finished and they had gotten their big head start. Believe me, my grandfather’s people tried to convince them. They tried hard. I’ll even tell you a little secret, now that it’s no longer fresh news: they were ready to steal it from them. But then, like you said… the wars. And then Allegro Andante was no more.”
“Then my father…”
“He wouldn�
��t budge either,” said Micah, “and they tried hard to persuade him, too.”
“Then how did it get here?” he said.
Micah gave another chuckle. For the briefest of moments, Nicolai closed his eyes. In the darkness, he saw the mansion burn in a fire of white phosphorous. He saw his family’s bodies laid out on the living room floor like macabre trophies. He saw himself alone, at seventeen, surviving the massacre — finally able to access the arsenal and its microscopic wonders once the others were dead. In his mind’s eye, he watched the last Costa walk away with only a few scant belongings and a crossbow like a voyager heading off into an unknown wilderness. Like a pilgrim heading off on a pilgrimage. Like a heroic warrior heading off on a quest.
“You brought it to us,” Micah told him.
Or like Typhoid Mary, off to seed a plague.
WANT MORE?
The Beam continues in Season Two … but this is actually a whole world, full of twists.
Here are three Beam-world books you may enjoy:
If you want to know what happens next …
The Beam: Season Two
The rabbit hole goes even deeper as the core Beam series continues in Season Two. You’ll find out what Nicolai’s revelation means for the NAU, how Doc keeps himself hidden, and more. A new elite class has surfaced as Shift approaches. The balance of power has begun to tip … and you’ll want to be there when it does.
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The Future of Sex
This companion series by author Lexi Maxxwell is set in 2063, just as the Crossbrace network is giving way to The Beam. It follows Chloe Shaw, new recruit to the monolithic O corporation — an industry giant that’s turned sexuality away from human connection and into a commodity. Sex has become a cyberpunk video game where anything is possible … but in Chloe Shaw, O has found a technological prodigy they can neither predict nor control.
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If you want to know all about The Beam itself …
PLUGGED: How Hyperconnectivity and The Beam Changed the Way We Think
This fiction-as-nonfiction future history (written by the authors of the Beam under a pseudonym) chronicles the development of The Beam from its origins in the first computers of the 1970s through its use today, in 2097. You’ll see how the Internet made Crossbrace necessary, how Crossbrace evolved into The Beam from the inside out, and how The Beam fundamentally changed us as a species. True Beam fans won’t want to miss this one!
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Author’s Note
A note from Sean: I wrote the author’s note for Johnny’s and my first major project, Unicorn Western, so Johnny offered to write this one. I don’t let him talk most other times, so letting Johnny write all of what you’re about to read was quite a concession.
Sean pitched me the idea for The Beam almost a year before we started work on the book you’re holding right now. I hated it.
Given how The Beam’s first season turned out, that might seem dreadfully short-sighted, but it’s not my fault. See, Sean is astonishingly good at many things, but squeezing his usually ambitious, always A.D.D. ideas into a nutshell isn’t one of them. (Neither is writing action scenes, according to Sean’s other partner, David Wright.) He introduced The Beam to me as futuristic world where the political system was different somehow… and oh, there was also a super-internet. Dave and I had also heard about it in another context: “That project I mentioned a while ago where nothing is capitalized.” And I remembered. Sean had mentioned it on our Self Publishing Podcast, on the episode in which we’d discussed the rather dry subject of grammar and punctuation as an example of knowing the rules in order to break them. Because, you see, nothing in The Beam would be capitalized except for “Noah West.” Now, aside from seeming stupid to me (and Dave, but everything seems stupid to Dave), the idea of capitalizing nothing also seemed 1) overly gimmicky and 2) fucking obnoxious in practice. My fingers want to capitalize like a normal English-speaking human writer, and Scrivener, my writing program, agrees with me. Slowing down and finding a way to force my fingers not to capitalize things would have been ridiculous.
We didn’t make it any farther than that. In his pitch to me, Sean went right from “science fiction” to “political” to “nothing is capitalized,” and by then I’d checked out. That thought flow might sound exaggerated, but if you think it is, you don’t know Sean. He’s like a muppet. I’ve learned since that almost every single one of his ideas is something we can turn into Awesome with a capital A, but you sometimes have to hold him still and punch him a few times to get the core of those ideas to come out. Besides, if the project was to be The Beam, then we couldn’t do Awesome with a capital A since nothing was capitalized. The best we could do would be “awesome with a pretentiously lower-case a.”
There were a dozen other things I hated about it at first, too. The project as conceived wasn’t The Beam; it was theBEAM, all one word with the absurd no-first-capital and all-second-word-capitals. There was even a full season written but never totally fleshed out and published. It was full of jargon; I felt like I needed a fucking alternate reality dictionary to understand it. We kept a few of the slang words from the original lexicon (two examples are jagger for dick and burned for mentally screwed up), but the original dialogue read like a cockney argument at Radio Shack. Whenever you said “fucking X,” you were supposed to concatenate the two words; I’m not fuckingkidding about how fuckingannoying that was to me before I suggested we fuckingknock it the fuckoff. Oh, and SerenityBlue’s name used to start with an asterisk: *SerenityBlue. I told Sean that I wasn’t going to do that because it made me want to punch shit.
So due to a series of misunderstandings worthy of a Three’s Company episode, the genius behind The Beam got lost behind all of these dumb writing conventions.
Sean then pitched me The Beam for a second time when we were considering writing something else together. But again he got all muppety and we ended up talking about that already-written season and the punctuation and jargon again, and again I passed. (We ended up writing Unicorn Western instead, though, so all wasn’t exactly lost.)
Then, by March or April of 2013, Sean and I had known each other for several years, had been podcasting and speaking together regularly for a year, and had been writing as a team for almost six months. By then, something must have clicked in my head — say, a new ability to see past the A.D.D. muppetry that shows up in projects Sean is most excited about and to the genius beneath — and this third time when he pitched me The Beam (ahem, theBEAM), it suddenly seemed interesting.
And so we started to talk it out. Sean had built this world, and he had it all fully realized (its 1.0 version, anyway) in his head. I needed to understand it. So he took me on a tour, and what I saw beneath the gimmicks blew me away. And so we began.
When we write together, Sean does all of the initial world-building and writes the outline of how we think the story will turn out. I then write the first draft from beginning to end, and Sean and I re-convene on story direction to explore where things are going after I inevitably deviate from his original beats. If we were excavating the story like a fossil in the ground (thanks to Stephen King for the metaphor), Sean picks the site, plans the dig, and operates the big machinery. I’m the guy in the trench with shovels and picks and toothbrushes.
It’s a great system, because we’re each doing what we’re best at. W
e’ve written several dozen projects this way, but The Beam surprised us one hell of a lot more than any of them. The fossil in the ground was simply much larger than we could have imagined, and the thing twisted and turned in ways we didn’t see coming from our original vantage point on the surface.
Slowly, bit by bit, we realized that what we’d thought was Sean’s original fossil was something else entirely. We discarded the grammar tricks and the concatenated name immediately, but as I started work on the project, I saw that we’d gotten other things wrong as well. For one, the story was much more about the people than the fact that it was set in the future. I had a hard time trusting that at first; the story as presented was very chrome and very foreign and had a lot of flashing buttons and robotic levers, so we had to spend a lot of time detailing the ways in which it was okay to just let it be about Kai, Nicolai, Doc, the Ryan Brothers, and all the others — people who, despite living in 2097, aren’t really any different from you and me. (And a big har-har on that point if you’re reading this in the 22nd century, by the way.)
So we based it in our own reality, then extrapolated. I didn’t think society’s speech would have changed so dramatically. I figured that some people would still write on paper from time to time, or wear glasses. Only the rich would be “full-on sci-fi”; the poor would still just be ordinary organic folks, albeit with much better internet (Beam) connections. We also realized quickly that our core characters would be much older than they looked, giving them roots very near our present day. Many characters were born around 2013, which is when we wrote this. One was even born on my birthday, down to the day and year. That let us play with current conventions and drag them into the future with us. Because the way we saw it, no matter how much the world changes around all of us, we are human and hence can’t help dragging ourselves along for the ride. I don’t care how much of the world has become chrome and flying cars; “wax on, wax off” isn’t going to stop being a cultural anchor point for someone who lived through the 1980s.
