The Beam: Season Two (10 page)

“But?”
 

“Sometimes, there are layers of lies, and sometimes, you have to settle for the lies where you can affect change. There was some sleight of hand, some pacifying, and a lot of people who sold out a little and started telling themselves the same convenient untruths. Now there’s a new lie, and if you aren’t diligent, you’ll fall right into it. And Dominic, you are too good and too smart and — dare I say it? — too
important
to fall into it without so much as a thought.”
 

Dom could feel his anger draining. It annoyed him that his 85 was starting to feel like a failing grade after all, but Mr. Booker had that effect on him. His favorite teacher was always able to sink his hooks into Dom.
 

“What lie?”
 

“That the network is our salvation. It’s a wonderful lie because everyone loves their connections. Hooking into Crossbrace strips the existential loneliness a person finds inside when he meditates, before he learns to see the truths beneath the stillness. If you have implants in your head, wear a display, and are always reachable, you never have to be alone. You’ll start to think collectively. That can be a good thing, but it can also cause you to get lost. You become a single input in a giant hive mind rather than an individual. But people don’t care about that because it makes them feel like they belong. The world has always had institutions — groups that people are shunted into so they will feel a pacified sense of belonging. The NAU says it was able to claw its way from the chaos because it got the network back up and running fastest, and that may be true. But it can also be taken too far.”

“When is it too far?”
 

“When people lose the will to rise for rebellion. When people will not stand up for what they believe in, regardless if others feel it’s wrong — or if that force of will is seen as disruptive. Even evil.” Again, he tapped Dom’s tablet. “And when people begin to feel that they no longer need to think because others are doing it well enough for them.”

Dom sighed, slouching back in his chair.
 

Booker turned the tablet around on the desk then slid it back toward Dom.
 

“I will fail you every time you don’t try your best on a question that requires deduction and thought. That may not even matter because even flunkies can find their slot in society. But I can only do so much, and will not rubber-stamp you through this system if you fail to challenge assumptions, refuse to challenge me as you’ve done just now, and neglect to use the muscle between your ears.”
 

Dom looked at the tablet. After a minute, he said, “It’s not a muscle.”
 

Mr. Booker stood then set his hand on young Dominic’s shoulder.
 

“Partial credit,” he said.
 

Chapter 7

Nicolai, pacing his apartment, kept talking out loud to a voice that wouldn’t answer. A few times, before remembering that his canvas was disconnected, he’d raised his hands to begin pawing through a Beam search he’d requested. Each time, he’d then paused with his hands up and empty, like a conductor directing the music of an invisible orchestra, and almost laughed at how conditioned he’d become.

It felt strange to not have use of his apartment’s canvas, but the only real harm was to his habits. He’d heard about the suicides that often came with sustained Beam outages — when people felt their worlds collapse and go silent, losing all of their extra senses and at-a-moment conversations at once (a feeling that was sometimes compared to suddenly going deaf, blind, and quadriplegic) — but Nicolai had spent many hard years totally on his own in the Wild East, and the memory of those years had seeped into his very cells. Thankfully, they seemed to have inoculated him against the connectivity losses that others felt so intimately.
 

Again, he raised his hands, and again he forced them down. This time, to forestall future reflexes, he shoved them into his pockets so he could keep thinking without distraction.
 

There was so much to think about, too, and The Beam hadn’t been any help before he’d voluntarily gone dark. For hours, he’d stood in the middle of his living room, becoming increasingly frustrated with how little the network was able to help him find what he wanted — what he
needed
, following his weeks-ago chat with Micah Ryan — to know. He’d tried everything he could think of, pacing the floor and demanding searches from his canvas, his hands up and gesturing, pulling intuitive web searches toward himself to grow and merge them, pushing them away to discard them. He’d peeled web after web open, pawing impatiently through pages. He’d run more searches, gone down more dead ends, and found several suspicious absences of information that should have been there. Finally, he’d thrown his last Beam search at the floor with a yell. But because the intuitive web simulation had never been designed to shatter, it had merely sat on the polished wood, embedded in the ground like a half-buried rock.
 

Now, with his hands in his pockets, Nicolai breathed deeply. He found that he didn’t mind the absence of the room’s usual responses to him at all. He was a civilized man in a cave made of Plasteel and paint, but with his canvas hacked and off, it was a cave nonetheless.

There was a knock on the door. At first, it surprised him. It was an actual, honest-to-West
knock
.
 

“Who is it?”
 

A female voice: “The only person in the world who wouldn’t be shocked that your canvas didn’t knock for me.”
 

Nicolai walked to the door and used the knob to turn it open. The act felt strange, and Nicolai realized that he’d probably never before grasped his own doorknob. The canvas always opened the door, just as it always announced visitors.
 

Kai, standing in the doorway, looked strangely ordinary. She was wearing blue jeans and athletic shoes, with a baggy sweatshirt up top. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was looking at her knuckles as if they’d done something to offend her.
 

“That feels weird,” she said. “Doors are hard.”
 

“I’m becoming Organa,” said Nicolai. “I had Searle build me a hack that kills this apartment’s connection without alerting the system to a short so that I can power it all down. Pretty soon, I’ll start grinding my coffee by hand because I won’t want The Beam to know I’m caffeinated. Caffeine makes me dangerous, like an enemy of the state.”
 

“And the reason for turning off your connection is…”
 

“Plain old-fashioned paranoia. If I’m going to talk to you, I need a place to do it openly, without feeling like I’ll be watched and heard.”

“Do you trust Searle’s hacks?”
 
said Kai.

“Not as much as what Doc could’ve gotten me, but at least it’s not marked up.”
 

Kai projected her voice toward the room’s center as she closed the door behind her, enunciating deliberately.
“But Doc is dead.”
 

“I told you, the apartment is off,” said Nicolai, regarding her.

“If you trust the hack.”
 

Nicolai shrugged. “I can only live with a certain level of paranoia. I choose to trust it. If someone can still snoop and the sensors are playing possum, so be it.”
 

Kai looked around, putting her hands on her hips. She tossed her head toward the bedroom. “You wanna?”
 

“Funny.”
 

“Just trying to lighten the mood. Unless, of course, you wanna.”
 

“Kai…”
 

“Because I’m down. No charge. I’m so stressed, Nicolai. I need the release.”
 

She looked at Nicolai. When he didn’t bite, she sighed and went on.
 

“Fine. But you’d be doing me a kindness. Micah is like a truth detector. You can’t imagine what it’s like to work for him after what we did. It won’t matter at all how well Doc is hidden if Micah can tell I’m not quite right.”
 

Nicolai leaned against a countertop. “What’s he up to?”
 

Kai gave Nicolai a second-long appraising look then let it go. They no longer had any secrets. They couldn’t. They’d betrayed one of the most powerful men in the NAU after being tortured nearly to death by his minions. It was the kind of thing that bonded people with too much to lose.
 

“He’s ‘up to’ prep for the upcoming Shift,” she answered. “I told you that his Enterprise group was behind most of the riots, right?”
 

“Yes.”
 

“Well, they’ve still got that going. And I know he met with Isaac.”

“That’s probably about Natasha,” said Nicolai. “She wants to have some big fuck-you concert the day after Shift. I almost feel bad enough for Isaac to go back and help, but I just can’t do that to myself. The knot is too tangled. I can barely remember who knows what about us, who’s
supposed
to know what, and what lies I’ve told to which people. Isaac didn’t care that I’d lost a few days to a memory wipe outside of its effect on his politicking, but now that I know it was Micah — well,
his people,
anyway — behind my memory wipe and everything it erased, I can’t remember if Isaac knows it was Micah, if Micah knows that Isaac knows, what either of them knows I may have told you, if you’re supposed to know about my missing time, or if anyone even really knows we do business.”
 

Kai looked longingly into Nicolai’s bedroom. “I could really go for some business.”
 

“Did you find out anything about my father?”
 

“Not an easy thing to ask, Nicolai,” said Kai. “‘Hey, Micah. Do you remember your family’s dealings with the Mafia in Italy that I shouldn’t know anything about? Well, I had a question about an inventor whose name nobody knows exists, but whose inventions sort of created our way of life.’ Sure. I’ll get right on that.”
 

“You’re a bit wilier than that, Kai.”

“Give me time. You don’t understand seduction. It’s like nudging an ocean liner with a finger, trying to get it to where you want it to go without it knowing you’re guiding it. I have to wait until he says something then pry a bit. I can’t ask outright.”
 

“Can’t you use your brain tricks?”
 

“Scent is evocative, Nicolai,” Kai said in a hectoring voice, as if they’d discussed this before. “There needs to be something there to evoke, like with Ralph or Whitlock or whatever his name was. I don’t have that with Micah. And even if I wanted to try and fuck it out of him, which I very much don’t, he wouldn’t do it. I’m like the daughter he never had, but that he trained to kill people for him.”

“How many people have you killed, Kai?”
 

They hadn’t quite gone down this road, despite their new full-disclosure policy. The idea that Kai was an occasional assassin bothered Nicolai less than he felt it should have. It may have been rationalization, or it may have been that he’d left bodies in his own wake, but Nicolai somehow got the impression that they’d all had it coming. He thought he knew Kai well enough to know what she was and wasn’t capable of…but then, all of her clients probably thought the same thing.
 

“Do you really want to discuss my work?”
 

He rolled his eyes. No, he really didn’t. Discussions about neither aspect of her business could lead to anything good.
 

“Look,” she said, “it sounds to me like Micah already told you all of what you need to know. You brought hovertech to the NAU. Little old you, all by yourself. So what?”
 

“So what?”
 

“Yes, so what?” Kai stared at him, her brown eyes meeting his.
 

He’d been killing himself trying to reason out the ramifications of what Micah had told him — not to mention becoming paranoid enough to go off-grid while remaining in the city — but for the moment, he stopped to see it how Kai seemed to. In a way, she had a point:
So what?
There was very little that any new knowledge about hovertech’s history was going to change Nicolai’s (or anyone’s) life. He’d spent a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of his unknown delivery since that first call with Micah and could only figure that some of his father’s prototype hoverbots must have attached to him when he opened the arsenal following the break-in. He’d changed and occasionally washed his clothes throughout his European wanderings, so they either hovered around him in a cloud or attached to his body rather than figuratively slipping into his pockets. There were dozens of questions about even that much of the story — “why?” most prominent among them, followed by “Did the bots know what they were doing?” — but answers to those questions would change nothing. No matter what Nicolai learned about the Ryan family and their manipulative, snooping, technology-stealing ways, he would just be satisfying his own curiosity, not changing anybody’s actions or existences. It was hardly a prime concern when he, Kai, and the woman formerly known as Doc had their own conspiracy to hide.
 

“It just feels like my whole life has been orchestrated,” said Nicolai, shaking his head. “There are so many unknowns. My father’s research, everything it’s become without his name, without even Allegro Andante’s name, and without my knowledge — just snatched and then exploited. And if it’s sat for so long, why did Micah tell me — why
now
, after more than fifty years? What’s his game? What does it mean? Did you know I was in the last group of people to enter the NAU before the borders closed? At the time, it felt lucky, but that’s one hell of a stroke. Looking back, it makes me wonder if they knew I was coming, and were keeping a foot in the door.”