The Beam: Season Two (13 page)

Leo nodded. “Some. And people know I’m doing it. It’s edging on panic.”
 

“The relief shipment didn’t help?”
 

“A bit, but I had to ration that too. I didn’t know if you’d been arrested.”

Dominic’s head cocked. “Arrested? Why would I have been arrested?”
 

“Your last call came from NPS.”
 

“My call came from my handheld.”
 

“But you were at NPS when you made the call.”

Dominic stood. “Fucking hell, Leo. Are you Organa, or are you hackers? You need to pick one. You can’t be both.”
 

“Don’t blame me, Dom. Leah told me. I didn’t even ask. She needed to find something on the canvas I keep here specifically to accept important calls like y — ”

Dominic rolled his eyes and head at the same time. “Oh, bull-
shit
, Leo.”
   

Leo looked up.
 

“Listen to you. You can’t just say, ‘My canvas?’ You have to defend it while you’re talking about it? To me? In private?”
 

“I was just saying that — ”

“That you’re not a hypocrite? Because if you had a canvas — an ordinary, everyday canvas, not that different from the ones used by people down on the main grid — then you’d definitely be a hypocrite, right? But it’s okay if you keep it specifically so I can call you, right? So it’s
my
fault. Or at least, it’s necessary to carry on the good fight against The Beam and the big crooked society you’re out here to avoid.”
 

“Dominic…”
 

“I had a talk with NPS, Leo. Yep. You’re right. I was arrested. I used my one phone call to make sure you got your goddamned dust, courtesy of Omar Jones, who is just as helpful as he is an evil son of a bitch. They busted me, again thanks to Omar, but do you know why they let me go?”
 

Leo said nothing.
 

“They wanted to go after a bigger fish, and wanted my help to catch that fish. Someone I knew about. Someone with an extensive, highly disruptive criminal past.” His eyes bored directly into Leo’s. The old man watched him, seeing the boy he’d mentored all those years before. Seeing the policeman he’d become, trained too well to miss clear connections, a man who had earned more respect than to be played for a fool.
 

“Sit down, Dominic,” said Leo.

The captain didn’t sit, holding his bolted eyes to Leo.
 

Leo sighed. “Please.”
 

Slowly, Dominic sat back down. Again, the wicker chair protested.
 

“Fine,” Leo continued. “You want to know it all? I have nothing to hide. As I’m sure NPS told you, I once led a rather violent group known as Gaia’s Hammer. We embraced technology as a sort of poetic irony. Way I saw it at the time, humanity hadn’t learned the evils of putting their machines above the machines of the natural world, so we would have to show them. It became a matter of pride to use the system against itself. We had the best hackers. We had the best upgrades. Did they tell you about my fist?” Leo held up his bony old arm, its skin sagging.
 

Dominic nodded. Much of the confrontation had melted from his face. He seemed surprised that Leo hadn’t tried to bluster, and was now robbed of his best conversational weapons.

“That was a long time ago,” he continued, lowering his arm back into his lap. He looked down, seeing his loose skin as if for the first time. He was older than a person should be. Leo hadn’t had any new enhancements other than emergency medical nanobots for over forty years. He was finally the old man nature had intended, and in time, he’d die a natural death. He was a few decades behind, but he was finally getting to where he was supposed to be.
 

“If NPS pulled you in to talk about me,” he said, “I suppose they must think I’m up to my old tricks.”
 

Dominic nodded again. “They think you’re preparing to revisit the Gaia days.”
 

Leo laughed.
 

“Are you?”
 

The laugh fell from Leo’s mouth as if hot. “Of course not. You know that.”
 

“Do I? I
thought
I knew you all along.”
 

“Did I ever lie to you, Dom?”
 

Dominic seemed to think. Then he said, “Don’t try to bullshit me, Leo.”
 

“I’m not bullshitting you and never have. I was the teacher; you were the student. You never asked me how old I was, and if you had, I’d have told you. It’s true; I didn’t volunteer that I used to lead an anti-establishment, quasi-military organization. But you tell me, Dom — when is the right time to bring something like that up in conversation?”
 

“This isn’t funny, Leo.”
 

“It’s at least a little bit funny.” Leo smiled.
 

“Goddammit, Leo.”
 

“What was I supposed to do, Dom? Give you my history? When you met me, I was a younger version of the man I am today. Biologically speaking, I’m probably in my seventies now. When we met, I was biologically in my thirties. I haven’t enhanced since Gaia made the deal with the NAU. I’ve kept my end of the bargain. I was already prepared to stop that life, and I did. My own change preceded the change they forced upon me.”
 

“Why weren’t you arrested?”
 

“Oh, I was. They wanted to crucify me. Public execution. But someone higher up the chain wanted to make a deal even more. I was ready to take it. I became the natural, granola-crunching man I am today. The same man you met in school. The things I taught you then, I still believe and abide by today. So how did I lie?”
 

“It was an error of omission.”
 

Leo thought then pulled his legs up from the floor and sat in the chair Indian style.
 

“You’re right. I apologize.”
 

Dominic waited for more, but there was none.
 

“That’s it?”
 

“That’s it. I’m sorry for not informing you. Now you know. And today, I really am the old Organa man I seem to be. I’m not planning anything, which you already know if you gave it any thought at all.”

“No secret plans? No new technologies meant to fight technologies where they live?”

“How would I coordinate something like that, Dom? I wouldn’t know how to make the call to arms, or to accept the call if it came.”
 

At that exact moment, there was a trilling sound. Leo actually hung his head and sighed.
 

“What’s that, Leo?”
 

Leo fished his handheld from his pocket. “Another error of omission.” His thumb hovered over the screen, preparing to take the call he shouldn’t know how to take on the handheld he shouldn’t have because he was an old hippie. “Honestly, I just forgot.” His mouth opened halfway then closed, and he added, “Okay, I’m a hypocrite. And sometimes I want to check my mail without taking a goddamned train.”
 

Without waiting for Dominic’s answer, he pressed the screen and took the call. Voice only, of course. Over-the-air video up here was highly unreliable. For 2097, Leo thought, audio-only calls were just shy of grinding spears into tips using rocks as sharpeners. If he was a hypocrite, at least it was only partial hypocrisy.

“Leo,” said a female voice. “I’m here.”
 

Leo nodded internally. She’d headed into the city to see Crumb, who was now Stephen York. He’d asked her to check in while she was there, but he’d forgotten all about her errand during the fascination of the clock and his own tapping feet.

Leo eyed Dominic, who was eying him right back. “Did you talk to him yet?” he asked Leah.
 

“No. My handheld doesn’t seem to work right inside the building.”

Leo had noticed that too. But why would she bother calling before going in rather than waiting until after? The whole point was to get an update from the old man, and she hadn’t had time to get one yet.

“Great,” he said. “Have fun.”
 

“That’s it? You don’t have more to tell me?”
 

Now Leo was just confused. She was a big girl and didn’t need hand-holding. She knew Crumb (even though he was
York
now; Leo should really keep that in mind) as well as any of them. Arguably, now that he was no longer a crazy old man ranting about squirrels and was instead a father of the network, Leah probably knew him much
better
than Leo ever could.

“No,” said Leo.

“So I should just go in? Just talk to him about whatever?”
 

Again, Leo glanced at Dominic. He seemed curious, and Leo wondered what this conversation must look like to the police captain, who could only hear half of it.
 

“Yes, Leah. Just talk. Hell. You know how to talk to people, don’t you?”
 

“I thought you might have specific questions.”
 

“Maybe
you
do. I mean, what am I supposed to say from where I’m standing, as an old technophobe? You know his mind better than I do.”
 

“But…” She trailed off. Leo waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.

“Leah,” he said, “what’s going on?”
 

“Nothing.”
 

“Just spit it out.”
 

On the other end of the line, Leah sighed.
 

“I can sense SerenityBlue,” she said, “and I think I might be able to sense him too. That’s a connection through the network, but also not through the network at all. Does that make any sense?”
 

It didn’t, really, but Leo had learned to trust Leah. He knew that even when she wasn’t plugged in, she always kind of was. Somehow, she’d spanned the worlds, making technology spiritual and making spirit technological.
 

“Sure. What about it?”
 

She sighed again before answering then said, “I just get this strong feeling that I won’t like what I hear when I go in there. And…” She paused. “And I’m afraid Crumb is in a lot more trouble than we think he is.”

Chapter 9

Leah peeked into Crumb’s large white room with the giant white bed in the center. She stuck her top half between the doors and looked around in a way that probably looked comical, like a robber checking to see if the coast was clear of cops.
 

“Is she here?”
 

Crumb, his gray beard neatly trimmed and graying hair neatly combed, looked up from his tablet. His answer was nothing like Crumb, somewhat like this new man Stephen York, and very like SerenityBlue: “I don’t think it matters.”
 

Leah shrugged, walked inside, and closed the door behind her. The halls of the school were quiet, but she liked having the farce of privacy. Leah didn’t feel like she’d had any
true
privacy since the train ride that had ultimately led her to Quark’s hidden Chinatown lab, when her mind was invaded by dreams that didn’t belong to her, but she also wasn’t ready to surrender.

Leah approached the bed. There was a wooden chair with a gently curving back beside it, also white. She sat, legs together, looking formal.
 

“Do you mean it doesn’t matter because you think she’s spying on us?” she said.
 

“No.”

But of course, given the odd bond she felt between herself and the woman in white, Leah had already known that.
 

She made a small resigned smile then looked at the tablet in Crumb’s lap.
 

“So, Crumb,” she said. “Are you exploring?” She was thinking of her own hazy kind of Beamwalking, wondering if the same was true for Crumb. Based on what she’d learned from his diary, it was hard not to think of the old man as a superhero.
 

“I’d rather you call me Steve.”
 

Leah looked him over from waist to head. When he’d first been taken to SerenityBlue’s strange school for Beam-adept children, his hosts had scrubbed him clean. Just recently, though, he’d found the strength to do it himself. He seemed to be taking neatness and order seriously, and Leah wondered if it was overcompensation for his decades trapped in the disgusting, dirty, reeking vagrant he’d so recently been. Every hair was in place. Even his eyebrows and nose hairs seemed to have been tended.
 

“Sorry. Steve.”
 

“No ‘sorry’ necessary. This is me asking you to change an ingrained thought. I’m not insulted by being called Crumb; I’m just trying to change my
own
ingrained thoughts and train my mind to open back up because I’m Stephen York again.” He paused. “Whoever
he
was.”
 

“Your memory still isn’t coming back?”
 

He shrugged. “I shouldn’t complain. I developed a lot of the technology that locked me down — for some reason, I actually retained a lot of technical information even when I was guarding the compound gates and ranting about squirrels — and it’s kind of like a tank: reversible, but destructive and clumsy. Getting my memories back will take time. You’re not supposed to be able to unlock it without a cypher. The fact that you were able to crack it without killing me is astonishing.”