The Beam: Season Two (17 page)

Even before the descent of chaos, maps had been hard to find. Who needed maps when everyone had a handheld? Nowadays, maps were nearly extinct, carried away by the stores’ first raiders seven or eight years before. For the past two years, stored maps inside his should-be-dead Doodad had acted as Nicolai’s compass. He wasn’t even sure how it was possible (satellites were surely still up in space, but didn’t the device need to communicate with repeaters on the ground that no longer had power?), but all that mattered was that it somehow worked. The maps told him what roads lay ahead, along with his own position on them. Some of the Doodad’s other geolocation features worked, too. There were no weather reports to speak of, but Cloudview, from the moon’s scopes, still worked fine. When views from above (Moon? Satellites?) were decent, Nicolai was even able to see camps belonging to various crews on his path ahead. Before meeting Greggie’s gang, the Doodad had shown him which areas to avoid, which roads were snarled with dead traffic, and the rare areas that had somehow wrangled generators or fuel cells to power a few lights scattered through rudimentary settlements.
 

After getting his bearings, Nicolai slipped into the car. The tires, new enough to be Permaflate, were full and fat. The frame and panels must have been partially steel because they were somewhat rusted, but the engine was really all that mattered. The keys were in the ignition, and that made sense, too. In the first waves, many people had fled in cars. They’d driven them dry until they ran out of gas (for hybrids) or battery (for NextGen electric). With barbarian hoards converging on the stalled, useless vehicles to claim what the stranded motorists carried with them, few people took time to pocket their keys.
 

The presence of keys in this one, then, meant the car’s tank or battery was drained.
 

Still, superstitiously, Nicolai turned the key. Shockingly, the engine tried to turn. He’d seen this before and had always attributed it to a dormant charge “re-accumulating” after being given a rest. It wasn’t scientific, and Nicolai had no idea if that’s what was happening, but he did know that most of the cars he tried would at least sputter and cough. Few were truly dead. But maybe he’d gotten lucky. Stranger things had certainly happened.
 

He turned the key again.
 

Crank.

Crank.

A bang, a cough, then nothing.
 

Nicolai took his hand off the key. He wished he knew something — anything — about engines. Did this model run on hybrid fuel? Was it electric? In Amalfi, where everyone was rich, he’d seen quite a few of the new solar jobs before the Fall, but he thought even those used electric on cloudy days.
 

“Come on, you piece of shit,” Nicolai whispered. By cranking the engine, he’d played his hand. If there were any crews in the area, the noise had raised a white flag to summon them.
No one
tried to start stalled cars. Crews often had their own vehicles, rigged and maintained, but the roads’ hulks were generally worthless. The engine noises that had just come from Amsterdam’s outskirts were ringing a dinner bell, urging those with bigger numbers and better weapons to come ‘n’ get it.
 

Sure enough, Nicolai saw movement in the rearview. He instinctively reached toward his crossbow on the passenger seat, but there was no point. When he turned his head to look properly around, he saw at least a dozen men emerging from a quiet little house across a field. They weren’t meandering slowly; they were in full-out sprints. His crossbow had six bolts, and Nicolai could only fire so fast. He could run, but there was nowhere to go.
 

And…there was something else in the background. He paused and listened, his heart in his throat. Yes. He could hear a gyro’s hum. Looking back as he tried again to key the engine, he could even see it. The apocalypse had made people resourceful. For years before the collapse, scientists had been talking about using gyroscopes to power vehicles, but it never worked out. Once the gas had gone bad and the world’s fuel cells and batteries had emptied, the smartest of the crews had figured it out. And now here they came — not just one, but two. Moving fast and low like ancient go-karts.
 

He had thirty seconds, no more.
 

“Come on…”
 

Nicolai turned the key. The engine tried to fire and stuttered. Everyone knew a dead car wouldn’t start. There was a reason it had stalled, with the keys in the ignition. If the car had failed its previous owner, why would it work for the man about to be massacred by a raiding party?
 

“Come
on
, you whore!”
 

There was nothing to power the vehicle. No batteries. No good fuel. Nothing. There was none of that left in the world; that’s why the crews built gyros. Just like how there were no working handhelds or Doodads or satellite maps.

One of the low, tube-frame gyro carts skidded in front of Nicolai’s car as the running men gained from behind. Nicolai no longer even felt his fingers on the key; he’d forgotten that particular futile sensation. He barely noticed when the dashboard lit and the stereo blared in the middle of the music file it had paused on seven years earlier. He barely felt it as the engine roared to life, chugging stale gasoline and firing dead fuel cells. When he did feel it, the sudden illumination and noise shocked him so much that his arm hit the gearshift, and the car began to roll forward. From his perspective, the gyro in front of the vehicle moved lower and out of sight. But that wasn’t what was happening. The car was rolling forward. The last thing Nicolai saw on the driver’s face as it vanished below his windshield was shock. There was a crunch, and the forward momentum stopped as the wheels wedged against something.

A fusillade of blows struck the car’s trunk. Nicolai’s head swiveled, still shocked. It was the hoard, with clubs and machetes, coming up to the car’s doors.
 

Nicolai slammed his foot onto the gas. At first, he didn’t understand why the running engine didn’t move him forward, but then he heard the screaming from beneath his wheels and remembered. The car, on its Permaflate tires, was surprisingly agile and powerful. He felt bones crack through the frame, felt the gyro’s tube frame flatten and crumple. Then the car was free, rolling forward, the mob behind gathered around an object of fused metal and flesh, mouths agape.
 

Nicolai’s foot found the floor. His hands held the wheel, steering the impervious tires over long-unused roads. He remembered the long-forgotten habit of driving. It had been a while. He hadn’t been behind the wheel for three years, since the last time he’d managed to start a dead vehicle.
 

Once clear, he turned on his Doodad. There was even a mobile charger in the car, so Nicolai plugged it in to give his immortal device some needed juice. Feeling as if it were still 2027 with his hands clinging to the wheel of a ghost, Nicolai lost himself and spoke his command aloud, forgetting that the network required to process the command was offline and that the Doodad, while functional, was now a self-contained brick that for some reason could still speak to GPS satellites.

“Navigate to English Channel,” he said.
 

Then he stopped, embarrassed, realizing his gaffe.

But in the silence, the Doodad’s soft, computerized voice began to speak.
 

“Three hundred and forty-eight kilometers to destination,” it told him. “Continue southwest on Oudezijds Achterburgwal toward Grimburgwal.”
 

Chapter 2

The door opened. Micah looked into Nicolai’s eyes and immediately decided that his brother’s former speechwriter looked guilty, nervous, or both.
 

“What’s up, Nicolai?” he said.

“Hi, Micah.”
 

Micah pushed his way past Nicolai and into the apartment without invitation. The place was large and open. Ignoring Nicolai, Micah took his time to look it over slowly, absorbing the details. Expansive wood floor with a few fine rugs, wide sill along the windows at the top of two steps running the wall’s length, a black grand piano with its top propped open. A stylish apartment. Micah approved. It had the kind of look that Isaac would try and fail to create for himself. Isaac understood luxury’s props, but had no intuitive feel for any of them. Isaac was the kind of man who’d pay 5,000 credits for a fine sweater and then wear it backward. Nicolai’s taste looked like it had been born from wealth. Which, of course, it had been.
 

“I wasn’t greeting you,” said Micah. “I was asking what was up.”
 

Nicolai looked up.
 

Micah watched him then slowly shook his head. “Now I’m wondering what you’re hiding.”
 

“Nothing.”
 

Nicolai had denied it, but his eyes had flicked toward his bedroom’s mostly closed door.
 

Micah followed his eyes. “You have a girl here?”
 

“No.”
 

“A guy?”
 

Nicolai didn’t answer.

“Look, whatever,” said Micah. “Can we have a chat?”
 

Again, Nicolai’s eyes flicked toward the bedroom. “It’s not really a good time.”
 

“Because your canvas is out?”
 

“What?”
 

“But of course, it’s not
out
,” said Micah, looking around. “It’s
off
. The front door worked fine, but I couldn’t ping up. I tried to reach you on my ride over, and it showed you as offline. It’s all very interesting to me. Not many people don’t want to be connected 24/7.”
 

Nicolai looked decidedly uncomfortable. He muttered something that Micah didn’t catch.

Micah settled into a large, squarish, black leather chair in the lower part of Nicolai’s living room. He crossed one leg over another then picked at a piece of lint on his pant leg. That was the problem with wealth these days. Suits made of natural fibers didn’t repel dust, and the hoity-toity fashion people claimed that nano sprays like EverClean ruined them. Micah thought it sounded like bullshit, but picking lint off of a pant leg had its appeal. It was a unique way of saying, “Fuck you. I’m making myself comfortable; deal with it.”
 

Nicolai tried on an awkward smile. He made no motion to settle in and join Micah in sitting. His body language suggested that Micah wouldn’t be staying long. Fortunately, Micah’s own body didn’t give a shit what Nicolai’s body had to say.

“Isolation and quiet is underappreciated,” said Nicolai.

“Indeed.” Micah picked off another piece of lint then looked up with his brown-silver eyes. “So, Nicolai. What are you hiding from?”
 

“Sorry?”
 

With the single word, Nicolai voiced the slightest of stammers. Micah wished the apartment’s connectivity was still on. If it was, he could cue his worm without alerting Nicolai, thus getting Beam AI to parse the data streaming through his intuitive sensors. It would give him a built-in lie detector. The add-on stimulated Micah’s brain into comfort when the AI intuited that the other party was being truthful and created discomfort when something was being concealed. It had taken Micah time to get used to the add-on and differentiate its signals from his own native feelings, but in time he’d seen that the add-on’s inputs felt counterfeit enough to be discernible. Even with emotions, a trained mind could tell the real thing from a forgery.
 

“You turned off your canvas,” said Micah. “It’s a building system. I don’t even know how you’d go about turning it off. It would require an excellent workaround. My building is wired the same way. They sold it as a feature. If my canvas glitches, the larger system knows. And on the other hand, here’s your canvas: off in the middle of a perfectly functional building. You’re in an isolated, dead-air capsule surrounded by soundproofed walls. If I were hiding from something — or perhaps hiding something — I might employ a hack like this.”

“Hack?”
 

Micah chuckled then switched legs, crossing them to the other side. “Don’t pretend, Nicolai. I’m not Isaac.”
 

Nicolai looked guilty. That response would need to be reined in if Nicolai was to operate on his side of the fence, as Micah’s group typically had more to consider feeling guilty about than Isaac’s bootlickers.
 

“Look. You have secrets. And do you know what?” Micah spread his arms wide. “I don’t even want to know what they are. How great of a boss am I?”
 

“I don’t work for you.”
 

“That’s one key difference between Isaac and me,” Micah continued. “Isaac was never any good at getting his hands dirty. When we took over the arctic operations in the ’30s, his official role was PR. Do you know how much PR he did? None. Do you know why? Because he thought what we were doing was wrong. It wasn’t. The Arctic was like the old American West, all yahoos staking their claims in a gold rush. If we’d let private enterprises mine the area, we’d never have discovered the precursors of Plasteel. Or any number of other materials we all now take for granted, like Warp. We wouldn’t have Alumix or Plaxi. That was all vital. It allowed the network to get back up and running, down to the high-capacity nanofiber in the ground lines. But more importantly, it allowed the network to become
embedded
into the NAU as it regained its feet. If there had been no conquest of the north, there could have been no Crossbrace and no Beam. Isaac was able to see the network’s future once I told him how things were going to be, but even then he couldn’t stomach it. You and me, though? We understand that making an omelet sometimes means working the chickens to death and stealing their babies.”