The Beam: Season Two (2 page)

DOMINIC LONG

Captain Dominic Long is called into the District Zero Police Department after the department nabs a hacker trying to break into Quark — a hippie Organa named Leah whom Dominic knows but must pretend he doesn’t. Dominic lets Leah go after her interrogation and tells her to be more careful. Organa leader, Leo Booker, calls Dominic to thank him for freeing Leah then asks Dominic to smuggle more of the illegal drug Lunis his way because the Organa inventory is getting dangerously low. Dominic tells Leo that there have been issues with shipments of “moondust” through his black market connections but promises a successful run very soon.

After a rough day at DZPD and a rougher night, Dominic wakes from the worst moondust hangover of his life. He returns to the office to discover there was a security breach the night before. Records of Dominic’s past indiscretions (involving the old man Crumb and Dominic’s refusal to send him to Respero) might have been obtained during the rudimentary hacking. It’s the last thing Dominic needs with so much on his mind.

On Leo’s dust-smuggling errand, Dominic runs out to meet his supplier, Omar Jones, in a secluded warehouse, still doing his best to convince himself that he’s not dirty despite his many dirty deeds and is instead subverting the rules in the interest of the larger “right.” The meeting turns out to be a setup, and Dominic is taken down by a nanobot swarm. He’s then dragged into an interrogation room where he’s questioned by Special Agent Austin Smith. The other cop realizes that without giving some of himself, he won’t be able to crack Dominic, so he uses a bot to hide their conversation and tells Dominic that he is a good cop who has done a few wrong things for the right reasons. Dominic opens up, but despite Austin’s theories, he insists that the Organa are in no way violent or planning a widespread revolt. Austin counters with damning evidence, painting the supposedly pacifistic Leo Booker as being quite old, highly enhanced, and the former leader of anti-establishment organization called Gaia’s Hammer — once a powerful enemy of the state that has since been expunged from history. Austin tells Dominic that if he flips on Leo, the arrest, the headache, and everything else troubling Dominic can all go away.
 

LEAH

Leah, a young Organa who is paradoxically a prodigious hacker, leaves the DZPD station after being dismissed by Dominic then travels to the Organa compound in the Appalachian Mountains. Outside the village, she chats with Crumb, the old man who has rambled in front of the place for her entire life. She then goes to see Leo, the man who raised her like a father. Leo tells Leah that Crumb has been saying strange things. He wants her to use the Beam connection in some nearby ruins to look into Crumb’s mind. The crazy old man has been behaving more peculiarly than ever, and keeps spouting off about Noah West, the man who fathered The Beam.

Leah takes Crumb to an abandoned estate in the outskirts with a hard line to The Beam and links the line to his mind — and her mind to his — hoping to see what makes the old man tick.

As she undertakes a moondust-enhanced tour of Crumb’s brain, Leah finds that some sort of internal firewall prohibits her from accessing Crumb’s thoughts and memories. She disengages from the link, but Crumb seems to want her to dig deeper. After some creative exploring deeper within their connection, she discovers a small back door in his heavily firewalled mindscape. Accessing it, Leah sees an image of a journal bearing the name Stephen York. Then, as she feels their shared reality beginning to crumble, she pulls back to the world and finds Crumb unconscious on the floor.

Leah calls Leo and gets Crumb to a mountain hospital, but soon after check-in, Crumb disappears. Leah heads into District Zero to search the core Beam network for clues, but on the ride in has foreign dreams that seem not to belong to her. She panics, thinking that her implant is malfunctioning, but rather than seeking an upgrade dealer or doctor upon arrival in the city, she finds herself heading to the place she saw in those odd visions: a restaurant in old Chinatown.

When she locates the restaurant, she is given unexplained access to what appears to be a high-end computer lab in disguise. In the stark and abandoned room, she finds the journal she saw in Crumb’s mind: the one belonging to a mystery man named Stephen York. She leaves the restaurant with the journal — which contains images showing Noah West sitting with a man who seems to be a younger version of Crumb — and more questions than ever.

Exploring later, Leah discovers that the journal describes the thirty years Stephen York spent working with Noah West. It details America's fall, the rise of the NAU in its place, the formation of the Enterprise and Directorate parties, and the development of the old Crossbrace network before it evolved into The Beam. Leah calls Leo and lets him know what she found, and Leo heads into the city to meet her.

Leah and Leo, following a spooky sort of
simpatico
Leah seems to have with The Beam, track the missing Crumb and end up at what appears to be a school. Inside, a young boy greets the pair and leads them through the most realistic simulation either has ever seen…without using a simulator to do it. The boy then takes them into a room where they find Crumb sleeping. A mysterious, angelic woman named SerenityBlue approaches Leah, and they go back and forth about Crumb, York, The Beam, and the nature of reality. Crumb awakes and tries to let Leah know that he is okay and that SerenityBlue is helping him. Crumb and Leah find an odd, familiar breed of comfort in her presence, but they soon realize that they see her as two entirely different people. Leo returns to the room and is shocked to realize that he sees her as Leah’s twin. Serenity responds by saying to Leah, “So that’s why you seem so familiar.”
 

LEO BOOKER

Leo rushes to meet Leah and Crumb at the hospital, where she tells him that Crumb is in a coma and should be out for a few hours. Outside the hospital, Leo tries to meditate, but Leah is fascinated by his advanced age and asks many questions, pressing and probing Leo about life before The Beam, Crossbrace, or even the Internet. After their history lesson, they return to Crumb’s room and find the once-comatose man now missing.

Leo desperately tries to get any information he can about Crumb, but the man has disappeared. Sensing an unusually high level of angst, Leah presses Leo about Leo’s moondust withdrawal, and Leo admits that he has begun to ration the Organa village’s dwindling supply. Back at the village, Organa citizen Scooter barges in and tells Leo of a drug-related fight. He says the new dust they’ve been receiving seems different and is making users paranoid. He wonders if there is — or soon will be — a new supply arriving. Leo dodges the question and dismisses Scooter.

Leah calls to tell Leo that she’s found York’s diary. She explains how she’s confident that she can find Crumb because of some unexplainable connectivity with the old man and The Beam itself. Leo worries that Leah is losing touch with the realism on which he is reliant. He asks if she can find Crumb. Leah claims that not only can she find him, but that doing so feels as if she’s returning home.

CRUMB / STEPHEN YORK

Stephen York is trapped inside his mind behind the firewalls someone forced into place, trying to calm himself the only way he can, by reciting prime numbers. He knows the others see him as the dirty, jittery old man Crumb, but there is nothing he can do.

He is taken by Leah to be hooked to The Beam, at which point she swims through his brain and crumbles his mind. But when he later awakes, Crumb finds himself bathed beneath the bright light of a beautiful young woman in flowing white robes. As they speak in circles about who he might be and where he came from, memories (or false thoughts) slowly fire inside his mind. The woman introduces herself as SerenityBlue and claims to be an entity known as a Beam cleric.

Serenity tells Crumb that she and her students have been seeking minds like his on The Beam. He admits that he knew Noah West and that he needs a journal to help him remember. SerenityBlue suggests that he send in Leah to retrieves the book: it will tell him who he is and what he might have done to the world.

When Leah arrives, Crumb realizes who he once was, but not what happened, what comes next, or what his mind seems so eager to remember.
 

And now, The Beam: The Complete Second Season…

EPISODE 7

Chapter 1

September 12, 2035 — District Two

The venue was fancy — high-end enough to boast AirFi. Not a spot access point running off the handheld/Doodad wireless network, but bona-fide
AirFi
, with a hard line running into the building that had been restored by some enterprising company in the aftermath of shellings and fires. The Layback Lounge had to spend a fortune on that one little luxury each month. AirFi was damn near obsolete, especially as the world struggled to stand. Mobile access had been huge before the Fall, and it was mostly all there was now. The only reason any establishment would even
have
AirFi — especially these days, with the US borders closing and politicians talking about merging with Canada and Mexico — would be because the patrons demanded something premium. And the only reason to do
that
would be because they had money to burn, and wanted very badly to burn it.

Natasha, waiting for her chance to perform backstage, let her fingers play across a shallow dish that someone had set on the dressing room table. It was made of crystal, with fluffy objects the size of large pebbles inside it. The dish itself looked decadent. It probably cost thousands of dollars.
Untold months’ worth of food.
 

Natasha picked up one of the pebbles, held it to her nose, and inhaled. She closed her eyes. Its scent was opulent, recalling a pre-calamity world that had been naive and complacent, and reminded her of early childhood. Natasha’s parents had taken her to middle-grade restaurants then, when they’d been able to afford such things and were still alive to give them. The object’s evocative scent pulled her effortlessly backward in time. It was only a mint, but it conjured memories of happier times, when a girl might care about freshening her breath rather than rationing her food and bank balance — or, for that matter, the pile of rapidly deflating US dollars she kept in her closet pillowcase, because Renewal-era banks were thieves like everyone else.
 

Natasha dropped the mint back into the dish then looked around the dressing room. The other performers were gone. The cellist was onstage. The dancers had already left. She slid the mints from the tray then slipped the dish into her purse.
 

She spent thirty seconds listening to the cellist onstage through the door then sighed and removed the crystal. She returned it to the table and laid the mints back into it one at a time. Then she moved to the mirror, placed her palms flat on the table’s surface, and looked up at the girl staring back from the glass.
 

“Have faith,” she told her reflection. “Better times are coming.”
 

The girl in the mirror — pudgy but pretty, with full cheeks and tree trunk arms (or at least, that’s how she saw them), deep-green eyes brilliant within her halo of naturally red hair — nodded back. The idea that her sky would soon brighten was hard to believe, but that was how affirmations worked: you had to believe in advance if you ever hoped to live them for real.

Natasha paced to the room’s far side, then back. She was nervous, and conflicted about whether or not she had any right to be. This was just another gig, and she’d played three a week for over a year.
But
it was the biggest gig she’d ever landed. Natasha would be performing for the most exclusive group of her career. The diners on the other side of the Layback’s curtain had been among the city’s wealthiest citizens before the fall, and money had a way of building lifeboats and keeping day-to-day existence disproportionately grand. They were people who had never felt life’s sharpest sting, and would always pay for a jester’s amusement. They were people with industry connections that hadn’t gone dry even while millions across the country starved. Maybe now was Natasha’s chance to climb from the hungry and into those lifeboats. To seize her past opportunities in disguise and spin her straw of hard-fought struggle into gold.
 

She closed her eyes and focused, forcing herself into deep, calming breaths.
Just another crowd.
Natasha had to trust herself and her path, knowing that whatever was supposed to happen would — even if she had to grab it with both hands and force the issue.
 

She opened her eyes.
 

The girl in the mirror still stared back, waiting for instructions.
 

She felt out of body, as if the girl in the mirror were more than a reflection. It was as if she were looking at a soul twin — someone who represented all that Natasha, purged of doubt and self-loathing, might one day be. On the near side of the mirror, Natasha’s heart fluttered as her head filled with doubts that her sweet, innocent reflection could not know. That other girl was Natasha’s responsibility, like a child. She had to stay strong for her.
 

“They will love you,” she said aloud, locking eyes with her reflection. “They
do
love you.”
 

Natasha pulled out her iPhone Ruby — a step above the ubiquitous Doodad handheld but just as free to use on the open network — and opened her bookmarks. She pressed the screen a few times and began to read through her marked reviews. As usual, her own local reviews (for performances in the ’burbs and in the slightly better city clubs) were self-flagellated inspiration. Every one made her feel better at the same time they made her feel worse.