The Beam: Season Two (25 page)

Kai rolled her eyes.
 

“If you wanted to, I mean,” he added.

Kai looked down at her feet. She was wearing tall black boots with heels. She almost always wore heels, but it wasn’t because she wanted to look sexy. It was because she was so short, and the men around her — Nicolai, Micah, the Artist Formerly Known as Doc — were all so tall.
 

This was absurd. Kai couldn’t pretend like they were a little wifey and her husband, playing house. She was a free agent. Nicolai knew she was a free agent, and always had. The O Corporation had mainstreamed sex, and her clients understood that. They weren’t buying something elicit, or purchasing pieces of her heart. They were buying an experience, like hiring a tour guide. Yet here she was, acting jealous. But not even jealous from her own point of view — jealous from
Nicolai’s
point of view,
for
Nicolai. It was as if she wanted him to have reservations about sending her into someone else’s bed. But Nicolai wasn’t like that. He understood that there was nothing between Kai and her clients other than business.
 

Then she realized that
that
was the source of her anger: Nicolai wasn’t concerned because he knew it was business…including between the two of them.

She sighed.
 

“Okay, say you’re right. Isaac’s a good-looking man. Say I’m game. How does any of this help me?” With a sliver of spite, she added, “…seeing as I’d be doing the work.”
 

“He might be able to tell you what the company has in mind for you. Everyone sort of forgets that the two PR figureheads of the parties work together as principals within their family business. Isaac has aims for Directorate, and Micah has aims for Enterprise, but they both work to steer Ryan Enterprises. Micah keeps suggesting that you’ll be moving up into his tier, where you get the fancy rigs and West knows what else — which, by the way, he just did out in the other room with me. Isaac would know what that means and what position you’ll be moving into. And maybe me, too.”
 

“Maybe Micah is keeping that separate and away from Isaac,” said Kai. “Maybe he wants me for his party, and not Ryan Enterprises.”
 

“He’d know about the business’s history. The stuff with my father.”
 

“Which has nothing to do with me.” She felt the need to drive home the point of serving her own needs strictly for the sake of driving it. She wouldn’t do it just for him. Given the circumstances, she simply couldn’t stomach it.

“It sort of does, though. You, me, and Doc.
Kate
, whatever. What affects one of us affects us all.” He made a twisted mess with all of his fingers, suggesting that their three lives were tied like strands in a braided rope.
 

“Rachel Ryan would know those things too,” said Kai.
 

“She’s ancient.”
 

“That’s rather ageist of you. She wasn’t young once? Maybe she ran the company back in the day. And if anyone has at least
your
answers, she sounds more likely to me, seeing as it was her father sniffing your daddy’s ass back in the old world.”
 

“I can’t just go in and see some woman I don’t know and start asking about her family affairs.”
 

Kai shrugged. “I can’t just go in and see my boss’s brother and ask to swing on his Johnson.”
 

Nicolai laughed. “That, you definitely
can
do. I guarantee you Isaac isn’t getting laid. Not in real life, anyway.”
 

“So I’m supposed to knock him out and rape his brain?”
 

“You wouldn’t have to. He’d crack like a walnut. You don’t know Isaac, Kai. You know how they tell you that if someone grabs you, you should break out of their grip via the thumb, because it’s the weakest? Well, Isaac is the thumb in this scenario. And that’s true under ordinary circumstances, but he’s especially beaten up now and at an absolute low. He’ll grasp at any lifeline. Now, add the amazing Kai Dreyfus to the equation, and it’s like a sledgehammer versus a grape. Imagine what you, with your unique skills, would be able to get out of him.”

“Maybe you could do the same with Rachel.”
 

“Come on, Kai. Be serious.”
 

“I am being serious. Something for something. You want me to go on a reconnaissance mission? Okay, then you do the same. You don’t have to sex her up. I’m guessing it’s like old, preserved documents down there anyway. She’d probably crumble to dust the minute you…”
 

“Fucking hell.”
 

“I just mean you should
talk
to her. And I’ll talk to Isaac.” She emphasized
talk
to make it clear exactly what was on the table. She watched for Nicolai’s reaction and saw nothing beyond an agreeable nod.
Strictly business.
It made her want to hit him again.
 

“Fine,” he said. The way the word came out, she was surprised he didn’t extend his hand so they could shake on it.

She looked at him somewhat sideways. Then, with an edge in her voice, she said, “So if I’m okay with this, you’re sure you don’t mind me doing what needs to be done.”

Nicolai shrugged. “It’s your body.”

“It’s not yours to play with or command,” she said.
 

“Right.”
 

She looked again at the bed — neatly made, soft to the touch, and unused despite her hour-plus in his apartment — and wished he’d answered differently.

Chapter 7

Rachel Ryan’s thin skin looked like paper. Beneath her frail integument lived a network of blue veins like roads on a map. Her hands were a skeleton’s, her neck all tendons.
 

By contrast, the old woman’s face seemed noticeably younger and far easier for Nicolai to look at. She’d applied copious amounts of cosmetic powders and paints, and although it should have looked like a macabre artist’s creation, it looked almost natural. Rachel had returned her pale skin to a human tone; she’d given her lips enough color to appear average; she’d somehow smoothed one color into another and left her cheeks with just enough blush to suggest healthy blood flow. Her eyebrows were in place and seemed to be her own. Rather than appearing made up, Nicolai had to admit that her face, taken as a whole, could have been that of any desperately old Directorate woman from the lower end — or certainly one from among the poor Enterprise, where the unenhanced people below the line were lucky to reach one hundred.
 

“I know what you’re thinking,” Rachel said, smiling through very thin lips. “You’re wondering how old I am.”
 

She slowly crossed her small room in the Alpha Place apartment complex. In concept, the place was a senior center, but in reality it was more like a building populated solely by extremely wealthy older people, all served night and day by well-dressed slaves.
 

“No, ma’am,” Nicolai answered. He’d been sitting in a chair while a nurse/butler went to retrieve the patient/lady of the house. He stood at her arrival. Nicolai had initiated the gesture as a sign of respect, but it quickly became one of offering assistance. “Can I help you to your chair?”
 

Rachel stopped and looked Nicolai in the eyes. He took a step back. Her old crone’s smile widened and cracked her lips at their sides.

“I could do a backflip for you right now,” she said. “My bones have been electrochemically replaced with Plasteel and titanium, and most of my muscles swapped with prototype biological motors that my son sends over like baskets of fruit. The problem isn’t me getting to the chair. The danger is what’s left of the real me falling off the frame before I get there.”
 

Nicolai didn’t know what to say, so he sat back down. Then he watched as slowly, like a person balancing a tray stacked with delicate stemware, Rachel made her way to an antique wood-and-cloth chair and eased herself into it. As she lowered her body using the chair’s padded arms, her limbs didn’t shake. Only her flesh jiggled. Finally, she settled in, rearranged herself with strangely precise, strong movements, and exhaled.
 

“That’s better.”

“Are you feeling okay, Mrs. Ryan?” It was an awkward sort of question, but Nicolai felt like he had to say something.

“The problem with getting as old as I am,” she said, “is keeping the ghost in the machine. I’ve got something under me that looks like Robocop, but…”
 

“Robocop?”

The old woman flapped a wrinkled hand. “You’re too young. It was from my day.”
 

“Oh.”
 

“I have a frame like a tank, but imagine making a house of cards on top of that frame. It doesn’t matter how sturdy the frame is, see…it can’t make the house of cards any stronger. That’s how it is with me. But you wouldn’t know. What are you, thirty-five?”
 

“Eighty-seven.”
 

“Well, that’s how it goes these days,” she said with a sigh that was almost wistful. “About the age of my boys, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but still it’s hard to believe. I looked the way a person is supposed to look at any given age for all of my life. Same as everyone in here, for the most part. What I look like now, there’s no seeming age for it because people aren’t supposed to live this long. I was somewhere around your age before I got my first treatments, but they came too late to turn back my clock. They tell me that nanobots won’t make you young. They can only
keep
you as young as you already are — or aren’t.”
 

“They’ll take off a few years,” said Nicolai. But really, that was true of everyone inside the NAU. Whenever Nicolai searched old Internet archives through a Beam emulator, he was always shocked by how old people appeared. Thirty-year-olds looked fifty. People in their sixties looked to be in their eighties. And that was comparing them to the unenhanced poor who hadn’t had any life extension. It was the profusion of ambient nanobots in the air and filtration systems, in-home dust mite scavengers, and fortifications in almost all non-grown foods (and even in plenty of grown foods, thanks to soil engineering) that did it.
 

“Let’s get this out in the open,” she said. “I was born in 1950. Those were golden years. I grew up with the Beatles and Motown, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. I used to spend my days in malt shops, and my boyfriend had a Ford Fairlane. I watched
Friends
and
Seinfeld
when I was older, and by the time the Internet came around, I was already getting fed up with kids and their bang-whiz doodads. I thought it didn’t matter. What the hell; who cared if they put a base on the moon? I’d be dead soon.”

Something dry and horrible cracked in her throat, making her catch a long breath.
 

“Then the chaos hit, and I said it again: Let the world burn; I’ll be dead soon. Eventually, I got cancer. Can you believe that? Goddammit if I didn’t get
cancer
after cancer had been cured. They said it was too aggressive for treatment and too advanced for the drugs at the time. This was before microsurgery, mind you. But for the third time, I said, ‘Who cares. I’ll be dead soon anyway.’ But then Micah brings me this syringe and says, ‘Ma, this will help you.’ I didn’t care. So the doctors shot me up, and they tell me that those first little buggers went in and assassinated my tumor one cell at a time. It didn’t matter how aggressive or advanced it was. Cancer cells don’t know they should die, and the bots were going in and telling them that they had to. When it was done, the tumor was gone, and then I was the only one left who apparently didn’t know when to die.”

The old woman rearranged herself in the chair, and again Nicolai was struck by her motions. Each shift seemed both easy and painfully uncomfortable at once. He got a mental image of a powerful metal claw attempting to cradle an egg.
 

“That’s fascinating,” said Nicolai.
 

Rachel Ryan’s face changed, nostalgic rambling replaced by a harsh, cynical expression.

“Cut the shit,” she snapped. “They told me you were a friend of Micah’s and that you wanted to pay me a visit. That’s absurd. So what the hell are you here for?”
 

Nicolai watched the woman for a moment, reframing. He’d been lured into thinking he was talking to a delicate old woman who’d lived through plenty and had a tale she wanted to tell. He’d been fooled by the packaging and hadn’t thought to look inside. Now he saw where he was — not sitting in front of a lonely old flower who wished for company and love in her waning days. In truth, he was sitting in front of a spider, its web already spun halfway around him.

“Why is the idea absurd?” he said.

The question was meant to buy him a few seconds. He’d come in with a half-formed idea to tell Rachel that his visit was for medical market research on behalf of Xenia Labs, but he’d never finished the idea for two reasons. One was that he wasn’t medical and didn’t know where to take the scenario if she asked questions. But more dangerously, he now realized he’d made the mistake of assuming she wouldn’t be sharp enough to see right through it.
 

Rachel gave him a look before answering: “Because Micah doesn’t have any friends.”
 

Nicolai met her eyes, his story crumbling to dust.