The Beam: Season Two (32 page)

Stupid Stefan. Sam never should have said anything. It was a mistake to believe in anyone.
 

Sam stood then briskly brushed his arms with his opposite hands. It was a shivering sort of gesture, but Sam wasn’t at all cold. If anything, he was overly hot and moments from going shirtless. The ancient radiator heat had come on for no reason, and the apartment was sweltering. Sam guessed that the entire complex had one master set of controls. The superintendent had probably turned the heat up for some old biddy, and because the building was technically Directorate (Sam’s current spoofed ID was similarly Directorate), the heat would cost nothing. Sam didn’t like it. He was Enterprise through and through, but the only Enterprise-centric building in the area with a vacancy had come with Beam environmental controls. Sam had seen them when taking a tour and had immediately crossed the building off his list because baked-in Beam meant security leaks he couldn’t afford. What were the odds? None of the other ghetto buildings were that connected. The kingpins at the top acted like everyone had a full-suite canvas, but Sam, who’d scraped the gutter ever since leaving his reporter job, knew better. AirFi was everywhere, and you could pick up a signal whenever you wanted, but nobody’s walls or coffee tables were talking down here. This far below the line, furniture was just furniture. Wood was wood…and Plasteel, more often than not, was just old aluminum.

Exhibit Sam, rubbing his heavily tattooed arm, wondering if he should start walking around naked.
 

“Where are you, Costa?” he said aloud.

After breathing the four words into his empty apartment, Sam slumped into the chair beside the table. He always went to great pains to shield his connection and didn’t interact with The Beam in the ways most people did, using intuitive webs and voice commands. It made sense because if someone was surveilling you or if your room actually had Beam pickups, whatever you said aloud could give you away no matter how anonymized your connection was. But it all kind of fell apart if you talked to yourself or inanimate objects, as Sam constantly did.
What’s he working on through that secure connection?
a spy might wonder, rubbing his small spy’s goatee. And then Sam, thanks to his nervous ticks and habits, would come right out and announce the answers.

“Where are you,
Ricardo Costa of Buena Vista, Maine?”
he added loudly, attempting to cover his gaffe.
 

He wanted to slap himself, suddenly more concerned that his Beam page’s followers (they called themselves “Null” and numbered in the millions) would see how stupid Shadow was in real life than that NPS or anyone else in power who would discover and arrest him.
 

Regardless, now that the non-fooled listeners who didn’t exist had been pacified by Sam’s vocal deflection, he clamped his mouth shut and returned his attention to the canvas screen where Stefan’s connection sniffer program was telling him it was unable to locate Nicolai Costa. Even though Sam had resolved to stay quiet, he knew he wouldn’t be able to. He was almost always alone, and silence made a mediocre companion. When your mind was as active as Sam’s, keeping all those bouncy thoughts inside was simply too hard. Sometimes, an intrepid reporter needed an out-loud medium as a kind of verbal scratch pad.
 

He stared at the screen and felt the burden of looking stupid effortlessly slip from his mind. Other things went with it, like the thought that he was hot, that he hadn’t eaten yet despite having been up for seven hours, and that his credit balance was again negative. The only thing in Sam’s world became the blinking arrow and the message:
Connection not found
.
 

It didn’t make sense.

Every structure had a weak spot. Sam thought he had found the Beau Monde’s weak spot — and, if he was lucky, the Ryan brothers’ weak spot as well. Nicolai didn’t appear to be Beau Monde (he didn’t have the trailing identifier on his Beam ID that Beau Monde usually had; Sam thought of it as a “get out of jail free” card even though those who had the identifiers probably didn’t even know they existed), but Nicolai was certainly on the cusp. Nicolai had access to at least three Beau Monde flag carriers that Sam had identified with the help of Null members. Once Shadow’s people (many of whom were hackers and all of whom spent an inordinate amount of time beneath the Beam’s surface, checking bolts and looking for leaks) had found the identifier, plucking the most privileged members from society became easy. All of the Ryans had it. Nicolai, who had far less security than true Beau Monde, worked with three people who had that famous last name. He had to be close to that secret upper class…and, if Sam was lucky, might just be the weak spot he needed to learn more about it.
 

Sam clicked the retry icon with his finger then clicked it again. The message returned:
Connection not found
.
 

Bullshit. Sam had Nicolai’s Beam ID. Null had uncovered many, many confidential Beam IDs. You couldn’t use someone else’s ID for anything worthwhile without submitting to a more invasive scan (about all you could do was leave Beam page comments and, for some reason, order flowers), but knowing what was supposed to be a confidential number had definite advantages. For one, it allowed a knowledgeable user with the right software to track entries that ID made on the grid, hence getting an excellent idea of where its owner was at any time. And for another, it allowed you to see the characteristics of that person’s connections. The best trackers could use just that much data to form patterns, and patterns always showed truths when seen from up high.

But Nicolai Costa’s connection couldn’t be found, which made no sense at all. Sam had wanted to snoop his activity in the interest of pattern-watching — to see which sectors Nicolai seemed to be in touch with and get an idea of how much data he was pushing and pulling, which might illuminate the extent of his technology’s access — but Sam wasn’t getting past stage zero. Stage one of the process was to start watching sheer bandwidth across the network within Nicolai’s Beam ID shuttle. But you had to find a man before you could watch him.

Using the keyboard, Sam clicked over to another of Stefan’s software patches. This one tracked Beam impressions of an ID within a city map. The current view showed Nicolai’s neighborhood, where the last check-in showed Nicolai entering his building. It didn’t show him leaving later, and that meant that Nicolai was home. But his ID had been dormant since almost the moment he’d arrived. That didn’t make sense because even the most mundane activities inside a person’s home left traces. As Nicolai walked around, his ID would be triggering doors, turning the heat up and down, turning lights on and off. Even if he was asleep, any canvas in Nicolai’s high-end neighborhood would be grooming his sleep cycle patterns. And yet there had been nothing. Nothing at all.
 

Sam shook his head. Stefan’s program was broken. It was also stupid. It couldn’t find the connection despite it being right there in front of the program’s electronic nose.

An alarm went off on Sam’s laptop canvas. He looked at the flashing icon then raised his head to survey the apartment. He silenced the irritating alarm, not remembering what he’d set it for. Was he making soup again? The hotplate was empty. He couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter. Surely, whatever it was would make itself known soon, probably by doing some sort of damage. Then he’d know.
 

Sam looked back at the canvas and began speaking aloud to Nicolai, having forgotten his pledge to himself to remain quiet.
 

“You’re home. I can’t find your connection. Does that mean you’ve somehow masked it? Why would you have masked it? And do you even know
how
to mask it?”
 

Sam doubted it. The wares he’d cobbled over the past year or so were the fruit of his own endless paranoia. You had to be certain that someone was out to get you to worry as much as Sam did about leaving footprints. But when you were at the top of the world (Costa seemed, by Sam’s investigation, to be just below the richest tier), you didn’t worry about people snooping. It was ironic that the people who were most worried about protecting what they had were also those who had the least to steal.

Somewhere behind Sam, there was a great gushing noise. Suddenly, the alarm he’d silenced a few minutes ago made sense. The apartment was so goddamn hot, he’d run himself a cool bath in order to sit and think. He’d prefer a shower, but the shower was broken. For Sam, a shower was also safer. Showers didn’t require prep time, and if you forgot they were running, they didn’t overflow.
 

“Sit tight,” he told the canvas, rushing away.
 

By the time he returned, having shut off the water but leaving the brimming tub and a handful of wet towels to stew, he’d gotten an idea. The idea was absurd, but it did fit his evidence.
 

He pulled up a city grid, again hacked for him by a faceless member of Null. And after a few minutes, he drew a shocking conclusion: The problem wasn’t that Stefan’s program was unable to
find
Costa’s Beam connection. The problem was that Costa’s connection had been turned off.
 

“Who turns off their connection?” Sam asked the canvas.
 

The answer was simple:
nobody.
Sam regularly turned off whatever paltry Beam connection he found himself with, but Sam was also Shadow. Some members of Null did the same, for the same paranoid reasons. But they were outliers. Outside of the underground set and the Organa,
nobody
willfully disconnected entirely. Especially not anyone with Nicolai’s status, with as robust a hardwired apartment canvas as he seemed to have.
 

“Never mind that,” he said. He stood and started to pace, hands in the pockets at his narrow hips. “Who even
can
turn off their connection in that part of town?”
 

The answer to that question was the same:
nobody
. Not without a lot of know-how. Apartment canvases in upper-class spires didn’t have off switches. You needed black market technology to turn an apartment dark. Plus — and this was key — you had to have a compelling reason to do it.
 

“You’re hiding something, aren’t you?” Sam asked Invisible Nicolai. His lower lip slid back and forth, his face contorting into an expression of concentration.
 

He’d already decided that Costa was the key to unlocking something, even beyond his Beau Monde connections. Now it looked like he might actually
know
something, and have reason to hide it.
 

Yes, he was suddenly
veeeeery
interested in Nicolai Costa.

He clicked over to the Null hyperforum, to the subboard where the most anti-establishment types tended to gather. There was a running thread on the upcoming Shift, and Sam, following what he could only think of as reporter’s instinct, had been keeping a close eye on it. He’d gotten the idea to snoop Costa from that thread. The mention of Nicolai’s name had stuck out in Sam’s mind like a jagged edge. Sometimes, Sam bemoaned his poor memory, but he didn’t really have a
poor
memory at all. His mind was really just
distracted
, and could be laser-focused when the topic at hand was strong enough to hold his interest. Just like Nicolai Costa was to him right now.
 

Scanning the thread, Sam found the mention that had originally caught his eye. It was a note that Costa was rumored to be defecting from Directorate and shifting to Enterprise.
 

Well, Null knew that already. Shadow had mentioned it a few times. But now, after finding Nicolai blank, the connection between the speechwriter and Shift felt somehow much more important.
 

Sam opened a new thread on the subboard. He titled it “Does party really matter?” and typed:

Re: nicolai costa going to enterprise does that mean that the parties are working together or that it’s a real shift, b/c if he’s working for m. ryan vs i. ryan, either way he’s working for beau monde. Anyone have info on defections and what happens with income after, status, etc?

The question had been asked in various forms before but not quite this pointedly and not in light of the new tidbit Sam had just uncovered: specifically, that Costa seemed to be keeping an important secret. The only reason Sam could think of to go to the trouble of blanking a connection would be to have a meeting in private. So who was Costa meeting with? Could he be meeting with both his old boss and new boss
together?
Maybe the new boss wasn’t that different from the old boss, like they said in his great grandpap’s favorite song.
 

Sam waited, watching his new thread. He could have posted the discussion on his Beam page, but in the forum, every participant was anonymous. Before he posted his thoughts to his Beam page as Shadow, Sam wanted see if the idea had any legs at all. In Null, anonymity had definite perks.
 

Within thirty seconds, the first reply appeared below his original post.

Parties def working together. Subvert. Null.
 

Sam rolled his eyes. It was probably some basement-dwelling mouth-breather who thought the idea of subverting sounded cool rather than anyone who truly had anything to say. That was the problem with Null: given the group’s faceless nature, the idiots looked exactly the same as the geniuses.

A second reply came a minute later: