The Beam: Season Two (40 page)

York raked the results aside and clicked over to the images tab. Many showed the exuberant, much-loved face of Spooner next to a Noah West that York didn’t recognize. The Noah West that York knew had become a brilliant tyrant with cold eyes. The eyes in these photos were bright and wide. Happy. The public face of Noah West, photographed repeatedly with Clive Spooner — out on the town, in fashionable spots, expensive drinks in hand.
 

Taking his time, York sifted through photos until one caught his eye. In the background was a red-and-gold dragon he recognized: the Chinese restaurant they went to often, in Chinatown.
 

“That’s your
meeting
place, Noah,” York told the screen. “What are you doing there with Spooner?”
 

The idea that Clive was a member of whatever “Panel” was had seemed obvious from the start. That’s why York had begun with him. When you wanted to peel a layer from the top of anything, you had to find a loose corner. Then you had to pry, dig, and itch at what you’d found, scratching to see what else lay beneath.
 

York reached to his side, turned on the monitor beside him, clicked around, then opened the Bully program. He clicked a few icons on the original terminal then confirmed on the other screen, linking them directly instead of routing their connection through the server. Only the first terminal was connected to the Internet through the secure double-tunnel, and now the second was hooked to it through the first.
 

York clicked the microphone icon on the second terminal, with the Bully analysis program open.
 

“Bully.”
 

There was a ding.
 

York liked working with Bully — one of the Crossbrace-native programs they had developed for use on the Crossbrace beta. Unlike Magellan, the Bully web browser utilized AI. It was nice having AI around. Ironically, it was more human than most of his coworkers.
 

York touched the photo of Spooner and Noah on the first monitor then kept speaking.

“Pull the figures out of this photo, then look for the same background in other images within this search.”
 

After a moment, the second terminal screen filled with what looked like the same search results, except it was now a subset containing only those set in the Chinese restaurant.
 

“Make a composite of the background only. Then repeat the search, this time looking only for the background in Internet images, regardless of people in photos.”
 

Both screens changed. The computer running Bully showed a composite background image of the Chinese restaurant, cobbled from images uncovered by the search. The computer with the Magellan window showed a simple Internet search, but the search field showed an incredibly complex string representing the background image. EverCrunch magic at work. The full image was too complex to search for, but you could fit the EverCrunch-compressed version into a simple query. The result was an image search wherein the background seemed to match York and West’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

York looked from one screen to the other. The Magellan window showed photo after photo of people standing or sitting with the same restaurant in the background. He didn’t know most of the people, and only one on the front page was either Noah or Spooner.

York pulled up the original image, dragged it larger, then spoke to the terminal running Bully.

“Give me a frequency analysis of the people in the search.” York used his finger to trace a square around Noah’s face on the image. “This is Noah West.” He traced a similar square around Spooner’s face. “And this is Clive Spooner.”
 

Small green geometric shapes crawled across their features, along with complex lines threading a web of green dots. A small shell window showed the Bully algorithm’s progress, turning two human faces into numbers.
 

“Use Noah West and Clive Spooner as anchors. Give me a fish-tail distribution.”

The Magellan window scrolled through page after page of results as the Bully AI scanned each image of the restaurant. Eventually, the second screen filled with what looked like the rear fin of a large fish, or a dolphin. On closer inspection, the fish fin revealed itself to be built from dozens and dozens of intersecting lines, forming a statistical distribution. A relationship web representing the connections of people in the image search.
 

York squinted at the screen then looked back toward the lab door. No one would be coming back tonight except for Noah, and he had just left a half hour ago. Based on his previous excursions to meet with his “Panel,” he’d be gone for hours. York would spend those hours alone. Working on the project, unsung, with no credit or respect. Like always.
 

“Put this on the big screen.”

A small dialogue box followed York’s words, appearing on the second terminal’s screen, asking him to verify that he wanted to mirror onto to the large monitor where everyone in the lab could see it. York touched the screen to confirm. Yes, everyone here could see it. Let all these groups of nobody get an eyeful.
 

When the fishtail distribution was on the big screen, York approached and stood a few meters away. The large monitor, meant for collaborative work, claimed most of the wall. It was taller than York and wider than his wingspan. The graphic displayed on it, mirrored from the terminals, was massive. For some reason, many people had had their photos taken in that restaurant and posted it online.
 

“Show me Noah West.”
 

A dot glowed in the matrix of lines.
 

“And show me Clive Spooner.”
 

Nearby, a second dot glowed. York noted the position of both and the small labels beside them.
 

“Clear everything and redraw, centering on West and Spooner.” He touched his chin. “In fact, give me an animation. Give me West and Spooner. Six degrees, animated, looping, one frame per second.”
 

The fishtail vanished and was replaced by dots for Spooner and West. A few lines and dots appeared spreading out from each, then more, then more. Each second brought a larger interconnected web, spreading out on the screen like a towel absorbing a spill.

York touched a particularly dense cluster.
 

“Pause. Give me this section.”
 

His finger on the screen stopped the animation. He pulled to the right and left, advancing and going back a frame at a time. He found the frame with the best view of the cluster then reached out with his other hand and pulled the cluster section forward. Bully helped him out, isolating the bright, tightly interconnected section.
 

“Who are these?” York touched nexus points on the web that were especially connected, indicating people who’d been publicly photographed often in the same restaurant with West or Spooner.

Tags appeared beside each of the dots York touched, and Bully read them out loud.
 

“Marshall Oates. Colin Hawes. Eli Oldman…”
 

“Eli Oldman? He’s still out in the real world?” Oldman was almost a cautionary tale in Internet and geek lore. He’d pioneered much of the imaging technology that underlay Crossbrace and had created much of the underpinning in early AI training but then had become obsessed and began spending more and more of his time deeply wired into his computers. He hadn’t, York thought, been seen in public for years. And now the search said that he was hanging out with Marshall Oates, the Plasteel baron?

“Give me the Oldman photos,” he said. “Are there any with both West
and
Spooner?”
 

Onscreen, exploding out of the Oldman dot on the graphic, came a fan of three image thumbnails. York enlarged each. Two showed the geek icon with not just West and Spooner, but also four other people.
 

“Who are these people?” York touched each face.
 

“Colin Hawes. Kendrick Hayes. Audrey Pascoe. Shannon Hooper.”
 

“Pascoe?” The name was ringing very loud bells. All of them were, in fact, but Audrey Pascoe above the others. York suddenly wished he hadn’t been isolated in the office for so long. He lived in a fucking computer lab 24/7 and had mostly lost track of the outside world.
 

“P-A-S-C-O-E,” the AI voice answered.
 

“Give me her Omnipedia.”
 

A new window came up. York dragged it wider and scanned.
That’s
why he recognized her name. She was the design leader and architect responsible for much of reconstruction after the Fall. Modern districts outside of DZ owed her their look, primarily because her original district became the model. And according to Omnipedia, who owned pretty much all of the land within that original district that had been shaped by Audrey Pascoe? The answer was Kendrick Hayes, who’d apparently survived the worst years with a massive fortune kept mostly in precious metals. Metals had been as worthless as anything else for a while, but they were also the first currency to return after the Fall. Kendrick had owned land; he’d bought a massive tract and had Pascoe build him a city. Both of them were front-page material, darlings of the press like West and Spooner.
 

York closed the Omnipedia window and looked at his small isolated cluster.
 

“Give me a 3-D representation of this.”

The flat image became 3-D, rendered flat but now revolvable by York’s hand. He turned it, drawing his fingers up and down and side to side to make it tumble, rolling it with twiddling thumbs. The graphic was tight like a ball in its 3-D form, indicating that not only was one frequently photographed with another, but that they were all photographed repeatedly in different permutations. Spooner with Pascoe. West with Kendrick. Kendrick with Pascoe. All in that same Chinese restaurant. This was a public search, of images freely available on the Internet. Some of the age’s most famous, brilliant minds, meeting over and over, playing around and taking commemorative snaps. To York, who’d never been invited and seemed to have been deliberately excluded, it was an insulting taunt. If this was their public record, what were they doing when the cameras were
off?
Were they meeting more regularly, more consistently, more secretly? If so, what were these titans of the modern age doing?

York turned the image. He put his finger on loose end after loose end — data points that only had a few connections or which only touched one or two central people. He flicked each away, cleaning the web, until he had a tight, clean knot of people who met and were photographed together, over and over again.
 

“That’s not all of you, though, is it?” York asked the screen.
 

The computer beeped.
 

“I’m not talking to you.” He touched the screen to mute the interface then paced in front of the screen. Alone, he repeated himself.
 

“That’s not all of you. Some of you are camera shy. Some of you don’t party in public. Because this is prelude to something, isn’t it? Of course it is. Noah doesn’t do things just to be social.”
 

It was true. Noah wasn’t going out with anyone — be it Clive Fucking Spooner or Audrey Fucking Pascoe — unless there was a very serious, Quark-related, Crossbrace-related, next-generation-related reason. He might have a few drinks — and apparently submit to a few casual snaps — if it was a prelude to something bigger and more important. Whatever this web represented, it wasn’t a social club. If York could see this much on the Internet, there had to be so much more happening in private.
 

He clicked the voice interface back on. “Show me tags on the rest of these points.”
 

Labels appeared beside the dots on the cleaned-up 3-D web. York noted them, screencapping to his protected storage for later analysis. With his anchor point established, he began digging into each.
 

Economist Morgan Marconi, one of the primary architects of the conversion to universal credits from the NAU’s three native currencies.
 

Colin Hawes, founder of enormous online mega-store Granite Quarry.
 

Alexa Mathis, an erotica writer whose first work in the teens revolutionized the way people consumed stories…who then parlayed her readership and income (plus a rumored stake in Olivia Gregory’s “Wellness Spas” company) to cofound O — now a dominant presence in the rapidly changing (and increasingly mainstream) sex industry.
 

Shannon Hooper, a sort of marketing savant, widely respected today but nearly burned at the stake in the ’20s for what were considered “invasive” conversion practices. Shannon’s methods were now the cornerstone of the commerce that Quark expected to dominate Crossbrace and its forest of new biological add-ons. Reading Hooper’s Omnipedia page, York found himself amazed at how, as with Alexa’s sex company O, genius was always considered heresy at the start. Even before Crossbrace launched, the idea of “pushed” sell offers had become standard — but once half of the NAU had Crossbrace-enabled eye implants and cloud storage ports in their brains, merchants would be able to push directly into people’s heads. Maybe that was intrusive, but it was already accepted…and Hooper had started the ball rolling.