The Beam: Season Two (58 page)

“If you can’t break the table, break its legs,” said Integer7’s smooth, deep voice. “The Prime Statements are tomorrow. Presidents Vale and Reese. That event we can disrupt.”
 

It was as if Integer7 had proposed lifting the entire NAU above his head. “The Prime Statements are given in the White House!” he said.

“I have found a way to breach even White House security. Pull up the White House page on your device. Hurry; 36 seconds.”

Sam thought he might drop the handheld as he juggled. He tapped his screen, feeling seconds as they ticked. Integer7’s voice continued to come from the speaker.
 

“Are you on the page?”
 

“Wait. Yes. Now I am.”
 

“Watch the upper right.”
 

“What?” But before the word was fully out of Sam’s mouth, he watched in shock as the upper right corner of the page flickered with a tiny black icon. It was the Greek letter pi, there for a second and then gone again.
 

“How did you do that?” said Sam. His mouth was hanging open.
The White House.
Somehow, Integer7 had hacked its system.

Instead of answering, Integer7’s voice began to move faster, rushing, as he spilled his instructions.
 

“The Prime Statements are held in front of the Senate, with the Beam cameras facing out, giving the same view of the parties as all 101 senators see. President Reese will be on one side with the Enterprise cabinet, and Carter Vale and the Directorate will be on the other. Between them and behind their backs, visible to the senators and cameras, is the display wall. I can hack that wall the same as I can the White House page. Rally whoever you can trust. Look for people who may or may not think true change is possible but who truly want change if it is. Tell them all — including your audience — to watch the Primes tomorrow. Tell them to watch the display wall because I will fill it with the information you just gave me.”
 

“And what are we supposed to…”
 

The connection broke before Sam finished his thought.
 

Moving slowly, Sam pulled the handheld from his face. A million questions and conflicting feelings were racing through his mind. Among the soup of impressions, one stood out. A single directive. One ray of progress, and maybe of hope for the underlings.
 

He had an update to write on Shadow’s Beam page, and minions to rally because tomorrow, there would be a show.
 

A show
, Shadow thought,
that might just turn out to be the century’s biggest.

Chapter 5

Natasha felt her heart flutter as she took The Sap’s stage. Her breath was shallow in her chest instead of full and deep. The lights were too bright. Her palms were slick and clammy. Her mouth felt dry, even after taking a long sip from her ice water backstage. She felt like she had felt all those years ago, as a young girl, taking the stage in front of a crowd for the first time.
 

Natasha’s circulating nanobots could downtune her nerve response (releasing pacifying endorphins, blunting the release of epinephrine from her adrenal glands), but she accessed her internal dashboard and told them to stand down. It had been a long,
long
time since she’d been afraid onstage. It had been decades since she’d feared a crowd’s judgment and wondered if she’d be good enough for them. The feeling of raw stage fright was rusty enough to be alien. She had butterflies in her stomach and a lump in her throat. To Natasha, stepping onto the low stage and feeling the cool light on her skin, that was a good thing.
 

It was good to be afraid. Those who took bold steps were afraid. Those who changed the world were afraid. A life worth living was filled with fear — but it was the temporary terror that guarded new frontiers rather than the crushing, permanent pain that accompanied cowardice. She’d been a safe coward for too long. It felt good to be a reckless daredevil again.
 

She began her set with “Lost,” forcing notes out through sheer will, feeling the non-lubricated way they moved through her throat. The audience wouldn’t hear her nervous heart pounding with each note (she was a professional, after all), but it felt good to let the nerves take over — or rather, to let them crawl to the edge, reminding her that while she was no longer seventeen, she
was
onstage for the first time since her disastrous concert at the Aphora. She
was
moving from the party of security to the party of risk and reward. She was putting herself out there (this time truly raw) before an audience that might scorn her and call her a sellout. They might hate her and throw things — not because they were Directorate rabble-rousers, but because she simply wasn’t good enough.
 

You’re shit.
 

You’re a sellout.

As notes left her wealthy, privileged, decades-in-Directorate lips, Natasha’s mind fed her a discouraging litany. She found that she wanted to hear every word. She wanted to revel in self-loathing. To roll in the filth she’d created, like a pig. Natasha’s move to Enterprise wasn’t only about giving Isaac an elegant, callus-free finger. At its root, she was making a long-overdue move to where she truly belonged. It really was about her, as an artist, reclaiming the art she’d surrendered. She’d earned the bad things the sheets had said about her. Right here and now, naked and waiting for audience’s judgment, she wanted to feel every barb of those insults. She wanted to swallow those words and let them rumble inside her. She
had
sold out. She
did
have an uphill battle ahead to regain her oldest fans’ affection. It was a good thing. There was no victory in accomplishing what she was supposed to accomplish. Victory came from overcoming adversity, as she had in her youth. And right now, she wanted all the adversity they’d ever thrown at her.

You’re a bitch.

You used to be good, but you lost it!
 

You gave up. You became a trophy wife. Worthless arm candy to a powerful man.
 

A burden on a top-heavy society.
 

Natasha looked out at the crowd. They were different than the people who’d attended her disastrous last show. The Aphora was large and elegant, well lit when the lights were up. It was hung with chandeliers. The walls were all arches, most of them old and faux-authentic. The Aphora had been built in the 2030s to mimic something built in the 1930s…which in turn mimicked a theater from the 1830s. The seats were backed with red cloth, their accents of brushed Plasteel made to look gold. The Aphora guests had been dressed in finery. The mood, until the riot, had been sober and respectful. Almost drugged.
 

By contrast, The Sap crowd was gritty and on-the-ground. The stage was low; Natasha, if she wanted, could lean out past the old and pointless stage monitor speakers to touch those in the front row. They were standing, not sitting. They were dressed well, but that was because Natasha, when she’d planned the event, had nursed an ulterior motive. Now, onstage, she cursed it. This had begun as a PR move, but now it was her triumphant return. She suddenly didn’t want to sully her concert with politics. She didn’t want the door to charge a charity price. As she stood on the stage and saw hard life in the eyes of the children’s working-class parents, Natasha felt herself reconnecting with her roots.
 

You’re only here as a publicity stunt.
 

You’re a fraud.
 

They hate you. They all hate you, and you
deserve
their hate. You have earned it.
 

Natasha felt the fear. She embraced it, holding it tight. It wasn’t likely that the crowd was thinking the terrible things she was telling herself, but it still felt good to savor them. She’d had a friend growing up, Paulette, who used to cut her arms with a razor.
I want to feel something,
Paulette had said. Natasha had never understood Paulette until now. Natasha was using thoughts instead of a blade, but she was cutting herself just the same. It felt terrible, and the terrible felt good. For the first time in years, she felt more than numb.

You’re shit you’re shit you’re shit you’re shit you’re…

The red churn of hurt swirled behind her eyes, rising into the final, tremulous note of “Lost” — an appropriate oldie to start her set, written in the years just following the worst of the chaos, when she’d had no home. The lyrics were the same, but the feeling behind them had changed. She
had
been lost back then. Now, as her heart returned, gripped in fear, she was finally clawing her way back to found.
 

The crowd applauded as she finished, but it was a more grounded applause than what had erupted from the Aphora floor. She wasn’t being given their approval as a rubber stamp. She was having to earn it note by note.
 

The parents of the children were in the front row. Behind them were others from the groups of protestors, selected using AI behavior software as those most unlikely to cause trouble. They’d all been carefully placed for the cameras so that Natasha would come off shining for the press, but she didn’t feel shining yet. They were a hard audience, but that was okay. It meant Natasha would have to wow them. She needed to be great. And after all those years under Isaac, she deserved a chance to be great again. She deserved their skeptical looks — their eyes wondering if Natasha actually cared about the children or was using them — and deserved the chance to turn them around, winning them over as a young, pudgy singer had once won over their parents’ generation.
 

The next song — another oldie, “Down Deep,” began with the strum of a harp and a tremulous note. Natasha’s chest rose. She felt her heart find a rhythm, from nerves to calm to exultation.
 

She was glad she had insisted on a minimal security detachment, deciding to trust the AI that had selected her audience. Having too much muscle present would have ruined the experience. Only big stars — especially when they were slumming below their proper level — brought armed guards. She had James in the back, but the single bodyguard was enough. There would be police in the area, of course, and there was a detail outside with slumberguns, plus a private contingent circulating the block on screetbikes. But Jane had wanted them inside the venue, ready with their riot gear out and visible. She said she didn’t want a repeat of the Aphora. But how could the crowd sink into emotion with armed men at the doors, their faces blank behind helmets? How could they emote if they knew they were untrusted at best, or held captive at worst?
 

We don’t want another riot,
Jane said.
 

There won’t be. These people were hand-selected.
 

It’s better to be safe than sorry.
 

You mean conduct my comeback under guns and batons?

She was coming back. She was returning. She was not the woman she’d so recently been.

In the middle of her third song (“We Are All,” from
Saint Sebastian
in 2069), a bold and devilishly reckless thought occurred to Natasha — a way to accelerate the return to her old Enterprise self and silence her haters at the same time. She’d put her existing bank account into a trust or other irrevocable fund then live on what she earned going forward. She could even move out, away from her secure Directorate husband. She’d rent an apartment across town, pay on a lease, and make a show of it even if she never actually bought furniture or spent time there. She’d treat her new rent as non-negotiable just to prove that she could survive on her own. She’d buy her own food. Her own clothes. All using her own new money — none of Isaac’s, and none of the old.
Oh yes.
She could definitely do that. It felt like riding a bicycle across a tightrope, with no net beneath. If she lost her fans, she could always crack open the trust or return to Isaac, but the idea of crawling back was incentive enough to never let that happen.
 

She could do this. She could be Enterprise again. For real. And once she’d done that, just
let
Isaac and the sheets try to say that…
 

Natasha felt more than heard her voice falter as she caught a flicker of movement from the room’s rear. For a millisecond — as the note she was singing chopped but didn’t cease, causing a few heads in the audience to strobe with curiosity — she didn’t know what had startled her. It was just someone at the back. There was no reason to…

But the person was dressed in black from head to toe. He wore a solid black helmet, with a visor covering his face.
 

For a few more notes, uncertain why she felt so unsettled, Natasha kept singing. But her composure had broken, and her spell had shattered on the audience like a dropped plate. They could sense her unease. Audience eyes ticked in the direction of her straying gaze. They saw a second figure in black slip through the front then close the double doors behind them. There was a click, loud enough to be heard onstage.
 

Security.
 

Fucking Jane had hired security after all. She’d gone behind Natasha’s back and invited intimidating people into her intimate room. Hadn’t she realized it would startle her singer onstage, and shatter her rhythm?