by Sean Platt
Leo shook his head. Leah felt like she was going to either scream or cry, and couldn’t decide which. She was angry at the others for their bullshit posturing, angry at Leo for taking their side while acknowledging that she was more important, and angry at herself for getting so caught up in it all. She’d been born in an Organa commune because her mother had wanted her to live without a Beam ID and to have the freedom that came with it. Then she’d moved to the city, under the radar, and explored the other side of the coin. She’d led that dual life, half city girl and half mountain-dwelling Organa, for most of her time on the planet. She’d learned enough about the growing NAU computer network to wonder if it had become too powerful. She’d watched the rolling service blackouts of 2089 and had seen just how despondent — sometimes suicidal — District citizens became when the walls didn’t respond, when their presences weren’t acknowledged by everything they encountered, when they couldn’t find out what was going on in the world and couldn’t talk to their friends with a gesture. That was when Leah realized things had to change, that there was more to Organa than simply eschewing technology. The Beam was too big to challenge, too big to fail. Humanity, never good at asking if it should do a thing once it learned it could, was on a slippery slope. So she’d suited up to fight, and now her side of the battle resented her for her preparedness? To Leah, living stark lives as a means of facing a complicated, technological enemy was beyond stupid. How could you fight an enemy you didn’t understand? Most Organas shunned technology without so much as a thought. Leah thought it was smarter to embrace The Beam enough to find the system’s holes, and a way out.
“No more add-ons,” said Leo.
“So I have to pretend. To be a good hippie rather than an effective one.”
“You have to be part of a movement. And a community.”
Leah rolled her eyes.
“Something else that concerns me,” Leo said, studying her expression.
“Something else for your pariah?”
“It’s Crumb,” said Leo.
That snapped her mood. Crumb was a wacko. The town oddity. There was nothing about Crumb that wasn’t a little troubling, and there was, at the same time, nothing about Crumb that was troubling at all. The old man was his own thing, neither good nor bad. He’d been around for as long as Leah had known about the Organas without meriting more than a mention as an oddity.
“What about Crumb?”
“He’s getting strange.”
Leah laughed. Leo’s glance made her stop.
“He’s been talking about West,” said Leo.
“Yeah,” said Leah. “Noah Fucking West.”
“I don’t think it’s just an expression with him. He keeps blabbing about West this and West that. West is here, and West is there. West is everywhere. It’s like he’s trying to warn us. Remember how he used to talk about the Indians?”
Leah did. Crumb had found a bunch of stories in a series of worthless tattered paper books that Leo had given him about old-time cowboys and so-called Indians native to the NAU hundreds of years ago. In the books, the Indians were always the bad guys, always coming to attack and rape and pillage. After reading the stories, Crumb had begun to spout off about Indians coming to raid their wagon train. At first, it was cute, but then it got annoying. Two weeks later, when Crumb’s paranoia over the Indians reached a head, Leo sent a few men out with Crumb to scout the trails. They’d spotted no men with red skin and feathers, but they had seen six police hovers approaching. They rushed back to the village and destroyed or hidden piles and piles of hard storage — slip drives, stolen paper records, plans, and boxes upon boxes filled with Organa propaganda — just in time, just in advance of the raid. Most in the village wrote it off as coincidence, but Crumb had returned to normal after the police had left, no longer yammering on about an impending Indian attack.
“I remember,” said Leah.
“That’s how he’s been with West, as if something’s jarred him loose. He used to be all over the place, but now everything is Noah West this and Noah West that.”
“He’s crazy, Leo.”
“It’s like he’s trying to warn us. We tried to crack his head when he first arrived, back in the ’60s, but we’ve never gotten anything from him. We wrote it off because like you said, we just figured he was crazy. But it’s always bugged me. Why was Dominic called to take him in when a sweeper could have done the job? Why was he ordered to federal Respero? He should have gone into the state system and then either been contained or dispatched without ceremony. But they were all over Dominic, remember? And that’s what got him thinking that maybe his gut feeling to save Crumb meant something.”
Leah shrugged, her gesture asking what came next.
Leo tapped his chin with his thumb. “I want you to ride with Crumb to Bontauk. They have the closest hardwired connection to The Beam. Don’t say I told you so, but I don’t think I have to explain why I’m asking you to do it?”
“My port. And my ID spoof.”
“Yes. But not for you. For him. I don’t want him scanned, even by something simple like a handheld. Not until we know more.”
Leah was shaking her head. “It’s just Crumb,” she said.
“Yes,” said Leo. “But my instincts have never failed me, and they’re all ringing that there’s something to this.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But until we know more, I’ll be getting the same brand of wretched sleep I’ve been getting for too long.”
Leah stood, brushed at her sarong, and picked up her backpack. “What do your instincts say about my getting caught breaking into Quark?” she said.
Leo stood and pulled something from a satchel at his side then handed it to Leah. It was a small collapsible slumbergun.
“That either way, it’s a good idea for you to keep that with you.”
Stephen York stood on the dirt, kicking at it, willing his feet to do what he told them. After a while, they did. He stopped kicking and fell still. Then he leaned back and crossed his arms. Soon, he realized his arms were twitching, so he pinched them harder to his sides. He told his mind and body to still; he needed to concentrate for what was coming.
He began reciting prime numbers, like a mantra.
One. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen.
In between numbers, York tried to decide what the last few days of foreboding could mean. His mind kept wanting to slip, but he held it down, focusing on the numbers. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-three. He could keep going. He had, over and over and over. He knew up to 3,571 by heart because he had once memorized the first five hundred primes while studying cyphers and encryption. It was a relatively useless skill, but today, he was grateful for it. Like an old man searching his mind for names from his youth, York felt that reciting the primes was a way to keep him sharp. He walked through the list repeatedly, feeling like he was running a stone over his thoughts, trying to hone their edge. Still, his thoughts kept slipping. His memories were there, quiet and orderly deep inside him, but they kept threatening to fall away. Some thoughts were stickier than others. Through simple repetition, some memories had become grooved and conditioned. Like the primes. He’d had reason enough to recite his wife’s name that he knew it without thinking. He knew his bank account number. He knew the access codes he’d used back when he’d helped develop Crossbeam decades ago. He could remember line after line of code — all obsolete today, of course. But doing reasoning with that archive of knowledge? Plumbing it in order to draw conclusions? That was hard. Maybe impossible.
He felt like his mind was inside a literal box. He kept rapping his mental shoulders and knees on that confining box because there wasn’t enough room to maneuver. That was the firewall, of course. He’d helped develop some of that technology too, but the details weren’t as well rehearsed as his wife’s name or the prime numbers, and so he couldn’t access much about them. He knew the firewall had blocked most of who he was. He knew it kept him inside this box, locked down tigh
t. He knew that his normal way of expressing himself was hampered, and that he’d need to find other ways to do what he needed to do. He had references. Back when York had studied neurology, he’d learned about a man who couldn’t form new memories, but who had relearned how to learn by establishing habits that played themselves out without his conscious awareness. York wouldn’t be able to do that to get out of his box, of course, but the process was the same: when one way is blocked, you find another.
1163, 1171, 1181.
Something was coming. There was something on the horizon. And here he was, with his hands tied behind his back.
1187, 1193.
York swore, heard himself swear, and again found his foot kicking at dirt. It was still kicking when a woman came up to him on horseback.
“Hop on, Crumb,” she said, indicating a second horse behind her. “We’re going for a little ride. Leo wants us to play on The Beam.”
1201, 1213.
It was a good idea. York didn’t know why, but somehow, it was.
He tried to tell the woman on the horse that he wanted to go, that he felt a sense of foreboding in the air.
“Noah Fucking West,” he heard himself say instead.
EPISODE 2
July 13, 2027 — Amalfi Coast, Italy
“Watch this.”
Nicolai didn’t reply. He held his tongue and kept his eyes on Enzo as his friend lined up a paper airplane with Ms. Marco’s ass then used a blob of spit to stick the hoverdisc to the plane’s bottom. The disc — a wafer-like slice of nanobot substrate that was not, in the normal course of affairs, meant to be attached with spit — was slightly smaller than a 1-cent coin and a fraction of its weight. Once attached, Enzo whispered to it and let it go. The plane hovered in the air, unsupported.
“Knock it off,” Nicolai whispered, watching the floating plane. He reached forward. “Give it back! You’re going to get me busted!”
Enzo looked at Nicolai. “You are going to get busted?”
“Yes, me!” Nicolai hissed, watching Ms. Marco’s ass to ensure it hadn’t heard them at the back of the classroom. “You know, by my father? Or maybe by his partners? While Marco sends you to the office, I’ll be getting arrested for espionage.”
Enzo flapped his hand dismissively at Nicolai. “Industrial espionage at worst.”
He whispered again to the plane. It began to drift slowly between the rows of desks, making for Ms. Marco’s serendipitously still-bent-over ass. The other students turned to watch it drift past them, gaping. Enzo would probably have preferred the plane to move faster, but if he made it do so, the disc would come off the paper, and Nicolai would jump Enzo if he considered using glue on a piece of equipment that he suspected might be worth thousands if not millions of euros. Enzo had no idea what he was playing with. He thought the flying disc was a fun novelty. He didn’t understand that what made it float were the millions of nanobots embedded in the substrate, chugging air in one end and out the other, floating by virtue of what amounted to countless synchronized mechanical farts. Enzo thought it was a toy, not a classified bit of technology that might one day change the world. It was Nicolai’s fault for showing Enzo his father’s office that morning, and failing to watch his prankster friend’s hands at all times.
“Stop it! Now!”
Enzo leaned back. “Oh, shut up, Nicolai.”
“That’s a priceless piece of cutting-edge equipment you stole,” Nicolai whispered. “And now, you’re going to lose it.”
“I’m not going to lose it,” said Enzo. “I’m going to score a bull's eye.”
The plane closed the gap between the front row and Ms. Marco’s desk at a putter. Ms. Marco was still facing forward, opening new windows on the network board at the front of the room. She moved like a woman who’d grown up with whiteboards, which, of course, she had. But this was a high-end private school, without any whiteboards. Marco was one of the oldsters who’d bitched up a storm about the loss of markers when they’d gone digital in 2018. Nicolai remembered whiteboards — but only barely, from his older brother’s school.
The students watched as the plane politely poked Ms. Marco in the rear, as if trying to remind her of something. She turned. Enzo laughed. The teacher’s eyes looked down at the plane and hardened. She opened her mouth to yell but didn’t have a chance before sounds of breaking and screaming exploded from the other end of the building.
“It’s a Rake Squad,” said a girl.
“It can’t be,” said Ms. Marco, looking uncertain. “This is the most secure school in the area. The rabble…”
She stopped talking as a hail of bullets ripped the top half of her head away from the lower half of her uncertain expression, leaving her face like a pumpkin sheared at the middle. The wall behind her was painted in a crimson spatter.
The students in the room began to scream.
Nicolai looked at the front wall and saw sunlight salting the room through fresh holes. The voices of the Rake Squad (and it was a Rake Squad, Nicolai realized, no matter what the bottom half of Ms. Marco’s head claimed) swelled closer. The tromping of feet mingled with booming shouts. Nicolai heard them as Marco’s body fell: a group of men and women who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by harvesting from elitists who carried on with business as usual while the world outside went to shit. The way the Squads of glorified rioters saw it, Amalfi and the other coastal hotspots would be lost to rising ocean levels within a few months anyway; they were just taking today what the ocean would take eventually. The poor and their families had to eat. If a few spoiled rich kids had to die in order to make that happen, then so be it.
Something inside Nicolai flipped like a switch. His mind seized onto his situation’s stark reality: the holes smoking in the wall, Ms. Marco’s corpse striking the desk and collapsing like a bag of meat, Marie’s hair flying as she whipped her head around two rows up, clearly out of her fucking mind. The feet were coming closer, the screaming getting louder. The bullets had entered near the door. There was only one other viable way out, and he had to take it now. Now. There would be no screwing around, no trying to be a hero and save everyone. He could save himself, and he’d give Enzo exactly one chance to come with him. The others could follow, but whether they did or didn’t wasn’t his problem. The decision wasn’t logical or emotional. It was pure adrenaline-laced survival. Nicolai had lived sixteen years on an idyllic, unified planet, then another on whatever Earth had become after the weather had declared war on humanity and everything it had built. If Nicolai didn’t want his seventeenth year to be his last, he couldn’t afford to be selfless. You couldn’t become a martyr without dying, and Nicolai had no intention of dying in a school, cowering under a gum-pocked plastic desk.
Nicolai stood and yelled a command. Paper rustled as the hoverdisc detached itself from Enzo’s plane and screamed across the room to slap against the reinforced window glass. The windows, which faced the fences, were bulletproof. But that wouldn’t be a problem.
“Duck,” he said to Enzo.
They dropped. Above them, the window glass began to crack as nanos from the disc burrowed into the windows, chewing through the lattice. Nicolai felt seconds tick off, hearing the beat of the Rake Squad’s boots as they combed through classrooms. But the nanos worked fast. After a few fractures had webbed across the window, the tiny machines started to vibrate, setting up waves of resonance. Then the window blew out in both directions, showering the screaming students with shards of glass.
“Run!” Nicolai yelled.
Without waiting for a response, Nicolai ran. He dove headfirst through the shattered window, tucking and rolling as he struck the grass beyond it. He hopped up, his eyes darting around for rioters. Enzo climbed through the window behind him — feet first, as if they had all the time in the world. Nicolai wasn’t waiting. He darted to the fence and threw a scrap of metal at it to see if it was still electrified. Nothing sparked, but he didn’t know if that meant anything. It didn’t matter. If they were going to esc
ape, this was the only way. Getting fried was better than waiting to be shot and robbed.
Nicolai gripped the fence.
It was safe. The Rake Squad had shut it down when they’d broken in, of course.
Without taking time to reflect on his good fortune, Nicolai clambered up hand for hand, moving fast. Enzo slapped into the fence below him and began moving upward, clumsy and slow. Nicolai stepped on his fingers. Enzo yelled, but Nicolai found himself unable to care. He reached the top, peeled off his sweater by alternating hands on the fence, and tossed it over the razor wire. He made it halfway over before one of the blades sliced into his calf. The cut wasn’t deep, but it made him grip the fence too tight. His balance teetered. Then a second blade pushed through the sweater and cut his palm. It was too much pain at once; his grip slipped. He was briefly airborne, then crashed roughly into the tall grass on the far side of the fence.
Nicolai looked up. He didn’t know where Enzo was. He heard gunshots close by. They were almost certainly coming from the classroom he’d just left. Rake Squad incursions were strangely formulaic, based on the Internet and news reports they’d been getting throughout Italy: The Squads tended to rob low academies and massacre high academies because seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds had an annoying tendency to fight back. Either way, the Squads took the spoils. If Nicolai returned to the school tomorrow, which he never would, he’d find it stripped to nothing, worse than a ghost town, probably burned for spite.