by Sean Platt
For the third time, Kane turned his head to look at Nicolai. Then he looked back at Doc and waited.
“Nicolai?” said Doc.
Kane shrugged. “Why not?” Then he turned away from Doc and started speaking to Nicolai. “Maybe you let your friend Mr. Stahl into your employers’ apartment. Maybe you report to him regularly on things you see and hear. I believe our man even found you at Doc’s apartment after midnight. Quite late for a casual visit, isn’t it?”
Nicolai said, “I was picking up an upgrade.”
“An upgrade. What kind of upgrade?”
“A creativity chip.”
Kane gave a laugh that sounded almost like a chortle. “I see. You write speeches for the Directorate, so you got a creativity chip. Because Directorate is where all of the creative people are.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Kai.
Nicolai turned, giving her a look that he hoped would tell her to shut up. None of this felt right, and the best choice, for all of them, would be to keep their heads down as much as possible.
“I’ll tell you my theory,” said Kane, putting a thoughtful finger to his chin and beginning a lazy stroll around the group. “I think you see things when you spend so much time with the Ryans. I think they aren’t as careful as they should be about keeping the secret. Come on. What have you seen?”
“Nothing,” said Nicolai.
Kane stopped walking then tipped his head to the side. “Please.”
Nicolai looked at the white-haired man, trying to gauge him. Nicolai had run across all types in his travels. He’d seen the best of the best — saints who sacrificed themselves to save others — and the worst of the worst. You didn’t make it far on your own in the wasteland without the right barometer for people. Looking at Kane, Nicolai knew him as a killer. Not a man to trifle with.
“I’ve seen them learn things quickly,” said Nicolai. “Maybe too quickly.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Dancing. Piano. And when I told Isaac that I would love to learn to play my piano like he could play his but that I couldn’t find the time, he laughed. Like he knew something about ‘the time needed to learn to play’ that I didn’t.”
“What else?’
“Natasha is in her office for hours and hours. Then she comes out all cheery and relaxed, like she’s been at a spa. It doesn’t seem like she’s just on The Beam. And she has these two rigs in there like I’ve never seen. I asked about them once, and she told me that they’re normal rigs, just really comfortable.” He didn’t go on to tell Kane the other things Natasha did that made Nicolai suspicious: the way she’d hinted to Nicolai about “going away somewhere together” and how she’d said that sometimes, you could do things without really doing anything at all. She’d licked her lips suggestively when she’d said that last. He knew Natasha enough to know those little quips for the come-ons they were, but he didn’t understand what they meant — other than trouble.
Kane nodded. “Yes, she is one of those types.” He didn’t elaborate on what “those types” were. “It makes sense. Loose lips. Your suspicions were inevitable, really.” He looked at Doc, then back at Nicolai. “So maybe you told Doc about the things the Ryans seem to have. About those fancy immersion rigs, say. Maybe Doc was curious, and so maybe you made a deal. You give him information, and he gives you…creativity chips.”
Before Doc or Nicolai could respond, Kane threw his hands theatrically in the air.
“Or not!” he said. “I do not know these things. It doesn’t really matter how you learned about the restricted product lines, Mr. Stahl. What matters is why you went to the trouble to learn more by breaking in — something I believe I already know — and also how you did it. Xenia’s security is complex. I find it hard to imagine you broke through the locks. So how did you bypass security?”
“Security?” Doc blurted. “Look, short stuff, they led me in. Ask Killian. Ask that cute little receptionist.”
“The receptionist was a temp and has unfortunately lost all memory of Xenia Labs,” said Kane. “Mr. Killian says you posed as another salesman. You had a manufactured ID and everything.”
“Bullshit! Check your security feed!”
Kane chuckled. “We don’t keep visual records at Xenia.”
“It was a mistake. They thought I was this guy Greenley. I even thought I was late, and was all sweaty and gross. Your reception gal sent Killian to me, and Killian rolled out the red carpet. I saw what I saw. So you’ve gotta wipe me? Go ahead. Gauss my shit up; I don’t care. Tell you the truth, I’d like to forget all of this.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” said Kane. “We don’t just want you to forget. We want answers.”
“It was a mistake!”
Kane sighed. The Beamers were still staying back, edging away from both the aluminum table and the small man with the white hair. Kane gestured at the table. “You know what this is?” He looked at each of his prisoners then waited for all three to shake their heads.
“It’s called an Orion.”
Kai gasped.
“Yes, you would have heard the rumors, wouldn’t you, as a woman so steeped in pleasure?” said Alix Kane to Kai with a serpent’s smile. He turned to Nicolai and Doc. “There are places on The Beam — very, very, very exclusive places — where people with rigs as high-end as those you saw can experience total immersion in an artificial environment. It feels as if they are there. These places cater to fully immersive experiences, but unsurprisingly, the most popular are those grounded in pleasures that its clients cannot experience in their normal lives. An Orion is a device — a device developed at an accelerated pace for certain quarters of NAU defense — designed to access an area very like those places in concept but quite different in experience. Humans have debated whether Hell exists?” Kane took a step toward the table and laid a palm flat on its top, looking at the contraption with something like affection. “It exists in here.”
“You can’t use that,” said Kai. “They were banned in ’84. Use is punishable by the Department of Respero.”
Kane laughed. “So the penalty is a quiet and peaceful death?” He slapped the machine twice and turned back to his prisoners. “We should be so lucky! But alas, the ’84 ban was on older Orions that were mere toys compared to this one — this one, which, once you’re given a little injection of nanos, will immerse you more fully than you currently believe is possible. Besides, I’m afraid I must insist. There are too many limits with conventional torture. For one, there is the question of scope. If I came at you with real-life jagged blades, how many places could I possibly cut you at one time? And think of all those areas I could never reach! Real life can’t pull all of your skin apart with hooks at once, but this can make you feel as if it’s happening. Then there is the issue of death. If I were to flay you, death would be imminent…and all too soon. But even if you didn’t die, how could I tear the skin from your body once it’s already been peeled away?” Kane chuckled as if discussing problems as mundane as weeding a garden. “And lastly, we run into mercy. A torturer doesn’t have to be merciful in order for the subject’s body to grant mercy. You can go into shock, fall unconscious…even, in a way, grow used to the pain. But the Orion allows us to make each cut as terrible as the first. To keep you awake and focused. With access to all of your neurons, the levels of agony that can be delivered are beyond belief.”
Nicolai tried to maintain his composure, looking at the device and swallowing a lump. Across from him, Doc had lost all of his bravado. His tan skin was ashen.
In a small voice, he said, “It was a mistake. I swear.”
Kai stared at the table, fixated on the glistening chrome. “Torture is an unreliable way to mine information,” she said.
“Well,” said Kane, beckoning to a man in a white lab coat who’d just entered holding a syringe, “we shall see.”
“Don’t do this to me,” said Doc.
“Oh, we won’t.” He pointed at Kai. “Let’s start with her.
”
Everything about Micah Ryan’s black-and-chrome office was designed to subtly intimidate the people who met with Micah in person. And of the two words in “subtly intimidate,” both were equally important.
Micah’s desk (unnecessary since every scrap in his files was virtual and every surface in the office was Beam-enabled) was large and made of solid mahogany. The walls were decorated with original Salvador Dali paintings — Micah’s favorite artist, because in Micah’s opinion, he so perfectly infused realism into scenes of surreality. Front and center, beside Micah’s desk, was Crucifixion, a Dali painting depicting Christ crucified on a tesseract, mounted in a smooth black frame that was almost as large as the painting itself. Micah said he liked Crucifixion because it symbolized the idea that the world was composed of multiple dimensions and as many realities, just like The Beam itself. But to his visitors, the painting symbolized what Micah Ryan might do to people who fucked with him…in any dimension.
But all of this intimidation was subtle, by design. Like Micah himself, the office also radiated a welcoming feel along with its symbols of power — and accordingly, visitors to the office often thought they might be imagining whatever menace they felt. They’d reason that Micah had the desk because he liked its look. They’d reason that he might have had the room designed to completely eliminate all echoes (even off of the polished wood floor) not to unsettle people, but because he enjoyed quiet. Along one entire side of the office, there was no wall or window; the floor and ceiling simply stopped, opening into a void. It looked like a precipice from which anyone might fall seventy stories to their death, but visitors would reason that Micah might have employed a force field barrier rather than windows because he enjoyed the aesthetics and wasn’t afraid of heights.
Micah walked to the wet bar, opened a small black box, and pulled out a cigarette. He held the cigarette up and looked at it for a moment before placing it between his lips and lighting it with a heavy table lighter. He inhaled, held the smoke, then vented a curling plume from his nose. The flavor was exquisite. The cigarettes were extraordinarily expensive, packed with engineered tobacco grown many districts south, where the weather was always kept warm. Between the shrinking of the North Atlantic continent and its continued rise in population (handled somewhat by Respero and a very secret and very controversial Beam-mediated pregnancy control program), land was precious. Little was left for farming, and the scant areas available were allotted almost exclusively for growing food. Tobacco grown in tiny sectors of the available land came at a premium. There were synthetic cigarettes, but they were terrible, and Micah didn’t understand the point. Even synthetic cigarettes were taxed out the ass and had been since humans realized they damaged the body, so the poor couldn’t afford them. The rich — who had the nanos necessary to undo smoking’s damage as fast as it occurred — were the only people who smoked anyway. Fake cigarettes were smoked by a small class of poseurs — the Presque Beau, just below the elite Beau Monde — who had enough money to buy smokes, but not quite enough money to afford real ones.
Micah walked to the edge of his windowless wall and stared out across the city. The high-end force field, like the rest of his office, had been ludicrously expensive. He could have gotten a less expensive model, but cheap fields shimmered and shook like heat haze in the desert. They were also staticky, and tended to spark when you neared them. Micah’s force field, which had cost at least ten times as much, was perfectly clear and semipermeable. As he stood at his office’s edge, he could feel a light breeze rustle his perfectly groomed dark-brown hair and run up the sleeves of his tailored blue suit, ruffling his authentic cotton shirt cuffs. The real wind up this high was intense, but the field only let through a puff, and even that vanished once a person was more than a few feet from the edge. Micah raised the toe of his polished black shoe and stepped forward, his toe hanging over the edge. There was no resistance. But if he tipped forward, he knew the field would pull him back. You couldn’t fall out…but it sure felt like you could.
Micah turned, again drawing on his cigarette and curling the smoke through his nostrils, aware that he was restless and not liking the weakness it implied one bit. Annoyed, he flicked the cigarette at the force field even though the smoke was only half finished: eight-five credits worth of waste. The Beam surfaces around him read his flicking motion and his pulse, decided that Micah wanted the cigarette to leave his office, and let it pass through the force field. Micah watched it catch the wind and fly. Not for the first time, he looked through the force field and wondered how picky the AI was about interpreting his intention. If he pushed a man toward the edge in the way he’d just flicked the cigarette, would the force field allow him to fall?
Micah strolled away from the edge and across the expansive floor, wondering how to quell his restlessness. Then his canvas chirped, and he realized he wouldn’t have to.
“Mr. Killian is ready for you in the anteroom, Mr. Ryan,” said a soft female voice. The voice had been meticulously replicated from old recordings of an adventurous woman named Veronica whom Micah had once known, although he called his console “Rebecca” for reasons of discretion.
“About goddamned time,” said Micah. “Give him five minutes of mild paralytics, then ping me.”
“Yes, Micah,” said the voice.
Micah paced for another few minutes, knowing the virtual space where Killian waited was being flooded with a subtle neural imitation of poison. Participants in virtual meetings weren’t supposed to have access to the inputs of the other participants, but most people weren’t Micah Ryan. The poison wouldn’t hurt Killian, but it would make (and leave) him unsettled. He wouldn’t be able to find a position that felt comfortable to his proprioception inputs, and things might smell slightly funny to him. The console would lift the poison when Micah arrived, and Killian’s subconscious would learn a lesson about being on time and about whose presence solved problems.
Once the five minutes were up, Micah sat in his immersion rig, plugged in, and had the console send him to meet Killian.
Micah opened his simulated eyes to find himself in what looked like a large boardroom a moment later, still dressed exactly as he was in real life, again holding a cigarette. Cigarettes were just as expensive in virtual space as in life — not to keep the raff from smoking them (the raff couldn’t afford full immersion even if they knew about it), but rather to rape people a little bit more. Meeting spaces on The Beam were capitalist endeavors, just like the rest of Enterprise.
Across from Micah was a tall man in a white lab coat, sitting in one of the chairs, clearly uncomfortable. When Killian saw Micah blip in, he stood then held himself stiff, as if at attention. Micah, who liked to watch old war films from back when war still existed, half expected Killian to salute.
“Sit down, Jim,” he said. Killian preferred to go by “James,” but Micah thought it sounded presumptuous.
“I’m sorry,” said Killian, sitting. There was that “subtle” thing again. It always surprised Micah how many people, after he fucked with them, ended up apologizing.
Micah didn’t sit. He circled the table instead, drawing puffs from his simulated cigarette. He could taste it in his mouth, feel the smoke in his lungs, and smell it as he plumed through his nose. He also felt mildly high, thanks to the engineered tobacco the cigarette’s programmers had so excellently simulated.
“Tell me what’s new, Jim,” said Micah.
Killian shifted, and something like relief crawled across his body language. He looked like someone had pulled a thorn from his toe.
“Oh, things are going very, very well, Micah. Fidelities of BioFi 7.6 are well above what we’d hoped, and the speeds we’re seeing are tremendous. We’re seeing successful replication of entity after entity not just on The Beam, but also within our buffers. Which actually raises an ethical issue, because once the transfer is complete and verified, we’d want to delete the buffer copy, right? I mean, once it’s no longer needed as a backup? But some of our people are joki
ng that it’s murder.”
“How can it be murder if no lives are ended?”
“Well, it’s a joke, of course. But really, if you think about it, the definition of ‘life’ is evolving, as is everything else. Life has always been conceived in biological terms — something that consumes, excretes, defends itself, reproduces, and so on — but when we’re talking about sentience within a virtual world, that definition no longer suffices. Even the earliest AI with the smallest emergent properties present versions of those traits of living things. They consume space on a server. They can copy themselves to reproduce. I mean, just look at West — there are copies of him everywhere, in addition to West Prime within the central spindle. So we get all these sticky new questions like, ‘When you erase a mind — even if it’s just a copy — then is that ‘killing’ that mind? I see both sides. Truth is, if you took one of the buffer copies and dropped it into one of the main sectors, it would continue to function as any other because that’s the whole point of there being a backup in the first place. And when you consider that it would carry a self-image and would, in a space like we’re in now, present itself as wholly real and corporeal? That it’d have thoughts and an attitude, and if you pushed it or tried to fight it, it would fight back? With all that considered, I see why people wonder about deleting even our redundant copies. But I’m speaking philosophically, you understand.”
“Fascinating,” said Micah. He didn’t actually care.
Killian seemed to read Micah’s impatient expression and continued. “But yes, the speeds and fidelities are very, very good, and soon mind duplication and transfer will be considered as nothing more than a simple outpatient medical procedure. Then, it’ll become wholesale, and people will stop regarding it as a fringe practice.”
“Excellent. Good work.” This time, Micah did care. Most people were governed by fear. Fear was a much bigger obstacle than restraint or conscience. Most tempted men didn’t refrain from cheating on their wives because they felt it was wrong, but because they were afraid of getting caught. Removing fear in the right places and adding it back in the right places — even if the moral qualms stayed right where they were — was the key to selling anything. From Micah’s point of view as a majority Xenia shareholder, fear could be sticky. Philosophy, not so much.