by Sean Platt
Nicolai entered, annoyed. This was all such posturing. He walked from the port into the living room then from room to room, expecting to find Isaac at some point with his hands on his hips, his petulant ire raised over something stupid. What that stupid thing could be, given the previous evening’s success, Nicolai couldn’t imagine.
Instead of Isaac, Nicolai found Natasha sprawled across the couch like a cat, draped in a thin garment that was somewhere between a dress and a nightgown. Nicolai imagined the pose was supposed to be seductive, and it might have been if he hadn’t known the Ryans for so long. Natasha was still beautiful (although Nicolai preferred her younger and less-skeletal look, before she’d eradicated nearly all of her fat cells) and looked to be in her late twenties, but after six decades of bullshit, it was hard not to think of her as an old woman clinging to youth.
“Long time, no see,” she purred.
“Where is Isaac? He mailed. Urgently.”
Natasha’s voice lost its purr and became biting. “He’s beating off in his office.”
Nicolai dodged the “beating off” comment, which was probably not literal, and said, “Does he know I’m here?”
“I know you’re here,” she said, effortlessly and shamelessly switching back to her soft voice. Beside her, her stupid little dog yapped. Clearly, the two needed to communicate better about which people should be courted versus barked at.
“Should I wait?”
“You could wait on my lap.”
Nicolai rolled his eyes. “Now now, Natasha,” he said, taking a few steps toward the office. He looked at Isaac’s office door. If there was one thing more annoying than being summoned like a slave with a double-urgent mail and a power-playing air, it was being summoned and then ignored. Despite the physical discomfort still in his body, Nicolai felt himself growing angry. He’d done his job. They’d been celebrating last night. What was Isaac all shitted up about now?
“Where have you been, anyway?” said Natasha from behind him, still striking her movie star pose.
“Sleeping. But apparently that was out of line. I should have known better.”
“Sleeping?”
Nicolai turned. “Why aren’t we meeting at the restaurant? I did my job last night, yet I’m getting the anger game. Summoned here like a bad little boy. Are we still having brunch?”
Natasha’s veneer thinned. She seemed confused.
“What do you mean, brunch?”
“It comes between breakfast and lunch,” Nicolai snapped, turning back and slamming his fist onto Isaac’s door. The office was soundproofed — both physically and electronically — but if he pounded long enough, chances were that the canvas would tell Isaac that some asshole was tap-tap-tapping on his chamber door. Besides, it felt good.
“Honey, we don’t do brunch on Mondays.”
Nicolai turned his head, his eyebrows drawing together. He was just about to ask Natasha what the hell she meant when the door opened and Isaac emerged, staring daggers at Nicolai, his hands as poutingly on his hips in life as they had been in Nicolai’s mind.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Isaac blurted. Then, with an annoyed look at Natasha (Nicolai intuited an argument in progress between them), Isaac grabbed Nicolai by the arm and dragged him into the office. Once the door was closed, Isaac resumed his irritated pose, waiting. Nicolai had thought Isaac couldn’t be more impotently angry, but he’d been wrong. Isaac postured like a master.
“I’ve been at my apartment,” Nicolai answered, starting to suspect there was more in play here than he realized.
“Off-grid? For two days? Have you been watching the feed?”
“What’s on the feed?”
“Oh, well,” said Isaac, broadcasting his agitation, “where should I start? Let’s see…you weren’t around when Micah gave that speech trashing us. The first speech trashing us, that is. You missed a few riots, a few stories and reports saying how incompetent I am and how I’m making the Directorate look terrible. Why is it my fault, by the way? I’m not king and grand fucking poobah of the Directorate. I’m just the Czar of Internal Satisfaction. But everyone is up my ass anyway — and up Natasha’s — because of motherfucking Micah and the way the sheets eat up the whole ‘brothers divided’ thing. It’s almost fucking biblical, how they act about him and me, and…”
“How is Natasha holding up?” said Nicolai.
“Fuck her!” Isaac spat. “She spent fourteen million credits this month already, most of it in the Viazo, and you know what I think? I think she’s fucking some guy in there, or maybe a lot of guys, and meanwhile she’s giving me shit for ‘not making her feel better’ or some crap, like I don’t have enough on my plate without…”
Nicolai held up a hand, suddenly realizing he’d passed up Isaac’s strange phrase “for two days” in jumping directly to “watching the feed.”
“Wait. Not to sound like a total cliché, but Isaac…what day is it?”
“What day is it?”
“Just…yes. What day is it?”
Isaac looked as if Nicolai had asked if the sun still rose in the morning. “Monday,” he finally said.
“I thought it was Saturday.”
“Noah Fucking West. How much did you drink on Friday?”
“I barely drink,” said Nicolai, thinking of the two glasses of wine he’d had at the celebratory after party. “Look…I’m missing time.” He touched his neck, then his face. “I think I’ve been in a fight.”
“You black out, get into a fight, and disappear for two days NOW?”
Nicolai’s mouth opened in shock. “Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding! I haven’t even told you about…”
“Jesus, Isaac! This doesn’t concern you at all? Did you even know there are ways to manually erase memory? Don’t you think there might be something to worry about here?”
Isaac looked slapped. “They can erase memory?”
“Yes, Jesus!”
“Who can do that?”
“Does it matter?”
“So, what…this is a conspiracy? Not your fault?” said Isaac. “Because I’ve gotta say, that’s awfully convenient, Nicolai. I had to write my last speech myself, and…”
Nicolai felt himself becoming angry. “Wow, that must have been tough. Almost as tough as being beaten and having your memory erased.”
“Don’t feed me that bullshit!” Isaac yelled. “I know you see that hooker. I know people who know her, and she vanished last weekend too. Kind of coincidental, right?”
“You think I’m lying?”
“Well, I think it would be bad if you didn’t have a really convenient excuse. And I think now that I’m telling you the shit that went down while you were gone, you’d never be able to change your story because…”
“You think I’m LYING?”
This was beyond ridiculous. In the space of sixty seconds, Nicolai been charged with abandonment, had found out he’d lost two days and had been assaulted, and had been accused of lying by someone whose ass he had wiped for sixty years. Someone whose rise into the upper echelon of society and politics was largely Nicolai’s doing. Nicolai, who wasn’t in the upper echelon himself yet and had gotten none of the credit.
“Micah gave a second speech, Nicolai!” Isaac barged on, apparently deciding to put a pin in the current discussion and get back to his own petty problems. “It preempted mine by fifteen minutes! He just made me look like a…”
“I want out,” said Nicolai. “Now.”
“What?” Isaac’s superior expression shattered like a plate dropped to the floor.
“I also want to hit you,” he added. “Very, very badly. But I’ll try to simply storm out on you instead. Let you keep writing your own fucking speeches, now that you know you can do it.”
“But…you can’t leave! I mean, what will you…you won’t have a job!”
“Who gives a shit? I’ve got Presque Beau status and a credit balance that’s nearly as much as — well, shit, not nearly as mu
ch as yours, if your wife is blowing fifteen million fucking dollars a month. I’ll be just fi…”
“Fourteen million,” said Isaac, looking helpless.
“Noah Fucking West, Isaac! This is what’s wrong with the Directorate, right here! It’s bothered me for years…but hey, I was Isaac Ryan’s man, so I had to toe the line. We talk about equality, but everyone earns a dole based on their position. Sure, Enterprise is a ruthless meritocracy. But at least there’s merit! You and Natasha don’t have to work harder than a cabbie does — and in fact, he works a hell of a lot harder — and yet he barely gets by while you spend fourteen million fucking dollars on virtual sex and…and…” He grabbed an object from Isaac’s shelf. It looked like ivory, was maybe a foot long, had to cost a fortune, and seemed completely pointless. Nicolai picked it up. “…and whatever the hell this is!”
“It’s an antique gunpowder horn,” Isaac said lamely.
“Raff on the bottom, below the line. Us up top. Equality, my ass! Sure we meet their needs, but what are we keeping from them? And how much is the gap widening by the day? There is no Directorate middle class. There’s us, and there’s them. Even between you and me there’s an ‘us and them.’ We’re not remotely on the same level, are we, Isaac? I know you have access to stuff I don’t, like those rigs in your offices. And how did you learn to play the piano so fast, Isaac? How did you and Natasha become dance experts overnight? What the hell is this ‘Viazo’ where Natasha is fucking other guys? Because it’s not in my Beam directory. But if it’s the kind of place where you can fuck people for millions of dollars, then hey, the simulation’s gotta be a lot better than my visor and headphones, am I right?”
Isaac looked shocked, like he’d been caught. He didn’t try to close his mouth or backpedal.
“I want out,” Nicolai repeated, his voice becoming calm but firm. “I’m no longer your speechwriter. I’m no longer your right hand. I’m no longer the guy you get to cry to. I’m moving to Enterprise at Shift. That’s where I belong, where I’ve always belonged. I’ve got plenty of credits, which gives me more of a head start than most. I’m going to write, and I’m going to learn to play my piano. Maybe I’ll die in the gutter a few years from now, and if I do, then so fucking be it. I’m out. You’re on your own.”
“Not now,” said Isaac, his voice and expression threatening to break. “I’ll be…I need you.”
“Yeah, you do,” said Nicolai, still angry. Isaac’s tone was solidifying his decision rather than softening it. This had been brewing for too long.
“At least wait until after Shift,” said Isaac.
Nicolai had his hand on Isaac’s doorknob. He paused, wondering how much it could hurt to wait a few more weeks. He could leave after Shift. After sixty years of history, he could at least do that much for Isaac.
“Just be honest with me about where you were the last two days,” said Isaac, “and we can pick up the pieces.”
Nicolai threw Isaac a look, suddenly feeling stupid for hesitating. Then he stormed from Isaac’s office, slamming the door behind him.
Leo didn’t even make the pretense of eschewing technology. While they sat in his office back at the Organa Village, he pulled out the handheld Leah wasn’t supposed to know he had (but that everyone knew he did) and told The Beam to get him Mercy Hospital yet again. He talked for a while using voice then stowed the device, suddenly looking at Leah with something like guilt.
“I knew you had it already,” said Leah, waving a hand.
“For emergencies,” said Leo.
“Like my nano fabricators.”
They looked at each other for a pregnant moment, and Leo sighed, conceding to Leah. The Beam had opened a kind of Pandora’s box, and Leah knew she was right: To fight fire, you had to use flame. They could only sit up in the mountains and munch homemade granola for so long. If they wanted to challenge The Beam, they’d need The Beam’s help.
“They said they didn’t know what I was talking about,” said Leo.
“Of course not. They told you that in person. And also the last three times you called.”
When they’d found Crumb missing, they had asked the nurses where he’d gone. They’d expected the nurses to report that the crazy old man with the ratty gray beard had wandered off, but instead the nurses had stared at the two Organas, genuinely perplexed. They’d been wiped. Not by a hand wipe, either, but by a full Gauss — probably the hospital’s own machine.
“I thought I might get lucky,” said Leo. “I talked to their records office this time. Thought a copy of his admission might have uploaded.”
“They did it on paper,” said Leah. “My request.” She’d checked the places she’d seen nurses leave Crumb’s charts and paperwork, to no avail. His bedsheets had been crisped and tight. His room had the tang of an industrial floor cleaner. He was gone, as if he’d never been there.
“There had to be some sort of a ping. They’re on The Beam. The Beam is paranoid.”
Leo was always saying things like that. It was bullshit, of course, but his thought gave her an idea.
“The Beam is a system,” she said. “It’s not paranoid. Even AI doesn’t get paranoid. People get paranoid, and believe me, I didn’t leave them anything to be paranoid about. Those nurses are used to dealing off the grid.”
“But they wouldn’t know it if a Beam tech managed to…”
“You’re paranoid, Leo,” she said. “The Beam touches everything. What possible reason would they have to watch that shitass hospital? Why would they send someone out to hotlink it? But you’re right; it would have pinged something. Nothing damning, but there’ll be an access imprint, like I left when I was scouting his brain at Bontauk. It won’t have his ID since he doesn’t have one, but it’ll have his key sequences indexed to his scan.”
“They can track without a Beam ID?” Leo asked. He looked much more frightened than he should have.
“It’s a hospital, Leo,” said Leah, exasperated. “They DNA print him at admission so they can flag any known mutations they’d need to know about while treating him. It drops into a file with his allergies and medical history. It’s anonymous. But…we have his map, too.”
“Why?”
“Some smart girl with too many tech enhancements suggested it,” she said, pointing to her own pink-dreadlocked head.
“Oh.”
“So we just match against the hospital’s pinged records. Not the official indexed ones, but the raw access imprints. That should tell us if there’s a record of him at all. If there is, we can follow it.”
“The data? Or Crumb?”
Leah sighed. “What’s the difference, Leo?” Leo, like most people, thought hacking was about ones and zeroes. Once upon a time, that was true. It wasn’t anymore.
Leo still looked nervous, still paranoid. Leah suddenly realized why. Even from a few feet away, she could see his shaking pupils. He was jonesing, and would soon be in full-on withdrawal.
“How low is your stash?” she asked.
“What? Oh, no. We’ve just been away too long.”
“No, you carry a rock on your ring. I can see it right there, still full. You’re intentionally rationing moondust. Why?”
Leo took a breath. She didn’t miss anything, and he damn well knew it. “Fine. The village’s supply is kind of low. I’m stretching.”
“How low?”
But Leo wasn’t able to answer because at that moment, the door slammed open and a moose of a young man entered. He was well over six feet tall and had the build of the Deathbringers the NAU had used during the splinter attack on DZ in the ’30s.
“Leo! Fuck!” said the big man.
“We’re kind of in the middle of something, Scooter,” Leah said, annoyed by the intrusion. A moondust shortage would be bad. Very bad. Leo had told Leah and a few others when Dominic Long had insisted on becoming their sole source of the drug. She’d been against it. Nothing good, Leah said, ever came from putting all of your eggs in one basket.
“We
’ve got a fight, bro,” said Scooter, speaking to Leo and ignoring Leah. “James and Milton. It started while we were prepping for the community campfire tonight, back behind the loom and dye house. I tried busting it up, but it just got bigger. James says Milton stole some of his rocks. I was like, ‘Bro, you can have some of mine!’ but James was all hopped up, like he hadn’t rocked in days, and he wouldn’t listen, just kept coming at Milton. You’d think he’d want some dust, right? But he was all burned, like totally fried, like the shit was doing something to him. And I gotta say, I’ve felt it harsher lately. Not as mellow. You got any fresh rocks, Leo? Maybe the shit’s gone bad.”
“Are they still fighting?” said Leo, ignoring Scooter’s question.
“Nah, I knocked ‘em both down, made ‘em listen.”
Leah looked at Scooter, thinking it had probably been the most decisive and strangely polite “knocking down” either of the fighting men had received. Scooter was enormous but gentle — the kind of guy Organa could have based an entire PR campaign around. He had a bushy brown beard and arms like a lumberjack’s, strings of beads hanging from a multicolored floppy hat, and wore brown sandals that wound up his calves like a Greek’s, even in the wintertime.
Scooter had been picked up by DZ Child Services after his mother had gone into a Beam game simulation one day and then refused to leave. Game addiction (not understanding or preventing addiction, but learning how to addict others best) was something you could study in college, and advances in immersion technology had made things almost too easy for developers who liked to use compulsion as a marketing strategy. After Scooter’s mother decided she’d rather stay in NeverForest forever with the rest of her gaming guild’s avatars rather than with her son, Scooter, then twelve, had decided that The Beam was something he wanted nothing to do with. Today, in a village filled with poseurs, Leah respected Scooter as one of the few who, for his own genuine reasons, lived as far removed from The Beam as was reasonably possible. Scooter’s hut ran off of a shared generator, and he didn’t mind roughing it with lanterns and fires when the thing went on the fritz, which was often. He bought clothes from other Organas. He didn’t have a mail account or a Beam ID and was nearly impossible to get ahold of other than by running into his hut. Scooter even wrote on Organa-made paper that had been fashioned from pulp — ironic, considering that protesters years ago had fought against paper and for the trees they came from.