by Sean Platt
The bikes, finding nothing to push off of, sank toward the grass.
Doc turned to Kai, his face urgent as he violently jerked his head toward the ground.
Kai shook her head, equally vehement.
The grass area was ending. Ahead were more houses. Once they reached the houses, they’d rise up again, and their opportunity to escape would vanish. He didn’t know if he had the strength to run, but he would have to find a way.
“GODDAMMIT, DOC, DON’T!” Kai yelled, watching as he shifted behind his driver. “WILL YOU FUCKING TRUST ME?”
Doc’s driver, sensing trouble, started to turn his head. Doc moved his hands up to grab the man’s shoulders and twisted them the same direction as he was turning his head, magnifying the soldier’s momentum. The bike jolted and shook as the soldier’s hands left the handlebars. Beside them, on the other bike, Kai was still yelling.
The soldier’s shifting weight twisted the bike onto its side. The driver slipped and fell. Doc fell with him, pushing off. He’d known the crash was coming (seeing as he’d caused it) and had prepared; he dove for the ground, tucked his chin against his chest, and rolled on impact. In front of Doc, the soldier struck the ground in a heap. His foot snagged in the stirrup, which grabbed the ground, bucked the bike forward, and threw it hard into a fence. It sputtered then stalled. Doc was off the bike and running with all of his diminished strength while behind him, the solider remained twisted and pinned under his bike, the other officer and Kai slowing above him. As Doc ran, he waited for Kai to crash the other bike and follow him, but she stayed mounted, still shouting.
They’d crashed very close to the field’s edge — good news for Doc, who had almost no energy in him. He stumbled into a thicket of trees, adrenaline bolstering his uncertain legs, his heart trying to keep up. Kai cried out from behind him. He waited for slumbershots, but none came. Both soldiers remained mute. If the metallic suits did something to make the men powerful or fast, which he assumed they did, then it would only be a matter of time before they would be on him. So he kept forcing himself to move, to gain whatever advantage he could.
His feet struck a shallow stream, and he turned to see an enormous drainage culvert. Doc ran into it, water splashing his legs, his shoes squishing. He reached a fork in the culvert, turned, then reached another and turned again. Minutes passed. He hunkered down, spent. He waited.
Despite his daring escape, Doc knew it had been in vain. He was too weak, and they would be too strong and too determined. It wouldn’t be long until they found him — and when they did, he’d have no energy left with which to flee. The tunnels weren’t that complicated, and the soldiers would surely have every sort of gadget at their disposal. They wore visors, like Beamers, so they’d be able to see in the dark. Doc was important; Kane’s insistence on continuing to torture him even after giving up with Kai and “freeing” Nicolai proved that. Doc was the one who had supposedly bypassed Xenia’s security, the one who was supposedly selling secrets.
He squatted in the culvert, waiting in the dark. But nobody came.
A few moments later, he heard the distinctive whine of two screetbikes starting up then gliding past overhead. They wouldn’t let Kai drive one of the bikes, so the fact that he could hear both of them meant that the soldiers were leaving without him.
Doc waited a few more minutes to make sure it wasn’t a ruse then carefully made his way through the culvert to its far end. He found himself emerging beneath a suburban street and into a neighborhood — all old construction, probably barely Beam-enabled. But it was still a neighborhood, and that meant there would be cabs. It also meant that somewhere, he’d be able to find a public connection.
Doc composed himself and started walking.
He had to find a Beam connection. He had to use his spoof to call Omar.
Oh yes. He would need to hook up with that slippery motherfucker as soon as possible.
Leah woke from a moondust haze to find her head throbbing. She felt vaguely sick, and was nursing a hazy memory from a fading dream — one of those persistent on-waking thoughts that refuses to leave. She remembered something about an enormous moon bearing down on the world from above, threatening to crush her. In the bright sunlight streaming in through the mag train’s window, Leah’s dream image should have seemed absurd and stupid, but it was neither. She looked outside and up, searching the blue sky for the moon’s ghost. After a moment, she found it. It was up, and she saw it right where it was supposed to be through the lattice, still tiny, pale in the light of day.
The train was approaching District Zero. She’d asked her tablet to wake her when she was fifteen minutes from the station, and it hadn’t alarmed yet, so she wasn’t quite that close. Maybe a half hour total travel time left. She could see buildings, but they were at her vision’s limit, still distant.
Leah lay back in the empty train cabin — not private, though she was the only one inside — and closed her eyes. She had barely been sleeping lately and was looking at a busy time once she was back inside the city. She should sleep while she could.
Behind her eyelids Leah saw a building with a red roof then saw a journal. They were the images from Crumb’s mind, which she’d seen in the metaphorical honey back in Bontauk.
She opened her eyes then shook her head and closed them again.
Leah tried to sleep, but rest mocked her. She was moving back into District Zero’s primary Beam network, and she could feel a hacker’s itch in her fingers. Now that she’d left Leo behind, Leah could indulge that itch. Leo tried to understand the duality of what she did for Organa, but he was too old and set in his ways to truly get it. Leah had grown up in the world of The Beam. Leo had grown up before the Internet. The gulf between them, technologically speaking, was unfathomable. They came from opposite worlds, and there was no way they’d ever be able to truly speak the same language. They were like a couple with different definitions of infidelity. For Leo, the dirtiest you could get as a tech-fighting Organa was to secretly use a handheld from time to time — the equivalent of beating off in the bathroom. For Leah, abundant use of technology was still perfectly fine as long as she did it in service of her cause — more like going to a prostitute you didn’t connect with emotionally. Leo tried to understand (which was why he’d gotten Leah her elite training), but again, his doing so was like sending his wild wife on a hedonistic trip so she could get out her jollies then return to him as a loyal partner. Leo was willing to indulge because the training was what Leah wanted and needed, but he didn’t truly get it, deep down, or see why it was necessary.
Leah rolled her eyes to herself, wondering why the metaphor was so sexual. She wondered if she was horny on top of being sleep-deprived.
The train’s high-band connection to the DZ core would be at full strength now, so Leah pulled out her tablet and began plinking around. But the tablet was a poor adept’s tool. She decided she wasn’t doing anything particularly scandalous, so gave herself permission to use the train’s native canvas.
Leah didn’t feel like craning her neck to the side to use the window as her surface, so she hit the pads on her armrest to project a screen and airboard. The train’s projections were decent, and she found that she couldn’t really see the compartment seats across from her through the screen.
She touched the hologram with her fingers, dragged it wider, then started touching keys on the airboard. She could speak to the canvas, but for Leah at least, her hands used a different part of her mind than her voice. It was why, when she tried dictating mail, she always gave up after a few minutes. But her fingers loved the airboard, especially since she’d had tactile response add-ons inserted into her fingers and thumbs. Leo didn’t know about the add-on because it was none of his business and would never matter to him; all it did was give her fingers the feeling of pressing keys. A neat side benefit of the add-on was that when Leah was plugged in, she didn’t really even require an airboard. She could mime typing with her fingers even if they hung at her sides, as long as
her add-on was active. It would have been an outstanding way to subtly pass notes in class, if only she’d been enhanced back then.
For Leah — and for many Beam-native young people, especially those with a hacker bent — poking around on The Beam was almost meditative — an experience that didn’t need to have an objective in order to be fulfilling and relaxing, like taking a stroll with no destination in mind. So-called Beamwalking was just one more thing for Leo to rail against in his stodgy old way. He said that nothing had changed since he’d been a young man, back when people had first started mindlessly checking their handhelds over and over…or when they’d sat for hours in front of their old 2-D canvas screens, drifting from display to display without really caring about anything they saw.
But as usual, Leo just didn’t get it. The Beam wasn’t like the Internet of Leo’s youth, and it sure as hell was nothing like television. A hundred years of progress separated Leo’s memories of obsession from the modern Beam experience. Leah didn’t like to admit it to the other Organas (who were mostly poseurs anyway; fuck them), but she saw tremendous good in The Beam. It really was another world — one you could stroll and experience as if it were a different country. The problems people saw with The Beam had little to do with the technology itself. They had to do with human restraint, or the lack thereof. Was it bad to travel for a while in an alternate world facilitated by The Beam? Not at all. Was it bad to become so obsessed that you’d lose yourself in that world and not know when to surface for air? Yeah, maybe. And maybe that kind of obsession was damaging society, crippling interpersonal connections, shearing ties to the natural world, battering morals, and totally annihilating self-reliance. But that wasn’t the technology’s fault.
After ten minutes of window-shopping and running simulations and following rabbit holes into off-topic hyperthreads in hacker forums (many filled with irreverent holos that she thought were hilarious), Leah found herself drifting and tired despite just waking. She also felt a haze on her thoughts that she normally felt only during a moondust high.
And she drifted.
An unknown time later, Leah realized that she’d stopped feeling her fingers on the airboard a while back and was more or less sitting still, staring at the projection. She became distantly aware that she must look like a junkie or mental patient, with her jaw hanging loose and her eyes fixed on the screen. Leo’s remonstrations about zombies staring at twentieth-century TV barged into her thoughts, until she snapped out of it and returned to reality. She felt suddenly guilty. How had she gotten so sucked in? She remembered visiting dozens of different locations, yet her hands were at her sides and her arms had gone numb, so she obviously hadn’t used her fingers to get there. Yet Leah didn’t remember dictating her way to all of those sites, and hadn’t even brought the wireless dongle that plugged into the port behind her ear. Had she blacked out? How much time had passed? What had she been doing?
And why was she so fucking hungry?
Leah gestured the screen and airboard away. She suddenly wanted Chinese food very, very badly — and not just any Chinese, but Chinese from one particular hole in the wall — somewhere in Chinatown — where she had gone with a boyfriend she’d not thought of in years. The feeling was sudden and insistent. Like a compulsion. Leah could practically taste the noodles in her mouth.
Then Leah realized that she’d never been to a restaurant in Chinatown. She’d walked through Chinatown, but had never eaten there.
The mag train compartment suddenly felt too small, too confining. Leah realized, with a fair degree of shock, that she felt panicked. What had just happened? She’d gone into a trance and had apparently blacked out only to wake with a strange craving she couldn’t explain (and holy fuck, was it strong! She could barely think around the hunger for noodles) and with an intrusive memory: meeting in a restaurant she’d never been to with a boyfriend she’d never had. Leah could still see the memory, even. She could almost smell it, even though she knew it wasn’t hers. The man across from her had been tall, thin, handsome, and neat, with delicate round-lensed glasses. But Leah had never had a boyfriend who wasn’t shaggy, usually with a beard and matted, dreadlocked hair like hers.
She’d heard of this happening. Sometimes, an implant went bad and stimulated parts of the brain it wasn’t supposed to touch. They used hypno-suspension to install brain implants for a reason — because without anesthesia, the recipients relived sensations and memories (tasting pie, remembering a visit to a water park, smelling lilacs) as the surgeons worked. Degradation wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, but of course it did. The Beam was filled with reports of people who’d had an implant malfunction and found themselves hallucinating. Was that what was happening?
Leah stood, spun, and sat. She looked out the window, watching District Zero’s spires approach. She suddenly wanted to visit her upgrades dealer. Only that wasn’t true — what Leah really wanted was to claw at her scalp and dig the port behind her ear out by hand. The idea that the thing was malfunctioning and fucking with her mind felt like a tapeworm in her brain. Yet of course she couldn’t claw it out, so she’d need to see a dealer. Or a doctor. Leah wondered which would be easier to find, and faster.
Oh god, oh god, oh god, she thought. What if it’s going to pop? What if it surges, fries my cortex, and I end up burned?
That probably wouldn’t happen, of course, but if the implant was the problem and Leah didn’t get it out soon, the random memories and sensations could drive her insane. How could you stay sane when you couldn’t trust your reality?
Leo was right. She shouldn’t have gotten enhancements. She should have stayed organic. No implants, no nano fabricators, no fucking nanos in her system. She decided to have it all flashed. Every bit of it. She wanted nothing in her brain. She was Organa, not a cyborg. Leah thought she’d known better, but she was wrong, and would now end up like Crumb.
Crumb.
Something cross-linked in Leah’s mind — the false memory of the noodles finding a connection, one thought sniffing out the next like a browse trail on The Beam. Network forming network. Leah found her desire for noodles wane and her perception of the meeting in the Chinese restaurant with the handsome man in round glasses finding context. Neurons settled; the memory was slotted somewhere deeper inside her as a realization struck: This has to do with Crumb. Somehow. That was why she was returning to DZ, after all. She had to find Crumb. And where was she planning to start? Nowhere. She had no plan. She’d simply trusted that she’d figure it out, same as she always did when facing a particularly stubborn problem. That’s what made Leah so Beam-adept, and something even the best hackers usually didn’t understand. Skills were the underpinning of what she did, but in the end, Leah had to let all of her how-to go and simply trust. At her best, she didn’t even know what she was doing. Her best hacks were like dreaming. And that, Leah was starting to realize, was what was happening now. If she’d plugged in and entered a moondust haze to find Crumb, none of this would be shocking. What made it shocking was that the dream was assaulting her here and now, sober and on her native plane.
Leah settled, trying to believe that this was coming to her rather than being sought. It had something to do with Crumb. What, she didn’t know.
Inside of the memory of the Chinese restaurant, Leah realized that the building she was in had a red roof.
She thought of her experience inside of Crumb’s mind.
Overhead, her cabin lights went dark then came back on.
The man with the round glasses. She’d seen him before. There was something there, something she couldn’t grasp. She’d never had a boyfriend who’d looked like him, and had never, she felt certain, had a friend (certainly not one good enough to share a meal with) who looked like him. Yet somehow, she did know him. Just as in the memory, Leah knew that the Chinese restaurant’s roof was red. And that while she was sitting in that restaurant, it was also something else. Someplace important, and secret.
Leah closed her eyes.
Insi
de her mind, she tried to conjure the handsome man with the glasses. Why was he so familiar? She watched the part of the memory she’d been able to hold, seeing how his lips moved, the way he gestured, the tiny smile that happened only on one side of his mouth, peeling up to reveal a few teeth.
“Who are you?” she said aloud.
Tall. Short brown hair. The sort of sideways smile that endeared him to the world.
She thought of the man as he said, We can live forever.
And then she had it.
“Canvas,” she said.
Something in the compartment chirped.
“Search Noah West. Pictures. Give it to me right here.” She put her hands together in front of her then pulled them apart as if stretching taffy. A life-sized head appeared between them, almost as real as a genuine human head. Damning her nervous system’s intrusion, already deciding her port wasn’t at fault for this intrusion of memory after all, Leah clutched her fists twice to turn on the tactile feedback in her fingertips. She grabbed the hologram, now finding it solid and opaque. She turned it in her hands, watching. Then she waved to the side, and the head vanished.
“Younger. Noah West, 2020s.” She did a calculation in her head. “No, wait, 2030s.”
The canvas, in the voice of a bureaucrat who’d had no user softening, said, “No holographic records exist.”
“Then give me a fucking 2-D!” Leah was suddenly impatient. This was taking too long. The need to find the right photo was as pressing as the need for noodles a moment earlier.
A two-dimensional picture appeared in front of Leah: a handsome young man with brown hair and small, round glasses.
Leah slumped back against the train seat.
“Noah Fucking West,” she said.
Literally.
She already knew the intrusive memory had something to do with Crumb. Crumb and West? It made no sense. But of course, none of this made sense. Leah wasn’t plugged in, and a rather vivid memory of Noah West from sixty years ago had entered and begun fogging her mind. She wasn’t on dust and had initiated nothing. It was like a memory of both time and place was being pressed upon her.