by Sean Platt
For now, Noah is still alive. He looks dead as he lies in his lab bed, and it is as if — perhaps literally — his soul has been sucked from the husk of his body. But I spoke with him briefly afterward and before he collapsed, and he is still Noah West. So if his soul and consciousness is still in his body, can it also be in the data we uploaded? Is it as if we’ve duplicated Noah West, and now there are two? If it is him and not a copy, shouldn’t he be able to see through its eyes? Shouldn’t he feel it as if it were himself? I’m pulled back to philosophy texts I read as a kid. All of the disciplines fall into this one. Epistemology, ontology, every question together with a single beating heart. Which is the true Ship of Theseus? Is it the body in the bed, or the file on The Beam? Must Noah the man die in order to imbue Noah the data with consciousness?
I’m too tired to contemplate the enormity of what we’re trying to do. This is a question for philosophers.
Aug 14, 2062
Noah West is dead. The NAU is in mourning.
I kept my word. I gave Noah a scan cap and a pocket recorder and sent him home. Once The Beam was live, we no longer needed to live in the lab, though I of course still spend an inordinate amount of time there. I didn’t disassemble Noah’s bed because I promised I would allow no one else into the lab, and without anyone to help me (or anyone to care), I just stopped letting its presence bother me. It has become simply another piece of furniture.
The recorder live-capped Noah’s newest thoughts until the end then uploaded them in a batch each night. When his heart and brain waves stopped, Noah’s canvas alerted me and only me, as directed. I went to his apartment, verified the uploads from the night before then manually copied the final batch in the recorder. The thing was set to not upload that last grab — the one that happened after his brain went flat — automatically. Who knows what happens at the moment of death? We didn’t think it was prudent to risk putting a death online, so I clipped the tail, completed his master file then sent it into the stream. It felt like spreading ashes. I do not know what will happen with that tremendous archive — whether it will be a living thing or a great many recorded memories and nothing more. People have asked me if I’m sad. I’m too exhausted for sorrow. Simply: I am finished.
Noah was already the voice and personality of The Beam.
But now I fear I may have created a god.
“Micah.”
Micah wanted to pretend he didn’t know who was calling, but of course the caller’s Beam ID was embedded in the transmission right there in the bottom right corner of his screen: Jason Whitlock’s official Enterprise Capital Protection photo, smiling in a starched, white, collarless shirt with a red band tie, wearing a shit-eating grin. The agent looked so faux-respectable that the photo made Micah want to shove his fist down Whitlock’s throat.
He settled for being rude: “What the fuck do you want?”
“What?” Now Whitlock sounded faux-indignant. “I went out to get your girl. Got her all spiffed up. She’s behind me now. What did I do wrong?”
They were voice-only because Whitlock was on his screetbike on his way into the city, so Micah allowed himself the exasperated luxury of closing his eyes. He reminded himself to have something painful or humiliating done to Whitlock later. Whitlock didn’t get to be indignant right now because Whitlock was still paying off a debt of trust. Micah hadn’t forgotten the way he’d hooked up with some piece of ass during the Natasha Ryan riot and had woken the next day wiped. If not for his mind’s firewall, he might have gotten himself data-raped. Whitlock was proving to be the worst sort of incompetent — the kind who doesn’t realize just how big of an irresponsible asshole he is.
“Never mind,” said Micah.
“Kane had her.”
“I know Kane had her. Why did he have her?”
“Apparently, she was with Stahl when they caught up with him.”
“So they just took her in,” Micah said, pacing his office. “Why not slumber her, do a quick wipe, and leave her?”
“Micah, she took out two armed Beamers. Ripped their balls off. This isn’t just another pretty face.”
Micah closed his eyes again, this time allowing his head a slow shake. Of course she wasn’t just another pretty face. She never had been, even back when Micah had first met her. She’d struck him as a scrapper from the first second — a woman who’d fight to the death and never flinch from doing what had to be done. Even before her first nanos and her first defensive add-on, Kai, codenamed Kitty, could sneak up on a man and break his neck between her legs. She’d been resilient and dangerous from the start. She reminded Micah of himself. He thought of her like the deadly daughter he’d never had.
“You fucking idiot,” said Micah. He was being somewhat unfair (nobody knew Kai worked with him, for one; that particular trespass had been an accident), but not much. You don’t involve bystanders in things like this. You took what you wanted, you slumbered, you wiped, and you ran.
“Hey, I didn’t do it,” said Whitlock.
“Same group of monkeys. None of you are competent.”
“You wouldn’t have told them to pick up Stahl?”
Noah Fucking West. Why was Whitlock debating him? Who worked for whom, here?
“Stahl, yes. The girl, no. Oh, and by the way…my brother’s fucking speechwriter? Also no.”
“He was in Stahl’s apartment, Micah. He might actually be in on this.”
And that was true, too. Isaac had always been jealous of the way Micah had gotten the larger slice of their family’s empire. He’d been jealous of the arctic windfall and of Micah’s involvement with Xenia. Was sabotage and theft through Nicolai really beneath Isaac? But Micah shook the notion away. He’d known Nicolai since the 30s — not as well as Isaac, but enough to have a good feel for the man — and knew that Nicolai wasn’t a spy. Nicolai shot straight and aboveboard. He was a regular Boy-Scout with a crossbow, content only to kill the bandits who tried to swipe his picnic basket.
“Keeping him there was a bad call,” said Micah. “I should have been informed.”
“Kane says that once they realized who he was, they just asked him some questions, never put him on that machine of his, then Gaussed him, and sent him home. He’s there now, safe and sound and totally unaware.”
Something in Micah snapped. This wasn’t supposed to be a discussion, and he sure as hell didn’t want his agent telling him about how everything was going to be all right.
“Why am I arguing with you?” he spat.
On the other end of the line, Whitlock made a noncommittal noise.
This whole thing was so irritating, so ready to blow up in everyone’s faces. Nicolai might realize he had missing time. Kai might realize that the people who’d rescued her were the same people who’d taken her in and tortured her to within an inch of her life. Micah could lose her loyalty. Isaac, through Nicolai and the disappearance of Nicolai’s upgrades dealer, might come to suspect the depths of Micah’s dealings.
Micah didn’t like losing control, and those assholes at Xenia had given him a tempest.
“Just bring them in,” he told Whitlock.
There was a pause. The pickups on the Stark suits had near-perfect noise cancellation, so the line was silent as Whitlock measured his response. Micah imagined him rushing toward the city with Kai behind him, his face working, his delay telling. Even before Whitlock spoke again, Micah’s heartbeat had already picked up. He took a cigarette from the box on his desk and lit it, taking a drag.
“Well…you wanted the girl, right?”
“The girl and Stahl.”
“You told us to get the girl.”
“I told you to get them both.” Micah took another drag on his cigarette. He was controlling his voice, but he could feel a vein in his forehead starting to throb.
“You told us we could get him later, but that she was the important one now. To…you know…save her. From death. Which we did. I did.”
“Noah Fucking West, Jason…if you don’t tell me what
you’ve fucked up now, I’m going to…”
“Stahl got away. It’s no big thing, though.” Whitlock was talking fast, trying to squeeze in his entire rationalization before Micah blew. “We ID’d his spoof. He can try to shuffle it, but he doesn’t know our tracking technology. It’ll be easy. Really. We didn’t even bother to track him yet because…”
“You didn’t bother to track him?”
“Yet! Judgment call, okay? We knew you wanted her first. The Neuralin stabilized her, but she’ll need more. Soon. We’ve got Stahl’s map. Unless he goes in for a full genetic refurb, he’ll light up any system we tag the second he passes a sensor, and he’s right on the outskirts of…”
“You DIDN’T BOTHER TO FUCKING TRACK HIM?” Micah was losing control of his voice, but he couldn’t help it. The best vengeance might be served cold, but right now Whitlock deserved to have flames licking his idiot skin. Micah had half a mind to call Kane and ask him if he could hot-hack the nanos in Whitlock’s Stark suit. He wanted to command the suit to squeeze the agent to paste, like a banana clenched in a fist.
“We’ve got him already, okay! I know where he is! I could circle back right now if you wanted, but this girl? Kitty? She’ll be in danger if I do. When the Neuralin wears off and she goes back into shock…”
“Stahl was the one person you assholes were actually supposed to get in the first place! Not her! Not Nicolai Costa! Stahl! Stahl was the one who infiltrated Xenia! Stahl is the only one of the whole group that you stupid motherfuckers were supposed to take into custody, the only one who was ever authorized to go onto the Orion, the only one who was expendable, the only one who was supposed to go into the evaporator! I know you’re all idiots, but tell me — tell me for real, Jason. What would you have done? How would you have handled this? When Stahl got in to see the Beau Monde upgrades, would you have skipped Stahl entirely because he was too obvious? Would you have solved the problem by driving directly to my brother’s right-hand-man’s apartment and wiping him, finding a random woman and killing her, then shuttling over to give Thomas Stahl a hand job?”
Whitlock barely had a voice when he replied. Very softly — likely too soft even to be heard even by his passenger on the screetbike — he said, “We’ll go back for Stahl.”
“Not now. Noah Fucking West. Where are you?”
“Brooklyn.” Everything in his voice said, Yes sir. Whatever you say, sir.
“Send your partner back to find him and watch him, if he can manage that. You do what you have to do at HQ with Ka…with Kitty. Then…”
Micah paused. Something was coming to him: a way to mitigate the damage, to make this clusterfuck a tiny bit less clustered. He had to wait for it, though, and while he did, Whitlock was blessedly silent. Good thing, too. The way Micah felt right now, keeping his fucking mouth shut might have saved the agent’s life.
“Then take her back out,” Micah finished.
Whispering, he said, “Take her back? You mean after Stahl?”
“Yes.” He stopped and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Have her kill him.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
“I didn’t get that, sir,” said Whitlock. Sir now. Usually, Whitlock called him Micah. About goddamned time they change that, too.
“You heard me fine.” He spoke plainly, knowing that even with Kai behind Whitlock, she wouldn’t be able to hear Micah speaking through the agent’s cochlear implant. “The girl is Stahl’s friend. If you’d managed to do your job and bring Stahl in, he could have either been wiped or died ‘accidentally.’ She might have bought that. But now, thanks to your idiocy, he has to be killed. She’s not stupid. He shows up dead after running from us, she’ll know who did it and why. I don’t want her as an enemy. She works for me, and I need to know if I can use her again. So if he’s got to die, she has to do it. Not you, her. She either will do it, or she won’t. Make her do it, and keep your distance so she can’t get to you first. If she refuses…” He sighed, knowing that sometimes, hard decisions had to be made. “If she refuses, then take her out. Permanently, not with a slumber. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“And Jason, do you also understand that there is no record of this conversation and that you will never be able to prove I said any of this?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Good. Then listen carefully: if at the end of today, Kitty and Stahl are both still alive, I will see to it that you are strapped to that Orion…and that you’ll feel every cell inside your body as it’s slowly ripped to atoms.”
Leo paced his small house, occasionally glancing out the window at the mountain community while waiting for Leah.
According to his handheld, the mag train had pulled into DZ station on time. That was hours ago. Leah would have had plenty of time to hop into a cab, head into the city, hook into The Beam, and do whatever voodoo was needed to find Crumb. At least, that’s how he figured it.
Truth was, Leo hadn’t been in District Zero in over thirty years. It was foreign territory — maybe even enemy soil — and he had no idea how the city’s geography might have changed, how people in the city habitually accessed The Beam, or where Leah might be going. The last time Leo had visited DZ, the best connections had been in underground parlors in the tech ghettos, where hackers clustered in rundown, police-ignored buildings. But even then, Leo had hardly known the city’s Beam underbelly. So he had to admit that he couldn’t know where Leah had gone, what she was doing, or how long it might take her to do it.
Still, Leo was uneasy. He didn’t know what to expect, but he wasn’t willing to settle for ignorance. His lack of expectation only made him more curious. What was Leah trying to do? She’d implied that she could track Crumb despite his lack of a Beam ID, and the way she’d said it had reminded Leo of a mother animal’s almost psychic ability to track her offspring. Or of one twin feeling the other’s pain from a distance. Or — and Leo found this one so much cooler — of the way quantum-entangled but separated particles could synchronize across distances as if they were two sides of the same particle. Leah made her quest sound like that — like she’d sampled part of Crumb in Bontauk, and would now forever feel his mind through The Beam no matter where he tried to hide. As if they were now one.
As Leo paced, two voices fought to be heard in his restless mind.
She said she’d call as soon as she had something to report. She hasn’t called, so there’s nothing to report.
But what if she’s in trouble?
She’s not in trouble. She’s done nothing wrong.
That you know of.
Somewhere, in a distant part of Leo’s mind, he knew he was being unreasonable — and not just about Leah. He’d had that unreasonable feeling that Crumb, who’d been a quirky part of the Organa community for decades, was evolving from crazy rants to (Go ahead and admit it, he told himself) prophetic rants. That hadn’t been unreasonable enough, so he’d sent Leah to Bontauk to take the rather unreasonable and dangerous step of trying to hack Crumb’s mind. Unreasonably, they’d then let Crumb vanish, and now Leo had sent Leah into the city on an unreasonable psychic flimflam journey. And all of this unreasonability was happening at the worst possible time, too — while fights were continuing to break out in the village over the moondust shortage and with Dominic, as their dust savior, now MIA. The only news he’d had that remotely involved Dominic was that anonymous mail he’d gotten this morning indicating that Dominic had called in a parcel for Leo. This “parcel” hadn’t yet arrived, but the whole thing stank to Leo. It felt like everything was starting to change, as if they were on the lip of a cliff and about to spill over. Things were changing, rotting slowly from the inside.
Maybe the Quark police picked Leah up again. Maybe they decided her stunt last week was more than digital trespassing. Maybe they discovered the way Dominic had covered for her, and maybe that was why Dominic wasn’t responding to Leo’s mail. What if the Beam clerics had discovered the nanos Leah had fa
bricated behind her little fingernail factories and loosed in their system?
Leo, out loud, told himself to get a fucking grip.
Across the room, Leo’s handheld trilled. He picked it up. The call didn’t show a Beam ID, but half of the people Leo knew didn’t have an ID. He remembered back when everyone had called everyone using their cellular phones, and the phone numbers themselves would tell you who was calling. These days, when you could call from almost anywhere — from a desktop to a high-end toaster — the device itself gave the recipient little information of its own. Apparently, technology didn’t always improve with time.
Leo set the handheld down on his desk, propping it up, and told it to accept the call. Leah’s pink-dreadlocked head appeared on the small screen. Leo suppressed a relieved gasp then touched the handheld’s corners to activate the magnifier. Leah’s image, now projected in front of the phone in a hovering square, grew to life size.
“Leah. Thank goodness.”
Leo realized what he’d said, but it was too late to take it back. He felt dumb for being worried, but Leah didn’t seem to have heard. She was practically bouncing, and smiling broadly.
“I know who Crumb is,” she almost squealed.
“You found him?”
“Well, I haven’t exactly found him yet, no. But I found something else. Something much more interesting.” She held up a leather-bound book.
“A book?”
“One to rival your collection, Leo. This one isn’t just paper; it was written in with pen.”
Leo paused. “Is that the journal? The one you saw in Crumb’s head?”
Leah was nodding, still grinning widely. “Yes. And like I said, I know who he is now, and you’re not going to believe it.”
“Is he Stephen King?”
“What?” said Leah.