The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  “Sorry. I meant Stephen York. I was reading Stephen King earlier.”

  “Who is Stephen King?”

  Leo waved at the screen, refusing to get into another debate over Leah’s refusal to sample classic literature. This wasn’t the time.

  “Never mind. So that’s the journal of Stephen York. And York is Crumb.”

  “I think so, yes. The journal was inserted into the honeycomb metaphor as a back door, meant to be found by someone and meant to be significant to whoever found it. And I have a 2-D you’ll want to see that came out of the book.”

  “A photo?”

  “Yes, but 2-D. On paper.”

  Leo, who still thought of two-dimensional paper photos as the default and not worthy of specifying as such, nodded.

  Leah appeared to be in a private cubicle at a Beam parlor. If she was smart, which she was, she would have already verified the place’s Privaseal so she could be sure that no one could see her stream or hear her speaking. She was sitting, staring straight ahead at either a Beam-enabled wall or a dedicated screen. But now, as Leo watched, she pulled a small piece of paper from the journal and set it facedown on the desk. She used her finger to trace a rectangle around it. There was a chirp, and Leah continued to grin up at him like a lunatic.

  “Well?”

  “You’re going to shit, Leo.”

  “Just show me.”

  So she did. A small paperclip icon appeared in the lower-right corner of the magnified communication screen. Leo touched it, wondering if the software’s developer had ever used or even seen a real-life paperclip. A photo unfolded from the icon. Leo dragged it into the center of the screen then used his fingers to drag it larger. He could still hear Leah behind the photo, chuckling.

  “This looks like Noah West,” said Leo.

  “It is.”

  “So?”

  Leah tittered. “Who’s with him, Leo?”

  To say Noah West was famous would be a vast understatement, so when Leo had looked at the image, his eye had been drawn to West like a moth to a flame. But of course there was another man in the picture with him. A lanky man with sharp features and fiercely intelligent eyes, a man who, now that Leo thought about it, looked an awful lot like…

  “Holy shit.”

  “I know, right?”

  “Holy shit. Holy shit, Leah.”

  “I ran a bunch of searches on Stephen York after finding that Easter egg in Crumb’s mind, since we sort of figured at first that he might be Stephen York. But the name is too common, so I couldn’t narrow the results to one specific York who was definitely our man. But once I had this image, I was able to pattern-match the face in that photo and repeat the search from the other direction, using a bit of software I picked up and that you are hereby not allowed to bitch at me about. The man in that photo is definitely Stephen York, and unless I’m imagining things, the man in that photo is also definitely Crumb.”

  “You’re not imagining things,” said Leo. He looked more closely at the image, still listening to Leah. He could see her shoulders articulating beneath the picture.

  “Stop staring at me, Leo,” she said.

  “I’m staring at the photo.”

  “Close it then. You’re creeping me out.”

  Leo pinched the photo closed. If he were anywhere other than in the mountains with only a shamefully hidden handheld for access, he’d have dragged the photo to one of the walls. Then, with the photo out of the way, he looked into Leah’s eyes. That was one way technology had improved: Leo remembered a day when the cameras never quite lined up, and the person you videochatted with always seemed to be looking in the wrong place.

  “So who is Stephen York?”

  Leah said, “According to The Beam’s official version, he’s nobody. I found some social profiles, nothing special. Says he worked at Quark a while back as a low-level guy, up through the 60s. Then he died.”

  “But you feel differently.”

  Leah again held up the book. “This feels differently. You should see what’s in here, Leo. Crumb is York, and York worked with West. Closely. Unless he was crazy when he wrote this, which he pretty obviously wasn’t, he was one of two fathers to The Beam. The father who’d had heavy reservations about what The Beam would be able to do and what its implementation might mean for the world. It reads like they must have had some heavy NDA shit in place to keep York’s name off of pretty much everything. He let West take all of the credit while he worked just as hard in anonymity.”

  Leo trusted Leah’s research and hacking implicitly, but her claim was immense. West was The Beam’s unquestioned genius. And now their crazy old mascot was supposed to share West’s spotlight? It was insane. Try as he might, Leo couldn’t make himself believe it. He remembered back when a politician named Al Gore had implied that he’d more or less invented the Internet. That became a joke that had lasted as long as the net itself.

  “You don’t buy it,” Leah said, looking at Leo.

  “It’s hard to,” he replied. “Very hard.”

  “Later I’ll tell you where I found the journal and how I got in to get it, and you might change your mind. The pieces fit, even though they’re hard to believe. York either cocreated The Beam or was a very involved, implicitly trusted assistant of Noah West’s. Either way, he was there for the whole thing. I recorded the place where I found the journal for you, but when I came out and tried to unspool the video, it was blank. It wouldn’t let me record. So you’ll have to trust my judgment and memory.”

  Stuffing down his doubt, Leo asked Leah to read from the journal. She told him that although her end of the connection was secure, his might not be. Leo said his connection was plenty secure and that he used it regularly to call Dominic because it was secure. Leah laughed and again told him to trust her. He’d have to hear the rest in person, or at least via a totally secure connection — the kind not available in the mountains. They’d probably said too much already.

  Leo asked if Leah knew where Crumb was now — because as important as it had felt before to find him, it now seemed a hundred times more important — and she told him that she was working on it. She said she thought she’d have an idea in a few hours.

  Leo said he could think of a good way to kill those hours then asked where he could meet her.

  Leah laughed with surprise. Leo hadn’t been into the city in Leah’s lifetime, and she was probably already imagining all sorts of hilarious fish-out-of-water scenarios wherein Leo could embarrass himself. But he wanted to go. He had to go. This was too coincidental. Captain Dominic Long of the DZPD had brought the Organas Noah West’s partner. No one had ever known who was guarding their gates and ranting at them through every day of sun. Did Dominic know? Leo doubted it. Dominic claimed to have saved Crumb from Respero when he’d shown up ranting in Times Square, and said he’d done so because something in the vagrant had compelled him. Much like something in the same vagrant had recently compelled Leo to send Leah to Bontauk for an unreasonable hacking.

  Dominic was meant to save Crumb.

  The Organas were meant to have Crumb.

  Which meant that at all costs, they needed to find Crumb.

  Leah didn’t argue, as amused as she seemed by the thought of Leo coming to District Zero. For all Organas, everything was interconnected…but for the hacker elite, the sentiment was almost literal. When you combined Leah’s intuitive, borderline spiritual approach to navigating The Beam with The Beam’s ubiquity, fate started to look like a mere side effect of hyperconnectivity. Complex networks were like vast, living brains. At a certain point, you could stop talking about the airy will of the universe and start talking about the calculable will of the system itself.

  The NPS agent sharing the room with Dominic was at least a public servant. That made Dominic more comfortable, despite his newly found shitheap of trouble. Quark wasn’t running this operation, and the agent was just a regular Directorate Joe like Dominic, earning a (probably decent) dole for doing an honest job. Dominic decide
d he could live with whatever was coming. He might be going off to a domestic prison or to one of the prison islands outside the lattice, and there was even a fair chance he’d be going to Respero. But as long as Dominic was being judged by public sector humans instead of posturing Quark insiders and clerics, he would try to accept his fate with a smile.

  “Come on, Captain Long,” said the agent. “Just look at this cap.” He gestured to the wall, which displayed a nearly life-sized recording of his earlier encounter with Omar in the abandoned glass warehouse. The agent cranked the volume with a gesture. Dominic listened as he incriminated himself. The cap couldn’t have been more perfect for the NPS’s case against him. Either Dominic had subconsciously known he was being set up and wanted to get caught trafficking moondust, or Omar was an exemplary theatrical dialogue partner. Watching the cap was like watching a scene from a movie — the scene where the bad guy confesses using all of the oddly perfect words.

  “We’ve got you up one side and down another,” the agent continued. “You’re a smart guy. I’ve reviewed your service record. It’s exemplary. You deserve to be captain. If I may be so bold, your salary — your direct, real, legit salary — has got to put you in the Presque Beau, notches from the top. You’ve worked hard for a long time and have earned your success. So let’s not do the thing where we posture back and forth. You know we’ve got you. You know what you did. So let’s talk.”

  It sounded reasonable to Dominic, but the agent had toggled between being a nice guy and a total cock so far, seeming to take on the roles of both the good and bad cop. Although, Dominic decided, even when he was being a dick, Dominic couldn’t help but like him. He was kind of a lovable asshole.

  “If I did anything wrong, discussing it with you would just get me to tell you things you don’t already know,” said Dominic. “That’s how I’ve landed some of my best leads.”

  The agent — whose name was Smith but who wanted Dominic to call by his first name, Austin — rolled his eyes so far up into his head that they nearly vanished. He sighed loudly, his level of exasperation exaggerated for Dominic’s benefit.

  “Cop to cop, Dominic,” said Agent Smith (Austin), still angling for a first-name trade, “you don’t have much left to expose that we don’t already know. Hell, you let it all hang out on this cap, so we don’t need to know more.” He indicated the video, still playing as a two-dimensional rendering on the wall, muted and on a loop. Dominic watched Omar verbally bend Dominic over, his bright-white suit making him look like an angel, a player, or both.

  Dominic shrugged. He was sitting. Agent Smith (goddammit if he wasn’t starting to think of him as Austin) was standing, occasionally sitting on the edge of the table in front of Dominic. The two couldn’t have been more of a cliché. If not for Beam surfaces (which could see into a room as easily as they could display information), Dominic knew there’d be a large two-way mirror at the end of the room to complete the tableau.

  Austin stood. “You bought dust from Mr. Jones and sent it to the Organas. If I may be totally frank, we know that unless you are very, very, very good at covering your tracks, you haven’t made any money at this. None whatsoever. You have received money from the Organas and have paid the exact same amount to Jones. And I do mean exact. To the point-credit.”

  Dominic watched Austin Smith circle the table, still like a cliché. Apparently, the agent didn’t realize how transparent all of this was to a seasoned cop like Dominic. The familiarity, the air of confidence, the use of first names, the small room, the pacing and the causal sitting on the table — all of it obvious…unless, Dominic supposed, Smith’s openness was actually genuine.

  “Actually, it was the other way around,” said Dominic, unable to help himself. “I paid Omar first then got money from the Organas.”

  “Like reimbursement for expenses when you work for a company.”

  “Exactly like that,” said Dominic. And it was. Leo even had a form Dominic filled out. He used a pseudonym, of course. He signed the forms Dick Huffington. The forms didn’t matter anyway, seeing as the monetary transfers were more obvious than digital paperwork. Besides, Organa record keeping was a joke. They did half of it on paper.

  “So essentially, you’re a courier. Why would anyone do that, Dominic? You’re a police captain, well respected, bringing down a hefty legit dole after so much time and seniority with the force. Your family has a history right here in DZPD. We know you don’t even spend all you make from your dole. So why deal drugs?”

  “I’m not dealing them,” said Dominic. “Like you said: I’m a courier.”

  “Why?”

  Dominic said nothing, watching the agent.

  “Let me make a supposition,” said the agent. “We’re friends, right?”

  “Since that’s what the ‘good guy’ script says, sure.”

  Austin pulled something from inside his jacket. It looked like an old-fashioned bottle cap. He set it on the table then pushed down with one finger. It separated and sprang up into a long, thin stalk with one bottle cap on the tabletop at the silver stalk’s other end. Then the stalk spread out into thin limbs that were anchored to the center, turning the device into something like a giant, ten-legged spider. The device sprang from the table and began circling the room’s periphery, touching the walls. When it reached the wall that was replaying Dominic’s encounter with Omar, the image flicked off, and the wall went back to being just an ordinary wall.

  Dominic was watching the thing, aghast. “Those are illegal,” he said.

  “As illegal as shuttling moondust?”

  “They’ll notice that they can’t see us,” said Dominic.

  “Not with this one,” said Austin. “It’s a really good one. Got it from a guy in Little Harajuku. It’s more than a privacy jammer. It’ll spoof the surveillance feed based on conversations we’ve already had. Besides, nobody’s watching live.” He stood and walked to the door, which had a Beam sensor but also a plain old-fashioned thumb lock. He turned the lock and said, “No, sir, we’re alone.”

  Dominic looked at the agent with fresh eyes. A small, knowing smile lit Austin’s lips at the corner. The smile asked if the professionals understood each other, cop to cop. Agent Smith had just exposed himself with an illegal privacy bot, and he’d removed both of their civility masks. It was a move that encouraged Dominic to speak openly — not because the agent wanted to build a case against him, but because if they could get past the bullshit, they might be able to shoot straight and help each other.

  “I don’t think you’re a bad cop, Dominic,” said Austin. “You’re too good to be a bad cop. You’re like an imitation of a bad cop. The dirty cops we see, they’re working angles. They have a vibe. They have a bearing. You? You’re a Boy Scout. Three generations on this force, and as far as we can tell, you’ve all been Boy Scouts. Your grandfather refused a Mafia bribe back in the 2010s. The rest of the department took the money, but not your grandpappy. And he didn’t testify. He just didn’t take the money. Your father…”

  “I know my history,” said Dominic. Something had shifted between them, their footing leveled.

  “Nobody’s listening. So c’mon. Tell me why you did it. Why send moondust to the Organas?”

  Dominic watched him, silent.

  Austin sighed. “All right then. Let me tell you a story,” he said, again sitting on the table’s edge. “A few years ago, we were on the case of a serial child rapist. We caught up with him in this shitty little apartment near the park. It was me and my partner at the time — a nice guy named Clem who retired last year. We were tipped that he was in the building, but the witnesses couldn’t agree on which apartment. We think it was because he moved around, seeing as so much of the building was abandoned and empty. They’d sent in bots, but it was during that sun storm, when the bots were all acting glitchy, and we’d gotten tired of fighting with our hover’s canvas to try and get them to cover us, seeing as we thought he had a victim with him at the time. So we went in ourselves. Clem took one
corridor, and I took another, searching what was open before barging into the locked apartments — basically trying to cover ground and kill time while waiting for the sweepers. I ended up surprising the guy in an unlocked apartment. Surprised myself, too, seeing as I wasn’t expecting to find him out in the open. Let’s just say I caught him red-handed. So I pointed my slumber at him and told him not to move. The guy raises his hands, and I see a red ring around his right wrist.”

  “A pass.” Dominic had heard about passes. A red ring around the right wrist was supposed to say what license plate medallions had said back in Grandy’s day — that any person who a cop encountered wearing one had been tapped by someone important as being untouchable.

  Austin nodded. “But I didn’t want to let him go. I have kids, see. Two of them. So I kept my gun up, started to get out my cuffs, and opened my mouth to call for Clem. But then I looked again at that red ring, and I realized that even if I did the right thing, this fucker would be let right back onto the streets by someone less righteous than I was. So I lowered my slumber and pulled my grandfather’s old service pistol from my shimmer holster, and since there’s no record of that weapon, I shot him twice.”

  Dominic’s heart was racing, but he doubted it showed as he stared at Austin as he waited for the man to finish.

  “Clem heard the shots, of course, but Clem’s a good man, like I said. We backed out, taking the kid he’d had with him back to the hover, all the while waiting for the sweepers to show. But they never did. We got lucky. The kid we recovered played along, told the recorder that another degenerate had shot his abductor and that he’d run out of the building and right into us. Nobody investigated further. Just another nugget of shit dead in the ghetto.”

  Austin turned to Dominic, looking him in the eye.

  “So yes, I get it. Sometimes, you have to break the rules you’re supposed to uphold if you want to do what’s right. I think that’s what you do, too, Dominic. Somehow, some way, you’re doing what you think is right. I know about your sister, and I think you bought her way out of Respero. I’d have done the same. So what you’re doing with the moondust and Omar Jones and the Organas…all I can figure is that there’s a reason there. A moral reason. Tell me that reason, Dominic.”