The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  “Are you offering me the job?” Noah asked, trying to bury his growing elation.

  “Yes,” said Stone. “Absolutely.” He appeared shell-shocked.

  Noah raised palms to ceiling. “You haven’t told me what the job pays.”

  “All the money in the world,” said Ben Stone.

  Leo arrived in the city, out of place and looking mystified. Leah couldn’t help but laugh. She knew he used to visit the city semiregularly back before the wars and the bombs, before the second Renaissance people called the Renewal, when it had still been called New York. Leo, in Leah’s mind, had the same tendency as most old people — a peculiar way of seeing things as they used to be. Old people never stopped being surprised that Beam walls lit when you touched them, no matter how many years they’d been seeing it. And in the same way, Leo had apparently never stopped seeing District Zero as it had been in the first part of the century.

  “You look like the country mouse,” Leah said, watching him approach.

  Even in a city as diverse as District Zero, Leo seemed out of place. He looked around at everything; he sniffed the air; he seemed amazed by the hoverskippers and hovercabs that jammed the streets like a sprawling Tetris puzzle. If Leo had had an ocular implant, he’d probably have been raising his hands in front of him like a picture frame to indicate images for capture, like a tourist. He’d told Leah that he’d been active in old New York during the 2030s turmoil, and Leah had gotten the impression that he’d even led a group — perhaps a precursor to Organa. But that was a long, long time ago.

  “It smells here,” said the old man, still standing while Leah remained seated.

  She had waited for him in a SoHo cafe. SoHo could be a dangerous neighborhood, but it was a sunny day, and Leah had taken the precaution of sitting outside. She hadn’t wanted to stay in Chinatown. For a reason she couldn’t explain, doing so felt like a jinx, like staying at the scene of the crime. It had taken a while for her to shake the feeling that Crumb, who seemed to have somehow let her into and out of the secret lab, was right over her shoulder. She hadn’t stopped walking until the strange sensation had gone away. That had happened near Houston. She’d stared at the burned-out boutiques and the gang tags, shrugged, and figured that good luck and fate had been on her side so far. So she’d sat.

  “You mean that it doesn’t smell,” said Leah. “You haven’t been here since they added the air filtration, have you?”

  “Air filtration?”

  “Read a feed article or two, Leo,” she said, laughing.

  “I read plenty,” he said, apparently uninterested in hilarity at his expense. “I read every word of the distillation sheets that come to the co-op. But there’s a lot more to the NAU than District Zero, you know.”

  Leah held up her hands. “Okay, okay. I hereby retract my mockery about you not reading The Beam and will focus any new mockery on you being an insufferable hermit. How long has it been?”

  “Since they added air filtration, apparently,” said Leo sniffing. He sat in a wrought Plasteel chair opposite her. “Did you find Crumb?”

  “I think so, yes. Or at least, I know which direction to go.”

  “You know ‘which direction’?” said Leo, puzzled. Then he nodded slowly. “So you don’t know where he is.”

  “It’s hard to explain. I think he wants me to find him, though. I’m confident that if I head in that direction and access along the way, I’ll find the trail.”

  “What, like a map?”

  “No, not like a map. And not a series of clues on The Beam either, like a scavenger hunt.”

  It was hard to explain the sense she had — that a cloud of intuition was floating above her, across the whole city like a low fog, and that all she’d need to do to access it would be to stand up into it. So in order to break Leo in, Leah told him how she’d found the building in Chinatown, how Crumb’s mind had seemed to let her in, and how she’d felt him behind her all the way to SoHo. Leo, who couldn’t help thinking of The Beam as a super-Internet despite knowing better, didn’t seem to get it at all. So Leah sighed and repeated that it was hard to explain and that he’d just have to trust her.

  Leo asked to see the diary. Leah showed it to him. Then Leo read it from start to finish, taking his time, while Leah sipped on a soda. Finally, he looked up.

  “This is amazing. Do you believe it?”

  “Oh yes. I was in the lab. If Stephen York isn’t who that diary claims he is or if Stephen York didn’t write that diary, then whoever did is a very smart, very creative impostor. There’s stuff in there about The Beam that I never realized, but that I recognize as true now that I’ve read it. The fact that there’s a subtle wireframe beneath it, for instance. If you just ‘use’ The Beam, you’ll never see its layers, but if you hack, you’ll find yourself delving into its guts. And now I can see the way the modern Beam was built on something older that must be Crossbrace. The old Internet is there too, even further down. The Beam infrastructure touches pretty much everything, but did you know there are still sectors where the systems use TCP/IP? Some of the AI clusters use it to talk to others, like a dialect. And it’s not just protocols, either. Sometimes, you can find stuff in L33t.”

  Leo shook his head. This was common when she talked to him about pretty much anything. At first, she’d thought it was simply a Leo affect, but she later realized he pretty much only did the head-shaking thing to her. Maybe it was because Leah — enhanced and technically gifted — was such an oddity amongst the Organas. She just had a way of talking over his head.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “AI has personality, is all I’m saying. At a certain point, you have to stop thinking about The Beam as a computer network and start thinking of it like a community. It’s like DZ itself. There are digital neighborhoods inside of The Beam’s programming. Different AI appropriates different elements from its environment to create its ‘culture.’ The oldest structures inside are relics of our earliest attempts at connectivity. The oldest ones harvested CompuServe and AOL to build their neighborhoods. Some seem to have learned from 1980s hacker forums, and do things like speak in L33t.”

  Leo kept shaking his head.

  “You never understood,” said Leah. “Just trust me.”

  “Of course I trust you,” said Leo. “When it comes to The Beam, it’s all you all the time. I don’t say this enough, Leah, but Organa can’t survive without you. It’s one thing to sit in the mountains and smoke dust, but another to understand the system enough to make our way within it.”

  Leah smiled, touched.

  “I try to understand,” he said. “But to me, what’s in this journal is simultaneously troubling and unbelievable. Don’t get me wrong; I believe it just fine. What I mean is…West’s mind is on The Beam? We know he’s out there because he’s the default on every canvas. Go into a public building, and a Noah West holo will probably be there to greet you. Hell, on my train ride over, Noah West came into the compartment and insisted I watch a safety demonstration because I don’t have a Beam ID, so it couldn’t confirm that I’d ever been on a train before to see the demo. But this is different, isn’t it?” He tapped the journal’s leather cover.

  Leah sighed. There was something she could tell Leo that might help him to understand, but she’d never told anyone before and didn’t really want to open herself up that much, even to Leo. But then, Leo had his own secrets, didn’t he? Everyone did. Leo didn’t like to talk about his old days in New York. It was a soft spot for him. But they were embarking on a long, strange trip together, and so Leah figured she might as well be the first to roll over and expose her underbelly.

  “Leo,” she said, “have you ever heard of anthroposophy?”

  He shook his head.

  “It used to be a kind of scientific approach to spirituality, but once people started getting so connected to The Beam and everyone on the network got used to its presence 24/7 as if it were part of them, it started being about The Beam�
��s reality instead. I guess the original idea of anthroposophy was to discover the real, objective world of spirituality, and what has happened is that modern anthroposophists believe The Beam has given us access to that world.”

  Leo looked at the journal then at Leah. “Is this like what happened with the church?”

  Leah felt slapped. “Oh God, no. This is closer to…well, like the alternative spiritualists you’ve told me about from back in the day. Where people would take cocaine to get in touch with themselves?”

  Leo laughed. “Cocaine didn’t exactly get you in touch with anything other than hyperactivity.”

  “Well, whatever. Drugs. Hallucinogenics. Head trips. Like us with moondust, only real.” Leah wrinkled her nose. She was as addicted to dust as the rest of the Organas and loved the glaze it gave her, and there was some truth to the idea that moondust showed you a deeper truth from reality. She needed dust for hacking, but in the end it still felt like a poseur drug. Leah had never liked doing something that everyone else did (mainly because she wanted to be unique, even among a group of people who all insisted on being unique in the exact same way), and a part of her resented that she used dust, given that it was exactly what people expected an Organa girl with pink dreadlocks, piercings, and various bright sarongs to do.

  “Not that moondust isn’t real,” she charged on, not entirely sure if Leo, who kept the village supplied, might take offense. “I just mean…more real.”

  “It’s okay,” said Leo. “I know what you mean.”

  “When you sent me into DZ for training and I was away from the community for a while, I started meeting people at the college. Some of them were into this old drug that was supposed to purge you in a way and show you the truth.” She looked up at Leo to see his reaction. He nodded. “It was superexpensive, but some of the kids in DZ? Well, they have good money. Anyway, you were supposed to drink this stuff. Like shots. Then you purged.”

  “Purged?

  “Barfed. They even started you with a bucket. The buckets were red.” As if that mattered, but the red in Leah’s memory was as vivid as the black that came later. “After that, you’d experience something unique to you, and you’d have to overcome it. Flushing your demons, I guess. Purging bullshit the world had laid over you.”

  “Then what?” Leo asked. He was watching her closely. It dawned on Leah how strange it was to be teaching Leo anything. He was a spiritual yogi. He’d done his share of drugs, plus plenty of other people’s shares. Little old Leah finding something he’d not done, didn’t know about, and that she could guide him through was downright surreal.

  “For me, I felt this deep sense of connection. I don’t know how to describe it any other way. It’s like the earth was my body. I could feel everyone at once; I could feel the trees; I could feel the sun and the sky and the clouds. Is this making me sound like a total spaced-out idiot?”

  Leo shook his head. “No. But I’m really curious about what the hell it has to do with Crumb and The Beam and West.”

  “Once I was in that place, Leo — once I’d gotten past some of the worst of the darkness inside me, mostly having to do with my mom and being abandoned, I guess — I started to think about The Beam. I hooked in, through my port, which I’d installed not long before. The idea to do it was just there. And once I’d hooked in, I started seeing through the infrastructure, code, and hardware. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was like I went into The Beam. I didn’t feel like I was plugging in and surfing or even Beamwalking. I didn’t feel like I left my body, but my body became like only part of me, as if it were just my leg or something. The rest of me, I realized, was something more. I could feel The Beam as if I were all of it, and a part of everyone connected to it. And The Beam was its own thing, too, quite separately — complete with its own identity. I saw how we’re all connected, and that while The Beam wasn’t necessary for that connection, it was like a lubricant. A facilitator. The Beam gave us a new way to feel the connection that was already there.

  “I explored for what felt like days, though it was really only hours. I reached out with what felt like new arms and could see the entire whole world at once. There are old, barricaded data pipelines leading out of the NAU on The Beam, and I could see right through their obstructions. I experienced the Wild East. I experienced the sky, where the data goes out to satellites. I took parts of it into me and felt like I left pieces of myself behind, like you would leave something behind if you stirred a pot of hot soup with a spoon made of melting chocolate. And while I was in those many places, I realized that wherever I went, The Beam was a thing within a thing within a thing. And at the very core, like the center in a piece of candy, was something I can only describe as human will. It was like the first networks had been started with an idea, and the creators had left that idea inside. They had wanted to connect people, and the idea had remained as if pieces of those creators were still there. Every layer added to the technology has been a bigger and better attempt to fulfill that original idea, but the thought has always been there at the core, realized to a greater or lesser degree. To me, that core of human will felt like a pond with a bunch of straws poked into its surface. The oldest straws — to the first systems connected to the pre-Internet — were small. The newest straws, leading out to The Beam, were like giant pipes. At the time, since I felt so connected to everything, the solution to fully realizing that core idea seemed so obvious, and it was something that the Internet, Crossbrace, and The Beam have all missed — at least in their original, tangible construction.”

  “And what they missed was…?”

  “That the network had evolved to a point where it’s more than the sum of its parts,” said Leah. She shifted in her chair, feeling District Zero’s clean breeze in her hair. “You know how I talk about The Beam like it has a soul, personality, will, and all of that? Same idea. I did a lot of studying in the months following that drug trip. I wanted to find out if any of what I’d experienced was true or if I’d just been whacked out. And when I studied, I found some interesting parallels. For instance, think about brains. The simplest life forms don’t have brains. They have ways to sense their environments, but it’s all stimulus and response, like bacteria moving toward food. Higher up, things get more complex. You get ganglia, which are nerve clusters — closer to brains, but not quite. Bugs move toward lights. Worms seek out food. And so on, up the chain. Squid identify patterns and understand what’s a fish and how they can capture and eat it. Octopi can use tools. Apes are damn near like us. At a certain point, you’d say there’s a ‘mind’ there. Nobody can agree where that line is (most people agree that dogs ‘think’ like we do, but it’s harder to say that about bugs), but there’s no doubt that once a collection of neurons becomes complex enough, they do more than the neurons should be able to do in and of themselves. The Beam is like that. It started as a network, but it became a mind. Now it can tap that original pond — that sense of human will and intention at its center — on its own. Quark, West, and York didn’t build a mind, though. They built a system, and the system evolved. Because it saw its own purpose — that first spark of an idea that begat its creation — and sought to fulfill it.”

  “You talk about The Beam like it’s alive,” said Leo.

  Leah shrugged. “Maybe it is. But really, where is your mind, Leo? Not your brain, but your mind? Is it in your head? And if it is, where does intuition come from? Where does creativity come from? When you go into a moondust haze and feel like something is working through you, what is that something, and where is it coming from? I’m telling you, Leo. Today, Crumb has been with me, right over my shoulder. I haven’t even been plugged in. He guided me to the lab; he let me in. Maybe West really is out there too.”

  She stopped, taking a long drink from her soda and giving Leo time to react. It was all out there now. She doubted Leo would judge her, seeing as he led a hippie community filled with drug addicts, but he might think her airheaded and ungrounded. The mountain Organas kept their heads in
the clouds, but Leah was supposed to be the objectivist. She was supposed to be the anchor. Leo had sent her to QuarkTechnic and a dozen specialized schools to steep her in hard, ones-and-zeros skills. She was Organa, but she was also not Organa at all. Leo might be disappointed that he’d ended up with another spiritualist instead of the realist his community needed.

  Leo remained silent, apparently still digesting what she’d told him.

  “You think I imagined it all, don’t you?” said Leah.

  “Maybe. But maybe not. If I didn’t think there were bigger truths out there in the world, I wouldn’t wear headbands like this.” Leo touched his forehead. Today’s headband was powder blue and sported a peace sign. “I guess the question is, can you find Crumb? Because if you can, it’d be hard not to believe you.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I get the impression that he’s looking to be found. But there’s another thing, too, and I have no idea what it means.”

  Leo raised his eyebrows.

  “Wherever he is and whoever he’s with, it all feels very familiar to me, like déjà vu.”

  “Like déjà vu?”

  “Wherever Crumb is,” said Leah, trying to articulate the odd feeling she’d been wrestling with over the past few hours, “feels to me like going home.”

  Nicolai sat in Central Park, near the monument, thinking about how when people said the world was your oyster, they only focused on the pearl. But even before the ocean outside the lattice went toxic with fallout, oysters were edible only by those who didn’t mind pollution. Sure, the world could be your oyster, and sure, that might mean that every once in a while, you might get lucky and find a pearl. But nine times out of ten, you just cut the fuck out of your hand with the shucking knife and were rewarded with a stinking booger full of the world’s purified shit.

  Now that he was free of Isaac (and, honestly, feeling more than a little guilty about it), Nicolai could do whatever he wanted. The world truly was his oyster. But how to find the pearl amidst all the looming shit? He’d almost certainly move to Enterprise when Shift came in twenty-three days, but what then? The implication that the ability to do anything automatically translated to a better life was based on faulty logic. Too many options left few guarantees. Nicolai had been nursing dissatisfaction for months (okay, years), but he’d never given serious consideration to what he might do instead. He had the whole ocean to move about in, yes. But his boat had no rudder.