by Sean Platt
Serenity, without further word, turned and paced to the far end of the room and began staring through one of the false windows. Leah looked past her, to the glasses on the end table. She was thirsty. If Serenity was as intuitive as she seemed to be, she’d pour Leah a glass of water from the full pitcher and bring it over.
Leah turned to Crumb. There was probably no reason to keep her voice low, but she did anyway, wanting to exchange a few words with the new Crumb while SerenityBlue was out of earshot.
“Are you okay?” she asked him. Leah tapped her own head. “In here, I mean? You’re so coherent. But do you remember the shack in Bontauk?”
“I remember that, yes. I also remember being erratic, but my mind never went away. I was just trapped.”
“I thought I might have killed you. Or burned you. Whatever wall you had inside…it started to buckle. It had an intentional failure point. It was as if your mind had decided it would rather self-destruct than let anyone in.”
“I’ve felt the wall. But I think I’m fine now.”
“Who did that to you? The wall, I mean? Why? When? Do you know? Do you remember?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“So now you’re just going to lie here like a convalescent and let a pretty young girl take care of you, huh?” she said, ticking her head toward SerenityBlue. She smiled. “I see how you are.”
Crumb shrugged. It was so odd. Leah had looked at this man hundreds or thousands of times, but she’d never really seen him. The man in front of her was totally new. The face was the same, but the spark in his eyes was different. Leah realized she should start to think of him as Stephen York, but her mind refused to think of him as anything but Crumb.
“She seems so familiar,” said Leah. “I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been here or that I’ve met her before. Is it just this place? Do you feel it?”
“I feel something,” said Crumb.
“She reminds me of my friend Alison, from years ago,” Leah whispered. “The sense of familiarity is so intense.”
Crumb said, “She reminds me of my mother.”
Leah looked at Crumb. His hair was mostly gray, peppered with the rare strand of stubborn brown. She remembered the 2-D from the journal, showing Noah West beside a young Crumb with long brown hair. She looked at Serenity, puzzled.
“Your mom was a redhead?” said Leah.
“No,” said Crumb, furrowing his eyebrows.
Leah looked at Serenity again. Her hair color wasn’t ambiguous. It wasn’t strawberry blonde or reddish-brown. It was red, as in red-red. Like Alison’s.
“She looks like your mom other than the hair, you mean,” said Leah.
“No,” said Crumb. “My mother had long dark-brown hair with light streaks in it.” He pointed. “Just like hers.”
Leah looked from Serenity to Crumb, from Crumb to Serenity. At the end table, the girl turned. She’d picked up the pitcher and was pouring a glass of water, turned slightly so that Leah could see that she really did look like Alison — Alison, whom Leah had last seen the night she’d swallowed drugs and purged in a bucket, whose hand she’d held as she’d realized they were all connected. She thought of how she’d felt later, when she’d dove into The Beam. The way everything had, for a while, made sense. Leah melting inside it. The feeling that she was touching everything, that everything was touching her. The feeling of unsettling a balance, of stirring, of leaving a part of herself behind.
Serenity finished pouring the glass of water and returned the pitcher to the end table.
“Wait,” said Leah, watching her. “Didn’t Leo…?”
But Leo could answer for himself because he’d appeared in the doorway, holding a pitcher of water. He looked at Leah, then at Serenity, who hadn’t been there when he’d left. His mouth hung open as the pitcher — the same one he had taken from the end table to fill — slipped from his fingers and crashed to the floor.
“Noah Fucking West,” he said, still flitting his eyes back and forth between Leah and SerenityBlue. “You two could be twins.”
Across the room, Serenity blinked then smiled. A flash of understanding crossed her face, as if something had finally snapped into place.
“So that’s why you seem so familiar,” she said to Leah.
“You want to know about Leo?” said Dominic.
He blinked in the room’s dim light. NPS Agent Austin Smith had thrown him for a loop. He’d thought the agent was going to ask him about the vagrant he’d picked up in Times Square back in the 2060s and shuttled up to the Organa community instead of sending him to Respero as ordered. But no, Smith was throwing him this curve ball about Leo.
“Leo Booker,” Austin repeated. “And let me be honest with you, Captain Long. We’ve been after you for a while. We took you instead of your buddy Omar (who flipped the minute we were able to make him a good enough deal; so eager for his own advancement, that Omar) because we were after you more than him…but the good news for you is that we’re after Booker more than you. It’s like I said: Yes, you’ve done things that aren’t by the book. We all have. But your intention has, as far as I can tell, always been honorable. So if you’ll help us get Leo, you can go. Remember — ” he gestured at the privacy jammer still idling in the corner, “ — this is all off the record. This arrest won’t even show on the books. It didn’t happen.”
That was appealing, but it wouldn’t solve Dominic’s problems. The Organas still needed their moondust (the bunkered supply Omar had stashed and enabled Dominic to ship with his phone call wouldn’t last forever), so he wouldn’t be able to retire as a trafficker unless he wanted blood on his hands. Besides, he was still all but incriminated in other ways. The Beam would have records leading up to the pickup itself, just lying around for someone else to find and use to pull Dominic’s puppet strings.
“What do you want with Leo, anyway?” Dominic asked. “He’s not hurting anyone.”
“Not yet, maybe. But what happens when his group decides to stage a revolt? We have reason to believe they’re planning a Beam outage — maybe a long and rather disruptive one.”
“So what if they are?” Dominic didn’t think Leo was staging any outage, but he didn’t see the big deal if he was. So people would have to open their own doors and beat off to stored pictures instead of holo shows. Big fucking deal.
Austin stood and began circling the table. “Dominic,” he said, “do you realize just how essential The Beam has become to most people…to the NAU in general? Not only does its AI run practically every system we have; it’s also plugged into just about every citizen. Not literally, of course, but think about all of the people out there who lean on The Beam for the simplest of daily tasks. How many people in the city do you think know how to use a stove? A radiant cooker? How many people know how to open a can? What about the cold climates and the hot climates? Most people don’t know where their heating and cooling controls are, or what settings are appropriate…and that’s assuming their systems would work without The Beam, which they usually wouldn’t. Did you know that in an unmodified hot climate, you should drink a lot more water to keep your body from shutting down? I didn’t. I grew up poor in the north, so I do know about cold, though. Most people don’t. People with internal heaters would walk out after the heaters stopped working and freeze to death in their shorts and tees. Literally to death, because they wouldn’t know what cold feels like and wouldn’t recognize the source of their discomfort. Most people don’t know how to drive or navigate. If they get in trouble, they wouldn’t know how to call for help. And what about the veggies who sit in one place all day, plugged in and walking The Beam, watching holos and filling their heads with obscure trivia that doesn’t matter to anyone? Do you think those people know how to read a plain old paper book to keep themselves from going nuts? Assuming they could even stand without their assisters, do you think they know how to go out and socialize, use a non-Beam communication device, play non-Beam games, or just sit and think? Those people aren’
t used to being alone with their thoughts. They don’t know how to handle the inputs of unplugged daily life. They haven’t built any internal defenses or filters. They’d go mad. The chaos that would come from a widespread, sustained Beam outage would be catastrophic.”
Dominic shrugged. “Are you trying to convince me?” he said. He knew how dependent the NAU was on The Beam. It was just one more reason to be disgusted by people, and Dominic had been bitching about it to bored friends for years. Grandy had had a cabin in the woods with no electricity or plumbing. He could head up there with a bow and an axe and live for weeks, hunting and cleaning and eating his own game. Grandy could survive Armageddon, and in the ’30s, he almost literally had. Most folks today could barely survive through the interruption of a pop-up ad. Dominic wouldn’t feel bad for the people who would have to learn in a trial by fire just what humanity was all about.
Austin shrugged. “Just making my case about what would happen if Organa got their way. If you’ll help us get Leo Booker, then…”
“Are you kidding me?” Dominic interrupted Austin with a laugh. “Leo isn’t planning a revolt. Leo just wants to sit up in the mountains and do moondust and think about the good old days. He’s a hippie.”
“Is that why he sent his girl Leah to some of the best schools to learn about networks and systems and how to bend them to her will? Is it why he sent her into Quark?”
“Leo distrusts The Beam. He wants to be prepared, to know his enemy. He talks like the world might be better without The Beam. But as far as actively doing anything about it? Forget it.”
Austin shook his head. “You’re being naive. What he has up there is a cult.”
This time, Dominic laughed harder. “A cult? I’ve been up there. It’s a group of people who want to be unique, so they all got together in order to be different in the same way at once. There have always been fringe groups. Organa is harmless. They don’t have a stockpile of guns, and I’ve never once heard or smelled a hint of revolution. Quark has its panties twisted over Organa too. It’s cute. You’re all so worried about a bunch of junkies with beards and colorful clothes.”
Austin pulled the chair from under the table and sat on it backward, his upper arms crossed over the chair’s back.
“When did you meet Leo, Dominic?”
Not knowing what else to do, Dominic shrugged and played along. He told Austin about how Leo had been his high school biology teacher and how he’d taught young Dominic, who had wanted to be a cop, how to track biology-based evidence. He taught Dominic how the scientific method applied to everything, not just to problems in his courses. He showed the boy how to form hypotheses, how to test them, how to see pieces of the puzzle that others couldn’t. Dominic had aced biology and wrangled a two-year virtual university scholarship thanks to Leo Booker. He’d then risen through the ranks of DZPD quickly once his superiors had taken note of his “natural” skills. There was more, of course, but Dominic didn’t want to volunteer it. It was too personal — like how when Dominic’s life had started to fray, when his parents got divorced and his father was killed in the line of duty, it had been kindly Mr. Booker who’d helped him pick up the pieces.
“So,” said Austin, eyeing Dominic and weighing his story, “that was…what? Mid-50s?”
“Fifty-five, I think,” said Dominic. He’d graduated in ’57 at age seventeen, and he’d been in Leo’s class as a sophomore.
“How old would you say Mr. Booker was at the time?”
Dominic thought. “Maybe forty? Late thirties?”
A sly smile crawled across Agent Austin’s lips. “In 2055, Leo Booker would have been seventy-nine.”
Dominic tried to hide his shock. His first thought was that Austin was lying, but to what end? It was a hell of a thing to toss an age out there and be so specific. Dominic knew all the tricks, but this didn’t feel like one.
“It’s the truth, Dominic. He was born on March 23, 1976. He’s 121 today. Still think you know this man, given what he’s been hiding from his good friend Captain Long?”
“Bullshit.”
Austin reached behind him, toward a counter at the back of the room. He removed a folder filled with papers then opened it and rifled through the contents. After a few minutes, he pinched a piece of paper and extended it toward Dominic.
“This is a very old file,” he explained. “They should scan it all and put it on The Beam, but a lot was still being done on paper when this file was started. We’ve got the same problems DZPD has. Nobody wants to pay for it.”
Dominic took the sheet of paper. It was a copy of a birth certificate. Someone had stapled a duplicate of an early Beam ID card to the birth certificate. Both were Leo’s.
“This could be anyone’s birth certificate.”
“Well, it was 121 years ago. They hadn’t started genetic marking yet, so the ID is supposed to act as a bridge, to help you believe the cert is Leo’s. I’ll admit it’s shoddy evidence. You can choose not to believe me, but there’s plenty more in this file, one bit after another. Taken together, you may find them hard to deny.” He held the folder in front of his chest. It was in a sort of yellowish, thick paper sleeve that Dominic remembered Grandy having had in his office.
Dominic set the paper on the table. Austin left it where it was.
“Let me tell you about your pal Leo,” said the agent. “The first part, which you’ve already figured out if you even halfway believe that certificate, is that he’s not organic as he pretends to be. He has nanos in his blood, just like a lot of the people he rolls his eyes at. He also has a handful of add-ons. They’re old ones, circa 2030s and ’40s, when add-ons were new. Leo was getting enhancements well before most people. Before it was fashionable, say.” Austin leafed through the folder then pulled out another piece of paper. “Here. ‘Polycarbonate radius and ulna, surgical steel core, right arm. Surgical steel plating with nanotube mesh resin coating, metacarpophalangeal joint, right hand. Commensurate splint reinforcement of metacarpals, right hand.’ Next time you’re with Leo, ask him to punch through a wall for you. I imagine it’s impressive. They called that a ‘warrior’s fist’ back in the day — popular with splinter groups during the riots. You’d split your skin when you punched something, but there was a numbing salve they used to carry in a pouch at their sides like climber’s chalk. And hey, that’s just his arm and hand. There’s also…”
“You’re telling me Leo has an iron fist?”
“Well, surgical steel. There was a movie back around when Leo was a kid, called The Terminator. The idea for the warrior’s fist came from that movie, from the arm of a kind of human robot in it. They apparently tried to make the full arms, which looked like the innards of an angry toaster, but in the ’30s, the medical technology just wasn’t there. The things looked good, but they couldn’t generate any power and were too slow. So they did this hybrid thing, stapling new materials to what was already there. It was all the rage in certain quarters. Really just the next step for a lot of folks. In the early 2000s and up through the catastrophic years, there was this huge upsurge in body modification. People started piercing more of their dangling parts then started hacking huge holes in their earlobes. Then when things got good and it looked like we might finally have world peace, some people couldn’t take all the joy and started doing things like implanting spikes under their shaved scalps so they’d look more fucked up. There was a wave of people who tattooed their whole bodies. Then there was digit replacement, when people started having their middle fingers amputated and replaced with the Terminator’s middle finger, so they could tell the shiny happy world to go fuck itself with a chrome salute. But hey, that was just the warm-up. After the world went to shit, the wackos thought nothing of giving themselves metal fists. Luckily, Leo opted for an approach that was useful rather than just flashy. He also had structural enhancements added to both legs. He also has an early covert communicator that works on RadioFi, which means it’s just a hunk of crap in his head today. Rudimentary vision enhancers. N
one of it Beam-enabled, of course. At the time, those mods were state of the art. But who knows how much of it works today, if any.”
Dominic felt like the air had left his lungs.
“You’re lying,” he said. He had never studied the old mods, but Dominic knew Leo. Leo had always been kind and gentle. He’d given Dominic countless lectures about peace, moderation in (not elimination of) technology, being fair, and trying to live and let live. Agent Smith wasn’t describing Leo. He was describing someone else — someone horrible. Leo had been forty back when Dominic had met him, and now that he was in his eighties, he was growing old gracefully and naturally, without age enhancement or nanobots.
But suddenly, it was Dominic’s version of the story that was starting to smell like bullshit. According to Austin and apparently a whole file’s worth of paper, his old friend was practically a cyborg.
“Oh, I’m afraid not,” said Austin. “Don’t go out drinking with Leo and get to the point where you have to carry him home, because I’d guess he weighs nearly three hundred pounds with all that old hardware in him. But don’t blame Leo for being vain, Dominic. Back then, he needed those doodads. I don’t suppose you know Organa’s roots?”
Dominic shook his head.
“No, of course not. Nobody does, except for a few old-timers on the fringe who nobody listens to. If you don’t believe me, look it up sometime. Organa’s history goes back until around 2048 and then just stops like it was cut off with a knife. But in ’48, you’ll see mentions of large groups with complex hierarchies, stuff you’d see in a mature organization. And at first, you might say, ‘Wow, this group got its shit together right away, as soon as it was formed.’ But if you’re not a stupid cop, which I know you’re not, that tune will whistle sour. If you’re smart, which I know you are, it’ll look like an organization that’s been around for years but has no recorded history. And that’s exactly what it was. Because in 2048 — and this is the part we’ll deny if you ever mention it publicly — the NAU cut a deal with them to erase their history from The Beam.”