by Sean Platt
“Yes, Leah. Just talk. Hell. You know how to talk to people, don’t you?”
“I thought you might have specific questions.”
“Maybe you do. I mean, what am I supposed to say from where I’m standing, as an old technophobe? You know his mind better than I do.”
“But…” She trailed off. Leo waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.
“Leah,” he said, “what’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Just spit it out.”
On the other end of the line, Leah sighed.
“I can sense SerenityBlue,” she said, “and I think I might be able to sense him too. That’s a connection through the network, but also not through the network at all. Does that make any sense?”
It didn’t, really, but Leo had learned to trust Leah. He knew that even when she wasn’t plugged in, she always kind of was. Somehow, she’d spanned the worlds, making technology spiritual and making spirit technological.
“Sure. What about it?”
She sighed again before answering then said, “I just get this strong feeling that I won’t like what I hear when I go in there. And…” She paused. “And I’m afraid Crumb is in a lot more trouble than we think he is.”
Leah peeked into Crumb’s large white room with the giant white bed in the center. She stuck her top half between the doors and looked around in a way that probably looked comical, like a robber checking to see if the coast was clear of cops.
“Is she here?”
Crumb, his gray beard neatly trimmed and graying hair neatly combed, looked up from his tablet. His answer was nothing like Crumb, somewhat like this new man Stephen York, and very like SerenityBlue: “I don’t think it matters.”
Leah shrugged, walked inside, and closed the door behind her. The halls of the school were quiet, but she liked having the farce of privacy. Leah didn’t feel like she’d had any true privacy since the train ride that had ultimately led her to Quark’s hidden Chinatown lab, when her mind was invaded by dreams that didn’t belong to her, but she also wasn’t ready to surrender.
Leah approached the bed. There was a wooden chair with a gently curving back beside it, also white. She sat, legs together, looking formal.
“Do you mean it doesn’t matter because you think she’s spying on us?” she said.
“No.”
But of course, given the odd bond she felt between herself and the woman in white, Leah had already known that.
She made a small resigned smile then looked at the tablet in Crumb’s lap.
“So, Crumb,” she said. “Are you exploring?” She was thinking of her own hazy kind of Beamwalking, wondering if the same was true for Crumb. Based on what she’d learned from his diary, it was hard not to think of the old man as a superhero.
“I’d rather you call me Steve.”
Leah looked him over from waist to head. When he’d first been taken to SerenityBlue’s strange school for Beam-adept children, his hosts had scrubbed him clean. Just recently, though, he’d found the strength to do it himself. He seemed to be taking neatness and order seriously, and Leah wondered if it was overcompensation for his decades trapped in the disgusting, dirty, reeking vagrant he’d so recently been. Every hair was in place. Even his eyebrows and nose hairs seemed to have been tended.
“Sorry. Steve.”
“No ‘sorry’ necessary. This is me asking you to change an ingrained thought. I’m not insulted by being called Crumb; I’m just trying to change my own ingrained thoughts and train my mind to open back up because I’m Stephen York again.” He paused. “Whoever he was.”
“Your memory still isn’t coming back?”
He shrugged. “I shouldn’t complain. I developed a lot of the technology that locked me down — for some reason, I actually retained a lot of technical information even when I was guarding the compound gates and ranting about squirrels — and it’s kind of like a tank: reversible, but destructive and clumsy. Getting my memories back will take time. You’re not supposed to be able to unlock it without a cypher. The fact that you were able to crack it without killing me is astonishing.”
Leah glanced down at her hands. She’d had the same thought and felt guilty for the near-miss. The notion still haunted her even though Crumb — ahem, Steve — seemed fine.
She looked back up. “You left a back door.”
York nodded then set the tablet on the end table to give Leah his full attention.
“Yes, I did. But I did it early then never had a chance to return and adapt it once the extra layers were added. I guess we’re both tougher than we thought: you to find and exploit the door, and me, from the inside, to keep pushing it forward. If, that is, that’s even how it happened.”
“You don’t know?” said Leah. “It’s your software.”
“That doesn’t mean I know how it works.” He gestured toward Leah with one palms-up hand. “Leo said he sent you to QuarkTechnic for school, right? You know that developing with AI is more like collaboration than making anything truly in isolation. Creating the software that did this was like throwing a Frisbee at nobody. Only instead of landing on the grass, the AI we were using snatched it from the air and took it somewhere new.”
It should have sounded strange but didn’t. Leah had already told York what she’d told Leo about her ayahuasca dream, and had used much weirder computer metaphors than York’s about the Frisbee. Or, for that matter, her own metaphor about rabbit warrens and honeycombs dripping with back door honey.
“Why didn’t they just kill you if they wanted you hidden or shut up?” she said. “The people who did…whatever this was?”
“Good question. And here’s another. Why didn’t they just erase me? Even back then, I could have easily been Gaussed and made to remember nothing. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and there’s only one reason I can think of.”
“What?” said Leah.
“At some point, someone wanted to be able to unlock me with the cypher — get the old Steve York back, or at least what was in his head.”
“Why?”
York gave a single, quiet, exhaling sort of chuckle, amused by a mystery that would frustrate most people. The affect was unique to Stephen York, and had been wholly absent from Crumb.
After a moment, realizing his laugh was a sign that the conversation had reached its end, Leah said, “Have you seen Serenity?”
“She came in a while ago.”
“And you saw her as having brown hair with light streaks,” said Leah.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what that means. The fact that you see her one way and I see her another.”
In answer, York gave her a smiling tilt of his head. Then he said, “You created her, you know.”
It was an absurd idea. SerenityBlue was a real person in the real world, and Leah had never been a mother.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you know what that means?” said York.
Leah had thought on it plenty, but she wasn’t sure of anything except that it was true. She’d felt herself melt into The Beam during her haze years ago, and somehow what melted away had congealed into a consciousness. And that, as odd as it was, seemed to be that.
Serenity, who seemed unsure of and unbothered by her own origins, had said she was a Beam cleric, but Leah wasn’t buying it. Clerics were created by Quark by sending specialized AI into hyperconnected donors who had voluntarily purged their internal protections. The resulting Frankensteins were basically sacks of meat driven by intelligent, conscious nanobots — highly controversial but highly useful creatures who could effortlessly span the digital and physical worlds. But they also had distinct characteristics that Serenity lacked. For one, they were all created by Quark using an unknown process to act as a sleeper police force. And second, they were distinct beings converted from distinct human bodies, and that meant they looked the same to everyone.
Serenity wasn’t like that. The way her appearance depended on the observer (not to
mention the way she looked like Leah to Leo) said she was something else. Something new.
“I know that I can sense her,” said Leah. “And I think she can sense me.” She shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about this right now. She felt like men must feel when women re-enter their lives with a child they hadn’t known existed.
She looked at York. “So what’s next, Steve?”
“Next?”
“When Leo and I first came here, we wanted to retrieve you, if for no other reason than we figured that you’d been kidnapped. Because you were Crumb, you know. No offense, Steve, but it was kind of like picking up a pet. Or a kid. But now everything’s changed. You don’t need saving anymore. Somehow, Serenity and her kids…well…unlocked you, and…”
“I think you unlocked me.”
“They got you healthy then, whatever,” said Leah. “Took care of you better than we could have. Got your brain back on kilter. But it wasn’t just that. You’re not even the same man we took into the hospital. Now you’re not Crumb. Now you’re Stephen York, and according to that book over there, you’re one of the smartest, most influential people in history.”
“You flatter me.”
“Well, you are, and I was thinking as I was coming here today: Why am I even going? I just did it automatically because it seemed to make sense — you leave something somewhere, you go back to check in on it. But then I realized how ridiculous of an idea it was. We don’t even know you. I’ve been acting like we expect you to come back to the village, but maybe you want to…I don’t know…go invent The Girder or something.”
“What’s The Girder?”
“I don’t know. What’s stronger than a beam?”
York laughed. “Well, if it’s okay with you and Leo, I think I need to return to the village after I’m back to full strength.”
Leah was surprised. They’d cracked an egg, but once an egg hatched, the bird wasn’t supposed to want back inside. They’d already lost Crumb. She’d made her peace with the idea that there was every reason for them to lose York as well.
“Why?”
“Someone locked me down, Leah. That’s not easy to do, and based on what I can find publicly — ” He nodded toward the tablet. “ — I doubt there’s much better technology out there today than what was used on me. It wasn’t any old Joe who did it, and he or she had her reasons. There’s also a reason I wasn’t erased or killed but encrypted instead, left to walk around like a human slip drive. I don’t know what any of it means. Most of my personal memories are still missing, and I don’t know that they’ll tell me anything when and if they return. I’m blind. And while blind, I don’t like the idea of popping back out into the world to see what happens. To design The Girder or anything else.”
Leah chuckled.
“I’ve been playing out every scenario I can think of. When you’re just sitting in a bed all day, you have a lot of time for that kind of thing. And as far as I can figure, there are only two places I feel comfortable: here in this place and with you.”
“We might be your enemies,” said Leah. “The Organas could be a bunch of hackers waiting for Stephen York to show his face.”
York smiled at the joke then said, “And so could the people here. But I don’t think that’s true. What do you think?”
Leah thought. She’d been to the school three times in two weeks. Her dominant impression each time was that of being called to the place, like a ship to a beacon. The experience was more mystical than real, and she couldn’t get an objective bead on Serenity or any of the kids. She kept trying to suss out who they really were, what they really wanted, what they really hoped to accomplish (by taking Crumb/York from the hospital or in general), but each time, Leah merely fell into a cloud-filled world. At first, she thought her sense of logic was failing, but then she realized logic was failing because it was the wrong lens through which to peer at Serenity and her children. The school was a place of intuition and fancy, not facts and logic and black and white. Everything in Leah’s gut told her that he was safe with them.
“No. It’s not true,” she said.
“But still, this is the city,” said York. “This is the core network. I remember where all the Beam nodes were originally placed, and I know how the AI thinks — or at least, how it thought thirty years ago. It doesn’t matter if this school is the safest place in the world because I’m not comfortable with it being so close to the center of the wheel.”
While York was painting the school as an island in the middle of hostile seas, an image came to Leah unbidden. The first time she and Leo had come here, the boy who’d met them at the front desk — a boy whose name turned out to be Alias — had used the lobby as an impromptu simulator. The simulation had been real enough for Leah to feel her toes in the sand and to throw a rock into distant surf, but later, she’d learned the lobby wasn’t actually a simulator. When the boy spoke about the reality of the world versus the simulated reality of The Beam, he’d said what Leah found herself wanting to say to Crumb right now about the school’s “real” location: “What’s the difference?”
But because it was all so foggy in her mind, she bit back the comment and said instead, “You feel like going to the compound would safer. Because it’s isolated.”
“Safer, yes,” he said, emphasizing ‘-er.’
“Well, you’re of course welcome to come back. When do you want to go?”
“When I’m well.”
Leah nodded. His mind was back, with only personal memories missing. But his body still seemed to be in a state of shock and needed time to recover. She’d seen him out of bed and sitting in a chair (white, of course) a few times so far, but those out-of-bed interludes were still relatively rare.
“We can transport you,” said Leah. “So you don’t have to walk.”
He gave her a look that said she should know better. There were a million ways that schlepping him back on a gurney or hoverdolly would ring bells they didn’t want rung.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “When you’re well. Although I have to admit, it will be strange if you don’t stand out front guarding the gate.”
York laughed.
“This time, we’ll guard you,” she added. “Keep you hidden from the people who might be looking.”
York’s face changed. The laughter left it, and he was suddenly serious.
“Oh, I think I gave you the wrong impression,” he said. “I’m just saying that I’ll be more comfortable with you.”
Leah’s eyebrows drew together. “Versus…?”
“You can’t actually keep me hidden,” he said, “because I’m certain they’ve already found me.”
EPISODE 8
April 12, 2034 — Amsterdam
“I’m gonna get me a Frenchie.”
Flare was sitting across the fire from Nicolai, his big knife out, carving an unidentifiable fruit into bite-size slivers and popping them into his grayish tooth-filled mouth. The entire crew was in the shell of a first-floor apartment along one of the canals. It was a good apartment in that it was still standing and had a large cache of both canned and fresh foods (trade was thriving in the city, just as Greggie had said it would be) and was in the center of all of the trafficking routes. Being along any one of the routes was like planting camp beside a chicken farm. As long as they could see the squad couriers with their packs of goods before the couriers saw them, they’d never run dry of food or supplies.
The space was large, the walls still intact, much of the top story sheared off like a neat trick. The hole in the ceiling allowed the fire’s smoke to escape but wouldn’t be too large of a problem in the rain so long as they stayed out of the room’s center and set out buckets. The apartment’s former occupants had made the place home with nearly a dozen couches raided from neighboring rubble. Those former occupants had had good taste, and right now, their bodies were piled in the corner like cordwood. Tomorrow, at daylight, they’d need to be tossed into the canal, or they’d start to smell.
�
�How you gonna know if she’s a Frenchie?” said Saul.
“And why you gonna care, eh?” said Greggie, the crew’s informal leader. Then he laughed. “A hole’s a hole.”
“Right-o, Flare,” said Will the Mooch. “I got a hole for you.” He stood from his spot around the fire, bent over with his ass facing Flare, and wiggled it.
“You’d like that, faggo.” Flare had an accent that Nicolai, in six months with the crew, hadn’t been able to place. At times, it sounded guttural, like German, but there were times it was almost Belgian. Impossible to tell. In the seven years Nicolai had spent wandering, he’d watched the language change with fascination, large areas that had boasted distinct tongues sliding into the mishmash that was heard most places nowadays. Before the world had died, English had been most countries’ common ground, but after the chaos had descended, the continent had seemed to churn end for end, every surviving wanderer deciding there was something better somewhere else. Northerners had gone south, and Southerners had gone north. East and west had swapped places. Languages had tumbled like silt in a stream, mixing and mashing into an absurd stew. English was still what the majority had in common, but it wasn’t the English Nicolai had learned in his very expensive prep school growing up.
“Why you wanna French gal-o, whatfor?” said Will. “You fuck what you get.”
“What you’s given,” Greggie emphasized, pointing at Flare. “What’s left. You got some cojones on ya. Two weeks with the crew, and you’s beggin’ for gash like you’s the fuckin’ king.”
“I don’t beg,” said Flare. He had a shock of bright-red hair in the middle of his head, more tuft than mohawk. The rest of his scalp was shaved. The red was entirely too bright to be dye, clumped and clotted together. Nicolai’s running supposition was that he’d colored it with paint, and that he carried a small can for touch-up.
“You do what I tell ya,” said Greggie.
“I wanna know why you care,” Will said. “You ain’t French, is ya?”
“I heard French gal-o’s is crazy. Can’t get enough.”