by Sean Platt
“I remember your version of the Fall years,” Nicolai said. “Our opulent dinners in fancy restaurants were brutal.”
“I mean the years when you were still wandering the East. Things were tough here, too. Everyone had to fight or else be trampled. Our company chose to fight, same as we fight today. That’s how things are in Enterprise, and you know it. You make your fortune, but you’re always clawing and grasping along the way. For my party, it’s always been about doing what you could to survive and thrive. Today, surviving and thriving are done in offices, and nobody has to die.”
Micah paused. Well, except for people like Thomas Stahl. Not that Nicolai needed to know about that.
“I chose to tell you about your father and my family’s…dealings…with him on my own,” Micah continued. “Keep that in mind while you’re deciding, Nicolai. I’ve wanted you in Enterprise from the beginning, and now that you’re leaving Isaac and coming over, I wanted you to know who you really are. Who your father really was. What his inventions really became. People think that Noah West is the father of The Beam, but he was really just the architect who gave the workers a place to grow and play.”
Micah took a step forward then came up beside Nicolai.
“Now that you know, what are you going to do? It’s up to you, but I’ll tell you what I’d do.”
“I know what you’d do,” Nicolai answered, an edge in his voice.
“There’s a larger life ahead if you want it. You were a rich kid who somehow made your way through the East, Nicolai. Alone, if what you’ve suggested over the years is true. You must have had to do things you didn’t want to do. It had to change you. But something can’t be created from nothing, and that means that killer instinct was always inside you. You’re Enterprise, through and through. You should be working with us. You should be up with the…well, you should be higher than you are. This is your birthright, Nicolai. The question is, do you have the balls to claim it?”
Micah watched the crux of what he’d said to Nicolai settle onto his shoulders. Nicolai was proud, just as all good self-made people were. The trick was to know when to open a hole in that pride and allow something larger inside. He hoped Nicolai was smart enough to see past his own righteous indignation. Telling him so much had been a calculated risk. If Nicolai couldn’t be reined in now that he knew most of what there was to know, he’d be another loose end. Too much had occurred by happenstance and luck (though it was no surprise, in retrospect, that the bots had done what they could to survive and reach out), and too much had been left to chance. If Micah could entice Nicolai, then he could control him. Anything else made things too complicated.
“I’d have to work for you,” said Nicolai, not looking over. It was a statement rather than a question.
“Let’s say that we’d work together,” said Micah. “But it wouldn’t be ‘have to’ unless you insist on seeing it that way. This is all mutually beneficial. Always has been.”
“What would I do for you?”
Micah shook his head. “I’m not sure yet.”
“How would I get paid, if you don’t know what I’m doing?”
Micah laughed then answered in a tone that suggested amusement at Nicolai’s naiveté: “Extravagantly.”
“I have enough money.”
Micah chuckled again, this time like he was amused by something bigger. The whole world, perhaps.
“People like you and me are never really motivated by money. That’s the irony. Enterprise is always called greedy, but what drives us isn’t our credit balances. I’m offering you a chance to become who you were supposed to be, and a chance to be free. I know you want to play the piano.” He nodded toward the big black grand by the window. “I also know you haven’t learned because you’ve never found the time. Wouldn’t you like the freedom to finally do it?” He gave a little laugh, delightedly remembering that Nicolai didn’t know about the next-tier technology he’d have access to a second after agreeing. Nicolai could of course learn piano the old, time-consuming way — or he could plug in and download a virtuoso’s skill set.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Of course. That’s all I ask. You still have time until Shift. But if you make your decision earlier, we can…”
“I’ll think about it,” Nicolai repeated.
Micah looked over and saw that Nicolai’s eyes were still restless, still mostly watching the city. So he stepped back, slapped Nicolai on the back, and said, “Stay in touch.”
“I don’t really have a choice.”
“And stop being so fucking paranoid.” Micah gestured around the dead apartment. “It’s giving me the creeps that nothing in here is responding. Turn it back on. Have a little more self-respect than to live like this.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
Micah was halfway to the door when he turned, realizing something.
“I’m going to use your bathroom,” he said. Then he turned and began walking away toward the bedroom.
“Not the one in there!” Nicolai’s careful stony facade suddenly crumbled. “There’s one in the hall.”
Micah watched him for a moment and then smiled, finally turning in the direction of Nicolai’s finger.
Oh yes, Micah’s new protégée was definitely hiding something.
Sam Dial entered his current kitchen, turned on his trusty convection hotplate, and set a copper-bottom pan he’d found in one of the cupboards on its top. He scavenged through drawers, not knowing what was where or what any of the cupboards held, and eventually found an ancient hand can opener. Of course it was right handed; he really needed to add “left-handed can opener” to his master inventory. The odds of finding a manual can opener (let alone one made for lefties) in a local store rather than a Beam antique shop were remote at best, but he could at least keep his eyes open.
Fighting his hands’ natural positions, Sam wrangled the machine enough to open the can of tomato soup he’d bought from the ShopMart on the corner. At the ShopMart, he’d paid cash (not Beam scan) for his purchase — something that had earned him a look, seeing as it was mostly Organas who used the increasingly rare coins. The chances that the small carry-out’s scanner would have been online in this neighborhood was unlikely, but it was always a good idea to assume everything with electrons and bits was being watched.
Sam plopped the congealed goo into the pan then added water. He stirred, praying the plate would work. It was temperamental, and one of these days he’d suddenly end up needing to eat everything cold. He could probably find a replacement (or get it repaired) in one of the ghetto scavenge shops, but who had money for that?
Blessedly, the plate did its job, and the soup slurry started to warm. It would take a while. One of the coils had already failed. Making soup on the old hotplate was only a few steps above making it atop a warm radiator.
He crossed the apartment, his eyes flicking as they always did to the door locks. Both were engaged, but checking, for Sam, was a compulsion. He’d made sure the thumb lock worked when he’d first looked at the apartment, and before his first night on the floor, he’d spent a few hours installing the deadbolt from his prior apartment. It was ironic. Sam was twenty-eight and had never had a long-term relationship owing to his nomadic lifestyle, but he and his Plasteel-core deadbolt had been together long enough to share a common-law marriage.
Of course, Sam wasn’t delusional; he knew what the locks could keep out and what they couldn’t. The thumb lock and deadbolt were a security blanket and a deterrent for thieving neighbors, nothing more. Anyone who truly wanted inside could get there easily enough…though to be fair, that was true even with a state-of-the-art canvas and multi-tiered security system, as was standard in the better spires. Whether the door was locked by the best Beam AI or a metal bolt, it didn’t make a bit of difference if the right people knocked. Sam had known that since his first days with the DZ Sentinel, on assignment for a Beam story that never got published.
The way Sam saw it, there were two
ways for powerful groups to get into the restricted places they wanted to be. The first was brute force. The second (and better) way was to go out of their way to provide the illusion of bulletproof security to their inferiors while secretly making a key that would open all of those impregnable locks. What was true in apartments was doubly true on The Beam. If you wanted “true security” online, the only way to get it was to pull the plug.
As Sam always did when his eyes fell on the door, he walked over and tapped the lock. Maybe he was doing it for luck; he didn’t know. It couldn’t hurt. Sam figured he could use all the luck he could get.
He crossed to a table in the center of his current living room, where his satchel had exploded. Sam had tried various systems of organization since he’d begun spending more and more time unplugged, but none had ever worked. Born in 2069, Sam had been trained into mental laxity by the everpresence of The Beam throughout his childhood — an intelligent network that organized everything for him, just as it organized everything for anyone who was connected. Back when Sam had worked at the Sentinel, he’d still been very plugged in and had uploaded absolutely everything to his desk canvas, which meant keeping it on The Beam. He’d used his handheld’s open Fi, and every 2-D and video he’d taken was sent to his cache. Every voice recording from every interview had gone into the same cloud archives. Every intrepid-reporter encounter Sam had ever conducted had been recorded by his ocular camera and sent directly to The Beam. Back before he’d had his add-ons removed, he’d also had an auxiliary input and Fi uploader in his head so he could send all of the less-tangible facts of his life to the cloud. Mind to Beam, baby…what could be better for a kid with the condition they used to call ADD? Sam didn’t need to learn to focus; he had AI to do it for him. He also didn’t need to learn to organize his files because AI always organized them for him in the way it thought best and allowed him to recall whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. Back then, Sam hadn’t needed to remember anything, really. The Beam had done his remembering for him.
But after that unpublished Sentinel article — after Sam had started to wander while carrying life’s essentials from place to place, storing paper files in an off-grid, numbered storage unit — he’d had to develop new skills that he’d probably been ill-equipped to learn even before The Beam had trained him to stop using his mind and trust it instead. Those lessons had come hard.
Sam had read a lot about attention deficit (mostly from paper and archived Kindle books, seeing as ADD was generally considered cured thanks to adaptive Beam AI), and one thing about it struck Sam as truer than the rest: He only had so much focus to use in a given period of time. Once he used up that focus, it would be gone, so it seemed smarter to aim it at his work and let his organization suffer. He wasn’t interested in organization anyway. If he spilled his papers onto the table, everything he needed would be in there somewhere, even if finding it required time and sifting.
Sam removed his handheld, tapped at the shielding to assure himself that the thing couldn’t broadcast (he’d had the Fi chip yanked and made into an external plug-in unit, but you couldn’t be too careful), then opened a simple timer app he’d installed from a certified-clean archive. He set the timer for five minutes then glanced up at the soup as he set the handheld back onto the table. Then, as he began to riffle through his papers, he quickly began to forget the soup. It would only become interesting again once it was burning, and by then it would be too late. Using a simple timer to remind him of what he’d otherwise forget was a simple technique that had saved his bacon more than once, sometimes literally. And hey, bacon wasn’t cheap.
The first sheet of paper to catch Sam’s eye was the one he’d marked with a fat red marker. He’d done so because the item on the paper was red-hot, and because he’d wanted to remember to start with it the next time he worked. He pulled it forward and scanned it. It was one long paragraph, underlined where important.
Was that soup ready yet?
He looked to the door. The timer. The soup.
In Sam’s hand, under the ceiling fan’s slow rotation, the paper folded backward and crinkled with sound. He looked back down, re-read the underlined sections.
“Where are you, Gibson?” he said aloud.
He began to paw through the papers then eventually found the two other sheaves he wanted: copies of the information he’d given to Sterling Gibson. He had the originals, of course, but Sam’s cobbled-together work system required duplicate copies of everything for hands-on use. Visually, it seemed to make sense to Sam’s mind to cross out the information he’d noted or acted upon, so his copies — intensely scratched out and indecipherable — looked like declassified documents from the previous century and were essentially ruined for later use. Keeping clean originals doubled the paper he had to carry, but it was the only way the system could survive.
On the three sheets in front of Sam, maybe a quarter of the words were marred by lines. That was the information Gibson had actually used in his book Plugged. But several passages had been highlighted in addition to the ones that were crossed out, and those were the parts that Gibson had so assiduously avoided despite their importance, deeming them “too incendiary.” But if Sam shuffled them just right, those highlighted parts seemed to point to a hidden truth centering on Isaac Ryan’s speechwriter. And that, for a former intrepid reporter, wasn’t something that could so easily be left unexplored.
“Okay then,” said Sam, inhaling. “Into the lion’s den.”
These days, Sam’s routine had evolved such that he had to say that four-word sentence whenever he pulled out his secure cables and connected to The Beam. He’d said it once on impulse, to a hacker friend…and when that session had gone well, it had only seemed sensible to go through the same ritual from that point on. He’d connected in public before and had to mumble the thing about the lion’s den, and he’d been in a house once, stealing an emergency connection while the family slept, and had to say it in his head. That had made him nervous (not saying it out loud felt like a jinx), so when he was out of the house, he’d said it twice: once because he had to, and the other for good measure.
Sam reached into his satchel and withdrew an object that looked like a small bomb. It was about the size of a deck of cards and was bulging with wires. There were two diodes on the thing’s top: one green (indicating a connection to The Beam) and the other red (indicating the presence of invasive software or curious AI). You wanted the green one on when the device was in use, but never the red. When the red diode lit (and although it was rare, it did sometimes happen), that meant it was time to pack up and run, and to find a new apartment for himself, his deadbolt, and his hotplate.
Sam uncoiled the cables, plugged the end of one of them into the wired Beam port on his laptop canvas, flipped a switch on the device, and waited.
Onscreen, a window opened indicating the progress of a running software patch. The corner displayed a truthseal badge showing the seventeen-digit identifier of the black market hacker who’d made the thing for him. While he waited, Sam read the number and compared it to the one in his head. His mind was highly selective. He couldn’t be trusted to remember not to burn his food, but he could remember intricate details on subjects that interested him. Tying shoes could be hard, but remembering every secret area in every one of the video games he’d played as a kid was easy.
The program scanned his canvas’s memory and peripherals, declared everything clean, and began sniffing for AirFi. Predictably, the neighborhood’s Fi was weak (who needed high-capacity connections in the ghetto?), but once the bomb-like device found its signal, it wormed inside the Fi and unlocked the throttled bandwidth that was nested inside every signal, partitioned and set aside for emergency police or medical use. A new series of identifiers (the sequence of connection nodes, Sam thought, but wasn’t sure) flashed in the window. Finally, the green diode lit, and the red remained off and safe.
Sam looked at the screen. According to the software, he was currently accessing The Beam t
hrough a connection at 217 West Beaumont Street in Niles, Wisconsin.
Just as Sam opened his custom Beam browser, his handheld’s alarm began to bray. The feed’s top stories had already caught his eye, so Sam reached over to silence it. His soup could wait.
The story that had been voted to the top position detailed a crisis at a factory that manufactured Beam glass for tabletop consoles, automobile and screetbike windshields, spire panes, and a few other applications. Apparently, there’d been a chemical leak, and the immediate area was being fenced off. Locals were concerned, but authorities had assured the press that there was no danger now that the factory had been isolated.
Sam put his fingers on the keyboard and began clicking around. In his youth, he’d always preferred intuitive webs, immersion, holo projection, and voice for interacting with The Beam, but nowadays there were too many loose ends and unknowns in all of those methods. If you spoke commands, the security of your canvas was no longer the only variable. Any number of listening devices could ascertain who you were and what you were doing. If you used an intuitive web, a room’s visual processors (whether they were malicious or intended for safety, like fire detectors) could be hacked to watch you. It was always safest to use keys, your fingers touching the board, with a pop-up privacy shield. It had taken Sam a while to adjust to using the network this way, but the process — seeing as it was integral to his anonymity and critical to his continued career as an intrepid reporter (albeit now undercover and illegal) — was interesting enough for him to learn, adapt, and then master like a language.
Sam searched Beam Headlines for stories that mentioned the phrase “Beau Monde.” Currently, there were three. They had two upvotes each, and both votes, on all three stories, belonged to Sam. He’d voted them up with his dummy accounts the last time he’d logged in, but no one else seemed to be interested. Sometimes, stories mentioning the Beau Monde disappeared, but more often they were left in place and ignored. The NAU’s indifference was more powerful, apparently, than censorship. The presence of those downvoted-but-still-existing Beam stories seemed to say, “Yes, we’ve heard these paranoid conspiracy rants about a supposed secret upper class, but we aren’t interested in them at all.”