by Sean Platt
Sam clicked the retry icon with his finger then clicked it again. The message returned: Connection not found.
Bullshit. Sam had Nicolai’s Beam ID. Null had uncovered many, many confidential Beam IDs. You couldn’t use someone else’s ID for anything worthwhile without submitting to a more invasive scan (about all you could do was leave Beam page comments and, for some reason, order flowers), but knowing what was supposed to be a confidential number had definite advantages. For one, it allowed a knowledgeable user with the right software to track entries that ID made on the grid, hence getting an excellent idea of where its owner was at any time. And for another, it allowed you to see the characteristics of that person’s connections. The best trackers could use just that much data to form patterns, and patterns always showed truths when seen from up high.
But Nicolai Costa’s connection couldn’t be found, which made no sense at all. Sam had wanted to snoop his activity in the interest of pattern-watching — to see which sectors Nicolai seemed to be in touch with and get an idea of how much data he was pushing and pulling, which might illuminate the extent of his technology’s access — but Sam wasn’t getting past stage zero. Stage one of the process was to start watching sheer bandwidth across the network within Nicolai’s Beam ID shuttle. But you had to find a man before you could watch him.
Using the keyboard, Sam clicked over to another of Stefan’s software patches. This one tracked Beam impressions of an ID within a city map. The current view showed Nicolai’s neighborhood, where the last check-in showed Nicolai entering his building. It didn’t show him leaving later, and that meant that Nicolai was home. But his ID had been dormant since almost the moment he’d arrived. That didn’t make sense because even the most mundane activities inside a person’s home left traces. As Nicolai walked around, his ID would be triggering doors, turning the heat up and down, turning lights on and off. Even if he was asleep, any canvas in Nicolai’s high-end neighborhood would be grooming his sleep cycle patterns. And yet there had been nothing. Nothing at all.
Sam shook his head. Stefan’s program was broken. It was also stupid. It couldn’t find the connection despite it being right there in front of the program’s electronic nose.
An alarm went off on Sam’s laptop canvas. He looked at the flashing icon then raised his head to survey the apartment. He silenced the irritating alarm, not remembering what he’d set it for. Was he making soup again? The hotplate was empty. He couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter. Surely, whatever it was would make itself known soon, probably by doing some sort of damage. Then he’d know.
Sam looked back at the canvas and began speaking aloud to Nicolai, having forgotten his pledge to himself to remain quiet.
“You’re home. I can’t find your connection. Does that mean you’ve somehow masked it? Why would you have masked it? And do you even know how to mask it?”
Sam doubted it. The wares he’d cobbled over the past year or so were the fruit of his own endless paranoia. You had to be certain that someone was out to get you to worry as much as Sam did about leaving footprints. But when you were at the top of the world (Costa seemed, by Sam’s investigation, to be just below the richest tier), you didn’t worry about people snooping. It was ironic that the people who were most worried about protecting what they had were also those who had the least to steal.
Somewhere behind Sam, there was a great gushing noise. Suddenly, the alarm he’d silenced a few minutes ago made sense. The apartment was so goddamn hot, he’d run himself a cool bath in order to sit and think. He’d prefer a shower, but the shower was broken. For Sam, a shower was also safer. Showers didn’t require prep time, and if you forgot they were running, they didn’t overflow.
“Sit tight,” he told the canvas, rushing away.
By the time he returned, having shut off the water but leaving the brimming tub and a handful of wet towels to stew, he’d gotten an idea. The idea was absurd, but it did fit his evidence.
He pulled up a city grid, again hacked for him by a faceless member of Null. And after a few minutes, he drew a shocking conclusion: The problem wasn’t that Stefan’s program was unable to find Costa’s Beam connection. The problem was that Costa’s connection had been turned off.
“Who turns off their connection?” Sam asked the canvas.
The answer was simple: nobody. Sam regularly turned off whatever paltry Beam connection he found himself with, but Sam was also Shadow. Some members of Null did the same, for the same paranoid reasons. But they were outliers. Outside of the underground set and the Organa, nobody willfully disconnected entirely. Especially not anyone with Nicolai’s status, with as robust a hardwired apartment canvas as he seemed to have.
“Never mind that,” he said. He stood and started to pace, hands in the pockets at his narrow hips. “Who even can turn off their connection in that part of town?”
The answer to that question was the same: nobody. Not without a lot of know-how. Apartment canvases in upper-class spires didn’t have off switches. You needed black market technology to turn an apartment dark. Plus — and this was key — you had to have a compelling reason to do it.
“You’re hiding something, aren’t you?” Sam asked Invisible Nicolai. His lower lip slid back and forth, his face contorting into an expression of concentration.
He’d already decided that Costa was the key to unlocking something, even beyond his Beau Monde connections. Now it looked like he might actually know something, and have reason to hide it.
Yes, he was suddenly veeeeery interested in Nicolai Costa.
He clicked over to the Null hyperforum, to the subboard where the most anti-establishment types tended to gather. There was a running thread on the upcoming Shift, and Sam, following what he could only think of as reporter’s instinct, had been keeping a close eye on it. He’d gotten the idea to snoop Costa from that thread. The mention of Nicolai’s name had stuck out in Sam’s mind like a jagged edge. Sometimes, Sam bemoaned his poor memory, but he didn’t really have a poor memory at all. His mind was really just distracted, and could be laser-focused when the topic at hand was strong enough to hold his interest. Just like Nicolai Costa was to him right now.
Scanning the thread, Sam found the mention that had originally caught his eye. It was a note that Costa was rumored to be defecting from Directorate and shifting to Enterprise.
Well, Null knew that already. Shadow had mentioned it a few times. But now, after finding Nicolai blank, the connection between the speechwriter and Shift felt somehow much more important.
Sam opened a new thread on the subboard. He titled it “Does party really matter?” and typed:
Re: nicolai costa going to enterprise does that mean that the parties are working together or that it’s a real shift, b/c if he’s working for m. ryan vs i. ryan, either way he’s working for beau monde. Anyone have info on defections and what happens with income after, status, etc?
The question had been asked in various forms before but not quite this pointedly and not in light of the new tidbit Sam had just uncovered: specifically, that Costa seemed to be keeping an important secret. The only reason Sam could think of to go to the trouble of blanking a connection would be to have a meeting in private. So who was Costa meeting with? Could he be meeting with both his old boss and new boss together? Maybe the new boss wasn’t that different from the old boss, like they said in his great grandpap’s favorite song.
Sam waited, watching his new thread. He could have posted the discussion on his Beam page, but in the forum, every participant was anonymous. Before he posted his thoughts to his Beam page as Shadow, Sam wanted see if the idea had any legs at all. In Null, anonymity had definite perks.
Within thirty seconds, the first reply appeared below his original post.
Parties def working together. Subvert. Null.
Sam rolled his eyes. It was probably some basement-dwelling mouth-breather who thought the idea of subverting sounded cool rather than anyone who truly had anything to say. That was the proble
m with Null: given the group’s faceless nature, the idiots looked exactly the same as the geniuses.
A second reply came a minute later:
Income never changes. Check posting here - [link]. It’s a rubber stamp, d or e, who cares. Feels like shuffling cards the way e shuffles sources of income to avoid nau taxes. Btw natasha ryan doing same, also from i. ryan. Mass defection?
Sam clicked the link and read. Then he clicked to another linked article and read that one then manually cycled his anonymizer to pull up a fresh location spoof. He started to sweat in a way that had nothing to do with his apartment’s heat. Yes. This was both good and bad at the same time, in just the way Shadow liked it.
A picture was starting to crystallize. Past a certain income and status level, party affiliation — at least according to the paranoid members of Null — didn’t seem to matter. People always ended up where they fit best, and the most convenient place. The kicker was that the most convenient place didn’t always seem to be wherever was most convenient to the individual. It had to be convenient for the parties as a whole. Both parties. The right person in the right position, synced between the groups as if they were all shaking hands behind the scenes.
Sam straightened then closed his canvas.
It was time for Shadow to harness Null’s power to do something that had never been done, in the name of scientific inquiry.
Shift was a black box. The truth was that nobody really knew, at the nuts-and-bolts level, how the pieces moved within it. Not just the “what” of Shift, but the “why.” The “which,” “who,” and “to what purpose.”
Sam knew all about science. It had been a subject that had actually interested him back in school. The only way to uncover answers using the scientific method was to swap the variables and see what happened.
That meant that the only way to explore any system — Shift included — was to disrupt it.
Kai arrived at the front door of the Ryans’ building at dusk. She wore a small black dress, dark and humble enough to be casual but tight and slinky enough for seduction. Her legs were on long and prominent display, strapped into moderately high heels. It was the most dual-faceted outfit she had, because Kai had no idea what she was here to do.
She came to the Beam panel beside the front door, noted the absence of the human doorman (they’d had one earlier in the day, but apparently he was there for courtesy more than security), and touched her finger to the panel.
A pleasant male voice with a light English accent answered Kai’s touch. She found it amusing that the ultra-rich found the presence of such an accent to be elegant when in all likelihood a true Englishman would only be at the building to raid it in the name of the marginalized East.
“Good evening, Miss Lowery,” said the voice, reading the ID Kai had given herself in the system two weeks earlier when she, Nicolai, and Doc had all visited with Whitlock in tow.
“I’ve forgotten my key.” Kai realized she was purring into the panel and stopped herself. AI had a terrible record of responding to seduction. There were programs that did respond, of course (Kai had worked with many, most notably a fantastic O training sim with the nickname “Chloe”), but they were specialty sex programs. Even then, no matter what the cyberneticists said, Kai had a hard time believing that AI could feel true lust.
“This building’s doors do not require a k…” The voice stopped abruptly when Kai finished tracing a complicated pattern on the panel. There was a clicking as the building’s canvas disengaged the Plasteel solenoid then the magnetic seal.
“Thank you, Jeeves.”
The panel didn’t respond. It would reset once the door closed but was mute for now.
She looked around the lobby. If there had been people, she would have headed straight for the elevators, but the place was empty. No concierge. If someone in the building called for a car, Kai figured The Beam would probably alert an on-call boot-licker to come down and open doors, but for now there was nothing.
After a moment, Kai headed for the elevator. The nanos she’d planted in the system two weeks earlier, now that they’d been activated by her passphrase, voice, and swipe pattern, would authorize the elevators. She might have problems once she reached the apartment given the fussy nature of security protocols (the Ryans were in the penthouse, and the elevator might refuse to open into it), but she should have no problem reaching any of the other floors. It might be enough to snoop around, for at least as long as it took to decide what exactly she wanted to do with Isaac Ryan.
Kai stepped inside. The doors closed behind her.
With her nanos triggered, she felt as if her consciousness had been split. Most of Kai was still in her head, seeing through her eyes. But part of her was also inside the building’s matrix, seeing connections within the network as paths in a crowded digital forest. She wasn’t a Beam adept by any stretch, but she knew her way around. Navigating minds was part of her business, and AI had turned most canvases and contained networks into something similar.
Closing her interior eyes, Kai again felt wholly integrated within her body. She stopped wondering what she’d do if the elevator stopped shy of the penthouse and began to wonder what she’d do if it didn’t.
Nicolai had suggested that Kai use her professional talents to draw information from Isaac, but that was because to Nicolai, sex was a blunt tool. If Kai could be seductive, he’d assumed she’d use that seduction to bed Isaac and get him to spill his guts. But Nicolai wasn’t a woman or a professional escort and didn’t truly understand how seduction’s spectrum spread from horizon to horizon. She could rush in and throw herself at Isaac, yes — and if Nicolai was at all correct about his former employer, that would be plenty easy. Isaac had eyed her with interest when he’d seen the group outside the apartment with Nicolai, and it sounded like his marriage was in shambles. He had to be stressed and was definitely weak. Squeezing secrets from someone like that would be like ringing water from a soaking sponge.
But that wasn’t the only way to go about this. Sometimes, the lure of sex could be more compelling than the act itself. Anticipation might be able to crack doors in Isaac that he didn’t even know could be opened. It was an interesting idea to Kai because while Nicolai wanted to know about the Ryans’ part in nanobot development and organized crime, she wanted to know more about their improbable technology, which had been deliberately withheld from everyone at Kai’s level and below. Like immersion rigs that projected a reality so real, there was no discernible difference between killing a person in a fantasy and offing them for real.
For her entire life, Kai had assumed that society was a long, slow continuum. At the very bottom were the poor Enterprise who’d failed their way into lives of starvation, hopelessness, desperation, and crime. Above them were the slightly less poor then those who were somehow scraping by. Bottom-rung Directorate came next, just above the line: able to live with a few of the masses’ opiate comforts, with roofs over their heads and bland food on their tables. And so on and so on until you got to the top where people were rich enough that a decent-sized Directorate dole was just a drop of water in a vast sea. Kai was well off after years of scrapping, planning, and a lot of smart deals. But if she was, by many definitions, “rich,” there had never really been a significant reason to become “just a little richer” because the continuum was long and slow. She’d have a few more credits, but so what?
But that wasn’t how things had turned out to actually be. There wasn’t a long, slow continuum. At the bottom, what she’d assumed held true. The desperate became the poor; the poor became those who could survive; those who could survive became the middle-class, who had extra, who were well-off, who were rich. But above the rich was an unending tier, and one that represented a quantum leap forward. Those exalted few were almost a pedestal or a plinth above the continuum curve. They represented a huge cliff of advancement, wealth, and privilege that made the entirety of the remaining continuum appear backwards, primitive and poor by comparison. From where the Isaac
and Natasha Ryans of the world stood, Kai’s hard-won standing was still seven seas away.
But if Kai could cross that gulf and become one of them? If she could claim what Micah Ryan had, in fact, one day promised her without giving her all the scintillating details she’d learned two weeks ago? Well, then she wouldn’t just be slightly richer and slightly fancier. She’d reap a Shangri-la of rewards — toys held tight by the NAU’s top 1 percent and unknown to the lower 99. The so-called Beau Monde rumors were true. There really was a “fine world,” per the translation, where a person’s dreams could become their reality. A secret club, draped in whispers. The best experiences she had so far were, it turned out, merely the appetizer before a royal buffet.
She wanted to help Nicolai, yes. But more than that, she wanted to know about those high-end immersion rigs. About the Ryans’ canvas. About their Beam connection, and all the bits of a posh life they likely took for granted.
The elevator stopped a floor shy of the penthouse. The doors hesitated then parted.
Kai closed her eyes. Then, self-conscious, she reached out and touched the panel to close the elevator doors again.
There were five elevators in the building. If they were anything like the elevators in her own building, they’d hover around the floors that the aggregate Beam consciousness running the building saw as most likely to need them next, based on resident activity. When Kai arrived, two had been in the lobby, likely anticipating the return of residents based on their current positions and headings outside the building. The other three, according to readouts above the doors, had been ticking around floor numbers in the teens. She figured that meant that the building was momentarily ambivalent. People were moving around, but no one was truly stirring. It meant her elevator wouldn’t be needed for a few minutes at least. She could occupy a single elevator for a while if she needed, undisturbed.