The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  He typed:

  heard from integer7. he’s on board. watch the prime statements tomorrow. tell everyone you know to do the same. need to be ready to

  Sam stopped, his fingers on the airboard. Be ready to what, exactly? Integer7 hadn’t let him finish. Time had run out, and Integer7 had killed the connection as promised. Sam, as Shadow, wasn’t sure what exactly he was supposed to do. He could guess, but something about that deep voice, which had been echoing in his head through his entire walk home, told him he’d better guess right.

  Integer7 wanted Shadow to do something. There would be no tolerance of doing it wrong. The fact that Shadow might not know what he needed to do right would be immaterial. Without a connection, he couldn’t even square off: big Beam balls to big Beam balls, online disruptor to online disruptor.

  They’d heard each other’s voices, and while Integer7’s had held all the authority and menace of his Beam page and Null forum persona, Sam knew his own voice had not. He’d shown his cards without meaning to. And somehow, Integer7 knew who Shadow was. Sam’s real dimensions were less impressive than Shadow’s larger-than-life image.

  Sam looked at the scrambling devices throughout his apartment. With hypercaffeine still coursing through his blood, he felt every bit of his normal paranoia. But seeing it as paranoia changed nothing.

  Clearly, Integer7 and n33t were playing him. Maybe they were working together. The connection had broken at such a convenient time. If there hadn’t been a kill switch looming on the conversation, Integer7 would have had to explain himself. As things stood, he would only be able to prove that he could hack the big wall at the White House. Sam might do any variety of foolish things to follow, and Integer7 could always claim that he’d never dreamed Shadow would do…well, whatever dumb, carrying-the-weight-of-the-movement thing he felt himself wanting to do.

  He deleted the fragment need to be ready to, and resumed writing.

  we may be in for a surprise and all of null needs to see it, as much as possible anyway. but anyway heres info on nicolai costa as a starting point. he’s the loose end maybe tied somehow to party leadership, early beam dev in some way based on ai analysis but probably just grit in the oyster.

  Sam attached a data sheet containing some of the Beam IDs he’d uncovered, along with the Beau Monde identifier, then sent the message. Thirty seconds later, staring at his open inbox, he began to refresh. Again. And again. After a full minute, n33t hadn’t responded, and Sam felt himself sweating. Nervous that he was just tightening the knot, he composed another message.

  costa has been in a lot of articles, interviewed i mean. i heard sterling gibson was asking about him but let it go like he was a loose end, or at least after him, and that’s what makes me wonder if he’s more, like there’s more there, like

  Again, Sam stopped midsentence. Fucking hypercaffeine. He felt jittery and afraid just looking at his mail app. He’d opened too many boxes. What did he really know about any of these people? Nothing. They really could be NPS agents. His mails were set to destruct, but couldn’t NPS hack email worms? Yes, that seemed likely. Maybe he was making things worse by talking. He’d already spilled it all to Integer7, too flustered by the man’s impatience to think things through, and now here he was, barfing everything to n33t. It was embarrassing. Maybe stupid. He’d sent a message; he should wait for a reply. Sending more now was showing his cards before he was asked. It would be fine if n33t were an ally, but it was a mistake if…

  Sam reached out and, before he could sweat another second, sent the message. It vanished, incomplete, as if the writer had been stabbed while composing it.

  Why had he mentioned Gibson to n33t? Gibson wasn’t investigating Costa. Gibson didn’t give a shit about Costa, from what Sam recalled. That was half of the problem, really. Gibson and Sam saw different things as worthy of publishing. When Sam, as one of Gibson’s uncredited sources, had tried to call him on it (Why didn’t you use what I gave you about the Beau Monde in Plugged, instead of making vague allusions?), Gibson gave him contradictory answers. He said that Sam’s findings were too inflammatory, and that even if they were true, they’d bring heat that Gibson didn’t want. That, in Sam’s mind, made Gibson a coward. Sam had never flinched when he’d been a reporter. Gibson had also told Sam that his data was unsubstantiated — and that, again in Sam’s mind, made him stupid. His data was above the need for substantiation. Sam could be scatterbrained, but he’d always been an excellent investigator. He was paranoid, but that was because so often, it turned out that people really were out to get you.

  Now the die had been cast with not just Gibson, but n33t and Integer7 as well. Sam felt like an idiot who wanted to send love mail to an old girlfriend when drunk and had to force himself to refrain. He’d already sent enough messages. It was time to wait for some replies.

  He stood and began to circle his apartment. He couldn’t find flow, so he had to walk out from the center then back before moving on. The resulting path made the shape of an asterisk: table-kitchen-table-front door-table-window-table-bathroom hallway. And again and again. Each time Sam reached the table, he glanced at the still-empty mailbox on his laptop terminal’s screen. Every few seconds, he pulled the handheld from his pocket and tapped it.

  Finally, after four long minutes, a message from n33t appeared:

  don’t know much about gibson. you know him? i don’t trust integer7. tell me what he’s planning. he’s a blowhard at best, trouble at worst.

  Sam stared at the message. He could prompt n33t to Diggle, but he had things he needed to do, and if he was honest, Diggle was just another way to procrastinate. Yet n33t had given him an open-ended question about Gibson that begged a discussion (one Sam didn’t really want to have) and was already rubbing salt in the wound about Integer7. The fucking die had been cast; didn’t n33t know that? No point in pissing in his cereal at this point.

  He didn’t want to answer n33t’s suspicions, lest they continue to wither his own irreparable suspicions about what he’d already done. And when he thought about it, he didn’t really want to tell n33t what Integer7 was planning. He felt like n33t would judge him, maybe call him stupid for entering into a deal with anyone who could hack the White House. It practically screamed NPS. Who else could do that?

  He dashed off a reply:

  just watch the prime statements. youll see. this is real. get as many eyes as possible. tell them shadow says to and to go to shadow’s page after for instructions

  He didn’t know what those instructions would be, but the Statements weren’t until tomorrow. That gave him time to figure it out, and Sam had always worked best under a deadline.

  He hit send without bothering to answer n33t’s other question. Sterling Gibson wasn’t the problem. Gibson, unlike certain others, was harmless. Gibson’s work was public. People knew his real face, unlike Shadow’s, n33t’s, and Integer7’s. Millions of people in the NAU knew his name, his past, and maybe even the rough location of his home. That openness made Gibson harmless. It also limited his usefulness to Shadow and Sam. What Gibson had in public reach, he paid for with a certain vanilla flavor in his work. You could be inflammatory or you could be a respected authority, but you couldn’t truly be both. Of course Gibson hadn’t used what Sam had given him. It would have been putting a target on his back.

  Besides, this way — Integer7’s way — might be better suited to the situation’s real needs anyway. Sam had read Plugged, if for no other reason than to see his own influence in a for-real book. Gibson had made some conspicuous omissions, but he’d also made several outright mistakes. The Beam had gone live in 2062, not 2061. The information surrounding Clive Spooner’s bio had several small factual inaccuracies, some of which Sam thought would be obvious to the right readers. He’d never met Gibson in person, but reading his pages, Sam felt like he knew the man. He wrote like Sam thought: hard on investigative prowess, sloppy on a few of the details. As if no one was looking over Gibson’s shoulder to check or proof his copy and his prose w
as coming out raw.

  Sam clicked over to Beam Headlines and scanned for updates on tomorrow’s Prime Statements. Both presidents were already in town. The Senate was gathering in preliminary sessions. Security at the White House, in the heart of Manhattan, was being beefed up, with street, hover, and air traffic re-routed. There were a few human-interest pieces on the presidents (especially the everyman Directorate president Carter Vale, who’d recently taken over for President Quince), their cabinet members, and of course the glorious Ryan brothers.

  Sam wanted to check his mail but resisted. Either n33t would respond positively, or he wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. Sam (and especially Shadow) wouldn’t be needy or impatient. He’d already said what he had to, and he wouldn’t obsess. It had only been a few minutes, and he had other things to do than compulsively checking his mail.

  Sam checked his mail. A reply from n33t was front and center.

  will rally who i can. still don’t know why you’re talking about gibson. maybe because this team could use an intrepid investigative reporter. be safe.

  Sam opened his Beam page’s dashboard in a separate app. He was typing a new post rallying his Null followers to watch the Prime Statements before his brain understood what it had just read.

  Intrepid investigative reporter.

  He knew one of those. Not Shadow, but Sam Dial.

  Dominoes began to fall, one after the other. So he needed information about the mysterious Nicolai Costa? The way to get it had been staring at him in the mirror every morning of his life. Costa was a public figure who made his living in politics. He was preparing for a major shift between parties — a move that many people were watching, with important symbolic meaning. It was a move that an intrepid investigative reporter (one who still had valid press credentials from his time at the Sentinel, say) might very well want to ask questions about. Said intrepid report could even ask those questions as himself rather than hiding behind the disguise of his Beam alter ego.

  Distracted, Sam’s fingers finished the Null post before his mind could interpret the words. He made himself read it three times to be sure it made sense. When the words felt good enough, he posted what he had and sent a mass ping to his readers. There was no turning back now. Null would be watching to see what kind of rabbit that Shadow — and Shadow alone, because a residual wariness told him not to mention Integer7 — was planning to pull from his hat.

  With that finished, Sam switched his equipment over to Sam Dial mode, untangling encoders and scramblers, then opened a fresh, public connection. He wouldn’t be able to reach Costa directly because Costa was an important and wealthy man who normally talked only to the big press outfits. But fortunately, Sam knew someone who could reach him just fine.

  “Canvas,” he said, breaking his out-loud rule now that the need to remain cloaked was gone, “get me Sterling Gibson.”

  Leo kept an apartment in the city for Leah.

  The room was bare and stark and in a crumbling building. It still had the beautiful park view that had, before the crash and shellings, commanded a staggering rent. Now the building was stuffed with poor people and derelicts. Leah found it fitting. Beauty without opulence was what attracted her to the Organa. There was beauty in a tent, in the woods, under the stars. There was beauty in aging. There was beauty outside the cracked main window in the Organa’s District Zero apartment.

  Before crossing town to visit Serenity and ask her a few questions, Leah wanted to detour and see some of what Shadow had been sending her. The apartment was in an ideal location. Every Beam access point had a flavor, and this one — one of the few strong connections left in the building, hardwired and hand-encrypted by Leah, of course — was best for deep access into the city’s archives. In theory, every sector of The Beam should be accessible to anyone with access from anywhere, but Leah had found the truth, like most truth on The Beam, to be more subtle. Information might be visible through any node, but to Leah that felt like doing surgery from three meters away. If you wanted to do delicate work, you snuggled up to the source and paid close attention. Nicolai Costa and the Ryan brothers lived in the city, and their Beam records had matured in the city. Their history was here, and she wanted to feel it on her spiritual fingertips.

  When Leah placed several rocks from her remaining moondust stash under her tongue, she paid extra attention to the sensations. The dust had a slightly earthy taste at the surface due to the cutting salts the dealers used to stretch the potent drug into rocks large enough to comfortably handle. The taste beneath was almost smoky, like mesquite mixed with ash. When the rocks dissolved, they did so with a slight effervescence that made Leah think of the Pop Rocks candy Leo had once given her. But instead of fizzing out, it felt like the bubbles (if there were any) from the Lunis floated up into her brain, into her blood, into her very soul.

  Leah thought about what she’d told Leo before leaving for the city. Lunis was supposed to give technology addicts’ bodies a sort of patch, allowing their brains to function as human brains used to. Lunis made you more human, in other words, which was probably why the Organa culture liked it so much. But at the same time, Lunis allowed adepts like Leah to walk The Beam much better than they would have otherwise been able to.

  All of that told Leah a few things. First, it told her what she’d already surmised: that navigating The Beam at the deepest levels was about less technology, not more. Second, it told her that her own brain was as addicted to Doodads and connectivity as anyone else’s because if Leah had grown up without The Beam, she ironically might not need Lunis today to navigate it as well as she could. And lastly, it told her that she — along with most of her fellow Organas — was a slave to two masters. On one side, she was addicted to The Beam. And on the other, her chain was held by Lunis.

  Leah wondered if he’d talk to Crumb about what she and Leo had discussed — and if one of The Beam’s fathers would be able to solve the Lunis shortage for Leo. She wondered if he’d hold the town meeting while she was away, and tell the increasingly on-edge Organas what they were facing. She wondered at how Leo was slowly (and successfully) weaning himself from Lunis’s hold.

  She thought of herself, and wondered how she could possibly ever turn from the drug. She didn’t want to, and suspected she might not be able to. Giving it up would be severing her line to The Beam’s core. Her womb. Or would it? Was the tech-addicted, Lunis-soothed mind better able to access the core than the quiet mind addicted to neither? Was it possible that she could disconnect fully and then — once clean and whole — return to a canvas and meditate her way just as deep as she could go now?

  Leah sighed, dreading the labor of losing her drug, and shoved the thought aside. Thinking about herself was uncomfortable, and she didn’t want to do it. Some days, Leah didn’t know what or who she was, or what she stood for. Was she a hero? Or was she a hypocrite?

  The Lunis began to run through her, fluttering her eyelids. Her disturbing thoughts broke apart like tissue in water. She breathed slowly, leaning into the sensations. Soon, her troubles were all gone, and she felt alive.

  Usually, Leah was hooked into a canvas and Beamwalking by the time the drug grabbed her, but this time she’d been disconnected, thinking about life and death and addiction and redemption. Her body felt heavy and sluggish. It felt unnecessary. Her mind tugged it toward the threadbare couch then allowed it to lie down so the mind itself could be free.

  “Canvas.” The word felt as weighty as her body. She almost couldn’t form the V sound with her unresponsive lips. She wanted to fly. The dose she’d taken had been substantial, even for someone without a limited supply. But she needed it, especially now. Shadow’s trails went deep. She’d have to go deeper to move behind them.

  She felt herself falling, becoming weightless.

  The canvas chirped.

  “Intuitive web.” She wanted to add: Hurry.

  Normally, an apartment this low-rent wouldn’t have the ability to produce a web (most residents accessed The Beam through term
inals), but Leah had wired a portable into the line when Leo had first rented the place. As she lay on the couch now, the sensors found her hands and head then projected the web above her.

  “Give me a hybrid immersive.”

  This time, the V sound failed her and came out drunk, as “fff.” The canvas understood, and the web lowered until it surrounded her. If she weren’t high, the sensation would have seemed stupid — the kind of thing Crossbrace early adopters had done to feel appropriately techy. But with so much Lunis in her blood, Leah saw the dull holograms take on shape, smile, and wrap tendrils around her senses and hug. She saw flowers bloom from a page in her history, saw their red petals dotted with bees not unlike those in the hive of Crumb’s locked-down mind. Her body’s weight increased until it pulled away and dripped from her skeleton. Then she was free, and flying.

  The room vanished as she blinked. Some part of Leah realized that her eyes, in her body on a stained couch in a cheap apartment, were vacillating between closed and open, between looking inward and looking into the soup of holograms to manipulate the web. The rest of her felt those same eyes opening wider deeper down, seeing beyond both walls and city.

  She let the first layers of The Beam slide by without effort. She saw Headlines, saw each story there (most about Shift, which Leah’s mind saw in reds and blues) as birds passing on their way to somewhere else. These were the things that most citizens cared about — things that, by definition, were only on the Beam’s front page because millions of people had voted them to its top. The Prime Statements were tomorrow, at the White House. The presidents were in the district for it. There had been another disturbance at yet another Natasha Ryan concert. But hadn’t that happened weeks ago?