by Sean Platt
“I’m sure it’s a glitch,” said Sam.
“I’m hearing a ringing noise, too.”
Sam’s alarm was still blaring. He threw it across the room. “Better?”
“Yes.”
“This connection is glitchy. Can we meet?”
The sentence made Sam feel cold. He’d said it himself, but the idea of meeting a source in public? Meeting Costa in public? Being out in public at all? It was daunting. But his own lips had betrayed him because meeting Costa in public passed for normal far more than meeting in Sam’s rundown, paranoid nest of an apartment.
Nicolai agreed, gave Sam an address, and asked if they could meet in a half hour.
The second alarm went off just in time, reminding Sam that he smelled like an armpit.
“Better make it an hour,” he said.
Nicolai had done his research on Samuel Dial, formerly of the District Zero Sentinel, previously of the Brooklyn Reporter, previously of an apparently short-lived paper-only rag at NYU called the Scene. It was that last that intrigued Nicolai most. Because while the majority of Sam’s articles (as far as Nicolai could find, anyway) skirted the edge while staying in safe bounds, he’d been able to find nothing of the Scene. He’d exhausted The Beam, along with two of his assistants’ on-foot efforts. It was as if the Scene hadn’t merely been a paper-only publication at all and had, in fact, been something considerably more nefarious. If it were just an old periodical that happened to rely on tree pulp, he’d have been able to find records: scans, on-Beam shares, even digital photographs. At the very least, Nicolai should have found secondhand reports from AI that had read the paper, even if they’d had to do it from across the room through a water-flow sensor in someone’s apartment shower head. But he’d found nothing. The Scene existed only as rumor. Those behind it seemed to have printed it on precious newsprint, distributed it below the radar, and only handed it out to people who weren’t wired and promised to burn after reading.
In reality, that was probably a bit of an exaggeration — the kind of rumor that made the inane scribblings of college kids seem much more legendary than they ever could have been in life. Nicolai had thoughts about that, too. If his prep school hadn’t been raided and his friends and teachers murdered back in Italy, Nicolai would have gone to college. In-person universities hadn’t been nearly as rare in those days. And if he thought his friends’ older brothers and sisters had been pretentious back then, it had to be double now. Remove the collegiate identity by making most attendance virtual, and students would have to take out their senses of repression and grandeur in other ways.
But as he sat in his apartment waiting for the intercom’s buzz, Nicolai reflected back on those first searches. Maybe the Scene had been idiot kids pretending they had enough underground muscle to change the world — but deluded or not about the paper’s actual content, the paper itself had managed to vanish into the slipstream of time. In this day and age, that was saying something.
Maybe Sterling Gibson’s random reporter had potential after all.
Nicolai waited. And waited. He passed the chair Micah Ryan had sat in when he’d appeared at the apartment unannounced, and it was as if Nicolai could still sense the man’s presence. Micah had known something when he’d come to Nicolai’s place. The more time passed, it seemed like that had always been Micah’s way — pretending to enter situations with Nicolai as an observer, when in fact he’d maybe always been the puppeteer.
The Ryans had brought Nicolai to the NAU because of his microscopic cargo.
The Ryans had shepherded him — first with Isaac and now unwittingly with Micah — in the way farmers fattened livestock for slaughter. And to think: all that time, he’d fancied himself free, able to do as he wished.
Micah had seemed to anticipate Nicolai’s defection from Isaac. He’d seemed, in fact, to have planned it.
So when Micah had shown up at Nicolai’s flat to find his Beam connection off, was it really so unreasonable to believe he’d known that Nicolai had worked with Kai to betray him? Had Micah actually sent Nicolai to see Rachel Ryan…even though at the time Nicolai had been sure going there was his own idea? Even Rachel had seemed to know he was coming.
Maybe Micah had sent Nicolai to visit Sterling Gibson, hoping he’d spill his secrets to the press.
And when Gibson — who wouldn’t publish Nicolai’s dangerous truths — had sent Nicolai and Sam Dial into each other’s lives — maybe that had been Micah’s plan, too. Maybe instead of subverting the Ryans, all Nicolai was doing right now was playing into their hands. Again.
Nicolai blinked, dismissing the thought. It was a ridiculous chain of paranoid ideas. Micah was devious, yes, and clearly the Ryans had privilege that Nicolai could only imagine. But the man wasn’t God. Nicolai still had free will. And right now, he was doing the most freewheeling, off-tracks thing he could think to do.
But maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe he should call off his meeting. Because, again, maybe Micah wanted him to shake hands with Sam Dial.
Nicolai sighed, knowing he was being stupid, unreasonable, and ridiculous. Knowing that the Ryans didn’t control everything, no matter how it sometimes seemed. Knowing that the more he entertained dark fantasies of being manipulated, the more he gave Micah the very power Nicolai, by meeting Sam, was trying to weaken.
“You’re still your own man. Nobody controls you.”
There was a chirp as Nicolai’s canvas considered his words.
“Canvas,” Nicolai answered. “Ignore until further notice.”
A second chirp answered. As far as AI could understand anything, it really should understand: Nicolai worked things out aloud. He paced to think and spoke to no one. His canvas had heard all of Nicolai’s musings ten times over, and the machine probably welcomed the order to ignore. Because as with understanding, perhaps AI could get bored, too. If so, Nicolai’s canvas would be bored plenty.
But once he’d silenced the canvas responses, Nicolai found he had nothing to say. He tried to look across the city through his expansive windows. He tried to focus on his extravagant grand piano, which he’d begun exploring via semi-immersive lessons. Progress had been slow; those above his pay grade seemed able to download a virtuoso’s ability from The Beam whereas Nicolai had to learn the old-fashioned way.
But his eyes kept returning to the empty chair. To the place Micah Ryan had sat, pretending to believe that Nicolai’s canvas was off because Nicolai claimed he preferred stints of bohemian living. Pretending he didn’t know that Kai was hiding in Nicolai’s closet. Pretending he didn’t know what was happening between Nicolai and Kai, against Micah.
He wants me to kill his mother, Nicolai, Kai’s voice whispered in Nicolai’s mind.
Nicolai waited for an out-loud response in his empty apartment, but of course he wouldn’t give it. His tongue wouldn’t say the words. Maybe because Nicolai hadn’t been surprised that Micah would hire an assassin to kill his mother, or that the assassin would be Kai. Nicolai had met Rachel and knew her to be as slippery as a snake. Maybe she even saw Micah’s bad news coming.
A soft voice announced an incoming call.
“Put it here.” Nicolai tapped the wall in front of him.
“It’s voice only, Nicolai.
“Who is it?”
“Edmundo Perez.”
“I don’t know any Edmundo Perez.”
“An encrypted text subvisual accompanies the request. It says, ‘Wink wink.’”
Nicolai sighed. “Accept.”
Sam’s voice came from the air around Nicolai’s head. Any decent canvas could do track and follow, but Nicolai paced so much when speaking that it had made sense to upgrade to an AuralStorm. Floating nanobots could vibrate around him much harder than he’d anticipated, and the effect was like being crushed by a wave. When he used them as a coherent speaker for calls and music, Nicolai kept the enhancement near 10 percent volume…and still Sam’s voice was too loud, maybe because he was shouting over some sort of mechanical roar.
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“This is your apartment!” said the voice.
Nicolai winced and turned the volume down.
“Wherever you are,” Nicolai replied, “it’s not my apartment.”
“The address you gave me!” he shouted. “It’s your apartment, right?”
Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be? Wasn’t Nicolai’s apartment a sensible place to meet? Nicolai resented the way Sam was making him feel ridiculous for proposing something so ordinary.
“Yes,” he answered.
The next thing Sam said was drowned by an almost deafening rumble. It sounded like Sam had been run over by something, but he kept speaking. All Nicolai could make out was a sense of urgency, as if the reporter’s exclamation points had detached themselves from his words and arrived naked.
“What?”
“!!!”
“Where are you?”
The roar decreased. “In the subway.”
That wasn’t true. The subway was a mag line, like the El. It was so quiet, commuters sometimes missed it if they were looking at their handhelds when it pulled into the station.
“Where are you really?”
“The subway! Below the mall!”
“The…” That couldn’t be right. “You mean the chute train?”
“Of course!”
There were a thousand questions Nicolai could ask at this point, but they all boiled down to “What the hell is wrong with you?” One and only one of New York City’s original subway lines had been recovered after the flooding of the ’20s, and it was used almost exclusively for moving cargo beneath the streets that was considered too hazardous or intrusive to shuttle above in plain sight. Technically, you could still buy rides, but most of the human passengers who rode the thing were just fleshy forms of cargo: homeless people too far gone for an official party designation, children and women who’d been blanked and were being sold. Nicolai had never known anyone foolish enough to use the chute train or even let it enter their consciousnesses because the idea of using the chute was only slightly more reasonable than shooting an old lead-slinging gun and riding the bullet.
“Look…just come up to the mag train, at least. If you’re at the mall, you’ll take the blue line to — ”
“I’m not taking any…!” The rest was lost in more mechanical grinding.
“I’ll pay for your ride. It’s no big deal.”
“…the money! It’s…Beam!…apartment anyway!”
Nicolai supposed the last was a refusal to come to his apartment. Hadn’t Dial contacted Gibson, demanding to speak to Nicolai? Gibson had hooked Nicolai up with Sam because Nicolai wanted a reporter, but it could have been any reporter — writer of vanishing underground paper ’zines or not. Nicolai wasn’t the needy one here. He considered telling Sam to fuck off and forget it if he was going to be a prima donna, but then Sam continued. The sound was lower; he must have moved up the tunnel to somewhere quieter.
“Look,” Sam said, now audible, “I can’t go to your apartment.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason I won’t ride a mag train. Or take a cab. It’s all trackable.”
“Trackable by whom?”
Sam ignored the question and asked one of his own: “Do you know Little Harajuku?”
Nicolai almost laughed. “Are you kidding? No, if you want to meet off-site, we stay in Midtown.”
“I’m not comfortable discussing what I need to discuss in Midtown.”
“I thought I was the one discussing?” said Nicolai, annoyed.
“I know you know what I don’t,” said Sam, “but this might be bigger than you realize.”
“If you’re that uncomfortable meeting in person, we don’t need to meet in person at all. I own a digital neighborhood. Have you ever used a Layer Sim?”
“You want to meet in a sim?”
“A Layer Sim. Like a layer on top of the real city. I’ll send you the key sequence. That way, you can enter and see that it’s secure. I own it, so nobody can snoop.”
“Are you kidding? I’d have to get all the way back to my place to do that, and even then I don’t have a compatible rig. Forget about security; I wouldn’t have the fidelity needed. I’d be begging to get stuck in a hole!”
Nicolai sighed, wondering if this had all been a terrible idea. He’d tried to get Gibson’s help with the story Nicolai was bursting to tell — and Gibson, predictably, had refused. Sam Dial was his recommendation for what Nicolai needed. Sam was the uncredited source behind most of Gibson’s book Plugged, he’d added in a whisper. Nicolai trusted Gibson, so he should probably trust Sam. But Sam, so far, had turned out to be a paranoid pain in the ass.
“You won’t get stuck, Mr. Dial.” Nicolai heard his own exasperation. He was tired of this conversation. He was also suddenly nostalgic for his little piece of digital real estate. Nobody bought Layer Sim neighborhoods anymore after the craze had begun and ended a decade earlier, and Nicolai hadn’t visited despite having spent many an idle hour building it to a fantasy version of the life he’d wished he had. It had been both an artistic outlet and a pathetic substitute for having the guts to leave Isaac’s employ. But the nature of all Layer Sims meant that they endured even if nobody accessed them. The place, though secure, would surely have been overrun by transient AI by now — most of it probably ancient and quaint. If he didn’t get back in there soon, all of Nicolai’s personalization would be washed away like an eroded shoreline.
“I know a place,” said Sam.
“I’m not going to Little Harajuku.”
“Starbucks.”
Sam didn’t trust mag trains, but he trusted Starbucks? Nicolai didn’t ask. It made a strange kind of sense, really. Starbucks had once been a coffee chain, but its real business these days was anonymity. The company’s focus on Beam-related security was well documented and virtually unassailable. Thinking of it now, Nicolai was reminded of the role Swiss banks once played for people wanting to keep their business and finances secret.
“Where?” Nicolai asked. Then he sighed, again telling himself this would all be worth it if Dial had the connections and guts Gibson swore he did.
Sam told him.
So Nicolai went.
In theory, Nicolai was supposed to be the source, and Sam was supposed to be the interviewer. But Sam wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
They were sitting in a private room in a Starbucks near the mall. Nicolai, with some resentment, had needed to make up most of the distance between them because Sam wouldn’t take any form of transportation that didn’t involve his feet or a rolling death train. Nicolai didn’t share his compunctions. He’d taken a cab. He’d paid the fare. Then he’d arrived to find Sam already there. The reporter had been waiting by the entrance with a hat on and pulled halfway down over his face.
Sam had demanded a private room for their discussion. Predictably, Nicolai had paid.
He’d wondered if they should get drinks. Sam had agreed as if Nicolai had offered, and then Nicolai had paid again.
Now Nicolai was sitting back in a soft leather chair that wafted the distinct auto-cleaning scent of Permaguard whenever he shifted his weight. He sipped his latte and tried to decide if he was more entertained or irritated by his companion.
The idea — from both Nicolai’s perspective and Sam’s — had been for Sam to interview Nicolai about things the world’s rank and file weren’t supposed to know: the Beau Monde, the Ryans, the Beam’s secret life. Nicolai knew he’d need to carefully curate which secrets he told Sam, but he had plenty and was willing to share so long as Sam could do as Gibson suggested by obscuring the rumors’ source. Nicolai wanted the information out. He wanted to play the Ryans for once instead of the Ryans playing him. He wanted to shove a splinter under the skin of both parties as Shift approached. If there were puppet strings ruling the world (and clearly, there were more than Nicolai had realized just a few weeks ago), he wanted some of them to begin showing.
But despite Gibson’s assurances that Sam Dial was dyi
ng to expose the same things Nicolai was dying to divulge, Sam hadn’t really asked any questions, and Nicolai hadn’t uttered more than a handful of words. Once the room’s privacy lock had shown impervious Starbucks green, Sam had announced his intentions to “frame the conversation and explain his intentions.” That had been fifteen minutes ago, and Sam showed no signs of stopping.
Nicolai’s attention kept drifting, but he was more fascinated by the strange, eccentric, tattooed kid than he’d anticipated. Sam was all over the place. But it was shocking how familiar so many of his conspiracy stories sounded to Nicolai’s ears.
He tuned back in, catching the animated young man mid-rant.
“…always known that there’s an upper class because when hasn’t there been? But not just upper, secret-upper, like there’s the rich people we see, but then there’s some above them, and that doesn’t even consider the idea of an upper-upper, like above them, like who will police the police? Only not with police. With Beau…oh, what the hell, with Beau Monde? It’s real, I’m sure of it, I’ve found evidence. Well, not me. Others. It’s hard to explain. Don’t ask me who. I can’t say. Not yet. Except that there are a lot of them. Not Beau Monde; there aren’t that many of them, like maybe 1 percent. I meant the ‘lot of them’ who figured this out. My sources. Do you know the Beau Monde? Don’t answer that. I know you do. I mean, I think you do. I anticipate you do. Which is kind of why I wanted to talk to you. Did I tell you about the ID sequences? I have someone I’ve talked to who found another set of identifiers, and no, I can’t tell you who…”
Nicolai settled back and took another slow sip. Sam kept fidgeting as he spoke. He scratched his head, stood, sat, crossed his legs one direction and then the other. He kept glancing at the door. Every few minutes, he’d get up and actually cross the booth, then tap the green privacy seal as if testing to see if it was really there. He barely breathed when he spoke. His legs bounced. He nibbled at his fingernails between rushed words.
“…and I mean Shift always matters in a way, I guess, but this time it actually matters, like in the past it was a choice between one color and another name for the same color, like there’s really not a difference, so for instance — oh, shit, I guess I can just tell you, right? Otherwise, why would you trust me? Isaac. Isaac Ryan. I know you work for him. Or worked. Some people say you defected.”