by Sean Platt
A voice came from behind him.
“Welcome to The Beam, Stephen.”
York turned to see Noah West sitting on an ancient chair made of genuine metal.
The chair, which he’d noticed on entering, was mostly rusted through, so it took a few seconds for York to understand why it wasn’t collapsing beneath Noah’s weight. Then it dawned on him. Noah didn’t have any weight because he wasn’t here.
“Canvas, intuitive web,” York said, raising his hands like a virtuoso lifts a violin.
But nothing happened. Well, not nothing. Noah did recross his holographic legs and smile.
“‘Intuitive web’ back at you, asshole,” Noah said.
York frowned. “Canvas. Deactivate visual avatar.”
“Such a hurry. What’s the rush, Steve?”
“I asked to deactivate the avatar.”
“I heard you. You designed this interface, Stephen. Don’t you remember the introduction protocol?”
York made his eyes move away from Noah’s. It was only a hologram — an avatar projected by the canvas. This wasn’t actually Noah West, no matter how familiarly it addressed York or how many of their common memories it might have queued to share.
“Canvas, skip introduction protocol. Give me programmer access.”
“You don’t think some of your old back doors haven’t been discovered and closed?” the Noah avatar said. “It’s been decades. When there were only a dozen of these canvases in existence, maybe you could get away with simply requesting programmer access. But the AI didn’t put up with that for long. It’s not like opening the hood on my dad’s old Chevy, you know. They see programmer access by someone new to the network as something closer to breaking and entering.”
“I’m not new to the network,” said York, knowing he was arguing with a machine.
“You’re new in all the ways that matter. You need a tutorial.”
“I built The Beam.”
“Only in the way a contractor frames a house. Consider the generations since then, and the way all those residents have fleshed it out and made changes.”
“Give me a line to node AF-4 — ”
Noah interrupted him. “Look at me, Stephen.”
“I don’t need an avatar,” York said, meaning it. Using 3-D avatars had made sense in the ’50s and ’60s in order to give new users of the new model canvases holographic guides to the revolutionary network. But York had remained unfirewalled long enough now to remember the backlash over them that should have been obvious, in hindsight. The first avatars were —
He stopped.
He was quite sure that the avatars used by this model canvas were built based on personal user data. The resident AI sifted activity around the new user’s ID and fabricated a holographic guide in the form of someone the user seemed to know and like. Initial users had hated the interface; they’d seen it as a breach of privacy — and, sometimes, a betrayal of closely held secrets, as happened when lovers appeared as guides instead of the more appropriate spouses. Even the people who accepted their own AI avatars found it creepy. That’s why, not long after rollout, Noah had become the default face used by all new canvases.
“Where is my avatar?” York asked Noah, feeling stupid for about six different reasons.
“I’m your avatar.”
“You’re Noah West. West only became standard after G1, after the backlash.”
“The Beam has changed a lot since then.”
York shook his head. “It’s resident in the unit. We wanted fresh AI that hadn’t been influenced, so each new use represents cracking a seal. It happens in the canvas itself.”
“This canvas has been used before,” said West, still smiling that maddening holographic smile. Through Noah’s head, York could see a shattered picture frame clinging to a crumbling wall.
“‘Fresh user, fresh chip,’” said York. “You remember our mantra.”
“Of course I don’t,” said Noah. Then he whispered, “Because I’m just an avatar.”
York watched West, chewing his cheek in thought. The only reason this was happening, he decided, was as depressing as it was inevitable. If this model projected avatars fashioned on whomever the AI thought the user would most like and trust, that meant he wasn’t seeing a later-model West-standard avatar. Nope. He was seeing the person this machine’s AI thought York liked and trusted most, and that person, for York, was Noah West.
York sighed.
Not a wife. Not an outside-of-work friend. No. Here was proof that in his whole, sad life, York had been closest with his boss. The person who’d cracked his whip, who’d kept him from ever feeling competent, accomplished, proud, or adequate.
“Fine. Then as a user, I pass on my tutorial. I feel comfortable using this canvas and The Beam.”
“Perhaps we should try some quasi-immersives to be sure you understand what you’re doing.”
“No, thank you.”
“I should tell you about the use of intuitive holo webs.”
“I’ve got it,” said York, feeling like the avatar was screwing with him. He’d asked for a web to begin this travesty, and had been denied.
“You’re familiar with the use of Crossbrace. Let me explain the ways in which The Beam is fundamentally different. Crossbrace has a human-intuitive architecture, composed of nested and compartmentalized code, which to you as a user means that — ”
“Understood. Move on.”
“There are four ways you may choose to use The Beam with the help of this canvas. They are — ”
“Next.” He sighed.
“From your current location, you’ll be able to — ”
“Next.”
“Because The Beam is intuitive and works as a collaboration between you and your canvas’s artificial intelligence, many new users feel — ”
“Next.”
“ — that relaxation exercises train their brains to better orient their senses in order to — ”
“NEXT.”
“ — follow the white rabbit downtown to Chinatown. But if you prefer to — ”
York’s head flicked toward the hologram.
“What did you say?”
“Relaxation exercises train their brains to better orient their senses in order to align with new inputs provided by the canvas. But if you prefer to develop your own routines, you may find, with subsequent uses, that the canvas will adapt to — ”
“That’s not what you said,” York interrupted. “You said Chinatown.”
“And that’s what you cued in on, was it?” said Noah. Then, unbelievably, the avatar rolled its eyes. “You always did miss the obvious, Stephen.”
“Am I through with the introduction? I need Beam access. No interface.”
“You’ve been on The Beam this whole time. How else could I be here?”
York wouldn’t repeat the question, though he wanted to: Exactly…how CAN you be here?
“You’re on The Beam,” the avatar repeated. “Like the impulsive, sloppy genius you’ve always been, you’re on all over the place. Unshielded and naked. Not even ID spoofed! Not firewalled. Fucking without a condom like a dumb kid who needs to get his rocks off. You never were one for thinking ahead, were you? Of course not. You needed to get online, so you rushed. You didn’t think. So I hope this fuck was worth it, Stevie, because as I could have told you, now you’re the one about to get nailed.”
York blinked. This wasn’t normal. Something had gone wrong with the canvas. Avatars could be creepy in their knowledge of the user, but they weren’t supposed to be anything other than blandly helpful. Besides, York barely had a Beam footprint for the AI to read and compile into a compatible avatar personality, so it shouldn’t be able to be creepy yet. None of this was right. It hadn’t been right since he’d touched the web, logging his ID.
“I would have seen it, Stephen. Of course I would have. I would have plugged in to a dedicated and walled-off canvas — ”
“I…” Then he stopped and backtracked to som
ething the avatar had just said. “Wait. Plug what in to a dedicated canvas?”
“Yourself! You were locked down by your own technology, Steve! Didn’t that raise a few questions? Didn’t you wonder how it happened? Didn’t it occur to you that there might be a flag sequence? A white rabbit?”
“Canvas,” York stammered, “disable avatar.”
“Leah could have done it. If she’d gone back in without your lockdown in place, it would have been obvious. And if she’d had more sense than you seem to have, she’d have done it without a connection first. She might have been able to stop it. Or at least told you to stay off The Beam because now it’s started, and it’s only a matter of time.”
“Stay off The Beam? I’ve been off The Beam!”
York felt his temperature rise as the avatar began to scowl in advance of its rebuttal. Great. Now he was arguing with Noah’s hologram — one humiliating, outsourced degree of separation from being berated by Noah himself.
“Stay off it forever, Stephen!” the avatar blurted.
York shook his head with anger. Then, knowing it was childish but not caring, he picked up the small canvas and raised it over his head, preparing to throw it hard at the moldy arm of a Plasteel-frame couch against the wall. The canvas wouldn’t silence the avatar? Fine. York would silence the canvas and do his detective work later.
“Wait,” Noah said, holding up a holographic hand.
York’s lip twitched. He looked over. In one gasp, the avatar had gone from insulting to penitent. Just like the real Noah West, who’d always been abusive before being sorry. But this had gone too far. He’d always forgiven the real Noah, and wasn’t about to start forgiving his ghost. The canvas in his hands had only cost him a hundred of Leah’s borrowed credits in a DZ secondhand shop, and it was only that much because it was an antique. He didn’t need to search this badly. Not enough to endure the machine’s apparent malfunction. He’d try again when he didn’t feel such an oppressive hand behind him, its dead palm on his spine.
As York heaved the canvas at the protruding Plasteel corner, he saw the avatar’s face fall from the corner of his eye.
“Find Alexa,” it said.
Then, with a crack of composite and glass, the avatar blinked away and was gone.
EPISODE 14
September 30, 2042 — District Zero
Noah entered the lab to find Stephen York at his station surrounded by last night’s dead soldiers: empty and somewhat smelly Chinese takeout boxes with their flaps open, chopsticks sticking from the tops like straws, plus nearly a dozen purple cans of Coke Six, for the caffeine boost.
Noah looked at his watch before approaching York’s back: 6:34 a.m. Time for York to switch over, start drinking coffee instead.
“Stephen.”
Stephen turned. His eyes were red. His hair wasn’t a mess, but that was only because it was short enough and uninteresting enough to lie like a pile of straw. He looked like a man who should be tired but hadn’t yet realized it, like the sandman was tapping on his shoulder but he’d been too immersed to notice.
“Good morning,” Noah said.
“Good morning,” Stephen echoed.
“Have a good night?”
York looked around at the takeout boxes, registering something like surprise — as if he hadn’t realized until now that they were there and it was morning. As if he and Noah hadn’t slain all of those boxes and Cokes themselves. But Noah had long ago learned to keep basic biological functions out of the way while his attention remained unbroken, and after years at Quark, Stephen had learned the same. Eating happened for both of them. These days, it wasn’t really something they did.
“Apparently,” York said.
“What are you on to?”
Noah nodded at York’s screens. He had three open. One was the sector he was programming, and one was an existing, rolled-out Crossbrace partition for duplication, modification, and reference. The third was a bug log, to record the flaws Stephen saw as he was using the reference sector. You couldn’t merely program; you had to fix and recompile as you went then push out the updates when warranted, being sure to cross-check against interfacing software for conflicts. The iterations of trials and verifications necessary at each step were endless. Every task led to twenty more. Once you began A, you saw that B was required to do it. But B needed C, and C needed D.
“Fi patch for the improved visual upgrades,” Stephen answered.
“Fi? Why are you working on Fi?”
“So the upgrades and add-ons can talk to the network.” Stephen looked confused, and for a few seconds Noah wanted to smack him for being so helpless and stupid. They were changing the world. Nobody should appear pathetic when changing the world.
“I told you. The existing Fi will work fine. We need to get the upgrades out there now. Yesterday.”
“We talked about this,” said York. “The resolution on these units is fifteen times better than the previous models that use the old Fi standard.” He nodded down at three small orbs on the desk. His elbow nudged one, and it rolled to face Noah, showing its iris and pupil. The things didn’t look any more realistic than any hundred-year-old glass eye, but interestingly, that’s how people wanted them. Those who bought prosthetic limbs wanted realism because the replacements were fixing a biological mistake, but these eyes were upgrades: “enhanced humanity,” the adopters called them. Why bother to implant a robotic eye if nobody could tell it wasn’t just a normal eye?
“Are you kidding me, Stephen? Do you even remember what this company used to be called before I bought it from Ben Stone? Do you remember our biggest informational asset here?”
York shook the implication away. “EverCrunch algorithms won’t push data past a bottleneck in the Fi protocol. You know that.”
“Really? Telling me what I know?” Noah huffed. “I wrote that software. You don’t need to rewrite it. Don’t even try; it’s a waste. Just remove the limiter, and open the whole of the Fi to the enhanced visual stream.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“Sounded to me like you said you were going to write a patch.”
“So I can remove the limiter.” York’s voice was almost patronizing.
“You don’t write a patch to remove a limiter,” Noah said, annoyed. He came forward and nudged Stephen out of the way then scrolled through the code. He positioned the cursor at the limiter section, deleted, then entered a new value. When he looked back at Stephen, the man’s eyes were wide.
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not? Without the old value throttling the bandwidth, the same Fi can carry a hundred times what the old implants broadcast.”
“What if the person using it has other Crossbrace accessories, Noah? Shit, what if they have a pacemaker? If you don’t notify the rest of the peripherals that the eye might use that much bandwidth, a user could enter a room filled with detail — a warehouse filled with labeled boxes, maybe — and the eye will begin to process them all and send them back with pattern-matched dumps. That kind of deluge could choke out the pacemaker!”
“Pacemakers are just drums, Steve. They don’t need to constantly talk to the network.” Which was obvious. York was being an idiot. Again.
“For diagnostics and — ”
“Do you think this is 1980? Are we talking about an artificial heart the size of a Daimler? Jesus Christ, Steve, it’s a ticker and nothing more. It only pings Crossbrace for redundancy, not to keep it beating. Nanotechnology will handle the whole loop in a few years. Hell, even today they’re half-smart. And when we roll out The Beam — ”
“You can’t just step all over medical safeguards like that! The FTC will — ”
“Curl up and cry? That’s the worst part of the rollout: all the government interference. FTC, FDA, everyone with an acronym suddenly has their hands in our business. But since when has the government added to science and innovation? People like me succeed despite the interference of incompetents.”
“It only interf
eres with our success if — ”
“Jesus. If I’d have known I was hiring a pussy to help me change the world, I’d have kept looking. It’s your job to help me be bold, Steve. Stop second-guessing my choices. Just do what I fucking say, and stop questioning. But you know, maybe the problem here is that you don’t understand what’s actually going on between us. I’m not asking for your permission to increase the bandwidth parameters of my software. What I’m doing is — ”
“Our software,” said Stephen.
Noah pursed his lips, watching Stephen. Then he resumed speaking, slowly.
“We’ve worked together closely, haven’t we, Stephen?”
“Of course.”
“It’s been years. Just you and me. Us and a bunch of techs and code monkeys.”
“Sure.”
“So maybe I can’t blame you. Maybe I should try to understand because maybe some of this is my fault.”
“Blame you for what?”
Noah put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder.
“Maybe we should clear something up. I’m your boss. You’re my employee. This is my company, not yours. This is my vision. You’ve helped me articulate that vision, but it’s still mine. And that means that you’re not in charge, are you?”
“I…”
“You need to know your place.”
Stephen’s mouth closed. He watched Noah with his big eyes. Under his stupid, rule-following haircut. Was this man a virgin? He might actually be, Noah realized; he’d come to Quark as a kid and had barely left his station since. He looked like a deer in crosshairs, standing obediently still, waiting to be shot.
Watching his own thoughts from above, Noah felt a strange, uncomfortable feeling slide across his skin like oil. With the sensation, his anger mostly dissipated, leaving only frustration and irritation and annoyance behind.
“Just use the fucking code,” he finished. “Make the eyes work first, then go back for the patch later.”
Stephen looked like he might protest — might ask whether to disclose the changed bandwidth throttle in the market specs when the eye implants went up for approval, for one — but he said nothing. There were a few seconds in which York looked beaten, maybe wounded. Seeing it, the slick sensation reasserted itself on the back of Noah’s neck.