The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  Stephen returned silently to work. Noah walked away, hoping the oily feeling might stay behind.

  Instead of sitting at his console in the lab with Stephen, Noah went back to his office, where he’d been for most of the nighttime hours, planning the network’s next iteration. It might be more efficient to continue the planning with Stephen — and, in fact, that’s why he’d come down to check on York in the first place. He’d reached the point where he could no longer hold his water, and on his way back from the restroom it had occurred to him that he wanted another set of eyes on the web he was plotting using the 3-D modeling software. Stephen wasn’t as good at thinking of networks in 3-D as Noah, but he was second best — and leagues ahead of anyone else in the lab. Really, Stephen might be the only person in the world other than Noah who truly understood Crossbrace from the inside out…and who therefore understood (as much as he tried to pretend he didn’t) why Crossbrace wasn’t good enough.

  The network was two weeks old, and already the country was losing itself down digital tunnels, singing the praises of Noah’s genius. In Crossbrace, people saw everything the Internet was not. But celebrations were for the lazy. It wouldn’t be long before those jubilant masses started seeing the shortcomings that Noah and Stephen already knew were there. The more immersed people became in digital living — the more of themselves they off-worlded to the new cloud, the more they tried on new senses, the more they came to rely on the Internet of Things — the more apparent it would become that the world Quark had created was woefully incomplete.

  Stephen’s current quandary was a perfect example. As long as the network relied on analog, individual minds to puzzle out digital, nonlocal, collaborative problems, there would be a disconnect. No wonder Stephen thought it wasn’t safe to uncouple the ocular implants’ limitations and risk monopolizing bandwidth that a person’s other peripherals might need to survive. Noah was already thinking of the next iteration, already imagining a day when the AI finally evolved far enough to make those decisions without human pollution. But that AI — the kind that could build its own world rather than just live in one created by Quark — wasn’t here yet. And not everyone could see as far forward, or think as many steps ahead, as Noah West.

  There was a small knock at the open door. Noah looked up from his chair and saw Stephen standing in the doorway, looking timid.

  “Noah?”

  Noah nodded without speaking. No greeting would sound conciliatory enough. If he spoke, he’d either insult Stephen further or come off as pandering. Noah had never been good at making peace.

  “I’ll keep working on the eye enhancements if you want, but just so you know, we got a report back from DZPD. They actually answered.”

  Noah sat up. He was good at thinking ahead for sure, but he hadn’t seen this coming.

  “They answered?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With a fuck you?” Noah hoped not. If the response from the police department came back as a no, it would be hard not to shout at Stephen again — as he had the first five times Stephen had suggested contacting them. Noah had been as dead-set against trying to involve DZPD as he’d been against the board’s stubborn refusal to understand Crossbrace’s genius at first…or Crossbrace’s successor’s genius today. And so, stymied, Stephen had finally sent the request to the cops behind Noah’s back, and when Noah had learned of it, he’d blown a gasket.

  York shook his head. “No. They agreed.”

  “They agreed to give us access to their camera feeds?” Noah said, flabbergasted.

  York shook his head again. “No, not that much agreement. But they did agree to let us place visual sensors wherever we wanted, up to sixty per city block, as long as they’re given access to the streams produced by those sensors. If I had to guess, once they see the coverage we’re able to offer, they’ll strip their cameras anyway, and it’ll be the same as if they’d given us permission to peep in on their feeds all along. Except that this way, the quality will be much better, and our AI will be better able to parse the visual data.”

  “And Crossbrace connectivity? Will they allow us to network those points into Crossbrace? Up to sixty visual sensors per block?”

  “As long as they have access to the API.”

  “Of course. Everyone has access to the API. Do you think they’ll have any idea how to use it?”

  York flipped his hands palm-up. “No idea. I suppose there must be geeks everywhere, so maybe. But of course the point-to-point coming into Quark is off limits, and they won’t have our behavioral algorithms. Though…if I could make a suggestion?”

  Noah nodded.

  “We could feed DZPD our behavioral analyses anyway — after they’ve been processed, maybe with a filter or some sort of vetting in place so they’re getting the Quark stream instead of the raw inputs — that could be far more helpful than just letting them fiddle with the API on their own. They’ll be able to spot crimes far earlier using our AI interpretations than they could by sitting there watching camera views since the AI can watch everywhere at once and their operators can’t.”

  “Tie it to robotic enforcers?”

  York paused before answering, probably trying to determine if Noah was really going to let him keep leading this discussion after shutting him down so completely in the last one.

  “Probably not yet,” he finally said. “I suppose they’d let officers look at the AI’s guesses, then check the feeds themselves to verify, then act. Not with robots in a closed loop, but using humans. At least for now.”

  Noah pinched the bridge of his nose. He hadn’t thought Stephen was right to ask DZPD about the citywide surveillance network, and he certainly wouldn’t have thought sending the Quark stream to the cops was a good idea. But now — now that the police had agreed to let them plant all those valuable sensors — he saw York’s idea for the gem it was. Regardless of whether the police used the Quark behavioral assessments or not, Crossbrace would still be assimilating sixty separate visual records per block of data. There was no harm to doing that other than pride: Quark giving away its hard-gathered data without so much as charging for it. But the more the cops liked using Crossbrace intelligence to make the city safer, the more the cops would like Crossbrace itself. Soon, they might consider equipping officers with false eyes, smart glasses, even smart bullets and drones. Police liked to pretend they were fine doing things the same old ways, same as everyone. But Quark wouldn’t be the first pusher to hook a customer by offering free samples.

  A small voice inside Noah said, You were right about this one, Steve. Thank you for pushing me and holding your ground and making Crossbrace’s dataset infinitely better.

  Instead, his lips said, “Use A-6 processors on the visual sensors. Not the A-5s. They’re unstable, and we’d have to tie them into the power grid to keep them online.”

  York waited a beat to see if Noah would say more, but when Noah merely returned to work, he left. Noah watched him go from the corner of his eye.

  A feeling of unease went with York. It was that same oily sensation from earlier — a feeling Noah couldn’t entirely place, but didn’t like at all.

  He wondered if Stephen regretted his time with Quark, or might even resent it. Even though York’s NDA would prevent him from ever taking credit for Crossbrace or what followed, he was still changing the world. He was paid a fortune. So did it really matter that he didn’t have any time to spend it? Did it really matter that he’d spent eighty hours a week, working for a decade, given the scope of the revolution he was helping usher into the world? That’s what people like Stephen wanted, right? The same as it was what people like Noah wanted — and they were the same kinds of people, deep down.

  A disturbing thought hit him: Have I stolen Steve’s life then given him nothing that matters?

  Certainly not.

  Still, Noah pulled up the Quark employee roster then inserted a glitch that would cause the system to fire Stephen from the company this coming Friday. His badge wouldn’t work, and
the AI would kick him out of the building to the accompaniment of blaring security alarms. Given the complexity of the glitch, Noah estimated it would take two or three days for Quark’s less-skilled programmers to find the problem and fix it — a period of unfortunate limbo that, after York was fired, they’d be able to tell him about in advance of solving what was wrong

  During that time, Stephen would literally have no choice but to take the weekend off.

  He could walk through the park.

  He could read.

  He could get laid, possibly for the first time.

  He could blow off some steam. Dampen the pressure. Regain some sanity to protect the mind that Noah had to admit would be needed if The Beam was ever to see the light of day. Maybe Noah could go forever on almost no sleep, but he reluctantly had to admit that wasn’t true of anyone else…and that the need for simple comforts, here and there, was only human.

  His small act of sabotage accomplished, Noah returned to work.

  As hard as he was on Stephen, deep down he knew he’d never let anything bad happen to the man. Not in a thousand years.

  May 15, 2063 — District Zero

  “Long.”

  Dominic turned. Detective Lewis was standing behind him in the doorway of the small, below-the-line apartment, holding something up in front of him. The something was black and drooped over a stylus that Lewis had probably kept in his pocket more for poking at evidence than for use on his tablet or Beam surfaces — at home, obviously, and not in the station. Dominic thought the joke was on Lewis, who was nearly sixty and apparently shared Dominic’s Grandy’s views on police work. He acted like poking things with a stylus to keep them clean of fingerprints would prevent soiling the scene. As if Lewis’s blueprint — and everyone else’s, given how much he used the stylus on the job — wasn’t soiled from end to end.

  Dominic’s eyes moved to the thing Lewis was holding out like a gross trophy carried home by a feline hunter. It looked like a wet shoelace.

  “Yeah?” Dominic said.

  “Have you ever seen one of these?”

  Dominic gestured down at his polished black lace-ups. “Every time I tie my shoes.”

  “It was halfway up one of the victims’ noses.”

  Dominic rose from his squat and came closer. Gross trophy indeed. It wasn’t a shoelace. Now it was a shoelace covered in boogers and mucus.

  Dominic approached the black thing dangling from the end of Lewis’s stylus. Its end curled upward. If it had had a tiny face, it would have been looking up to acknowledge Dominic’s stare. But it didn’t have a face. Just the minuscule silver dot at its tip, which opened slightly as Dominic bent toward it, showing its tiny ring of teeth.

  “Drug worm?” Dominic tried not to show his revulsion, but it wasn’t easy. It fit: the idea that the two dead men in the other room were traffickers, and that a couple of thugs had been fighting over illicit business. But something about that hadn’t felt right to Dominic from Go, and the idea that one of the smuggler’s cargo had been caught trying to make its escape now that the host was dead didn’t change his uneasy, doesn’t-quite-fit feeling.

  Lewis shook his head. He flexed his non-stylus hand, and Dominic saw the glimmer of a resin barrier flash and sparkle on it. He used the resin-protected hand to retrieve the black object by its other end and held it up like a snake. Now that its tail was being pinched, the thing seemed agitated. It was curling up like a fisherman’s hook, wiggling, looking for something to bite — or, if it was anything like a drug worm, to burrow into. The very idea of worms gave Dominic the creeps. The kind that was swallowed was bad enough — not too different from the tied-off condoms Grandy used to report waiting for smugglers in his day to pass. But this looked like one of the newer mimic variety, which made itself at home in just about any tissue, then used nano-fabricators to build itself a perfectly ID-matched cocoon using its host’s own Beam connection. Or Crossbrace connection, which was the case in most flop houses like this shitty apartment.

  “It’s not a drug worm,” said Lewis.

  “Maybe you should have left it where it was,” Dominic said, thinking of the fit the sweeper crew would have, yet again, when they found out Lewis hadn’t left the scene as whole as he should have.

  “Watch this, Dom.” A small grin lifted the corner of Lewis’s mouth.

  Dominic thought his partner might hand him the glistening thing, but instead he pulled a trash can from under a desk (another scene disturbance; Lewis made his own rules) and dropped the worm into it. The can was metal, and despite looking like fabric or membrane, the worm must have been metal as well because it made a scratching racket as it writhed and thrashed. It had been so quiet across the stylus, it was hard to believe its frenzy now. The thing looked furious, flicking from side to side and trying to climb the can’s walls. At first, Dominic thought it couldn’t climb out because the walls were too slick, but there was something else going on that became apparent the longer he looked at the thing. It was animated while at the bottom of the can but seemed to die and become limp once it rose higher. Then it fell to the bottom, regained energy, and repeated the cycle.

  “I didn’t leave it in the victim’s nose because I don’t think it wants to stick around,” said Lewis. “It’s a creeper. Systematic full-body anonymizer. Have you seen one before?”

  Dominic watched the thing scurry in the bottom of the trash. Lewis lifted the can from its position near the ground to cradle it in the pit of his arm, and it fell still. Lewis plucked its inert form from the can’s bottom and dropped it into an evidence pouch he’d had in an inside pocket. The pouch was one of the reinforced ones, made of paper-thin but bullet-strong NuLon. He set the empty can down, and the pouch disappeared back into his pocket like the end of a magician’s trick.

  “No,” Dominic answered. He felt a bit sick even with the worm out of sight.

  “This is the first one I’ve seen in person, but I’ve read briefs. They come up on victims while they’re quiet, usually asleep, then enter somewhere under the skin and proceed to erase their cell IDs. And by IDs, I mean any Beam or Crossbrace ID they’ve adopted — but DNA too. All the key identification sequences. The process of anonymizing that much identifying information takes days, so it’d be simple for anyone afflicted to just head to a clinic when symptoms start. Even a rudimentary house medic bot could probably handle it. That’s why creepers burrow up to uncouple the victim’s spinal cord to paralyze them first and sabotage the vocal centers second.”

  “Why wasn’t it trying to get at you when you came in here with it hanging over your stylus?” The memory made Dominic’s skin crawl. Creepers sounded like ticks that dove deep and stayed for days, and Lewis had walked in with it swinging in plain sight, free to act.

  “They’re keyed to one host,” said Lewis. “Now it wants to get away. They’re not very smart. Put them near the ground, and they scramble, but keep them high, and they think they’re caught.”

  “One host?” Dominic blinked, now looking past Lewis into the other room toward the two dead men.

  Detective Lewis read his expression. “Exactly. And they’re not cheap. They don’t wander buildings like rats; they’re sent after a specific target.”

  “So someone…?”

  Lewis nodded. “Someone very rich and very connected sent creepers in here for these two. The one from the other guy got away under the baseboard when I was nabbing this one. Marks ran off after it, but his handheld won’t be able to find it. It’ll shoot down to the foundation, tunnel through the Plasteel, then self-destruct.”

  Dominic looked at Lewis’s pocket.

  Lewis said, “It’s already self-destructing. Don’t worry. They don’t explode. They just sort of erase and shrivel.”

  Dominic started to walk past Lewis, suddenly more interested in the two dead lowlifes than he’d been when they’d arrived on-scene. The instinct prickling at Dominic now made sense. Something really wasn’t right, and if the creepers had done the job Lewis had described
, even the sweeper crew might not have been able to identify the bodies.

  But before Dominic could enter the front room, a large torso blocked his way.

  Dominic was large, but the man in front of him was several inches taller and several inches wider. Dominic could practically see his pectoral muscles and bulging arms through his charcoal-gray blazer. He had to look up after nearly colliding to meet the man’s chiseled chin. His eyes were nearly as gray as his suit, and Dominic could see the swirling within them as the data agents swarmed across his irises, tapping into his optic nerve, making the millions of touch points that were, somehow, being fed back to The Beam.

  “Detectives Lewis and Long.” The big man held up his handheld. It blinked with an authentication sequence that Dominic knew not to bother verifying then settled into an image of a shield-shaped badge. “I am Special Agent Ray Workman, Quark Sector 7. Your services on-scene are no longer required.”

  Dominic’s eyebrows drew together. Lewis bristled beside him. Behind the first agent, Dominic could see another. Tending to the corpses. Plugging into walls, waving a handheld that looked far more advanced than anything Dominic had ever seen.

  “Who the fuck are you?” said Dominic.

  “I am Special Agent Ray Workman, Quark — ”

  No matter how advanced they became, machines never really stopped being machines. The simple repetition of the agent’s name and reporting agency made Dominic want to punch him. No artificial intelligence truly got it, as far as Dominic was concerned. The Beam may have kicked Crossbrace to the curb like an unwanted trashcan baby and wonders might abound these days, but you still couldn’t fix stupid.

  Lewis beat Dominic to a reply. “This a District Zero police investigation. I don’t give a shit what Quark says, you’re not the — ”

  “Detectives Lewis and Long. I have been authorized to provide you with certain information basic to this situation. We have reason to believe this is a Beam-related crime. Quark Police will now take over the investigation. If your agency is required, your captain will be alerted. As a courtesy in this event, you will be notified and reinstated with any files you have built thus far.”