by Sean Platt
“If you say so,” said the voice.
“I’ve been looking for you,” said Leah.
“If you say so.”
“Have you been looking for me?”
“What do you think?”
Leah thought. She had. She’d been looking for many things, and he was just one. But which was the chicken, and which was the egg? There was no past or future. There was only now. In the wide-seeing grip of the drug, Leah saw it all as present. A box unfolded and laid flat, now embarrassingly obvious as something that had only been two dimensions all along.
Leah said, “The way you speak is confusing.”
“If you say it is.”
“You don’t think so?”
“You would know,” said Integer7.
They floated. Behind the man’s digital body, the scene was a living kaleidoscope. Was Leah on The Beam? Was she in the connection alcove in the little apartment, and this part of her experience was false? It was a tough call. This was all new to her, and yet she was sure she’d known it forever. She’d always felt it. Always been searching for this thing, this intelligence, this person. She’d felt Integer7 over her shoulder forever. Him taking so long to reveal himself was baffling.
“How long have you been on The Beam?” Leah asked.
“How long has The Beam existed?” he answered.
“Has anyone else found you?”
Integer7 nodded his numeric head in front of Leah’s far-seeing eyes. “Of course.”
“When?”
“Always. Now. Later.”
“Which one?”
“n33t,” he said.
Leah nodded internally, accepting the name as if she’d always known it.
“Yes?” she said.
“If you write an error into a line of code one day and I fix the error the next, which is reality? The error or the corrected code?”
“Both. Just at different times.”
“Wrong. The corrected version is real.”
“But before you correct it, the flawed version is real.”
“Prove it,” said Integer7.
Leah didn’t trust herself to reply. The drug’s buzz was thinning, and now these mental gymnastics were hurting her head. He hadn’t answered any of her questions…except that he also had. He’d always been here. She’d been looking for him. Whether those things had happened yet, had happened long ago, or hadn’t happened yet didn’t seem to matter.
But it was taxing. Her head was swimming, her mental lubrication finally thinning.
“I should go,” she said.
“Why?”
“I have to get back.”
“Why?”
It was like talking to a child. “Because I have to. I have things to do.”
“Do them here,” Integer7 said.
“They are real-world things.”
“Then do them here.”
“This isn’t the real world.”
“Isn’t it?”
Leah felt slight irritation rise. Seeing Integer7 felt like a kind of homecoming — a familiar voice in the void. But now his obstinance was wearing on her. He struck her as one of those stubborn pixels that refused to dim. A bit that refuses to toggle. A one that refuses to obey and lie down as a zero.
“No. It’s not.”
“If you were to leave that world and stay here, you would have access to anything you ever wanted. But if you go back and leave this world forever, you will feel ill. You will be unable to sit without moving. The itch will drive you mad. You will feel compelled to return here. And if you could never connect again, you would go insane. So if all of that is true, then I ask you: Which world is more real?”
His question stirred a murmur of panic inside Leah. She’d been offline for too long a few times before, and he was right about the nerves that came with it. Leah was one of the lucky ones; she’d been born and raised Organa and had only gravitated to The Beam after learning to be herself. Others weren’t as fortunate. Most people were born into The Beam like pods. Mothers needing rest immersed their babies in colorful sims to occupy them. Kids were raised more by AI than their parents. Schools were virtual and, in many cases, optional. Work wasn’t required if you chose Directorate. It was as Integer7 said: you could leave the real world forever and enter The Beam. The other way around was so much harder.
“I can survive out there. I won’t get Beamsick.”
“You, maybe. But if the network died tomorrow, all you know would eat itself like a black hole consuming a star.”
Why had he chosen that metaphor? Leah shivered. Her earlier vision returned, seeing The Beam as life’s top layer, making Integer7’s case for him.
“The Beam is a crutch. Nothing more,” she said.
“And you cannot walk without it.”
“I can.”
“You can. Others cannot.”
Leah turned away. This wasn’t fair. A few minutes ago, she’d felt only bliss, melting into universal consciousness. Everything was connected; she saw that now. The Beam was a facilitator of nature’s intention. AI had real life, inside their virtual neighborhoods. At The Beam’s core, Leah had seen its creators’ beating hearts. She’d been part of it all, and the sense of sloughing part of herself into the primordial stew had felt right, had felt benevolent. Now it felt poisonous. Rancid, like spoiled meat.
“Don’t go back, n33t.”
Leah went. Pulled back, as she’d pulled back from the apartment to the NAU to the planet to the solar system to the galaxy to the universe to The Beam.
“As you’ll have it,” he told her as she emerged. “But remember, always, that help is here if you need it.”
Leah wanted to hear it as an offer, but she couldn’t help hearing a threat.
“And sooner or later,” Integer7 said before the voice dimmed to nothing, “you will.”
Leah sat with Dominic at the end of a long concrete tunnel that sloped down toward them from above.
The building was old. It had, Leah thought, been here before the world had nearly eaten itself alive in the 2020s. Based on what Leah had learned in school, when the ocean floodwaters had first risen and the electrostatic levies were all that had kept District Zero from flooding, the deepest places had got wet anyway. Hoverbots had helped keep the ocean out at the edges, but the pressure still squirted water through cracks at the edges and from below. And this place — this garage — had the musty scent of a space that had been through the war. Leah looked around, taking in the personal hovers in their bays. Had the garage flooded entirely? Or had District Zero commuters merely moistened their fine shoes while the Wild East burned outside?
Leah was sitting on a ledge with her legs crossed beneath her. Dominic, waiting beside her, was clearly uncomfortable, attempting to do the same. But while the posture looked natural on Leah’s Organa-dressed frame, it looked awkward on Dominic’s fat, orthodox one. He looked like he’d been forced to be here — something that wasn’t entirely inaccurate.
Dominic was watching Leah, noting the way she kept looking around the garage.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Leah said.
“I thought you had all of this handled? You look like you’re expecting company.”
“We are expecting company. ‘Company’ is why we’re here. That’s why we have the buses.” She gestured. It would be a tight fit, cramming all the Organas into the two large hoverbuses, but they were lucky that the group was so small. Organas tended to be nomadic, and Leo’s group had recently lost a large contingent to wandering. Two buses should handle those in NPS custody — if they were shoved in like puzzle blocks rather than human beings, according to plan.
“That’s not what I meant,” Dominic said. “You look like you’re expecting a raid.”
“Relax. I was just noticing the damp smell and wondering if this place flooded in the ’20s. Do you remember?”
“How old do you think I am?”
Leah studied the captain. She knew he had no nanobots, no enhancement
s, no Beam-facing add-ons. Whatever age he looked, that had to be the age he was.
“Seventy.”
Dominic grumbled. “I’m fifty-seven.”
“Oh. I meant, maybe you know the history of this building. Since you work in it and all.”
“Sure. That’s what you meant.” Dominic shifted the enormous crowd-control slumbergun in his lap. The thing looked like a short-barreled bazooka with a belled end like a Civil War musket. “I don’t work in this building. I work in the station.”
“They’re connected.”
“Not the way I move around.”
Leah looked over, considered continuing their small talk to break the tension then decided it would only make things worse. Dominic’s fingers had gone white against the weapon’s matte-gray surface, and Leah wondered if there was a safety or if he might fire it accidentally. His eyes were like mice trapped in a too-small cage. His large lips, when they weren’t spouting reasons this was a terrible, dangerous idea, were pressed into a thin line.
“What the fuck is taking them so long?” he said.
“I haven’t made my call yet.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you want other ‘company’ out of the way first?”
“Are you doing that now?” Dominic looked over, as if he might see the steam of churning effort spilling from her ears.
“Just…shh.”
Leah took a breath. She closed her eyes. For a second, she saw a dark, faceless shape behind her eyelids. But that wasn’t a real thing; it was only her paranoia.
Just because Integer7 told you that Leo was in custody doesn’t mean he’s involved.
But of course, Integer7 was involved. He’d basically said so.
Then: just because he wants the Organas released doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be released.
Which, really, bristled against Leah’s sense of independence. She’d been a pointed rebel her entire life. The surest way to get Leah to do something had always been to suggest the opposite. This time, she had to fight her natural impulses. Of course Leo needed to get out of his current bind, held by NPS as an enemy of the state. He needed to cure the Organas’ collective shakes, and had a plan to do it. If she hadn’t known that already, the snooping she’d done on Leo after Dominic had committed to this idea had confirmed it.
It made Leah uncomfortable to be on Integer7’s side, and even more nervous to feel as if she were doing his bidding. But regardless, Leo had a plan. Leah knew half of the answer already. And Dominic, without any nanobots to help, had already intuited the truth: Leo had the Organas arrested on purpose.
Because they couldn’t get what they needed in the village…but down here in the city, that same rare thing was like sand on a beach.
It made Leah nervous. Not just Integer7’s resurgence (twice, through Shadow and now Leo’s release — logically related, though Leah couldn’t see how), but Leo’s plan itself.
But, hey — that’s why Dominic had the slumbergun.
She blinked again, willing away the apparition.
When Leah closed her eyes a second time, ignoring Dominic’s nervous sidelong glance, she saw the dashboard. Superimposed over the darkness behind her lids, white on black. In one corner, she could see the video feed she’d established from Leo’s cell.
Then she looked into Agent Smith’s office and made his canvas trill.
In the darkness of Leah’s dashboard, she watched as Smith told his canvas to answer the call. According to Dominic, NPS canvases were better than those at DZPD. From the positioning of her current nanospot, Leah couldn’t see the connection window Smith opened to take the incoming call, but it wasn’t coming from a box on his desk as would happen in Dominic’s office. It was probably on the opposite wall, big as life.
Leah didn’t need to see the screen because in just a minute, she’d be busy filling it.
She opened her eyes then reached into her satchel and pulled out a tiny Beam camera. She handed it to Dominic, who seemed reluctant to take a hand from his weapon.
“Point this at me,” she said. “And for West’s sake, hold it steady.”
Dominic’s hands were already shaking. He was perfectly seasoned, but smart veteran cops didn’t usually try Leah’s brand of stupid shit.
“Why?”
“I’m going to talk to your Agent Smith.”
Dominic’s face changed. “I don’t think he’s going to listen.”
“I’m not going to talk to him as myself. I’m going to talk to him as Agent Regina Macabee.”
“Who’s that?”
“A Quark cleric.”
“I’ve never heard of her. She sounds like an heiress.”
“That’s because I made her up.”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed.
“Smith isn’t going to pull any of his men unless someone higher up the chain orders him to, and Quark’s the only agency around here that can order NPS to do anything,” Leah explained.
“Quark doesn’t have authority over NPS.”
Leah gave Dominic a patronizing smile that said, Aw, sweetie. But maybe that wasn’t fair. Leah had spent a lot of time behind the Quark firewall, and Dominic hadn’t. Based on the degrees of freedom in command flag chains, it looked like Quark had the unofficial ability to boss most of the city around. If Leah had to guess, nobody had likely given Quark permission to establish that authority, but they’d made The Beam, and he who made The Beam had a way of making the rules.
“Hold up the cam, Dominic. Hurry, or he’ll start to wonder what’s taking Regina so long.”
Thinking this, Leah turned off one eye so she could check Smith’s office without looking to Dom as if she was falling asleep. She toggled her visual cortex mediator to give preference to her blacked-out right eye and saw the agent still waiting, watching the verified Quark seal on his screen. Leah wouldn’t be able to hear Smith without turning on her cochlear mediator and distracting herself, but she could see the raw code logging in from Smith’s point on the network, duly hijacked by the AI gate she’d established inside. It was trying to handshake, waiting for a connection. Over and over.
“He’s going to know you’re not an NPS agent, I think,” Dominic said.
“The video will be filtered through a Macabee avatar I created. Modulators will also take the echo from this room out of the audio. So hold up the camera. Come on, hurry.”
“This will never work. You’re going to get us Respero’d.”
The cam lowered. Dominic was looking around again, waiting for an ambush.
Leah leaned in, putting her small hand over the meaty paw holding the cam. She spoke quickly, feeling Agent Smith’s patience — and her avatar’s credibility — thinning by the second.
“Remember when I got busted for digital trespassing at QuarkTechnic? They dragged me in here, faced me off against those two digitheads, and you had to come in here and spring me?”
“Just one of many times you put my job and life on the line.”
“I dropped spoofed nanobots onto the table, remember? You yelled at me for it.” She raised a hand then used the other to tip back one of her fingernails, revealing the small nano-fabricator beneath.
“You’re saying — ”
“Yes, stupid. Just like I told you. I can call Smith as Quark because my nanos were cloned from the clerics we spoke with and have since got their little feet dirty. I’ve had AI behind their firewall for weeks. It’s designed to model and adapt, and evades their internal AI sweeps because it’s one step ahead, literally. I designed a protocol that iterates a new authentication sequence on the hour then prompts native AI to authenticate mine. It’s basically given the answer I already have and instructed to ask for that specific reply. The Quark AI thinks the authentications are its own idea. Got it?”
“You’re kidding me.”
Inside Leah’s blacked-out right eye, Smith was cueing the system for a soft restart, issuing a ping to Leah’s nonexistent Quark agent. Soon, he’d call someone else to let them know
his connection was acting flaky. Leah couldn’t have that. She’d already spoofed and rerouted Smith’s office’s sensors when she’d installed the new circulation routines for the bots and shunted duty agents to convenient parts of the station to clear them a path. But if Smith called in for support, there would be nothing she could do. Leah had too many hands in too many places already and didn’t think she could convincingly hack another connection, right now, in real time.
“Dominic! Just trust me, okay?”
Slowly, he raised the cam. Disbelief refused to leave his face.
Once the cam was up, Leah could see the feed from its queued position in Quark’s system. She double checked the way the Macabee avatar was overlaying her own face, moved around a bit to test its reality, and decided it was good enough. She made the connection and soon found herself looking at Smith through her own eyes while Smith faced her alter ego, Agent Macabee.
“Agent Smith?” Leah said.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant Macabee?”
“We’ve been requesting NPS assistance via your canvas. Have you missed the pings?” Leah made her voice annoyed. A bit imperious.
“I haven’t got any pings.”
“You should have received redundant reminders in your HUDs.”
“Most of my agents don’t have heads-up enabled.”
Leah rolled her eyes, knowing Macabee would do the same. “It’s still in your collective. Nobody has seen it? It’s double-flagged.”
“We don’t all neural-share, either.”
“Then how about a fog horn, Agent? Would you like us to blow a fog horn to get your attention? Maybe a telegraph. Or Pony Express.”
“Now wait just a — ”
Smith stopped himself when Leah began pushing fake incident reports onto Smith’s wall where he couldn’t miss them. There would be a history on his desktop now, too, and when Smith looked later, he’d probably feel guilty for having missed them even though they’d never arrived.
“Do you see them now?”
Smith was scanning, dragging windows around, his manner annoyed and hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure if he was in trouble. “This is Quark. We aren’t responsible for Quark incidents.” Then Smith’s eyebrows bunched together as if he’d seen something on-screen that he didn’t like, which he absolutely had.