by Sean Platt
Isaac’s eyes flicked around, hands clasped at his waist, unsure what else to do with them.
“Oh, sit down. You’re making me sad.”
Isaac sat.
“The problem isn’t that you enlisted my help — ”
“I needed permission, not help.”
Purcell’s dark eyes moved from Isaac’s then back with a long enough pause to make Isaac physically shrink, almost becoming part of his chair’s digital leather.
“The problem isn’t that you enlisted my help,” Purcell repeated, “but that you didn’t tell me the true reasons for the stunt: to improve your standing in your wife’s eyes.”
“I — ”
“Relax. Like I said, I knew, and still gave my blessing.”
“Thank you. It’s better for the party when I have enough respect to lead pro — ”
“If you think I’m going to let you finish sentences now, you’re insulting me further.”
Isaac swallowed.
“What I’ll admit I didn’t see coming,” Purcell said, “was that Directorate — the party itself or its Czar of Internal Satisfaction — wouldn’t need any help this Shift.”
Isaac thought he was maybe supposed to respond but decided to spare himself the indignity of another interruption.
“How well do you know Carter Vale, Isaac?”
“Not that well. Not as well as you must.”
“Stop being so fucking servile, Isaac. I just asked a question.”
“I’ve met him. We’ve exchanged a few words. Not much more than that.”
“Hmm. Because there’s a problem with Vale that requires addressing.”
Isaac had thought of that. Privately — not even including the new and improved Natasha — he’d cheered Vale’s disruptive little coup at the Primes. But everyone else he knew, outside of party toadies, was walking around with a little black cloud overhead. Micah tried to keep his chest out and chin up, but Isaac could easily see how pissed off his younger brother was. Ditto Nicolai, whom he’d begged twice to return. He could even hear it in his mother’s raspy voice. Vale had shocked everyone and stolen an almost-certain victory from Enterprise. After Vale had dropped his bomb about a revitalized Project Mindbender, the idea of beem currency pulling everyone toward Enterprise seemed laughable.
“Okay,” Isaac said.
“Tell me, Isaac, are you planning to attend Craig Braemon’s Respero Event?”
“I’m — ”
“Of course you are. And you’re going to go along with Micah’s little stage show idea?”
“I think — ”
“Good, good. And Isaac?”
“Yes?”
“You’re proud of what you did to help Natasha, aren’t you? Not what you did to put her life at risk, but what you then did to save her from your own ineptitude?”
“Um. Yes?”
“Are you or aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Maybe I should talk to her about it, if you’re unsure. Tell her the story behind the story, as it were.”
Isaac didn’t know how to respond. No answer seemed correct. Fortunately, Purcell recrossed his legs and continued before he could.
“There are limitations to what I can do these days, unfortunately,” Purcell said, now flicking at the lid of a brass lighter Isaac hadn’t seen him pick up. “It’s true for all of us. But a good leader delegates regardless. And since you caused the problem with Vale, maybe it’s right that you do something for me.”
“I had nothing to do with — ”
“Your party, Isaac. Do you want to be a big man or not? Because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t defer responsibility and want credit for your accomplishments. You must take the good with the bad. The responsibility and the praise. Not everything can be like it was with Natasha, where you connive for a pat on the back. You want respect? I’ll tell you how to get it: Put your hands on the damned wheel, and steer the ship. Right now, the captain of Directorate’s ship is a rogue. Vale wasn’t given permission to announce what he did about Mindbender. The laugh is that he doesn’t know anything about the reality behind the project, which means the future course of actions could have easily been avoided.”
“What do you mean?”
Purcell smiled. “Mindbender is a real thing, Isaac. Micah knows that. Do you seriously not?”
He didn’t. “Of course I do. I just didn’t get what you were saying about it.”
“If Vale had promised Shangri-la and that had managed to sway the nation, he’d have been a rogue. But his actions have accidentally shone light on a real project of grave importance, and that makes him a fly in the ointment.”
“Oh.”
“I know, because you’ve just told me, that you know all about Mindbender,” Purcell said, clearly not fooled, “but you might not know that the trickiest bit Xenia still needs to crack is what they call the ‘fragmentation paradigm.’ The full explanation is complicated, but the short version is that every time Mindbender tries to separate mind from body, there’s a tether that won’t quite break without spilling the mind everywhere. It’s as if the confinement of a lump of gray matter gives a mind shape. Whenever they try to upload a mind, it fragments.”
“That sounds like a problem.”
“Agreed. But the rest is easy at this point.” Purcell shrugged then said, “So for instance, you’re connected to The Beam most times, aren’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Well. With the right permissions, you could be uploaded at any time — now, tomorrow, when you’re sleeping…whenever. Or parts of you could be uploaded. But of course, that would be terrible. It would be like having sections of your brain cut out, given the fragmentation issue.”
“Oh.”
A snake’s smile crawled onto Purcell’s features. “Luckily, there are safeguards in place to prevent someone from doing that to you. Pretty decent ones…for most users.”
Isaac swallowed.
Purcell clapped his hands and sat up. The sudden change made Isaac jump.
“Anyway!” he said. “You’re going to Braemon’s event. And if you play your cards right, smooth as you are, I’m sure you can arrange a meeting with Vale. To…convince him of some things?”
“What things?”
“Sensible things.”
“How do I — ”
“Let’s just begin with the fundraiser for now, Isaac.”
Isaac nodded. He didn’t like that answer but was in no position to argue. So, when it seemed Purcell was satisfied, Isaac said, “Can I ask a question?”
“For you, Isaac? Anything.”
“How close is Xenia to solving the whole Mindbender thing?”
It was more than curiosity. Now that Purcell had connected a few dots, Isaac’s mind was recalling bits and pieces he’d heard but not understood — revolutionary changes Micah had implied in his grandiose manner, his mother’s lack of concern about things that should be disastrous to the Enterprise Party and Ryan Enterprises but for some reason weren’t. The ideas were big enough to seem frightening. Not knowing, now that he’d seen a piece of the puzzle, was much worse.
“I suppose that depends on who you ask,” Purcell said.
“What if I ask Micah?”
“Why don’t you ask Micah?”
“Or my mother.”
“Again, Isaac. Why not ask your mother?”
After a few seconds, Purcell seemed to realize Isaac wasn’t going to answer rhetorical questions, knowing their answers. Isaac was part of the company and party in name, but no one behaved that way. Asking would only lead to embarrassment.
“I suppose it’s just a matter of figuring out the fragmentation paradigm,” Purcell said. “Solve that, and the only remaining hitches are, in my opinion, philosophy.”
In my opinion. That had the ring of an unexplored corner, and for some reason, Isaac found himself needing to inspect it.
“Not everyone agrees with you then? Do some people think there will be problems even after that iss
ue is solved?”
Purcell stopped straightening a pleat on his pants and looked up, perhaps reaching the limit of patience with Isaac’s impertinent questions about something that was clearly none of his business.
“It’s just superstition.”
“Oh. Okay.” Wishing he hadn’t asked as Purcell stared at him.
But then Purcell, curiously intent, said something odd: “Are you a religious man, Isaac?”
“Not really.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“Do you believe in SerenityBlue?”
“No.” Though he knew, for a fact, that Natasha did. Had seen SerenityBlue on The Beam more than once, she’d said to the accompaniment of Isaac’s derisive laughter.
“What about Noah West?”
That was a stupid question. Without West, who would have created The Beam? Who’d created the world they all lived in?
“Of course I believe in West,” Isaac said. Too late, he realized Purcell had been talking about the church.
Isaac moved to correct himself, but Purcell was already rolling his eyes.
“You sound just like Alexa,” he said.
The kid wouldn’t leave Stephen alone.
Stephen had picked her up while browsing a deep Beam forum, shortly after procuring his black market replacement canvas. As was usually the case in forums, Stephen found the debate perpetually hot, but the participants lonely people with nothing better to do. It wasn’t a hacking forum, or a writer’s forum — as might make sense in his search for Alexa Mathis. It wasn’t a business or alternative marketing forum. It was more like the Null forum: dedicated to nothing but arguing conspiracies. But unlike the Null forum, the place had been all talk and no show. That’s why he’d moved on: because he was learning nothing about Alexa, and Noah’s warning — if it was, in fact, somehow Noah’s warning — had given him a clear impression: Time is short. Move fast.
So he’d left the forum, but the kid had stuck to Stephen like glue.
After the strange Noah avatar had vanished, Stephen had moved away from Vance Pilloud’s Bontauk ruins just in time to see a black drone fly overhead, pausing where he’d made his connection. The Noah avatar he’d encounter on the old canvas might have been anything, but it was right about one thing: Someone was after Stephen York. York could feel the truth of that inside himself — some bit of his old firewall code gone missing, run off to tattle.
So after the drone had moved on, he’d cabled a small Fi attachment to the unearthed fiber line and marched a quarter mile away from the ruins. Using a simple spoof, he launched a refractive echo search on his secondhand handheld that rode beneath the weather control. Then, pinging the hoverbots under the first layer of the Lattice, Stephen watched the drone approach. Eventually, as expected, he saw a second drone show to the east. Both were relaying data: information York couldn’t decode, but that seemed to be in couplets. They were probably relaying coordinates. If so, there’d be a third drone out there somewhere, the three working together to triangulate on something.
Given what he’d felt in his own firewall’s tattletale signature, that something was probably his Beam ID.
The drone’s AI must have been satisfied (or just confused) by his jury-rigged setup because it flew away. That wouldn’t last forever. Whoever was after him, they’d have modern-day information — probably top-tier modern information — whereas Stephen’s was nearly obsolete.
But as one of the network’s creators, York did know something that had never really been public knowledge: The Beam hadn’t actually replaced Crossbrace; it had been built atop Crossbrace. Crossbrace, in turn, had been built atop the Internet. That meant that as old as York’s knowledge was, it was still valuable — because all that old stuff was still in existence, buried deep down.
So he’d gone out. He’d begun his search for Alexa, just as “Noah” had instructed. And this kid — this stubborn, overly eager kid — was his tagalong reward.
Stephen watched the kid’s avatar as they traversed the deep Beam. She stuck out like a human in this place. But the fact that she walked and talked at all among all of this granddaddy AI was at least something worthy of York’s respect.
“You really think you can find her?” the kid asked.
Her voice (artificial, probably nothing like her voice in the real world) was tinny and annoying. But considering that Stephen wasn’t immersed and was simply sitting on the floor staring at a screen, the fact that the kid had found a way to talk out loud to him at all was impressive. She claimed not to be a hacker — just a devout Alexa Mathis fan — but she’d still effortlessly cobbled a floating, reverberating larynx out of the air-filtering nanos flying through the shitty hotel room Stephen had rented with his spoofed ID. The fact that it sounded like anything other than shaking robots made her nearly an adept, in Stephen’s mind. And the way she seemed to have programmed those bots using subtle flashes of his canvas screen? That was downright spooky.
Stephen answered her aloud, having already swept the room for listening devices.
“No, I don’t think I can find her.”
“But you came here. You came to this cluster.”
“I did.”
“Why won’t you immerse?” the kid asked. “It would be easier to navigate if you were in here with me.”
Stephen had no idea who the kid was or what she looked like in the real world, so he’d formed his own idea. He knew only from the age restrictions on her ID that she was younger than the age of Choice, and her voice made him imagine someone aged maybe sixteen or seventeen. Possibly with short, punky hair and a backward cap, as befitting a proper cyber punk.
“This way is easier for me.”
York emphasized for me to remind the girl that she hadn’t been invited on this trip. She’d been tagging along like a lost puppy through three digital clusters already, his search feeling as futile as locating a specific grain of sand on a beach. It wasn’t just painstaking; it was downright futile. He’d explained that to the kid, but still she insisted on following him. Despite his best efforts, he’d been unable to shake her. It was both annoying and troubling. He was supposed to hide from a powerful entity with malicious intentions…but he couldn’t get away from one dumb teenager who’d wouldn’t leave his heels.
“You’re slowing us down, trying to watch code on your screen,” the kid said. “We could search for Alexa faster if you got down here and actually talked to some of them.”
“Talked to whom?”
“Packets, silly.”
The off-handed, it’s-no-big-deal way she said “packets” made Stephen’s skin crawl. Nobody talked about packets as anything but groups of ones and zeros.
“You really should go,” Stephen said. “I have no idea what I’m looking for, but I know I’m not going to find it.”
The floating voice box beside Stephen’s ear gave an excellent imitation of an amused laugh. “Alexa is my life. I don’t care if it takes forever. Your questions about her in the forum were the first new things we’ve seen in…well…ever. I can tell we’re on to something.”
“I am. I am on to something.”
Hearing his own voice, Stephen flinched. He’d been trying to make a point about this being his mission and not hers, but what he’d just said probably smacked of optimism.
“Exactly!” the girl voice said. “So come on down here!”
“Why are you talking about packets like living things?”
“Because they are. You just have to speak their language.”
“Are you sure you’re not a hacker? Not a Beam adept?”
“Are you?”
“I’m just a guy.”
“Well,” she huffed, “I’m just an Alexa fan.”
“But you talk like an adept. Can you really…talk to packets?” He felt stupid saying it.
“Stephen,” she said, “will you please just — ”
“How do you know my name?”
“It’s all over your face.�
�
“You can’t see my face.”
“Not that face.” She laughed.
“What’s your name?” He hadn’t cared to know, but now that she’d said his name, their footing seemed uneven.
“Kimmy.”
“I can’t immerse, Kimmy. Don’t you get it? I don’t have a rig.”
Kimmy paused. Then she said, “Can I try something?”
“Um…”
“Oh, come on,” she said, her voice teasing.
Stephen sighed, sensing futility. “Fine.”
Something stirred in the room, disorienting Stephen. At first, he thought he might pass out, but he wasn’t dizzy; the room really was starting to swim and spin. The walls seemed to crack and splinter, and a moment later he found himself somewhere new. It was a world of blue-and-white lines, tracks of light seeming to run hither and yon, vehicles of some kind zipping overhead and all around. It looked less like a true digital immersion and more like a parody — what people a hundred years ago thought a virtual world might look like, maybe.
Looking at his immediate surroundings, York found himself in some sort of a large transit, like an elevated mag train. The transit’s car — and, now that he looked, the world beyond the windows — was more like a wireframe than something solid. He could see the world shooting past underfoot, as if he were in a glass cage with glowing edges.
To one side was a teenage girl with medium-length brown hair wearing a skintight suit. The suit was all black crossed with light-blue lines. Looking down, he saw a similar outfit on himself.
“How did you do that?” he asked the girl, blinking.
“Do what?”
“How did you bring me here?”
“You were already here. All I did was let you see it.”
“But how?”
She smiled. “It’s pretty simple to see things that are actually happening, silly.”
Balls of light blurred past outside the windows — some large, some small. One by one, the larger balls landed on the digital, blue-lined ground and transformed into giant mechanical insects that began rolling and shambling about. The smaller balls never seemed to land. Instead, they hovered near the larger objects as if accompanying them. They were flying around the transport, too, and as Stephen looked, Kimmy regarded one that had entered their cabin with suspicion.