by Sean Platt
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Noah. You got a little reprieve, and for a while I suppose you’ll be a hero — at least within the NAU. Same as Clive was a hero, though that fucker is charming enough to keep selling everyone on the idea that his shit doesn’t stink even after he got the world to build his moon station and pay for it then let him keep what he had, safe over here while his home burned in the East. But you, you’re not charming. You’re an asshole.”
Noah considered contradicting Iggy but decided not to bother.
“So if you want to replace Crossbrace with something even bigger, you have to pull off what Clive did with the Mare Frigoris base…but even harder, you have to make it seem like it was barely your idea. That you had a vision but knew it couldn’t happen, and somehow you pulled it off anyway.”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” Noah said.
“Well, right. That’s where the story comes in. And who’s better at telling stories than me?”
Noah watched Iggy. He was long, tall, and awkward. He had a huge nose and a messy head of hair. Storytelling was Iggy’s thing. Noah supposed he had to give him something.
“How have those in power led armies to kill people they don’t know for centuries, always at the risk of their lives? By telling them God wants them to do it. By telling them that the country is depending on them.”
“Propaganda,” said Noah.
“Stories,” Iggy argued. “Stories about religion and patriotism. ‘If you die for the cause, you’ll save those you love from evil.’ Because the enemy is always evil. They’re never just people in a distant land; they’re evil. Maybe you’ll go to Valhalla. Maybe you’ll be rewarded with a harem of virgins. Hell, Clive had a story, right? Why do you think his company is called For the People? Because For Clive’s Bank Account doesn’t have the same ring to it. He told everyone that if they could build that array and look back to the beginning of time, it’d give humanity a common cause. Or look at Alexa. Do you think O could have got away with the shit it did if they hadn’t spun all those yarns about sexual liberation and freedom? Hell, I don’t even know half the alter egos Alexa has out there. She has fake activists trying to establish that not screwing O girls on their sex islands and not buying O toys and sims is tantamount to repressing every woman who’s ever lived. You think you can change the world without a great story? Think again.”
Noah stood. He crossed to Iggy’s bookcase — which, like Ben Stone’s desk when Noah had begun his journey, was lined with small cartoon figures. One was a blue platypus with a fedora. Now what the hell was that? He almost wanted to ask, but it was never a good idea to get Iggy started.
“Okay. So how do I tell a story?”
“First of all,” Iggy said, “you have to remember that the story can’t be about you. The story that drove the Crusades wasn’t about kings and queens and popes; it was about the destiny of nations and Heaven. Clive’s story wasn’t about Clive; it was about giving the world something to work toward that just so happened to benefit Clive Spooner, and he just piggybacked on Terrence Ferris’s PR campaign for the Doodad. ‘Everyone can join the worldwide conversation? Awesome; now let’s put our heads together “For the People.”’ Or Take Alexa. O’s story wasn’t and isn’t, ‘We have the best sex toys and porn.’ It’s, ‘We’re evolved enough as a people that we deserve a new standard and a new understanding of freedom.’ And don’t even get me started on what Rachel pulled off with the NAU itself.”
That got Noah’s attention. His head flicked toward Iggy, still smiling his idiot’s smile.
“Come on, Noah. Enterprise and Directorate? Rachel’s own sons moving up each of those party’s ranks? Don’t tell me that doesn’t seem convenient. And beneficial to Ryan Enterprises, among other things.”
Pieces of a vast puzzle were sliding into place inside Noah’s mind. He’d always wondered why Iggy was part of Panel, regardless of the empires he’d built. Noah liked the man, but his talents had always seemed peripheral, central to nothing. Now he was seeing something he’d been blind to before.
“Did you have something to do with For the People’s PR? Or O’s? Or…Rachel’s?”
“You tell me, Noah. You’re the one who asked if you could pick my brain.”
Noah’s head cocked, more pieces slotting into place.
Before he could speak, Iggy smiled and said, “Or maybe it wasn’t actually your idea after all.”
“What’s in this for you, Iggy?”
The tall man shrugged playfully, his faux-serious demeanor evaporating in an instant. “I get to change the world. Not many people get to do that.”
“So what’s my story?”
Iggy became thoughtful. He moved to a chair and sat on its arm. One long finger went to his chin.
“What you said before,” he began. “About being a digital being?”
Noah nodded.
“You were talking about how a person would have to leave the physical world to enter the digital one. To die.”
“That’s the idea behind Mindbender. Copying minds to digital form, so people could still live after their body dies.”
“As a brain in a vat,” Iggy said.
“With the new network, it’s a bit more than that.”
“With whatever is next.”
Noah nodded again. “Crossbrace won’t support anything like it. It’d only be bandwidth on Crossbrace. There’s nothing emergent there, so there’d be no room for emergence. No precedence.”
Iggy seemed deep in thought. Then he said. “You’re sick, Noah.”
“It’s not sick. It’s visionary.” Noah could hear his own defensiveness.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” he said, waving dismissively. “I mean that’s part of the story: that you’re sick. Right now, nobody knows about your tragic illness, but in a few years, I’m sure it’ll come out. It’ll be leaked. You’re terminal, actually. Beyond the ability of life extension treatments to help you.”
“Terminal?”
Iggy shrugged. Noah waited while he scratched his cheek thoughtfully, trying to hold down the disturbing feeling the word “terminal” had dredged up inside. The idea of dying and moving into digital form had been Noah’s own, but he was still young, and the plan was more long term than that: to record his life then pass on at the end — not into nothingness, but into a digital Heaven. Iggy’s idea sounded more immediate. But still Noah tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, willing to hear what the storyteller had in mind.
“Okay,” Iggy finally said. “Here’s what I’m thinking. This can’t just be about you, obviously. But you can and should be at the center of it. You’ll need to be a reluctant hero, seeing as your normal personality is so repugnant. You have the world’s attention now, but you’re no Clive. Smile for me, Noah.”
Noah felt caught off guard but smiled anyway.
Iggy made a face. “Exactly. You look like you’re ready to eat babies. Your public image is shit, and you’re just not attractive enough. Steve is even worse, and it’s not like you could let him out from under his NDA now because that’ll make you look terrible. So ‘tragic genius’ is our best chance. That’s the center of it all. But what’s the bigger story?”
“No idea.”
Iggy didn’t seem to hear him. He wasn’t asking; he was thinking aloud.
“How about manifest destiny? Is that too played out?”
“You mean arguing that the NAU deserves to rule the whole world?”
Iggy shook his head as if Noah had made an argument rather than asking a question.
“You’re right. Too hegemonic. But Crossbrace is NAU-only, so The Beam would be NAU-only too, right?”
“It has to be. Their networks in the East are in such terrible shape, it’d take too much to get them up to speed. Not to mention their puppet governments.”
“Okay. Well, we’re already calling them the Wild East. That was a great idea.”
“Whose idea?” Noah asked.
But Iggy was rolling. “So the Wild East gets wilder. We won’t even need to create footage; drones are providing plenty of videos of genuine atrocity. Did you know they have a guy over there named Petra the Cannibal?” Iggy didn’t let Noah reply. “Anyway, keep demonizing the East, no problem. They don’t deserve Crossbrace or this new thing. No reason to feel bad about it. And the humanitarian groups? I know some character assassination stuff we can do. And I’ll talk to NPS. Get public sentiment in favor of doubling down inside the borders. But we…”
Iggy paused with a hand raised, thinking. Then it dropped.
“What?” Noah asked.
“I was thinking that might be an angle. Escape as a story. But evasion is way less compelling than moving toward something. Again: too hegemonic or maybe just cowardly. But what about…wait, this could be it. Hang on.”
The hand went back out. A finger went up, pensive.
“Okay. Ascension. Or maybe evolution is better. You see what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“You can’t just argue for building a better network, whether you’re dying or not. Because that’s what I figure we do to kick this off: you die.”
“Now wait a minute…”
“And so you’re the test case, but…well, you can’t just call back down from the cloud and tell everyone it’s great from up there. What about…oh, wait, this could be great. How do you feel about being a ghost story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, do you really think you can just upload yourself to Crossbrace? For real?”
“Not Crossbrace. The Beam.”
“You really think that’s possible? Like, in your lifetime?”
“Of course I do.”
“It’s fine,” Iggy said, clearly not buying it. “You don’t need to actually pull it off. You just need to be working toward it. To save your own life because you’re terminally ill.” Then, excitedly, Iggy snapped in Noah’s face. “Oh! And because you want the NAU to evolve away from the East. Get it?”
“I just want support to get The Beam online,” Noah said.
“Right, but you won’t. Not anytime soon. You’ll need to use your own money. I’ll invest, and let’s face it: You can siphon right off York’s account because he’ll never spend it. I think we can do some creative bookkeeping to divert some of Quark while keeping the right public face. Eventually, you’ll admit to working on this Beam project, but it can happen around the time you admit that you’re dying. You and York will already have a big head start by then. And the official line — on the level of a rumor, of course — becomes not just that you want to make a better network, but that you’re trying to get all of humanity online. All of the NAU, at least. What’s the project name? Mind Game?”
“‘Mindbender.’”
“Perfect. We leak the name. We don’t connect the dots. We seed the deep web forums, like Null. Get them putting the pieces together the way we want them to, and they’ll decide that because you’re dying, you’re trying to save your own life with Mindbender. But like all good selfish efforts, it’s being commercialized and ultimately brought to everyone’s use via the free market economy. ‘Mindbender is a reality for everyone.’ Meanwhile, officially, everyone denies it all — which will be easy, because only a few of us will know it’s a fabrication. Rumors hidden in rumors. Everyone starts to believe it’s true because it’s being so vehemently and believably denied. Make sense?”
“Shit, Iggy. Sounds so complicated.”
“Says the man who wants to rebuild Crossbrace, again, better. Don’t worry about it. You handle The Beam. I’ll handle the story.”
“And Eli. Eli should really be able to help.”
Iggy shook his head. “No, Noah. Just you and me. Panel can’t know.”
“Why not?”
“They’re part of the story. Especially Alexa. And they’re shit actors.”
“How are they part of the story? And what with Alexa?”
Iggy smiled. “Again, Noah. This is my territory.”
“So…you think I just begin?” Noah wasn’t sure, but Iggy was right: He’d come to the storyteller without thinking because something inside him believed that Iggy — and Iggy alone — could help him pull this off. If what he’d implied was true about his work behind Alexa, Clive, and maybe the NAU itself through Rachel, then it would work. If only he was sure of his own role — and if he, too, wasn’t just part of the story, blind to the storyteller’s tricks.
Iggy nodded. “Just start working. Assume the funding will keep coming and that you’ll get public support when you need it. We’ll wait a while then leak the idea of Mindbender. It’ll be a speck of a thought, so amateur hackers everywhere will 1: start attacking Quark to get more information, which I’ll have in place for them to discover ahead of time and 2: begin working on the problem themselves. The hive-mind, crowd-sourced culture is already entrenched; they’ll share like they did for the lunar base, but underground. You can skim the best for your own project. It won’t matter if you pull it off. It’s the idea of evolution — for everyone — that’s key.”
That didn’t sound right. Evolution (and yes, The Beam seemed to almost require and pave the way for evolution) meant “survival of the fittest.” If everyone evolved, that meant evolution was broken.
“It’s just a story,” Iggy said, seeing Noah’s face. “There’s the story, and then there’s the truth.”
“Which is which?” Noah asked, a bit lost down Iggy’s rabbit holes.
“The story is that you died as The Beam went online. That you were Mindbender’s first attempt, but that something went wrong. Only a lot of people think nothing went wrong at all, and that you’re still out there. Waiting. Watching.” He smiled. “Do you see why Alexa can’t know?”
“But what about — ” Noah began, ready to list the first of a thousand loose ends Iggy had failed to consider. It wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever was.
Iggy cut him off, still smiling. “The thing you’ll learn about telling a good story is that in the beginning, even the storyteller doesn’t know how it will all turn out.”
Noah sighed. He was hardly new to uncertainty, and he did trust his own abilities. His vision was firm and had been from the start. Did it really matter what web of lies Iggy spun to make it happen? Not really, so long as the funding stayed fresh and nobody stood in his way.
“I’ll tell Steve about The Beam project on Monday,” Noah said, already imagining the crestfallen but obedient way York would react to the news that their work together was far from over.
“Good. Steve is your ally.”
It was such an obvious thing to say that Noah, having turned away, looked back to meet Iggy’s eyes. There was more to what Iggy had to say, but like a true dramatist, he was waiting for the gravitas of a proper reveal.
“What? Of course you need allies,” Iggy said, smirking. “Because surely you realize The Beam will need enemies, too?”
Leo woke with a world-ending headache.
Opening his eyes was difficult. Rolling his head to the side was even harder. He rolled a few times anyway, tolerating the pounding and the way his neck tendons seemed to creak in an attempt to unfreeze frozen joints. He squinted the entire time, fighting the feeling of a lance stabbing his brain.
It wasn’t until Leo was sitting upright that he realized something interesting: his head hurt, but it was more or less clear.
“Leo? You hear me in there?” came an echoey voice.
Leo took a few moments before responding. The voice was coming from somewhere high up, and when he craned his pained head to look, Leo saw it was coming from an ancient speaker that looked something like a bullhorn.
“Is that you, Dominic?” Leo asked the speaker.
There must have been an input somewhere, because the voice seemed to hear him.
“Yeah. Are you…are you okay?”
The hesitance in Dominic’s question made Leo’s eyes narrow. He’d known Dominic forever. He’d practically raised
him. He’d accepted one Respero refugee from him early in Organa’s history, then another, in Crumb, later on. Sometimes, Leo had a hard time seeing Dominic as more than the kid he’d been when Leo had been the teacher and Dominic had been the student. And now, look where they’d ended up: with Dominic sounding tentative, as if Leo were a bomb about to explode.
“My head hurts.”
“And your hand?”
The question caught Leo by surprise. He looked at his hand (the left, resting on his leg) and was about to respond with a question of his own when he saw the blood. There were great pools of it along the walls, tracked around as if someone had paced through it. He was in some sort of a concrete room with a metal door. It couldn’t be Plasteel because there was a wrinkled dent in its middle that looked recent. In the dent’s center — and, now that he looked, in the heart of several pits around the room’s block walls — were splats of crimson.
Leo’s left hand felt fine, but his right was aching. He assumed it was because he was still halfway sitting on it and it had gone numb, but when he fished the hand out, the sight of it almost made him pass out again. His fist hurt to flex. His flesh was mostly gone, turned to mashed hamburger squeezed between bright chrome-plated metal fingers. Caked blood covered the appendage and his sleeve almost entirely.
“We’re limited on first aid here,” speaker-Dominic said. “I gave you a shot of repair nanos, but I don’t know if it’s enough for the job you did on yourself.”
“Where are you, Dom? Come in here so we can talk face to face.”
After a moment of hesitation Dominic said, “Let’s just keep talking this way for a bit, if that’s okay with you.”
“But where are you?”
“There’s a control room. For monitoring.”
“I mean, where are we?”
Leah’s voice, small, as if beside Dominic but not talking into the microphone: “Just tell him. What’s he going to do?”