by Sean Platt
Dominic drew a deep breath, letting the final pieces slot into logical places.
“And since someone seems to be after York these days,” he said, “I’m thinking that whatever poor sucker they find to transport that fake York is looking at some very big trouble.”
Kai’s senses returned, and she found herself in the studio room at Ryu’s bunker. She stood, feeling both anchored and out of place. The last time she’d stood in this room, it had been a simulation. But it had felt no less real than now, and it was difficult to fight the sense that the same thing might happen again.
Nicolai was looking up at Kai, assessing her, practically staring.
“What?” Kai asked.
“Is it real this time?”
“I don’t know,” Kai said. “Try and do some magic.”
Nicolai frowned then stood. “That’s not funny.”
“Ryu didn’t have to worry. That was easy.”
“I don’t know I’d characterize that man as worried,” Nicolai said.
“Worried that he’d have to dispose of our mindless corpses. Worried that we’d get into a loop and not get out then hit a time accelerant and lose years in the blink of real-world seconds inside.”
“Was that ever a danger?” Nicolai asked.
Kai shrugged, already over it. “Ask Ryu. I guess there are spots where you can get stuck when you’re off the official paths of The Beam. But if you’re sharp, I’m thinking you’d figure it out.”
Nicolai looked around the room, still wondering at its reality.
Kai said, “So. Do you have it?”
Nicolai tapped his head.
“Did all of that make sense to you?”
“Sure. Put another man’s identity on like a coat. Makes sense.”
“Did you believe him? I’ve never even heard of Stephen York.”
“He has the feel of veracity. I think I’m getting some of his thoughts.”
“Creepy,” said Kai. “You should offload him. Send him to Quark.”
Nicolai sat back on the chair, its colander lid tipped back. Kai recognized his body language. It was one step above lecture mode, and meant Nicolai was about to lay down some home truths for the benefit of anyone lucky enough to be around and learn from his wisdom.
“I think the question here is do you believe Rachel?”
Kai wasn’t sure how to answer that.
“It’s not an easy choice,” Nicolai went on. “I met her. She has plans within plans within plans. But the people opposing her are men like Micah, who want you to kill her. So do you trust the person giving the order or the woman willing to die?”
“Neither.”
“Then maybe it’s a case of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Or at least aligned goals. You heard what York said about Mindbender. That, I believe. We already know the Beau Monde have technology that’s far above what even we have, just below them. If there’s a higher tier that Micah’s trying to weasel his way into, using you to do it, then of course they’d be working on the next step above the next step.” He patted Ryu’s rig. “The stream in that place was unreal. I know you’d been in a sim like that before, albeit in much nicer rigs, but the same is the same. And I’m telling you, I understand how someone could get stuck on The Beam. You’d never know you weren’t going on with your life, seeing as the reality is so complete and convincing. Even now, I’m not entirely satisfied that we’re not still immersed. That’s how much the idea of what’s possible freaks me out. So if the Beau Monde can do that, why wouldn’t the next level be working on whole-brain uploading, like Mindbender?”
“Carter Vale promised Mindbender for everyone,” Kai said.
“That’s the official version. But what Rachel wants me to upload to Braemon’s canvas?” He tapped his head again, indicating the stored York shell they’d sideloaded, complete with the boson inside it. “That’s about the top-tier version of Mindbender. They’d need to keep it a secret, right? And toss Vale’s public version a bone, and know it’d never get off the ground?”
“Maybe.”
“The question isn’t really whether we should believe Rachel, Micah, or anyone else.” His dark eyes hardened, and his voice sharpened. “I’m through being good, Kai. I was Isaac’s stooge for too long, and I’m damned if I’ll be Micah’s. Fuck them all. I talked to Sterling Gibson, dumping a ton of anonymous info that no one else knows but that I’m sure will make its way around. And then I talked to someone else — a kind of underground reporter who won’t have Gibson’s reservations about discretion. Expect new revelations about the Beau Monde and the Ryans to hit the deep Beam any day now, with proof.”
“Is that who told you to go to Braemon’s event? The reporter?”
Nicolai nodded. “Yes, but he wasn’t the only one. Convenient how it all converged, isn’t it? Micah told me to go, too, with you. I even talked to Kate, who told me the same. Just like Micah told you to go.”
“You talked to Kate?”
Nicolai nodded again.
“That seems like a big coincidence.”
“Exactly, Kai. It’s all a hell of a coincidence. So given all the unseen hands pushing and pulling me these days, I don’t really feel like trying to figure out which master to serve. I want to serve me. And you. We should do what’s best for us, and screw everyone else.”
Kai watched him, touched that she of all people was his sole confidant. She waited for him to take it back, but he kept looking at her with his strong, soulful eyes. He took her small hand with his larger one. She squeezed it.
“Okay. So what’s best for us?”
“Beau Monde.”
“How do we get it?”
“We go as planned, but with our own agenda. Just you and me.”
“Doesn’t it feel dangerous? Trying to breach Braemon’s system?”
“York can do it. I don’t trust Rachel, but I trust her sense of self-preservation — if what she’s preserving is power rather than her own life. Maybe this really is a case of the enemy of our enemy. Or enemies.”
“I meant the whole thing seems dangerous. All these plans. All these hidden motives.”
“We’re already going. I think you’ve decided to do what Rachel wants regardless because she wants it, and so does Micah, making the vote two to one. I told Doc I’d help him, and that’s already dangerous. And I’ve talked to Gibson. And this other guy, this Sam. As long as we put what we need ahead of them, I think we’re as safe as we can be, given the circumstances.”
Kai’s hand moved up Nicolai’s arm. His forearm was thick and firm. She squeezed that, too.
“Doc — Kate — thinks these people she’s in with, Omar and this cop, might double-cross her. Or at least one of them will. I’d rather side with Doc than anyone else other than you. So I say we do it. We pop the lid on Mindbender as York said inside, and you go ahead and take care of Rachel while we’re at it. Maybe that’s what Micah wants and maybe not, but either way we move up…and if we don’t, I have plenty of evidence that could get Micah in an awful lot of trouble.”
Kai watched Nicolai, her head moving slowly up and down. She didn’t really like any of the options either, but Nicolai made some excellent points. In the presence of too many options, you had to forget you could see any of them and simply choose your own. After three sets of nested schemes, all bets were off. You couldn’t consider anyone’s motives. You had to close your eyes, plan your best shot, then take it without flinching.
“So we stroll into the fundraiser tomorrow,” Kai said. “Just like that.”
Nicolai nodded. “Wearing Stephen York like a hat. And if what he said in the Viazo is true, the system will see me as York. All the doors, if we’re lucky, will open.”
“Okay,” Kai said, “but what if what he said isn’t true? What if we’re not lucky?”
Nicolai walked forward and keyed Ryu’s outer door to exit the immersion room.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Sere
nityBlue was looking out one of the false windows in the school’s atrium when the boy entered. He was thirteen and just starting a period of bamboo-like growth. He’d told Serenity that to him, she looked like his mother. That was true of fewer of the children than she’d have thought, but as with anything, their perceptions (or lack thereof) probably had to do with baggage. Many of the children had unresolved issues with their parents, whereas many got along fine. For this boy, nicknamed Wax, the whole issue was much simpler. His mother and father were both dead. It made sense that he’d see her as he did, but that didn’t make Serenity understand it — or know what she should do above and beyond for Wax, if anything.
“Yes, Wax,” Serenity said.
“You asked us to let you know when it was coming together.”
“And is it?”
The boy nodded. “And there’s another thing. With the man we found as Crumb?”
“What about him?”
“Did you experience his awakening? Or was it just the group? I can’t remember.”
“I was there,” Serenity told him.
“It’s like that. Like he appeared again. Would you like some parameters?”
Serenity shook her head. If he gave her search parameters, she’d be able to find Crumb/York’s signature on The Beam — not his location or what he was doing, per se, but the condition of his consciousness, for want of a better phrase — but she’d already seen some of what Wax was telling her. And it was as he’d said. They’d first seen York appear as a beacon, back when he’d first been uncorked and diagnosed at the mountain hospital. Now, it was as if he’d shone a spotlight into the sky. It was like a beacon again, except that instead of merely alighting for Serenity and her children to see, something within York was calling two others to him. That had begun days ago. The two parties seeking Stephen York were getting closer, but Serenity felt no urgency. There were more fish in the pond than York and his pursuers — and these things, complex as they were, had a way of working out in the end. Or at least of revealing patterns and failure points before everything fell apart.
“No, it’s fine. I already have a sense for what’s around Mr. York. The Beam knows who he is now, and it’s welcoming him. Moths are always drawn to flame. And now there are two fires burning.”
“I don’t understand. A second Mr. York?”
“In a way. It’s hard to say. But that is my feeling, yes.”
The boy made a whatever gesture. Everyone here had their strengths. There were things some children were better at than others, and there were things at which Serenity was better or worse than all of them. The children had seen York first, but Serenity had recognized him — or something inside him — as core to the Beam’s beating heart.
“What about the coming together?” she asked.
“It’s as you said. There seems to be a node forming.”
Serenity nodded. They’d already been through this part. “Thank you. But are you able to see its connections to the top world yet?”
“Just the normal connections, if we’re talking lines and Fi. Are you expecting more?”
“Maybe not.” She nodded. “Thank you, Wax.”
“Would you like to see the map?”
Serenity was already dismissing the boy, but she stopped. She was tactile and emotive, whereas some of the children were better at seeing patterns, watching the flow of power and other energies, or juggling digital matter. Some were artists, making something from nothing. Wax was best with things he could visualize, so his skill set had gone to mapmaking and topology. Most of the children and Serenity saw the layered networks as differing forms of reality: the world you walked and talked in, that you browsed with others beneath a core of agreed-upon rules. But Wax and a few others couldn’t stop seeing underpinnings. There was a wireframe beneath even the most real virtual worlds. Where Serenity saw and felt trees, someone like Wax saw the code history that had created it. Where some heard the roar of machines, Wax saw the movement of electrons driving speakers.
“How centralized is your map?”
“Pretty centralized,” Wax answered. “It’s quite a nexus.”
“What’s the center?”
“Much of it is tomorrow, almost all in the city.”
Serenity exhaled, feeling a spike of nerves. She’d known something was coming together, and the children had been watching it for weeks, alerting her to every new development. But the science was inexact. The network in District Zero was made of sensory and mental streams from millions of users, and Serenity could see the Internet of Things those millions of inputs had made and continued to update. There was a city inside The Beam inside the city, each of the twin worlds referring to and dependent upon the other, like the unending single side of a Möbius strip. It meant that while people affected the network’s dataset, the dataset and the intelligences parsing it affected the people as well. There were times when the formation of eddies and nodes like this coming one seemed almost predestined, but sometimes human free will shifted and slashed them apart, or formed them faster. Sometimes. Often, it was the unseen collaborative hand of the AI sifting Beam data and handing it back to the population that was in charge.
Free will went both ways, but neither breed (human to machine or machine to human) had nudged this knot off its trajectory. If there was a failing in Serenity’s predictions for how soon the nexus was coming, it was that she’d assumed less inevitability.
“Yes, please,” she said. “I’d like to see whatever map you have.”
Wax gave a small smile then stood in front of Serenity and put his fingers together as if shaking his own hand. He pulled the hands apart, and what looked like taffy made of light stretched between them. He turned his palms flat, and the taffy grew, becoming a large mess of interconnected blue lines.
“This is the city? Tomorrow?”
Wax nodded. He didn’t give the caveat he might have offered an outsider. Of all people, Serenity understood that every prediction was exactly that: a prediction. There was no guarantee of anything she was seeing. It was only a guess. But knowing Wax and the others, it was probably an excellent guess.
“Here’s now, for reference,” he said.
The boy didn’t move, but a second mess of lines overlaid the first. The new map was about the same shape as the first, only much larger. Lines on the overlay were yellowish orange rather than blue. Standing back to take in both maps — today’s and tomorrow’s — Serenity thought it looked like the orange blob had swallowed the blue one. A brain inside a brain.
“This is just one day’s difference?”
Wax nodded. “That’s why I wanted to give you the update. It’s changing so fast.”
“How sure are you about this?”
“It’s moving too quickly to be sure,” the boy said, “but a bomb is a bomb.”
Serenity looked closer. With some perspective, she could see that the blue network was much tighter than she’d thought. They were only looking at one section of the grid — a subset of connections that the children had seen change as something coalesced. The city grid as a whole was much larger and more random-seeming than this one forming node, and The Beam as a whole was impossibly massive. But in this one small grouping, something was indeed becoming far too intertwined.
“Why is it happening, do you think?”
“I was hoping you’d have ideas,” said Wax.
Serenity had plenty of ideas. She just wasn’t sure what to make of them. Wax had said “bomb” in an offhand manner, but to Serenity, this looked almost literally like an explosion in reverse. The Beam had begun as its own Big Bang. In a small and limited way, it looked like this subset of inputs was headed for its own Big Crunch.
“What’s this?” Serenity pointed to a rash of small dots in Wax’s map.
“Drone inputs, I think. They keep moving, and it’s too fast for people.”
“City Surveillance? Police?”
“Dunno. But if I had to guess, I think this over here is Mr. York.”
Serenity squinted as if her eyes actually mattered in seeing the answer. There was a tangled mess within the larger knot, but the place Wax was indicating was mostly cut from the rest of the web. It was bright — augmented, surely, by Wax’s construct because he thought it was important. The art of wireframe mapping wasn’t in Serenity’s skill set. She was a floater, not a plotter. Unfortunately, though, there’d been less floating lately. She’d seen her area of focus drifting away as if dragged toward a drain.
“If that’s Stephen, who is this with him?” She poked at a second point beside York’s.
“Hard to say. Someone who’s feeding a lot to The Beam for sure, but…” Wax squinted as Serenity had, “…but it kind of looks like a mapmaker.”
“Like you?”
“Maybe. If you understand that what you see makes The Beam as much as The Beam sometimes makes what you see, things kind of turn in on themselves. See?”
Serenity moved closer. The bundle near the supposed York bundle was almost like a miniature donut with an incomplete hole. If the lines represented I/O streams, this one seemed to be both giving and receiving on the same channels, at the same time. But again: not Serenity’s specialty.
“It’s not someone here at the school?” Serenity said.
“I’ve asked around. No. But even so, we’d see a kind of beacon. This over here is me looking into the knot.” He pointed to a thin ribbon, denoting both observation and passive causation, jutting from both clouds’ edges.
“Oh. You leave your own investigations on the maps you make?”
“If I remove them, the map changes.”
“But it’s just omitting a line. The map doesn’t change.”
“If you change intention, the map always changes.”
Serenity considered debating further, but mapmaking wasn’t most important now. “So it’s not someone here. An autonomous mapmaker? Have we been watching this one?”
Wax nodded. “Archive has.”
“Did you ask Archive about it?”