The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  Kate felt a burst of resentment. “You aren’t going behind my back, are you?”

  “West, Doc. Relax. No. It’s…I’ll tell you later.”

  “And now? You don’t even look like who you are.”

  “Also complicated. Also, I’ll tell you later.”

  “Maybe you tell me now. We had a deal, Nicolai.”

  “Look…you wanted to get into Braemon’s system, right? That’s the whole idea?”

  “Yeah.” Now Nicolai had her attention.

  “I think I may have a key. I’m…I’m kind of wearing my own ‘Doc’ right now, too. You saw it when the call connected with video instead of audio-only like usual. I think it’s defaulting to the shell’s settings instead of mine.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You’ll see. But there’s a bonus. Something I got that could really turn things end for end. You know this stuff with Mindbender?”

  “What President Vale said at the Primes?” Something clicked, and Kate added, “Wait. You know Vale’s supposedly going to this thing? Does it have something to do with him?”

  “I don’t think so.” But then Nicolai paused too, as if only now considering it. Doc was used to duplicitous assholes and double-dealing, whereas Nicolai, despite his tough-guy stories of traveling through the East with a crossbow, wasn’t one. If there was now another party in the mix pretending to give Nicolai keys and Mindbender gifts, Kate didn’t trust him to riddle out the motives on his own.

  “But now you do, huh? Tell me more, Nicolai. Who’d you talk to? This reporter guy?”

  “No. Not him. Someone else.”

  “Then who?”

  “I’ll tell you in person.”

  “This line is secure as it’s gonna get,” Kate said, growing annoyed. The knot had got tangled enough already without adding new loose ends

  “In person. Look. I’ve gotta go. Anything else I absolutely need to know?”

  “Maybe you can tell me what you had to say about this Mindbender thing.”

  “I’ll tell you that in person, too. But the more I think about it, after checking out your Omar character, the Mindbender wrinkle seems like the kind of thing that might make a good ulterior motive.”

  “Something Omar wants to get and sell?” Kate said. “While selling us out?”

  “I’m just considering all the options.”

  Kate nodded in the empty office. Nicolai was right. If this event somehow involved both Mindbender and Vale, that was the kind of perfect storm Omar Jones might be very interested in, if he’d seen it coming in advance and not bothered to inform his so-called partners.

  “Okay. Fine. But there’s another wrinkle, if you want to tell me anything at all in person. Omar’s currently up his own ass about it, which maybe makes me think he’s not as mad-genius as I’ve been afraid of. Looks like, with Vale coming to the event as some sort of Directorate emissary, there’s going to be an extra layer of security. I guess Captain Long might be able to get us in as planned, but if people start looking into it and wonder why he allowed some hustler and his whore into the year’s biggest party…”

  “Hang on,” Nicolai said. “I want to try something.”

  Kate waited. On the other end of the line, she heard tapping, as if Nicolai was using his canvas. After thirty seconds, she was about to ask him what he was up to when there was a commotion outside the office, at the other end of Omar’s long hallway. Kate could hear footsteps quickly approaching.

  “Did that do it?” Nicolai asked.

  Kate’s attention was on the footsteps. If Omar caught her talking to Nicolai — or, West forbid, whoever’s shell Nicolai was wearing like a disguise — her advantage would be gone. And maybe Omar would find he had no use for her after all.

  “I gotta go,” Kate said, already slapping at the screen.

  “But did that work? Did you get a notice that you’re — ”

  The call ended as Kate looked up at the opening door, her face surely guilty.

  Omar’s expression, as he came in, was puzzled. “What you doin’ in my office, Katie?”

  “Nothing,” Kate said, fooling no one.

  But, shocking her, Omar didn’t press. A wide white smile slit his dark complexion in half.

  “Get your best dress on, sweetheart,” he said, holding up his handheld. “Our temporary security issue is solved. I just got an official invitation to the shindig from my old buddy Craig, and I’m allowed a plus one.”

  Kate was about to ask Omar if the last-minute arrival of an invitation struck him as suspicious, but his eyes seemed firmly on the prize. If he’d been telling the truth all along, they were all on the cusp of Beau Monde at long last. If he’d been lying, his eyes were wide for a bigger reward.

  A last-minute invitation.

  Whatever key someone had given Nicolai, it looked like it unlocked doors after all.

  Things were looking up, and maybe everyone was about to come out smelling like roses.

  “Canvas! BEAM CENTRAL SUPPORT!”

  Sam was experiencing a strange sense of doubling. On one hand, his previously wired, newly reconnected mental hardware was caught in the hole he’d somehow stumbled into, The Beam’s rough edges holding him in a curious and looping gravity well. This part of Sam’s mind wanted to believe the reality he saw and felt around him: his apartment, permanently at 4:16 p.m. on the day before the big Respero fundraiser, and following a Nicolai Costa trail that never got closer. But on the other hand, Sam was fully aware that he was stuck…and that if he didn’t keep trying to rock the boat, he’d be stuck until his money ran out or he died of dehydration in a Starbucks cubicle. And that part of him didn’t like this one tiny bit.

  For one, Sam’s mind was trapped, and that was bad.

  But for another, Nicolai Costa was heading — or, depending on how much time had passed, had already headed — into a trap, and that was worse. Integer7 had said it, and now Sam’s own intuition was screaming. He’d spent the last six years paranoid, sweating unseen eyes and conspiracies. Now that one such conspiracy had borne authentic fruit, Sam’s and Shadow’s usually loud and disruptive mouths were stuffed with cotton, unable to escape a Beam loop.

  A terminal window opened on Sam’s small screen and filled with hex code — another splinter of microfragment AI, belching its garbage his way. A halting, artificial voice crackled through his cochlear implant. “Access support with the command, ‘Beam central support.’”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying, you shitter!” Sam yelled, seeing his room and trying to force his mind into recognizing it as a Starbucks cubicle. “BEAM MOTHERFUCKING CENTRAL SUPPORT!”

  “This is Beam support.” The new voice was either a human woman or a realistic-sounding AI support agent.

  “I’ve encountered a loop,” Sam said, fighting a sense of relief, trying to stay calm and collected. He wondered if last night’s Lunis hit was wearing off. He felt scattered, like he usually felt. Not nearly as in control. Not nearly as cool.

  “Please state your name and specific error.”

  So formal. AI, not human.

  “My name is Sam Dial, and I’m stuck in a hole.”

  “Mr. Dial, I’m showing your line as fully functional. But if you’d like to double check the following troubleshooting steps, I can walk you through them. First, I’m showing that your canvas unit is hardwired, so unplug it now, and then re-plug it. You will lose contact with me but once you reconnect — ”

  “I know how to unplug and replug my connection,” Sam interrupted. “That’s not the issue. The issue is the loop.”

  “I’m not showing a loop, Mr. Dial. I’m showing that you are accessing The Beam through a 2085 standalone console unit with extensive modifications and a power switch. Perhaps power cycling your unit will — ”

  “I know how to turn my shit on and off! It’s the loop! I’m stuck in a motherfucking hole!”

  “There’s no need for profanity, sir,” the agent chided. “I’m sensing fractur
ed biometric data. Your heart rate is rising, and your brainwaves appear erratic. I would like to suggest calming breaths.”

  “Calming breaths?”

  “In over a count of three, hold one second, out over a count of six. Please breathe with me now.”

  Sam shoved the console away, stood, and furiously paced. He kicked the table. He punched the wall. Both strikes hurt his foot and hand, respectively. Onscreen, the connection icon indicated that the support agent was still waiting patiently for her customer to get over his irrational hissy fit.

  Maybe he was being irrational.

  His foot and hand did hurt, after all. And this did look like his apartment. Everything seemed solid enough. Why would he have gone to a Starbucks? He thought he’d gone, but he was cheap, poor, and surrounded by evidence to the contrary.

  The longer he looked around, the clearer his conviction felt.

  He’d taken Lunis.

  He was, admittedly, scattered by nature.

  So what was more likely? That he’d become fixed in some sort of a hyper-realistic, mind-invading Beam glitch that had fabricated an elaborate hallucination as good as any simulation? That he’d been invaded by microfragments that had reprogrammed his sense of time and place? Was that paranoid, bizarre idea honestly the truth?

  Or was it, instead, more likely that it was midafternoon the day before Craig Braemon’s party and that he was in his apartment, chasing Nicolai’s signature?

  Sam’s door opened. Nicolai Costa entered, appearing to have been shot in the face with a slamgun. His head was barely there, but his lips managed to say, “Thanks a lot, asshole.”

  Then he was gone, and Sam found himself no longer standing, now sitting tall in his chair, cracking his knuckles, and adjusting his screen.

  “Dammit, BEAM CENTRAL SUPPORT!” Sam suddenly bellowed, his calm shattering. “BEAM CENTRAL SUPPORT, MY NAME IS SAM DIAL, AND I’M STUCK IN A HOLE!”

  With his fractured mind — half at 4:16 p.m. the day before the party and half at some point in the unknown future — Sam felt a clock continue to tick, millimeters from a midnight Armageddon.

  Kai emerged from Nicolai’s bedroom. He thought she looked like something out of a game.

  Nicolai hadn’t grown up playing video games, considering how many of his formative years had been spent clawing through the remains of a decaying Europe, but he’d seen plenty and played a few early on. To his eye now, Kai looked like an artist’s conception of the perfect combination of danger and beauty.

  She was wearing typical Kai seduction gear but had added a heavy touch of class. She was in fire-engine red heels, tall but not overly so, strapped to her foot at the ankle with an extra loop of synthetic leather. Her dress was red to match. It came to well below her knees, almost to the shoe straps, and flowed at the bottom hem with a long slit up one leg that made it nearly to her upper thigh. Higher up, the garment hugged Kai’s slight curves, accentuating what God, nanotechnology, and a lot of training had given her. The dress had thin straps and non-gratuitous cleavage that still showed off her smallish assets.

  Her lipstick was the same shade as dress and shoes, set off by deceptively meager eye shadow and mascara. She’d used real makeup, Nicolai thought, rather than letting her cosmetic add-ons do the work for her. A subtle nod to ways of the past. Among the elite classes, applied cosmetics were a rarity. Why bother with painting your face when your canvas could instantly put color exactly where you wanted? But Kai did little without meaning, and if Nicolai had to guess, this particular game of facial dress-up was for Rachel’s benefit — or in tribute. The Ryan boys’ mother had been around for a century and a half. When she’d been trying to look pretty, she hadn’t had the options of a modern woman.

  But when Kai moved, Nicolai could see a black something on her leg, behind the swaying slit, that reminded him of a holster — for an old firearm, for a newer gun, for something. The way she’d done her eyes made her a specific kind of sexy: a praying mantis breed of seductive that told a man she’d kill him, yes…but he’d almost go willingly, under her expert hand. Her chestnut-brown hair was up in a complicated knot without a single loose end. And of course there was the way she moved that brought it all together: like a cat, stalking a mouse.

  “Shit,” Nicolai told her. “You look…good.”

  He thought Kai would reply with her trademark sarcasm, but instead she almost blushed and thanked him. These past weeks had changed their relationship in strange ways. They’d been through torture; he’d forgotten the torment; they’d had their memories modified, fled the modern Mafia, and turned social saboteurs. They were tied to others in a web: Kai to Doc, Nicolai to Doc, both of them to Micah, Micah to Rachel, Rachel to Isaac, Isaac to Carter fucking Vale. Nicolai had been sent to Braemon’s by three different parties: Sam Dial, Micah Ryan, and Kate, who’d once been Doc. His mission could be one of several, and he still didn’t know which way to go.

  And today? Today, they planned to create a power vacuum for one of their enemies to fill, in the hopes that it would open a new one a rung lower for Kai, Nicolai, and maybe Kate/Doc to grab. Kate brought baggage in the form of Omar and the cop, but those were a few of the million loose ends and potential pitfalls surrounding Nicolai today. He was wearing another man’s ID, could now open Beam doors that should have been far above his pay grade, and might hold the secret to unlocking the most powerful technology the world had ever seen.

  Compared to the twin ideas of validating Project Mindbender and cracking Shift open like a walnut, Kai killing a woman who was well past her expiration date felt like a small thing. Looking at her now, Nicolai — who’d done his share of justified murder — found no room or reason to judge.

  “You look pretty sexy yourself,” Kai said.

  Nicolai nodded his thanks. He’d slapped on a tuxedo after a quick shower. His nanobots had done the rest.

  “Did it feel like dressing that Steve guy? Or are you still Nicolai?”

  Kai walked forward and put her hands around Nicolai’s waist, just inches between them. He shrugged, playing along.

  “I don’t know. Nicolai couldn’t have sent out party invitations to Kate and her buddy.”

  “Omar Jones?”

  “Apparently. You don’t know him, do you?”

  “I think I met him once or twice when…” She trailed off, and Nicolai knew she was trying to be discreet. It seemed strange to back away from Kai’s profession considering he’d helped her refresh the deadly cloned blood under her nails that she’d be using to stop Rachel Ryan’s clock, but right now she didn’t seem eager to discuss sleeping with Omar.

  “Through Doc,” she finished, her brown eyes flicking away before returning to Nicolai. “But no, I don’t really know him.”

  “I looked up a bit while you were getting ready. Seems as slippery as…as Kate said,” Nicolai told Kai, still stumbling over Kate and Doc’s confusing identity. “But this Steve York suit Rachel gave us has a lot of bells and whistles. It’s like I have backdoor access to half of The Beam. I have prison records in my web. Looks like Omar once shared a span of incarceration with one Craig Braemon in Flat 4. The island prison, in the Great Lake?”

  “So you think Kate is right? That Omar’s planning some kind of double-cross?”

  “I don’t know. I’m getting lost here. How many times do you have to double-cross back and forth before you’re right back where you started? Omar and Kate might be after the same thing in the end, even if Omar’s version of how it’s supposed to work is a lie. And it probably is. Kate has a shell, too, like my York suit. But hers is Doc. What kind of a plan is that? He…she…says Omar thinks Doc’s strange absence from the network will give him access to things he shouldn’t have. So does he really think it will work? Or is Omar after something else…and does that something else end up looping back to something Doc would have agreed to all along?”

  Kai put a thumb and forefinger to her forehead. “I’m getting a headache trying to keep it all straight.”

&nbs
p; Nicolai, nervous but feeling that this web of lies had to collapse soon, pulled Kai into a half embrace.

  “Well, tell your nanos to fix it,” he said, smiling, feeling her warmth against him, “because we need to catch a cab. It’s showtime.”

  Shadow wasn’t responding.

  Leah checked her inbox repeatedly, somehow sure that all of her notification systems were experiencing errors. Shadow should respond to her pings. He would if he was who Leah thought he was — and not who Dominic had implied. But Dominic had to be wrong.

  Everything he’d spooled out earlier (Omar’s many allegiances, most of which were to himself, Kate, some guy named Doc, another guy named Nicolai) seemed to Leah like an overly complicated puzzle. There was a fake Stephen York out there somewhere? Really? Leah barely knew the real Stephen York, and it’s not like he was high-profile. Why would he be worth duplicating in most people’s minds — especially for Omar Jones’s purposes, of all people?

  But despite all that perfectly rational logic, Shadow still hadn’t responded to n33t’s message. Shadow, like his name, had gone suspiciously dark.

  And there was the other thing. The thing she’d rationalized not telling Dominic because Dominic would only take it the wrong way. The thing she’d discovered when she’d been out on The Beam, blindly searching for some evidence of a decoy York, whatever that might be.

  She hadn’t mentioned it because it was nothing — but if she told Dominic, it would only give him ideas.

  It had made sense to check in with SerenityBlue. And why not? Her errand for Dominic was ridiculous and only required lip service. So she’d checked in with the school. And sure, she could ask Serenity about the idea of a York shell because Serenity had helped uncork York in the first place, and because she seemed to know freaky shit about The Beam in the same way Leah did.

  A Stephen York clone? Har-har. No, of course Serenity had never heard of such a thing. The idea was ridiculous.

  But oh, by the way, it did seem like someone out there was looking for Stephen York. No big deal, though.

  And also (just because it was worth mentioning as a surely-not-an-issue coincidence), Serenity had added that there was also a big Beam knot that seemed to center on Braemon’s party, with an unseen hand pulling the strings. But hey: probably no big deal either.