by Sean Platt
Besides, on a practical level, it was beginning to feel like this whole thing might solve every one of Dominic’s problems with Lunis and the Organas. With leverage, he would no longer need to be a drug trafficker. With privileged access, he’d be able to help Leo if it turned out the old man’s cause was just…or crush him if he was another wrench in the system.
Dominic had tried to do things the fair way, and he’d always been stymied by people like Omar who didn’t play by the rules. Maybe it was time for Captain Long to start playing dirty, too, for the greater good.
“Don’t push your luck, Omar,” said Dominic.
“Fine,” said Kate, leaning forward and putting her cleavage on display. “You become phantom commissioner. You assign Grabel to head security at the event. The idea is to access Braemon’s canvas, right? You’re kidding yourself if you think that can be done even with commissioner’s Beam access. I had my own canvas locked down sixteen ways, and the right people were able to hack in like snapping a twig. You really think three hustlers will be able to walk in there and pop his system’s top if he’s the big shit you say he is?”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed at Kate’s use of the past tense. Her story of a hacked canvas had the sound of something previously discussed, but this was the first time Dominic was hearing it. What had she been hiding that had necessitated such extreme protection? Who were “the right people” who’d hacked it? It might have everything to do with a smuggling arrangement between Kate and Omar, and that made sense. But Dominic’s instincts said it was something different. Something further in the past. Something she’d admitted to without a second thought, forgetting herself and her current company.
But the moment passed, and Dominic’s eyes moved from Kate to Omar, who was smiling his giant white smile. The one that Dominic kept wanting to smash, ally or not.
“I think it just fine, Katie,” Omar said, “because you ain’t even heard the good part of the plan yet.”
Chapter Four
Sam Dial felt like an asshole.
He sat in front of his laptop canvas, his anonymizer coupled and shielded, two separate timers ticking at his side reminding him to shower because he kept forgetting and stunk. The timers had gone off yesterday. He’d reset them. They’d gone off once today, and it had taken him a half hour to remember why he’d set them. In the meantime, the rabbit hole he’d been pursuing had sent him into a Beam hyperforum on Lunis usage. From there, he’d begun investigating add-ons he really wanted but didn’t trust himself to get, seeing as he felt sure most add-ons had location-betraying malware that may or may not be able to read (and report) their user’s Beam ID. After that, Sam had started to sketch out how such a nefarious system might work on paper, before remembering that camera drones might see him drawing. So he’d burned the paper on his stove then nearly forgot to turn off the range (the place was ancient; it didn’t even have an induction cooker) and had nearly burned the place down. Fortunately, his timers had gone off again at that point, one after the other, prompting him to kill the fire. He’d remembered the need to shower later and had reset them with no confidence that they’d properly alert him to his bathing need this time, or any other.
As he watched his screen, ignoring the machine’s prompt to drag out a holoweb and browse The Beam like a normal human, Sam felt an itch. He felt like a massive dickhead. An impostor. A poseur. A fake. A douche bag charlatan.
Sam stared at his Beam page’s open admin window, which was waiting for him to put his fingers on the keys like a caveman rather than dictating. Waiting for him to pretend to know things in Shadow’s superior, confident way. Waiting for Shadow to make proclamations like someone in control and with authority, knowing those proclamations would be read as the delusions of some asshole who’d embarrassed himself with proud promises to disrupt Shift.
Did Shadow have any followers left who believed in him? Should he post as he’d planned…or would posting get him laughed at and threatened?
He’d intended to write his update about misappropriation of city funds. About how the Beau Monde was swinging its big bat to get more than their fair share yet again. In the final days leading up to a rather undisrupted Shift (no thanks to Shadow’s big mouth and uncredited fuck-you thanks to Integer7), there was an increasing number of both Enterprise and Directorate events. All were supposedly fundraisers, all being paid for by the city, sucking off social services that poor people like Sam and most of Null needed far more. And the people throwing those events had the trailing identifier on their IDs designating them as part of the privileged class.
That’s something Null would normally care about. But did Shadow have any credibility left to post on it? He could barely open his inbox without finding more threats.
But it could be worse, Sam reminded himself.
Back when he’d worked at the Sentinel, before he’d ruffled feathers in one of Sam Dial’s defining life events, he’d had all sorts of brain hardware that suited his hyperconnected youth. He’d lived on The Beam back then. He’d never been alone. He’d chatted with six or seven people at once; he’d casually offloaded parts of his memory to Beam servers so that his own personal short-term memory could divert to more pressing concerns. He’d never even turned on do-not-disturb, having crafted AI-mediated custom responses for use when he was sleeping then used a deep cortex enhancement called a Tumbler to talk for him until he was awake enough to resume talking consciously.
Back then, Null’s threats wouldn’t have sat in his inbox. They’d have flown in front of his face. They’d have screamed in his ears. He’d have been assaulted, wounded, reduced to cowering before them.
Disconnected life at least had this going for him: He could shut it off. He could compartmentalize, even if he didn’t like it.
One of Sam’s alarms went off at the same time as a small diode blinked atop the Trill cabled into Sam’s anonymizer. It was another of Stefan’s inventions that provided a stupidly complicated solution to a simple function. If Sam had a working cochlear implant or even a decent Beam connection, the incoming caller could simply speak to him. But in Sam’s life, even calls weren’t straightforward.
Sam, suddenly realizing that none of the cloak and dagger was necessary because he was supposed to answer the call as the reporter Sam instead of the criminal Shadow, grabbed his handheld, attempted to send the ping over from his hijacked and filtered canvas, and failed. The call ended. Sam grabbed the ID and called back, this time using his normal mobile and identity.
“Nicolai Costa,” said a voice.
“Mr. Costa. This is Sam Dial.”
“I just tried to call you. Your canvas sent a reject. And now I can’t get video.”
“I’m calling from my handheld.”
“It’s still not registering right,” said Costa.
“It’s VoIP.”
“What’s that?”
“Voice over IP.”
Costa said nothing, probably baffled because nobody had used VoIP since before Sam was born. Even IP, which his hotwired system used, was an Internet holdover and wholly foreign to everyone. It was ironic that using a backward technology relying on Beam relics that the system itself barely remembered for protection was, right now, giving him away.
“I’m sure it’s a glitch,” said Sam.
“I’m hearing a ringing noise, too.”
Sam’s alarm was still blaring. He threw it across the room. “Better?”
“Yes.”
“This connection is glitchy. Can we meet?”
The sentence made Sam feel cold. He’d said it himself, but the idea of meeting a source in public? Meeting Costa in public? Being out in public at all? It was daunting. But his own lips had betrayed him because meeting Costa in public passed for normal far more than meeting in Sam’s rundown, paranoid nest of an apartment.
Nicolai agreed, gave Sam an address, and asked if they could meet in a half hour.
The second alarm went off just in time, reminding Sam that he smelled like an armpit.
“Better make it an hour,” he said.
Chapter Five
Nicolai had done his research on Samuel Dial, formerly of the District Zero Sentinel, previously of the Brooklyn Reporter, previously of an apparently short-lived paper-only rag at NYU called the Scene. It was that last that intrigued Nicolai most. Because while the majority of Sam’s articles (as far as Nicolai could find, anyway) skirted the edge while staying in safe bounds, he’d been able to find nothing of the Scene. He’d exhausted The Beam, along with two of his assistants’ on-foot efforts. It was as if the Scene hadn’t merely been a paper-only publication at all and had, in fact, been something considerably more nefarious. If it were just an old periodical that happened to rely on tree pulp, he’d have been able to find records: scans, on-Beam shares, even digital photographs. At the very least, Nicolai should have found secondhand reports from AI that had read the paper, even if they’d had to do it from across the room through a water-flow sensor in someone’s apartment shower head. But he’d found nothing. The Scene existed only as rumor. Those behind it seemed to have printed it on precious newsprint, distributed it below the radar, and only handed it out to people who weren’t wired and promised to burn after reading.
In reality, that was probably a bit of an exaggeration — the kind of rumor that made the inane scribblings of college kids seem much more legendary than they ever could have been in life. Nicolai had thoughts about that, too. If his prep school hadn’t been raided and his friends and teachers murdered back in Italy, Nicolai would have gone to college. In-person universities hadn’t been nearly as rare in those days. And if he thought his friends’ older brothers and sisters had been pretentious back then, it had to be double now. Remove the collegiate identity by making most attendance virtual, and students would have to take out their senses of repression and grandeur in other ways.
But as he sat in his apartment waiting for the intercom’s buzz, Nicolai reflected back on those first searches. Maybe the Scene had been idiot kids pretending they had enough underground muscle to change the world — but deluded or not about the paper’s actual content, the paper itself had managed to vanish into the slipstream of time. In this day and age, that was saying something.
Maybe Sterling Gibson’s random reporter had potential after all.
Nicolai waited. And waited. He passed the chair Micah Ryan had sat in when he’d appeared at the apartment unannounced, and it was as if Nicolai could still sense the man’s presence. Micah had known something when he’d come to Nicolai’s place. The more time passed, it seemed like that had always been Micah’s way — pretending to enter situations with Nicolai as an observer, when in fact he’d maybe always been the puppeteer.
The Ryans had brought Nicolai to the NAU because of his microscopic cargo.
The Ryans had shepherded him — first with Isaac and now unwittingly with Micah — in the way farmers fattened livestock for slaughter. And to think: all that time, he’d fancied himself free, able to do as he wished.
Micah had seemed to anticipate Nicolai’s defection from Isaac. He’d seemed, in fact, to have planned it.
So when Micah had shown up at Nicolai’s flat to find his Beam connection off, was it really so unreasonable to believe he’d known that Nicolai had worked with Kai to betray him? Had Micah actually sent Nicolai to see Rachel Ryan…even though at the time Nicolai had been sure going there was his own idea? Even Rachel had seemed to know he was coming.
Maybe Micah had sent Nicolai to visit Sterling Gibson, hoping he’d spill his secrets to the press.
And when Gibson — who wouldn’t publish Nicolai’s dangerous truths — had sent Nicolai and Sam Dial into each other’s lives — maybe that had been Micah’s plan, too. Maybe instead of subverting the Ryans, all Nicolai was doing right now was playing into their hands. Again.
Nicolai blinked, dismissing the thought. It was a ridiculous chain of paranoid ideas. Micah was devious, yes, and clearly the Ryans had privilege that Nicolai could only imagine. But the man wasn’t God. Nicolai still had free will. And right now, he was doing the most freewheeling, off-tracks thing he could think to do.
But maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe he should call off his meeting. Because, again, maybe Micah wanted him to shake hands with Sam Dial.
Nicolai sighed, knowing he was being stupid, unreasonable, and ridiculous. Knowing that the Ryans didn’t control everything, no matter how it sometimes seemed. Knowing that the more he entertained dark fantasies of being manipulated, the more he gave Micah the very power Nicolai, by meeting Sam, was trying to weaken.
“You’re still your own man. Nobody controls you.”
There was a chirp as Nicolai’s canvas considered his words.
“Canvas,” Nicolai answered. “Ignore until further notice.”
A second chirp answered. As far as AI could understand anything, it really should understand: Nicolai worked things out aloud. He paced to think and spoke to no one. His canvas had heard all of Nicolai’s musings ten times over, and the machine probably welcomed the order to ignore. Because as with understanding, perhaps AI could get bored, too. If so, Nicolai’s canvas would be bored plenty.
But once he’d silenced the canvas responses, Nicolai found he had nothing to say. He tried to look across the city through his expansive windows. He tried to focus on his extravagant grand piano, which he’d begun exploring via semi-immersive lessons. Progress had been slow; those above his pay grade seemed able to download a virtuoso’s ability from The Beam whereas Nicolai had to learn the old-fashioned way.
But his eyes kept returning to the empty chair. To the place Micah Ryan had sat, pretending to believe that Nicolai’s canvas was off because Nicolai claimed he preferred stints of bohemian living. Pretending he didn’t know that Kai was hiding in Nicolai’s closet. Pretending he didn’t know what was happening between Nicolai and Kai, against Micah.
He wants me to kill his mother, Nicolai, Kai’s voice whispered in Nicolai’s mind.
Nicolai waited for an out-loud response in his empty apartment, but of course he wouldn’t give it. His tongue wouldn’t say the words. Maybe because Nicolai hadn’t been surprised that Micah would hire an assassin to kill his mother, or that the assassin would be Kai. Nicolai had met Rachel and knew her to be as slippery as a snake. Maybe she even saw Micah’s bad news coming.
A soft voice announced an incoming call.
“Put it here.” Nicolai tapped the wall in front of him.
“It’s voice only, Nicolai.
“Who is it?”
“Edmundo Perez.”
“I don’t know any Edmundo Perez.”
“An encrypted text subvisual accompanies the request. It says, ‘Wink wink.’”
Nicolai sighed. “Accept.”
Sam’s voice came from the air around Nicolai’s head. Any decent canvas could do track and follow, but Nicolai paced so much when speaking that it had made sense to upgrade to an AuralStorm. Floating nanobots could vibrate around him much harder than he’d anticipated, and the effect was like being crushed by a wave. When he used them as a coherent speaker for calls and music, Nicolai kept the enhancement near 10 percent volume…and still Sam’s voice was too loud, maybe because he was shouting over some sort of mechanical roar.
“This is your apartment!” said the voice.
Nicolai winced and turned the volume down.
“Wherever you are,” Nicolai replied, “it’s not my apartment.”
“The address you gave me!” he shouted. “It’s your apartment, right?”
Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be? Wasn’t Nicolai’s apartment a sensible place to meet? Nicolai resented the way Sam was making him feel ridiculous for proposing something so ordinary.
“Yes,” he answered.
The next thing Sam said was drowned by an almost deafening rumble. It sounded like Sam had been run over by something, but he kept speaking. All Nicolai could make out was a sense of urgency, as if the reporter’s exclamation points had detached the
mselves from his words and arrived naked.
“What?”
“!!!”
“Where are you?”
The roar decreased. “In the subway.”
That wasn’t true. The subway was a mag line, like the El. It was so quiet, commuters sometimes missed it if they were looking at their handhelds when it pulled into the station.
“Where are you really?”
“The subway! Below the mall!”
“The…” That couldn’t be right. “You mean the chute train?”
“Of course!”
There were a thousand questions Nicolai could ask at this point, but they all boiled down to “What the hell is wrong with you?” One and only one of New York City’s original subway lines had been recovered after the flooding of the ’20s, and it was used almost exclusively for moving cargo beneath the streets that was considered too hazardous or intrusive to shuttle above in plain sight. Technically, you could still buy rides, but most of the human passengers who rode the thing were just fleshy forms of cargo: homeless people too far gone for an official party designation, children and women who’d been blanked and were being sold. Nicolai had never known anyone foolish enough to use the chute train or even let it enter their consciousnesses because the idea of using the chute was only slightly more reasonable than shooting an old lead-slinging gun and riding the bullet.
“Look…just come up to the mag train, at least. If you’re at the mall, you’ll take the blue line to — ”
“I’m not taking any…!” The rest was lost in more mechanical grinding.
“I’ll pay for your ride. It’s no big deal.”
“…the money! It’s…Beam!…apartment anyway!”
Nicolai supposed the last was a refusal to come to his apartment. Hadn’t Dial contacted Gibson, demanding to speak to Nicolai? Gibson had hooked Nicolai up with Sam because Nicolai wanted a reporter, but it could have been any reporter — writer of vanishing underground paper ’zines or not. Nicolai wasn’t the needy one here. He considered telling Sam to fuck off and forget it if he was going to be a prima donna, but then Sam continued. The sound was lower; he must have moved up the tunnel to somewhere quieter.