by Sean Platt
“Did you know about her? Before you came to this school, did you know SerenityBlue actually existed…before you met her for real?”
“I’ve always known her. We all have.”
“I don’t mean knowing of her, like she’s famous or something. I mean knowing her like you know me, here, in person. Like you talked or something, had conversations. Or that you could, if you stood in front of her.”
“I always knew her just like you always knew her.” He looked confused by the question and delivered the answer as an obvious absurdity.
“So you haven’t always known her.”
The boy smiled again.
“Okay,” said Leah, giving up. “Thanks for letting me know about dinner.”
Alias gave a small nod and left. Leah heard the closing door’s tiny echo as the simulator again became a meadow. The coexistence of stimuli was strange. This place shouldn’t have echoes. Or doors.
Her focus slipped, but this time the room didn’t waver. Leah didn’t understand why, but there was nothing about this she truly understood. The children at Serenity’s school acted like The Beam and the real world were interchangeable, and the first time she’d been here that same small boy had turned a non-simulator room into a simulated reality true enough to step into. She’d asked how to learn to do the same, but the answers had taken days to understand. The way everyone had spoken to her, it was as if Leah had asked how to hold a rock while already holding it.
But the more she’d just accepted and tried, the more she’d found a quiet place inside herself that knew what to do. The building must have Fi, and that Fi must be able to interact with thought. It wasn’t unreasonable. Biofeedback had been doing similar things since before the turn of the millennium, and anyone with an early generation artificial smartlimb crossed thought and Fi every time they reached out to pick something up.
In a simulator, without moondust, she’d been able to create objects that evaporated when she tried to touch them. Then she created backgrounds. Vistas. And finally, like now, immersive realities.
There was another knock.
“What is it, Alias?”
But the door in the sky didn’t open. Instead, Leah watched as a tall, dark figure appeared before her. It grew like a pool of congealing mist, swirling toward a center from nowhere. A few seconds later, she found herself looking at the back of a broad-shouldered man in a long black coat, black trousers, black shoes, and a brimmed black hat. His hair was dark brown, and he had a thin strip of Caucasian skin visible below a neatly trimmed hairline.
The specter, once formed, remained where it was, still facing away from Leah. The head shifted minutely, causing the hat’s brim to tip like the profile of a banking flying saucer.
“End simulation,” Leah said.
Nothing happened.
“Canvas. End this simulation.”
The dark figure stayed where it was, shifting slightly. If the room was responding to her thoughts, maybe this thing was part of her. A Freudian reflection, showing Leah her own darkness as if through a mirror.
“Canvas. Force quit, and restart. Force clear buffer memory.”
A small white butterfly flitted between them. A light breeze stirred. Leah felt the flyaways in her dreadlocks lift away from her face and then settle, tickling her skin. She felt suddenly sure that if she were to throw something into the distance, it wouldn’t strike a wall as it should. The children were right. When things became this real, there was no way to tell what was outside and what stayed in.
“You are n33t,” the man’s back said. His voice was deep and authoritative.
“Who the hell are you?”
“You know me as Integer7.”
Leah felt a shiver, glad that the phantom couldn’t see it. There was no way the man was really Integer7, mostly because Integer7 had never been seen and because nobody knew Leah was n33t. He had to be a figment of her imagination. A trolling thought. A bit of darkness stirred up because whatever remembering it took to power this simulation, she’d finally got the hang of it…and her subconscious had immediately butted its way in.
She walked toward where the boy had peeked in earlier. She put her hands out, waving them like a blind person, feeling the empty air for the simulator’s wall. But there was nothing. She kept glancing back, watching the still and silent figure. His arms must have been clasped at his front, because to Leah, his silhouette was streamlined: feet together without any gap between them, the shape of an armless jacket, shoulders, a head wearing a hat. He looked like a large, vaguely human-shaped peg. A strangely dark chess piece in the middle of a sunny meadow.
“Canvas. Force quit.”
Nothing.
“A situation has come to my attention that you will need to intervene upon,” the shape said. “My resources are limited, but my informational sources are not. You must be ready to act.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I told you who I am.”
Leah circled the man, determined to look him in the eye. But when she came around to his front, she only found more of his back. She circled him twice, but from every angle she saw only the pressed-together legs, the suit coat’s rear, the armless shoulders, the back of a hairline, and the tip of a hat.
“How did you get in here?”
“I knocked.”
“How did you find this place?”
“Everything is a matter of degrees. Near and far mean little. You have authored posts for Null that say as much.”
“I was talking about The Beam. Not geographic places.”
Her mind went to Crumb-slash-Stephen-York, who’d hidden in this building because he’d thought it was off-grid. What did it mean for York’s invisibility if Integer7 could enter the school? York hadn’t even touched the real Beam since emerging, and if he was up in the mountains with Leo, that would still be true because there were no connections up there. York should be a ghost. And yet here was her contradiction.
“Where do you think you are?” Integer7 asked.
“I…” But Leah didn’t know how to answer.
“A man named Leo Booker has recently been taken into NAU Protective Services custody. For reasons I don’t care to divulge, it’s in my best interests that he does not remain so.”
“Leo? Why would NPS have come for Leo?”
“Irrelevant.”
“Not the cops? Not narcotics?”
“NAU Protective Services. It is not relevant for me to tell you more.”
“How did they…”
“He was betrayed. Then he betrayed himself. There is something about Leo that you do not know, that nobody knows. And now he needs assistance.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“There is no downside to believing me. Belief is irrelevant. Leo is in custody. He cannot be freed without your intervention.”
Leah reached for the man and used her hands to wrench him around. Again, she found herself looking at the back of his head, the back of his shoulders, the back of his black hat.
“You have a choice,” Integer7 said. “You may choose to disbelieve my report or to disbelieve that I am here with you now and telling you the truth. In that case, you will remain where you are and try to call Leo. You will not reach him because he is in custody, but you may decide he is simply out of range. You will ride out of the city. You will make your way to him, to see him in person. You will find him absent then retrace your steps to do what I have already suggested you do. Or you may choose to believe me and act. I leave it to you, but consider for a moment that there is no downside to simply accepting and activating your eyes to find out for sure.”
Leah’s eyes — activated or not — scrunched halfway closed. He talked like a robot. “Activating your eyes” wasn’t something that made a modicum of sense to Leah, but the intruder was as enigmatic as Serenity’s children.
“If you know so much, why don’t you help him?”
“There are reasons.”
“Such as?”
“You will act as
you will regardless of my reasons.”
“What makes you think I can do shit?” Leah demanded, infuriated by the fact that he wouldn’t look at her — maybe that he couldn’t look at her and actually had no mouth or eyes or face.
“You are n33t.”
“I am Leah.”
“You are n33t. I see your fingerprints and footsteps. You spoke to Shadow from node 14342-B, Harlem-Bontauk. Transcript as follows — ”
“We spoke via Diggle.”
“Time is short, n33t.”
“Diggle is untrackable.”
“If you insist.”
“How do you know Shadow?” Leah said.
“Like I know you.”
“What did you do to him? What trick did you pull?”
“Every pawn has its place.”
“And after you talk about pawns, I’m supposed to do as you say?”
“I have told you what you need to know. You will do as you will do.”
“Noah Fucking West,” Leah said, rolling her eyes.
“There is a house of cards. Shift is near. Shadow failed to disrupt Shift, but that does not mean disruption did not occur. There is dissent in the inner circle. It is not required that I explain more. But it is not only Leo Booker who is threatened.”
“Who are you?” Leah yelled, her nerve starting to crack.
“I am gone,” said the specter. Then the faceless peg in Leah’s serene world dissolved like ink in water, swirling into the air the way it had come.
A moment later, Leah found herself in the middle of the meadow, feeling the light breeze, listening to the light chatter of insects and birds, more unsure than ever of what was real.
Chapter Ten
Serenity felt the change like a bump in the road. She was sitting in her room, thinking about nothing in particular, when something shifted.
She set her hand on the wall to orient herself in space. Then she looked inward. In through her local mind. In through her node. In through the hub. To the center and out again, now seeing through another set of internal eyes. There was a nonlocal phenomenon — something that had just altered from one phase to another. A situation she’d finally squared that was now popping out of line.
It was hard to see through the changes. Her perspective tended to view things holistically, meaning that circumstances in the past were roughly the same as circumstances in the present and that circumstances here were the same as circumstances there. It didn’t matter how something had begun when its later form made that first form irrelevant.
But that was the thing about change. It required consideration of time. Remove past and present from the equation, and nothing really changed. Things just sort of were what they were.
There was still the future to contend with, though. And as much as Serenity could see (not always through her own senses, but through the reports of all those she spoke to and appeared in front of), the future couldn’t be predicted. At least not infallibly. The more she knew, the better her predictions were. But nonlocal or not, distributed or not, Serenity was still just a person, albeit one with an origin she herself didn’t entirely understand. She couldn’t factor everything at once. She couldn’t know everything at once. Even AI couldn’t do that. Even The Beam couldn’t do that.
Sometimes, the Internet of Things was complete and up to date, and still everything went unexpectedly. The re-creation of the physical world in The Beam was complete enough that it was almost its own duplicate, but even that archive of knowledge couldn’t account for a motorist’s desire to turn suddenly right. And that could screw up a whole predictive matrix.
Not that Serenity concerned herself with traffic. She could peek in on the movement of cars and pedestrians if she wanted, sure, but she didn’t care. Nor did she care about throughput to the cloud servers, the function of redundant storage, or behavior algorithms that appeared as their own emergent entities when enough people were aggregated. There were sectors of The Beam that amalgamated individual behavior of humans into a whole, and the AI there sometimes theorized that humanity, taken in aggregate, behaved like one massive organism. The same way a flock of birds or a school of fish sometimes behaved as if it were many bodies, one brain.
And that made sense, too, seeing as that’s how The Beam and humanity worked together: one brain, many bodies.
So when something changed, it wasn’t really change. It was just Serenity discovering something she hadn’t known before.
So what was this thing she’d discovered about Leah just recently? Was it something to do with Leo? Serenity didn’t know.
There was a theory, she knew, that all of existence was a hologram, wholly contained in every particle of existence. That meant you could look at the smallest things and see everything. It also meant you didn’t need to look at everything to see it all. And with The Beam duplicating reality in order to understand reality (that “Internet of Things” again, redrawing the human world in ones and zeros so those digital parts could be shuffled to serve), the world did indeed feel like a hologram to Serenity.
There was reality.
There was the way The Beam saw reality.
There were thousands and thousands of backup copies of the way The Beam saw reality.
And because backups endured in a way normal time did not, the history of the backups was sort of like The Beam literally preserving the past. She could look through the old backups and see history unfold as if it were happening now. If you were digital — which Serenity sort of was, sort of wasn’t — you could go back in time. You could walk up to yourself and say hello, and it would cause none of the paradoxes so common in time travel movies.
Contradictions could exist, if you entered backed-up history. They were realities within realities within realities.
But still, despite the mental gymnastics, Serenity couldn’t entirely buy her high-minded notions. Maybe nothing did change. Maybe things were as they’d always been, and maybe what she saw as change was just something unknown becoming known.
But what was coming felt different.
This time, the change at Shift felt to Serenity like it heralded real change. The kind of change that even the most stalwart philosopher would have to admit was a real thing.
Her students were growing older. She could feel their changes, like flowers nearing their time to bloom. And by peeking out through her portals on The Beam (by allowing herself to be seen, though always as a ghost), she could catch the scent of the connected population, ranging from the gutter poor who knew her through ancient hotwired Doodads all the way up to the richest of the rich. Anyone who knew Serenity’s name left a trace she could follow, if she knew to look for it.
And what she saw told her something else: those people were changing, too.
It had been happening slowly. When Serenity had first felt her own consciousness, humanity had been more organic than it was now. But then little by little, they began to feel more digital. More connected to one another. At first, they’d shared memories, sending images from their lives for others’ enjoyment. Lines had blurred as bandwidth and storage had become better and faster and free, and the life-logging trend had gathered steam. People subscribing to others’ streams, slipping into those borrowed lives like a foot into a shoe.
Serenity, watching them from the inside, found the edges harder to define. Where did one person end and another begin? The meat of organic life started to matter less. A class moved inside The Beam and reinvented themselves. They became slimmer, more attractive, faster, more agile, stronger, better. The only thing that couldn’t be swapped in a Beam avatar was the mind, but these days even that hard fact had softened.
Feeling it now, rolling Leah’s recent change between virtual fingers with a curious pout on her virtual lips, Serenity tried to make the pieces fit.
Where did Leo Booker fit in the grand puzzle? Was Leo changing? Was Leah?
And what about Stephen York? When the children had first seen York’s signature on The Beam, it was like recognizing some
one from long, long ago. She’d known him from somewhere. From the Beam’s heart. Because just as Serenity had melted from Leah, something in The Beam had melted from York.
And now York was…in danger?
The pieces refused to fit. Serenity didn’t know. But she could feel the weight of the evolving network on her shoulders, and the weight of humanity’s new birth cries above it. She could feel her followers looking for her the way she’d looked for York, but she hadn’t asked for followers and had never offered advice. She’d tried to stay hidden. And yet so many called her name.
She focused on York. Tried to see him on The Beam.
But there was nothing. He’d gone up into the mountains, which was where he’d been all those intervening years. There wasn’t access up there, so he was hidden from her. He hadn’t returned to The Beam.
Although come to think of it, he’d be returning as Stephen York, whereas before, he’d only been Crumb. She would see it, whenever it happened. She’d recognize him, shining like a beacon.
It meant York hadn’t gone online yet.
She didn’t want him online, though.
There was no answer to that unasked question. No reason why York shouldn’t go online. She’d helped him peck through his confining shell. She’d helped him to recover his trapped mind at least a little. Helped him make sense of the panel image that had so plagued him, whatever that was. There was no reason he couldn’t go free. No reason he couldn’t connect, no matter where he managed it.
Except that there was a reason.
It was something to do with Leah. Something else that had changed with Leah. Something she’d found, or discovered. Something to do with others out there who knew Serenity’s name. Something to do with others who believed.
A threat.
Danger.
Serenity folded in, folded out. Came back to exterior reality, to her body, to the fluxing particles that had chosen to give her form. She felt her corporeal hand on the corporeal wall to orient herself and knew where she was.
But the idea was gone.
There was a knock on the door. Serenity came fully out and answered, and one of the children entered. A small girl named Sapphire.