by Sean Platt
“Oh, come on,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Chapter Eleven
SerenityBlue 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.”
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br /> “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?”
“He’s still not sure it’s a potential. Might be a cleric. Or someone like you.”
Serenity scanned the map. It was fascinating to see, laid out like this. Lines and dots weren’t her native language, but this was how Wax saw the world. It really wasn’t any different from the way people saw Serenity in unique ways. Different assumptions, altered observations. The world changed people, and people changed the world. Long before The Beam, physicists had proved that at a granular enough level, what you expect is what you get.
She stepped back, ruminating, searching for her signature. Wax wasn’t on his own map, but the string representing his attention was. Serenity and the other children should be here too. Whatever was happening with the forming node, her school’s interest made them part of it.
But on Wax’s maps, Serenity was never a dot or a line. Perhaps because The Beam saw her as many places at once and perhaps because Serenity’s manifestation was exactly between the realities of The Beam and District Zero, Wax always represented her as a cloud. If she defocused her eyes just right, she’d be able to see that cloud, like a haze over everything. A guiding hand, perhaps, or an ever-present observer.
Finding Leah was the first step in finding herself. As for York or anyone else represented here, Leah’s position on the map didn’t show her location in the city, but rather how many connections she’d formed below the surface to how many others. It wasn’t always easy to tell which was Leah, but Serenity could usually guess, as she had with York. Leah had more connections than most, and she usually had a faint spray coming from her, like the shimmer of a ghost rising from a dead man’s chest. The spray always led to Serenity, and somehow became her.
Finally, she saw it. But the cloud’s shape was a bit different from normal, and seeing it made her shiver for a reason Serenity didn’t understand. It was as if there was something wrong with her extended body. Her cloud, on Wax’s maps, was usually round, soft, and blurred at the borders. But now, with her eyes screwed up and defocused, she saw something with edges. Darker than normal. Faint tendrils seemed to snake down from the cloud and to the connections themselves as if sniffing. She could see system faults and holes tinged with the same color — woe to the AI who tried to traverse the in-between regions. What was happening? Serenity hadn’t been feeling lately like this cloud on Wax’s map made her look. The shape she saw wasn’t observing as she herself was. It was destructive. Meddling. Manipulative.
“What’s wrong with me?” Serenity looked over at Wax.
He understood her meaning and turned to the map rather than Serenity herself for an answer.
“You seem fine.” His finger traced a large, gently looping shape around the outer cluster. Serenity saw it: her usual mapped presence, right where it should be. She’d been looking at the wrong thing was all.
She pointed to the other cloud. The one that wasn’t her at all. The one that looked ill. The one she couldn’t now unsee, no matter how much she tried to refocus her eyes. It was now plain as day to Serenity: a blighted fist clenching the entire node into a colliding center.
“What is this?” she asked.
Wax’s eyes scrunched. He made the maps, but the process wasn’t top of mind. They were a tool to help him see, not seeing itself. Whatever was here, he hadn’t seen it either, until now.
He finally did, pinching in and out. In and out. Trying to locate the dark cloud’s source.
“It’s something else,” he said.
Chapter Twelve
I’m sure you can arrange a meeting with Vale. To…convince him of some things.
Aiden Purcell’s voice ran through Isaac’s mind as he stood in front of the bedroom wall, its surface converted to mirror mode. He hadn’t tried on his tuxedo in a long time, and expensive suits weren’t Permafit. Cloth had to be cut and sewn, not automatically adjusted. It was ironic that the old bespoke was now the least custom way to fit clothing, but not everything made sense among the Beau Monde. If human hands didn’t touch something, it wasn’t worth as much. Never mind that nanobots and fabricators could customize clothing far better than any tailor ever could.
Isaac tried to focus on the length of sleeves, the fit of cuffs, the perfect diameter of the old collar on his current neck. Unsurprisingly, Isaac hadn’t changed much since he’d last worn the tux. But still he was reluctant to take it off and ask his canvas to clean it for tomorrow because the minute he did, he’d have to admit his evening was over.
He’d have to go to bed because tomorrow would be a big day.
And once in bed, Purcell’s voice would be louder and keep him from sleep.
Was he supposed to kill Carter Vale? Isaac didn’t think he could do it if so. Regardless, the lack of a clear order was worse than knowing, for sure, that he was supposed to end a life — a rather prominent life, in the grand scheme of things. If Purcell had told him that was his mission, Isaac could go about making plans and then making his peace. But Purcell, like the slippery shit he was, spoke in vagaries and circles.
Maybe he was literally supposed to convince Vale of something: that reopening Project Mindbender was a very bad idea, for instance. Just like, in one of his mother’s favorite movies, a crime boss had suggested making a rival “an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Was it possible it wasn’t a euphemism? And if Purcell had been intimating murder, was it possible Isaac could play dumb and pretend he’d taken the order literally? Everyone thought he was an idiot anyway. Hey, Mr. Purcell. Yes, I convinced Carter Vale of the need for a public forum to discuss dole increases. That’s what you wanted, right?
Purcell would crush him. He’d tell Natasha that Isaac had been behind the riot that nearly killed her. Natasha would relaunch her plans to emasculate Isaac then crank her vindictiveness dial to fifty. She’d ally with Micah. She’d ally with Micah’s insider in Rachel’s group. Because
Micah had one; of that, Isaac felt certain. Isaac didn’t have an insider. Isaac was being dragged along for the ride — blessed with the Ryan name and wealth, but cursed because he’d unfortunately turned out to be Isaac.
It was such total bullshit.
But it was what it was, Isaac thought as he adjusted the band tie, trying to be impressed with his sharp appearance rather than repulsed by the acid in his gut. Micah was the alpha between them and always would be. They both knew Rachel was part of an ultra-high-level power group, and everyone knew that Micah (not Isaac) would ascend once Rachel was gone. They both knew that even now, Micah had that group’s ear. And they knew that Isaac had the same group’s ear — but that while Micah’s contact was an ally and an almost-equal, Isaac’s was a boss. A commander, whose boots required his tongue.
Isaac sighed.
He picked at the tuxedo’s jacket, trying to find adjustments in need of making. If the thing needed tailoring, he’d get to do a few more tasks before bedtime. But if it remained as perfect as it seemed to be, he’d only be able to put it into the Tomorrow Closet beside the in-wall dresser, where it would be cleaned up, freed of dust, and made even more perfect.
Maybe there was more to this than he knew.
The idea was strangely heartening. Isaac was never given more information than what he strictly needed to know, so why would this time be any exception? He’d always been shuffled around like a piece on a game board. Isaac, do this. Isaac, go here. He was rarely given whys, only tasks. There was always a larger game in play, and Isaac never knew about it until everything was over. Everything leading to Shift had been that way. Isaac’s reactions to the riots had been provoked, and necessary for much of Micah’s Enterprise counterreactions to make sense. Isaac’s Directorate responses hadn’t had their own merit or life. They’d just been fodder for Enterprise strategy.
So really, maybe this was just another gambit. Maybe the truth was being held from Isaac yet again. Maybe that was why Purcell had been so nonspecific: because whatever Isaac did, it didn’t actually matter. And it made sense that there was a hidden agenda. Purcell had already told him that Braemon’s party wasn’t, in the strictest sense, actually Braemon’s party.