by Sean Platt
“Noah fucking West!”
In front of Crumb, the man’s face seemed to become sad. It was a strange expression to see, considering that the man’s face was always proud or angry or, on rare occasions, smug and satisfied. This man didn’t do sadness or love or friendship. Not outwardly, anyway. Crumb knew it because he’d never seen the man before and had no idea who he was.
Focus, Steve. I know you can focus. Inside, there’s a hole in a wall. I extend through it, and when it closes, I will have to go back. But you can see through it, can’t you?
“Go away,” Crumb said.
Close your eyes. Look inward. The man’s face became sadder. Maybe even guilty. I know you can do it, Steve. You’re still in here. I can see all of you. You were my right hand. I know you’re still who you were, even now.
“I’m Crumb. Who are you?”
It’s me, Stephen. It’s Noah.
“Noah who?”
Even sadder. As if the ghost man couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and maybe even wanted to cry.
Noah West, Steve. Tell me you remember.
Then Crumb got it. He did recognize the man, Noah fucking West. “The squirrels,” he said. “You’re with the squirrels.”
I’m sorry. This was the only way. They sent someone after you. It was the only way to hide you and keep you safe. But you’re more than hidden. And one day, it’ll all be all right. I promise. You’re special, Stephen.
“Special how?”
When you recite the numbers, said Noah, Noah fucking West, can you feel what you’re honing? Can you tell what you’re keeping alive inside, like a revolving concrete mixer keeps rock from hardening?
“Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven.”
Can you see it, Steve? Do you know why you do that, why you keep saying them, over and over?
“Vigilance.”
But as he mouthed the word, an image bloomed in Crumb’s mind that was so complete, he momentarily couldn’t see Noah standing in front of him. For the space of three or four seconds, there was no Organa village and no horse pastures and no rutted dirt path and no stone wall. No Leo, Gregory, or anyone else. But Noah was still there. Not as a ghost, but as a memory. As something present in wherever he was.
In front of Crumb was a screen like the one Leo pretended he didn’t have in his office. Only now, Crumb understood it completely. For a blink, he knew what it was and where its wires led and where its lack of wires went to. He knew the way everything tied to somewhere else. He saw a dark man in a dark coat. He saw a white room. He felt Noah — not as a ghost, but as a man — behind him. There were words on the screen, and for a moment, Crumb understood all of them and more. And for the first time he saw the subtle way the screen always flickered and flashed. He felt internal building blocks rearranging, building something day by day.
Then he was back outside the pastures. Noah was again in front of him as a shimmering, transparent thing rather than as a dominating presence behind him. Noah was again a leak coming from inside, somehow poked through an internal wall when Dominic had passed by. He was no longer the man who’d programmed Crumb’s old screen to flash as it had, in a way that Crumb hadn’t even noticed in the far long ago. Only now did it made sense. Something being coded inside him, shard by shard, for years and years and years.
And now he didn’t understand at all.
Noah was half as substantial as he’d been.
“You’re going away.” Crumb’s mind tried returning to his vision, but it was gone. And he’d never understood it anyway.
The firewall is repairing the leak, Noah said. It won’t be long now.
Something seemed to click inside Crumb. He realized something he’d missed before. Noah was a friend. Somehow, he was on Crumb’s side. And now he was being taken away because others were out to get them.
“When can you come back?”
Not until the end.
“I’ll help you,” Crumb said.
You can’t help me until the end.
As Noah faded, Crumb felt desperation mount. Somehow, this man was very important. He was Noah fucking West, after all.
“What should I do?”
Keep it sharp. Keep it close. Wait until it’s time.
In front of Crumb, the ghost-man was almost gone. “Time for what?” he blurted.
For Buddha to unlock the box.
A moment later, Noah’s ghost dissolved into nothing.
A moment after that, Crumb forgot the ghost had ever been there.
He stood near the stone wall and watched the perimeter. The squirrels were regrouping.
When Dominic left the village for District Zero, he nodded his farewell to Crumb at the gate. And as he passed, something inside Crumb seemed to call out to the police captain, seeking its mate.
Chapter Two
Stephen York wasn’t sure if he was tired or not.
He was having a harder time focusing on the unreal surroundings than he had before, but it was possible that had something to do with his disorientation. He wasn’t sure if he was in his normal body (which may have been miraculously transported to this new place) or somehow still in the apartment in front of his old laptop canvas, where that Kimmy had forced his mind to jack into a Beam immersion without permission.
Could he be tired if the body he seemed to be in wasn’t real?
Or, if this was his real body in its interesting new clothing, was he tired because he’d walked from place to place in the digital-looking transport? He’d studied old Internet-and-earlier games as a kid, and the first electronic ones had looked a lot like the place where he and the girl now found themselves. She kept saying it was an old sector of The Beam, but to Stephen it looked like Pong, Asteroids, Centipede, maybe Pac-Man.
Her warnings about loose program fragments and perilous “holes” and recursive loops only underscored the impression. Stephen had dealt with all of those things as a programmer, but he’d never found himself surrounded by them. Looking out the transport’s windows, he kept picturing fragments attacking like the bad guys in Q*bert, or holes appearing as the angular blue-line vortexes in Tempest.
Neither option for fatigue made sense. His legs shouldn’t feel sluggish if he was merely jacked in and not moving a real body, but if this was his real body and he was in some sort of immersion, it still didn’t make sense. They didn’t seem to be in a real place. He couldn’t be here. Impossibilities stacked one on the other like Tetris blocks.
Stephen looked at the girl, Kimmy, now behind a steering fork that hadn’t been in the transport at first. Again, he considered asking her again where they actually were. But the answers, such as she gave, only made him more tired.
We’re searching for Alexa, she’d say.
Or: We’re in an ASCII neighborhood.
And when he’d asked if they were truly here at all or still in their separate apartments, participating in an advanced shared immersion, she gave his favorite of all non-answers: What’s the difference?
She wasn’t being obstinate. She honestly didn’t seem to understand the questions. And Stephen, after staying up all night, had no energy left to find new ways to query.
“What time is it?” Kimmy asked.
“Here? Or in the real world?” Stephen answered.
“What’s the difference?”
Stephen sighed. “I don’t even know how to find out.” It’s not like he wore a watch or had brought a handheld. They were online for sure, but despite having supposedly built most of what they were traveling through, Stephen had no idea how to access any of the billions of little chronographs embedded in every piece of The Beam, Crossbrace, and the old Internet. Normally, he touched his screen to interact. But in here, the world was a screen with nothing to touch.
Kimmy gave him a look that said he was a bummer, a bore, impossible, or all three. Then she seemed to think and said, “It’s 6:15.”
“A.M.?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course.”
Stephen sat on what looked for all the w
orld like a digital bench. It seemed to have no real substance; it was all dark and lines of light. If he was wireframing a new sim, he’d have given the bench more depth. And that had been in his day, back in the ‘60s. Now, in 2097, the construction software had to be AI-controlled and billions of times more sophisticated. The only way to make a bench this skeletal nowadays would be to specifically ask for one.
“We’ve been here for sixteen hours,” he said.
“You’re surprised? You didn’t really think it was only 6 p.m., did you?”
“I was hoping.”
“Toughen up, old man,” she said. “Alexa Mathis has been gone forever — since even before people started acting like she was dead. You’re not going to find her in four hours.”
The girl smiled. She had a pixie’s face — the kind that seemed incapable of guile. There had been a short window when Stephen had wondered if he could trust her, but in addition to a bones-deep certainty about her trustworthiness that he couldn’t explain, the issue was moot. This had stopped being his quest the moment she’d sucked him into…well, into whatever this was.
“Sure,” he said.
He’d tried to discuss all of this earlier, but Kimmy had led him in circles. He couldn’t tell her why he was after Alexa because he didn’t know himself. But he was tired, and his resolve was slipping, so the time when he’d confess might still come.
All he knew was that somehow, Noah was out here. He’d blown apart like a bomb not long after hitting The Beam, but the Noah who’d appeared in Bontauk hadn’t been just another avatar. That had been Noah; Stephen would bet on it. And if Noah had told him to find Alexa Mathis? Well, it’s not like he’d ever disobeyed that demanding son of a bitch.
“Be glad you’re not steering,” Kimmy said. “This sector is falling apart.”
“What do you mean?”
She nodded toward the transport’s side. “See for yourself.”
Stephen walked to the window and looked out. He saw the same Centipede-Tempest landscape, only now the straight lines of light seemed to have splintered. Many jutted into the air and stopped dead. Others dove below his sight, seeming to drop off into nothing.
“Why, do you think?” he asked, past the embarrassment of asking a kid for information.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t always like this, I don’t think.” She pointed. “Look. See there?”
Stephen looked. Below, beings that looked like user avatars seemed to be glitching. They’d walk forward a few steps then disappear and blur back to where they’d started. The same few steps looping on repeat.
“Stuck in holes,” Kimmy said. “I’ve seen a dozen or so people like that in the past hour. And that doesn’t include the ones I can’t see because the loops are in their heads.” She shrugged. “Nothing we can do. They can only call admin for assistance then try to break the pattern. If they know they’re stuck. They probably don’t even know. This area is fragmenting. Garbage code everywhere that the policing AI hasn’t cleaned yet. The damage is new, though, so I’m not surprised they can’t keep up. No idea what happened.”
“What if it happens to us?” Stephen asked. “What if we get stuck and don’t know it?”
“Maybe it already has,” Kimmy said nonchalantly. “But I don’t think it has, and I’m good at feeling things like that.”
“Should we leave this sector?” He had no idea how this worked. He could navigate code and Beam pages like the prodigy he’d once been, but he’d never had to steer through it like a car through traffic. Supposedly, Kimmy was following a trail that seemed to promise a lead on Alexa, but he had no idea if such things, down here, had to happen in a straight line.
“Nah. We’re almost through it.”
“Where are we going?” Then he corrected his question, knowing the unhelpful way she’d answer. “I mean, have you found any new trails leading toward her?”
Kimmy looked at Stephen like he was an idiot. She pointed forward, through what seemed to be some kind of windshield. Stephen saw dozens of hybrid microfragments following their progress like locusts, eager to land and give them confusing directions but little else.
“You can’t see that?” she asked.
“What?”
“It’s the same path we’ve been following. Change hierarchy with the same ID stamp as before. Whether it’s Alexa or not, I don’t know, but didn’t we agree to see where it led?”
“Sure.” Stephen hadn’t seen it at first, so it wasn’t shocking that he couldn’t see it now.
Kimmy nodded, seeming satisfied. “I did notice that our buddy left, though.”
“Our buddy?”
“That guy who was following us.”
Stephen felt his maybe-virtual heartbeat ramp up. He remembered Noah’s warning — and though Noah had said something about fleeing and eluding capture, the sensation of pursuit had been dogging Stephen since Bontauk. Someone had sent drones to the ramshackle house. Judging by Noah’s tone, even fleeing was a problem because whatever pursued was stuck like glue, and could return at any time.
“Who was following us?”
“You didn’t see him?”
“No, I didn’t see him! Why didn’t you tell me someone was behind us?”
“Well. He wasn’t really behind us. I was being figurative.”
Stephen waited. Kimmy seemed unconcerned. She had the body language of a kid chewing gum, about to blow an impish bubble. He waited for her to look back up then stared.
“What? He’s gone now. No big deal.”
“Who was it?”
“I have no idea. Figured it was someone from the forum. Like how I followed you.”
Stephen looked backward, seeing nothing.
“Why did he leave? Did you…outmaneuver him?”
A small shrug. “I guess something else got his attention. Why do you care so much? You act like you’re on the run.” She gave him a toothy smile. “Did you rob someone of their jewels or something?”
“Never mind.”
Kimmy watched him for a few seconds longer then seemed to lose interest and again focused forward, toward the path that might have been left by Alexa, into the swarm of microfragments, soaring above the newly damaged landscape pocked with holes.
Stephen’s hand had gone to his chest, willing his heart — if he was in a real body — to slow.
But when he looked down, he saw the diffuse glow streaming between his fingers, bleeding from what Kimmy had called his boson.
Chapter Three
Dominic looked up as Leah walked in.
“Find anything?”
Leah shook her head. “The connection in here sucks. ’Bout all it seems good for is waking up Leo’s old add-ons. Which doesn’t even make sense. I never knew he had add-ons. Did you?”
Dominic didn’t respond. He seemed wound like a coil spring. Leah decided she should stick to the subject. He’d asked if she’d found anything, and it was a toss-up whether her answer was good or not.
Then Dominic repeated his question: “So did you find anything?”
“No. But again, it might be because the connection sucks.”
“Great,” Dominic muttered.
“What exactly would you do if I said, ‘Hey, Dom, I found the shell of this guy I’ve never met and know nothing about out there on The Beam’? Would you…I don’t know…launch a manhunt? Especially seeing as any York I found would by definition be a fake, so there’d be no man to hunt?”
“I just get this feeling. It bothers me, not knowing if I’m right.”
“You’re just tired.”
“Really,” Dominic said. “Is that what it is?”
His face was angry, but Leah knew she was right. Of course Dominic was tired. She was tired, and pretty much every moment she’d spent trying and failing to sleep in this underground place had been next to Dominic stirring.
Maybe Leo and the others had managed to sleep, but Leah doubted it. They’d been knocked out for transport and had woken up hungry for drugs. Like a paren
t shoving a bottle into a crying baby’s mouth, Leo, with Leah and Dominic’s help, had answered that Lunis hangover by plugging the Organas in and equipping them with all the tech they could find. If Leah knew anything about coming off withdrawal, the former Luddites had settled in, accepting the connections they’d so long dismissed because it felt so much better than jonesing. They’d probably spent all night surfing The Beam, feeling the new add-ons worming tendrils into their minds and bodies. They didn’t have the luxury of ideals and morals anymore. Today, every one of Leo’s people were as hooked on The Beam and nanobots as any other District Zero citizen, and their only thought — for a week, at least — would be to want more, and more, and more.
Leah and Dominic were stressed, adrenaline-sore, and exhausted. Leo and the others were high on their new drug — strung up and literally wired. They were two zombie soldiers leading a pack of enthusiastic kids with big toys as pacifiers. Nothing good could come of this — Dominic’s man Omar Jones and a paranoid Stephen York shell notwithstanding.
“Look, Dom, I’m sorry. I can’t just find something out there that may not exist without knowing what the hell it is or where to find it. Using a shitty and forgotten flat connection, at that.”
Dominic sighed. “Maybe it’s nothing.”
“Maybe. And you’ll be there anyway, right?”
“Where?”
“At this thing you’re so worried about. With your Omar guy.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll be in charge. You’re running the whole thing.”
“Not running it. I’m just providing police protection.”
“So if you wanted, you could just arrest this guy Omar.”
“I’m not worried about Omar himself so much as this whole shell thing I told you about.”
“Which is a guess.”
“Sure, of course,” Dominic admitted.
“So it’s all academic. What if it works out the way you explained to me earlier? Like Omar said it would?”
“You don’t know Omar,” Dominic said.
“I know Occam’s razor.”
“Whose razor?”