by Sean Platt
Leah sighed, dreading the labor of losing her drug, and shoved the thought aside. Thinking about herself was uncomfortable, and she didn’t want to do it. Some days, Leah didn’t know what or who she was, or what she stood for. Was she a hero? Or was she a hypocrite?
The Lunis began to run through her, fluttering her eyelids. Her disturbing thoughts broke apart like tissue in water. She breathed slowly, leaning into the sensations. Soon, her troubles were all gone, and she felt alive.
Usually, Leah was hooked into a canvas and Beamwalking by the time the drug grabbed her, but this time she’d been disconnected, thinking about life and death and addiction and redemption. Her body felt heavy and sluggish. It felt unnecessary. Her mind tugged it toward the threadbare couch then allowed it to lie down so the mind itself could be free.
“Canvas.” The word felt as weighty as her body. She almost couldn’t form the V sound with her unresponsive lips. She wanted to fly. The dose she’d taken had been substantial, even for someone without a limited supply. But she needed it, especially now. Shadow’s trails went deep. She’d have to go deeper to move behind them.
She felt herself falling, becoming weightless.
The canvas chirped.
“Intuitive web.” She wanted to add: Hurry.
Normally, an apartment this low-rent wouldn’t have the ability to produce a web (most residents accessed The Beam through terminals), but Leah had wired a portable into the line when Leo had first rented the place. As she lay on the couch now, the sensors found her hands and head then projected the web above her.
“Give me a hybrid immersive.”
This time, the V sound failed her and came out drunk, as “fff.” The canvas understood, and the web lowered until it surrounded her. If she weren’t high, the sensation would have seemed stupid — the kind of thing Crossbrace early adopters had done to feel appropriately techy. But with so much Lunis in her blood, Leah saw the dull holograms take on shape, smile, and wrap tendrils around her senses and hug. She saw flowers bloom from a page in her history, saw their red petals dotted with bees not unlike those in the hive of Crumb’s locked-down mind. Her body’s weight increased until it pulled away and dripped from her skeleton. Then she was free, and flying.
The room vanished as she blinked. Some part of Leah realized that her eyes, in her body on a stained couch in a cheap apartment, were vacillating between closed and open, between looking inward and looking into the soup of holograms to manipulate the web. The rest of her felt those same eyes opening wider deeper down, seeing beyond both walls and city.
She let the first layers of The Beam slide by without effort. She saw Headlines, saw each story there (most about Shift, which Leah’s mind saw in reds and blues) as birds passing on their way to somewhere else. These were the things that most citizens cared about — things that, by definition, were only on the Beam’s front page because millions of people had voted them to its top. The Prime Statements were tomorrow, at the White House. The presidents were in the district for it. There had been another disturbance at yet another Natasha Ryan concert. But hadn’t that happened weeks ago?
Leah didn’t care. She slipped lower and lower and lower.
Her online information caches felt like limbs on her body as she settled. Her cloud storage was an arm. Her mail inbox was an arm. Her add-ons — and the new senses they gave her — were arms. Her own buffer memory was an arm. She reached out with the arm, clinging to bits sent by Shadow since their Diggle exchange. She dug without question, sure that the information he’d sent her was as true as Shadow himself believed it to be. He’d uncovered Nicolai Costa’s Beam ID because he was nearly as adept as she was, but via a totally different modality — a species of tech-nativity that, to Leah, felt jittery and manic. Through that jittery familiarity with The Beam, though, Shadow had uncovered the trailing identifier code that he claimed marked members of the so-called Beau Monde. He’d found it because he — or someone like him — had looked somewhere she hadn’t even thought to look.
With that thought, Leah realized something both profound and troubling: She could pull almost anything from The Beam, but she, like anyone, was a prisoner of her own preconceptions and worldview. She couldn’t see what her beliefs caused her to favor or to miss, such as the interconnected nature (a web in itself, really) of Beam IDs. She’d never even considered they might form their own patterns because Leah didn’t have a Beam ID, and neither did many other Organas.
Shadow’s findings, in and of themselves, neither surprised nor alarmed Leah as she floated in the immersive haze, her hands manipulating the web almost without her awareness. On the contrary, the fact that Shadow had found and shared what he had raised the mysterious man’s esteem in her eyes. Seeing his data, Leah was suddenly certain he could be trusted. She could see his hands’ impressions on data he’d handled (they left a residue, like oils in skin) and his intentions in how the data should be parsed and passed forward. It introduced her to Shadow in a way that hyperforum threads and his Beam page never could.
For one, Leah saw that as paranoid as Shadow seemed, he definitely believed what he was saying. And there was something else — something that surprised her immensely. Shadow, despite his intense online persona and bullet-quick neurosis, was rather sensitive. He wasn’t only paranoid. He wasn’t only leading an army of potentially dangerous Null into battle (a community Leah had always distrusted, signing her posts with n33t as a subtle jab at culture of anonymity). She saw how he was genuinely bothered by what he saw wrong in the world, not just reacting as a knee-jerk. He didn’t want chaos for its own sake, like so many Null. He was concerned, and fought, because he felt that his work might somehow right a few wrongs. A crusader more than a revolutionary. An exposer rather than an exploiter. Shadow was someone who wanted to fix the balance of power…but didn’t care to take any of that power for himself.
Shadow’s impressions left an aftertaste of nobility. Unlike Integer7’s.
She’d mostly brushed off Shadow’s first mention of the yang to his yin, but his renewed discussion of Integer7’s “plan” at the Prime Statements tomorrow felt troubling to Leah — as troubling as the fact that n33t had been Shadow’s second choice of contact, meaning he preferred the blunt force that hallmarked Integer7’s style. He’d only settled for n33t’s thought-out, well-reasoned approach to persuasion when the first hadn’t responded. As part of her mind searched The Beam for Nicolai Costa’s ID, Leah felt a concern wanting to surface. Shadow, by seeking Integer7’s masculine energy first and settling for n33t’s feminine energy second, seemed to want more direct help than Leah felt willing to give — and, judging by his cryptic series of messages, might actually have already gotten it. He’d twined his path with Integer7’s already, for better or for worse.
As she floated, Leah saw the holos and pages (projected both in the web around her and on her corneal heads-up displays) as a swirling vortex, more symbolic than literal. She knew that thinking too much while doing this kind of work was always folly, so she let her hands move where they wanted, feeling them as extensions of her mind rather than the heavy meat sticks they were. She let her internal chips process the information in a way that was more intuitive than analytical, trusting a kind of emergent awareness of Beam activity in the chip over the sifting and sorting that would have shown up on an activity log.
In time, she saw Costa’s Beam ID surface in a cool blue hue, flat rather than glossy, with the texture of antique gunmetal. Her mind felt it as cold — not only in temperature, but temperament. The ID itself was a sequence of numbers, but as Leah reached into The Beam and sorted the locations that ID touched, she began to get a picture of Nicolai Costa. How he looked. How he moved. The temperature of his eyes, and the way he seemed to be looking not just into the camera, but into the eyes of the person viewing the images and vidstreams at the other end. She found digital avatars that Nicolai had used then hung on virtual hooks like fine suits. She could sense his presence in those empty shells and records. She co
uld almost smell his skin.
Leah was shocked to find herself very attracted to Nicolai Costa.
Her mind moved fast, sorting the in-stream response to a tunneled search query. She imagined piles forming then closed her eyes to watch them grow and wondered if she was closing her human eyes or a sense that was more abstract. There was a pile of Nicolai as he related to Isaac Ryan, a pile that pegged him as a closeted should-be-Enterprise artist. The best pile was the one that pegged him as something primitive — an earlier form of human despite obvious nanobot and add-on augmentation. The AI seemed to see him as a kind of outdoorsman or hunter. A hard man with a soft exterior. A ruthless man covered in refined culture.
Costa wore spectacles as some did in a day where all of the wealthy could see perfectly, but they didn’t come across as presumptuous. Nicolai’s glasses, by contrast, seemed to pay tribute to an earlier age and vintage style. They were homage, not hollow imitation.
She found restaurant chits and grocery charges, and saw how he ate. She found photos and saw the company he kept. Her mind, speaking with the canvas’s AI, parsed billions of words of text and spoken word, drawing three-degree-removed profiles of those around him. Who did Nicolai know, who did they know, and who did those friends of friends know? Who did Nicolai seem to surround himself with by choice, who was bound to him by work, and how often did he seem to desire being alone?
The AI — the deep AI, which lived as old souls within the Beam’s original data neighborhoods — didn’t feel that Nicolai truly liked the people he was around most often. If the AI had to guess (which it did), it pegged two of his closest true friends as being a high-end escort named Kai Dreyfus and one Thomas Stahl, missing and believed deceased, both of District Zero.
A secret artist who did what he had to do while never losing his soul or truly becoming the phonies who surrounded him. A scrapper who had clawed his way upward with persuasion rather than aggression. A man with tough, fighter’s eyes but a polished (if seemingly disobedient) exterior. Yes, Leah liked this man plenty.
Just as Nicolai’s information was flooding through Leah, the stream changed. Her subconscious mind claimed her hands and her output, steering the search to where it wanted to go. Leah saw the Beau Monde “trailing identifiers” Shadow had keyed her to look for as an orange-pink color, and they fluttered around Nicolai’s gunmetal blue like fireflies as information coalesced into meaningful deductions. Natasha Ryan had one of the identifiers. Isaac Ryan had one. Micah Ryan had one. Many others around Nicolai — almost exclusively those in politics or entertainment, following branches led by Natasha and Isaac — had them. When Leah emerged, she’d want to analyze that data. Shadow was right; the Beau Monde was real. Nicolai was surrounded by them, but he was always alone.
Link to link to link, Leah saw the colors. Nicolai was matte blue. Then orange-pink, orange-pink.
Red.
Leah felt something like a blink, though she doubted her human eyes had moved. The colors in here weren’t real; they were artifacts placed on the information by her deeper mind as it spoke to The Beam. That part of her consciousness had turned something red amidst the lighter colors as it had seen something the shallower parts of her mind had not.
She backed up, feeling a breath inward that brought the information swooping toward her like exhaling smoke in reverse. Her hands moved, swapping and arranging. She didn’t pay attention; she manipulated. Once finished, she’d uncovered the red corner she’d seen earlier, tied to a circle of orange-pink, like beads on a colorful necklace.
The orange-pink balls to each side of the red anomaly were Micah and Isaac Ryan.
The one in red was Rachel.
Curious, Leah picked up the red bead in her mental hands then pulled it closer in her mind, digits and bits flying about her like the shadows of ghosts. Rachel’s digital signature grew larger, taking on pulsing life. Leah’s mind turned it then peeled the Beam ID like skin from a nectarine. She saw the Beau Monde identifier then wondered again at the color.
She pondered the information, floating in the Lunis haze like a woman suspended in a tank of viscous liquid. The human mind was a puzzle box, with nested layers of increasing complexity, and Leah’s was no exception: somewhat of an enigma even to her. She knew that a part of herself had thought to pull Rachel’s ID out as being different, but she had no idea why. She found herself engaged in a silent quiz, with herself as both officiant and contestant.
It’s the same.
But it’s not.
It’s Beau Monde.
Obviously.
But it’s more.
Also obviously.
So what? What is different?
Leah pulled a packet of cyphers from her mental back pocket like a building superintendent removing an enormous keychain. Her mind slotted cypher after cypher into the puzzle, turning the visual metaphor into a key and a lock. First came the simple base substitutions: binary, hex, base-8. She turned the sequence, end-on and top-on, spinning one part of the puzzle after another. Then she saw it: how the sequence matched the Beau Monde key while also conforming to a pattern in itself. A subset within a subset. An ID within an ID. Two pieces of a coherent whole folding inward to make something entirely different.
If Micah, Isaac, and Natasha Ryan’s Beam IDs identified them as being more than Nicolai and most NAU citizens, Rachel Ryan’s ID clearly placed her beyond even them.
Leah sighed then backed away from the information and allowed herself to float. If an observer had been able to see a recreation of Leah’s visual metaphor at the moment, they might have seen her floating in blackness, lying on her back as her body was on the couch in her external world, her hands folded on her chest. To that observer, it might have appeared that Leah was doing nothing, but the reality was deeper. The transfer of information between Leah and The Beam was invisible because she was inside it. One with it. She breathed in data that the AI breathed out. Her exhalations were taken in by the Beam AI, sifting and sorting, making wholes from pieces.
Circles within circles.
Subsets told the story. Nicolai’s activity (not his ID) had placed him in a circle within the larger population. He was rich. He could do everything those below him could do, and more. The Beau Monde, by both Null’s estimation and what Leah could see through the trailing identifier, had access to everything Nicolai had access to…plus, yet again, more. Beau Monde stood above Nicolai, but the numeric reconfigurability of Rachel’s ID suggested that she stood above even that chosen group. It was math, not supposition. The Beau Monde identifier was a specific key, meant to unlock a certain set of technological privileges. Rachel’s key was far, far less specific. Rachel’s was a kind of skeleton key. It looked like it could unlock everything.
What are you, Rachel Ryan?
The Beam’s complete dataset was many orders of magnitude too large for Leah to even remotely consider grappling, but if she restricted her query to Rachel Ryan, she might be able to reconfigure it in her head/canvas and think/compute her way into…
Yes. That did the trick.
The search gave her enough data without being overwhelming, and when it returned, she folded edges and twisted facets until her mind had made the thing into a giant puzzle lock, keyed to fit Rachel Ryan’s identifier. The exercise wouldn’t tell her what Rachel’s code was made to open because Leah had fabricated the lock herself, but it might just shake some similar keys from the dataset.
In other words, Leah knew she wasn’t going to be able to determine the nature of Rachel’s high-level access. But with luck, she might be able to get an idea if anyone else shared it.
Keys fell. Leah’s eyes and mind watched them, turning numbers, symbols, and pages into Lunis-altered representations that her lower mind could manipulate into definite meaning. She couldn’t tell what was what; the data was incredibly complex, incredibly well masked, and obscured from individual identities. She’d seen that in The Beam before: The right hacker, if she was a good artist and knew what she was looking for,
could often find amazing things. But if she didn’t really know what she was looking for? Well, there was an old expression for that: “garbage in, garbage out.” You couldn’t find gold if you didn’t know what you were seeking…or even that the precious metal existed.
She pulled back up to the surface of awareness, desperate to ground herself. A tweak of perception and focus allowed her to again feel the couch under her back. A refocusing of her eyes turned visual metaphors back into the holographs making up her hybrid immersion. She was again a young woman in a run-down apartment overlooking the park in District Zero. She could smell burning from another apartment — either food or genuine fire, equally likely.
What are you looking for?
She looked at the ceiling, seeing its cracked plaster through the holograms. She’d come here on Shadow’s lead to find information on Nicolai Costa. As so often happened on Beam excursions — for Leah, at least — her starting point had been nothing more than that, and the true target, unseen at first, had only surfaced by accident. The problem was that such things always appeared out of context. Leah had been looking for unusual circumstances surrounding Costa and had found a special club involving his employer’s mother. A very secret, apparently very privileged club.
She inhaled, closed her eyes again, and dove. There was a sensation of falling, and when Leah opened her eyes, the code had again become symbols and edges.
The dataset had shaken out three people who shared the red tag she’d seen on Rachel. Three people who were somehow tied to Rachel Ryan. How? In what capacity? The configuration was tricky, but the data was there, and Leah’s mind worked to make sense of it.
A subset.
A subset within a subset.
That was it: an even smaller group inside whatever Rachel Ryan was involved with. Three Beam IDs with the special identifiers, in their own secret club, nested in the secret club within the secret club. Not a higher level of access, though. To Leah, it felt like a sidebar conversation within a larger group. Three people who belonged to a larger mass of ten or twenty or thirty people, but who’d stepped aside, in relative secret, to conduct their own discussion.