by Sean Platt
Leah settled, trying to believe that this was coming to her rather than being sought. It had something to do with Crumb. What, she didn’t know.
Inside of the memory of the Chinese restaurant, Leah realized that the building she was in had a red roof.
She thought of her experience inside of Crumb’s mind.
Overhead, her cabin lights went dark, then came back on.
The man with the round glasses. She’d seen him before. There was something there, something she couldn’t grasp. She’d never had a boyfriend who’d looked like him, and had never, she felt certain, had a friend (certainly not one good enough to share a meal with) who looked like him. Yet somehow, she did know him. Just as in the memory, Leah knew that the Chinese restaurant’s roof was red. And that while she was sitting in that restaurant, it was also something else. Someplace important, and secret.
Leah closed her eyes.
Inside her mind, she tried to conjure the handsome man with the glasses. Why was he so familiar? She watched the part of the memory she’d been able to hold, seeing how his lips moved, the way he gestured, the tiny smile that happened only on one side of his mouth, peeling up to reveal a few teeth.
“Who are you?” she said aloud.
Tall. Short brown hair. The sort of sideways smile that endeared the world.
She thought of the man as he said, We can live forever.
And then she had it.
“Canvas,” she said.
Something in the compartment chirped.
“Search Noah West. Pictures. Give it to me right here.” She put her hands together in front of her, then pulled them apart as if stretching taffy. A life-sized head appeared between them, almost as real as a genuine human head. Damning her nervous system’s intrusion, already deciding her port wasn’t at fault for this intrusion of memory after all, Leah clutched her fists twice to turn on the tactile feedback in her fingertips. She grabbed the hologram, now finding it solid and opaque. She turned it in her hands, watching. Then she waved to the side and the head vanished.
“Younger. Noah West 2020s.” She did a calculation in her head. “No, wait. 2030s.”
The canvas, in the voice of a bureaucrat who’d had no user softening, said, “No holographic records exist.”
“Then give me a fucking 2-D!” Leah was suddenly impatient. This was taking too long. The need to find the right photo was as pressing as the need for noodles a moment earlier.
A two-dimensional picture appeared in front of Leah: a handsome young man with brown hair and small, round glasses.
Leah slumped back against the train seat.
“Noah Fucking West,” she said.
Literally.
She already knew the intrusive memory had something to do with Crumb. Crumb and West? It made no sense. But of course, none of this made sense. Leah wasn’t plugged in, and a rather vivid memory of Noah West from sixty years ago had entered and begun fogging her mind. She wasn’t on dust, and had initiated nothing. It was like a memory of both time and place was being pressed upon her.
Leah felt her need for Chinese noodles swell and then subside in a pulse, as if her brain and body were trying to remind her that that part of the memory was important, too. Then the need for noodles faded to a memory of memory, and Leah realized that she no longer precisely wanted the noodles; she was simply experiencing nostalgia. Was this what it had been like for Crumb when she’d entered his mind? Because she didn’t like it. The sensation was intrusive, like someone sticking their fingers into her mouth. The memory wasn’t hers and she had no context for it, whatever it was. Still, Leah found herself wanting to revisit the time and place in the memory (or at least mull fondly upon it) but how exactly did that work when she’d never experienced it in the first place?
“Canvas, switch off connectivity to this compartment,” she said.
A chirp, and the memory vanished.
“Canvas, resume connectivity.”
The memory returned.
So it was coming through The Beam. But how? Leah wasn’t plugged in. The Beam didn’t communicate directly to the cortex. That’s not how it worked. Except that it kind of did, seeing as how entering an intuitive, dreamlike fugue was how Leah did her best hacking. She entered a haze, then lost track of time and released control over the details of what she was doing. Beam-related problems, approached that way, had always resolved themselves. She always knew where to go. And hadn’t she come here looking for something?
Leah closed her eyes and allowed the memory to fill her. She stepped into its shoes, scrolled backward in time, and found one memory inside another. Entering, she knew there’d been a red roof. And in the back room, there was…
“Canvas,” said Leah. “Has Quark or a Quark subsidiary ever owned a restaurant in District Zero’s Chinatown?”
The canvas trilled, indicating a positive search.
“Show it to me.”
Leah walked from the mag train station. She had plenty of credits for a cab or could have rented a hoverskipper, but she wanted to use her feet. If nothing else, she felt she needed the fresh air. But secondly, she was also starting to feel dumb. The memory of the Chinese restaurant had faded as quickly as it had come, and after it was gone, Leah had come up with a list of reasons why it had never been genuine in the first place. She’d decided that her port implant was malfunctioning after all. True memories, in any real sense, didn’t exist on The Beam. They certainly didn’t project themselves into the heads of other people, especially if those people weren’t even plugged in. The only explanation for Leah’s spontaneous burst of strange thought (and a strange, compulsive craving that had hit her like a brick) was an implant malfunction.
But she hadn’t been able to let it go, and hadn’t headed to a clinic or a dealer immediately upon arriving in DZ station. Instead, she had set out on foot toward Chinatown. She felt stupid doing it, but despite common sense about memories and malfunctions, the experience had contained too much coincidence to ignore.
For one, the odd thought slotted neatly into her current mission. Leah had set out in search of Crumb, and had done so on blind faith that she’d be able to find his path on The Beam. The Chinatown scene, she’d been sure, somehow involved Crumb. Secondly, when Leah had been inside Crumb’s mind back in the burned out house, she’d seen a vision a lot like she’d experienced on the train: the building with the red roof. And thirdly, what of West? If the memory was entirely a product of her own malfunctioning mind, why had she pictured Noah West in a way she’d never seen him before? West had died before Leah was born, and she’d known him only as the voice of The Beam. Avatars and projections of West used inside The Beam were very different from the young man she’d “remembered” an hour earlier. Her usual conception of West was older, with longer hair, giving off a more serious bearing. And lastly, there was the way the memory had led Leah to a rather obscure and strange bit of knowledge: namely, that one of Quark’s earliest holdings had been a restaurant in Chinatown. Who knew something like that, and who could possibly care? And how could Leah explain the fact that she’d known it if her experience on the train had simply been the work of a faulty implant?
It took her a long time to cover the distance to Chinatown on foot, but she didn’t mind. She needed time to convince herself that even if she was being stupid, she had no other leads and was blind anyway. She’d planned from the beginning to hook in and Beamwalk around, without any deliberate strategy. Only after getting her feet metaphorically wet would Leah start the work that Leo thought of as true hacking: trying to plunder the trail Crumb might have left in moving from the hospital to somewhere else, searching for whispers of a John Doe who fit his description. But it was the Beamwalking, not the searching of records, that was most important. The Beam had stopped being an archive of information a long time ago. True virtuosos today understood that navigation was an art rather than a science — and that you had to treat The Beam like a brain rather than a databank. Just as smell could conjure vivid memory ins
ide the human mind, the oddest bit of recalled data could open floodgates inside The Beam. You had to intuit your way to what you needed if what you needed wasn’t concrete and defined.
So, Leah reasoned, following this stupid but strangely compelling errand wasn’t as off-track as it seemed. The air was nice and smelled clean thanks to the filters; the day was warm; and the sun was bright enough in the sky to almost entirely obliterate the appearance of the lattice covering the continent. If Leah closed her eyes as she walked — a bad idea, seeing as she’d be run over by people on foot and hoverskippers, or maybe a car or cab with faulty collision sensors — she could almost pretend she was still in the mountains. A loud part of the mountains, filled with the sounds of people.
Leah took the long route, heading down Old Bowery and through the neighborhoods, avoiding the ganglands that ruled Soho and passing the expensive, high rent towers in Big Italy. She meandered around the bomb crater, never rebuilt and left as a monument from the skirmishes. Then, as Chinatown drew nearer, Leah wandered further and dawdled more until finally heading back toward Old Bowery, down Canal, and into the small streets that (save the hovers in the street) were among the few that hadn’t changed much since the days when DZ had been Manhattan. Leo, old enough to have known New York as New York, loved Chinatown and had shown Leah 2-D’s of it from his youth. As she stared at the small, narrow streets now, it was as if those old 2-D’s had come to life.
Leah knew the address the train’s canvas had given her and didn’t need to re-access The Beam. She found the building easily, right where the map had said it would be. The red roof was still there unchanged, like the rest of the street. But it wasn’t a restaurant, and it was no longer open. The front windows were soaped and the door was locked tight. There was no sign to indicate what the small building might now be (or had been, before being closed up), but Leah could see bolt holes and a lighter swatch of paint where a sign had once hung.
She looked up and down the street, feeling like an intruder. People milled behind her, unheeding. Chinatown had become very ethnically pure around the time the lattice went up — citizens clustering together with those like themselves out of fear, seeing as one of the NAU’s largest antagonists at the time had been China — and most of the people she saw were Chinese. Leah, an Organa white girl with bright pink dreadlocks, couldn’t have stood out more.
What am I doing here? she asked herself.
But as she stood in front of the building from her memory, the door clicked and then slowly swung open. A black square similar to a Beam hand pad circled briefly with a dull white glow, indicating that it had just been accessed. But Leah hadn’t pressed her hand to it. She hadn’t even spoken.
“Welcome, Leah,” said a voice she recognized. It was the default voice of any canvas, modeled after the creator of the network that powered it: Noah West.
And somehow, the canvas knew who she was.
The place had scanned her. That was the only explanation, and it wasn’t legal. You couldn’t scan a person who didn’t willingly access a panel or request information that required a scan. It was an invasion of privacy, permissible only by DZPD sweeperbots whose AI had probable cause. The place, when it had illegally scanned her, had read her Beam ID, confirmed her identity, and given her access. And the only problem with that theory was that she shouldn’t have access to this door, this building, or this canvas. And also, she didn’t have a Beam ID.
“Canvas,” she said, regarding the open door with suspicion.
The voice of Noah West answered. “Yes, Leah?”
Behind the door, the building’s interior lights came on. What she saw looked clean, and not at all like a restaurant.
“Why do I have access to this building?”
“You were given access on oh-six-one-two-two-oh-nine-seven by Stephen York.”
“What is today’s date?” Leah asked. She knew, of course, but wanted to see if the system’s time was correct.
“Oh-six-one-two-two-oh-nine-seven.”
“Who is Stephen York?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
“What is this place?” she said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
Leah stared at the pad and the door as if it might offer more, but of course it didn’t. The canvas’s voice was a program, not a person. She couldn’t ask it if she should be scared, why the man whose journal she’d seen in Crumb’s head would have given her access to a restaurant in Chinatown, and how it had happened today — possibly a few seconds before, as she’d stood out front lightly tugging at her dreadlocks. The whole thing had the feeling of someone watching her, then buzzing her in.
“What the fuck is going on?” Leah asked.
The polite voice said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
Not at all sure that she was being wise, Leah stepped inside. The door — an ordinary, old-fashioned shop door from the front — closed behind her on a pneumatic hinge to reveal a solid Plasteel backside. The place had a small entrance foyer, but behind a partial wall was what had once been the interior of the restaurant she’d seen on the train. Today, it wasn’t remotely similar. The main room was bright and mostly white, with everything alight from wall to ceiling to floor. The place seemed to be covered in old-model Beam-enabled surfaces, back before they’d developed IntelliResin and started mixing it into paints to create the subtler surfaces most new homes used today. Once upon a time, this room — sparkling clean and dust-free, apparently maintained by bots — had been beyond state-of-the-art. It was now an antique, but thirty years ago it had been the best of the best… of the best.
There were countertops along the walls and a pair of what looked like immersion rigs near the room’s center. The rigs (if that’s what they were) had the clunky look of old technology, but unlike the Beam surfaces, Leah couldn’t shake the feeling that even as old as the rigs seemed, they were well beyond anything she had ever known or tried. The place looked like a white and sterile high-end lab. But amidst all of the lights and geekery, there was one thing that didn’t fit. Along one wall was a large king-sized bed with a white comforter that appeared slept in and unmade. The bed’s frame was heavy wood.
Leah thought about about the security that had kept this place safe, realized it must be formidable, and wondered if she’d be allowed to leave or if she’d be locked in forever to die here. From the outside, the soaped-over windows had seemed to be glass, but now, inside, Leah grew certain they would be transparent steel. The walls would be soundproofed, locked down with elecromagnetic bolts as big as her fist. She’d walked into a monster, and it was up to the monster if she would be allowed out.
She crossed the room, watching as the strangely soft surface underfoot glowed to follow her footsteps. Lights chattered in small clusters on the walls. As she approached one of the workbenches, the light over the bench lit to greet her. Instruments Leah didn’t recognize turned on and came to life. She touched the wall behind the bench, trying to swipe a window open, but the walls either weren’t equipped to create windows or weren’t willing to give her access. She could try speaking, but the room’s silence seemed almost holy. She had the feeling of being in a temple, and of speech here amounting to sacrilege.
On a shelf, standing on end with a few other volumes, Leah found a book with a leather cover. On the cover was the single word JOURNAL. She opened it, already knowing what she’d find: an attribution that read, “Stephen York.”
Leah flipped through the journal, finding entry after entry from decades in the past. The name Noah West appeared throughout — usually as “Noah,” as if Stephen York had known West personally. As she flipped through the handwritten pages, something fluttered out from the journal’s back pages. She stooped to pick it up. It was an old 2-D, printed on actual paper. Strange, the idea of putting a 2-D on paper, but it actually made sense coming from a man who’d wanted to record his thoughts on paper, in a paper book, using an ink pen. It felt like a r
itual to Leah. Leo was like that, too. Sometimes he did things the old way not because it made sense, but because he simply wanted to experience the ritual of doing it. As a Beam-native, Leah had no attachments to such inefficient methods of communication as some older people seemed to have, but she did understand it. She had just walked all the way from midtown rather than taking a faster, easier method of transport. It was the same way of thinking: sometimes the harder way was the better way, and just because you could do something didn’t mean you had to or even should. Sometimes, the act of putting foot to concrete (or, she supposed, pen to paper) was a tiny act of rebellion, showing the world that you refused to be owned.
She looked at the paper in her hands. The 2-D showed a handsome young man with round-framed glasses sitting in a restaurant she recognized with a plate of noodles in front of him. Beside him — beside Noah West, circa 2030s — was another attractive man with a square jaw, long brown hair, and a neatly trimmed beard that had to be Stephen York. The two men had their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera like great friends.