The Beam: Season One (13 page)

“Sit down,” he said.
 

“I’d rather stand.”
 

“Sit down, Leah.”
 

She watched the old man with the braids and headband, trying to decide if this was an argument worth having. She decided it wasn’t. Yet. So Leah sat in the chair farthest from Leo, opposite him in the circle, and crossed her arms across her chest.
 

“You think we move too slow,” said Leo.
 

“Yes.”

“You think that we’re fighting a losing battle.”
 

Leah tried to decide how she wanted to answer. It was a trick question. She believed in Organa, but she argued for it on shaky ground — she with her new nano fabricating implants.
 

“I think that we need to keep up,” she said. “Quark is taking chances, and they get smarter every time. I got caught because I wanted to, because…”
 

Leo shook his head side to side. Leah watched him and trailed off. Then, reservedly, he picked up the pipe and puffed it again.
 

“I know why you got caught. I know about your new implants. I seem to recall telling you not to get them.”
 

“We need a presence on the inside. And now thanks to me, we have one. We have…”
 

“We have a traceable path right back to our front doors!” Leo snapped, his voice rising. “We have a girl who thinks she’s so goddamn smart that she doesn’t need to listen! We have someone who forgets that she’s not the only Organa in this game!”
 

“Dominic will erase my record,” she said.

Leo laughed a humorless laugh. “Oh, I see. And you were talking to the average person on the street, right? Beat cops who will just forget about you. The Beam doesn’t forget, Leah. They have you coming and going. They know every feature on your face, and they have a voice record of everything you said. You’re blind if you think that data stayed in the station, or that Dominic has access to a tenth of it. Who really controls the cops? Who polices the police? Do you really think The Beam will forget you? You were where you shouldn’t have been, and now your footprints are in there forever.”
 

“The station is a black box, Leo,” Leah protested. “They don’t have lines out. I tried telling you that. They cut it totally off and batch hand-selected datasets semi-weekly. You’d know that if you listened.”
 

“
You
need to listen!”
 

“Oh, I do? Tell me, Leo… why do you have me? Is it because you understand systems better than I do? Is it because this is all just on the tip of your tongue but you’d rather have someone else handle it to make your life easier? The Beam knows too much, does it? But you still think of it like a monster. It’s not a monster. It’s a system. The system will always do what’s best for the system. It responds to stimulus-response, same as you. When you go home and search The Beam to find one of these expensive books of yours, the system is on your side because you’re spending credits. It doesn’t care about your other face, where you pretend to hate it.”
 

Leah felt her heart racing, felt blood pulsing up her neck in a furious blush of mounting rage. She waited for Leo’s angry response, but instead of becoming cross, the old man just dropped his head.
 

“Fine,” he said. “We’re all hypocrites. But you are still part of a team. You’re important to us, but if you endanger the team by being reckless, then you’re useless. You are the only one here who I’d give this much latitude, but I can only take so much, Leah. You talk back. You question every plan. You’re given direction to do one thing and you do something else, almost automatically. You throw your knowledge and what you can do in everyone’s faces. The idea of getting deliberately caught! Do you know what Laura said when she heard? She wants you kicked out. If you’d gotten caught on accident, that’d be one thing, but there are already rumors about you hotdogging with new enhancements, and people already suspect that you have others…”
 

“Fuck them!” said Leah.
 

“Really.”
 

“Yes! Do you want to get into Quark, or do you want to bang tambourines and do moondust and dance in circles? I’ve done more to advance this group’s mission with my add-ons than a thousand Lauras with her braided necklaces and soul dance bullshit!”
 

“All right. You want to know the truth? I’ll tell you the truth. But if you say I told you this, I’ll deny it, and people will believe me, not you.” Leo sighed again, leaned forward, and set aside his pipe. “In order for the Organa movement to have a prayer of success, a small percentage of us must sell out. That’s why you got your training, and why we don’t discuss it here. It’s why I looked the other way when you got your first enhancement, and then your second. It’s why I’ll deny you got this new one. But you have to listen to me, Leah. You have to follow my orders and lay low. If people found out just how ‘non-Organa’ you really are...”
 

Leah bolted to her feet. “Fuck them!” she yelled again. “You want me to play down? I know the people up here don’t have enhancements, but I’ve done more for this movement than everyone else here put together. What’s more Organa — to stick to the doctrine, or to try and actually advance the cause? How dare anyone look down on me! And how dare you hide it! You know what best serves the cause, so embrace it, Leo. That’s what you could do — what you
would
do — if you really cared. There’s more I need! A mimic set, for one, and there’s something I’ve heard a lot about on the black market called…”
 

Leo shook his head. Leah felt like she was going to either scream or cry, and couldn’t decide which. She was angry at the others for their bullshit posturing, angry at Leo for taking their side while acknowledging that she was more important, and angry at herself for getting so caught up in it all. She’d been born in an Organa commune because her mother had wanted her to live without a Beam ID and to have the freedom that came with it. Then she’d moved to the city, under the radar, and explored the other side of the coin. She’d led that dual life, half city girl and half mountain-dwelling Organa, for most of her time on the planet. She’d learned enough about the growing NAU computer network to wonder if it had become too powerful. She’d watched the rolling service blackouts of 2089 and had seen just how despondent — sometimes suicidal — District citizens became when the walls didn’t respond, when their presences weren’t acknowledged by everything they encountered, when they couldn’t find out what was going on in the world and couldn’t talk to their friends with a gesture. That was when Leah realized things
had
to change, that there was more to Organa than simply eschewing technology. The Beam was too big to challenge, too big to fail. Humanity, never good at asking if it
should
do a thing once it learned it
could
, was on a slippery slope. So she’d suited up to fight, and now her side of the battle resented her for her preparedness? To Leah, living stark lives as a means of facing a complicated, technological enemy was beyond stupid. How could you fight an enemy you didn’t understand? Most Organas shunned technology without so much as a thought. Leah thought it was smarter to embrace The Beam enough to find the system’s holes, and a way out.
 

“No more add-ons,” said Leo.
 

“So I have to pretend. To be a good hippie, rather than an effective one.”
 

“You have to be part of a movement. And a community.”
 

Leah rolled her eyes.
 

“Something else that concerns me,” Leo said, studying her expression.
 

“Something else for your pariah?”
 

“It’s Crumb,” said Leo.
 

That snapped her mood. Crumb was a wacko. The town oddity. There was nothing about Crumb that wasn’t a little troubling, and there was, at the same time, nothing about Crumb that was troubling at all. The old man was his own thing, neither good nor bad. He’d been around for as long as Leah had known about the Organas without meriting more than a mention as an oddity.
 

“What about Crumb?”
 

“He’s getting strange.”
 

Leah laughed. Leo’s glance made her stop.
 

“He’s been talking about West,” said Leo.

“Yeah,” said Leah. “Noah Fucking West.”
 

“I don’t think it’s just an expression with him. He keeps blabbing about West this and West that. West is here and West is there. West is everywhere. It’s like he’s trying to warn us. Remember how he used to talk about the Indians?”
 

Leah did. Crumb had found a bunch of stories in a series of worthless tattered paper books that Leo had given him about old-time cowboys and so-called “Indians” native to the NAU hundreds of years ago. In the books, the Indians were always the bad guys, always coming to attack and rape and pillage. After reading the stories, Crumb had begun to spout off about Indians coming to raid their wagon train. At first it was cute, but then it got annoying. Two weeks later, when Crumb’s paranoia over the Indians reached a head, Leo sent a few men out with Crumb to scout the trails. They’d spotted no men with red skin and feathers, but they
had
seen six police hovers approaching. They’d rushed back to the village and had destroyed or hidden piles and piles of hard storage — slip drives, stolen paper records, plans, and boxes upon boxes filled with Organa propaganda — just in time, just in advance of the raid. Most in the village wrote it off as coincidence, but Crumb had returned to normal after the police had left, no longer yammering on about an impending Indian attack.
 

“I remember,” said Leah.
 

“That’s how he’s been with West, as if something’s jarred him loose. He used to be all over the place, but now everything is Noah West this and Noah West that.”

“He’s crazy, Leo.”
 

“It’s like he’s trying to warn us. We tried to crack his head when he first arrived, back in the sixties, but we’ve never gotten anything from him. We wrote it off because like you said, we just figured he was crazy. But it’s always bugged me. Why was Dominic called to take him in when a sweeper could have done the job? Why was he ordered to
federal
Respero? He should have gone into the state system, and then either been contained or dispatched without ceremony. But they were all over Dominic, remember? And that’s what got him thinking that maybe his gut feeling to save Crumb meant something.”
 

Leah shrugged, her gesture asking what came next.

Leo tapped his chin with his thumb. “I want you to ride with Crumb to Bontauk. They have the closest hardwired connection to The Beam. Don’t say I told you so, but I don’t think I have to explain why I’m asking you to do it?”
 

“My port. And my ID spoof.”
 

“Yes. But not for you. For him. I don’t want him scanned, even by something simple like a handheld. Not until we know more.”
 

Leah was shaking her head. “It’s just Crumb,” she said.
 

“Yes,” said Leo. “But my instincts have never failed me, and they’re all ringing that there’s something to this.”
 

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. But until we know more, I’ll be getting the same brand of wretched sleep I’ve been getting for too long.”
 

Leah stood, brushed at her sarong, and picked up her backpack. “What do your instincts say about my getting caught breaking into Quark?” she said.
 

Leo stood and pulled something from a satchel at his side, then handed it to Leah. It was a small, collapsible slumbergun.
 

“That either way, it’s a good idea for you to keep that with you.”

Chapter 13

Stephen York stood on the dirt, kicking at it, willing his feet to do what he told them. After a while, they did. He stopped kicking and fell still. Then he leaned back and crossed his arms. Soon he realized his arms were twitching, so he pinched them harder to his sides. He told his mind and body to still; he needed to concentrate for what was coming.
 

He began reciting prime numbers, like a mantra.
 

One. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen.
 

In between numbers, York tried to decide what the last few days of foreboding could mean. His mind kept wanting to slip, but he held it down, focusing on the numbers.
Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-three.
He could keep going. He had, over and over and over. He knew up to 3571 by heart because he had once memorized the first five hundred primes while studying cyphers and encryption. It was a relatively useless skill, but today, he was grateful for it. Like an old man searching his mind for names from his youth, York felt that reciting the primes was a way to keep him sharp. He walked through the list repeatedly, feeling like he was running a stone over his thoughts, trying to hone their edge. Still, his thoughts kept slipping. His memories were there, quiet and orderly deep inside him, but they kept threatening to fall away. Some thoughts were stickier than others. Through simple repetition, some memories had become grooved and conditioned. Like the primes. He’d had reason enough to recite his wife’s name that he knew it without thinking. He knew his bank account number. He knew the access codes he’d used back when he’d helped develop Crossbeam decades ago. He could remember line after line of code — all obsolete today, of course. But doing reasoning with that archive of knowledge? Plumbing it in order to draw conclusions? That was hard. Maybe impossible.
 

He felt like his mind was inside a literal box. He kept rapping his mental shoulders and knees on that confining box because there wasn’t enough room to maneuver. That was the firewall, of course. He’d helped develop some of that technology too, but the details weren’t as well-rehearsed as his wife’s name or the prime numbers and so he couldn’t access much about them. He knew the firewall had blocked most of who he was. He knew it kept him inside this box, locked down tight. He knew that his normal way of expressing himself was hampered, and that he’d need to find other ways to do what he needed to do. He had references. Back when York had studied neurology, he’d learned about a man who couldn’t form new memories, but who had re-learned how to “learn” by establishing habits that played themselves out without his conscious awareness. York wouldn’t be able to do that to get out of his box, of course, but the process was the same: when one way is blocked, you find another.