The Beam: Season One (18 page)

Once alone, Dominic pushed back his console, then cleared space on his non-Beam-enabled desk blotter. He pulled a small vial from his bottom desk drawer and tapped a miniature avalanche of small gray rocks — each about the size of a troublesome pebble in a man’s shoe — onto its surface.
 

He picked up a trio and dropped all three under his tongue.
 

Dominic leaned back and looked at the ceiling, waiting for the moondust to show him truths The Beam could not.

Chapter 4

Doc felt nervous in this part of town.
 

By contrast, Kai, walking along beside him, seemed to be right at home in a place where the servicing of raw human needs was done so openly. The drug dealers were almost unionized here, each with his or her own speciality, and Kai apparently knew them all. Some dealt dust; some dealt hypercrack; some dealt plain old-fashioned heroin. Kai treated them all like old friends, despite the fact that her clients were all from much higher social castes. She said she liked society’s castoffs. They were honest in a way law-abiders could never be. And everyone certainly knew Kai, even if they’d never met her in person. Her reputation as a woman with connections seemed to precede her.
 

Doc stared too long at everything, unable to help himself. There were walkers on every corner. Most of them, he knew, would have upgraded themselves with bargain-basement sexual enhancements that even Doc, with his loose morals and entrepreneurial impetuosity, would never sell. He’d heard of such things, though; they were advertised in rip-off shops throughout The Beam, pushing geotagged ads at everyone who connected to the network within twenty miles of this place. The walkers would have vaginas made of flexible Plasteel, with small rollers under the surface that provided ribs “for his pleasure.” The rollers vibrated and shook, and would do so to milk a john while stimulating his prostate via an appendage up his ass at the same time. The walkers’ faces were barely human. They had lips that looked like a joker’s, their skin stretched tight to conceal wrinkles that, in higher-class hookers, would have been erased by nanos. Many of the girls had long, dexterous synthetic tongues. They flicked them at Kai in greeting like obscene robot kisses. Kai waved back and called the walkers by name.
 

They finally came to a crumbling building with a sandstone facade that, Doc supposed, had once been beautiful and grand. It was just west of the park and had been home to the District Zero’s old rich before the upheaval of the twenties had turned the previous century’s elite real estate into ghetto.
 

Kai stopped and looked up. “This is it.”
 

Doc was unimpressed. The nicest-looking older buildings tended to be the worst, and he didn’t trust it. Something was running up and down his spine, warning him off like a sixth sense.

“Looks like a flophouse,” he said.

Kai, her eyes still on the building, nodded. “Pretty much,” she said.
 

After Doc — on the run from the police and whoever had broken into his apartment — had paged Kai and stormed into her building (and after Kai had soothed his jangled nerves in the way that only Kai could, for a price) she’d listened to his story, then busted his balls. After a suitable period of mockery, she’d called a man named Stanford who she claimed could make people disappear. She explained that Stanford’s process wasn’t simple, that it’d cost Doc more credits than he’d want to spend, and that it wasn’t foolproof… but that it was the best Doc would be able to do. It
was
possible to get your hands on a permanent solution, of course — a stolen Beam ID — but installing stolen IDs was more than tricky, and Doc had neither the time nor the money to make it happen. Beam IDs were mRNA-based and replicated inside a host’s body like a virus. Changing a person’s ID involved genetic manipulation that a skeeve like Stanford couldn’t safely do. What Stanford
could
do, though, was perform a full-body magic trick involving false eyes or lenses, skin lotions, and other spoofed parts that the bots were most likely to scan. Stanford couldn’t yank a person from the grid, but he could make that person invisible in the same way a good magician makes things invisible — by using misdirection and flair.

Standing in front of the sandstone building, Doc listened again to his sixth sense playing ominous notes across the back of his neck. Something was wrong. He took Kai’s wrist and pulled her further down the littered sidewalk.
 

“What are you doing?” she said.

Doc kept his face neutral. “Just keep walking.”
 

Kai, who had seemed to find Doc’s reports on Xenia’s secrets as ominous as he did, obeyed. They crossed a street and skirted several burned-out hulks of ancient cars when Doc finally saw the unseen thing that had set his nerves on high alert.
 

“Shit,” he said.
 

“What?”
 

Doc didn’t answer. Instead, he shoved Kai into an alcove behind a refuse bin and pushed his body against hers, suddenly groping her small breasts, reaching around to grab handfuls of ass. He smashed his lips sloppily into her mouth, using plenty of tongue. It was wet and gross and desperate, and Kai pushed back at him until she heard the hum. Then she fell into it and let Doc do what he wanted.
 

They waited, playing out their little drama. Behind them, the hum increased in volume.

Doc rolled Kai to the side and glanced at the sweeperbot from the corner of his eye. DZPD didn’t try to disguise the bots and make them look friendly. Sweeperbots were all metal and menace, without any attempts to mimic human expression. The thing looked like an upright bullet with few visible features. Its sensors were all under the surface of its Alumix skin, able to see through what looked from the outside like a jacket of copper. It was floating now, but at least half the time you ran into sweepers, you’d see them prowling to conserve energy, stalking the streets on long chrome legs with pointed ends, like giant spiders.
 

The sweeper stood behind them as if enjoying the show, humming as it hovered. Inside its smooth copper-colored jacket, something whirred, reversed, whirred again.

Doc couldn’t see the thing fully without being obvious, so he kept waiting, groping Kai while she groped back, now seemingly adding her considerable work experience to her performance. The bot wouldn’t be able to scan them without cause, and making out in public certainly wasn’t cause in this part of town. But if the bot was looking for a missing man with shoulder-length blonde hair in a suit jacket too nice for the district? Well, that might be cause aplenty.
 

After a long moment, the bot hovered on, searching for criminal activity that violated the low standard it was programmed to accept in this part of town.
 

Doc exhaled, then parted from Kai. She didn’t peel off the wall with him. Instead, she continued to hold on south of his belt.
 

“You fucking pig,” she said. “You’re totally hard!”
 

“Come on,” he said, ignoring her. “We can go back now.”
 

But Kai kept holding his crotch and refused to lose her infuriating sideways smile. Doc couldn’t believe she wanted to play this game right now. Of
course
he was hard. Her pointing it out was like a ninja observing his way with a blade.
 

“Goddammit. Knock it off,” he said.

“You started this.”
 

Doc wrenched free, then took Kai roughly by the arm and pulled her back in the direction of Stanford’s sandstone building. She was tiny compared to him, but right now the small pale-skinned woman with the dark brown hair clearly had the upper hand over the broad-shouldered blond man. She dragged her low heels as he tugged her, giggling.

“You like me, Doc Stahl,” she teased.
 

“Come on.” He released her hand and took the lead, figuring she’d either follow or she wouldn’t.
 

“I can see it in your eyes,” she cooed. “
And
in your pants. I could do things to you right here and right now, you know. In this part of town, nobody would think anything of it. That sweeper wouldn’t have thought twice if I’d dropped to my knees and put your cock in my mouth.”
 

Doc, who was usually impervious to embarrassment, felt a blush creeping up from under his collar. He’d done acres of dirty deeds with Kai, but all of them had been in the bedroom. He didn’t exactly appreciate her come-ons while they were crossing a street filled with hookers and junkies. They were passing a few clusters of people in the gutters, and despite the vagrants’ stupor, heads had raised at Kai’s remark.
 

“You know I can do things with my tongue that…”
 

“Do you ever get tired of being a whore?”
 

The comment was wrong on a dozen levels, but Kai took it as fair retaliation and smirked. She liked control, and sex was one of her ways to get it. Other ways were money and rapport, both of which Kai had in spades. Doc had always felt comfortable with her. It was as if they were a couple, rather than mutual clients. Kai bought from Doc, and she seldom paid with credits. Doc got the dust knocked off his boots and usually remunerated with gifts instead of cash. It was intimate, in a way. It was easy to forget that she probably had the same setup with dozens of guys.
 

“Can I ask you something, sweetheart?” Doc said.
 

“Always.”
 

“Why are you here?”
 

“Stanford,” she answered.
 

“I mean, why are you here
with
me
.” He shook his head, already feeling dumb for where his question was going. “Never mind. You must get that all the time.”
 

“What?”
 

“Guys who think they’re getting special treatment.”
 

She laughed. It was a strange sound, down in the city’s gutter. “This
is
special treatment,” she said. “Believe it or not, I don’t help all of my clients vanish.”
 

“So again, why are you here?”
 

She shrugged. “This job isn’t about the money for me anymore. A girl can’t just do it for the money if she expects to stay whole.”
 

As strange as her laugh had been, hearing Kai talk about wanting to be “whole” was a thousand times stranger. She saw his look and continued.

“Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “We all — well, all of us in Enterprise, anyway — earn our credits so that we can do something else. We work hard so we can play hard. But when I’m done working, I don’t want to read books. I
like
to fuck. That’s the fun part. So I don’t have to work and then play. I turn parts of my work
into
play.”
 

“This is play?” said Doc, looking around. He still felt like he could get a knife in his ribs at any second.

“I’m not afraid of life’s dark corners, Doc,” she said. “I have my favorite clients, and doing things like this for them? Well, it’s my version of reading books after work. In fact, another of my favorite boys had me worried when you showed up. He called, then disappeared. Now I can’t find him. It has me bothered. So yeah, I have my little projects.” She caught him looking again and gave him a fake glimmer of anger. “What? You’ve never heard of a hooker with a heart of gold?”
 

Doc shook his head. “I guess I figured you did it for the money.”
 

“I’ve got more money than I can spend.”
 

That got Doc’s attention. They were nearing Stanford’s building again, but he stopped short of it and faced her.

“How much money you got, sunshine?”
 

“How much money
you
got, cowboy?” she retorted.
 

“Plenty.”

She looked around, seeming to notice her surroundings for the first time. Then, quietly, she said, “If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
 

Doc smiled. “On three,” he said. Then he counted down, and when he reached one, they both gave the balances in their credit accounts. Then both looked at the other, impressed.
 

“I thought you were a scrapper,” she said.
 

“And I thought you were a working girl.”

 
They resumed walking. Looking forward, he said, “You know, we’re not that different.”

“Sure we’re not,” she said, looking at him amused. She probably used that look a lot, probably when her clients fell in love.
 

“We’re both whores,” he said. “We screw people for a living. I do it with slick talk and you do it with your fancy fur box, but it really ain’t that different. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it’s hard for me to look in the mirror. I’ve sold defective upgrades when I had to eat. I once got my hands on a friend’s client list, and stole them all away. I’m not proud of it, but the thing is, sometimes things are tough and a man has to eat. I’d do it all again if I had to, and…”
 

Kai stopped him by reaching up and putting a thin finger against his lips. She said, “You should know I don’t have any fur on my box, unless that’s what the client wants. And please, don’t be a cliche.”
 

He shook his head. The finger left his lips.
 

“Men tell me secrets,” she said. “It’s not wise. Don’t just spill your guts to the pretty girl because she acted like you mattered.”
 

“Bitch,” he said, smiling, “I matter just fine without your approval.”

They arrived back at the sandstone building and turned toward its entrance. Doc had one foot on the first step in front of its door when Kai put a hand out to stop him.
 

“Stanford is the best, but I don’t trust him at all,” she said. “When he called me back, there’s a reason I tried to push you out of the shot and a reason I got annoyed when you shoved your face back into it. Believe me, he screencapped you and has run your image through enough filters to know exactly who you are.”