The Beam: Season One (26 page)

“I’m sorry, sir. It was brief. But HQ wanted this security checkpoint set up until all of the lights are green.”
 

“Are they green now?”

“E.O.D., sir. After all staff has cycled through.”
 

“Noah Fucking West. And the servers?”
 

“Secure, I believe, sir.”
 

“According to who?”
 

“Officer Harper, sir.”
 

Dominic pinched the bridge of his nose. Harper was smart, but was almost a rookie himself. Harper didn’t know about the glaring security gap. He probably
did
actually think everything was fine, even if it wasn’t.

“How long did the system reset take?”
 

“I don’t know, sir.”

“When did it happen?”
 

“Around one-fifteen A.M., sir, give or take.”
 

Dominic thanked the kid and left, but he didn’t like this at all. There was an old axiom about computers that said, “Garbage in, garbage out,” and it was supposed to refer to the fact that computers only made mistakes when people made mistakes programming them or giving them data — i.e., when the inputs were “garbage.” But in Dominic’s experience, The Beam had mostly evolved beyond that quaint expression. With the advent of AI and increasingly sophisticated algorithms, The Beam could, in most cases, either find its way around bad data or make what were essentially educated guesses. There were system outages due to failures in the lines or inferior incidental technology, but The Beam itself seldom made mistakes. What Prince had described sounded to Dominic like a hard reset or a bug, not an outage. Outages were possible, but hard resets were caused by people or intelligent programs like clerics. Bugs, as far as The Beam was concerned, were things of the past.
 

Harper might think the fault was accidental, but Dominic didn’t buy it.

His anger now turning to concern, Dominic crossed into his office, started up his console, and began checking the system logs. His sector of the station’s canvas, being the chief’s sector, had an extra layer of security. Its logs were independent from and duplicated off of the server, then stored in protected memory. This memory was physically shuffled every half hour on a device called a data carousel that was sometimes a pain in the ass, but for which Dominic was suddenly thankful.
 

He went to the wall behind his office chair and removed a panel. Behind it was a large wheel with vertical slots that reminded Dominic of an ancient slide carousel Grandy had used to project family photos onto the wall until the day he died. There were forty-eight slots in the wheel, and each held a data card representing a half hour’s worth of everything in the station from surveillance to logs to bookings. Every thirty minutes, a mechanical arm removed the card from the backup drive and placed it in a slot in the wheel, then replaced it with the next half hour’s card.
 

The device was clunky and non-compact by design. Everything the carousel did could have been handled digitally and without moving parts, but as The Beam became more and more ubiquitous, the only way to truly isolate data was via its physical removal. Unless someone walked into Dominic’s office and used human hands to remove or alter the data cards, it would be safe from hackers.
 

Dominic removed his handheld, turned off its wireless connectivity, then wrapped the thing in digital foil just to be sure it couldn’t broadcast. He removed the card from the carousel slot marked 01:00-01:30 and slid it into the handheld. He quickly scrolled through the logs and found what he was looking for:

01:13:02 SYSTEM FAIL

01:14:12 SYSTEM RESET

There was no data at all in the seventy seconds between those two entries. Normally, the entire system’s activity was logged six times a second using EverCrunch compression, collapsed for easy viewing and expandable by anyone with sufficient access to view the 360 backups made each minute. But at 1:13am, there had been a reset, and it had taken seventy seconds to restore logging — an eternity in which any skilled hacker would be able to remove or copy any files they wanted without leaving a trace.
 

“Shit,” he said aloud.
 

He compared the file tree before and after and found no significant difference between the two backups, meaning that nothing seemed to have been deleted. No files other than the self-referential meta logs had changed modification dates. So if someone had been inside, they’d been snooping, probably copying. Someone searching for information.
 

“Chrissy,” he said, talking to the handheld.

The handheld, recognizing his voice, chirped.
 

A soft female voice — not Noah’s; Dominic had changed that default immediately — said, “Validation, please.”
 

Dominic said his name, pressing his thumb onto the handheld’s screen.

The handheld, recognizing his voice and thumbprint, chirped, then said, “Thank you, Dominic. What can I do for you?”

“Compare the three minutes of logs prior to system failure entry at oh-one-one-three-oh-two.”
 

“What would you like to know about the comparison?”

“Project the file trajectory of any activity during that period.”
 

File trajectory
wasn’t a term Dominic had ever heard anyone else use, but he’d been working with this particular handheld long enough for it to know what he meant. He wanted to know what people had been up to, where they’d been snooping, and where they’d probably been headed — and hence what they might have done while the lights were out.
 

“There were four users during that time period,” said the handheld in its soft feminine voice. “One was officer Harper, doing his hard backups. One was an outside access port, 048390, labeled as Brooklyn sub-PD, searching for a suspect in recent bookings named Dotson, Wyatt. The third was the Quark daemon. The fourth was anonymous FTP, looking at…”
 

“FTP?”
Chrissy might as well have said someone had ridden into the office with the Pony Express and sent telegrams while listening to music recorded on phonograph cylinders.
 

“Yes, sir.”
 

“FTP hasn’t been used in eighty years,” Dominic said.

“Records show IBM 286 processor, connecting at 1200 baud…”
 

“Are you fucking kidding me?”
 

“No, Dominic. Serial of Lima-three-three-tango.”
 

“Noah Fucking West,” said Dominic. They weren’t even being careful. Everything about the entry was spoofed and clearly designed to be found, because someone had thought it hilarious. 286 processors and 1200 baud modems weren’t much newer than his great-grandfather’s slide carousel. And the serial? L33t, the old hacker dialect? Yes, someone was having a shit ton of fun while committing high crimes.
 

“Where were they going? Can you predict their trajectory?”
 

“Your files would be my guess, Dominic,” said the soft voice. “They opened files all over the system prior to the outage, but it looks to me like misdirection. The pattern suggests intentional subterfuge intended to make it look like they went for arrest records, but if they’d been after arrest records, they wouldn’t have…”
 

Dominic killed the voice, in no need of details. If Chrissy intuited that they’d been after his files, he believed her. He removed the data card, slipped it into his pocket, and returned the handheld to broadcast mode. Before shutting it down, he thanked the voice, wondering what it said about him that his most cordial relationship was with an artificial person.
 

There was plenty in Dominic’s files that an intruder might have been after, but only one thing he cared if anyone found. He pulled up his console, then clicked through to bookings and cross-referenced those against the tracker in his uniform shoe. Being careful not to open any files and disturb the footprints, Dominic pulled up a window containing one particular tracking set and another containing a single day’s booking records. He closed his eyes, whispered a prayer, and looked at the open dates for each. Both files had been opened the previous night, meaning that the intruder had been looking for exactly what he’d feared.

Dominic slumped into his chair. “Shit,” he said.
 

The vagrant. The fucking vagrant, and his own fucking compassion that had made him act in a way he shouldn’t have.

Once upon a time, Dominic had had a sister who was four years younger than him. They’d not always gotten along because she’d required so much of his parents’ attention. At the time, Dominic hadn’t understood why; he hadn’t known what Down’s Syndrome was or that unregistered clinics were the only hospitals that still permitted Down’s births. He hadn’t understood why, after his father died and his mother had gotten an actual paper letter under the door, she had spent two weeks crying, then three years taking his sister to special doctors, special schools, and finally special people who would only do business in abandoned places that made Dominic, then sixteen, nervous. Even after their mother died in a car accident, Dominic hadn’t stitched it all together — not until six full years later, when he found himself his sister’s guardian and received her final Respero decision. The board referenced the letter that Dominic’s mother had received nearly a decade earlier and said that the board was very sorry, but the subject had reached age eighteen and her brain was still not growing to spec. A summons to her Respero dinner was attached.
 

Respero was something many people had whitewashed into “graduations” (rich people’s dinners were extravagantly catered and populated by guests popping EndLax so they could fill their stomachs like bottomless pits), but Dominic, jaded from a young age, saw right through them. Dominic saw Respero for what it was:
murder
.
 

So rather than delivering his sister to her euthanasia, he’d started to dig, using all of the skills the police academy taught him for all the societally wrong reasons. The board had given the family two weeks to prepare her dinner, but within ten days Dominic discovered a hideous truth: for the right number of credits paid to their families, it was possible to buy terminally ill people to stand in for Respero.
 

That was Dominic’s first association with Omar, the first time Dominic was forced to choose the lesser between two evils. He sold out, becoming Omar’s inside-the-system moondust liaison in exchange for enough credits to buy Chrissy’s replacement.
 

It took Chrissy another fifteen relatively happy years of life spent in Appalachia to die of natural causes, but both the lesson and the wound had stayed with Dominic through the years. So when he’d been called to Times Square to apprehend a ranting vagrant a few years later, he remembered what he’d learned about Respero. The state had ordered Dominic to take the man to a free center immediately, but Dominic had sensed something in Crumb that he couldn’t ignore. There was a desperate look in his eyes — a kind of pleading intelligence that wasn’t quite able to claw its way to the surface of his crazy, scraggly-bearded exterior. Dominic was still in his cheap apartment at the time but had just gotten his designation advancement and the correspondingly large Directorate pay dole. So he’d used the surplus credits to buy another body and had shuttled the man up into the mountains to live out his days, the same as Chrissy.
 

And now, someone knew. The record Dominic’s tracker had made of his first encounter with the vagrant and the file showing that the vagrant’s ID hadn’t appeared on the same day’s duty roster (booking him through to Respero) had both been opened last night during the system outage.
 

Someone knew, and that someone had surely made copies.
 

It was enough of a betrayal to bust a captain to nothing — or maybe send him to an elegant dinner and a bitter dessert.
 

EPISODE 3

Chapter 1

January 15, 2037 — District Zero

Nicolai looked down at the two small pink pills sitting in the tiny dish, perched atop a small plate as it was set in front of him by a white-gloved waiter. His first thought was that the dish was unnecessary. His second was that the plate was, too. He’d been to restaurants where a side of ketchup would be delivered on a saucer, and Nicolai thought
that
unnecessary. The idea that pills would be given to him not from a bottle but in a dish was dumb, and the idea that the dish would need to be delivered atop a plate was ludicrous. It was supposed to feel opulent (like the white gloves on the waiters and the hot towels he’d seen delivered to other tables), but to Nicolai, it felt pompous.
 

“EndLax,” said Isaac, looking over at Nicolai. “Take them and you won’t have to pass on any of this amazing food simply because you’re full.”
 

Nicolai looked up at Isaac, then around the table at Natasha, Micah, Micah’s date Paige, and back to Isaac. Isaac’s expression was helpful, and Nicolai decided not to tell him that he knew exactly what the pills were. He also decided not to tell Isaac that his confused look was being caused by how he felt about them.
 

“It’s okay,” he said to the Monteffero’s waiter. “I’ll do without.”
 

The waiter didn’t take the plate away. “Are you sure, sir? You have quite a lot of food coming.”
 

“I’ll just stop when I’m full,” he said.

The waiter looked at Nicolai as if he’d just expressed his belief in Bigfoot out loud, then looked around at the table’s other occupants, seeming to ask if he should listen to the crazy dark-haired man and take the EndLax away. Micah nodded, and the waiter, with a sense of confused resignation, took the pills.
 

“You’ll have to excuse Nicolai,” Natasha said to Paige, laughing. “He’s used to eating only what he needs.” She laughed as if this were the most preposterous thing she’d ever heard, then smiled at Nicolai to show that she was teasing. Her red hair was piled high, her smile wide and genuine, her breasts pushed up and her curves — in her opulent dress — settling in all the right places.