The Beam: Season One (33 page)

But she was wrong.

Right now, Kai felt dozens of knives severing each of her toes and fingers wide open, peeling them back, separating every shred of tendon from her bones. She felt the pulpy innards of her digits smashed and chewed, further separated — the nails peeled straight back and skin slowly stripped. She looked down, vision commanded as if by the push of a strong hand at the back of her head, and saw her fingers and toes coming off. The pain should have stopped once the digits were gone from her body, it didn’t. Kai felt each cut, each flay, each intrusion and impalement. Then the knives were on what remained of her hands and arms, running up and into her gut, shredding flesh from flesh. Something was happening to her face; she seemed to feel her skull retreating from a blade, her face melting from bone, her eyes becoming hot like rocks in a fire and popping. A circle of agony wrapped her neck and slitted it, her larynx seeming to crack and fold back on itself like a split walnut. Still she was able to scream, her lips peeling from her face, and as she did, her…
 

It stopped. Kai’s eyes blinked, and she suddenly found herself staring at a featureless white ceiling. The pain’s departure was so complete and sudden that she was totally disoriented. This wasn’t how pain was supposed to work, and her body was baffled. Pain was supposed to subside and retreat, not cease like a switch being flipped. She was afraid to move. The absence of pain was a sort of torture in itself. Everything in her braced, preparing for its return.
 

“It’s very real, is it not?” said a pleasant voice. Kai rolled her eyes and saw Alix Kane’s white-haired head step into view above her. Her own head was strapped firmly down on the Orion, a kind of cap snaking long fingers under her hair. “That’s what people of your lower station always say when they’re first exposed to this level of immersion: that it’s so
real
. With this technology, you aren’t being
shown
horror. You are
experiencing
horror as if it were really happening.” He tapped the machine beneath Kai with his palm. “If I had a kinder machine than this old girl, I could put you in a meadow. You would not experience it as a falsity. You would believe you were there.
Fully
. I could let you live out your entire life in that meadow, and soon you’d forget that there even was another world that you used to call “reality.” There is no way to tell them apart. Now do you see why Mr. Stahl was so interested in learning about all of this?”
 

Kane circled the table once while Kai’s breath hitched and she fought to get her bearings. It had been
real
all right. Realer than real. She’d never imagined that such a degree of simulation was possible. The Orion’s takeover of her five senses, aided by the neural down-tuning nanos they’d injected into her, had been perfect.
 

“That was just a starter,” said Kane. “I can literally excite every sensory nerve in your body at once, but there’s no art to that. At lower levels, I can give you knives and fishhooks and white-hot brands. We have programs for the iron maiden, for being drawn and quartered, for all sorts of terrible things. But that doesn’t occur everywhere, see? Even when a team of horses is pulling you apart, your scalp doesn’t hurt. Some people, they use this thing like a blunt weapon.” He tapped the table’s aluminum surface beside Kai’s head. “But there is value in anticipation, is there not? You of all people should understand the power of teasing.”

Kai felt her heart thumping in her throat. Her breath was coming fast and hard. She jerked against the restraints, testing them. But they were too strong for her to break, and Kane had managed to disable her upgrades by uploading what he called a “short-lived virus” into her — something Kai didn’t know was possible. She still had her mental add-ons at her disposal, but that was probably intentional because right now, all they were good for was categorizing the depths of her agony, recording it for later playback if she wanted.
 

“I don’t know anything else,” Kai managed to say. She’d already told Kane about how Doc had come to her, how he’d seen some strange things at Xenia Labs, and how she’d been trying to help him disappear. She hadn’t needed a round on the Orion to tell them everything, because they knew it all already. But Kane had strapped her in anyway.

Kane laughed. “Oh, I know you don’t.” Kane called over his shoulder. “Unmute Mr. Stahl.”
 

Kai rolled her eyes, trying to look around. Her head was fixed and she couldn’t move it, but she soon saw one of the Beamers dragging Doc into her field of view. His blond hair was unkempt, eyes wide and wild. He was ranting and raging, screaming and shouting — except that no sound was leaving his mouth. Then the Beamer touched a button on a handheld and the nanos they’d shot into him moved away from his vocal cords, and Doc’s voice returned as suddenly as Kai’s pain had departed.
 

“— know anything, you motherfucker! I keep telling you! It was a mistake! Let her…”

He stopped, seemingly surprised by his voice in the quiet room. Of course, it couldn’t have been this quiet a moment ago, could it? Kai assumed she’d been screaming, but she realized she had no idea. Her experience on the Orion was fully immersive — more immersive than even she, as an expert in sensation and sensation-enhancing technology, thought possible. She hadn’t just
imagined
her fingers peeling like bananas to show the bleached white bone beneath. She’d felt it as if it were happening. She’d
seen
it. She’d
heard
it. She’d even
smelled
it, and she’d tasted blood in her mouth, metallic like copper. She’d felt as if she had screamed, but she might have been doing so into the black, bloody room in which she’d been sequestered a moment ago. As far as the others were concerned (and she had to believe Nicolai was over there somewhere too, equally muted), it might have looked like she was peacefully napping.
 

Doc said, “Why is she bleeding?”
 

Kane reached down and ran a finger along Kai’s neck, below her ear, then pulled it away and looked at a fat line of red blood. Kai felt sure he would lick it.
 

“We don’t understand that,” said Kane. “The eggheads say it’s something like stigmata. But it’s the reason the table has holes. Sometimes their bodies believe the pain so intensely that they’ll bleed through their clothing. It can get … messy.”

“What were they doing to you, sweetheart?” said Doc. As pissed off as she’d been at him earlier and as steely as she herself had been, Doc’s use of the word touched her in a strange way. It almost made her want to cry. But she couldn’t answer. She could only shake her head.
 

Doc turned to Kane.
 

“She doesn’t know anything, and I don’t know anything, either. I told you. It was a mistake. They thought I was this other guy, Greenley. I had no idea that stuff existed. I went home and tried to look it up afterward, even. I have a secure router. I’ll tell you where I got it; I don’t care. I hacked into a dozen high-end upgrade stores, but couldn’t find anything like the stuff at Xenia. I haven’t told anyone other than Kai what I saw. I swear. Go ahead, Gauss us all, problem solved.”
 

“It’s not enough,” Kane said. He didn’t seem angry. He just seemed unfinished, or perhaps unsatisfied.

“It’s all there is. Please.”
 

Kane looked at Kai, his small white head haloed by the overhead light, creating a haze around his face. He raised his own handheld and made a show of preparing to push a button. He wanted Kai to see it coming.
 

“Wait!” she yelled.
 

“Yes?” said Kane.
 

“Don’t. Please. I don’t know anything. I’d tell you if I did. I would.”
 

Kai saw Kane press something, and like a light switch had been flipped, found herself again in the black room that smelled of sour meat. She felt a spear strike her middle, then flower out into a slow moving circle, tearing a hole through her body’s center. Her flesh burned and her throat was slit, her neck contorting and breaking. She wanted to scream but there was no air, and when she managed to inhale, Kai found her lungs filled with acid, burning and devouring and…

“Jesus!
” Doc blurted as the room returned. He stared at her, his face ugly. So apparently she’d done something visible or audible after all. She may have screamed, or bled. But now, returned to the white room and feeling logic want to leave her, she hardly cared. Her head was too foggy to care. The white room, with Doc and Kane, was becoming peaceful. Not just because there was no pain, but because here, Kai’s mind seemed to want to surrender and forget. While the Orion was on, she was totally present. But in the real world, her mind could drift. She felt it wanting to unhinge, drift away and vanish. She wondered if the Beamers could see her. They’d feel vindicated. The Beam’s world really was more vivid and alive than the foggy false environment she assumed was still known erroneously as “reality.”
 

Kane raised his handheld again, finger poised. He was putting on a show for Doc, but it was Kai who responded.
 

“It was my fault,” she whispered, her heart starting to flutter. She did
not
want that button pushed, not again, no matter what. “I told Doc to go to Xenia.”
 

Kane’s handheld gave a low buzz. Doc had already started to protest, but the buzz beat him to it. “Lies won’t help,” Kane said to her, like a teacher relaying a lesson.

“She doesn’t know anything!” Doc bellowed. “What do you expect to get? Let her go! I’ll tell you whatever you want. Everything.
Anything
. I’ll talk
until
you hear something you want. When I was twenty, I robbed a homeless guy. I’ve scammed half my clients. I fucked my neighbor, who was thirty years older than I was and looked every year. I’ve got hundreds of thousands in illegal equipment. Whatever. Xenia. Anything I have! Just let her go.”
 

Kane stared at Doc, uncertain. He looked down at Kai, then at the Orion.
 

Reluctantly, Doc added, “If you’ve got to put me on that thing, do it. But me, not her. She can’t help you.”
 

Kane pursed his lips, then gave a small nod and looked up at the Beamer holding Doc, then across the room at something Kai couldn’t see.
 

“Take her down,” he said.
 

Another Beamer came forward and unstrapped Kai’s arms, legs, and head. He removed whatever was under her hair, then rolled her up to a sitting position. She found she couldn’t stand, so the Beamer pulled her from the table and dropped her unceremoniously onto the ground. Kai watched floor and ceiling trade places as she rolled, her body limp and unresponsive. She couldn’t feel the Orion’s pain in her body anymore, but it must have left its mark on her mind because she couldn’t feel the pain of striking the floor, either. Dissonance between her nerves and memory was jarring. Her body didn’t even want to try. Something in Kai’s brain said it was beyond dead, cut to its constituent pieces. She decided, body and mind, to surrender, then rolled onto her back, able to see the men above her. If she’d found herself staring at the floor (which she couldn’t believe wasn’t painted in blood), she’d have been just as content.

Kane looked at the Beamer who had pulled Kai from the Orion. His sleeves were black, but Kai thought she could see wet spots shimmering, and assumed it was her blood. Not that she had it within her to care.
 

“Get him an injection and strap him on,” said Kane. Then he looked at Kai. “Her, you can kill.”
 

Kai, from her spot on the floor, thought this was a brilliant idea.

Chapter 6

Feeling like a cliche and not caring, Isaac stared at his reflection in the convention center’s green room mirror, slapping his chest and taunting himself.
 

“You don’t need anyone else, do you, motherfucker?”
he yelled at the Isaac in the mirror.
 

The first time he’d asked his reflection a rhetorical question, a voice had answered him. Before asking again, he’d turned off the mirror’s verbal interface so that he could be awesome without being disturbed. His mirror at home was a plain mirror. The mirrors at the convention center would, however, have to be Beam-enabled. VIPs using the green room would want to follow news stories, get updates on their financials, or have the room’s sensors provide feedback on their appearance or their body language. Isaac, trying to pump himself up for his speech, found this all very annoying. Sometimes, a mirror should just be a fucking mirror.
 

The reflected version of Isaac didn’t respond re: this particular motherfucker needing anyone else.
 

“You rose to greatness on your own, didn’t you?” Isaac continued, staring daggers at his reflection. “
Not
because of Micah.
Not
because of Nicolai. And
definitely
not because of Natasha. You’re your own motherfucker, aren’t you?”

The man in the mirror offered no opinion as to whether or not he was his own motherfucker. So, knowing that it would ruin his makeup, Isaac slapped himself across the face in order to give himself even more shit.
 

“Wake up! You got this! You don’t need anyone! Fuck Micah! Fuck Natasha! And fuck your speechwriter! He wants to go off-grid and leave you, then fuck him! You can do this on your own, because you are
Isaac Fucking Ryan!
Aren’t you?”

The man in the mirror did not reply. However, his stare seemed to indicate that he was, indeed, Isaac Fucking Ryan.
 

Isaac held his own gaze for five long seconds, then broke it with a feeling of,
That’s what I motherfucking thought!
 

He stepped back, reasonably full of testosterone, wondering if a Beam-enabled mirror could be programmed to mimic a regular mirror in order to give you a lifelike reflection, then break from its mimicry and cause your reflection to start yelling back at you. He decided that was indeed possible. In a world where you could book a week-long virtual vacation that you could fully experience in a single night while sleeping, getting into an argument with your mirror sounded like playing with blocks. Isaac tried to decide if it would freak him out to have his reflection yelling back at him, or if it’d be awesome. He had just decided that it would be awesome (and was about to tell the mirror to grow a motherfucking spine and give him some motherfucking lip) when the green room door opened and a page stuck his head in.