The Beam: Season One (46 page)

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 inside 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 ritual 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.

Leah recognized the second man’s eyes, which hadn’t changed in all the years that had passed since the 2-D had been taken.

It was Crumb.
 

Leah looked around the room — around the converted restaurant-turned-elite-lab hidden in Chinatown — and then down at the photo of the crazy vagrant she’d known all her life with his arm around the most famous man who had ever lived.
 

Aloud, she said, “What were you part of, Crumb?”
 

The lights on the workbench and in the panels above, below, and directly to Leah’s sides faded, becoming an unresponsive gray. Surprised, she stepped backward, out of the dark. As soon as she did, another ring of lights went black. She turned and stepped forward again, and more lights dimmed. She was being herded forward, toward the foyer. One by one, the lights went off in rings around her until she stood in the small area where, a long time ago, customers had sat and waited for a table to sit and eat their noodles.
 

The front door opened on the pneumatic hinge.

The last of the interior lights clicked off.
 

Leah, with Stephen York’s journal in her hands, stepped into the street.

The door closed behind her, and Leah turned to look at it.

She could try to re-enter, but was sure that if she did, she’d be told that her access had been revoked by Stephen York, oh-six-one-two-two-oh-nine-seven.

EPISODE 5

Chapter 1

Stephen York’s Journal, Selected Entries:

Dec 22, 2032
 

Dad got me a journal. He called it an early Christmas present. He said, “Stephen York, you’re going to be someone someday, and any life worth living is worth recording.” Totally a Dad thing to say. I asked him if he’d just quoted Tony Robbins again. He does that. He went to see Tony live last year. Tony has to be in his seventies but still jumps around on stage like in Dad’s old videos. I don’t get it. But whatever.
 

So Merry Christmas. I got a book. And not even a book I get to read, but one I have to write in myself.
 

Dad said, “What do you want instead, Stephen? A toy? A video game?” I got his point. That’s what most of my friends want, but only the rich kids are still dicking around with that kind of stuff these days. I’m lucky my parents can give me a book, that nobody in our family has been sent to the wars, and that we haven’t been drowned in the floodwaters that would have covered the whole island if not for the levees and hovertech to hold them.
 

Anyway, I got employee of the year today. Pretty fucking boss, considering how hard it was for me to even land the job. They gave me a plaque. Wilson gave a little speech, said it was for “excellent work integrating nanotechnology into fluid gaming environments.” I can’t believe this is my job. I could be working at Sloppy’s to help my family pay the bills, but instead I get to play video games. Javier was pissed, by the way. He was 24 when he won last year, and they made such a big deal about his being so young, and I beat that by nine years. He said I got lucky. I called him an old man.
 

Dec 23, 2032

I got like ten calls today from recruiters. Apparently Javier got them too when he won, but he turned them all down because he said he had a secure, steady career at Zenka Games. He said he used the other offers as leverage to land a big raise, but that going to a new company felt too risky. He said that when you’re the new guy, you’re the first to go if the company gets into trouble. He said times were too uncertain, and that if the east invaded or if global war broke out or even if people just got afraid, the economy could collapse. He didn’t want to end up in the rabble. Jobs are precious, and he’d built up a few years of seniority at Zenka.