The Beam: Season One (57 page)

The riot hadn’t been started by rowdy members of the Directorate after all. The Directorate had been framed.
Enterprise
had staged the riot as a power play, to denigrate their opposition in advance of Shift.
 

Whitlock was Ralph. Ralph was Whitlock.
 

And Whitlock, of course, worked for Micah Ryan.
 

Kai almost shut her eyes to block out the secret she’d tried so hard last week to uncover. It was a very,
very
dangerous piece of information. Micah was an exceedingly private man. You didn’t browse Micah’s files; you didn’t rifle through Micah’s apartment or office; you sure as
hell
didn’t try to crack your way into Micah’s agents while he was using them for something underhanded. But luckily, there was no way Micah could possibly know she’d tried that last one, was there? It wasn’t as if Kai had used a sterile lancet to drop six scavenger nanobots into Ralph’s cortex or anything… say, six scavengers that wouldn’t have expired or been purged yet. Six little fingerprints still floating around inside Whitlock’s head — Kai Dreyfus hallmarks that the technology Micah had at his disposal would easily be able to trace.
 

Kai realized she’d put herself in some deep shit, attempting to hack Soldier Whitlock. She also realized she didn’t
want
to know what she’d just learned, and wished she had never tried to learn Ralph’s secrets.
 

But perhaps most importantly, she realized how she could kill Doc Stahl.
 

Whitlock looked at Kai, last week’s well-placed bit of mental fog still obscuring his memories of ever having met her.
 

“What are you doing?” he said.
 

“What you told me to do,” she purred, smiling and blinking her eyes. It was a rather obvious and clichéd gesture, but that didn’t matter because she wasn’t trying to seduce Whitlock or his partner. She was trying to distract them from her hands as they moved behind her back — as the fingers of her right hand thrummed a rhythm onto her left wrist.
 

“You’re in the middle of an alley,” said Whitlock, unimpressed.

“So?”
 

“What, are you going to beat him to death right here in public?”
 

“Kicked to death by a jilted woman seems like a pretty legit crime, from the police’s perspective,” said Kai. She took a few steps toward Whitlock, stepping like a cat. He should be close enough to smell the enhanced musk that was now churning from her pores. She inhaled, puffing her chest as she cocked her long, pale neck to the side.
 

Whitlock’s partner watched, apparently interested. But Kai wasn’t trying seduce either of them; she was exploiting the fact that smell was an extremely evocative sense. Right now, Whitlock’s brain should be starting to remember Kai deep down, well below the level of consciousness. Connections were forming. He’d be realizing that he genuinely liked this woman for some reason, almost as if they’d shared a bond. In a strange way, he’d trust her. He’d want to please her. And as the motion of Kai’s fingers on her arm reactivated the scavengers in his cortex, his defenses would sigh enough to let those scavengers do their work without resistance.
 

Whitlock’s eyes took on a dreamy appearance. The corners of his mouth started to twitch, as if with memory.
 

“Let’s finish this up,” he said, looking into Kai’s brown eyes.
 

“I’d like that.”
 

“End it with something quick.”
 

“Can I use your gun?”
 

“No,” said Whitlock.
 

She’d known that wouldn’t work, but it had been worth a shot. Not that having a gun would solve anything, she realized. She couldn’t kill the soldiers, and she couldn’t run. She had to
kill Doc
. That was the only way. Kai’s unfair influence over Whitlock notwithstanding, the only way out was if Micah knew that she’d done what he’d told her to do.
 

She lowered her voice to a whisper.
 

“But maybe we should be alone,” she said, glancing at the other soldier.
 

“Jameson,” said Whitlock, still staring at Kai but pitching his voice toward his partner. “Report back to HQ.”
 

Jameson looked confused. “Report what?”
 

Still locking eyes with Kai, Whitlock said, “Just go back.”
 

“Why?”
 

“Because you’re a rookie and I’m your superior,” Whitlock said.
 

“I think we’re supposed to stay together.”

Whitlock turned, his tone becoming angry. Judging by the expression on his face, his own anger seemed to surprise him.
“I
think you’re supposed to fucking
listen
!”
 

“You might need help bringing her back,” said Jameson.
 

Whitlock glared. “You idiot. She’s doing this to prove herself. You really think I’ll need to restrain her
after
she’s done the job?”
 

Knowing it was over the top, Kai whispered to Whitlock, “You
might
have to restrain me.”
 

Jameson looked confused, but was already starting to turn. “What do you want me to tell them?”

“Whatever you fucking want!”
 

Still uncertain, the second man began walking back down the alley. Kai and Whitlock watched him go. The entire way, he kept glancing back. Then, a few minutes later, Kai heard the distant whine of a screetbike. They watched as it flew off over the low buildings.

Behind her back, Kai continued to tap on her forearm. Then, in front of Doc and Kai, Whitlock folded and collapsed.
 

Doc, still on the street below Kai, looked up. “What did you do to him?”
 

“Something you should keep in mind that I can do,” Kai snapped, still not over her anger at Doc.
 

Doc sat up, wincing as he gripped his side. He looked for a moment like he was going to make a joke about what Kai had done to him, but instead he looked at the slumped soldier and said nothing.
 

“Now we run?” he asked.

“No,” Kai said. “Now we make some memories.”
 

EPISODE 6

Chapter 1

August 13, 2023 — New York

“Would you like me to get something for you while you wait?” the receptionist asked Noah West.
 

The girl — who was pretty and petite — looked even tinier sitting at the too-large reception desk. Behind her, the word
EverCrunch
was spelled out in eighteen-inch letters. The idea of the huge desk had probably been to impart visitors with a sense of awe, but all it really did was to make the receptionist look ridiculously small. Noah found himself thinking of her as Tinkerbell, expecting her to start throwing fairy dust at any moment.
 

Noah looked to his left, where a conference table with heavy wooden legs was stocked with a giant coffee urn and more food than seemed necessary for anything other than a marathon pit stop. He knew it was a courtesy table, complementary for visitors, but it seemed so wasteful. How many people came into EverCrunch on a daily basis? How many of those people needed or even
wanted
something to eat? But that wasn’t the point, really. The point was that this was EverFuckingCrunch, and when you had as much money as EverFuckingCrunch, you could burn wads of cash to warm the foyer if you wanted.
 

“What kind of something do you mean?” Noah asked the Tinkerbell receptionist.
 

“Something to eat,” she said, smiling. “A cup of coffee?”
 

Noah looked at the food table, at the receptionist, then back at the courtesy table. He’d been waiting for ten minutes and she’d pointed out the food when he’d first come in. They had even small-talked about its variety and volume.
 

“Other than
that
food and coffee?” he said, pointing.

“No,” she said. “I meant something from there.”
 

Noah put a perplexed look on his face. “From this table that’s right next to me?” He held up his hands. “Are you asking if you can walk around your desk, pick up something from that table, and put it into my hand?”
 

The receptionist giggled.
 

“People must really be that lazy if you’re offering,” said Noah, dropping his hands.

“You’d be surprised.”
 

But Noah wouldn’t be surprised at all. His father had busted his ass daily from dawn to dusk for his entire life: working land, driving tractors, repairing machinery, digging and breaking things that had to be broken. Noah had grown up under toil’s unending shadow, and all it had given him throughout high school (hell, even into college) were odd, almost pitying looks. Kids whose parents shuffled papers acted like Noah should be ashamed of his father and his chosen profession as a farmer, despite the fact that Ian West out-earned all of their parents. Most people were afraid of hard work, and didn’t understand the need to reach out and
take
what they wanted. They expected the world to hand it over gift-wrapped instead.

“I’m unnerving you by not partaking in this banquet,” Noah said. “Let me fix the problem.”
 

For a second, Noah hung on the F in “fix.” It was probably thinking of his father and the ridicule in high school that did it. But he wasn’t the farmer’s kid anymore, and he no longer stuttered. He wasn’t ashamed of his past and didn’t want to hide it, but he wouldn’t be defined by it, either. A man or a woman of substance wrote their own life story, line by line, no matter how the tale was begun.
 

Noah stood. Then, making a show for the receptionist, he approached the food table. The girl giggled again. Noah inspected the spread, stealing glances behind him.
 

The table was covered in food. Easily ninety percent of it would be stale or spoiled by sundown. Noah hoped they sent it to a homeless shelter. There were still quite a few homeless shelters in New York, no matter how uniformly wealthy and optimistic people liked to believe the world was these days. Noah saw six kinds of donuts in the spread (including some fat jelly-filled ones that smelled delightful), a few varieties of danishes, various spice breads, English muffins and wheat bread for toasting (there was a toaster and some condiments near the coffee urn), blueberry muffins, and various other carbohydrate bombs. Add a reservoir filled with congealed gray sausage gravy and it would be like the continental breakfast buffet at a Holiday Inn Express.
 

To one side, almost neglected, sat a bowl of fruit. Noah avoided the junk and grabbed an apple, which he polished on a napkin. Then he drew a cup of black coffee from the urn and sat, took a bite, and raised his eyebrows at the receptionist.
 

“Better?”
 

“Much,” she said.
 

The phone rang. The receptionist answered it, taking the call on a conventional phone with a cord. Noah found that worthy of note. EverCrunch had been built on technology — its compression algorithm that squished petabytes of data into a few megs of space without a corresponding decrease in access speed — and that technology had, through hosting fees alone, catapulted the company to the top of the
Fortune
list. Yet despite the astonishing things the company could do with data, the rest of EverCrunch’s world seemed abjectly unremarkable, making its facility with data appear almost random.
 

For one thing, the company had actual physical offices. Few companies bothered to co-locate anymore, because of the expense and the way it limited the talent pool to the immediate geographic area. For another, EverCrunch used phones that ran on the unreliable fiber network. Sure, they were only using voice, but the company had internet anyway, right? So why not tie internet and phone together and cut the cord? Was it possible the building’s Internet ran on fiber? Of course not; it’d be G10 AirFi. So then why not use cellular phones instead of corded phones — or better, something like Talkie that used the G10 directly? The oddities were all small things, but they struck Noah as almost troubling. If the company couldn’t see around something so obvious (who still used corded phones?), did that explain why they couldn’t see how EverCrunch compression could tag-team with the internet and shift the nature of information forever? What other blind spots were in EverCrunch’s way? It made Noah wonder if Ben Stone was actually as brilliant as the press said or if he was just a savant — a man with a beautiful mind for numbers but who didn’t know when his shoes were untied.

The receptionist hung up, and Noah pitched his voice toward her.
 

“Question for you.”

It would have been more polite to approach the desk, but Noah didn’t want the receptionist to think he was hitting on her. She was cute, in her mid-twenties, and around his age. She must be hit on constantly. And just as Noah had a sore spot about laziness, he also had a sore spot around the way women were treated — even in the 2020s, while men were working the moon and the world was finally getting out of its own ass and working together. Noah’s sister was attractive. She got a lot of dates, but her ideas at her marketing firm were only really “taken seriously” by the men cocky enough to think they had a chance with her. Besides, Noah wouldn’t have the guts to hit on her anyway. He’d grown up as a farming gamer with a speech impediment who could barely read primers at age ten, and had the confidence-related scars to prove it.

“Yes?” said Tinkerbell.
 

“Have there been a lot of candidates coming in recently?”
 

She nodded. “It’s like Willy Wonka announcing he’d let a tour through the chocolate factory. The minute they listed the job, resumes poured in like the faucet had stopped working.”
 

Resumes.
Of course EverCrunch would receive
resumes
. Probably on
paper
, stapled in the corner and detailing five years spent getting official degrees that were obsolete before the ink on them had dried. It was like the corded phone and the failure to see the applications of their own code. What did a
resume
tell a company, other than that the applicant was proficient at listing bullshit on a template?