The Beam: Season Three (30 page)

Dominic opened his mouth to retort, but Leah was right and both of them knew it.
 

“Then why are you wasting my time?” he snapped, his thin patience snapping like a twig. “Why did you come all the way down here if you’re too chickenshit to do anything? I’m trying to put out fifty fires at once!”
And that doesn’t even include the twenty illegal fires I’ve got brewing with Omar Jones
, his mind added.

Leah was quiet. Then she said, “There’s something else, Dominic. Something you need to know. About Crumb.”
 

“Crumb?”
 

“You remember Crumb?” The way she said it seemed guarded. They’d all mostly trained themselves to refer to the man as Stephen or Steve or York by now, so Leah’s using his old, more-public name now meant she didn’t trust their connection’s privacy.

“I don’t see how he’s relevant right now.”
 

Leah paused then said, “It’s complicated. If you come out here, I’ll tell you what’s bugging me.”
 

“
I’m
not coming
out. You
come
in.
We deal with Organa now then deal with Crumb later.”
 

“I think they may be related somehow.” Leah sighed. “There’s a lot to this. I don’t know where to start. Some stuff I’ve found, Dom…it just feels like there’s too much entanglement between Crumb and the Organas and everything else. Even the way you were called to deal with Crumb when you first found him and then brought him to Leo bugs me. It all feels very coincidental. Almost too convenient.”
 

Dominic was again about to argue but then remembered some of the coincidences he’d just pointed out to Kate. He fought a constricting feeling, blinking hard to stay present.
 

“That doesn’t change the here and now, Leah. I don’t know or care what’s bugging you about Crumb because the people I just saw are ripping themselves apart. Pretty soon, I imagine NPS will send in immobilizers, but that’ll only handle things temporarily. They need to be sequestered. Every one of the detained Organas needs to be locked in solitary.”
 

She inhaled, exhaled. “Look, I had a thought. I’m pretty sure I can get them out, but…”
 

“How?”
 

“It’s moot until we know what to do with them once they’re free. You say they’re violent?”
 

“Holy shit, yes. It’d be like freeing wild animals.”
 

“And there’s no way to get them more dust to calm them down. Not from your coffers, nothing?”
 

“Believe me, I’ve tried. There’s a…let’s just say, ‘a supply chain problem.’”
 

“West,” Leah swore. “You don’t by any chance know some top-secret, cops’-eyes-only cure for Lunis withdrawal, do you?”
 

“Sure I do. Wait it out. See who survives. But that’s the catch-22 about all of this: Bars are all that’s keeping them safe, so getting them out scares me, too. But what else can we do? If they stay in unrestricted custody, all but a few of the strongest will be dead by day’s end.”
 

“Just ‘wait and see who survives.’ That’s it? That’s the only option?”
 

“As far as I can figure, yes.”
 

Leah fell silent. Dominic thought she might be thinking. Either that or giving up.

“There
was
something Leo mentioned,” she finally said. “He was figuring out how to kick the habit.”
 

“Figuring out how to defeat biology? I don’t think so, Leah. Leo knew what he was getting into when he got the first Organas hooked on that shit. Everyone knew the rumors about how addictive it was before it hit the streets. And Leo knew what he was doing when…”
 

Dominic trailed off.
 

“What, Dom?”
 

“Hang on.” Dominic put his finger in the air as if he were talking to Leah in person.
 

He was about to say,
When he got them all busted by NPS.
 

But Dominic had got Organa busted, not Leo. And still the idea wouldn’t leave Dominic’s head now that he’d had it, obeying layers-deep cop instincts.

Dominic was sure that Leo had disbanded Gaia’s Hammer years ago. Agent Smith could say all he wanted about their continued activity, but Dominic knew better, deep down. It’s why he’d been willing to plant the bug under Leo’s table: Anything Leo would say in the bug’s presence, Austin Smith already knew. Because Gaia had once been insurgent but was dormant today. Leo was peaceful now. Dominic knew it as surely as he knew his own name.
 

And yet the bug had caught Leo red-handed. According to Smith, Leo had given a perfect confession in his living room, tying his noose clear as day.
 

“What, Dominic?”
 

“Leah,” he said. “Do you really think you can get them out?”
 

“Yes, I do. But unless we figure out how to address their withdrawal, they’ll — ”

“I don’t think we need to worry about that. I think Leo already has a solution to the Organas’ moondust withdrawal in mind.”
 

Leah hesitated a moment before speaking.
 

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

Dominic rubbed his forehead, a headache brewing.
 

“Because he got them arrested on purpose,” he said.

Chapter Three

May 31, 2093 — DZTech

The drug’s effects, in the real world, lingered as Leah became the other entity. She felt herself disembodied — now disembodied twice.
 

She’d floated from her body (not in a literal, cliché sense, but in a
now I see it all
kind of way) not long after the purging stopped. That had been interesting, and for a while, after slaying some inner demons with something that felt to Leah like a sword of fire, she’d merely drifted. She’d seen herself as if from above — again, not literally, but as if she herself were universal understanding. Then she’d begun to understand the NAU and its relationship with the Wild East: not enemies, but like quarreling siblings who couldn’t quite get along. After that, she’d understood the planet: the connections between ecosystems both natural and man-made, all of which had eluded her before taking the drug. Leah was aware enough of her own presumption to laugh a little at that: little old Leah solving problems that the best scientists couldn’t. But presumptuous or not, it all made sense as she floated in the medicine’s haze.
 

Then she’d pulled back farther. She’d seen the solar system. The planets revolving around the sun: balls of rock and gas held by invisible tethers, gravity and centripetal force having fallen into perfect balance. It occurred to Leah that if the Earth were moving just a bit faster, it would fling off into space — but if it were bit slower, it would spiral into the sun.
 

Everything out there in the universe was coincidentally perfect. And right now, the whole idea of
coincidence
felt bogus.
 

So Leah had pulled back one step farther. And from out here, she saw the system as a whole. The Oort cloud beyond it, filled with ice chunks that occasionally dove toward the impossibly distant sun in a daredevil celestial snowball fight. She saw the galaxy and the way it spun around its core of supermassive black holes in the same way Earth revolved around the sun.

All those abstract notions that had always eluded her — time and space, connection and disconnection, genesis and destruction — seemed to make sense now.
 

The drug pulled her back one step farther.
 

She saw trillions of galaxies, each as insignificant as a single speck of sand. But then she thought: If planets revolved around a sun and the stars and bodies inside galaxies revolved around black holes, what did the
galaxies
all revolve around?
 

What was the universal axis?
 

Leah saw herself floating, content, feeling a strange balance of otherworldly intuition and common sense. She couldn’t know any of this, or be seeing any of it. The drug that had caused her to puke into that little red bucket was in her head, and nothing more.
 

And yet her new understanding was everything.
 

Leah was making peace with the obvious, intuitive,
right
order of the universe when she felt a jolt and pulled back one step farther.
 

Beyond the whole of the universe.
 

Beyond the horizon line marking the farthest reaches of what the Big Bang had supposedly churned out all those years ago.
 

Beyond the limit of existence. Beyond all that humanity understood — or what it had the
capacity
to understand.
 

And out here, beyond it all, Leah saw The Beam.
 

Her eyes opened.
 

She was on the floor, surrounded by pillows and blankets. The room was dark. Few were moving around her, but there was someone in the other room.
 

She looked around. Mussed her hair.
 

Then, following her strangely clear senses and the strong pull from her gut, Leah walked to the alcove behind the large wall screen and sat.
 

She pulled the head rig from a shelf and put it on.
 

This time when she donned the rig, instead of seeing the inside of a helmet or an imitation of a virtual world, Leah saw nothingness. Not just
disconnected
nothingness, but
deliberate
nothingness. The absence of reality, waiting to be filled.
 

She powered up. Lowered every one of her firewalls and protections, dancing dreamy fingers across code as if they belonged to someone else.
 

Then she felt herself disembodied again. Now out-of-body twice over. First from the drug, and now from The Beam.

Leah sighed and allowed it happen.
 

She didn’t raise any dashboards or issue commands. She fell into this new reality, letting her unknowing fingers, internal presets, and something like intuition guide her.
 

She went into a kind of core in the network before her.
Out. In. Out.
At the smallest levels, there were still ones and zeroes. Bits and bytes. On and off, like alive and dead. But even those hard-and-fast, there-or-not-there, black-and-white ones and zeros were, to Leah’s floating eyes, only probability.
 

Things weren’t
on
or
off
on The Beam.
 

They were
maybe
.
 

They were
intention
.
 

And at the core? That was intention at its root. That was the realm of souls. The place where the stuff of life found digital homes then lived and grew on its own. It was where life force was born, like elements cast from stardust. An internal supernova, never ceasing, never pausing, effortlessly self-perpetuating.
 

She wondered why The Beam had safeties.
 

Some people feared getting lost inside The Beam, but Leah couldn’t imagine it…or rather, she
could
imagine it but didn’t know why it wasn’t something everyone would want. Sometimes, people got stuck in here — either wholly or just a bit, as part of themselves recognized a digital home.
 

Just like real life was digital.
 

Ones and zeros.
 

On and off — but
not
. Really, everything in the universe came down to intention and probability.
 

When people feared getting stuck in The Beam — loops, nests, holes, other human-conceived traps — that fear came from a lack of understanding.
 

Leah felt herself sinking deeper. Melting. Shedding skin. Coming home. The world she saw was the hot soup of creation, and Leah was becoming it as it became her.
 

A spoon made of chocolate.
Stirring. Melding. Joining.
 

A voice behind her, real as any sound in the outside world. Leah heard it with digital ears, more real than the ones attached to her flesh-and-blood head.
 

“n33t.”
 

Leah’s digital head turned. She could see everything, the way she’d seen the network of existence. Above them all was the universe. And above that was The Beam.
 

Her internal eyes saw the newcomer as a constellation of numerals. Her own conception. Correctly, the voice belonged to someone who looked different than Leah saw him, and her interpretation was just that: an interpretation. But even more correctly, he was only energy and looked like nothing. Just as Leah — now more accurately
present
in this virtual space than she was
present
in her body — was only energy.
 

Not as a metaphor, but for real. Because energy was the stuff of life, and why the network was more real than reality.