The Beam: Season Three (8 page)

“The address you gave me!” he shouted. “It’s your apartment, right?”
 

Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be? Wasn’t Nicolai’s apartment a sensible place to meet? Nicolai resented the way Sam was making him feel ridiculous for proposing something so ordinary.
 

“Yes,” he answered.
 

The next thing Sam said was drowned by an almost deafening rumble. It sounded like Sam had been run over by something, but he kept speaking. All Nicolai could make out was a sense of urgency, as if the reporter’s exclamation points had detached themselves from his words and arrived naked.
 

“What?”
 

“!!!”

“Where are you?”
 

The roar decreased. “In the subway.”
 

That wasn’t true. The subway was a mag line, like the El. It was so quiet, commuters sometimes missed it if they were looking at their handhelds when it pulled into the station.
 

“Where are you really?”
 

“The subway! Below the mall!”
 

“The…” That couldn’t be right. “You mean the
chute train?”
 

“Of course!”

There were a thousand questions Nicolai could ask at this point, but they all boiled down to “What the hell is wrong with you?” One and only one of New York City’s original subway lines had been recovered after the flooding of the ’20s, and it was used almost exclusively for moving cargo beneath the streets that was considered too hazardous or intrusive to shuttle above in plain sight. Technically, you could still buy rides, but most of the human passengers who rode the thing were just fleshy forms of cargo: homeless people too far gone for an official party designation, children and women who’d been blanked and were being sold. Nicolai had never known anyone foolish enough to use the chute train or even let it enter their consciousnesses because the idea of using the chute was only slightly more reasonable than shooting an old lead-slinging gun and riding the bullet.

“Look…just come up to the mag train, at least. If you’re at the mall, you’ll take the blue line to — ”

“I’m not taking any…!” The rest was lost in more mechanical grinding.
 

“I’ll pay for your ride. It’s no big deal.”
 

“…the money! It’s…
Beam!
…apartment anyway!”
 

Nicolai supposed the last was a refusal to come to his apartment. Hadn’t Dial contacted Gibson, demanding to speak to Nicolai? Gibson had hooked Nicolai up with Sam because Nicolai wanted a reporter, but it could have been
any
reporter — writer of vanishing underground paper ’zines or not. Nicolai wasn’t the needy one here. He considered telling Sam to fuck off and forget it if he was going to be a prima donna, but then Sam continued. The sound was lower; he must have moved up the tunnel to somewhere quieter.
 

“Look,” Sam said, now audible, “I can’t go to your apartment.”
 

“Why not?”
 

“Same reason I won’t ride a mag train. Or take a cab. It’s all trackable.”
 

“Trackable by whom?”
 

Sam ignored the question and asked one of his own: “Do you know Little Harajuku?”
 

Nicolai almost laughed. “Are you kidding? No, if you want to meet off-site, we stay in Midtown.”
 

“I’m not comfortable discussing what I need to discuss in Midtown.”
 

“I thought I was the one discussing?” said Nicolai, annoyed.
 

“I know you know what I don’t,” said Sam, “but this might be bigger than you realize.”
 

“If you’re that uncomfortable meeting in person, we don’t need to meet in person at all. I own a digital neighborhood. Have you ever used a Layer Sim?”

“You want to meet in a sim?”

“A
Layer
Sim. Like a layer on top of the real city. I’ll send you the key sequence. That way, you can enter and see that it’s secure. I own it, so nobody can snoop.”
 

“Are you kidding? I’d have to get all the way back to my place to do that, and even then I don’t have a compatible rig. Forget about security; I wouldn’t have the fidelity needed. I’d be
begging
to get stuck in a hole!”

Nicolai sighed, wondering if this had all been a terrible idea. He’d tried to get Gibson’s help with the story Nicolai was bursting to tell — and Gibson, predictably, had refused. Sam Dial was his recommendation for what Nicolai needed. Sam was the uncredited source behind most of Gibson’s book
Plugged
, he’d added in a whisper. Nicolai trusted Gibson, so he should probably trust Sam. But Sam, so far, had turned out to be a paranoid pain in the ass.
 

“You won’t get stuck, Mr. Dial.” Nicolai heard his own exasperation. He was tired of this conversation. He was also suddenly nostalgic for his little piece of digital real estate. Nobody bought Layer Sim neighborhoods anymore after the craze had begun and ended a decade earlier, and Nicolai hadn’t visited despite having spent many an idle hour building it to a fantasy version of the life he’d wished he had. It had been both an artistic outlet and a pathetic substitute for having the guts to leave Isaac’s employ. But the nature of all Layer Sims meant that they endured even if nobody accessed them. The place, though secure, would surely have been overrun by transient AI by now — most of it probably ancient and quaint. If he didn’t get back in there soon, all of Nicolai’s personalization would be washed away like an eroded shoreline.
 

“I know a place,” said Sam.
 

“I’m not going to Little Harajuku.”
 

“Starbucks.”
 

Sam didn’t trust mag trains, but he trusted Starbucks? Nicolai didn’t ask. It made a strange kind of sense, really. Starbucks had once been a coffee chain, but its real business these days was anonymity. The company’s focus on Beam-related security was well documented and virtually unassailable. Thinking of it now, Nicolai was reminded of the role Swiss banks once played for people wanting to keep their business and finances secret.
 

“Where?” Nicolai asked. Then he sighed, again telling himself this would all be worth it if Dial had the connections and guts Gibson swore he did.
 

Sam told him.

So Nicolai went.
 

Chapter Six

In theory, Nicolai was supposed to be the source, and Sam was supposed to be the interviewer. But Sam wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
 

They were sitting in a private room in a Starbucks near the mall. Nicolai, with some resentment, had needed to make up most of the distance between them because Sam wouldn’t take any form of transportation that didn’t involve his feet or a rolling death train. Nicolai didn’t share his compunctions. He’d taken a cab. He’d paid the fare. Then he’d arrived to find Sam already there. The reporter had been waiting by the entrance with a hat on and pulled halfway down over his face.
 

Sam had demanded a private room for their discussion. Predictably, Nicolai had paid.
 

He’d wondered if they should get drinks. Sam had agreed as if Nicolai had offered, and then Nicolai had paid again.
 

Now Nicolai was sitting back in a soft leather chair that wafted the distinct auto-cleaning scent of Permaguard whenever he shifted his weight. He sipped his latte and tried to decide if he was more entertained or irritated by his companion.
 

The idea — from both Nicolai’s perspective and Sam’s — had been for Sam to interview Nicolai about things the world’s rank and file weren’t supposed to know: the Beau Monde, the Ryans, the Beam’s secret life. Nicolai knew he’d need to carefully curate which secrets he told Sam, but he had plenty and was willing to share so long as Sam could do as Gibson suggested by obscuring the rumors’ source. Nicolai wanted the information out. He wanted to play the Ryans for once instead of the Ryans playing him. He wanted to shove a splinter under the skin of both parties as Shift approached. If there were puppet strings ruling the world (and clearly, there were more than Nicolai had realized just a few weeks ago), he wanted some of them to begin showing.
 

But despite Gibson’s assurances that Sam Dial was dying to expose the same things Nicolai was dying to divulge, Sam hadn’t really asked any questions, and Nicolai hadn’t uttered more than a handful of words. Once the room’s privacy lock had shown impervious Starbucks green, Sam had announced his intentions to “frame the conversation and explain his intentions.” That had been fifteen minutes ago, and Sam showed no signs of stopping.
 

Nicolai’s attention kept drifting, but he was more fascinated by the strange, eccentric, tattooed kid than he’d anticipated. Sam was all over the place. But it was shocking how familiar so many of his conspiracy stories sounded to Nicolai’s ears.

He tuned back in, catching the animated young man mid-rant.
 

“…always known that there’s an upper class because when hasn’t there been? But not just upper,
secret
-upper, like there’s the rich people we see, but then there’s some above them, and that doesn’t even consider the idea of an
upper
-upper, like above them, like who will police the police? Only not with police. With Beau…oh, what the hell, with Beau Monde? It’s real, I’m sure of it, I’ve found evidence. Well, not me. Others. It’s hard to explain. Don’t ask me who. I can’t say. Not yet. Except that there are a lot of them. Not Beau Monde; there aren’t that many of them, like maybe 1 percent. I meant the ‘lot of them’ who figured this out. My sources. Do you know the Beau Monde? Don’t answer that. I know you do. I mean, I think you do. I
anticipate
you do. Which is kind of why I wanted to talk to you. Did I tell you about the ID sequences? I have someone I’ve talked to who found another set of identifiers, and no, I can’t tell you who…”
 

Nicolai settled back and took another slow sip. Sam kept fidgeting as he spoke. He scratched his head, stood, sat, crossed his legs one direction and then the other. He kept glancing at the door. Every few minutes, he’d get up and actually cross the booth, then tap the green privacy seal as if testing to see if it was really there. He barely breathed when he spoke. His legs bounced. He nibbled at his fingernails between rushed words.
 

“…and I mean Shift always matters in a way, I guess, but this time it
actually
matters, like in the past it was a choice between one color and another name for the same color, like there’s really not a difference, so for instance — oh, shit, I guess I can just tell you, right? Otherwise, why would you trust me? Isaac. Isaac Ryan. I know you work for him. Or
worked
. Some people say you defected.”
 

Sam didn’t pause to confirm. A few minutes ago, Nicolai had tried to interrupt to verify or refute what Sam was saying, but he’d already given up, waiting for a pause that never came.

“But Isaac? Or you? Maybe you. We don’t think you’re Beau Monde. You’re
pre
-Beau Monde. No offense.”
 

“None taken,” said Nicolai, wondering why it would be offensive to begin with.

“When people switch Enterprise to Directorate, Directorate to Enterprise, nothing really changes. The dole at those positions in Directorate is so high that it’s basically unlimited, like Enterprise, and it feels like a shell game. Are the parties working together? Don’t answer that yet. We’ll circle back. Did you see the Prime Statements?”
 

Nicolai waited to see if he was expected to respond. He nodded.
 

“And the wall behind the Presidents? Did anything show up on it?”
 

“Like what?”
 

“Exactly!
Nothing! So now I’m wondering if he’s working with them. If he’s on my side or not.”
 

“Who?”

“Once you see the ID tags, you can follow them and watch their patterns. I know someone, he — she? There’s no way to know — made a behavior-matching algorithm to sift the public Beam and watch the visible movements of any ID-tagged people, and do you know about that guy who died a few years back? Or not
died
—
vanished
, and I mean come on; we all know he’s dead.”
 

“What guy?”
 

Sam nodded as if Nicolai had just said something profound. “That’s right. Had the tag. And you know what some people say? They say it was an assassin. Like someone where, if you watch the tags and sort by Enterprise and Directorate and follow this inner circle, it starts to look like maybe he didn’t just vanish but
is
dead, and not just
dead
but
killed
, and that it was the work of an assassin. But not just an assassin; if you look at the possible assassins, there’s no previous criminal activity, and it’s like they didn’t even
know
they were assassins, like they were being controlled? Like maybe they’re clerics? That’s one idea that’s been advanced: that Beam clerics — and you know they’re all Quark-controlled, right? You know they’re never handed off to other sectors of service, and that Quark always holds the reins? — that a lot of the political backstabbing does happen through assassins, and that maybe the assassins are clerics, but maybe they’re kind of
made
clerics, like they didn’t
sign up
to be clerics, and I know that’s supposed to be impossible, but if you believe there’s really a SerenityBlue out there, then there might be all sorts of things, and yeah I know how that sounds but — ”