The Beam: Season Three (7 page)

As he watched his screen, ignoring the machine’s prompt to drag out a holoweb and browse The Beam like a normal human, Sam felt an itch. He felt like a massive dickhead. An impostor. A poseur. A fake. A douche bag charlatan.
 

Sam stared at his Beam page’s open admin window, which was waiting for him to put his fingers on the keys like a caveman rather than dictating. Waiting for him to pretend to know things in Shadow’s superior, confident way. Waiting for Shadow to make proclamations like someone in control and with authority, knowing those proclamations would be read as the delusions of some asshole who’d embarrassed himself with proud promises to disrupt Shift.
 

Did Shadow have any followers left who believed in him? Should he post as he’d planned…or would posting get him laughed at and threatened?

He’d intended to write his update about misappropriation of city funds. About how the Beau Monde was swinging its big bat to get more than their fair share yet again. In the final days leading up to a rather undisrupted Shift (no thanks to Shadow’s big mouth and uncredited fuck-you thanks to Integer7), there was an increasing number of both Enterprise and Directorate events. All were supposedly
fundraisers
, all being paid for by the city, sucking off social services that poor people like Sam and most of Null needed far more. And the people throwing those events had the trailing identifier on their IDs designating them as part of the privileged class.

That’s something Null would normally care about. But did Shadow have any credibility left to post on it? He could barely open his inbox without finding more threats.
 

But it could be worse, Sam reminded himself.

Back when he’d worked at the
Sentinel
, before he’d ruffled feathers in one of Sam Dial’s defining life events, he’d had all sorts of brain hardware that suited his hyperconnected youth. He’d
lived
on The Beam back then. He’d never been alone. He’d chatted with six or seven people at once; he’d casually offloaded parts of his memory to Beam servers so that his own personal short-term memory could divert to more pressing concerns. He’d never even turned on do-not-disturb, having crafted AI-mediated custom responses for use when he was sleeping then used a deep cortex enhancement called a Tumbler to
talk
for him until he was awake enough to resume talking consciously.
 

Back then, Null’s threats wouldn’t have sat in his inbox. They’d have flown in front of his face. They’d have screamed in his ears. He’d have been assaulted, wounded, reduced to cowering before them.
 

Disconnected life at least had this going for him: He could shut it off. He could compartmentalize, even if he didn’t like it.
 

One of Sam’s alarms went off at the same time as a small diode blinked atop the Trill cabled into Sam’s anonymizer. It was another of Stefan’s inventions that provided a stupidly complicated solution to a simple function. If Sam had a working cochlear implant or even a decent Beam connection, the incoming caller could simply speak to him. But in Sam’s life, even calls weren’t straightforward.
 

Sam, suddenly realizing that none of the cloak and dagger was necessary because he was supposed to answer the call as the reporter Sam instead of the criminal Shadow, grabbed his handheld, attempted to send the ping over from his hijacked and filtered canvas, and failed. The call ended. Sam grabbed the ID and called back, this time using his normal mobile and identity.
 

“Nicolai Costa,” said a voice.
 

“Mr. Costa. This is Sam Dial.”
 

“I just tried to call you. Your canvas sent a reject. And now I can’t get video.”
 

“I’m calling from my handheld.”
 

“It’s still not registering right,” said Costa.
 

“It’s VoIP.”
 

“What’s that?”
 

“Voice over IP.”
 

Costa said nothing, probably baffled because nobody had used VoIP since before Sam was born. Even IP, which his hotwired system used, was an Internet holdover and wholly foreign to everyone. It was ironic that using a backward technology relying on Beam relics that the system itself barely remembered for protection was, right now, giving him away.
 

“I’m sure it’s a glitch,” said Sam.
 

“I’m hearing a ringing noise, too.”
 

Sam’s alarm was still blaring. He threw it across the room. “Better?”
 

“Yes.”
 

“This connection is glitchy. Can we meet?”
 

The sentence made Sam feel cold. He’d said it himself, but the idea of meeting a source in public? Meeting
Costa
in public? Being out in public at all? It was daunting. But his own lips had betrayed him because meeting Costa in public passed for normal far more than meeting in Sam’s rundown, paranoid nest of an apartment.
 

Nicolai agreed, gave Sam an address, and asked if they could meet in a half hour.
 

The second alarm went off just in time, reminding Sam that he smelled like an armpit.
 

“Better make it an hour,” he said.

Chapter Five

Nicolai had done his research on Samuel Dial, formerly of the District Zero
Sentinel
, previously of the Brooklyn
Reporter
, previously of an apparently short-lived paper-only rag at NYU called the
Scene
. It was that last that intrigued Nicolai most. Because while the majority of Sam’s articles (as far as Nicolai could find, anyway) skirted the edge while staying in safe bounds, he’d been able to find nothing of the
Scene
. He’d exhausted The Beam, along with two of his assistants’ on-foot efforts. It was as if the
Scene
hadn’t merely been a paper-only publication at all and had, in fact, been something considerably more nefarious. If it were just an old periodical that happened to rely on tree pulp, he’d have been able to find records: scans, on-Beam shares, even digital photographs. At the very least, Nicolai should have found secondhand reports from AI that had read the paper, even if they’d had to do it from across the room through a water-flow sensor in someone’s apartment shower head. But he’d found nothing. The
Scene
existed only as rumor. Those behind it seemed to have printed it on precious newsprint, distributed it below the radar, and only handed it out to people who weren’t wired and promised to burn after reading.
 

In reality, that was probably a bit of an exaggeration — the kind of rumor that made the inane scribblings of college kids seem much more legendary than they ever could have been in life. Nicolai had thoughts about that, too. If his prep school hadn’t been raided and his friends and teachers murdered back in Italy, Nicolai would have gone to college. In-person universities hadn’t been nearly as rare in those days. And if he thought his friends’ older brothers and sisters had been pretentious back then, it had to be double now. Remove the collegiate identity by making most attendance virtual, and students would have to take out their senses of repression and grandeur in other ways.
 

But as he sat in his apartment waiting for the intercom’s buzz, Nicolai reflected back on those first searches. Maybe the
Scene
had been idiot kids pretending they had enough underground muscle to change the world — but deluded or not about the paper’s actual content, the paper itself had managed to vanish into the slipstream of time. In this day and age, that was saying something.
 

Maybe Sterling Gibson’s random reporter had potential after all.

Nicolai waited. And waited. He passed the chair Micah Ryan had sat in when he’d appeared at the apartment unannounced, and it was as if Nicolai could still sense the man’s presence. Micah had known something when he’d come to Nicolai’s place. The more time passed, it seemed like that had always been Micah’s way — pretending to enter situations with Nicolai as an observer, when in fact he’d maybe always been the puppeteer.

The Ryans had brought Nicolai to the NAU because of his microscopic cargo.
 

The Ryans had shepherded him — first with Isaac and now unwittingly with Micah — in the way farmers fattened livestock for slaughter. And to think: all that time, he’d fancied himself free, able to do as he wished.
 

Micah had seemed to anticipate Nicolai’s defection from Isaac. He’d seemed, in fact, to have planned it.
 

So when Micah had shown up at Nicolai’s flat to find his Beam connection off, was it really so unreasonable to believe he’d known that Nicolai had worked with Kai to betray him? Had Micah actually sent Nicolai to see Rachel Ryan…even though at the time Nicolai had been sure going there was his own idea? Even Rachel had seemed to know he was coming.
 

Maybe Micah had sent Nicolai to visit Sterling Gibson, hoping he’d spill his secrets to the press.

And when Gibson — who wouldn’t publish Nicolai’s dangerous truths — had sent Nicolai and Sam Dial into each other’s lives — maybe that had been Micah’s plan, too. Maybe instead of subverting the Ryans, all Nicolai was doing right now was playing into their hands. Again.
 

Nicolai blinked, dismissing the thought. It was a ridiculous chain of paranoid ideas. Micah was devious, yes, and clearly the Ryans had privilege that Nicolai could only imagine. But the man wasn’t God. Nicolai still had free will. And right now, he was doing the most freewheeling, off-tracks thing he could think to do.
 

But maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe he should call off his meeting. Because, again, maybe Micah
wanted
him to shake hands with Sam Dial.
 

Nicolai sighed, knowing he was being stupid, unreasonable, and ridiculous. Knowing that the Ryans didn’t control everything, no matter how it sometimes seemed. Knowing that the more he entertained dark fantasies of being manipulated, the more he gave Micah the very power Nicolai, by meeting Sam, was trying to weaken.
 

“You’re still your own man. Nobody controls you.”
 

There was a chirp as Nicolai’s canvas considered his words.
 

“Canvas,” Nicolai answered. “Ignore until further notice.”
 

A second chirp answered. As far as AI could understand anything, it really should understand: Nicolai worked things out aloud. He paced to think and spoke to no one. His canvas had heard all of Nicolai’s musings ten times over, and the machine probably welcomed the order to ignore. Because as with understanding, perhaps AI could get bored, too. If so, Nicolai’s canvas would be bored plenty.
 

But once he’d silenced the canvas responses, Nicolai found he had nothing to say. He tried to look across the city through his expansive windows. He tried to focus on his extravagant grand piano, which he’d begun exploring via semi-immersive lessons. Progress had been slow; those above his pay grade seemed able to download a virtuoso’s ability from The Beam whereas Nicolai had to learn the old-fashioned way.
 

But his eyes kept returning to the empty chair. To the place Micah Ryan had sat, pretending to believe that Nicolai’s canvas was off because Nicolai claimed he preferred stints of bohemian living. Pretending he didn’t know that Kai was hiding in Nicolai’s closet. Pretending he didn’t know what was happening between Nicolai and Kai, against Micah.
 

He wants me to kill his mother, Nicolai,
Kai’s voice whispered in Nicolai’s mind.
 

Nicolai waited for an out-loud response in his empty apartment, but of course he wouldn’t give it. His tongue wouldn’t say the words. Maybe because Nicolai hadn’t been surprised that Micah would hire an assassin to kill his mother, or that the assassin would be Kai. Nicolai had met Rachel and knew her to be as slippery as a snake. Maybe she even saw Micah’s bad news coming.
 

A soft voice announced an incoming call.
 

“Put it here.” Nicolai tapped the wall in front of him.
 

“It’s voice only, Nicolai.
 

“Who is it?”
 

“Edmundo Perez.”
 

“I don’t know any Edmundo Perez.”
 

“An encrypted text subvisual accompanies the request. It says, ‘Wink wink.’”
 

Nicolai sighed. “Accept.”
 

Sam’s voice came from the air around Nicolai’s head. Any decent canvas could do track and follow, but Nicolai paced so much when speaking that it had made sense to upgrade to an AuralStorm. Floating nanobots could vibrate around him much harder than he’d anticipated, and the effect was like being crushed by a wave. When he used them as a coherent speaker for calls and music, Nicolai kept the enhancement near 10 percent volume…and still Sam’s voice was too loud, maybe because he was shouting over some sort of mechanical roar.

“This is your apartment!” said the voice.
 

Nicolai winced and turned the volume down.
 

“Wherever you are,” Nicolai replied, “it’s
not
my apartment.”