The Beam: Season Three (80 page)

But then something she’d said clanged in his mind like a bell.
 

“Wait.
Now?
Why now?” He squinted. “Because you’ve met me?”

“Of course not. I’m not that airheaded.” Alexa laughed. “Because not twenty minutes ago, my archive began to crawl with software I’ve never seen. It’s…I don’t know how to describe it. Holographic?”
 

“Your archive projects’ holograms?” It didn’t make sense.
 

“No. Like how every piece of a hologram contains a shadow of the entire thing? It’s…self-referential? Self-assembling?”
 

“Of course. It’s an archive.”
 

Alexa smiled. “Maybe it’s not much to you, Stephen, but to me, this is the sign I’ve been waiting for. If I die and my data breaks apart now, there are instructions in all of the fragments on how to assemble the whole. It will pull order from chaos, and then I’ll wake up on The Beam as a digital being.”
 

“Twenty minutes
ago?”
 

Alexa nodded, smiling. “Quite a coincidence, isn’t it? It couldn’t have worked out better if it had been orchestrated. Or destined.”
 

“I’m sorry, Ms. Mathis,” York said. “I just can’t believe in destiny.”
 

“You don’t have to.” A wider smile. “The holographic encoding happened whether you believe or not. I could show you. The software itself assembled from fragments on The Beam, as if it, itself, was a holographic archive.”
 

“Why now?”
 

“Maybe it was time.”
 

“But where did it come from? Not the code, but the…it must have had a codex? A way to
unlock
all those little pieces you say were hanging around? So where did the solution come from? The activating sequence that made them assemble, to make them into the software you’ve been waiting for?”
 

Alexa shrugged. “That’s not for me to ask.”
 

York drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Something was itching at him, but he couldn’t articulate what it was. Then suddenly he had it: He’d always been after something. He’d always been important. He’d always had a quest, or something to do. But if someone had been after him but now, per Alexa’s thinking, was no longer following him,
then what did that say about what came next for the great Stephen York?
 

“So you don’t think they need me after all — whoever locked me down, saved me for later, then decided to uncork me because they needed my help to fix Mindbender.”

“Maybe and maybe not. Not everyone has my faith. Rachel tried to have you killed, but then she had a change of heart, thought you were important, and decided you were worth saving. So one idea, if you’re so inclined, is to seek out Rachel Ryan and offer your services.”
 

York watched the old, dying woman on his screen. There was something inscrutable in her eyes. Something she wanted him to say but wouldn’t offer a hint.
 

“But you don’t think I should do that.”
 

“I wouldn’t.”
 

“Because there’s nothing required to fix Mindbender. Because you believe your archive will live on its own thanks to this brand-new, mysterious development.” He paused. “And that means that Mindbender
already
works, and has for twenty minutes now.”

Alexa nodded. “For anyone who knows about it, yes. For anyone with the access, the equipment, and the means, I believe it’s now possible to live on The Beam.”

“If I’m not here to help fix Mindbender, and going to Rachel Ryan is a mistake,” York said, “what should I do, Ms. Mathis?”
 

“Wait,” she said.
 

“Wait for what?”
 

Alexa smiled. “For Noah’s digital self to tap you on the shoulder and say hello.”

Chapter Seventeen

Sam heard the scream before he saw the girl standing in the doorway.
 

At first, he thought the party’s marauders had returned despite Nicolai’s strange assurance that they wouldn’t. But then he looked up and saw the girl standing alone, her back strapped with something that looked like a groundskeeper’s leaf blower, her brown hair in thick pink mats that looked like sausages made of fuzz. She was young if her appearance was natural — maybe a bit younger than Sam, perhaps a bit older. Her face had twisted into something ugly, but even as she fell to her knees in grief Sam could tell she was, in happier times, quite pretty.

“Oh shit. Oh West.
Leo!”
The girl dropped to her knees beside the dead man on the floor, the dead man whose head was still being cradled by the holographic girl — or, at least as
cradled
as a hologram could manage. Her hands went all over him, shying from the mess of blood soaking his head and shirt. Then the new girl’s head jerked toward the closest of the room’s occupants (it happened to be the tall blonde), and her eyes were momentarily hard. They softened almost immediately, perhaps as a reluctant truth dawned.
 

“What happened?” she asked.
 

Kate’s eyes flicked toward Nicolai. His eyes passed the buck to Sam. That was hardly fair. The ball of spikes that had killed the old man hadn’t been the only one in the house. They had to be part of Craig Braemon’s security system, but Braemon, who seemed to have vanished, wasn’t controlling them unless he was doing so from a distance. Each ball had entered the room, just to the doorway. If they’d had eyes, it was clear they’d have looked at Nicolai — and then they’d gone, having duly checked in. If the old man was this pink-haired girl’s friend or father and someone was to blame, it was Nicolai, not Sam.
 

But the girl’s eyes still went to Sam, waiting. So Sam swallowed and said, “He tried to kill us.” Then he nodded at Nicolai and added, “To kill
him.”
 

The girl’s eyes were filling with moisture. She wiped them absently in a gesture of getting down to regrettable business, then pulled a handheld from her pocket and held it up, the device’s back toward Nicolai. She pushed buttons, seeming to scan.
 

“You were wearing a shell earlier, weren’t you?” she finally asked.

Nicolai looked at Kai and nodded.
 

“It looks like it really had its hooks in you. You’re resetting now, but…” She shook her head. “This is just a guess, but does the name Stephen York mean anything to you?”
 

Nicolai didn’t hesitate. No reason to be coy now.
 

“It was his shell.”
 

The girl looked down, found a clean spot on the dead man’s head, and ran her hand affectionately over his gray hair. “Oh, Leo,” she said, sniffing. She blinked hard and looked up. “If you give me your ID I can explain later, but it…” She shook her head regretfully. “He couldn’t help it. I think he was programmed. There’s no way he even knew this would happen, that he’d be triggered to come after…” She looked at Nicolai. “Well, after Stephen York.”

“What do you mean, he didn’t know it would happen?” Sam asked, thinking of the way Leo had stormed in with his guns blazing. It was bizarre, watching the girl comfort the dead rather than apologize to the living. But when she looked up, the girl only sniffed and waved the question away.
 

“Later.” She tapped her handheld’s screen, ignoring the others. It was fine with Sam. They were done here. After the York shell had pilfered what it wanted from Quark using Braemon’s credentials, it had self-destructed, and the system had reset. Braemon, if he returned now, probably wouldn’t even notice a difference. All the security was back in place. Sam couldn’t even use a calculator app on it now if he wanted.
 

Sam’s handheld buzzed. He pulled it out, seeing half a dozen ignored messages from n33t on his lock screen. n33t really must be coming to trust Shadow. n33t had told Shadow about the secret society with the ultra-high-level tags on their IDs, and now he was skipping Diggle to hit Shadow’s inbox directly.
 

The new buzz was from n33t, too. It said,
where r u?

Sam, not wanting to be obvious in all this company, used his thumbs to reply.
craig braemon in the city - respero fndrasr & massacre

The response came back almost immediately. It said,
where tho? hiding? have to cap a un/archive. v important. will explain l8r

Sam squinted at his screen. Why did n33t care where
specifically
Sam was at Braemon’s horrific event? And what was this about capturing an unarchivable archive? Sam had only heard of the things, mainly on the Null forums, mainly from deep Beam hackers whose obsessive immersion into code bordered on religion. Normally, the idea of a file so enormous that it literally couldn’t be massaged, compressed, or even transmitted due its precise sensitivity and the chance of fidelity loss would have seemed like folklore to Sam — on par with digital hexes and ghost stories. But before today he hadn’t truly believed in Beam holes either, or believed anyone could be fooled so completely while inside one.
 

And hey, if you even wanted to
attempt
to contend with an un/archive, the geeks all said, you needed either a stable, protected canvas or a highly elaborate, overstabilized slip drive. The things he’d seen sold to suckers for such purposes didn’t even look like computer equipment. They looked like something from a hundred years ago. They had a self-contained, self-actualized canvas, several layers of redundant cooling centers, a mechanical drive, and the accompanying micro-motion cancellation stabilizers — on and on. Geeks called the devices “proton packs” — a reference to some old movie that Sam had never seen. They were huge. You couldn’t even carry one. You had to…
 

Sam looked up.
 

…to wear them on your back like a backpack. Or maybe like a groundskeeper’s leaf blower.
 

Sam typed into his handheld,
hey, n33t.

The response came back:
???

And Sam typed,
look straight ahead.

Across the room, the girl with the pink hair had shifted her attention from the dead man to the holographic girl — a digital presence too strange to be anything but an unarchivable archive, now that Sam thought about it.
 

The girl with the pink hair and the mechanical backpack looked up then met Sam’s eyes.
 

“Shadow?” she said.
 

Chapter Eighteen

It was probably important to protect the integrity of Kate’s cover, but after all that had happened, Kai found herself unable to care. So when Kate had fallen into step between Kai and Nicolai, Kai had said nothing. The three of them shouldn’t be together. Kai and Nicolai weren’t supposed to know this strange blonde vixen, with her reputation for moon inspector killing and dust smuggling. But Kai was tired. Nicolai, too. And Kate, who was walking the line between protecting herself and trying not to admit that she may have undergone ID refurbishment for nothing, seemed both exhausted and beaten.
 

They’d left Nicolai’s reporter friend, Sam, behind with the pink-haired girl. Leaving the party hadn’t even been tricky. Kai, Kate, and Nicolai had simply left through the front door. There was no security. The police — possibly due to whatever the York shell had done to Braemon’s canvas and possibly due to a still-glitching Beam sector — hadn’t so much as shown their faces. Kate had said she’d been working with the captain, but he was nowhere to be seen, either.

The partygoers who’d survived were gone.
 

The people who’d invaded the party were gone.
 

The police, Quark officers, City Surveillance, even the fucking media (which normally swarmed events that were even
remotely
interesting) were all no-shows, at least for now.
 

To Kate, it almost seemed as if something was keeping them away. Allowing them to flee without question. Maybe protecting Nicolai from his casual,
I’m-too-tired-to-be-careful
association with Kate. Or maybe protecting the girl the nation had once watched die in Respero — before reappearing tonight as a digital ghost.

Thoughts of that last piece dogged Kai as the trio found Kate’s hover — as Kate finally, with a sense of merely paying lip service, turned on her spoof to anonymize and disguise their uneventful escape. Only now that the threat of peril had passed did she allow herself to admit what she’d seen: The girl who’d shown up to warn them had been Violet James. Unless someone had cracked The Beam’s deepest security and manufactured an avatar in the image of a real person (which was significantly more impossible than the many other impossible things Kai had seen lately, according to consensus), it was
actually her.
And everyone knew Violet James had been dead for years.
 

“Want to hear something funny?” Nicolai said from the passenger seat beside Kate.

“Hit me, chuckles,” Kate replied.
 

“I spent the last six years preparing Isaac Ryan for Shift. Then it looked like I might end up getting roped into spending the last weeks before Shift helping Micah whether I liked it or not.” Nicolai turned his head enough to meet Kai’s eyes, unspoken animosities passing between them without comment. “And now it’s two days until Shift, and Directorate is going to win just like they were supposed to all along, before the bullshit over beem currency, before Carter Vale’s Mindbender trick at the Primes. All those machinations. All that worry and plotting meant to steer the Senate a few points in one direction or another.” He sighed. “But now, I can’t imagine even caring about Shift. At all.”