The Beam: Season Three (12 page)

Leo sat back, crossing his arms, keeping his face vaguely pleasant. All of what the agent was saying was true. It was the main reason that Leo had stopped trying to sabotage the network when he’d promised NPS he would. He didn’t like what Crossbrace had been even when he was hooked into it every bit as indelibly as the rest of them, and he
really
hadn’t liked watching Crossbrace become The Beam. Some of what Leah had told him about The Beam — and specifically, the differences between the two — chilled his blood. Man had made Crossbrace, but the AI birthed by Crossbrace had made The Beam. Today, humanity was just a guest in a world it still thought it had created.
 

Leo watched the agent’s eyes. Without the mesh, he could see them clearly, only slightly distorted by the field’s interference. Whatever Agent Smith thought Leo was planning, he was taking it as personally as what Leo and his group had already done.
 

The stare, as it was meant to, loosened Leo’s bolts. He found himself thinking of the other Organas now traveling beside him in carrier hovertrucks. Their hands and legs would be shackled or frozen in an immobility field — or if they were lucky, NPS might have equipped its transports with a pacification immersion, so they might be skipping along virtual shorelines, their violent need temporarily forgotten. But whatever they had, it was only a spot solution. When the group reached the city, Leo would surely be unloaded beside all the people he’d spent his life shepherding, seeing their tortured faces, how badly they were hurting and how much they hated him.
 

The idea prickled Leo’s own need. He was mostly through his own weaning period, but not entirely. The sudden realization that he couldn’t get any dust at all now just made him want it more.
 

But whatever twinge Leo felt, the others — who’d been forced by circumstances to go cold turkey — would be feeling it a thousand times worse.

“Nothing to say for yourself then?” Smith asked.
 

“I always do what my conscience tells me.”
 

“Including killing to get what you want. Including addicting your people to a dangerous drug. Including betraying those people, leaving them dry.”
 

“I’m not betraying them.” He said it straight, but it was getting harder to keep the smug smile on his lips.
 

“That’s right, Leo,” said Smith. “Keep telling yourself that.”
 

Leo snapped. He shot his bound hands forward, aiming for the agent’s throat. He was right about the force field; it was only a partial barrier. He managed to get through it to the wrists before the current hit him and his muscles seized. He fell back, breathing heavy. The metal under his skin was designed as a heat sink, serviceable for dissipating current as well. But in the closed flying car, there was nowhere to ground himself. But of course, if he’d been grounded, the shock might have stopped his heart.

Which would be the easy way out.
 

“Sit back, old timer,” Smith said, turning to front and placing his hands on the steering fork. “We’ll be there soon.”
 

Leo, breathing heavy, reminded himself why he’d lied for the NPS bug to hear and report. Why his own false confession had got him arrested, and all of Organa with him.
 

He reminded himself that this was for the best, no matter how it looked.

He reminded himself that he had a plan.
 

And he reminded himself that, appearances to the contrary, he was no longer a son of a bitch.
 

He thought of Leah.
 

And hoped she could do what he’d so recently felt sure she could, before the doubts had begun to creep in.

Chapter Nine

Leah sat in a meadow. The grass under her palms, hanging at the sides of her crossed legs, was cool and soft. She could feel the moisture beneath her, possibly wicking up through the legs and seat of her canvas pants. She might stand up with a wet ass. The only thing saving her, she tried to remember, was that the grass didn’t exist. And, she felt somehow sure, her pants didn’t exist either.
 

There was a tap, as if of a fist on a door. Leah looked up, staring across the meadow’s recently mowed grass and into the blue sky above a gently sloping hill.
 

“Yes?”
 

A vertical and horizontal slice appeared in the blue sky, meeting in a corner. The opening widened, and the face of a young boy with big ears stuck his head through it.
 

“Sorry to interrupt you while you’re outside,” said the boy.
 

Leah laughed. “Right.
Outside
.”
 

The boy’s face seemed confused. Around his head, the blue sky began to wobble and lose focus. He must have seen it happen on the other walls of the simulator because his confusion turned to something more certain, and the world resolved. Again, Leah saw him standing in an impossible doorway, offering entry to the school’s hallway without any building in between.
 

“Did you do that?” Leah asked.
 

“What?”
 

“Stabilize the simulation.”
 

“I helped you remember,” the boy said.
 

Leah sighed. She didn’t have the brainpower for this discussion right now.
Later
, she told herself. She pretended it would make more sense later, which of course it wouldn’t.

“What is it, Alias?”

“We’re having dinner.”

“Oh. Thanks.” She waited, but the boy didn’t move. So she added, “I’m not hungry right now.”
 

“Sure.”
 

“Where is Serenity?” Leah asked. “Is she with you?”
 

“She’s with you.”
 

Leah looked around then realized what the boy was saying. But the question of SerenityBlue’s general incorporeality was just one more of five thousand things Leah could think about later.
 

“I meant her body. Is she in the cafeteria…like, standing there, on her feet, with her arms and stuff?” It was the oddest question Leah had ever asked.
 

“Maybe. I haven’t checked. Do you want me to find her for you?”
 

“No. It’s fine. I need to practice this.”
 

“You just need to
remember
it,” said the boy.
 

“Oh. Right. Of course. I’ll try to…well, to remember that.”
 

The boy turned to go. The dark slit through the pure blue sky narrowed behind him.
 

“Alias?” Leah said.
 

The gap widened again. The boy’s face watched her.
 

“What does SerenityBlue look like to you?”
 

“Like SerenityBlue.”
 

“But who else? When you look at her, does she look like me?”
 

“She looks like you. Like your friend Leo looks like you.”
 

“Leo looks nothing like me.”
 

The boy smiled.

“Did you know about her? Before you came to this school, did you know SerenityBlue actually existed…before you met her for real?”
 

“I’ve always known her. We all have.”
 

“I don’t mean
knowing of her
, like she’s famous or something. I mean
knowing her
like you know me, here, in person. Like you talked or something, had conversations. Or that you could, if you stood in front of her.”

“I always knew her just like you always knew her.” He looked confused by the question and delivered the answer as an obvious absurdity.

“So you
haven’t
always known her.”
 

The boy smiled again.
 

“Okay,” said Leah, giving up. “Thanks for letting me know about dinner.”
 

Alias gave a small nod and left. Leah heard the closing door’s tiny echo as the simulator again became a meadow. The coexistence of stimuli was strange. This place shouldn’t have echoes. Or doors.
 

Her focus slipped, but this time the room didn’t waver. Leah didn’t understand why, but there was
nothing
about this she truly understood. The children at Serenity’s school acted like The Beam and the real world were interchangeable, and the first time she’d been here that same small boy had turned a non-simulator room into a simulated reality true enough to step into. She’d asked how to learn to do the same, but the answers had taken days to understand. The way everyone had spoken to her, it was as if Leah had asked how to hold a rock while already holding it.
 

But the more she’d just accepted and tried, the more she’d found a quiet place inside herself that knew what to do. The building must have Fi, and that Fi must be able to interact with thought. It wasn’t unreasonable. Biofeedback had been doing similar things since before the turn of the millennium, and anyone with an early generation artificial smartlimb crossed thought and Fi every time they reached out to pick something up.
 

In a simulator, without moondust, she’d been able to create objects that evaporated when she tried to touch them. Then she created backgrounds. Vistas. And finally, like now, immersive realities.
 

There was another knock.
 

“What is it, Alias?”
 

But the door in the sky didn’t open. Instead, Leah watched as a tall, dark figure appeared before her. It grew like a pool of congealing mist, swirling toward a center from nowhere. A few seconds later, she found herself looking at the back of a broad-shouldered man in a long black coat, black trousers, black shoes, and a brimmed black hat. His hair was dark brown, and he had a thin strip of Caucasian skin visible below a neatly trimmed hairline.
 

The specter, once formed, remained where it was, still facing away from Leah. The head shifted minutely, causing the hat’s brim to tip like the profile of a banking flying saucer.
 

“End simulation,” Leah said.
 

Nothing happened.
 

“Canvas. End this simulation.”
 

The dark figure stayed where it was, shifting slightly. If the room was responding to her thoughts, maybe this thing was part of her. A Freudian reflection, showing Leah her own darkness as if through a mirror.

“Canvas. Force quit, and restart. Force clear buffer memory.”
 

A small white butterfly flitted between them. A light breeze stirred. Leah felt the flyaways in her dreadlocks lift away from her face and then settle, tickling her skin. She felt suddenly sure that if she were to throw something into the distance, it wouldn’t strike a wall as it should. The children were right. When things became this real, there was no way to tell what was outside and what stayed in.
 

“You are n33t,” the man’s back said. His voice was deep and authoritative.

“Who the hell are you?”
 

“You know me as Integer7.”
 

Leah felt a shiver, glad that the phantom couldn’t see it. There was no way the man was really Integer7, mostly because Integer7 had never been seen and because nobody knew Leah was n33t. He had to be a figment of her imagination. A trolling thought. A bit of darkness stirred up because whatever
remembering
it took to power this simulation, she’d finally got the hang of it…and her subconscious had immediately butted its way in.
 

She walked toward where the boy had peeked in earlier. She put her hands out, waving them like a blind person, feeling the empty air for the simulator’s wall. But there was nothing. She kept glancing back, watching the still and silent figure. His arms must have been clasped at his front, because to Leah, his silhouette was streamlined: feet together without any gap between them, the shape of an armless jacket, shoulders, a head wearing a hat. He looked like a large, vaguely human-shaped peg. A strangely dark chess piece in the middle of a sunny meadow.
 

“Canvas. Force quit.”
 

Nothing.
 

“A situation has come to my attention that you will need to intervene upon,” the shape said. “My resources are limited, but my informational sources are not. You must be ready to act.”
 

“Who the fuck are you?”
 

“I told you who I am.”
 

Leah circled the man, determined to look him in the eye. But when she came around to his front, she only found more of his back. She circled him twice, but from every angle she saw only the pressed-together legs, the suit coat’s rear, the armless shoulders, the back of a hairline, and the tip of a hat.

“How did you get in here?”
 

“I knocked.”

“How did you find this place?”
 

“Everything is a matter of degrees.
Near
and
far
mean little. You have authored posts for Null that say as much.”