The Beam: Season Three (40 page)

To one side was a teenage girl with medium-length brown hair wearing a skintight suit. The suit was all black crossed with light-blue lines. Looking down, he saw a similar outfit on himself.
 

“How did you do that?” he asked the girl, blinking.
 

“Do what?”

“How did you bring me here?”
 

“You were
already
here. All I did was let you see it.”
 

“But how?”
 

She smiled. “It’s pretty simple to see things that are actually happening, silly.”

Balls of light blurred past outside the windows — some large, some small. One by one, the larger balls landed on the digital, blue-lined ground and transformed into giant mechanical insects that began rolling and shambling about. The smaller balls never seemed to land. Instead, they hovered near the larger objects as if accompanying them. They were flying around the transport, too, and as Stephen looked, Kimmy regarded one that had entered their cabin with suspicion.
 

“What are those things?”
 

“The big ones are packets,” she said. “You could see them before, couldn’t you?”
 

York wasn’t sure if he should nod. He’d seen the code, and he’d recognized the things as AI in varying degrees of seniority — some dating all the way back to the buried Internet. But to York, before he’d been brought into whatever this was, they’d been ones and zeros. Seeing the packets now, it wasn’t nearly as absurd to think that the girl could talk to them.
 

“The littler ones?” She pointed at the ball she’d been watching with a raised eyebrow. “Those are micropackets. They’re barely intelligent. More like stray bits of code. They’ll try and attach to each other around you because they’re like halves of an equation that want to solve themselves. The pairs they form are almost always random and unhelpful, but you need to watch out because paired micropackets can look and act a lot like AIs. They’ll answer questions, for instance. They can run basic routines. Every AI in here has a purpose, but packets are actually integrated, whereas paired micropackets just
seem
integrated.” She laughed. “I’m sorry. You know all this already, don’t you?”
 

“It’s fine,” said Stephen, not really knowing it — in these terms, anyway — at all.

The micropacket Kimmy had been eyeing moved closer. She began to swat at it like a troublesome insect, but then another plopped into the transport, and the two snapped together like magnets.
 

“There,” she said, pointing. “Look at that. Half-screen pixel correction and half-external drive boot protocol. How is
that
useful?” She turned to the pair and kicked at it. “Get out of here!”
 

The microfragment seemed to elongate and stand. It said, “Where are you going?”
 

But Kimmy swatted again, and it dispersed and blew into aether.

Stephen had no idea what to do. He didn’t even know if he was still in his shitty, rundown room or if she’d somehow sucked him into another world. All of what she’d said made sense
in concept;
he’d seen recombinant AI before, but even Noah had seen them as emergent intelligence — not pests, the way Kimmy saw them. But then again, he was now seeing his life’s work through a new lens. Running across native AI from behind a desk wasn’t like walking and talking with it on its home turf.
 

“That thing raised a good question,” Stephen said, looking where the microfragments had been. “Where
are
we going?”
 

“Not anywhere
they
suggest. Listen to things like that, and you’ll end up stuck in a hole for sure.”
 

“A hole?” Stephen had never heard the expression, but then again he’d been out of commission for over thirty years. Surely the lingo had evolved, along with the network.
 

“A loop,” she said. “Holes are self-reinforcing because they’re driven by faulty AI —
crazy packets
, is a good way to view them. Being in one is like being in a Chinese finger trap. Normally, people will try and report holes to the SysOp, but in most cases the SysOp is AI, so you can’t tell for sure that you’re not still in the hole, talking to the same busted packet.”
 

Stephen looked out the digital window, feeling buried below seventeen layers of lack of understanding.
 
And to think: He’d believed he was an expert here…having invented the place and all. He found himself watching what passed for ground, wondering if a
hole
would look like a huge pit, and if it was as doomed a place as Kimmy made it sound.
 

“It’s fine,” she said, seeming to read his mind. “You get stuck in a hole, you just need to break the loop by doing something the AI doesn’t expect. The hard part is knowing you’re in the loop to begin with.”

Stephen sat on a blue-lined digital bench, feeling tired, wondering if he was himself at all — if this was his body beneath him, or if he was asleep in the real world, dreaming. There was a brief moment of claustrophobia — a sense that if Kimmy wanted, she could keep him here forever — but then it passed. This mission was fucked no matter how he sliced it. Whatever Noah thought was stalking York, maybe it would be easier to lie down and let it get him.
 

“I never noticed that before,” Kimmy said, her eyebrows bunching. “Have you always had that?”
 

York looked down, seeing her gaze settle on his chest. A dim light grew from his middle, as if something was buried below his skin.
 

Seeing his surprise, Kimmy said, “It might be nothing. Just an artifact.”

“What did you think it was?”
 

“Code like that? The kids I know call it a boson. Like a birthmark, but cooler.” She shrugged. “They say SerenityBlue has one.”
 

“Boson?”
 

“Named after the Higgs boson in physics,” she said. “You know…the God particle.”
 

Chapter Eleven

September 18, 2042 — Quark Infinity Spire

Everyone at Quark was celebrating. In the other room, Noah could hear the champagne corks popping. He could hear laughter. He could even (and this was nice, despite his mood) hear Stephen York’s distinctive chuckle. That particular sound was as strange as it was unique because nobody really heard it. York was an excellent worker, and he was a good friend insofar as Noah had friends. But despite having all the professional satisfaction, thrill of discovery, and money that a person could ever want, Stephen didn’t seem happy at all. And laughter? That never happened.
 

Still, it was nice to hear evidence of the man’s smiling. At times like this (when something had temporarily been accomplished, when the pressure was briefly off, when even the likes of Noah could permit a short rest), Noah had to admit that the man deserved better.
 

Stephen deserved better than Quark.
 

And Stephen definitely deserved better than Noah West.
 

Noah listened to the sounds from the front room for another few minutes then walked back to his office. He sat at his desk and called up the big screen on his far wall. Using gloves, he manipulated windows from across the room. He called up a few of the big news sites, knowing that today — and maybe only for today — he’d find only good news about himself and his company. The hype machine had done its job. The launch of Crossbrace, like anything, had its good and bad. In time, people would begin finding the network’s faults. But for now, the hangover of lead-up was still colliding with the splendor of the reality. There were no big bugs, and the team seemed to have allowed plenty of room in the network’s capacity. The big board was showing no significant latency or traffic jams. The distributed processors were effectively shuttling loads to nodes with capacity, letting it all run according to plan.
 

For today only, the NAU was basking in the newfound splendor of the Crossbrace network. For today only, all of the news sites were as excited as the population: dazzled by Crossbrace’s promised abilities on one hand, blown away by the features Quark had kept secret until now on the other hand.
 

The headlines proclaimed Quark to be revolutionary.
 

They said that da Vinci, Edison, and Jobs were nothing compared to Noah West.

They said that Crossbrace would redefine life now that everything talked to everything — and every step of those interconnected processes were intelligent.
 

It was all very nice, and for maybe five minutes Noah let himself be pleased by the press they’d garnered with the system’s launch. He couldn’t have asked for it to go better.
 

Except that it should
be
better, and Noah damn well knew it.

Crossbrace was currently knocking the NAU’s socks off, and as more peripherals rolled out, those socks would continue to fly. As the new AI got to know itself better, Crossbrace’s accuracy and abilities would grow. The Internet of Things was reasonably complete within the city, but that IOT would grow in the coming months as more people fed the system data. That would improve the network’s knowledge — and hence its ability to serve — even further.
 

But Crossbrace only blew people’s socks off because they didn’t know better. Because they didn’t have Noah’s vision.
 

To Noah, Crossbrace now seemed a neat trick — embedding billions of sensors in the physical environment and enlisting users as mobile sensors who’d further fill out the IOT and teach the network its business. And the new AI? That was a neat trick too.
 

But in Noah’s mind, what Crossbrace could do wasn’t real magic. It was only illusion. Crossbrace hadn’t changed the world. It had merely slapped a new face on the old world, making it
appear
as something new.
 

Maybe people would see that soon, or maybe it would take them longer. But, Noah knew, they’d see it someday. The wondrous always eventually became taken for granted. How many times had Noah seen
that
? Even the engine in the tractor his father had used to plow fields had once seemed like a marvel. But had his father ever praised its wonder, constantly amazed that a machine could do the work done worse by a team of mules a century earlier? Not at all. Instead, Dad was always swearing about the tractor. Banging on it with wrenches when it hiccuped, wondering why the stupid fucking thing couldn’t just work properly once in a while.
 

Crossbrace would be like that one day.
 

Why is there a lag in my geotag gaming glasses? How am I supposed to conduct my virtual scavenger hunt if the stupid pieces of crap never work?

The problem with every technological revolution was that it merely established a new set point. Instead of being revolutionary, each thing just created a new level of ordinary. In time, humanity caught up to and passed that new set point, and then all that could be done was to start over and reinvent it all again.
 

The world needed a system that wasn’t merely better, but that would
stay
better. It needed a network that didn’t merely move the ball forward on a line, but lifted it
upward
into a new plane.
 

The problem with Crossbrace — as great as everyone believed it to be today — was that it had been created by humans, who could only understand the world in fundamentally physical ways. What if, instead, there was a way to create a network organized by human hands…built by beings native to a digital world? What if, instead of creating AI to fill a world, someone could create the wireframe…and set AI loose to build whatever it wanted?
 

Noah could see that world. He’d been seeing it for years, but it was too late to divert Crossbrace’s launch by the time his new truth became self-evident. The march forward had felt jubilant to most at Quark, but for Noah, it had soured almost as quickly as the effort was begun. He’d seen the light; he knew the paradigm had moved on, and yet they were about to release something that was already five generations behind. But a man had to reach first base before moving to second, so he’d kept a straight face and plowed forward, frustrated, knowing his hands were bound. Knowing that when this was over, he’d face the monumental task of convincing a company awash with victory that what it had just birthed was nearly worthless.
 

The idea for the next network was maddeningly clear in Noah’s mind. With each passing day, he could see it better. He could picture what a fully AI-developed world would be like for the beings who inhabited it. What it would be like to exist in a purely nonphysical realm, able to have whatever you asked for…and redefine the process of instantly asking those questions.
 

It was an amazing, intoxicating vision.
 

There was only one hitch. One trick left to pull off, one bit of true magic —
not
illusion — that would solve every problem forever by redefining the structure of problems.
 

Noah went to his private bathroom, flicked on the light, and stared into the mirror’s silvery depths. It was a plain mirror, but one day it might be a mirror hooked to the new network, spanning the worlds themselves.