The Beam: Season Two (28 page)

“I haven’t decided yet,” she said.

“I said bend over.”
 

“Motherfucker, just take it easy. This isn’t exactly something I’m used to d — ”
 

Kate felt something touch her bare ass.
 

Doc Stahl had lived his life on the thin line between right and wrong and had run across many people who didn’t like him and wanted him dead. He’d carried an emergency change of clothes in his hover in case he had to flee a lover in the face of a rampaging spouse. He’d had his apartment recently invaded. Over and over again, Doc had been grabbed from behind by an attacker intent on doing him harm. His body had changed, but his instincts hadn’t, and so Kate’s reaction to the man at her ass was automatic, involuntary, and happened completely without her permission. Her elbow came up hard and fast, connecting with Inspector Levy’s face just above the lip. He’d tilted his head back, probably to get a good look at what was about to go where, and had exposed his nose. Kate’s blow turned into an effortless chop, breaking his septum up into his brain. Then Levy slumped to the floor in the sealed, soundproofed room, dead with his eyes still blinking.
 

The blinking stopped. Blood trickled from his shattered nose, spreading into a macabre red mustache.
 

Kate stepped away, looking down at the body. Between her face and Levy’s corpse were two large, gravity-defying breasts.
 

“What the fuck is wrong with me that I’m still turned on by these things?” she said to herself as she cupped them.

EPISODE 9

Chapter 1

January 29, 2086 — District Zero

“Mr. Stahl?”
 

Doc turned.
 

The agent — too tall, too beautiful, and too robustly endowed to be anything other than real estate bait — was standing across the apartment, trailing her long, delicate fingers across a property scan station sitting on the kitchen bar. Every movement was sexy, almost contrived. She was wearing heavy (but not overly heavy) eye makeup and, Doc was near certain, had glitter in her hair. Doc almost wanted to laugh. These days, it seemed like brokers all hired from modeling schools, stuffed the girls full of stats, and sent them out to woo their prospects with temptation and pheromones. Doc almost wanted to ask the girl a question about real estate law in DZ just to see if she’d bother with a bullshit answer.

“I was asking about your move-in plans. Are you eager to buy immediately or just looking?”
 

“Because this place will sell quickly, right?” Doc smiled. “Because there are several offers already on the table?”
 

The agent — whose name Doc seemed to remember sounding like a stripper’s, possibly Felicity — looked caught off guard. “Well, actually, yes. There is an interested party in…”

“Fuck it then. Let them take it.”
 

The agent’s fingers twitched over the scan station. The connection blipped, perhaps thinking she was interested in favoriting the property or making an offer on it. “So you’re not…”
 

“I like it, darlin’,” Doc told her. He turned then laced his fingers together behind his back. He’d worn one of his best suits for the showing, knowing full well that any decent agent’s snooper AI would look at the fine tailoring, decide what the prospect could likely afford, and cue the agent to negotiate accordingly. It didn’t matter. This was an important moment for Doc (one might even say “monumental” or “watershed”), and it deserved some honoring. Besides, he could handle Felicity the model-agent and whatever tricks she had up her sleeve.

“So…”
 

Doc turned again then took a few steps toward her.
 

“Let’s just get this out of the way, okay? I want this apartment, but I know what it’s worth because I’m a salesman too, Sparkles. I have clients in this building. I know those stupid bridges between the two towers are just hookup spots for kids and hotbeds of narcotic activity. But I also know that it doesn’t matter because the kids are the spoiled rich shits that come spilling out of spoiled rich parents, and because I got into plenty of trouble in my youth and didn’t hurt nobody by just being a jackass. But because there have been arrests, the law says you have to disclose that. And I know how much that disclosure turns most buyers away.”

“I…” she began.

“You
don’t
have other offers right now. I know you don’t. And it’s the end of the month, so this is your last chance to grab commissions. So let’s not play that game.”
 

The girl looked dizzy. Doc turned back to the windows and stared out across the city’s sprawl. Like all of the apartments he’d seen in Tuco Towers, an entire wall gleamed with floor-to-ceiling windows. Standing near them now gave Doc a feeling of weightlessness. Or perhaps of having risen high above, which was exactly what he’d done over the past few years.
 

“So…” the girl began.
 

“My move-in plans are immediate. Now, hon. But just show me around, and don’t yank my chain about the price. Two of my clients have empty apartments on their floors.”
 

The girl cleared her throat, apparently trying to regroup. He almost felt sorry for her. No one outsold the master salesman.
 

Doc felt his fingers twined together behind his back, the sides of both hands pressed against the rear of his fine bespoke suit coat. The rug under his feet was brand new and had a scent that made Doc think of wealth. The view, forty-seven stories up, gave him a grand view of the city — high enough to be above most of the surrounding buildings, but not so high as to feel totally alone. The apartment was on the spire’s far side, facing away from the eyesore of the other tower and the drug/sex bridges. Doc could see all the way to the monument crater, to the bridges out of the city.
 

He wanted to say something out loud, but Felicity (or whatever) the Agent was tapping her handheld behind him in an attempt to recover her edge. So Doc said it in his mind:
I’ve made it. Finally, by fuck, I’ve made it.
 

Doc’s struggle had been intense. Even when he’d first started seeing successes selling add-ons to an increasingly impressive client roster (a level of quasi-security that felt only as solid as walking across an eggshell: fragile and likely to fracture at any moment), he’d told himself that the worst wasn’t over. And it hadn’t been. Just when he’d finally built up a respectable bank balance, there had been that dry spell when the resin used to bind his wholesalers’ nanobots to their substrates had become suddenly scarce. Doc had wiped his savings dry trying to scramble. He’d needed to stay afloat, but he was heavily invested in ocular heads-up enhancements on a wing and a prayer. Trends had gone the other way, though, and Doc’s clients had opted for quasi-immersives instead — from other dealers because Doc hadn’t thought add-ons that provided “partial immersion” was an idea worth dick. His semi-legal suppliers were raided, and that lost him too many clients. The economic dip two years ago had nearly ruined him. There were months when Doc had been sick — just a flu, but it had swept the city, and the medical nanos that fought it had to be refabricated rather than reprogrammed — and those nanobot deals, of course, had gone to the pyramid’s top first.
 

At the time, Doc had been poor and had nearly bankrupted himself trying to stay afloat as clinic fabricators barely kept pace with demand. That would never happen again.
 

Felicity the Real Estate Agent had moved into the spacious kitchen. She motioned for Doc to come over. He was halfway across the apartment when he realized that she hadn’t actually called him. What she’d done was closer to a wink. Damn her. Doc was immune to her sales bullshit, but if she wiggled her ass or shook her tits or pursed her lips like a blowjob in the offing, he’d end up being dragged around like a bitch on a leash.
 

“Full archive kitchen,” she said. “This complex has had them since construction, which means they’re both more efficient and more compact than the retrofitted apartments in older buildings.” She walked to a single black cabinet beside a brushed chrome Beam refrigerator and tented her fingers over the knob, glancing at Doc with what looked like fuck-me eyes. “You’ve used an archive kitchen before?”
 

“My last apartment had a partial archive.”
 

That wasn’t exactly true. Real archives shuffled large quantities of food into a single access cubby, available on demand, to save space. One of Doc’s last apartment’s cabinets had a manual lazy Susan built into it, allowing Doc to spin the wheel to bring his cornflakes to the front. The original archive, accessible by fingers even without The Beam.

She opened the empty cabinet. The shelves were smooth and black, with a dull look, like the refrigerator’s brushed chrome.
 

“Once you move in, the apartment’s canvas will of course be tuned to your Beam ID, but…here.” She pulled a handheld from her jacket’s interior pocket. The shirt beneath the jacket could be played off as professional and proper, but all Doc saw was cleavage. “Hold out your wrist.”
 

He surrendered his left arm. That limb had an appointment with a specialty shop down on Ninth in the morning to get the most pointless upgrade Doc could find — the kind a man would only get if he was no longer concerned about paying his costs of living. He was planning to get a nanobot tattoo watch. What the hell; he could afford it.
 

“What’s your name?”
 

“Felicia,” the agent answered, her tone annoyed. She’d already pegged him as a pig — a
pushy and inconsiderate
pig, probably, based on how he’d killed her scarcity ploy — and didn’t seem surprised that he’d already forgotten. The way she gave her name was both acquiescent and resigned at once.
 

The handheld beeped.
 

“You doing anything tonight, Felicia?”
 

She ignored him, tapping the screen. She closed the cabinet and, not taking her hand from the handle, met his eyes. There was a light tapping from below, and Doc realized she was clicking her toe against the floor like his mother used to do. To Doc, it was the sound of a rattlesnake shaking its rattle.
 

She opened the cabinet, which was now full, and pulled a blue box from the front row.
 

“Pop-Tarts? Really?” she said. She turned the box over in her hand with something like disgust.

Doc gave her his most charming smile. “What can I say? I’m a kid at heart.”
 

She replaced the box, and Doc almost wanted to reach after it. The Pop-Tarts had shown up because he wanted them, after all. The cabinet closed.
 

“Right now, this apartment is tied to a demo stock, but you’ll obviously fill your own. You can either do so right here, through the cabinet, or you can fill it through a conveyor in the countertop over there.”
 

Doc looked. “There’s no conveyor there.”
 

The agent gave him a condescending smile. “Pretty much everything in these units is keyed to Beam recognition algorithms, meaning the environment will constantly respond to you. The conveyor descends from beneath that slab in the middle, if you want it. There will be a training period where the AI will need to get to know you, and how you think.”
 

“What if I don’t want my apartment reading my mind all the time?”
 

“It’s not reading your mind. It’s responding to recognizable electrochemical patterns that are readable in the space surrounding…”
 

“That’s reading my mind.”
 

The agent gave a giggle. An actual
giggle
. “Well, Mr. Stahl, if you don’t want your environment responding to you, perhaps you should consider a less expensive apartment.”
 

“What else?”
 

“AI cookers, of course, if you’re into that.” She started to pace the kitchen and gesture. “Or you can cook for yourself. There’s a small appliance garage over there that operates on the same principle as the food archive. You can of course completely ignore it if you’d like, but the appliances are included. All of the individual appliances are unique to you, of course. Some people ask if you’d end up using the toaster your neighbor used yesterday, but no, everything is contained. That’s why you can’t order food from other places directly into your cabinet. It’s complicated; something to do with proprietary systems and access. A safety feature, basically, because you don’t want anyone having access to your food. Or, for that matter, your toaster.”
 

“What’s a toaster?” Doc flashed a smile that told Felicity he was only kidding, and she made a face right back. This was how Doc liked to deal. Nobody was bullshitting anyone, trying to be friendly to extort the other. Although the more Doc watched Felicity walk around and show him features, the more he found he’d like to be friendly with her.
 

“You can order up, of course, but to be honest I’ve never been a fan. Pizza does horribly in transit. It’s like the lift unsettles the cheese, and it sloughs off to the side. Other deliveries do better. Pharmaceuticals, for instance. Of course you can program recurring deliveries for that sort of thing and have them piped into your medicine cabinets. For some reason, it’s okay for people to have access to your medications, but not your food; go figure. Follow me this way, please.”