The Beam: Season Two (35 page)

Natasha’s pale skin filled Kai’s field of view as the nanobot eye neared her face. There was a disorienting sense of inversion as the nanobots rolled all at once to look in the other direction. Kai realized it had slipped up under the back of Natasha’s hair. The view was dark and filled with filtered reds, but in the last moment before the eye dispersed, she saw a small port in the rig. The sort of port where you might plug in an external monitor.
 

Kai waited. The bots would be spreading out now, making contacts like a rudimentary plug. But when the redundant visual stream filled Kai’s view, it didn’t seem as redundant as she’d thought it would be. Rather, she saw an immersive stream made flat…which was in turn made semi-immersive again thanks to Kai’s current eye-on point of view.
 

She saw a white room. Slim hands that seemed to stem from Kai but that were, in fact, Natasha’s. Fingers buried in a gorgeous man’s hair. His face came closer, and Kai could almost feel his kiss. She saw how he moved and craved audio to hear the rise and fall of his breath.

Kai was seeing this, but Natasha was
there
. As real, with another person, as if they were in the same bed. As real as it had felt to Kai when she’d held the heavy pipe in her hands.
 

She’d struck Doc seven times and would never forget a single one of those blows. Each was embossed on her soul because she’d b
een there.
She’d
done it
. Real as reality.

“I’m going to get what you have,”
Kai whispered for Natasha’s absent ears.
 

Her view flashed red, indicating the nanobots had heard her and detected a factual inaccuracy.

But outside the office, Kai shook her head, because she knew better.

Chapter 5

Micah approached his mother, took her hand, and raised it to his lips. He kissed her papery skin then set her hand down delicately, as if it were fine China.
 

Rachel looked up. Micah had approached her without getting recognition, and if he didn’t know better, he would have thought she hadn’t heard him come through the door and approach. But of course, the old woman had the finest implants money could buy. Soon, she’d be all robotics and Plasteel, dressed in peeling, rotting skin. It would happen all of a sudden. One day, Micah would realize that his mother was dead and that what lived in Alpha Place had been something else for a very long time.

“How are you feeling, Mom?”
 

Rachel took Micah’s hand, which he’d left on the chair’s arm near hers. She patted it delicately then turned her cheek toward him.
 

“Is a kiss on the hand any way to greet your mother?”
 

“I didn’t know if you were bruising.”
 

“I don’t bruise under the affections of my son.”
 

Micah forced a smile then leaned toward Rachel’s cheek. He held a neutral expression, trying to ignore her scent. The odor wasn’t precisely decay, medicine, or old age. It was an ozone smell that reminded him of running electricity dusted with musk.
 

He kissed her cheek then pulled back. His lips had left an impression, delicate as he’d been. He watched as the white area on her cheek, after a moment, flushed red and inflated back to its prior state. Even the return of color was the work of her nanobots. It was macabre — more like watching roadies erecting a tent than anything remotely organic.
 

Micah pulled up a small soft chair and sat with his knees almost touching Rachel’s.
 

“So how are you feeling?”
 

“Poor.”
 

“I’m sorry.”
 

“It’s okay. It’s a very specific form of poor. My bones would ache if I had any left, and my muscles would be sore if they weren’t filled with machines and paralyzers. Fortunately, I have none of those original items. And in their place, I have ghost pains.”
 

“You mean phantom pains?” Micah remembered stories of pre-microsurgery amputees feeling a limb that was no longer there.

“No. I mean pains that stem from the fact that I should be a ghost.”
 

This was Rachel’s unique species of half joke. Micah, since childhood, had never known if he should laugh or turn his face serious when she made her jokes — a uniquely disarming experience tinged with both guilt and discomfort.
 

Micah chose to smile.
 

“Thank you for coming to visit me,” she said. She returned his smile. It should have felt like a confirmation that he was doing things right, but it didn’t. Micah had never, ever understood or felt comfortable around his mother. Rachel had been in her seventies and eighties through the boys’ formative years, wedging a double-wide generation gap between them. She’d never been able to do the fun, playful things that Micah’s friends’ mothers had done. She’d been old forever, and time had only magnified their differences. Before her first nanobot treatment, he’d felt like a caregiver assigned to an invalid. After, he’d felt like a good Samaritan visiting an anomaly.
 

“Of course.”
 

“You’re a good boy.”
 

“Thank you.” He forced a smile. “I do try.”
 

“Have you seen your brother?”
 

Micah cocked his head. They almost never discussed Isaac. Isaac came to visit Rachel as well, but their relationship, so far as Micah could tell, was quite different. Isaac usually ended up running errands and taking care of Rachel’s household for her. Micah was the confidant: the one she spoke to, the one she confided in. But the two worlds never crossed, and Micah and Isaac hadn’t visited their mother together in years. They’d never decided to split visiting duty, either. It had simply occurred because it seemed wiser. Safer, perhaps.
 

“We’ve spoken.”
 

“I worry about him.”
 

“You don’t need to worry about Isaac, Mom. Isaac can take care of himself.”
 

Rachel gave a crow-like scoff. “No, he can’t. He’s a fool.”
 

“Mom!”
 

“So now you’re offended?”
 

Micah’s hand was still near Rachel’s. But something had changed in the conversation, and Micah didn’t trust it. A moment before, he’d been a dutiful son visiting a poor old woman in failing health. In the blink of an eye, Rachel’s other, deeper face had replaced that of the sweet shut-in. That face triggered old chills. He remembered it from all those years ago, over dinner tables, discussing business with Pops…strategies that simultaneously seemed to circle matters of life and death. Micah and Isaac’s father was never part of those conversations. Micah still remembered the way Dad had always retreated to the parlor, reading and pretending not to know his wife’s business. Trying to pretend, Micah had thought, that he wasn’t terrified of his father-in-law.
 

Micah stood. He faced away from Rachel for a beat, trying to mentally compose himself. He was Micah Ryan, the public face of Enterprise. People feared him, the way Ashford Ryan had feared Pops.
 

Then he turned back, his face appropriately serious.

“I’m not offended,” he said. “Just wondering what makes you say that.”
 

Rachel laughed. “Why do I say he’s a fool?
Because he’s a fool
, Micah. You know it. You always have.”
 

“He’s your son.”
 

Rachel shook a bony finger. It swayed too much with each swipe, and Micah was reminded of a bag of water tied around a metal pendulum. “He’s my
older
son. Older. And yet you’re the one who took over Ryan Enterprises.”
 

“We’re partners.”
 

Rachel’s eyes hardened. “Listen to me, Micah. I don’t have many years left on this planet, and don’t want to spend them being bullshitted. You and Isaac have equal shares, subject to my 34 percent. When I die, you’ll be 50/50. But you are the board. You are the phantom stockholder with the single share that tips the balance toward you. And you have the will. Isaac is a sponge. You do realize that given the company’s private nature, you’re free to vote his shares invalid? He only has control as long as you want to keep giving him the warm fuzzies that come with illusions and fantasy.”
 

“Fine.” Micah sighed.
 

“I, on the other hand, am no fool. I had to give you equal shares of everything when you were kids. It was very Directorate of me, and I hated it. I did it because I ended up becoming a mother, then somehow it happened again. I didn’t have to do the things I did for you both. But I did it anyway.”
 

“You did great, Mom.” Somewhere inside, Micah realized that this was an atypical tone for a conversation with one’s mother, globally speaking.
 

“I did great by you,” she said. “And now you can do by me. Both of you. That’s the way things had to be, and have to be. I get it, and I was always willing to play along. That’s why you
seem
to have equal shares. Because Isaac is a delicate fool, and I must spare him even though he’s a grown man old enough to have his own grandchildren. But my compassion dies when we begin to talk about the business built by my father. One of you is qualified to run it. The other is not. And if you for a moment forget that your brother is weak and foolish, I will be forced to prove it by taking his inherited share and willing it all to you. Don’t make me do that, Micah. I’m too old to look like the bad guy. Let Isaac maintain his illusions.”
 

Micah nodded, unsure what to say.
 

“Now, what will you be doing about this situation with Natasha? Has Isaac asked you to step in?”
 

“He did.”
 

“What did you tell him?”
 

“I told him that it’s his problem.” Micah stopped short of telling Rachel that the complete thought included Isaac “getting control of his woman.” She might take offense, being a woman herself. But probably not, because his mother was practical above all else, and Natasha had to be reined in, for the good of both parties.
 

“Good. Are you going to step in anyway?”
 

“I’m monitoring it. We’ve talked anyway because she wants to shift to Enterprise and be a bi…well, she wants to be
loud
about it. I know she’s spoken to Jameson Gray. As friends. I don’t believe he’s told her anything he shouldn’t have.”
 

“What did Jameson say?”
 

Micah resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Jameson Gray had made his enormous fortune by throwing glitter and waving his arms while wearing a stern, mystical expression. He maintained a show based on flimflam in a world where the most amazing illusions were already being supplanted by technology’s truths.
 

“I don’t know, Mom. It’s not like I have a pipeline to the Master of Illusions. Wouldn’t you know better than me?”
 

Rachel gave a minuscule shake of her head to indicate that it didn’t matter. “Let her do what she wants, within reason. You understand?”
 

“She’s going to make a big splash. A huge show. Just to throw it in Isaac’s face. I’ve neither encouraged or discouraged it. I figure it’s best she sink or swim on her own. And the same goes for Isaac.”
 

Rachel nodded. “That’s very Enterprise. She’ll learn one way or the other. What matters is that the press knows she’s left Directorate. What happens next matters little.”
 

“I didn’t even need to leak it. Natasha’s so huffy and insufferable, the sheets found out immediately. The chatter is as obnoxious as she is.”
 

Rachel nodded. “Good.”
 

“There’s something else.” Micah looked into his mother’s somehow artificial stare. “You remember Nicolai Costa. Well, he’s…”
 

“Yes, yes. Nicolai,” she said, waving a hand in acknowledgement, urging him to get on with it.

Micah blinked. She’d said it like Nicolai Costa was a common topic of conversation, but in truth they hadn’t discussed the Costas since Salvatore had died and Ryan Enterprises had stepped in to shepherd the development of hovertech that had conveniently made its way stateside. Micah, who’d been project head on much of Ryan Enterprises hovertech development, was in the middle on that one. He wasn’t supposed to know that his mother was part of a group that pulled strings above even the company’s reach, but blood had always had a way of talking. It put him in a strange position. Mysterious commands came down, and Micah had to accept them. And no matter how much he thought he knew about anything, Rachel always seemed to be six steps ahead of him.

“You act like he’s an old friend of yours,” said Micah.
 

“Oh, yes. He came to visit me yesterday.”
 

Micah’s eyes met Rachel’s for long enough to see a passing look of contentment. Then it vanished, and again she looked like an innocent old woman.
 

“He
what?”