The Beam: Season Two (43 page)

Renting the private Starbucks cubicle had cost him a small fortune relative to his current finances, and he couldn’t afford it at all. Starbucks connections ran the gamut from open-floor Fi in the middle of the public room to carrels, partitioned environments, and private rooms like the one he was in now. Prices climbed steeply once you could close a door because people who insisted on privacy were usually here to beat off. Sam could even see the port where you could plug in the dongle for a wireless orifice attachment. Or, for the ladies, a wireless thruster.
 

The thought of ladies coming to Starbucks and getting a private Beam room for a rendezvous with projected porn and a thruster peripheral was arousing for maybe two seconds. Sam felt himself stand at momentary attention, and for those seconds, it was nice to have a respite from fear. But it didn’t last, and soon after Sam was back to being a paranoid man in a sealed room, pacing like a caged animal.
 

His laptop was open, along with his mail window.

Three fucking hours
.
 

He could have gone home. Probably
should
have gone home. Home was paid for by the month. But in spite of Sam’s many precautions, he’d begun to suspect that his apartment wasn’t secure. He was registered there as Sam Dial, if anyone followed his trail far enough and had the access required to look. How could he not be registered as himself? That’s who he was; it was what the ID in his body read to scanners; it’s the identity The Beam paired to his 2-D image when his landlord had looked him up to rent the place.
Shadow
was a master of disguise and evasion, but
Sam
, on the other hand, was a few steps removed from an intrepid reporter banging out 10-credit stories. There were places you could get an apartment with no scan and no questions asked outside of DZ, but Sam was always in an ironic catch-22: he had to avoid The Beam yet had to stay right in the middle of its nest — in the heart of the city — if he wanted to be able to do his work.

If someone like Integer7 discovered that Shadow was actually Sam, how hard would it really be to find Sam’s apartment, hack in, and then watch or listen to everything he did? Was it really impossible to believe that Null had ways to hack his encrypted, scrambled signal and see what he was looking for on The Beam?
 

Yes, of course that was impossible.

But also no, it wasn’t.
 

Sam had gone to the park so he could be in the open. But if you stayed in any one place too long, it seemed possible that someone could triangulate your position.

So he’d moved from where he was sitting. Safer that way.
 

Maybe there was a body that monitored all activity into and out of the Null forum. It almost made sense; NPS had tried before to shut them down but couldn’t pull the plug on the forum. They’d tried until it was declared unconstitutional, but even before the cease-and-desist, the forum had spoofed its existence, creating a doppelgänger of itself, like a hologram. NPS had stared directly at the forum and at its connection, had yanked, and then had found that contrary to everything they seemed to be seeing, the forum wasn’t really there. That had been one of Null’s great victories. Many memes had been birthed and circulated afterward, filled with lulz over the NPS’s stupidity and Null’s triumph.
 

Maybe Sam was being paranoid.
 

But could you ever be too careful?

So Sam had gone to another section of the park but was unable to find a location with a sufficiently protected rear so he couldn’t be approached from behind. He’d eventually gone to another park entirely and settled beside a kids’ jungle gym. He’d obsessively watched his inbox until several women began to eye him and their adjacent playing children, likely assuming Sam to be a freak or a pedophile.
 

So he’d returned to Central Park, putting his back to a dry fountain.
 

That hadn’t lasted.
 

Back and forth, he’d hauled his bag. The thing was unwieldy and heavy, and he got looks whenever he opened it. Everyone else in the world accessed The Beam on native canvases or on some sort of mobile, but Sam didn’t trust native canvases, and the anonymizer wouldn’t hook to a mobile. Besides, mobiles could be easily tracked. Laptop AirFi was harder to follow.
 

Finally, he’d decided to cough up the money for a private booth at Starbucks. At least he’d be away from prying eyes. Sheltered by his anonymizer, he’d be invisible.
 

There was a chance the Starbucks room might be watching his activity despite the company’s claims of privacy, but it was still safer than his apartment. Nobody knew that Sam Dial was in the booth because you didn’t have to be ID tagged to rent one. People balked at the idea of required ID for a booth. How could you rent a place to rub your parts if your ID was giving you away?

Sam paced. And paced. And paced.
 

Things were doubly troubling now.
 

It had only taken Sam an hour to decide that Integer7 was 1) planning to betray him, 2) in federal custody with Sam soon to follow, or 3) a federal agent him(her?)self.

So Sam went to Plan B, and reached out to n33t.
 

n33t wasn’t as connected or well known as Integer7 by a long shot, but he was a regular on the Null forum who’d led some of the place’s most thriving, thoughtful discussions. Integer7 was unquestionably the best choice for what Sam needed, but n33t made for a solid number two. Most of the Null forum was immature humor, gross-outs, and inane exchanges and taunts (not to mention the many hilarious memes), so the fact that n33t, with his almost philosophical threads, managed to survive as a respected member of Null was impressive.
 

Most members who tried to be serious (or, correspondingly, to steer an off-the-rails discussion in a sensible, mature direction) were called quills, but that didn’t happen with n33t. Sam had even seen someone come at n33t once, attacking one of his threads then watched as thousands of Null descended on the topic and assumed his defense.
 

There was another thing about n33t that intrigued Sam. n33t used his screen name on the forum. As with anything else, all of n33t’s posts showed as being authored by “Null,” but while that couldn’t be changed, n33t signed every one of his posts, writing
-=n33t=-
at the bottom of each. Sam had seen others try that, but it never lasted. As a community, Null wanted to stay anonymous. For some reason, n33t alone had earned an exception. He seemed to have grabbed the community by the collar and demanded respect. Null, shockingly, had listened.
 

But n33t, like Integer7, hadn’t replied to Sam’s message.

It had now been two hours since Sam had first contacted n33t via the PM system. Only after sending both private messages (to both possible revolutionary assistants) had Sam thought to consider that he had maybe made a mistake and might be playing into the hands of the NPS or whoever was obviously after him.
 

Maybe Integer7 wasn’t the problem. Maybe someone had compromised the Null PM system, and Sam, like a big idiot, had used it twice. Now he’d be nabbed for real. If only Integer7 had failed to respond, that would be one thing. But n33t too? Sam had contacted n33t before, and n33t, like anyone else, had always responded immediately.
 

“It’s cool. It’s cool. They’re just busy.”
 

But that was absurd. How could they
both
be busy? Nobody waited this long to reply. A quarter hour was about as long as you could expect to wait for a reply to an asynchronous communication like text mail. A lot of people didn’t even bother with mail. Pretty much all of Generation N (N for “Natives”) had chips, and most of their parents had them as well. At this point in history, society had moved at least a few generations away from letting messages sit in inboxes, molding until someone finally happened upon them. Com chips were the most bargain-basement of upgrades, affordable even by the failed Enterprise living on the streets. People who couldn’t buy food had them, just like they had mobiles to ensure the chips always had a point of access. If Sam had been a typical kid, he probably wouldn’t even bother with mail. He’d do what most people did, tapping on mental doors only as a courtesy before using his Beam connection to enter. You could open a window to a friend while they were on the toilet these days, and no one seemed to mind. It’s not like you could see anything above the waist anyway, and the chips all knew to enter DND mode when clothes were off or sex was being had.
 

Fifteen minutes was an eternity. Two and three hours were decades’ worth of time. And here Sam was, trying to reach two hackers — two Beam adepts, who spent their lives submerged — and hearing from neither.
 

He sent a new ping to n33t. He’d just sent one two minutes ago (and one three minutes before that), but what the hell.
 

It was too strange to be a coincidence. The only explanation was that something — or someone — had been compromised.
 

NPS was probably coming after him right now. Raiding his apartment. He wouldn’t be able to go back. Where would he sleep? And what would they find that might incriminate him?

Sam stabbed at his canvas again, sending a fresh ping to n33t.
 

He was starting to sweat. Fucking hypercaffeine. And paranoia.
 

He forced his feet to stop moving then sat back in the room’s chair. A thought about what the chair might have been used for in the past flitted through his mind, but the whole room was nano-maintained. He wasn’t sitting in anything harmful or diseased. It was just the concept that was kind of gross.
 

“Okay.” Sam exhaled through his mouth, closed his eyes for a second, and tried to mentally reset. Then he opened his eyes, put his fingers on the keys, and with a final glance at his still-empty inbox, opened a new Beam window.
 

He rolled up his sleeve and, reading from the pen marks on his skin, began to type in Nicolai Costa’s Beam ID.
 

If Integer7, n33t, and NPS were going to team up and come after Shadow, Shadow would shake up what he could in the meantime.

Chapter 4

“Let me get this straight,” Jimmy said.
 

He was beside Kate as she sat, his hands gripping the sides of the enormous prep table in the restaurant’s kitchen. The table looked like soft white wood, but Kate knew it to be a polymer called Velastack. It could take a meat cleaver’s blow then repair and clean the cut as the blade pulled away.
 

“Sit down, Jimmy,” said Kate. She crossed and recrossed her legs. She’d stopped in the restaurant’s bathroom and doffed her underwear just before allowing Jimmy to drag her into the kitchen. The staff was gone, the place closed for the night. She knew they would be alone and knew that Jimmy was a guy like any other, not quite immune to a beaver’s hypnotic flash no matter how angry he got.

But Jimmy didn’t look over or even acknowledge her. He gripped the table harder, leaning forward, looking across the kitchen at a rack of hanging Plasteel sauce pans.
 

“Let me get this
straight,”
he repeated, leaning on “straight” as heavily as he was leaning on the butcher block. “You left
fifty fucking meterbars of dust
in a scrap yard on the moon?”

“It sounds so good when you repeat shit.” Kate reached out with one long leg and kicked at a chair beside Jimmy. It skittered back with a metallic chattering. “Sit down, and stop being so fucking superior.”
 

Instead of sitting, Jimmy’s eyes met Kate’s with murder. Kate wasn’t sure if it was the loss of the dust, the news that one of his runners had killed a federal inspector, or Kate’s own smart-mouthed, unapologetic attitude that was causing it, but she knew a slap was coming before Jimmy pivoted. But she’d encumbered herself with the crossed legs, and couldn’t back away in time. Jimmy’s hand rocked her head to the side, hard, and she was momentarily blinded both by pain and her own blonde hair. It stayed in place while her neck spun, wrapping her like a mummy as the chair tipped back and spilled to the ground.
 

“This is not a clerk job! I am not a Directorate manager!”
Jimmy bellowed. He reached down, grabbed a fistful of Kate’s hair, and dragged her upright. She tried to get her legs under her but was wearing tall heels that danced beneath her like the wobbly legs of an animal trying to stand on ice.

Jimmy was strong, with enhanced musculature. Kate felt her hair rip, followed by a series of sensations that were even more daunting as he pushed her onto the table: the cool surface of the Velastack butcher block table against her cheek, the weight of Jimmy’s left hand on her back, and a jangle from the cleavers hanging above as he took hold of one with his right.
 

“You’ve got a shuffling ID, cunt!” Jimmy yelled. Kate could see a metallic flash above her as hair settled into place. “You’re off-record! You could vanish tomorrow, and nobody would know or care! Do you really think there’s anything stopping me from cutting your fucking head off with this thing right now?”
 

Kate knew better than to struggle, so instead she held her palms up as far as they could go, which wasn’t far considering the way she was pinned.