The Beam: Season Two (66 page)

It’s the same.
 

But it’s not.

It’s Beau Monde.

Obviously.

But it’s more.
 

Also obviously.
 

So what? What is different?

Leah pulled a packet of cyphers from her mental back pocket like a building superintendent removing an enormous keychain. Her mind slotted cypher after cypher into the puzzle, turning the visual metaphor into a key and a lock. First came the simple base substitutions: binary, hex, base-8. She turned the sequence, end-on and top-on, spinning one part of the puzzle after another. Then she saw it: how the sequence matched the Beau Monde key while also conforming to a pattern in itself. A subset within a subset. An ID within an ID. Two pieces of a coherent whole folding inward to make something entirely different.
 

If Micah, Isaac, and Natasha Ryan’s Beam IDs identified them as being more than Nicolai and most NAU citizens, Rachel Ryan’s ID clearly placed her beyond even them.
 

Leah sighed then backed away from the information and allowed herself to float. If an observer had been able to see a recreation of Leah’s visual metaphor at the moment, they might have seen her floating in blackness, lying on her back as her body was on the couch in her external world, her hands folded on her chest. To that observer, it might have appeared that Leah was doing nothing, but the reality was deeper. The transfer of information between Leah and The Beam was invisible because she was inside it. One with it. She breathed in data that the AI breathed out. Her exhalations were taken in by the Beam AI, sifting and sorting, making wholes from pieces.
 

Circles within circles.

Subsets told the story. Nicolai’s activity (not his ID) had placed him in a circle within the larger population. He was rich. He could do everything those below him could do, and more. The Beau Monde, by both Null’s estimation and what Leah could see through the trailing identifier, had access to everything Nicolai had access to…plus, yet again,
more
. Beau Monde stood above Nicolai, but the numeric reconfigurability of Rachel’s ID suggested that she stood above even that chosen group. It was math, not supposition. The Beau Monde identifier was a specific key, meant to unlock a certain set of technological privileges. Rachel’s key was far,
far
less specific. Rachel’s was a kind of skeleton key. It looked like it could unlock everything.
 

What are you, Rachel Ryan?

The Beam’s complete dataset was many orders of magnitude too large for Leah to even remotely consider grappling, but if she restricted her query to Rachel Ryan, she might be able to reconfigure it in her head/canvas and think/compute her way into…

Yes. That did the trick.

The search gave her enough data without being overwhelming, and when it returned, she folded edges and twisted facets until her mind had made the thing into a giant puzzle lock, keyed to fit Rachel Ryan’s identifier. The exercise wouldn’t tell her what Rachel’s code was made to open because Leah had fabricated the lock herself, but it might just shake some similar keys from the dataset.
 

In other words, Leah knew she wasn’t going to be able to determine the nature of Rachel’s high-level access. But with luck, she might be able to get an idea if anyone else shared it.

Keys fell. Leah’s eyes and mind watched them, turning numbers, symbols, and pages into Lunis-altered representations that her lower mind could manipulate into definite meaning. She couldn’t tell what was what; the data was incredibly complex, incredibly well masked, and obscured from individual identities. She’d seen that in The Beam before: The right hacker, if she was a good artist and knew what she was looking for, could often find amazing things. But if she didn’t really know what she was looking for? Well, there was an old expression for that: “garbage in, garbage out.” You couldn’t find gold if you didn’t know what you were seeking…or even that the precious metal existed.

She pulled back up to the surface of awareness, desperate to ground herself. A tweak of perception and focus allowed her to again feel the couch under her back. A refocusing of her eyes turned visual metaphors back into the holographs making up her hybrid immersion. She was again a young woman in a run-down apartment overlooking the park in District Zero. She could smell burning from another apartment — either food or genuine fire, equally likely.
 

What are you looking for?

She looked at the ceiling, seeing its cracked plaster through the holograms. She’d come here on Shadow’s lead to find information on Nicolai Costa. As so often happened on Beam excursions — for Leah, at least — her starting point had been nothing more than that, and the true target, unseen at first, had only surfaced by accident. The problem was that such things always appeared out of context. Leah had been looking for unusual circumstances surrounding Costa and had found a special club involving his employer’s mother. A very secret, apparently very privileged club.
 

She inhaled, closed her eyes again, and dove. There was a sensation of falling, and when Leah opened her eyes, the code had again become symbols and edges.
 

The dataset had shaken out three people who shared the red tag she’d seen on Rachel. Three people who were somehow tied to Rachel Ryan. How? In what capacity? The configuration was tricky, but the data was there, and Leah’s mind worked to make sense of it.

A subset.
 

A subset within a subset.
 

That was it: an even smaller group inside whatever Rachel Ryan was involved with. Three Beam IDs with the special identifiers, in their own secret club, nested in the secret club within the secret club. Not a higher level of access, though. To Leah, it felt like a sidebar conversation within a larger group. Three people who belonged to a larger mass of ten or twenty or thirty people, but who’d stepped aside, in relative secret, to conduct their own discussion.
 

Then she saw it — why this
felt
like a meeting to her yet wasn’t a meeting at all.
 

It was a technology Leah didn’t understand. Something she’d never seen. Based on the rows and columns within the raw data, she intuited channels not just for visual information (red, green, and blue color primaries translated to a variety of other matrices including CMYK — a print standard that didn’t make sense in a digital environment), but for audio and tactile as well. Tactile immersions, as far as Leah had ever seen, were clumsy and meant for novelty: Grip an apple in a simulation, and responsive gloves press into your hands to make it seem as if you’re holding the fruit for real. Why did the record of this group’s conversation involve tactile data? And what were the other two channels in the same bundle? In real life, the grouping would have suggested taste and scent. But who tasted and smelled in a simulation? Simulations were fancy A/V experiences, yet these three people had conducted an entire meetup using what seemed to be all five senses.
 

A next-level immersion?
 

It hardly mattered, whatever it was. Even if she’d had the cypher, Leah couldn’t have opened the full record, including what appeared to be highly immersive sensory information. It had been erased then clumsily zeroed. It had the feeling of a rushed bulk erase, which even kind of made sense. If these three people were meeting in secret — away from Rachel and whatever others there were — then they wouldn’t have their full toolsets available. They’d have to bulk erase because they were off-list, perhaps outside their authority.
 

But the data was gone just the same. All Leah could see was its skeleton: the record of something that had once been there, but had since been hollowed out.

Now what?

Now you come out of it. You end the holo immersion and get something to eat.

She really should. Leah hadn’t eaten since the train. Going into a Lunis fugue in a semi-fasted state had always helped her to quickly find clarity, but it was a fine line. Without nourishment, the moondust in her system acted more potently. If she didn’t surface soon to refresh and refuel, she could burn herself.

Before Leah returned her attention to the holographic nature around her (reminding herself that they were projections rather than interpretations made by her mind), something scratched at her senses. Something she was forgetting.
 

Backups.
 

Everything was backed up on The Beam at least five or six times. Maybe the troika who’d met in secret had forgotten to delete the backups. Leah looked, and saw how ridiculous her idea had been. Companies who made bulk erasers knew what their clients were using them for. Bulk erasers, of course, left no trace.
 

Caches.

That, too, was a good idea. But Leah couldn’t see any kind of cache memory. For the most part, caches would be on the users’ individual canvases, not out on The Beam. And of course, a bulk eraser worth its salt would hit all of the caches as well.
 

Come out of it. Get something to eat.

But then she thought:
Check the redundant streaming buffer
.
 

Leah felt herself stop, mid-ascent.
 

When A/V immersion technology had been new, the sheer volume of data the systems required the fiber lines to shuttle had taxed the network’s capacity. The glass lines, under perfect circumstances, were able to handle the intense bandwidth…but only barely. If there was any sort of a slowdown — say, from others hopping onto the node and beginning their own downloads — immersions stalled. To counter this, early immersions employed buffer memory repositories known jokingly in the development community as “3-D TiVo.” Leah was too young to understand the reference, but understood just fine what the buffers were designed to do: to fill up with a few minutes’ worth of data from the immersion while the signal was good then knock completed packets out the other end to deliver the immersion live. As networks matured, the need for buffers mostly vanished, but developers had always believed in taking elements from the past and remixing them. Little in art was new, and software development was no exception.
 

Systems built on systems built on systems.

Meaning that more than likely, the buffers were still there.
 

Half-aware of her hands and half still in her haze, Leah began to pull the web apart looking not to access the secure protocols, but to fumble through the immersion’s delivery code itself. It had the feel of trying to break into a locked car by stripping through the nuts and bolts of the undercarriage in order to access the interior from below.
 

The buffer was still there. It was degraded, partially overwritten, and bare-bones as she’d supposed it would be. A few minutes of the audio track was still intact, encoded as an audio file but accessible only as a jumbled written transcript filled with garbage code. A partial text record of the conversation from three huddled members of the secret organization — people who orbited Rachel Ryan yet didn’t seem to want Rachel and their other peers to hear their whispers.
 

There was an identifier in the transcript’s header. One word seemed to have survived the corruption that infected the file like digital cancer.
 

The word was
Panel
.

Chapter 11

Partial Scavenged Transcript

Header Designation: “Panel”

Beginning Timestamp: 03082063 07:12:04

Participants Unknown. Designations A, B, C added post-recovery

A: 000834j&fucking9999999coffee [truncated as worst of corruption ends]

B: Don’t you have a coffeemaker?

A: Of course. I meant in he89ikek9989

C: If you’re caffeinated in your real body in the real world, you’re caffeinated. Speaki&&#ng for myself, I’m caffeinated. And laid.
 

B: Nobody needs to hear that.

C: I’m just saying.
 

B. You’re just saying be34555se you want us all to know.
 

A: He’ll just say later how it was a hot young model. Just watch.

B. Because he’s so amazing.
 

C: That’s why I’m here. Because…

A: I’m serious. I just need something to h////////77s my hand. I’m not a morning person. Coffee reminds me that I should be up.
 

C: Early to bed, early to rise. Makes a person healthy, wealthy…

B: Okay, what else? Let’s get through this.
 

C: You don’t like our company?
 

B: We shouldn’t be off-Panel. Ever. Forgive me for wanting to move things along.

A: Bullshit. There’s no law against it.

B: There are no laws about any of this.
 

A: No rules either. Against going off-Panel included.
 

B: Inform^^33lly. All discussions involve everyone. That’s the whole point.
 

A: In theory, it makes sense, but when it comes to brass tacks, sometimes it’s too many goddamn cooks. Hell, Crossbrace wouldn’t have launched at all if we hadn’t handled that thing with Adair. We. Us. Only us. You know, off-Panel?