The Beam: Season Two (9 page)

Even without her visual assets, Kate was great at what she did. This was due partly to her powers of persuasion and rapport and partly to her skill with misdirection. She’d show the inspector to one hatch without the inspectors even realizing they were being led, or draw overt attention to a loose bolt over an equipment panel so that they’d miss the concealed compartment in the shuttle’s belly. She had a knack for stashing smuggled dust in her shuttle’s engine the times the inspector checked the luggage compartments most thoroughly, and she always seemed to hide it in the luggage compartments when the engine was the prime target of scrutiny. Unless the inspectors had been given a tip that she was carrying, they moved quickly through her inspection, eager to punch her ticket and move on. There was always a long line to exit the moon, and Kate always left at the busiest times. In two weeks of constant missions, everything had gone perfectly. Better than anyone else who’d run dust for the boss in the past, as she understood it.

Kate walked through the hub, avoiding stares and pretending she didn’t see them, reminding herself that sometimes, even unwanted attention could be an asset.

She looked down at her wrist, feeling a small but noticeable rise in her heartbeat from the trip. She still had goose bumps. Or maybe it was the cold that was causing her prickled flesh, just as it was prompting her nipples stand at attention. And
that
, by the way, was just fucking peachy, because now it looked like she had headlights despite the thick double shirt she’d worn for the trip. She really needed to get a spacesuit. Spacesuits were for space poseurs, but at least they didn’t show nippage, and all Kate needed was for every man she walked by to inspect her out of the corner of his eye, looking like he wanted to reach out and give her a honk.
 

In the middle of the hub, one man’s gaze lingered for too long, so Kate rammed his side without apology. It didn’t work, though. When she glanced back, the man was smiling, as if she’d flirted back at him.
 

Kate rolled her eyes then decided to distract herself by doing what the men were doing: checking out hot girls. A disproportionate number of people on the moon were extremely wealthy — and the wealthy, thanks to their nano and youth treatments, were usually beautiful. She caught sight of a trio of women crossing the hub, all three in short skirts as if attending a business meeting or a stripper convention. They might have been old enough to be Kate’s mother, but hey — firm boobs were firm boobs. She should know. She could barely stop pawing at her own.
 

Kate passed them. She smiled. They smiled. And her heartbeat rose again as she sighed, wishing she had time to stop.

At the far end of the hub, she took the tube that led to the external airlock. Once through the passageway, she was pleasantly surprised to see that her transport had already been delivered and converted for ground travel. Maybe she could stay on schedule after all. And maybe, if she hurried through the rest of her trip, she could even find those girls on the way out, with time to spare.

Kate slid into the transport, closed the hatch, and for the third time looked down at her wrist to check the time. But her nanowatch had left with her penis, and despite the watch upgrade’s uselessness, she missed it. She hadn’t been able to see the time on the back of her wrist since before the genetic refurb and Beam ID reset — since before she’d had to go into hiding from Micah Ryan, just two weeks ago, when she’d still been Doc Stahl.
 

The transport’s canvas chirped. The soft female voice said, “Where would you like to go, Miss Rigby?”
 

“To find my cock.”
 

“I’m sorry,” said the canvas. “I don’t know that location.”
 

Kate sighed. “Then take me to Digger Base.”

Chapter 6

April 17, 2055 — District Zero

Dom approached Mr. Booker’s desk, sucked up his courage, then set his tablet in front of the teacher. He wanted to slam it on the desk (he’d seen this sort of thing plenty in vidstreams, done with paper, and it looked so much better), but a tablet was a tablet, and he’d already broken one this year.
 

Mr. Booker looked up. “Yes?”
 

Dom met his eyes. Mr. Booker wore glasses but didn’t have bifocals, so he tended to look over their tops, the way he was looking at Dom now. The entire thing was antiquated and clumsy (why didn’t he just get eye surgery or a Crossbrace-enabled implant?), but that was how Mr. Booker was. He wore his hair long, often in a ponytail. He had a wardrobe of brightly colored shirts. He bicycled to work; he used pencils and paper; he wore glasses and peered over their tops. Dom’s father said his biology teacher was a leftover hippie, but Dom always wondered what he was left over from. Mr. Booker wasn’t old enough to pick up the early century or late prior-century fashions Dom had found when poking around on Crossbrace. It was as if he’d pulled his philosophies and look from the air then tried them on and discovered that he liked their fit.
 

Dom picked up the tablet then set it back down on the desk. Apparently, he hadn’t faux-slammed it pointedly enough.
 

“You’re giving me your tablet? Thanks, Dom.”
 

“Why did you fail me?” Dom demanded.
 

“Because you did poorly on the test.”

“I only missed three. Out of twenty.”
 

Booker shrugged.
 

“That’s 85 percent. I got 85 percent of the questions right.”
 

“Very good. You may pass math.”
 

“Failing is 50 or less.”
 

Booker looked up then closed the slim volume he’d been reading — bound and printed on paper, of course. He removed his glasses and set them aside.
 

“Yes, yes it is. And let me ask you something, Dom. Does it seem right to you that you can get half of a job correct and still pass?”
 

“It’s not my rule.”
 

“Maybe it should be.”
 

“No. I mean, I don’t make the rules. Fifty is passing.”
 

“If you could make the rules, would you allow people to pass with 50 percent correct?”
 

Dom shrugged. He didn’t want to debate. He wanted the passing grade he deserved.
 

“Let me tell you something, Dom. It wasn’t that long ago that schools in this union — well, the US, anyway; my Canadian and Mexican history is rusty — were graded on a letter system. A grade of A was excellent. B was good. C was average. D was poor. And F was failure.”

“What about E?”
 

“There was no E.”
 

“Why? That’s stupid.”
 

Booker laughed. “It was plenty stupid. Even back then, it didn’t make sense. But then, nothing about school made sense to me. Now look at where things have gone. You either pass, or you fail, and the bar is set at half. Even back in the letter days, you had to hit the mid-60s, percentagewise, to pass. We continue to slide down the spiral. And do you know why?”
 

“It doesn’t matter.”
 

“Oh, but it does.” Booker stood then raised a single finger. “You see, there are two ways to make a piece fit a puzzle. The ideal way is to solve the puzzle correctly, and set the right pieces in their proper places. The other is to get out your scissors and cut the pieces so they’ll fit wherever you put them. Some people would call that cheating, and there are times when I think it’s appropriate — when you can change the rules rather than blindly follow them. But there are also plenty of times when it is, as you said,
stupid
. In some cases, cutting those puzzle pieces to fit is about willful disobedience and nonconformity, but usually — and this is certainly the case with organized education these days — it’s about adaptation. You know about adaptation, of course.”
 

Dom did. It was a cornerstone principle of biology. Dom knew all about biology. Specifically, he knew it well enough to earn 85 percent on a biology test, and hence a passing grade. He nodded, irritated that he was being dragged into a debate rather than being given the grade he deserved.
 

“In this case,” said Mr. Booker, “the individuals — that’s the students — didn’t rise to adapt. Instead, the system lowered itself, adapting to the individuals. The puzzle had to fit, see. A society — especially one still struggling to stand after it caused a catastrophic planetary collapse — must function as a unit. So the education system
must
pass people because that’s the only way to graduate the adults who will go on to shape the NAU’s future.”
 

Dom shrugged.
 

“Well, don’t you see?” said Booker, now sitting on the desk’s edge. “Graduations matter more than knowledge. People were distracted by the way the world changed, so we cut them a break. Made things easier. Schools lowered their standards to make it look like everything was working as it should. From the outside, it seemed like it was. Graduation rates rose. People churned through the system, duly conditioned for adult life, prepared to slot into their assigned roles. It was enough that they ‘passed,’ whatever that meant. It only mattered that they fit, not that they’d learned what they needed to know.”
 

Dom sat in the wooden chair opposite Booker’s desk. Behind the teacher, the network board was filled with the 2-D vidstreams and notes he’d written for the day’s lesson. He hadn’t turned it off yet, despite its irrelevance. An image of the board was still the default view on every student’s tablet.

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with my grade.”

“You, Dominic Long,” said Booker, pointing, “are
better
than that grade.”
 

“But I only missed three.”

Booker shrugged. “Which questions were they, Dom? Did you look? They were the deductions. You got all of the factual answers correct, sure, and you proved you can draw glucose-6-phosphate and, I’m sure, most of the other steps in the Krebs Cycle.”

“So?”
 

“You knew everything that could be found in a book. Everything that can be memorized and regurgitated. So what?”
 

“So that was the test,” Dom retorted.
 

“Dom, I don’t care at all if you can remember facts. Any monkey can memorize facts. You could memorize the periodic table, and it would be a useless gesture, seeing as it’s meant for reference — displayed in every lab because nobody expects you to know it by heart. I care about the questions that make you apply what you learned. The ones that make you think.”
 

 
Dom shook his head. “But I didn’t fail.”
 

“Sure you did. You failed
me
. And yourself.”
 

“That’s not fair.”

“
Life
isn’t fair.”
 

“Did you fail everyone who got 85 percent?”
 

Booker laughed. “I would have if anyone else had scored that high.”
 

“I got the
highest score
on the test?” said Dom.

His teacher sighed, shifting on the desk. “Sad, isn’t it? But yes. The next was an 80. There was a 77 and a 74. Most were in the ’60s.”
 

“And you
passed them?”
 

“I have to. The machine needs bodies. I do what I can, but most people aren’t ready to be thinkers. They’d rather turn off, tune out, and drop right into wherever the world wants to put them.”

Dom stood, the chair scooting a few inches backward behind him.
“That’s not fair!”

“It sure isn’t,” said Mr. Booker, his face still pleasant and mild. He gave Dom an odd, bittersweet sort of smile. “I feel bad for you, Dom. The world is changing, and it thinks things are getting better. Standards in education are down, and standards for things like job performance are down to match. People don’t have to do nearly as much to make the system run anymore, so it works. By the time you graduate, you’ll be able to get all sorts of jobs. You could be a welder, sitting at home and collecting a dole. You could be a filing clerk, sitting at home and collecting a dole. Maybe you could be a fireman or a policeman, sitting at home and collecting a dole. The world is your oyster, and you can see it all from the comfort of your couch.”
 

“What’s your point?” Dom demanded.

The issue of his unfair grade aside, Dom generally liked Booker a lot and could feel their usual rapport about to break through the surface and ruin his anger. Booker would get to philosophizing, and Dom always found himself agreeing with his teacher whether he wanted to or not when that happened. The man was persuasive, and his arguments always ended up being very convincing. It was infuriating how hard he was to disagree with.

“Dom,” said Booker, his face softening, “the world will try to tell you many pleasant lies throughout your life. You will want to believe them, but you must not simply accept them as true, and you must always ask questions until you uncover the truth. I’ve always encouraged you to have a deductive, inquisitive mind. The kind of mind that doesn’t pay lip service to facts on a test then not bother with the questions that matter.” He tapped the tablet. “Before the Fall, the world’s pleasant lie was that the planet could withstand whatever we could dish out, so there was no reason to stop building and building. The Fall proved that wrong, but soon after, the lie returned. The exact same lie! The US government and then the NAU told us that we had to rebuild our society, so all bets were temporarily off. They said it would be okay; the Earth had reset itself and was now tougher than ever…and besides, they rationalized, it wasn’t our actions that caused the Fall in the first place. From a scientific standpoint, the idea was absurd. But people wanted to believe it, so they did.” He paused. “There were groups that tried to stop it, but…” He trailed off.