The Beam: Season One (17 page)

“My husband is neglecting me. He doesn’t understand me.”
 

“Would you like some company?” Andre asked.

“I
need
some,” she replied.
 

He nodded. Natasha closed the window. She turned, then laid back on the bed. A man shimmered into existence across the room, having moved his avatar into the Viazo on her invite. Viazo avatars weren’t like the pixelated, video-and-audio-only avatars that existed in poorer sections of The Beam. These were sharp, and Andre’s beauty, as Natasha watched him approach, was sharp and crisp and present. Viazo avatars had all five senses,
 
every scintilla of which were transmitted into the user’s cortex via high-end immersion rigs. And thanks to the rather expensive nanos in Natasha and Andre’s real bodies that were able to down-tune their real senses so they could experience the replacement senses, it truly felt like being there.
 

The handsome man climbed onto the bed and laid on top of Natasha. His pressure on her was reassuring and arousing at the same time.
 

“You shouldn’t cheat on your husband,” Andre said while kissing down the length of her neck, her chest, her belly.
 

“How can I cheat?” Natasha replied, spreading her legs to make room for Andre’s face. “I’m not even here.”

Chapter 3

Dominic Long sat in his shitty public official’s office behind his shitty sixty-year-old public official’s desk. The casters of his shitty chair rattled on the shitty chipped synthetic flooring beneath his feet, most of which was peeling and faded because, Dominic suspected, it was incredibly shitty. He stared at his shitty console-model canvas and wondered for the billionth time why, if police were so important to maintaining order, they received such shitty appropriations.
 

Thanks to his high position within this shitty, underfunded public service, Dominic had money despite being Directorate. Good money, in fact — enough to put him at the lower edge of what those above him called the “Presque Beau.” But regardless of his good station, Dominic always felt depressed after a visit to the Quark wing. His great-grandfather had been a New York City cop back around the turn of the millennium, and Dominic had seen the old digital videos Grandy had shot with his ancient iPhone — enough to know that the station Dominic sat in today hadn’t changed all that much since Grandy’s day. The Quark station was what law enforcement was
supposed
to look like after a hundred years of progress. But would Grandy be surprised to see how little had changed? Dominic doubted it. Sure, DZPD had The Beam, but the consoles they used to access it weren’t all that different from the PC’s Grandy had used back when he used to walk the beat.
 

Of course, the reason the DZPD wasn’t as funded as it should have been was partially due to politics, but it was also due to the fact that DZPD wasn’t the real law in town. When all the fancy talk was set aside, everyone knew that The Beam ran the city (just as it ran all cities) and that despite all of their protests to the contrary, it was
Quark
who’d created The Beam… and hence Quark who still controlled it.
 

“Noah Fucking West,” Dominic said aloud. His shitty office didn’t respond.
 

Dominic looked down at his wooden, non-Beam-enabled desk with its ancient blotter, then tapped the console with a sigh. He was about to start poking around to see what he could find on new riots when his console trilled. A call was coming in, and the only way he could take it was there on his console screen, same as Grandy had done a hundred years before.
 

As if that wasn’t annoying enough, the call was coming from Leo Booker. Dominic shook his head, tapped the screen, and took the call.
 

“Leo,” he said. They were both using video, so Dominic found himself staring at a man with a headband and two gray braids beside his face. Noah Fucking West. If these granola-fuckers wanted to get anywhere with their cause, why didn’t they try harder to blend in? Dominic believed in what the Organas stood for, but the way they dressed and gussied themselves sure made it hard to agree with them.
 

“How’s your office?” said Leo.

For a moment, it seemed as if Leo’s question was psychic. Then Dominic realized the old man was asking about security, not about whether his environment had managed to keep current with the century.
 

“My door is closed.”
 

“Is that a go-ahead?”
 

Dominic shrugged. As captain, Dominic had the significant perk of a secure Beam connection that was as close to anonymous as a non-Quark agent could get. His office, while antiquated, was electronically soundproofed. But explaining all of this to Leo seemed like an unnecessary concession to his station’s adequacy, so he let the shrug suggest that things were merely acceptable.
 

“Thanks for covering for Leah,” said Leo.
 

“Sure.”
 

“Her record is as expunged as it can be?” he asked. The question carried the undercurrent they both knew was there — that The Beam never truly forgot — but the answer was, as with everything, that Dominic had done good enough. There was simply too much information in the world. Evidence of Leah’s visit to the station could never be fully removed thanks to the ubiquity of City Surveillance and the attention of what Leah had told him were Beam clerics, but the bits that Dominic hadn’t erased would almost certainly be lost.
 

“Yeah.”
 

“Good. Is it getting crazy in tech town?”
 

“You mean crazier than it is in tech poseur villages up in the mountains?” Dominic’s mood was sour and he wanted to poke Leo. Up in what was supposed to be a blackout zone, Leo had a wireless connection capable of making calls like the one they were on that his hippie toadies didn’t know about.
 

Leo laughed, ignoring Dominic’s bait.
 

But Dominic felt like arguing. Things around the DZPD station had been downright infuriating lately. Shift was always an unsettling time rife with civil unrest, but the last few Shifts had been a walk in the park. They’d gone so smoothly, in fact, that after the last Shift Dominic had joked that the universe must be saving up for a doozy to come. This Shift hadn’t disappointed, and the idiocy was only just starting. The city had had riot after riot, and crime was up. The DZPD jail cells weren’t usually filled — the core of District Zero was so well-watched by City Surveillance and sweeperbots that most DZ citizens managed to keep their hands to themselves or be sent quietly to Respero — but those same cells were overflowing now. Respectable people were raging and rioting. “Civil uprising,” they called it. To Dominic, it was hippie bullshit and a headache.
 

“You think it’s funny?” said Dominic.
 

“So things
are
crazy in tech town?”
 

“Goddammit, Leo. I know you get a feed up there. You’ve got your little gadget and your air signal, and I suspect you might even have a hard line…”
 

“I don’t have a hard line.”
 

“… and I frankly don’t feel like playing cutesy games. We have riots up the ass, and you send Leah into Quark? That’s beyond stupid. And now on top of all of these fucking riots, I’m cleaning up after you. You get to have the ideals, while I’m stuck cleaning up the mess.”
 

Onscreen, Leo finally looked affected. “It isn’t Organa that’s causing your riots. That’s about Directorate and Enterprise.”
 

Dominic grunted. He’d gotten his hippie movements confused. The Enterprise wanted freedom to make as many credits as they wanted, the Directorate wanted freedom from poverty, and the granola-fuckers in the mountains wanted freedom from technology. Or so they said.

“Organa isn’t helping,” said Dominic. It was a spiteful, groundless comment, but Dominic wanted to blame someone. Leo was the only one within range.
 

“This is your cause too, Dominic,” said Leo.
 

Dominic held his breath for a long moment, then finally exhaled. Blowing steam at Leo changed nothing. The rioters were still rioting, and the Directorate was still bitching. The Enterprise was still making things worse by blustering back. It was a like a bunch of schoolchildren slap-fighting. Leo was at least ostensibly on Dominic’s side.
 

Besides, Leo hadn’t chosen Dominic; Dominic had chosen Leo. They’d known each other since Dominic’s school days, but it was Dominic who’d begun to put together bits and pieces of some giant puzzle over the past decade, a hunch tickling the back of his brain about Quark, The Beam, West, and whether the upper tier had more privilege than was commonly known amongst most of the population. It was Dominic who’d sought out Leo not just as a friend but as an Organa leader; it was Dominic who’d been shuttling drugs and information to keep the Organas one step ahead; it was Dominic who’d sent Leo the vagrant he was supposed to send to Respero and hence saddled both of them with a moral burden. Dominic had made his own bed with Organa, with Leo, and maybe even with Leah’s incursion into Quark. He was making his own bed with the riots even now, Dominic reminded himself. He could try harder to stop them — there were plenty of sweepers and apprehenders in DZPD’s garages to quell the riots at the first sign a new one was erupting — but in truth, Dominic intentionally let a few fires burn, because a little upheaval was good for the cause.
 

Instead of conceding Leo’s point, Dominic pinched the bridge of his nose and looked at his non-Beam-enabled desk blotter.
 

“I hate to make your headache worse…” said Leo.
 

The way Leo trailed off, Dominic knew what was coming. But he asked anyway.
 

“What is it, Leo?”
 

“Moondust.”
 

“Noah
Fucking
West.”
 

“I’ve tried not to mention it, Dominic, but we’re getting really low. I don’t want to press you, but you’re the only person I can ask. Ever since you stepped into Omar’s place as an intermediary… well…” Leo shrugged.
 

Now it was Dominic’s turn not to rise to the bait, because the truth was that Dominic had brought the moondust burden on himself and they both knew it.
 

The Organas had been synthesizing their mind-altering hallucinogenic in labs since the ‘60s, but in the late 70’s they’d discovered that the compound was especially potent when grown on the moon — something about the vacuum, alternating exposure to unshielded solar radiation and deep cold, and space dirt… or some other bullshit Dominic didn’t understand in the least. Opportunistic entrepreneurs with access to the moon elevator had immediately begun growing “moondust” and smuggling it back. Ever since, the drug had been intertwined with Organa like two hairs in a braid. Organas said Lunis allowed them to see truths The Beam couldn’t, and perhaps as a perverse kind of proof, the most elite Beam hackers were deeply, deeply addicted. Whether that was coincidence or not, Dominic couldn’t say… but it didn’t matter whether he thought it made sense or not. Organa didn’t function without moondust, and when addicts ran dry, withdrawal could be fatal.
 

Dominic didn’t need more pressure right now, but Leo was right:
he
was the one who’d stepped into the middle of the supply chain, who’d told Leo to stop buying directly from Omar because Omar was screwing the Organas every way he could manage. Like it or not, it was on Dominic unless he wanted his one “cause” to fall into a pile of twitching junkies and die.
 

“I’ll get you your dust,” said Dominic.

“Our stores are nearly depleted. People know it, too. If this goes on much longer, we’ll have to start rationing, and if we do that, we’ll have our own version of your riots.”
 

“I said, I’ll get it for you.”
 

“Even if you have to make a run yourself, Dominic,” said Leo. “Don’t make me beg.”
 

“Okay.”
 

“Promise me you’ll do it. Just a few meterbars.”
 

“I’ll get it when I get it.”
 

“This week. Can you run this week?”
 

Dominic, annoyed, pushed down his own irritation as he watched Leo’s thin veneer grow thinner. Deep down, Leo was scared. There were hundreds of people who came and went in the mountain community, and that was a lot of need to fill. One person would run out, then tear the rest of the others apart trying to find more. Organas were peaceful by nature, but
all
addicts were dangerous when their needs weren’t met.
 

“Look, Leo…” said Dominic.

“What?”

“One of the runners was pinched on the moon,” he admitted.
 

Leo’s eyes went wide. Dominic held up a hand.
 

“It’s not a big deal, okay? We have people coming down all the time. There’s usually a buffer supply, but, well, it belonged to this guy and he fucked up. We won’t make the same mistake again. There are guys coming down every day, bringing a few dozen centimeterbars with them each time. One of the people we know is sending a hover with a nice big hidden compartment, and he’s taking your usual bribe with him. Okay?”
 

“When?”
 

“Two days. Tops.”
 

Leo seemed to force his face into a smile. “Okay.”
 

“I promise.”
 

“Don’t fuck it up,” said Leo.
 

That made Dominic’s head snap around. Leo was just scared, but bullshit was bullshit and Dominic was doing his best.

“You know,” he said, “has it ever occurred to you — the irony of you trying to ‘free people’s minds’ while you’re all hooked on dope?”
 

Onscreen, the man with the gray braids scowled, and then his image vanished. It was the video call equivalent of slamming a door in someone’s face.