The Beam: Season One (25 page)

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?”
he blurted.
 

Natasha took the fuzzy sleep mask from her eyes with an irritating lack of alarm, then looked up at Isaac and said, “What? I thought you were in your office.”
 

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” he spat, his anger increasing as she stared up at him with doe eyes. “In just two weeks, you managed to…”
 

“Your
soundproofed
office,” Natasha continued, cutting him off, “which you soundproofed so that my presence wouldn’t disturb your important work.”
 

“What the hell, Natasha?
This
is the debate you want to have, when…”

“I can listen to it at whatever volume I want without damaging my ears thanks to my cochlear upgrade,” she said. “I can hear the nuances when I play it this loud.” She lowered her eyes and batted her eyelashes — something that made Isaac want to put a boot through her throat. “I
am
a musician, you know.”

Isaac could only stare. “You are
unreal.”
 

“What? Why do you care?”
 

Isaac stared at her, then said, “Canvas.”
 

The canvas made a chirp in response.

“Total expenditures of this household, month-to-date.”
 

A soft voice said, “Fourteen million, six hundred eighty five thousand, eight hundred and twelve universal credits.”
 

Natasha, unmoved, continued to stare at her husband. Her long red hair was tied up to look casual but had surely taken hours of primping. Her long, thin, pale arm was still slung over her head. Isaac found himself wanting to snap it at the elbow.
 

She said, “If you ask for it in NAU dollars, it’ll tell you the number of cents, too.”

“What have you been spending our money on? Fourteen fucking million? When we had our cap set, we received special dispensation. It was above the highest cap the Directorate allows. Impossible to hit!”
 

“I know,” she said. “With only three hundred thousand left this month, we won’t be able to buy groceries. We’ll starve!”
 

“Answer the question.”
 

“Cars. Planes. Vacations. What do you care? I’m buying my way out of loneliness.”
 

Isaac rolled his head back. “Oh,
holy motherfucking…”
 

“What do you care? You don’t spend it. You just sit in your office and work. You take virtual meetings with your brother. You take
real
meetings with your brother. Sometimes, when I see you for two minutes, you bitch about your brother. So yes, I spent a lot of money. What does it matter to the great Isaac Ryan? Look at how much your dole is, and how much mine is. We have billions in savings. Why does it remotely matter?”
 

“Because people watch us, Natasha. You wonder why you end up being the target of riots? Oh, geez, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that with Shift approaching, with everyone in both parties acutely aware of how they made the wrong choice and pretending that the other choice might have made a difference,
you
ride around in fancy cars wearing furs, replacing a hundred percent of your parts with enhancements. Who are you, anymore? Should I pull up our wedding album?”

Natasha’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare,” she snarled. Their wedding, over sixty years ago, had happened before Natasha had her first nanos — fat scavengers and rejuvenators that turned her from the soulful, beloved songstress into the thin plastic doll she’d become. She’d tried several times to have their wedding photos recreated in her new image, but Isaac wouldn’t allow it. He’d finally locked the photos down inside his own private files. Natasha saw her old photos as round and fat, but Isaac thought she’d been beautiful back then — in her twenties for real instead of fake, unenhanced in face and body, round enough to be a woman.
 

“I earned my money, and I can do what I want with it,” she said.
 

“Sounds like Enterprise thinking,” Isaac said.

“If you remember, I used to
be
Enterprise,” she snapped. “
Someone
made me shift.”
 

“For much larger pay, guaranteed.”
 

“Pay you don’t want me to spend! I could have been with your brother, and not had a cap! I should be allowed to spend three, four times what I do!”
 

That made Isaac’s skin prickle, but he couldn’t let her get to him. “Fourteen million in two weeks, Natasha. You deserve the hate you get, doing that. The average Directorate dole is still under twenty-five-thousand a year. Do you know what
those
people’s spending caps are?”
 

“Oh, fuck off, Isaac!” she shouted, standing from the couch. “This is about equality for you? Then give your fucking money away. Be Robin Hood more than we’re already expected to be. I gave up Enterprise for you. I used to have incentive! My excellence used to be celebrated, not hated! Now here I am with money I can’t spend and a husband who doesn’t love me, who can’t write a fucking speech without his Cyrano, who spends all his time running from his problems…”
 

Isaac wound up and threw the award hard at the window. It bounced harmlessly off, leaving a tiny scratch. A cleaner scrambled from its garage on the floor, climbed the window, and began repairing the glass.
 

“Mature,” said Natasha, watching the bot.
 

Isaac stared at his wife, furious but unsure what to say. So he turned toward his office and stalked off.
 

“Good idea,” she said from behind him. “Keep avoiding your problems.”
 

“Go buy some more enhancements, Natasha!” he shouted back. “Keep trying to make yourself feel young and beautiful and vibrant! Make yourself feel alive for five more seconds!”

“Canvas!” she screeched, furious. “Beethoven! Full volume!”
 

Music blasted into the living room as Isaac closed his office door, shutting it out. His heart was hammering. He was so angry that it took several minutes of stalking in circles and drawing deep breaths before he trusted himself not to trash his shelves, his equipment, and everything else in frustration.
 

When he calmed down, he sat.
 

Fuck her. Fuck Micah. And fuck Nicolai.
 

Nicolai wanted to abandon him in his hour of need? Well, he could eat shit. Isaac wasn’t a puppet, or a PR tool of his brother’s — a punching bag for the always-in-control Micah Ryan. Isaac was his own man, who could write and give his own speeches. Isaac Fucking Ryan was a man who could make his own decisions.

Chapter 10

Dominic woke up sprawled on the floor, trashed, in his apartment on the twenty-second floor of the Lycos building, head on fire and mouth filled with cotton. He was still fully dressed and his mouth
was
actually full — not with cotton wadding, but with his neckband tie, which he’d removed at some point. That wasn’t good even if it made sense, which it most certainly did not. He could choke on it. And if there was a close second to choking on your own puke until you quit breathing, it was choking to death on a symbol of civilized slavery — the workingman’s noose, killing him from the inside of the throat rather than the outside.
 

Dominic managed to roll over, still feeling nauseated and like choking on puke wasn’t yet an unlikely scenario. Even the small motion hurt, tearing his core muscles as he made them work, crushing his arm under his side as if it were made of glass. His vision was splintered, almost literally; he saw two versions of his bedroom (where he apparently was) and they seemed to be cracked apart from one another with a sharp edge, like a knife’s.
 

He wanted to call for help, but Dominic was a bachelor and lived alone. He had no one to help him. If he died with his drooling lip plastered to carpet, they’d find him that way — another moondust junkie dead. But as he thought about it (insofar as he was
able
to think with his throbbing brain), that made no sense. Moondust users didn’t OD. Moondust addicts died plenty, but only from withdrawal. Moondust itself was mellow. Even after a bender, the worst you could expect was to wake up mildly dehydrated with hours gone missing. Or you could die in a car accident because you were blitzed, or step in front of a mag train because you thought Jesus was coming to hug you. But you didn’t get fucked and wake up feeling like
this
.
 

What the hell kind of dust had Omar sent him?

Dominic forced himself to his hands and knees, felt something swell in his gut, and heaved onto the floor. His puke poured out brown and gray.
Gray
. What the hell had been gray? Or was it the dust? Dominic imagined the tiny moondust rocks turning into literal moon dust in his stomach, as if he’d eaten handfuls of ash from a fire pit. The thought churned his gut, and he threw up again. The smell made him want to start back up, but Dominic couldn’t think about the puke now, or waste any more time in surrender. His housebot could handle the mess while he was at work… if he survived. He didn’t have enough strength to call for his canvas, so he hoped the bot would find the barf while on patrol without his pointing it out, like a parent discovering a kid’s wet bedsheets after the kid ran off embarrassed. The housebot would probably find the various puddles just fine. The thing had sucked up his copy of Yankees slugger Brian Morgensen’s autograph and the cigar Dominic had bought to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, so it didn’t miss much. Although given the idiot nature of AI, it seemed equally to Dominic that the bot would suck up the important paperwork on his desk and ignore the vomit entirely.
 

Dominic stepped into the shower, hoping it would make him feel better. It did not. He threw up again, at least satisfied that the drain would clear the liquids away. His canvas then spoke up, asking if he was okay. Dominic said he wasn’t, and requested a light scan. The scan reported that his vitals were fine, which was as deep as a noninvasive scan went. So Dominic asked for music, entertainment… anything to distract him. He asked for warm towels and a warm floor mat, which he never asked for. He put the news on his mirror, then had it follow him back into his bedroom. He put on new clothes with fingers that were clumsy and painful. He’d taken some Novril tablets and used the never-used accupressure bot while he’d been brushing his teeth, but the usually quick fixes were taking their time to kick in.
 

Dominic stumbled to the balcony, barked at his canvas for a mag shuttle, and took a hoverskipper to the mag line. He got a private shuttle, not wanting to wait for a cheaper group transport because feeling like he might die and fall to the city streets below was too horrible to consider. So he forked over the twenty extra credits, clicked off the robotic driver’s voice, and rode to the station (which the mag line ran directly through) in silence.
 

By the time Dominic arrived, his headache and pain were both mostly gone, but his mood was still foul. His skin was apparently also gray and hanging in all the wrong places — or so he was told by a scan port that some asshole had placed in front of the station’s door.
 

The scan port was essentially a small section of the long hallway that led into the Quark wing, and it was just as judgmental. Noah West’s voice told Dominic that his toxin levels were quite high and asked if he needed anonymous help with any addictions. It told him that his breath was foul and slid a small mint at him on a tray. It told him that his shirt was wrinkled and that his shirt cuffs were uneven and that his shoes were dull and scuffed. Without asking, a robotic armature reached out and tried to comb his hair. Dominic, knowing exactly what he was doing, reached up and hit the thing hard enough to break half of it off, leaving it to dangle by a cable. The assault left his hand bloody, but the release he felt was worth the blood, the repair fee, and the reprimand he’d face later.
 

Noah’s voice, in its unperturbed and polite way, asked after the armature-breaking incident if Dominic would like a bandage and a squirt of repair nano ointment. Dominic refused, knowing full well that nano ointment would return his skin and capillaries to knitted within fifteen minutes. Instead, he wrapped a napkin around his fist, and when Noah gave him the all-clear and a green light and told him to have a nice day, Dominic told him to fuck off and die.
 

Dominic took a few irritated steps and put his hand on the shoulder of Damian Prince, the rookie who was manning the scan port’s monitor.
 

“What is this bullshit?” Dominic snapped, jerking his head toward the scan port.
 

“Captain Long!” said Prince. “I’m sorry, sir. We’ve been trying to contact you all morning, but your canvas wouldn’t ping you.”
 

Dominic had installed a little hack that was quite useful for moondust junkies. He didn’t have to manually put his canvas into Do Not Disturb. Instead, his apartment’s sensors monitored his movements and turned calls off automatically when he was unconscious or in a trance, seeing as calls during trances were always a drag.
 

“I was in an important meeting,” said Dominic.
 

“Well, sir, we had a brief outage here at the station last night. Just a system reset.”
 

Dominic was aghast at Prince’s nonchalance. “
Just
a system reset? Are you kidding me?”
 

The station’s data was all fed directly into The Beam despite the station’s shitty Beam connections at the user level. (Police data was considered vital while police officers were considered city budget expense items.) Unfortunately, a significant side-effect of the city’s schizophrenic attitude toward DZPD was that there were no good redundancies in place. When the connection failed, as it sometimes did, the station went totally offline. And with it, Dominic and a few others knew, went most of its security. Wireless hackers trying to access the routers while the hardline walls were down needed only to cross a few layers of encryption. Because most of the hackers used hacks employing EverCrunch compression algorithms, all they needed were thirty seconds. It was an unforgivable and short-sighted gap that Dominic had been complaining about for years.