The Beam: Season One (31 page)

“You’d be surprised,” said Kai.
 

Nicolai turned, giving her a look that he hoped would tell her to shut up. None of this felt right, and the best choice, for all of them, would be to keep their heads down as much as possible.

“I’ll tell you my theory,” said Kane, putting a thoughtful finger to his chin and beginning a lazy stroll around the group. “I think you see things when you spend so much time with the Ryans. I think they aren’t as careful as they should be about keeping the secret. Come on. What have you seen?”
 

“Nothing,” said Nicolai.
 

Kane stopped walking, then tipped his head to the side. “Please.”
 

Nicolai looked at the white-haired man, trying to gauge him. Nicolai had run across all types in his travels. He’d seen the best of the best — saints who sacrificed themselves to save others — and the worst of the worst. You didn’t make it far on your own in the wasteland without the right barometer for people. Looking at Kane, Nicolai knew him as a killer. Not a man to trifle with.
 

“I’ve seen them learn things quickly,” said Nicolai. “Maybe too quickly.”
 

“What kinds of things?”
 

“Dancing. Piano. And when I told Isaac that I would love to learn to play my piano like he could play his but that I couldn’t find the time, he laughed. Like he knew something about ‘the time needed to learn to play’ that I didn’t.”
 

“What else?’
 

“Natasha is in her office for hours and hours. Then she comes out all cheery and relaxed, like she’s been at a spa. It doesn’t seem like she’s just on The Beam. And she has these two rigs in there like I’ve never seen. I asked about them once, and she told me that they’re normal rigs, just really comfortable.” He didn’t go on to tell Kane the other things Natasha did that made Nicolai suspicious: the way she’d hinted to Nicolai about “going away somewhere together” and how she’d said that sometimes, you could
do
things without really
doing
anything at all. She’d licked her lips suggestively when she’d said that last. He knew Natasha enough to know those little quips for the come-ons they were, but he didn’t understand what they meant — other than trouble.

Kane nodded. “Yes, she is one of those types.” He didn’t elaborate on what “those types” were. “It makes sense. Loose lips. Your suspicions were inevitable, really.” He looked at Doc, then back at Nicolai. “So maybe you told Doc about the things the Ryans seem to have. About those fancy immersion rigs, say. Maybe Doc was curious, and so maybe you made a deal. You give him information and he gives you…
creativity
chips
.”
 

Before Doc or Nicolai could respond, Kane threw his hands theatrically in the air.
 

“Or not!” he said. “I do not know these things. It doesn’t really matter how you learned about the restricted product lines, Mr. Stahl. What matters is why you went to the trouble to learn more by breaking in — something I believe I already know — and also
how
you did it. Xenia’s security is complex. I find it hard to imagine you broke through the locks. So how did you bypass security?”
 

“Security?” Doc blurted. “Look, short stuff, they led me in. Ask Killian. Ask that cute little receptionist.”
 

“The receptionist was a temp and has unfortunately lost all memory of Xenia Labs,” said Kane. “Mr. Killian says you posed as another salesman. You had a manufactured ID and everything.”
 

“Bullshit! Check your security feed!”
 

Kane chuckled. “We don’t keep visual records at Xenia.”
 

“It was a mistake. They thought I was this guy Greenley. I even thought I was late, and was all sweaty and gross. Your reception gal sent Killian to
me
, and Killian rolled out the red carpet. I saw what I saw. So you’ve gotta wipe me? Go ahead. Gauss my shit up; I don’t care. Tell you the truth, I’d
like
to forget all of this.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do,” said Kane. “We don’t just want you to forget. We want answers.”
 

“It was a mistake!”
 

Kane sighed. The Beamers were still staying back, edging away from both the aluminum table and the small man with the white hair. Kane gestured at the table. “You know what this is?” He looked at each of his prisoners, then waited for all three to shake their heads.

“It’s called an Orion.”

Kai gasped.
 

“Yes, you would have heard the rumors, wouldn’t you, as a woman so steeped in pleasure?” said Alix Kane to Kai with a serpent’s smile. He turned to Nicolai and Doc. “There are places on The Beam — very, very,
very
exclusive places — where people with rigs as high-end as those you saw can experience total immersion in an artificial environment. It
feels
as if they are there. These places cater to fully immersive experiences, but unsurprisingly, the most popular are those grounded in pleasures that its clients cannot experience in their normal lives. An Orion is a device — a device developed at an accelerated pace for certain quarters of NAU defense — designed to access an area very like those places in concept but quite different in experience. Humans have debated whether Hell exists?” Kane took a step toward the table and laid a palm flat on its top, looking at the contraption with something like affection. “It exists
in here
.”
 

“You can’t use that,” said Kai. “They were banned in ’84. Use is punishable by the Department of Respero.”
 

Kane laughed. “So the penalty is a quiet and peaceful death?” He slapped the machine twice and turned back to his prisoners. “We should be so lucky! But alas, the ’84 ban was on older Orions that were mere toys compared to this one — this one which, once you’re given a little injection of nanos, will immerse you more fully than you currently believe is possible. Besides, I’m afraid I must insist. There are too many limits with conventional torture. For one, there is the question of scope. If I came at you with real-life jagged blades, how many places could I possibly cut you at one time? And think of all those areas I could never reach! Real life can’t pull all of your skin apart with hooks at once, but this can make you feel as if it’s happening. Then there is the issue of death. If I were to flay you, death would be imminent… and all too soon. But even if you didn’t die, how could I tear the skin from your body once it’s already been peeled away?” Kane chuckled as if discussing problems as mundane as weeding a garden. “And lastly, we run into mercy. A torturer doesn’t have to be merciful in order for the subject’s body to grant mercy. You can go into shock, fall unconscious… even, in a way, grow used to the pain. But the Orion allows us to make each cut as terrible as the first. To keep you awake and focused. With access to all of your neurons, the levels of agony that can be delivered are beyond belief.”
 

Nicolai tried to maintain his composure, looking at the device and swallowing a lump. Across from him, Doc had lost all of his bravado. His tan skin was ashen.
 

In a small voice, he said, “It was a mistake. I swear.”
 

Kai stared at the table, fixated on the glistening chrome. “Torture is an unreliable way to mine information,” she said.

“Well,” said Kane, beckoning to a man in a white lab coat who’d just entered holding a syringe, “we shall see.”
 

“Don’t do this to me,” said Doc.
 

“Oh, we won’t.” He pointed at Kai. “Let’s start with her.”

Chapter 4

Everything about Micah Ryan’s black and chrome office was designed to subtly intimidate the people who met with Micah in person. And of the two words in “subtly intimidate,” both were equally important.
 

Micah’s desk (unnecessary since every scrap in his files was virtual and every surface in the office was Beam-enabled) was large and made of solid mahogany. The walls were decorated with original Salvador Dali paintings — Micah’s favorite artist, because in Micah’s opinion, he so perfectly infused realism into scenes of surreality. Front and center, beside Micah’s desk, was
Crucifixion
, a Dali painting depicting Christ crucified on a tesseract, mounted in a smooth black frame that was almost as large as the painting itself. Micah said he liked
Crucifixion
because it symbolized the idea that the world was composed of multiple dimensions and as many realities, just like the Beam itself. But to his visitors, the painting symbolized what Micah Ryan might do to people who fucked with him… in any dimension.
 

But all of this intimidation was subtle, by design. Like Micah himself, the office also radiated a welcoming feel along with its symbols of power — and accordingly, visitors to the office often thought they might be imagining whatever menace they felt. They’d reason that Micah had the desk because he liked its look. They’d reason that he might have had the room designed to completely eliminate all echoes (even off of the polished wood floor) not to unsettle people, but because he enjoyed quiet. Along one entire side of the office, there was no wall or window; the floor and ceiling simply stopped, opening into a void. It looked like a precipice from which anyone might fall seventy stories to their death, but visitors would reason that Micah might have employed a forcefield barrier rather than windows because he enjoyed the aesthetics and wasn’t afraid of heights.
 

Micah walked to the wet bar, opened a small black box, and pulled out a cigarette. He held the cigarette up and looked at it for a moment before placing it between his lips and lighting it with a heavy table lighter. He inhaled, held the smoke, then vented a curling plume from his nose. The flavor was exquisite. The cigarettes were extraordinarily expensive, packed with engineered tobacco grown many districts south, where the weather was always kept warm. Between the shrinking of the North Atlantic continent and its continued rise in population (handled somewhat by Respero and a very secret and very controversial Beam-mediated pregnancy control program), land was precious. Little was left for farming, and the scant areas available were allotted almost exclusively for growing food. Tobacco grown in tiny sectors of the available land came at a premium. There were synthetic cigarettes, but they were terrible and Micah didn’t understand the point. Even synthetic cigarettes were taxed out the ass and had been since humans realized they damaged the body, so the poor couldn’t afford them. The rich — who had the nanos necessary to undo smoking’s damage as fast as it occurred — were the only people who smoked anyway. Fake cigarettes were smoked by a small class of poseurs — the Presque Beau, just below the elite Beau Monde — who had enough money to buy smokes, but not quite enough money to afford real ones.
 

Micah walked to the edge of his windowless wall and stared out across the city. The high-end forcefield, like the rest of his office, had been ludicrously expensive. He could have gotten a less expensive model, but cheap fields shimmered and shook like heat haze in the desert. They were also staticky, and tended to spark when you neared them. Micah’s forcefield, which had cost at least ten times as much, was perfectly clear and semi-permeable. As he stood at his office’s edge, he could feel a light breeze rustle his perfectly-groomed dark brown hair and run up the sleeves of his tailored blue suit, ruffling his authentic cotton shirt cuffs. The real wind up this high was intense, but the field only let through a puff, and even that vanished once a person was more than a few feet from the edge. Micah raised the toe of his polished black shoe and stepped forward, his toe hanging over the edge. There was no resistance. But if he tipped forward, he knew the field would pull him back. You couldn’t fall out… but it sure felt like you could.
 

Micah turned, again drawing on his cigarette and curling the smoke through his nostrils, aware that he was restless and not liking the weakness it implied one bit. Annoyed, he flicked the cigarette at the forcefield even though the smoke was only half finished: eight-five credits worth of waste. The Beam surfaces around him read his flicking motion and his pulse, decided that Micah wanted the cigarette to leave his office, and let it pass through the forcefield. Micah watched it catch the wind and fly. Not for the first time, he looked through the forcefield and wondered how picky the AI was about interpreting his intention. If he pushed a man toward the edge in the way he’d just flicked the cigarette, would the forcefield allow him to fall?
 

Micah strolled away from the edge and across the expansive floor, wondering how to quell his restlessness. Then his canvas chirped, and he realized he wouldn’t have to.
 

“Mr. Killian is ready for you in the anteroom, Mr. Ryan,” said a soft female voice. The voice had been meticulously replicated from old recordings of an adventurous woman named Veronica who Micah had once known, although he called his console “Rebecca” for reasons of discretion.
 

“About goddamn time,” said Micah. “Give him five minutes of mild paralytics, then ping me.”
 

“Yes, Micah,” said the voice.
 

Micah paced for another few minutes, knowing the virtual space where Killian waited was being flooded with a subtle neural imitation of poison. Participants in virtual meetings weren’t supposed to have access to the inputs of the other participants, but most people weren’t Micah Ryan. The poison wouldn’t hurt Killian, but it would make (and leave) him unsettled. He wouldn’t be able to find a position that felt comfortable to his proprioception inputs, and things might smell slightly funny to him. The console would lift the poison when Micah arrived, and Killian’s subconscious would learn a lesson about being on time and about whose presence solved problems.
 

Once the five minutes were up, Micah sat in his immersion rig, plugged in, and had the console send him to meet Killian.