The Beam: Season One (49 page)

March 3, 2061

I was right. The son of a bitch had an ace up his sleeve all right, and it’s one fuck of an ace. The little wrinkle he wants to add to The Beam project will delay us a full year. Sometimes I want to kill him, even though he’s already sick and dying.
 

I can’t write (yet again) about the change, but I’ll just say that as part of it, he’s moving our R&D into Chinatown. That’s right, CHINATOWN. For what has to be nostalgic reasons, he bought that restaurant we used to love to eat noodles at back when we first started working together and has converted it into a lab. The logistics of moving the project, wholesale and in secret, are insane and muddle an already ridiculously complicated project. Noah’s turned paranoid, saying our rivals (he uses the word “enemies”) have spies in our midst and are watching the Quark labs.
 

Moving to a totally new secure location (just the two of us plus Jenna and Hal, with Noah sick in bed most of the time) is stupid and paranoid. But The Beam project isn’t costing Quark in the way Crossbrace did, seeing as how Crossbrace-related profits have made Quark as rich as the NAU itself, and easily as powerful.
 

I’m beginning to regret my ironclad non-disclosure agreement. When I signed it originally, I thought it was standard. Each time I re-signed, I thought the same thing. It all seemed logical: to focus scrutiny on the fabulous Noah West and keep me, as his partner, silent and hidden so that I could do my work without worrying about PR. But now with Noah dying, I wonder if this wasn’t just another genius move. I wonder if he didn’t know EXACTLY what he was doing from the very, very beginning. He’s already an icon and as powerful as the senate. (He’d have to be to nudge through the Tagging Law, marking all new babies with a Crossbrace ID at birth. Nobody but the messiah he thinks he is — and is seen to be — could pull that off without a revolt.) And with me behind the curtain, I’m invisible to the world. Nobody would listen to me. Nobody even knows I exist. And of course, nobody can challenge the will of the great Noah West. Quark will go on when he’s gone, but it will just be a company again. Its icon will already be in the aether, having died a martyr’s immortal death and living on in the everyday lives of the continent.
 

Jan 23, 2062

I had an idol, once. By age 45, you’d think I’d know better than to idolize anyone, but it seems your heroes can always amaze you, enchant you, and… well, we’ll see if this is something I shouldn’t be doing. I believe in the power of The Beam. I believe in people, and that they are inherently good. Some would say I’m naive, maybe weak. We’ll see.
 

Noah’s been mostly too sick to work on the Beam project. He started out at the lab, but he’s been absent for a while, mostly staying in his apartment. I give him updates. Today he asked and I told him about our recent successes. I told him we should be running in alpha by the end of the month. He was pleased. Back in the days of Crossbrace, he would have mocked me, yelled at me for being slow and making too many mistakes. But today, he was the man I first met when I was only a kid who looked up to him as a hero. We had dinner in his apartment like we used to, even ordered Chinese noodles — from a different restaurant, seeing as our old one is a lab now. I felt plied, placated. He was Noah West again. I was sixteen-year-old Stevie York, awed to be near him. He told me, very casually as if it were reasonable, that I would have to finish the Beam Project alone. Jenna and Hal would no longer be allowed in the new lab; they would be ordered back to Quark HQ and told that work on The Beam was finished, and that techs would handle implementation. Then I was to finish the rest of the work solo. Noah said he would guide me, then pulled up a screen and showed me six months of development already outlined for me. It was intensely detailed. I was awed. I still am. These days, the man can barely breathe on his own. He looks like a bag of bones, and never leaves his apartment because he can’t. And here, he’d done work that I couldn’t even imagine. A new module of an entirely new technology that is quite simply beyond belief, incredible in scope, finished just inches from his own death.
 

Noah told me he would move to the lab and that the two of us would finish The Beam together. It sounds absurd to think about it now, but I don’t know that I even protested when he suggested it because I was too spellbound by his last magic trick. He told me he’d require a bed and would need me to give him some light medical assistance (no nurses or doctors, though), but he’d made peace with his impending death. Noah wanted only to end his days working, and to see The Beam live. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I had to help him. Just he and I, working side by side, like in the old days.
 

It was absurd. I said no. Then, after a while — of course — I changed my answer to yes.
 

Noah said this went beyond an ironclad NDA, and that I couldn’t tell anyone anything, ever.
 

I told him I wouldn’t ever divulge what we were doing, but despite my earlier willingness to do my idol’s bidding, I’m now uneasy. So I will compromise and tell this journal, so that at least a sliver of history has a splinter of record.
 

In violation of Noah’s trust and in legal violation of my contract with Quark, I will commit his final wish to paper:

Noah West has found a way to live forever.
 

Jun 4, 2062

Succession plans for Noah’s death are in place. The Beam has been live for two months and is already being embraced (and obsessed over) to a degree I’d not have thought possible. With the project’s details handled, I’ve handed over official word that Quark is opening the Beam’s source code for developers to do with as they wish. Free enterprise is the best way to ensure that The Beam will continue to evolve forever, and that there are enough proprietary pockets in The Beam to allow us to do what we must.
 

I remain skeptical about both what Noah wants and my role in it, but at this point, it’s tossing dice. There’s tremendous potential for good in this, and I cannot turn my head.

What Noah was developing in secret — probably since the start of Crossbrace — was a process for uploading the content of a human mind to The Beam. Over the past five months, we’ve been ironing kinks, using Noah as the first subject. His reasoning is that if the process kills him or fries his mind (the rich kids who get upgrades these days call frying your brain “getting burned”), it won’t matter because he’s nearly dead anyway. Besides, his mind is kind of already on The Beam. Once the new generation of VR and holo-immersion went online, every upper-class household gained a Noah West butler. Every canvas, by default unless changed, gained a Noah West voice. Noah’s preferences, tendencies, image, and mannerisms made it seem as if there was a face on the AI that ran large sectors of The Beam, but it was only farce. Noah avatars speak like Noah and act as if they are him (some versions more burned than others), but they don’t know everything that Noah knows. And more importantly, Noah isn’t a part of them at all. He is in our lab, in the other room even as I write this. The Mindbender Project will, if successful, duplicate not just the map of Noah’s neurons and their habitual firings, but the emergent properties that go with them: consciousness, emotion, logic, intelligence, presence. It sounds terrifying to me, living as a series of ones and zeroes, but Noah says it will be as amazing as it is beautiful. He’ll have a billion eyes and a billion ears, able to be everywhere at once. He makes it sound almost religious, almost as if we’re bypassing bodily death and uploading his consciousness directly to Heaven.
 

Quark will announce the Mindbender Project soon, once we determine that it’s viable, but the public version involves great thinkers uploading their intelligences — not their true minds or spirits, if there are such things — to the Beam’s data stream. It’s hard to argue the elegance of the idea behind it. Imagine if today, we could get Einstein to think for us!
 

But what the public won’t know right away — though it’s only a matter of time before the Beau Monde is told because they will want to buy it — is that Noah will actually
be
on The Beam. He will not simply duplicate his intelligence, but he will actually move there. And as the rest of The Beam goes open source, his mind will not. It will look like proprietary AI, not attention-drawing because there’s plenty of that out there. People will see their Noah avatars and think they are Noah. But his true self will be behind it all.
 

As I’ve said repeatedly, I am not without my reservations. But in the end, the brain is a big computer, and I’ll admit to my fascination. All visionaries sometimes appear as the devil.

Everything is in place. We will attempt Noah’s upload in one week.

June 11, 2062

It is 2:15am. I’m beyond exhausted.
 

Noah’s upload took all day, but the data’s integrity seems solid. There’s no way to know if what I currently see as a massive data file has any life on its own, though I can access it in parts and verify that the information itself is there. But is it a life form? Does it have consciousness? Will it function and act of its own accord, or is it simply a repository?
 

For now, Noah is still alive. He looks dead as he lays in his lab bed, and it is as if — perhaps literally — his soul has been sucked from the husk of his body. But I spoke with him briefly afterward and before he collapsed, and he is still Noah West. So if his soul and consciousness is still in his body, can it also be in the data we uploaded? Is it as if we’ve duplicated Noah West and now there are two? If it is
him
and not a copy, shouldn’t he be able to see through its eyes? Shouldn’t he feel it as if it were himself? I’m pulled back to philosophy texts I read as a kid. All of the disciplines fall into this one. Epistemology, ontology, every question together with a single beating heart. Which is the true Ship of Theseus? Is it the body in the bed, or the file on The Beam? Must Noah the man die in order to imbue Noah the data with consciousness?
 

I’m too tired to contemplate the enormity of what we’re trying to do. This is a question for philosophers.
 

August 14, 2062

Noah West is dead. The NAU is in mourning.
 

I kept my word. I gave Noah a scan cap and a pocket recorder and sent him home. Once The Beam was live, we no longer needed to live in the lab, though I of course still spend an inordinate amount of time there. I didn’t disassemble Noah’s bed because I promised I would allow no one else into the lab, and without anyone to help me (or anyone to care), I just stopped letting its presence bother me. It has become simply another piece of furniture.
 

The recorder live-capped Noah’s newest thoughts until the end, then uploaded them in a batch each night. When his heart and brain waves stopped, Noah’s canvas alerted me and only me, as directed. I went to his apartment, verified the uploads from the night before, then manually copied the final batch in the recorder. The thing was set to not upload that last grab — the one that happened after his brain went flat — automatically. Who knows what happens at the moment of death? We didn’t think it was prudent to risk putting a death online, so I clipped the tail, completed his master file, then sent it into the stream. It felt like spreading ashes. I do not know what will happen with that tremendous archive — whether it will be a living thing or a great many recorded memories and nothing more. People have asked me if I’m sad. I’m too exhausted for sorrow. Simply: I am finished.
 

Noah was already the voice and personality of The Beam.
 

But now I fear I may have created a god.
 

Chapter 2

“Micah.”
 

Micah wanted to pretend he didn’t know who was calling, but of course the caller’s Beam ID was embedded in the transmission right there in the bottom right corner of his screen: Jason Whitlock’s official Enterprise Capital Protection photo, smiling in a starched, white, collarless shirt with a red band tie, wearing a shit-eating grin. The agent looked so faux-respectable that the photo made Micah want to shove his fist down Whitlock’s throat.
 

He settled for being rude: “What the fuck do you want?”
 

“What?” Now Whitlock sounded faux-indignant. “I went out to get your girl. Got her all spiffed up. She’s behind me now. What did I do wrong?”
 

They were voice-only because Whitlock was on his screetbike on his way into the city, so Micah allowed himself the exasperated luxury of closing his eyes. He reminded himself to have something painful or humiliating done to Whitlock later. Whitlock didn’t get to be indignant right now, because Whitlock was still paying off a debt of trust. Micah hadn’t forgotten the way he’d hooked up with some piece of ass during the Natasha Ryan riot and had woken the next day wiped. If not for his mind’s firewall, he might have gotten himself data-raped. Whitlock was proving to be the worst sort of incompetent — the kind who doesn’t realize just how big of an irresponsible asshole he is.
 

“Never mind,” said Micah.

“Kane had her.”
 

“I know Kane had her.
Why
did he have her?”
 

“Apparently she was with Stahl when they caught up with him.”
 

“So they just took her in,” Micah said, pacing his office. “Why not slumber her, do a quick wipe, and leave her?”
 

“Micah, she took out two armed Beamers. Ripped their balls off. This isn’t just another pretty face.”
 

Micah closed his eyes again, this time allowing his head a slow shake. Of course she wasn’t just another pretty face. She never had been, even back when Micah had first met her. She’d struck him as a scrapper from the first second — a woman who’d fight to the death and never flinch from doing what had to be done. Even before her first nanos and her first defensive add-on, Kai, codenamed Kitty, could sneak up on a man and break his neck between her legs. She’d been resilient and dangerous from the start. She reminded Micah of himself. He thought of her like the deadly daughter he’d never had.