The Beam: Season One (61 page)

But it was only Kai Dreyfus.
 

“Nicolai! You
are
alive!”
 

It was a bizarre thing for Kai to say. He thought he might have misheard, but Kai had spoken as plain as day.
 

“Me?”
he said. “I was trying to reach
you
.”
 

“When?”
 

“Yester…” He stopped mid-word, remembering his missing day and a half. Yeah, that was another thing he needed to spend some time working out. “The other day,” he finished.

“You’re not pleasantly surprised that I’m alive?” she asked.

Okay. He could play along. “Sure,” he said. “Go you.”
 

“Are you hurt?”
 

“Hurt? Why would I be hurt? No, I’m not hurt.”
 

“Did you get Neuralin? Are you hiding, or did they really let you go free?”
 

Nicolai cocked his head to the side. His implant thought he was trying to add another party to the call so he kicked his head the other way to cancel the accidental request. He’d have to go right at this. The games were driving him nuts. “Kai, what the hell is going on? Just give me the full run-down, okay?”
 

There was a long pause. Nicolai heard a thumping on Kai’s end, as if she’d dropped an armload of laundry. He thought he heard someone grunt. Kai sounded almost out of breath. She wouldn’t call him while screwing some guy, would she?

“Oh,” said Kai. “Nicolai, when did you talk to me last?”
 

“Few days, I think. When we went to Vesuvio. I left you a message or two after that.”
 

“I see.”
 

“What?”
 

“I’ll explain in person. Now unfortunately, this is going to seem stranger to you than it should, so just trust me that there’s a reason for it. Promise?”
 

He wasn’t about to promise shit regarding this particular conversation. So he just said, “A reason for what?” He felt both bothered and intrigued. Kai was never like this. For one, she was being so mysterious. She was normally dead straight, and not into games. And secondly, though Kai had always been honest with him, Nicolai had never heard her so… so
real
. Kai the escort had a way of speaking, a way of breathing, a way of lilting her voice that she’d trained herself to do and could now no longer help, even when she was with Nicolai. This wasn’t Kai the escort. This was Kai the woman. This was her as she’d been born, with no posturing, seducing, or bullshit added. This was her naked voice — ironically, the voice she’d use when there would be no getting naked anytime soon.
 

“I need you to get me into the Ryans’ penthouse,” she said.

She might as well have said she needed him to dress like a clown and run the DZ marathon pulling a wagon filled with Twinkies.
 

“What?”
 

Now she sounded even more out of breath. She was almost heaving. Nicolai gave Kai a lot of latitude and not a lot she did could bother him, but he didn’t think he wanted to hear her have an orgasm. Or fake one. But then, as he listened, there was another thump and she yelled at someone on her end of the connection. Something about “stop dropping him.”

“What the hell are you doing, Kai?”

“I’m sorry. I’m taking a heavy load here.”
 

“Gross.”
 

“No, not… hang on.” She yelled at the other person again. This time it was just swearing, nothing specific. When she returned, she was all business and to the point. “Noah Fucking West, Nicolai. Just trust me, okay?”
 

“Um…”
 

“Where are you?” she asked.

“In the park.”
 

“Where in the park?”
 

“By the monument.”
 

Pause. More out-of-breath noises.
 

“Okay. I’ll meet you there. Ten, fifteen minutes. I’m bringing Doc Stahl. You know him, right?”
 

Doc?
 

Something desperately wanted to connect in Nicolai’s mind. Doc had something for Nicolai. He grasped for what it was, then found it.
His chip.
His upgraded creativity wetchip. He’d been so eager to get the chip. He’d been bugging Doc about it for days. Doc had called him and had left a message telling him it was in. Factoring in his missing time, that had to have been days ago. So why hadn’t Nicolai picked it up? Reflecting, he seemed to remember being excited, anticipating, going for the chip. Yet he didn’t have it; he couldn’t sense it inside him. How had his trip to Doc’s ended? He had a vague sense that he’d arrived to find Doc gone, then went home empty-handed, content to try the next day. The memory was dull but ill-fitting, like a patch-job. When the brain had a hole, it tended to make up something to fill it. So was that the beginning of his missing time? What had happened between going to Doc’s on Friday night and waking up this morning?

“Yeah, I know him. Ask him if he has my wetchip,” said Nicolai.
 

Kai laughed. Her voice pitched to that same someone else, who was apparently Doc. She asked him if he had Nicolai’s wetchip. Doc laughed, dry in the distance. Some joke was passed between them that Nicolai didn’t get. But at least he was beginning to believe they weren’t having sex.
 

“He says he’ll give it to you if you get us into the penthouse,” Kai said.
 

“I don’t even work for…” Nicolai started, but then the connection broke as Kai ended the call. “I don’t even work for him anymore,” he finished.
 

Alone again, Nicolai stood and strolled listlessly around the monument. It showed an enormous stern-faced soldier in an American military uniform holding an old machine gun over his shoulder. Nicolai had never understood the monument. It was supposed to commemorate the shelling of New York, but the preserved bomb crater near Houston commemorated the same thing and was much more impressive. The greenbelt had barely been struck; the (at the time) high-rent apartments and shops and lower Manhattan offices had taken the brunt. As far as Nicolai knew, there hadn’t even been any soldiers in DZ at the time. That was why it was such a tragedy. So why was the monument of a soldier?

He walked in circles, pacing. Nicolai always did his best thinking while he was in motion, but even after making many tiny laps, nothing made sense. He could call Kai back, but there was little point. She’d be at his side in a few minutes, and based on all that grunting and heaving, whatever she’d been doing was keeping her hands full in the meantime. Besides, she’d been speaking in a subtly guarded way that Nicolai (as a high-ranking political official) and Kai (as a high-strata escort with a secret second life) were both fluent enough to use when it seemed possible that their conversation might not be private.
 

It must have to do with his missing time, he thought. The day and a half in which Micah Ryan had made an incendiary speech, Isaac had felt abandoned, Nicolai had gave Kai reason to think he might be hurt, and she had given him reason to think she might be dead.
 

Nicolai suddenly, out of the blue, wondered if he’d been right to leave his post with Isaac. It had nothing to do with Kai and her odd need to break into his penthouse. It had to do with the unknowns. Nicolai had never before, to his knowledge, experienced missing time. Was this what a mind wipe felt like? He’d heard it was possible. He’d read an article or two and viewed a handful of Beam vidstreams made by conspiracy theorists who announced that all of their paranoid fantasies had come true, that the government could now officially control minds. There was also a handful of vidstreams made by nutjobs who wanted to tell the world that their memories were erased, and aliens were real. The latter had kept him busy for an entire night, laughing until he cried. But it all seemed so fringe, so unnecessarily paranoid.

Nicolai had wanted out of his job as a speechwriter so he could finally create, could finally take risks and build his own future, could finally get out from under Isaac’s passive-aggressive thumb and Natasha’s unrelenting seduction. But he’d made his decision without having all of the information. What might have happened to him during the missing weekend? What might have happened to
Isaac?
Maybe Isaac had really, truly (for real this time!) needed Nicolai. Maybe whatever had happened (and what might happen next) was the pearl-in-the-oyster he had been waiting for. Nicolai was
paid
to turn lemons into lemonade — or had been until a few hours ago. Weren’t conspiracy and scandal excellent lemons? Maybe he’d screwed up.

Nicolai spent the next few minutes pacing the monument, pondering the soldier. Maybe it represented the proud military who’d fallen in battle, if not specifically in the shelling. But then why position it as a monument to the shelling rather than to the conflict as a whole? The bronze plaque clearly said it honored those lost during the shelling of District Zero. Nicolai looked up at the soldier, mystified.
 

A noise behind him turned his attention to Kai as she pulled up behind him on a screetbike, inexplicably wearing a baseball cap and a large wrap around her neck and shoulders. Alone.
 

“That’s an interesting look for you,” he said.
 

“Get on.”
 

“Where’s Doc?”
 

“In an alley,” she said, brushing a runaway strand of long brown hair behind her ear. “In a dumpster with another man.”

“Is that a gay joke?”
 

Kai didn’t seem to be in the mood for joking, and Nicolai, always observant, saw things in her manner that he didn’t like as he climbed onto the bike behind her. She looked around nervously, as if afraid of being followed. Her clothes — blue jeans and a plain white shirt — were clean and unassuming (if far less sexy than her usual wares), but there were spots of dirt and what might be caked blood on the back of her neck, as if she’d changed quickly but not had time to properly shower. She seemed to have spritzed herself with perfume, but under the flowery scent was an earthy smell tinged with sweat and adrenaline.

“What happened, Kai?” he asked.
 

“It’s complicated.”
 

“I was there, wasn’t I? Whatever you’re running from, I was there.”
 

She looked back at Nicolai, and for a moment, he was afraid she might strike a woman pushing a baby carriage down the sidewalk. She turned forward, jogged the bike around the woman, and said, “Yes.”
 

“I’ve been wiped?”
 

“Sounds that way. What’s the last thing you remember?”
 

Nicolai told her about going to get the wetchip from Doc on Friday, then knowing nothing after that.
 

“So you don’t remember the simulator. Fighting with Doc. Me being tortured, then taken away for evaporation?”
 

“Jesus. No. Why?”
 

Natasha and Isaac’s apartment, where Kai said she’d left Doc and another man named Whitlock, was across town from the park. So during the long ride through traffic, Kai told Nicolai a story that chilled his bones.
 

When she was done, she told him about the rock and the hard place she found herself between. Then, she told him exactly how she planned to kill Doc Stahl inside the Ryans’ lush uptown penthouse.

Chapter 4

In 2041, Natasha won a Best Artist award from the Music Artists’ Alliance. It was a particularly brilliant honor, and the one award among her many that Natasha particularly cherished. The MAA was the recording industry’s first truly meritocratic organization. As early as the turn of the 21
^st
century, musicians were breaking out without needing help from the big businesses who had grown comfortable raping them, but at the time, truly independent artists were the exception rather than the rule and it was hard to buck the system and distribute music on your own. Things had progressed nicely by the 20s, and around the time the world was celebrating its AIDS and cancer cures and the unparalleled scientific discoveries being made on the new lunar base, it looked as if musicians might finally get their fair shake on a more global level. But then the weather went bad and the chaos started, and people stopped caring about music for a decade. In 2038, however, the MAA was formed, structured as a virtual co-op that granted artists a 60% cut of music they produced on their own. Musicians rejoiced. And in 2041, Natasha won the MAA’s most coveted award. The award statue was simple but beautiful. Its base was brown marble formed into the shape of a shallow bowl. A solid ball of brushed metal rested in the bowl’s basin. Natasha didn’t know what kind of metal it was, but it was heavy, about the size of a shot put and maybe half of a shot put’s weight. She loved to pick the ball up out of the bowl, feel its heft in her hands, and read her name. The legend read “Best Artist of 2041” — and below that, “Natasha Ryan.”

When Isaac said the thing about her being fat, the award was sitting on a shelf near Natasha’s right hand, so she threw the metal ball at him hard enough to punch a hole in the wall. The hole was perfectly round and looked as if it had been removed with a large cookie cutter. Isaac, who had parried to the side to avoid a direct hit to his face, looked at Natasha with something like disbelief. He looked more afraid than angry. He
would
be more afraid than angry, she thought with spite. He was so goddamn weak.
 

“You could have killed me,” he said.
 

“Fuck you, Isaac!” she yelled.

Natasha was so furious that she was starting to cry. She wasn’t sure anymore how the argument had started, but it probably had something to do with Isaac, his fucking work, and his fucking inability to cope with his position. ‘Directorate Czar of Internal Satisfaction.’ What a joke! He didn’t have any satisfaction himself, so how was he supposed to help the members of his party be satisfied? And really, what reason did they even
have
to be satisfied? The Directorate was shit, in Natasha’s opinion. She hated it, hated its ethic, hated that she’d allowed Isaac to talk her into shifting to Directorate and being saddled with the baggage that came with it. Any decent self-made person was Enterprise, and any Enterprise person worth anything would see Natasha’s Directorate Shift all those years ago for what it was: a political move and a cop-out. She was married to a man who was thought of as “Mr. Directorate” by the press (but only because he was Micah’s brother; ‘Internal Satisfaction’ wasn’t important without the Ryans’ drama) and had needed to become Directorate to make his party look less shitty. But it
was
shitty. Natasha was in a party of layabouts, most of whom sat inside all day long plugged into The Beam, receiving a government dole for contributing nothing. Enterprise had always been more Natasha’s style. The Directorate said that Enterprise was ruthless — that members would slit each other’s throats in order to reach the top — but Natasha didn’t see it that way. Or, perhaps, she didn’t care. What did it matter how many throats were being slit at the bottom if you were good enough to reach the top?