The Beam: Season One (29 page)

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
 

“A walk?”
 

“I want to meditate, and we need a spot that’s not here. You said Crumb will be out for a few hours? Let’s not lose any more of our life to these uncomfortable seats. Let’s find a nice place to clear our heads.” He looked down at her and smiled knowingly. “I can see guilt all over your face.”
 

“I could have burned him,” she said.
 

“But you didn’t.”
 

Leah nodded.
 

“You handled this perfectly, Leah. Like a grownup. You weren’t rash or impetuous, you got him the care he needed, you let me know, and you’re not your usual cocky self right now, making excuses. You’re respecting the gravity and reality of the situation. You’ve done well. I’m proud of you.”
 

Leah twirled a pink dreadlock. “Thanks.”
 

Leo held out his hand. “So come on. Let’s meditate.”
 

Leah took Leo’s hand and they left the hospital together. They walked through the grounds until, leaving the hospital’s small oasis of civilization within the mountain wilderness, they found themselves surrounded by trees. The woods’ silence immediately helped to soothe Leah’s guilt and fear, and after a short time hiking by Leo’s side, she felt herself settling in to nature’s rhythm and as eager to meditate as Leo. Meditation was a sort of safety valve for Leah — and, strangely, it felt a lot like navigating The Beam. Leah could hack code and hit keys better than most, but at its best, steering through The Beam’s hive mind (or the minds of those willingly attached) felt more like a trance or a dream than pushing buttons.
 

Once out of ear and eyeshot of the hospital, Leah told Leo about her nugget of discovery: the book, the name of Stephen York, and the building with the red roof somewhere in District Zero. She asked Leo if any of it meant anything to him, and he shook his head. Then he repeated that she’d done well, and agreed that the level of complexity in Crumb’s mind made the fact that she’d gotten anything at all was amazing. As to the complexity of Crumb’s mind, Leo only shook his head. He said there was clearly more to Crumb than they’d thought, and reiterated that hooking him up had been the right decision. As loud as Leo’s instincts were about Crumb before he’d sent Leah on her errand, they were louder now. He was more certain than ever that it all meant something, and that the book and Stephen York were both worth finding.
 

They found an open area in the trees and sat down a few feet apart, facing each other, on a bed of brown pine needles.
 

Leo closed his eyes and placed his hands palm-up on his knees. But instead of doing the same, Leah studied Leo. He seemed old and not old at the same time. His skin was wrinkled around his eyes and mouth, but it was smooth on his forehead and arms. He had a glow about him, rather than the fading light you saw around most of the oldest people. He moved like a man of biological fifty, yet looked at first glance like a man of biological eighty. Yet based on what Leo had said, he had to be older than that.
 

“Seriously, Leo. How old are you?”
 

Leo blinked. His brown eyes opened and peeked at Leah.
 

“I can keep a secret. You’ve pretty much told me anyway. I could figure it out.”
 

“Go ahead,” he said, his body unmoving.
 

“Ninety.”
 

“Sure,” said Leo. His eyes closed.
 

If he were ninety, Leo would have been born in 2007. But hadn’t phones — the kind that hung on walls in houses — already been on their way out by then? Leah wasn’t sure. She wasn’t good with history. She was born in ’68, and The Beam was mostly everywhere by then. She’d lived all her life in ultra connectivity, and had always had to leave the city to pull any of those plugs.
 

“Older?”
 

Leo’s eyes opened again. “You’re making it hard for me to find inner peace.”
 

“A hundred? Are you a hundred?” Nanobot technology had blossomed in… what? Maybe mid-century? If Leo was in that first wave (which she didn’t know) and had been old when he’d done it (which she couldn’t be sure of), then he could be…
 

There was too much she didn’t know.
 

“I’m over a hundred. Satisfied?”
 

“Were you around before The Beam?”
 

Leo nodded. After Leah nodded back, he closed his eyes again.
 

“Before the
early
Beam? Cross… whatever?”
 

“Crossbrace,” said Leo, sighing and putting his hands in his lap. Leah wasn’t remotely trying to find a meditation posture, so Leo let his collapse. “A ‘beam’ is stronger than a ‘crossbrace,’ so it works. Get it?”
 

“And you were around before Crossbrace?”
 

“Leah, we thought Crossbrace was going to take over the world. It was a topic of great debate. And look: it
did
take over the world. You can’t forget to buy milk anymore. Your refrigerator knows and has it delivered for you. You can’t get lost. You don’t even need a handheld to keep from getting lost; if you carry a spark toggle, you can flash your ID at The Beam from the most remote locations and it’ll send a bot.”
 

“Unless you don’t have an ID,” said Leah.
 

“And assuming you don’t actually
want
to get lost,” said Leo, agreeing with a nod. “My generation used to
want
to get lost. We talked about ‘getting away from it all.’ People don’t do that anymore. They have the vacation islands, but those places are even more wired than DZ. Or they take virtual vacations, staring into visors. Nobody wants to march out into the woods and unplug anymore, except for fruits like us. Have you heard about the tragedies that sometimes happen during Beam outages?”
 

Leah nodded. Two years back, there had been a citywide outage in District Zero that had lasted for two full days. The lights and power had stayed on, but during those 48 hours of lost connectivity, seven people had become so despondent that they’d committed suicide. A few of them left notes indicating that they felt like they’d lost all of their limbs and senses. They said they felt like invalids trapped in beds, like how Crumb was right now. There had also been a rash of depression that had lingered for months after connectivity was restored — a strange sort of post-traumatic stress. City counseling centers had been overwhelmed.
 

“I remember the first July 21
^st
, Leah,” said Leo. Then he chuckled. “Well, not the
first
one, but the first one that was an official holiday, in 2019, when they established the lunar base in the Mare Frigoris and started finding all of that great space stuff out there in space. They had that new far side radio telescope, where there was total radio blackout from Earth’s interference, and that big old array was seeing all the way back to the beginning of the universe.” He inhaled slowly, lost in the memory, a smile of recalled optimism on his face. “Everyone thought it was so important at the time. And it
was
important, back then. Strange, how seeing new celestial objects and seeing back in time all the way to the Big Bang bolstered the world. The tech renaissance followed quickly afterward, with the first hovertech showing up, and the HIV cure, and all of that.”

“You say it like one thing caused the other,” said Leah. She knew a lot of this, of course, but she knew it in the distant, sepia-toned way that history books portrayed it. Leo, on the other hand, had lived it in Technicolor.
 

“It sort of did,” he said. “The telescope came first, and it gave the world a feeling of ‘we really are all in this big universe together.’ The vaccines came very quickly afterward, as if that global optimism allowed people to finally work together for a change. Hovertech popped up next, and for some reason, the way nanobots could make things float exploded into thousands of other applications, which spawned even more new ideas, and on and on. There’s a reason they call it a
renaissance
, because so much of it happened pretty much all at once. They even have a word for that kind of thing, where everything happens at once, in evolution. It’s called ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ It means that evolution doesn’t occur slow and steady, but through distinct periods of phenomenal growth. That’s how it was for us back then. All of these new treatments and technologies at once, one followed another, and each was better than the one before. It was as if all of humanity stopped our fighting and turned our attention toward moving forward as one. The notion was paradise for a hippie like yours truly. The world all held hands, it seemed, as we found our global purpose.”
 

Leah was doing the math in her head. How old would Leo have been to remember the renaissance so clearly, and to have considered himself a hippie at the time? Teens at the least?
 

“You lived through the wars?”
 

Leo snickered. “
Wars
. They weren’t wars, Leah. The planet declared war on
us
, yes, but then the people just kind of went to shit when the oceans rose at once and swallowed the biggest cities. Most of New York went too, before they managed to build the seawall and drain it back out. Have you seen a globe from the twenty-teens?”

Leah had. There had been so much land back then. There’d also been a cap of white on the top and bottom of the planet. She’d once asked a teacher what those white spots were, and the teacher had told her that they’d been ice. Modern globes didn’t look like that. The north pole was blue and the south pole was green. It was strange to imagine it any other way.

“It was a terrible time,” said Leo. “Just like that, we went from global cooperation to global animosity and suspicion. Everyone started looking out for themselves and
only
themselves. Maybe they looked out for their families too, if their families were lucky. And then for some reason, leaders in most of the civilized world thought this would be a good time to launch missiles at each other, presumably because there was only so much land left and they all wanted it.” Then Leo looked at Leah and his starry eyes cleared. He laughed and said, “But I’m going on and on.”
 

“I’m just trying to figure out how old you are,” Leah replied, smiling.
 

“I had a car. A Plymouth Fury. Fire-engine red, like Christine. She was old when I got her, but she was still beautiful.”
 

“Who’s Christine?” said Leah.
 

“Oh, but you wouldn’t understand the beauty of a fine car,” said Leo, either missing or ignoring her question. “Back then, your car was your freedom. You could get into your car and go anywhere you wanted. Hovers aren’t like that. You can still go anywhere, but it’s not the same. And land cars? Forget about it. They’re so stripped down, they’re an embarrassment.”
 

“Didn’t those cars pollute like a motherfucker?” said Leah.

“Don’t judge me,” said Leo. “I was young.”

“So you had cars, but no computers?”
 

“We had them later. But you can’t imagine that, can you? What are you, twelve?”
 

“What are you?” said Leah. “A thousand?”
 

Leo sighed, apparently tired of playing coy. “I was born in seventy-six.
Nineteen
seventy-six. And don’t gasp. I’m your elder and you have to respect me.”
 

Leah gasped dramatically. Leo rolled his eyes.
 

That started another round of questions, and once Leo got rolling, Leah had a thousand questions. How could they know the weather before it was controlled inside the NAU lattice? And if they didn’t know the weather, how could they plan their days? How did they get what they needed if things had to be shipped over the course of days? Was it a bummer growing old when you were still so young? Leo said he’d been born before the ancient internet and had had to watch an old screen only when his shows were on, at certain times. Nothing was 3-D, and he’d even watched for a while on an old black and white screen. How, Leah asked, were they able to function with so little information? How did people survive without add-ons on such a large scale? Today, the Organa were considered tough, living life mostly unenhanced. But back then, everyone did it. How had they managed to let bones heal without replacements? How had those who played sports competed without eye or muscular enhancements? How had average people remembered what they needed to remember without wetchips or recall flashers?

Leo groaned, but Leah could tell how delighted he was by her interest, how willing he was to answer her many questions, and how pleased he was to go on and on about the US, Canada, and Mexico before they formed the NAU. He wanted to tell her about his days exploring Europe and Asia in the 1990s, back before chaos turned the Wild East into what it was now.
 

After over an hour, Leo brushed off, stood, and made a good-natured comment about Leah not letting him meditate. She made a good-natured joke about how he wouldn’t shut up, then parodied his voice, mimicked walking with a cane, and did an impression of Leo yelling at fictional kids to get off his lawn. Then they returned to the hospital, spending their short walk in discussion of what they should do with Crumb if he was awake.

But when Leo and Leah stepped back into his room, they found his bed empty. Crumb — with his strangely complex, locked-down mind — was gone.

Chapter 3

Nicolai woke to find Kai touching his face with something cold. Her brown eyes were tender. It took him a while to place her, along with his location (currently simulated as a large, old-fashioned saloon), and to place the blond man sitting on a stool ten feet away, his arms crossed and his face almost angry. But then slowly, it all came back. He remembered the Beamers, the simulator, and the one-sided fight.