The Beam: Season One (45 page)

For Leah — and for many Beam-native young people, especially those with a hacker bent — poking around on The Beam was almost meditative — an experience that didn’t need to have an objective in order to be fulfilling and relaxing, like taking a stroll with no destination in mind. So-called “Beamwalking” was just one more thing for Leo to rail against in his stodgy old way. He said that nothing had changed since he’d been a young man, back when people had first started mindlessly checking their handhelds over and over… or when they’d sat for hours in front of their old 2-D canvas screens, drifting from display to display without really caring about anything they saw.
 

But as usual, Leo just didn’t get it. The Beam wasn’t like the internet of Leo’s youth, and it sure as hell was nothing like television. A hundred years of progress separated Leo’s memories of obsession from the modern Beam experience. Leah didn’t like to admit it to the other Organas (who were mostly poseurs anyway; fuck them), but she saw tremendous good in The Beam. It really was another world — one you could stroll and experience as if it were a different country. The problems people saw with The Beam had little to do with the technology itself. They had to do with human restraint, or the lack thereof. Was it bad to travel for a while in an alternate world facilitated by The Beam? Not at all. Was it bad to become so obsessed that you’d lose yourself in that world and not know when to surface for air? Yeah, maybe. And maybe that kind of obsession was damaging society, crippling interpersonal connections, shearing ties to the natural world, battering morals, and totally annihilating self-reliance. But that wasn’t the technology’s fault.
 

After ten minutes of window-shopping and running simulations and following rabbit holes into off-topic hyperthreads in hacker forums (many filled with irreverent holos that she thought were hilarious), Leah found herself drifting and tired despite just waking. She also felt a haze on her thoughts that she normally felt only during a moondust high.
 

And she drifted.

An unknown time later, Leah realized that she’d stopped feeling her fingers on the airboard a while back and was more or less sitting still, staring at the projection. She became distantly aware that she must look like a junkie or mental patient, with her jaw hanging loose and her eyes fixed on the screen. Leo’s remonstrations about zombies staring at twentieth century TV barged into her thoughts, until she snapped out of it and returned to reality. She felt suddenly guilty. How had she gotten so sucked in? She remembered visiting dozens of different locations, yet her hands were at her sides and her arms had gone numb, so she obviously hadn’t used her fingers to get there. Yet Leah didn’t remember dictating her way to all of those sites, and hadn’t even brought the wireless dongle that plugged into the port behind her ear. Had she blacked out? How much time had passed? What had she been doing?

And why was she so fucking hungry?
 

Leah gestured the screen and airboard away. She suddenly wanted Chinese food very, very badly — and not just any Chinese, but Chinese from one particular hole in the wall — somewhere in Chinatown — where she had gone with a boyfriend she’d not thought of in years. The feeling was sudden and insistent. Like a compulsion. Leah could practically taste the noodles in her mouth.
 

Then Leah realized that she’d never been to a restaurant in Chinatown. She’d walked
through
Chinatown, but had never eaten there.
 

The mag train compartment suddenly felt too small, too confining. Leah realized, with a fair degree of shock, that she felt panicked. What had just happened? She’d gone into a trance, and had apparently blacked out only to wake with a strange craving she couldn’t explain (and holy
fuck
was it strong! She could barely think around the hunger for noodles) and with an intrusive memory: meeting in a restaurant she’d never been to with a boyfriend she’d never had. Leah could still see the memory, even. She could almost smell it, even though she knew it wasn’t hers. The man across from her had been tall, thin, handsome, and neat, with delicate round-lensed glasses. But Leah had never had a boyfriend who wasn’t shaggy, usually with a beard and matted, dreadlocked hair like hers.
 

She’d heard of this happening. Sometimes an implant went bad and stimulated parts of the brain it wasn’t supposed to touch. They used hypno-suspension to install brain implants for a reason — because without anesthesia, the recipients relived sensations and memories (tasting pie, remembering a visit to a waterpark, smelling lilacs) as the surgeons worked. Degradation wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, but of course it did. The Beam was filled with reports of people who’d had an implant malfunction and found themselves hallucinating. Was that what was happening?

Leah stood, spun, and sat. She looked out the window, watching District Zero’s spires approach. She suddenly wanted to visit her upgrades dealer. Only that wasn’t true — what Leah
really
wanted was to claw at her scalp and dig the port behind her ear out by hand. The idea that the thing was malfunctioning and fucking with her mind felt like a tapeworm in her brain. Yet of course she couldn’t claw it out, so she’d need to see a dealer. Or a doctor. Leah wondered which would be easier to find, and faster.

Oh god oh god oh god
, she thought.
What if it’s going to pop? What if it surges, fries my cortex, and I end up burned?
 

That probably wouldn’t happen, of course, but if the implant was the problem and Leah didn’t get it out soon, the random memories and sensations
could
drive her insane. How could you stay sane when you couldn’t trust your reality?
 

Leo was right. She shouldn’t have gotten enhancements. She should have stayed organic. No implants, no nano fabricators, no fucking nanos in her system. She decided to have it all flashed. Every bit of it. She wanted nothing in her brain. She was Organa, not a cyborg. Leah thought she’d known better, but she was wrong, and would now end up like Crumb.
 

Crumb
.

Something cross-linked in Leah’s mind — the false memory of the noodles finding a connection, one thought sniffing out the next like a browse trail on The Beam. Network forming network. Leah found her desire for noodles wane, and her perception of the meeting in the Chinese restaurant with the handsome man in round glasses finding context. Neurons settled; the memory was slotted somewhere deeper inside her as a realization struck:
This has to do with Crumb.
Somehow. That was why she was returning to DZ, after all. She had to find Crumb. And where was she planning to start? Nowhere. She had no plan. She’d simply trusted that she’d figure it out, same as she always did when facing a particularly stubborn problem. That’s what made Leah so Beam-adept, and something even the best hackers usually didn’t understand. Skills were the underpinning of what she did, but in the end, Leah had to let all of her how-to go and simply trust. At her best, she didn’t even know what she was doing. Her best hacks were like dreaming. And that, Leah was starting to realize, was what was happening now. If she’d plugged in and entered a moondust haze to find Crumb, none of this would be shocking. What made it shocking was that the dream was assaulting her here and now, sober and on her native plane.

Leah settled, trying to believe that this was coming to her rather than being sought. It had something to do with Crumb. What, she didn’t know.
 

Inside of the memory of the Chinese restaurant, Leah realized that the building she was in had a red roof.

She thought of her experience inside of Crumb’s mind.
 

Overhead, her cabin lights went dark, then came back on.
 

The man with the round glasses. She’d seen him before. There was something there, something she couldn’t grasp. She’d never had a boyfriend who’d looked like him, and had never, she felt certain, had a friend
 
(certainly not one good enough to share a meal with) who looked like him. Yet somehow, she did know him. Just as in the memory, Leah knew that the Chinese restaurant’s roof was red. And that while she was sitting in that restaurant, it was also something else. Someplace important, and secret.
 

Leah closed her eyes.
 

Inside her mind, she tried to conjure the handsome man with the glasses. Why was he so familiar? She watched the part of the memory she’d been able to hold, seeing how his lips moved, the way he gestured, the tiny smile that happened only on one side of his mouth, peeling up to reveal a few teeth.
 

“Who are you?” she said aloud.
 

Tall. Short brown hair. The sort of sideways smile that endeared the world.
 

She thought of the man as he said,
We can live forever.
 

And then she had it.
 

“Canvas,” she said.

Something in the compartment chirped.
 

“Search Noah West. Pictures. Give it to me right here.” She put her hands together in front of her, then pulled them apart as if stretching taffy. A life-sized head appeared between them, almost as real as a genuine human head. Damning her nervous system’s intrusion, already deciding her port wasn’t at fault for this intrusion of memory after all, Leah clutched her fists twice to turn on the tactile feedback in her fingertips. She grabbed the hologram, now finding it solid and opaque. She turned it in her hands, watching. Then she waved to the side and the head vanished.

“Younger. Noah West 2020s.” She did a calculation in her head. “No, wait. 2030s.”
 

The canvas, in the voice of a bureaucrat who’d had no user softening, said, “No holographic records exist.”
 

“Then give me a fucking 2-D!” Leah was suddenly impatient. This was taking too long. The need to find the right photo was as pressing as the need for noodles a moment earlier.
 

A two-dimensional picture appeared in front of Leah: a handsome young man with brown hair and small, round glasses.
 

Leah slumped back against the train seat.

“Noah Fucking West,” she said.
 

Literally.

She already knew the intrusive memory had something to do with Crumb.
Crumb and West?
It made no sense. But of course, none of this made sense. Leah wasn’t plugged in, and a rather vivid memory of Noah West from sixty years ago had entered and begun fogging her mind. She wasn’t on dust, and had initiated nothing. It was like a memory of both time and place was being pressed upon her.
 

Leah felt her need for Chinese noodles swell and then subside in a pulse, as if her brain and body were trying to remind her that that part of the memory was important, too. Then the need for noodles faded to a memory of memory, and Leah realized that she no longer precisely wanted the noodles; she was simply experiencing nostalgia. Was this what it had been like for Crumb when she’d entered his mind? Because she didn’t like it. The sensation was intrusive, like someone sticking their fingers into her mouth. The memory wasn’t hers and she had no context for it, whatever it was. Still, Leah found herself wanting to revisit the time and place in the memory (or at least mull fondly upon it) but how exactly did that work when she’d never experienced it in the first place?

“Canvas, switch off connectivity to this compartment,” she said.
 

A chirp, and the memory vanished.
 

“Canvas, resume connectivity.”
 

The memory returned.
 

So it was coming through The Beam. But how? Leah wasn’t plugged in. The Beam didn’t communicate directly to the cortex. That’s not how it worked. Except that it kind of did, seeing as how entering an intuitive, dreamlike fugue was how Leah did her best hacking. She entered a haze, then lost track of time and released control over the details of what she was doing. Beam-related problems, approached that way, had always resolved themselves. She always knew where to go. And hadn’t she come here looking for something?

Leah closed her eyes and allowed the memory to fill her. She stepped into its shoes, scrolled backward in time, and found one memory inside another. Entering, she knew there’d been a red roof. And in the back room, there was…

“Canvas,” said Leah. “Has Quark or a Quark subsidiary ever owned a restaurant in District Zero’s Chinatown?”
 

The canvas trilled, indicating a positive search.

“Show it to me.”
 

Leah walked from the mag train station. She had plenty of credits for a cab or could have rented a hoverskipper, but she wanted to use her feet. If nothing else, she felt she needed the fresh air. But secondly, she was also starting to feel dumb. The memory of the Chinese restaurant had faded as quickly as it had come, and after it was gone, Leah had come up with a list of reasons why it had never been genuine in the first place. She’d decided that her port implant was malfunctioning after all. True
memories
, in any real sense, didn’t exist on The Beam. They certainly didn’t project themselves into the heads of other people, especially if those people weren’t even plugged in. The only explanation for Leah’s spontaneous burst of strange thought (and a strange, compulsive craving that had hit her like a brick) was an implant malfunction.
 

But she hadn’t been able to let it go, and hadn’t headed to a clinic or a dealer immediately upon arriving in DZ station. Instead, she had set out on foot toward Chinatown. She felt stupid doing it, but despite common sense about memories and malfunctions, the experience had contained too much coincidence to ignore.
 

For one, the odd thought slotted neatly into her current mission. Leah had set out in search of Crumb, and had done so on blind faith that she’d be able to find his path on The Beam. The Chinatown scene, she’d been sure, somehow involved Crumb. Secondly, when Leah had been inside Crumb’s mind back in the burned out house, she’d seen a vision a lot like she’d experienced on the train: the building with the red roof. And thirdly, what of West? If the memory was entirely a product of her own malfunctioning mind, why had she pictured Noah West in a way she’d never seen him before? West had died before Leah was born, and she’d known him only as the voice of The Beam. Avatars and projections of West used inside The Beam were very different from the young man she’d “remembered” an hour earlier. Her usual conception of West was older, with longer hair, giving off a more serious bearing. And lastly, there was the way the memory had led Leah to a rather obscure and strange bit of knowledge: namely, that one of Quark’s earliest holdings had been a restaurant in Chinatown. Who knew something like that, and who could possibly care? And how could Leah explain the fact that
she’d
known it if her experience on the train had simply been the work of a faulty implant?