The Beam: Season Two (20 page)

He crossed to a table in the center of his current living room, where his satchel had exploded. Sam had tried various systems of organization since he’d begun spending more and more time unplugged, but none had ever worked. Born in 2069, Sam had been trained into mental laxity by the everpresence of The Beam throughout his childhood — an intelligent network that organized everything for him, just as it organized everything for anyone who was connected. Back when Sam had worked at the
Sentinel
, he’d still been very plugged in and had uploaded absolutely everything to his desk canvas, which meant keeping it on The Beam. He’d used his handheld’s open Fi, and every 2-D and video he’d taken was sent to his cache. Every voice recording from every interview had gone into the same cloud archives. Every intrepid-reporter encounter Sam had ever conducted had been recorded by his ocular camera and sent directly to The Beam. Back before he’d had his add-ons removed, he’d also had an auxiliary input and Fi uploader in his head so he could send all of the less-tangible facts of his life to the cloud.
Mind to Beam, baby
…what could be better for a kid with the condition they used to call ADD? Sam didn’t need to learn to focus; he had AI to do it for him. He also didn’t need to learn to organize his files because AI always organized them for him in the way it thought best and allowed him to recall whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. Back then, Sam hadn’t needed to remember anything, really. The Beam had done his remembering for him.

But after that unpublished
Sentinel
article — after Sam had started to wander while carrying life’s essentials from place to place, storing paper files in an off-grid, numbered storage unit — he’d had to develop new skills that he’d probably been ill-equipped to learn even before The Beam had trained him to stop using his mind and trust it instead. Those lessons had come hard.
 

Sam had read a lot about attention deficit (mostly from paper and archived Kindle books, seeing as ADD was generally considered cured thanks to adaptive Beam AI), and one thing about it struck Sam as truer than the rest: He only had so much focus to use in a given period of time. Once he used up that focus, it would be gone, so it seemed smarter to aim it at his work and let his organization suffer. He wasn’t interested in organization anyway. If he spilled his papers onto the table, everything he needed would be in there somewhere, even if finding it required time and sifting.
 

Sam removed his handheld, tapped at the shielding to assure himself that the thing couldn’t broadcast (he’d had the Fi chip yanked and made into an external plug-in unit, but you couldn’t be too careful), then opened a simple timer app he’d installed from a certified-clean archive. He set the timer for five minutes then glanced up at the soup as he set the handheld back onto the table. Then, as he began to riffle through his papers, he quickly began to forget the soup. It would only become interesting again once it was burning, and by then it would be too late. Using a simple timer to remind him of what he’d otherwise forget was a simple technique that had saved his bacon more than once, sometimes literally. And hey, bacon wasn’t cheap.

The first sheet of paper to catch Sam’s eye was the one he’d marked with a fat red marker. He’d done so because the item on the paper was red-hot, and because he’d wanted to remember to start with it the next time he worked. He pulled it forward and scanned it. It was one long paragraph, underlined where important.
 

Was that soup ready yet?
 

He looked to the door. The timer. The soup.
 

In Sam’s hand, under the ceiling fan’s slow rotation, the paper folded backward and crinkled with sound. He looked back down, re-read the underlined sections.
 

“Where are you, Gibson?” he said aloud.
 

He began to paw through the papers then eventually found the two other sheaves he wanted: copies of the information he’d given to Sterling Gibson. He had the originals, of course, but Sam’s cobbled-together work system required duplicate copies of everything for hands-on use. Visually, it seemed to make sense to Sam’s mind to cross out the information he’d noted or acted upon, so his copies — intensely scratched out and indecipherable — looked like declassified documents from the previous century and were essentially ruined for later use. Keeping clean originals doubled the paper he had to carry, but it was the only way the system could survive.

On the three sheets in front of Sam, maybe a quarter of the words were marred by lines. That was the information Gibson had actually used in his book
Plugged
. But several passages had been highlighted in addition to the ones that were crossed out, and
those
were the parts that Gibson had so assiduously avoided despite their importance, deeming them “too incendiary.” But if Sam shuffled them just right, those highlighted parts seemed to point to a hidden truth centering on Isaac Ryan’s speechwriter. And that, for a former intrepid reporter, wasn’t something that could so easily be left unexplored.

“Okay then,” said Sam, inhaling. “Into the lion’s den.”
 

These days, Sam’s routine had evolved such that he
had
to say that four-word sentence whenever he pulled out his secure cables and connected to The Beam. He’d said it once on impulse, to a hacker friend…and when that session had gone well, it had only seemed sensible to go through the same ritual from that point on. He’d connected in public before and had to mumble the thing about the lion’s den, and he’d been in a house once, stealing an emergency connection while the family slept, and had to say it in his head. That had made him nervous (not saying it out loud felt like a jinx), so when he was out of the house, he’d said it twice: once because he had to, and the other for good measure.
 

Sam reached into his satchel and withdrew an object that looked like a small bomb. It was about the size of a deck of cards and was bulging with wires. There were two diodes on the thing’s top: one green (indicating a connection to The Beam) and the other red (indicating the presence of invasive software or curious AI). You wanted the green one on when the device was in use, but never the red. When the red diode lit (and although it was rare, it did sometimes happen), that meant it was time to pack up and run, and to find a new apartment for himself, his deadbolt, and his hotplate.

Sam uncoiled the cables, plugged the end of one of them into the wired Beam port on his laptop canvas, flipped a switch on the device, and waited.
 

Onscreen, a window opened indicating the progress of a running software patch. The corner displayed a truthseal badge showing the seventeen-digit identifier of the black market hacker who’d made the thing for him. While he waited, Sam read the number and compared it to the one in his head. His mind was highly selective. He couldn’t be trusted to remember not to burn his food, but he could remember intricate details on subjects that interested him. Tying shoes could be hard, but remembering every secret area in every one of the video games he’d played as a kid was easy.

The program scanned his canvas’s memory and peripherals, declared everything clean, and began sniffing for AirFi. Predictably, the neighborhood’s Fi was weak (who needed high-capacity connections in the ghetto?), but once the bomb-like device found its signal, it wormed inside the Fi and unlocked the throttled bandwidth that was nested inside every signal, partitioned and set aside for emergency police or medical use. A new series of identifiers (the sequence of connection nodes, Sam thought, but wasn’t sure) flashed in the window. Finally, the green diode lit, and the red remained off and safe.
 

Sam looked at the screen. According to the software, he was currently accessing The Beam through a connection at 217 West Beaumont Street in Niles, Wisconsin.
 

Just as Sam opened his custom Beam browser, his handheld’s alarm began to bray. The feed’s top stories had already caught his eye, so Sam reached over to silence it. His soup could wait.
 

The story that had been voted to the top position detailed a crisis at a factory that manufactured Beam glass for tabletop consoles, automobile and screetbike windshields, spire panes, and a few other applications. Apparently, there’d been a chemical leak, and the immediate area was being fenced off. Locals were concerned, but authorities had assured the press that there was no danger now that the factory had been isolated.
 

Sam put his fingers on the keyboard and began clicking around. In his youth, he’d always preferred intuitive webs, immersion, holo projection, and voice for interacting with The Beam, but nowadays there were too many loose ends and unknowns in all of those methods. If you spoke commands, the security of your canvas was no longer the only variable. Any number of listening devices could ascertain who you were and what you were doing. If you used an intuitive web, a room’s visual processors (whether they were malicious or intended for safety, like fire detectors) could be hacked to watch you. It was always safest to use keys, your fingers touching the board, with a pop-up privacy shield. It had taken Sam a while to adjust to using the network this way, but the process — seeing as it was integral to his anonymity and critical to his continued career as an intrepid reporter (albeit now undercover and illegal) — was interesting enough for him to learn, adapt, and then master like a language.
 

Sam searched Beam Headlines for stories that mentioned the phrase “Beau Monde.” Currently, there were three. They had two upvotes each, and both votes, on all three stories, belonged to Sam. He’d voted them up with his dummy accounts the last time he’d logged in, but no one else seemed to be interested. Sometimes, stories mentioning the Beau Monde disappeared, but more often they were left in place and ignored. The NAU’s indifference was more powerful, apparently, than censorship. The presence of those downvoted-but-still-existing Beam stories seemed to say, “Yes, we’ve heard these paranoid conspiracy rants about a supposed secret upper class, but we aren’t interested in them at all.”
 

Sam’s nose perked up. Something was wrong in the apartment. He was suddenly sure that someone was up to something outside.
They’d found him.
 

He’d expertly covered his tracks and had anonymized his connection and his trail in securing the apartment with trusted hardware. He’d missed nothing, yet still somehow they’d found him.

They were coming, and they were going to kill him. For some reason, the proof of their arrival was something he could smell, and…
 

It was the soup.
 

Sam stood in a hurry, scurrying across the room to his hotplate. Not only had he forgotten to check on it after silencing the alarm, but the second heating coil had apparently come back to life. By the time Sam reached it, the soup had boiled over and was spilling down the cabinets onto the floor.
 

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck…”
 

Sam grabbed the pot’s handle, found it hot, then wrapped it with a towel and tried again. Everything went into the sink, tomato soup blowing up the sides and onto the tile backsplash like a gory death from a horror vid. He looked into the pan and found a thick mess of blackened soup crusted to the bottom. The air smelled like feet.
 

“Noah Fucking West.”
 

Sam grabbed a bag of potato chips, ripped it open, and told himself that he really needed to start getting exercise. His diet was dancing on his heart.
 

Sam returned to the table and gorged from the giant bag as if it were his lifeline. Anyone watching would have encouraged him. He was waif thin, his shoulders narrow and chest hollow. He had a handsome face atop his mess of a body and wore glasses with thick black frames. There were other poor Enterprise who couldn’t afford vision correction and hence wore dime store glasses, so it worked, but Sam didn’t wear the glasses to help him see. The glasses were an affect meant to make him look older — same as the large, full-sleeve tattoo on his right arm. Tattoos were spectacularly passé these days, so those who had them were always old enough to have gotten them long ago then maintained them like an old automobile.
 

Sam returned to his papers, set the big bag of chips on the floor at his feet, and promptly forgot what he’d been doing on The Beam. So, with no other ideas, he used the keyboard to access his page, called
Shadow Report
.
 

The first thing Sam noted was that
Shadow Report
was still online. That was good. He had a running backup on what he sincerely hoped was a hidden, untraceable server, and whenever he was online, he downloaded a new manual backup to a slip drive. He did that now then began to plink around the page.
 

He saw that today’s discussion was lively, with his most controversial content voted to the top. The activity felt encouraging. Moving around as much as Sam did (keeping his head low, moving often, re-uploading his page to reclaimed space on hacked public servers whenever it was taken down), it was easy to feel like a spook creeping around in the dark. The discussion reminded Sam that he wasn’t alone, and that his loyal readers, at least, were as dedicated to uncovering the truth as he was. It also reminded him that so far, none of those readers had divulged the ways in which they were always able to follow and find his new, rotating homes on The Beam — a discovery that, when leaked, always forced Sam to start completely over and wait for those with the means and the will to sniff him out through trial and error.