The Beam: Season Two (26 page)

“Micah is a snake, like me,” she said. “If you’re by his side, you’re either a henchman or someone with my son’s knife to his throat.” She gave a cackle and settled back, this time with a motion that seemed filled more with pleasure than pain.

“I just work with him,” said Nicolai.
 

“A henchman then.”
 

Nicolai didn’t know what to say next. He didn’t work for Micah yet, but it seemed increasingly likely that he soon would. But as to what his supposed job was, or what errand he was supposedly on? Those questions were blanks. He’d spoken with the house staff as he’d come in and registered as a visitor, and they’d treated him like a dignitary. He’d been thanked no fewer than three times for the visitation. It had quickly begun to feel like an errand of charity first and a reconnaissance mission at an easy, distant second. But all those assumptions had done was to unseat his readiness and make him sloppy.

“It’s not official,” he said. “He just wants me on his side.”
 

“Obvious. The question is, whether you’re here to help or hinder something he’s doing.”
 

Something inside Nicolai snapped like a twig. Rachel saw it happen and patted the air with one wrinkled hand.
 

“Oh, relax. You think I’m going to go running to him? I can take care of myself and make my own decisions. Micah doesn’t run Ryan Enterprises yet.”
 

“Well, of course, I know that Isaac handles…”
 

“Isaac’s position is almost honorary. I was talking about me.”

“You?”
 

“My father started this business,” she said. “It’s mine now. The boys handle the day-to-day, but I’m not giving up my controlling interest before I’m dead. I imagine that will be any time now. It’s okay. I’m ready for Hell.”
 

Nicolai coughed.
 

“Not that I believe in Hell. Just in planning for the worst.”
 

He felt punched, watching the old woman’s slow yet oddly precise movements as she tried to get comfortable. The juxtaposition of frailty and power was disorienting. She looked delicate enough to be undone by a draft or a misstroke of her heart, yet Nicolai found himself walking on egg shells, terrified of blurting something wrong. But then with that thought, something clicked.
 

My father started this business. It’s mine now
.

“Did they tell you my name?” he asked.

“Nicolai,” said Rachel.
 

“Nicolai
Costa
,” he finished.
 

A slow, crawling grin crept across the woman’s ancient features. “Oh. Now I understand. Micah told you, did he?”

“What do you think he might have told me?”
 

“You’ve watched too many old detective movies,” Rachel said. “I know all the clichés, so here’s another for you: ‘
I’ll
ask the questions here, mister.’”

“You think he told me about my father,” said Nicolai.
 

“What else?”
 

“About his inventions. About how I brought them into the NAU without realizing it.”
 

Nicolai suddenly realized that he would tell the old woman everything if she didn’t stop him. He’d lost his filter, and his alibi. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up telling her about the trick he and Kai had pulled on her son. A terrible idea because Nicolai was realizing he hadn’t just played the trick on Micah after all. Doc was a threat to Ryan Enterprises, not just Micah. That meant they’d played their trick on Rachel, too.
 

“My father tried very hard to get those little robots from Salvatore,” she said. “It was a complicated situation. There was only so much he could do because the bots were useless without your father’s knowledge. We didn’t just need the hovertech nanobots. We needed Salvatore, too.”
 

“We?”
 

“The company.”
 

“But you didn’t get him. He was killed.” Nicolai swallowed. “Tell me the truth, Mrs. Ryan. Did your father have him killed?” He felt his heartbeat ramping up at the weight of his request. He’d just implied murder, and he was suggesting very matter-of-factly that her family might have gained its power through violence and duplicity. It wasn’t an indefensible position for Nicolai to hold, seeing as they had.
 

She shook her head. Nicolai got the impression that she was very deliberately dampening the motors in her neck, so as not to rattle her brain to death inside her reinforced skull.
 

“No. He didn’t. He
wouldn’t
. Even if it wouldn’t have meant cutting off a source of needed capital — your father’s mind — he wouldn’t have done anything like that. I’m too old for bullshit, young man, so I’ll say it straight: My father built his business through some very lean years using a few sometimes-unsavory tactics. But I can promise you, there
is
honor among thieves. There must be, or it all falls apart.”

Nicolai’s disbelief must have shown on his face because she followed the pause with more truth.
 

“You don’t believe me? Think about it then. Your father’s developments were revolutionary, but they were unfinished. We knew about some of the weaponry, but it was only new tricks on an old theme. He could make fancy grenades, but what did it matter? So could our contracts in defense. If Micah hadn’t opened up the north in the ’30s, we’d have found those resources somewhere else. That’s one thing that becomes obvious when you live as long as I have:
There is always a way.
No, the one thing Salvatore Costa and Allegro Andante had that we couldn’t replicate were those bots. But not just the bots — it was the way they thought as a group that mattered. That was a model that had been shown to make sense. Just look at what happened in the ’20s with Spooner and his moon project.”
 

“What about it?” Nicolai knew about the Mare Frigoris moon base, of course. Everyone did. The opening of the base and its dark-side telescope was an international holiday — ironic because the holiday was supposed to celebrate the triumph of worldwide cooperation yet was only celebrated today inside the prosperous NAU. Nicolai had barely been a kid when the base had opened and didn’t see what it had to do with nanobots, the Costas, or the Ryans.
 

Rachel laughed. “He got the world to do his work for him! Every bolt on that station was designed and architected by someone in a wiki, working for free, from somewhere on Earth. And we thought we understood crowdsourcing before! It was like having a slave force then pocketing the profits and getting everyone to say thank you. Millions of minds tossing their bit into a single, ultra-intelligent brain that was greater than the sum of its parts. Remind you of anything?”
 

“You mean my father’s nanobots?”
 

“Them, Crossbrace, The Beam…what doesn’t work like that now?” She put a withered hand to her chest. “My father was a forward thinker, too. He saw what networked intelligence would be able to do in the future. He wanted Salvatore on his side, but Allegro had him locked up. So in the end, if he couldn’t be persuaded to come willingly, Dad had to let him go.” She laughed again. “But you? We didn’t count on you taking Salvatore’s little soldiers through Hell for us. Training them. Forcing them to adapt and grow. By the time you made it to the NAU seven years later, we didn’t need Salvatore to run the nanobots. By then, they were running themselves.”
 

“Micah wants me to work for him,” Nicolai blurted. It simply came out of him, without planning or warning.

“Of course he does,” said Rachel. She squinted at Nicolai like a bacterium under her microscope. “But more importantly, I think I might let him take you on.”
 

“Let
him?”

“Micah does what he’s told,” she said.

“Same as Isaac?”
 

“Isaac does even what he
isn’t
told.”
 

Nicolai looked Rachel over from head to toe. She was like any old woman, albeit one who was far past her prime and apparently good with facial cosmetics. Isaac and Micah were in their eighties but appeared to be in their thirties, but Rachel looked her age. The revolution that Nicolai had unwittingly ushered might one day be able to make the younger Ryans immortal, but Rachel wasn’t long for the world. She knew it and seemed to have accepted it. For now, she held plenty of strings, but Nicolai wondered how many of them were fraying. He wondered what would happen once they broke and the puppets started pulling the strings themselves.
 

He leaned forward. “Can I ask you a question?”
 

“It’s so charming when people ask permission, knowing they’re about to blurt out regardless.”
 

“Why are you telling me all of this?”
 

“Because old people love it when young people want to talk to them,” she said, smiling to reveal a perfect, unblemished set of teeth. “Would you like some butterscotch candy?”
 

“I mean, how do you know you can trust me?”
 

Nicolai thought Rachel had laughed earlier, but that laughter was a thin chuckle compared to the roar that escaped her now. Her palms slapped the chair’s arms. Her head fell back, perilous to her brain though it may have been. She shook as if in a fit.

“I don’t care if you can be trusted,” she said, wiping away a tear. “Who are you going to tell, and what would any of it mean to them?” She smoothed her last fits of laughter. “Oh, Mr. Costa, we haven’t scratched the surface of what I consider to be precious secrets. No, you deserve to know your role in the development of your father’s technology. Honor among thieves, don’t you know. It was always going to be necessary, someday, to bring you in and let you decide if you wanted to help us or not.”
 

“You mean ‘help Micah.’”
 

“I said what I meant. I’m sitting in front of you, and you still think my sons have different ends in mind than what I want for the future. But let me ask you something: Right now, the Directorate controls the Senate. But what do you think will happen if Enterprise takes the majority at Shift?’
 

He shrugged. The question sounded rhetorical, but she waited, apparently meaning for Nicolai to answer.
 

“I assume they’ll ratify beem currency.”

Rachel shook her head. “Beem. Debates over dole increases. Directorate oversight for entrepreneurial ventures that impact the public sector. Allotments of police and fire departments. Oh, there are plenty of hotbeds in this Shift. More than enough to argue about. Such choice. So many things that matter so very much to all of those people out there.”
 

“If those issues don’t matter, then what does?” said Nicolai.
 

She waved a finger. “Ah, but now we’re getting close to the secrets I don’t want to share.”
 

“Why? You said that nobody would believe me.”
 

“I said that it wouldn’t
mean anything
. That’s different.”
 

“How?”

She affected a detective’s inflection. “I’ll ask the questions, sonny.”
 

Nicolai recrossed his legs, feeling restless. The impression of being a fly in front of a spider was larger than ever. He looked up at Rachel and suddenly wondered if she’d known everything all along: Who he was, why he’d come, what he knew, and what he’d done. The thought was paranoid, but it was hard to shake.
 

He felt a reckless idea seize him. Thinking back to his conversation with Micah in his apartment, he said, “What is the Beau Monde?”
 

A new look crossed the old woman’s face. There was just a flicker of surprise, but it was there long enough for Nicolai to see it for what it was.
 

“Now
that’s
an interesting question,” she said.

“I’ve seen the high-end immersion rigs in Isaac’s apartment,” he said. It was a calculated risk, but he was beginning to feel that he had little to lose.

“I don’t know all of the new toys Micah is having made,” she said. “But that’s not what you asked about, is it?”
 

“They’re sensory interfaces that are light years ahead of what’s publicly available or even known to the general…”
 

“There has to be a down in order for there to be an up,” said Rachel, interrupting his technical sidetrack with a dismissive wave. “My father used to say that. Everyone needs someone to aspire to, and someone to control them.”
 

“You’re saying it’s about control?”
 

“Everything is about control, Mr. Costa.”

“Who controls
you?”
 

She shook her head of white hair. “You’re only seeing one small corner of the puzzle. It’s just enough to tell you there’s more hidden away. That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To peek at a little more of the picture. Maybe you thought I’d be soft enough to spill my guts. But I imagine all I’ve done is to make you wonder more.”