The Beam: Season Two (29 page)

Despite the attempted blasé attitude he’d used to unseat the agent, Doc couldn’t help but feel impressed by the apartment. He’d seen others in Tuco when visiting clients, but opulence rose with the floor numbers. The buildings were each fifty-two floors tall, and the upper two were massive penthouses. This apartment was on the forty-seventh floor and couldn’t be too shy of the best. It took up a quarter of the floor and was way, way,
way
more expensive than was reasonable. There was a hoverport down the hall for docking his car. Because the elevators were keyed to owners’ Beam IDs, there were only three other apartments’ worth of people who could even get off on Doc’s floor. The bridges and their infamy didn’t matter because the kids couldn’t come up and Doc would never stop on those floors. It had the most advanced canvas Doc had ever seen in an apartment. He wouldn’t need to do anything. He could just come up here, sit in a chair, and wait for life on a silver tray.

As Doc followed Felicity’s twitching rear down the hallways and into more opulent rooms than Doc had ever seen in a single living space, he took a moment to wonder if buying this apartment would be a mistake. He didn’t actually think it
would
be, but he enjoyed the contemplation. Reminding himself just how absurd his purchase was (the monthly mortgage payments would be more than twice what Doc had made per year just a few years ago if he were getting a loan to buy it, which he wasn’t) reminded Doc how secure he finally was.
 

Doc had grown up poor, had
wanted
to be rich as a kid, had
planned
to be rich throughout his teens, and had logged off of schooling at sixteen to start his pursuit. Then, when he’d turned eighteen and had faced his Choice, he’d of course chosen Enterprise. He’d moved out and into an Enterprise Hopefuls group house (the name was a laugh; EH houses were like hostels except that it took sixteen kids in a single room to manage the group rent, even with a rare stipend from Enterprise’s “Start Right” program) then had proceeded to fail. And he’d failed
spectacularly
. It had taken more than a decade to see his first profitable year and a few years after that to hold an apartment for longer than it took for eviction proceedings to oust him. Even then, life had been like a porcelain figurine balanced atop a bull’s back.
 

But those days were finished. He’d always scrap, but now he’d do so in tune with his nature. He’d never scrap for food. He’d never
need
to steal — though it was always possible he’d steal for pleasure. He’d never need to run from debtors…though a man like Doc, with a sweet tooth for dangerous deals and deadly women, probably was never quite through with running.
 

Felicity led him into a bedroom. The room was empty, but there was a master bathroom visible through a door to the side.
 

“Do you have cochlear call implants? Heads-up corneas? An archival cloud chip?”
 

“Some,” said Doc. Truth was he had some moderate-grade nanobots, a few muscular enhancements he’d gotten back when he’d erroneously believed his ship had come in five years before, a cochlear implant, and the same social upgrades that pretty much everyone got with their first handheld, seeing as the two sort of went hand in hand. Despite having sold upgrades for over a decade, Doc still hadn’t been able to justify getting many for himself. Things had been too tentative, and storing credits in irredeemable ways inside his body had, up until now, felt like asking for trouble. Now that would change. Starting tomorrow with his new tattoo.
 

“The canvas has the standard interface toolset, of course,” said the agent. “Like I said, it will take time to learn your patterns. While it might sometimes feel like the canvas is reading your mind, it’s merely parsing patterns as they pass back and forth with The Beam. Good behavior and intention prediction depends a lot on the native processor and especially on the sensor capability of the system. This one is state of the art, fully refurbed last week, between owners, when the carpet and painting was done. The more enhancements you have, the better its predictive abilities will be. Not just parlor tricks like putting the foods you’re hungry for up in front of the cabinet, but projecting holos and screens where you most want them, siphoning off uploaded factual data that would be best sent to the cloud, determining what you’re working on and helping you analyze it all and prepare for your day, helping you solve problems while you sleep, then reading project details back to you in the morning while you shave, and…”
 

“What if I don’t want all the details of my work out on The Beam?”
 

Felicity turned and gave Doc a snakelike smile. After spending most of the showing being beaten down by Doc’s dominant personality, she’d finally gotten one up on him. Her smile said that Doc was naive, that the answer would have been obvious to anyone who truly belonged in Tuco Towers. She now knew he hadn’t always been rich. Good thing Doc could afford the punishment she’d now bake into the price.

“You’ve never had an AI data gate, have you?”

Doc considered lying, but there was no point.

“Tell me.”
 

“The canvas’s protection isn’t just about encryption. It’s more like having millions of minuscule soldiers at every entrance and exit.”
 

“What if I want to do something the AI doesn’t approve of?”
 

“AI is impartial, Mr. Stahl.”
 

“Doc.”
 

“You should think of the canvas as an extension of your brain. It learns from you, like a baby learns from its mother. Children grow up believing that what their parents believe is right. Of course, if you are conducting illegal activities here, you’d better be sure to hide them well from your neighbors and…”
 

“I meant more like if I hire some company.” He winked.
 

Felicity rolled her eyes. “Escorts aren’t illegal.”
 

“Are
you
legal?”
 

She put her hands on her hips. “Tell me the truth…
Doc
. You’re going to buy this apartment, right? I’m not wasting my time dealing with your chauvinistic bullshit?”
 

“Hey, I’m just appreciating beauty.”
 

She waited.
 

“Yes. I’m going to buy it,” he said.

“Should I bother continuing?”
 

“I’m going to buy it
after
I get the full show.” He looked around the room, but there was no question that Felicity knew Doc meant the “show” was her parading around in front of him.

“Master bathroom over there.” She pointed. “Responsive shower, full robotics for cleaning, you get the idea.”
 

Doc gave a good-natured shrug and peeked into the bathroom.
 

“What else?”

Felicity sighed and led the way out, down the hall. They emerged into a room that kicked Doc in the balls. He tried to suppress his shock but failed. Felicity smirked.
 

“Every apartment on floor forty-five and above has a room like this.” She gestured at the half-sized pool and oversized hot tub. The entire room was made to look like it was outdoors, with rocks (or fake rocks), plants (or fake plants), and the pool with what, through holographic trickery, appeared to have a vanishing edge. “Apparently, the weight of all this water is tremendous and makes the building top-heavy. Does that bother you?”
 

Doc shook his head. He’d had no idea. The room was an opulent nirvana. And to think, he’d washed his own sheets that morning. He had just one Beam wall in his current apartment, and his holo projector was broken. His bathtub leaked.
 

“Plasteel mesh underneath. Fantastically strong, and monitored by a patrol of repair nanos backed by heavier-duty droids between floors. Much of the same technology used in the continental lattice, actually. If it can protect the NAU from Wild East missiles, it can hold this floor in the air. But for reasonability’s sake, the water is only two meters deep. Hopefully, that’s not a problem.”
 

Doc shook his head.
 

I’ve made it,
he thought.
Noah Fucking West, if I can afford a place with a pool…indoors…at the top of a spire…then I’ve goddamn made it and will never,
ever
have to look back
.
 

Doc looked at the water sparkling in the light streaming through the window. While he watched, the agent touched something on the wall, and the glass began to darken and smother the late-day sun.
 

Never again would he have to fight to survive.
 

Never again would he be without something he wanted or needed.

Never again would he fall asleep uneasily, his mind preoccupied by what horrors the next days might bring. That was the curse of Enterprise, after all: The price you paid for the chance to roll the dice on — well, on earning a life like he now had — was years of fear and torment. There was no ceiling to what you could do, and you could become as wealthy and successful as you wanted. But he had to be honest: There were days when he’d wished for a Directorate life, and days when he’d thought of shifting. But those weak moments always came between Shifts, and somehow, every time he had a chance to go Directorate, things had been just good enough to keep him rolling those dice.
 

It had finally paid off. Here he was, preparing to buy his way into the elite.
 

And yet twenty years ago almost to the day, Doc had been at the bottom of society. Caught dealing counterfeit implants one day then stealing a shopping cart full of food from a homeless man the next. He remembered how furious he’d been then — not because he’d been arrested, but because DZPD had waited that extra day to surveil him. If he’d been arrested immediately, he wouldn’t have had that final night of terror, fleeing the scene of his crime without so much as bogus payment for his artificial wares. He wouldn’t have decided that the bottom was the bottom, so he might as well do what those on the bottom did. Stealing that cart had hurt him far more than the man he’d stolen it from. It had hurt him inside. Forever.

Standing in front of the pool with the vanishing edge and looking out over District Zero from above, Doc could barely remember those days. And yet he very much wanted to, for the sake of comparison and appreciating the rise for the ride it had been. But he’d survived. He was recession-proof. He’d made enough credits — and diversified them far and wide — that even a severe drought would barely dent him.
 

He’d never be in a Flat prison again, forced to fight for survival. He’d never be so flagrantly confronted by what he truly was, at the bottom of society’s barrel. The Flat had been like a mirror, and Doc had hated his reflection. Scrapping had turned to scheming, and struggle turned him criminal. The first months in Flat 16 had almost cost him his mind and humanity. Only meeting Omar before Omar was moved to Flat 4 had saved him. In the few months they’d shared the same walled city, Omar had held the mirror to Doc’s face and made him confront his reflection.
 

You are what you are, Doc, and ain’t nothin’ changing that right now,
he’d said.
The question is do you want to
stay
what you are or become something better?

Standing in front of the pool, Doc nodded toward Felicity. “I’ll take it.”

“I haven’t told you the price,” said the agent.
 

“Then tell me.”
 

“They’re asking 1.2.”
 

“1.0 via direct transfer. Immediately.”

“You won’t be getting a loan?”
 

“Did I forget to say ‘direct transfer’?”

The agent turned and touched her ear, and Doc realized that they’d never been alone. The sellers must have been in her ear throughout the tour. Maybe in her eye, too, projecting holos of the showing on their end while Felicity captured the images on hers. The realization was annoying. Doc made a mental note to outfit the apartment with a jammer the minute he moved in. He didn’t like the idea that guests could bring visitors into his place without Doc even knowing it was happening.
 

Felicity turned back to Doc and stuck out her hand. She had a wide smile on her pretty face. And why not? Real estate agents — be they former models or hard-fought scrappers like Doc — were Enterprise, and this one had just earned a 70,000-credit commission.
 

“The sellers are going to accept your offer. They’d like to port you the agreement. You can countersign with your ID.”
 

Doc subconsciously touched his temple, where a Fi-enabled memory port and authenticator would be if he’d ever had the disposable income to justify installing one.
 

“My implant has been acting sketchy,” he said. “Put it on the wall there, and I’ll fingerprint it.”
 

Felicity gave him a tiny smile, touched her ear again, and nodded when, Doc assumed, someone on the other end confirmed they’d heard.
 

Ten minutes later, after thanking Felicity (“Felicia,” she’d corrected), Doc was standing alone in his new apartment. Amazing how quickly things could happen these days. His account was a million credits thinner, and the balances of a few others were fatter. The Beam authentication had already transferred ownership to Doc’s ID. And to think: this morning, before doing his laundry, he’d opened his eyes on a squeaky bed in an apartment that was barely at the line, with one Beam wall, randomly wondering where Pop-Tarts had gone since his childhood.