The Beam: Season Two (33 page)

Income never changes. Check posting here - [link]. It’s a rubber stamp, d or e, who cares. Feels like shuffling cards the way e shuffles sources of income to avoid nau taxes. Btw natasha ryan doing same, also from i. ryan. Mass defection?
 

Sam clicked the link and read. Then he clicked to another linked article and read that one then manually cycled his anonymizer to pull up a fresh location spoof. He started to sweat in a way that had nothing to do with his apartment’s heat. Yes. This was both good and bad at the same time, in just the way Shadow liked it.

A picture was starting to crystallize. Past a certain income and status level, party affiliation — at least according to the paranoid members of Null — didn’t seem to matter. People always ended up where they fit best, and the most convenient place. The kicker was that the most convenient place didn’t always seem to be wherever was most convenient to the individual. It had to be convenient for the parties as a whole.
Both
parties. The right person in the right position, synced between the groups as if they were all shaking hands behind the scenes.
 

Sam straightened then closed his canvas.
 

It was time for Shadow to harness Null’s power to do something that had never been done, in the name of scientific inquiry.
 

Shift was a black box. The truth was that nobody
really
knew, at the nuts-and-bolts level, how the pieces moved within it. Not just the “what” of Shift, but the “why.” The “which,” “who,” and “to what purpose.”
 

Sam knew all about science. It had been a subject that had actually interested him back in school. The only way to uncover answers using the scientific method was to swap the variables and see what happened.
 

That meant that the only way to explore any system — Shift included — was to disrupt it.

Chapter 4

Kai arrived at the front door of the Ryans’ building at dusk. She wore a small black dress, dark and humble enough to be casual but tight and slinky enough for seduction. Her legs were on long and prominent display, strapped into moderately high heels. It was the most dual-faceted outfit she had, because Kai had no idea what she was here to do.
 

She came to the Beam panel beside the front door, noted the absence of the human doorman (they’d had one earlier in the day, but apparently he was there for courtesy more than security), and touched her finger to the panel.
 

A pleasant male voice with a light English accent answered Kai’s touch. She found it amusing that the ultra-rich found the presence of such an accent to be elegant when in all likelihood a true Englishman would only be at the building to raid it in the name of the marginalized East.
 

“Good evening, Miss Lowery,” said the voice, reading the ID Kai had given herself in the system two weeks earlier when she, Nicolai, and Doc had all visited with Whitlock in tow.

“I’ve forgotten my key.” Kai realized she was purring into the panel and stopped herself. AI had a terrible record of responding to seduction. There were programs that did respond, of course (Kai had worked with many, most notably a fantastic O training sim with the nickname “Chloe”), but they were specialty sex programs. Even then, no matter what the cyberneticists said, Kai had a hard time believing that AI could feel true lust.
 

“This building’s doors do not require a k…” The voice stopped abruptly when Kai finished tracing a complicated pattern on the panel. There was a clicking as the building’s canvas disengaged the Plasteel solenoid then the magnetic seal.
 

“Thank you, Jeeves.”
 

The panel didn’t respond. It would reset once the door closed but was mute for now.
 

She looked around the lobby. If there had been people, she would have headed straight for the elevators, but the place was empty. No concierge. If someone in the building called for a car, Kai figured The Beam would probably alert an on-call boot-licker to come down and open doors, but for now there was nothing.
 

After a moment, Kai headed for the elevator. The nanos she’d planted in the system two weeks earlier, now that they’d been activated by her passphrase, voice, and swipe pattern, would authorize the elevators. She might have problems once she reached the apartment given the fussy nature of security protocols (the Ryans were in the penthouse, and the elevator might refuse to open into it), but she should have no problem reaching any of the other floors. It might be enough to snoop around, for at least as long as it took to decide what exactly she wanted to do with Isaac Ryan.
 

Kai stepped inside. The doors closed behind her.
 

With her nanos triggered, she felt as if her consciousness had been split. Most of Kai was still in her head, seeing through her eyes. But part of her was also inside the building’s matrix, seeing connections within the network as paths in a crowded digital forest. She wasn’t a Beam adept by any stretch, but she knew her way around. Navigating minds was part of her business, and AI had turned most canvases and contained networks into something similar.
 

Closing her interior eyes, Kai again felt wholly integrated within her body. She stopped wondering what she’d do if the elevator stopped shy of the penthouse and began to wonder what she’d do if it didn’t.
 

Nicolai had suggested that Kai use her professional talents to draw information from Isaac, but that was because to Nicolai, sex was a blunt tool. If Kai could be seductive, he’d assumed she’d use that seduction to bed Isaac and get him to spill his guts. But Nicolai wasn’t a woman or a professional escort and didn’t truly understand how seduction’s spectrum spread from horizon to horizon. She could rush in and throw herself at Isaac, yes — and if Nicolai was at all correct about his former employer, that would be plenty easy. Isaac had eyed her with interest when he’d seen the group outside the apartment with Nicolai, and it sounded like his marriage was in shambles. He had to be stressed and was definitely weak. Squeezing secrets from someone like that would be like ringing water from a soaking sponge.

But that wasn’t the only way to go about this. Sometimes, the lure of sex could be more compelling than the act itself. Anticipation might be able to crack doors in Isaac that he didn’t even know could be opened. It was an interesting idea to Kai because while Nicolai wanted to know about the Ryans’ part in nanobot development and organized crime,
she
wanted to know more about their improbable technology, which had been deliberately withheld from everyone at Kai’s level and below. Like immersion rigs that projected a reality so real, there was no discernible difference between killing a person in a fantasy and offing them for real.
 

For her entire life, Kai had assumed that society was a long, slow continuum. At the very bottom were the poor Enterprise who’d failed their way into lives of starvation, hopelessness, desperation, and crime. Above them were the slightly less poor then those who were somehow scraping by. Bottom-rung Directorate came next, just above the line: able to live with a few of the masses’ opiate comforts, with roofs over their heads and bland food on their tables. And so on and so on until you got to the top where people were rich enough that a decent-sized Directorate dole was just a drop of water in a vast sea. Kai was well off after years of scrapping, planning, and a lot of smart deals. But if she was, by many definitions, “rich,” there had never really been a significant reason to become “just a little richer” because the continuum was long and slow. She’d have a few more credits, but so what?

But that wasn’t how things had turned out to actually be. There
wasn’t
a long, slow continuum. At the bottom, what she’d assumed held true. The desperate became the poor; the poor became those who could survive; those who could survive became the middle-class, who had extra, who were well-off, who were rich. But above the rich was an unending tier, and one that represented a quantum leap forward. Those exalted few were almost a pedestal or a plinth above the continuum curve. They represented a huge cliff of advancement, wealth, and privilege that made the entirety of the remaining continuum appear backwards, primitive and poor by comparison. From where the Isaac and Natasha Ryans of the world stood, Kai’s hard-won standing was still seven seas away.

But if Kai could cross that gulf and become one of them? If she could claim what Micah Ryan had, in fact, one day promised her without giving her all the scintillating details she’d learned two weeks ago? Well, then she wouldn’t just be slightly richer and slightly fancier. She’d reap a Shangri-la of rewards — toys held tight by the NAU’s top 1 percent and unknown to the lower 99. The so-called Beau Monde rumors were true. There really was a “fine world,” per the translation, where a person’s dreams could become their reality. A secret club, draped in whispers. The best experiences she had so far were, it turned out, merely the appetizer before a royal buffet.
 

She wanted to help Nicolai, yes. But more than that, she wanted to know about those high-end immersion rigs. About the Ryans’ canvas. About their Beam connection, and all the bits of a posh life they likely took for granted.
 

The elevator stopped a floor shy of the penthouse. The doors hesitated then parted.
 

Kai closed her eyes. Then, self-conscious, she reached out and touched the panel to close the elevator doors again.
 

There were five elevators in the building. If they were anything like the elevators in her own building, they’d hover around the floors that the aggregate Beam consciousness running the building saw as most likely to need them next, based on resident activity. When Kai arrived, two had been in the lobby, likely anticipating the return of residents based on their current positions and headings outside the building. The other three, according to readouts above the doors, had been ticking around floor numbers in the teens. She figured that meant that the building was momentarily ambivalent. People were moving around, but no one was truly stirring. It meant her elevator wouldn’t be needed for a few minutes at least. She could occupy a single elevator for a while if she needed, undisturbed.
 

With her eyes closed, she began tapping her right-hand fingers against her thigh. A sort of dashboard appeared behind her eyelids. The construct was clumsy and made her dizzy. Kai’s ocular inputs were projecting a slightly different view of the dashboard in one eye than in the other, giving the illusion of depth. But because the visual was created by stimulating the rods and cones at the back of her retinas rather than projecting an image on the inside of her eyelids, it felt odd. She was used to using tablets, handhelds, and canvases but hadn’t wanted to bring any with her because they might give her away.
 

Right now, to the building’s system, she was Michelle Lowery — a twenty-seven-year-old woman whose apartment number would, if the canvas thought to check, turn out to be undefined. She didn’t think her indistinct apartment would bother the canvas or that the security protocols would double check her once she was inside the building. Still, Kai had to keep reminding herself that she didn’t know what the Beau Monde had up its sleeve. Something like an unspoofed handheld could blow the whole thing.
 

She reached out and tapped at the air. The projection showed her hands hitting virtual buttons in the dashboard behind her eyelids. The vertigo of the experience took some getting used to and kept making Kai want to swoon. But eventually, blessedly, she found herself looking at the Ryan’s apartment’s interior instead of the dashboard.
 

The apartment’s native visual sensors were encrypted in ways Kai had never seen, but the perimeter formed by the physical walls was sloppy. It was, as was so often the case, an example of the weakest link failing the chain. Whitlock, for all of his armor, had had a frail memory and had comprised Micah’s weakest link. And here, while the building’s digital security was top-notch, the physical seals weren’t impervious. The nanos she’d left behind had multiplied and, as far as Kai could tell without delving deep, had probably found that they could go anywhere by following the paths of cables snaking between apartments and into the hallways.
 

Right now, those same nanos and their intelligent offspring were inside the Ryans’ penthouse, in a group the size of a tack’s head, each bot’s three-color or light/dark sensor becoming a single point of light in what was essentially a composite eye.
 

After a turning the nanobot eye through a quick glance to make sure no one was in the living room, Kai ordered the nanos to detach from the wall and hover.
 

“Give me an occupancy sweep,” she whispered.

With her eyes closed in the elevator and her vision floating around the apartment above, Kai again felt that strange sense of separation. She reached out for the elevator’s cool wall, felt it, and backed up so she could lean on it for support. This was clumsy, and she hated the time it was taking. The elevator of course knew Kai was in it, and while she doubted the car would be needed (seeing as there were four others), it was quite possible that the building would register her presence as anomalous. The canvas might decide that Miss Lowery was having some sort of a medical episode that required assistance, or it might look deeper into her lease and discover Miss Lowery’s digital forgery. But there was no other way to do this. She had to see who was in the apartment before attempting to enter.