The Beam: Season Two (45 page)

Just how low
was
the supply? How far down had Leo ratcheted the rations? Did he have emergency stores somewhere? Leah hoped that if he did, he hadn’t stored it anywhere obvious. She also hoped that Leo was carrying the personal shield she’d brought him, that he’d junked in disgust, and that she’d later seen sitting on his desk. She had decided not to call him on his hypocrisy then and was glad now that she hadn’t. At some point, needs would supplant idealism, and when that happened, all eyes would turn toward the one man who might be holding out on the rest of them. It was a matter of
when
, not
if
.

She shook brewing thoughts of violence from her mind then looked down at her phone. Still no connection. Not at Leo’s, not at the gate, not in the common, not on the hill. The sky was clear, but it didn’t seem to matter. Clear days, overcast days — whether any given conditions would yield a clean signal (sometimes strong enough for video chat, sometimes too weak for simple text) — was always a matter of chance.
 

“Goddammit,” she said.

Sighing, Leah walked back to the Organa barn. She’d just hiked all the way up with Crumb. She wanted to lie down and nap — ideally swinging in one of the common hammocks like a true dreadlock-headed granola-muncher. But she couldn’t keep ignoring the pings. They’d stopped, and that made things worse. It probably didn’t mean that the sender had stopped pinging. It probably meant that he or she was still trying but was now getting undeliverable replies. Anyone with an issue important enough to hit her this often would go apeshit if they got undeliverables. Only the Organa went off-grid regularly. To non-Organas, leaving the Beam umbrella was like asking the world to make them blind. They didn’t simply
avoid
it; they literally couldn’t
understand
it.
 

Leah entered the barn and, casting a glance at Missy, looked one final time at her handheld’s screen. She saw the pings but couldn’t even open them. A ping only delivered a header. It was a notification and nothing more. Each was tied to a message (a ping had to be
about
something, after all), but she couldn’t access any of the messages without a connection. But the messages themselves were only part of the issue. If the matter was as urgent as it seemed to be, she might need video or port-to-port communication, and she couldn’t get that here.

She slid Missy’s saddle onto her back and mounted up then nudged the horse onto the trail toward Bontauk.
 

Almost two hours later, Missy walked into the back end of Vance Pilloud’s overgrown field, and Leah, on her back, guided the horse around the fence remnants and toward the house’s shell. Leah looked at the place with its few standing walls and couldn’t suppress a chill. The last time she’d been here, she’d knocked down a barrier inside Crumb’s head — now
York’s
head — that had felt as fragile as Pilloud’s old walls.
 

She found the FiGlass line where she’d dropped it after unplugging from Crumb’s hat in panic. It was in an untidy jumble, completely open to the elements. She hadn’t been thinking; she’d only been trying to get Crumb away so she could hopefully save him.
 

She picked up the line, brushed dirt from the coupler, and blew on it. Satisfied, she plugged the end into her handheld. Immediately, the device lit up, its screen coming alive. It was a sort of Frankenstein moment for Leah every time she plugged it in. Handhelds weren’t supposed to have hardwire ports, but Leah had needed one more than once. She had a hard time believing the Beam AI (or AI in the handheld; she wasn’t sure if it had its own resident nanos) stood tall and declared “IT’S ALIVE!” whenever she plugged in her jury-rigged monster of a device, but Leah liked to imagine it anyway. It added to her mental image of lightning striking around her, illuminating the day.
 

As the connection established, the text color within the pings changed from gray to black. Leah clicked on the first one.
 

Her mail app opened and showed an encrypted message in her inbox. Before reading it, her eye was drawn toward the I/O history at the bottom, where a long list of pings was listed. Several dozen new pings had arrived between the time she’d lost her connection on the trail to the compound and now, and she saw them lined up like eager soldiers. A quick glance confirmed what she’d already suspected — that every one of the pings pertained to this same message. Someone wanted very badly for her to see it.
 

Leah cleared her ping history and, before reading, used her finger to fling one of the notices toward the top of her screen. Let her tormenter get the return ping. It was shorthand for, “I’m on it, so hold your fucking horses.”
 

This done, Leah read the message.
 

n33t —
 

have uncovered s/thng you need to hear to do with shift and your post abt party affiliations. reply.

shadow

“Shadow?” Leah squinted at the screen.
 

She remembered her post on the Null forum about Enterprise and Directorate Party affiliation and how the Senate always seemed to equilibrate after Shift regardless of which way things went, but the message didn’t make much sense. Her point was that the Senate had the power it wanted regardless of which party had majority stake, and that Enterprise and Directorate Senate initiatives really weren’t as different as people pretended. It was a hardly novel or profound thought, and Leah had written it with a feeling that she was recapitulating the history of politics like a pretentious poseur. Politicians looking out for themselves regardless of their declared stance. What else was new?

Re-reading the message, Leah found herself assaulted with conflicting sensations. The first (hardly fair or on point, but the strongest within her) was a loss of respect for the famous Beam vigilante. The message wasn’t exactly time-sensitive, making the constant pinging feel obsessive. It also seemed inappropriate given that the two of them had never interacted directly. It was almost unheard of to interact directly in the Null community, given how paranoid the group was. But now, not only had Shadow messaged her (and it
was
the real Shadow; she could tell by the authentication token); he’d then ceaselessly pinged her about the message. She found herself transported back to her teens, when she’d been courted by several awkward would-be boyfriends. They’d been like this when she’d expressed less-than-intense interest in them: both pathetic and desperate.
 

Leah’s other immediate impression about the message was that even if Shadow was being a little pathetic, he seemed to think that his issue was one of great importance. The gravity he’d put behind it made it feel like a hot potato.
 

Leah felt conflicted. Really, she felt almost
caught
. Being n33t gave her an unassailable wall of protection from her true identity, but still Shadow’s direct contact made her feel naked. She wanted to be read-only, posting but not being queried. But then, if she didn’t want to engage, why was she active within Null in the first place?
 

She looked down at the message, reading it again.

Who
was
Shadow? He could be a plant. Or NPS. He claimed to move constantly to evade detection, and his messages were filled with anti-establishment rhetoric. He’d been railing about the Ryans last Leah had seen, and something about an employee of Isaac’s. He said a lot of questionable things about important and popular people, but did that really mean he believed them? Was he truly an irritant on the Beam’s underbelly as Leah herself was, or was he an agent? He might not even be real. He might be autonomous AI. He could be a Beam cleric. There would be no way to know without either meeting him or deciding, on faith, to trust him…but Leah would never meet him in person
because
she didn’t know if she could trust him.
 

She pulled up the encryption patch on her handheld, verified that her access point would be masked, and replied.
 

what? hmb.

It was the most noncommittal, borderline brush-off reply she could make, but noncommittal was as far as Leah was willing to go. Asking the simplest of inquiries then simply telling Shadow to hit her back with a reply would put the ball in his court. It didn’t commit her at all, and there was nothing in the message that even NPS could object to or pin on her. He was the one who wanted to play? Fine. Then he could be the first to show his hand.

The reply was instant, as if Shadow had been repeatedly refreshing his inbox. Based on the obnoxious nature of his pings, he probably was.

have information on nicolai costa as in my page posts. need to disrupt.
 

Leah looked at the message, annoyed. They were like two blushing teenagers, each unwilling to lean in and go for that first kiss. Disrupt
what?
What
information about Nicolai Costa? She vaguely recognized the ethnic-sounding name as the one he’d been going on and on about across both Null and his own page, but it otherwise had no meaning to her. She replied:

you contacted me. spit it out.

Not twenty seconds later, a new message popped into Leah’s handheld. She wasn’t even sure how he’d had enough time to receive her mail, read it, type a reply, and send it back. The Beam’s processing of simple mail was basically instant, but each of them was sending messages through a car wash’s worth of scrubbing that required a second or three on each end. Shadow seemed too eager, too quick.
 

hard to explain. found beam id tracker designating secret upper class of society, called beau monde, again as in my post. stories about it never make beam headlines, votes are being suppressed, getting signs that headlines and shift are being manipulated. need to test with scientific method. (tmwsd)

Leah reached the end of the message just in time, seeing the classic paranoid hallmark “tmwsd” (a callback to an old video series that stood for “this message will self destruct”) just as the attachment cannibalized the mail and left her inbox empty. Leah would have liked to read the message again just to make sure she fully understood it. Something more than vaguely understood ideas of Beam Headlines and Shift being manipulated.
 

Not that any of it was news. Clearly, Beam Headlines were being manipulated. She’d read Shadow’s page posts on the topic and had participated in many Null forum threads about it. There was no surprise or shock to it; Beam Headlines was the most visited page on the entire network, and there were thousands of so-called systems out there about how to game the subpages and get your story’s (usually your for-profit venture’s stories) headline to the top of those subpages. It had been clear for a while that Quark or some other body was working hard to reverse the gaming of headlines even in subpages and local subpages because they wanted the results to be as relevant, as organic, and as true to life as possible. Algorithms operating behind the visible vote counts could only be theorized about, but the days of hiring vote farming companies to send moneymaking scams to the top of the charts were long gone.
 

The front page, unsurprisingly, seemed to be watched more closely. There were many in Null who found the idea of anything other than votes affecting the rankings repugnant and intolerable, but Leah didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Right now, it was true that all of the pre-Shift rioting and demonstrations were what people cared about most, and they were certainly the stories that were being organically voted onto the first page and into the top slots. She’d seen Shadow’s posts about trying to vote up stories on his pet term “Beau Monde,” but of course nobody cared about a supersecret nut job’s obsession as much as they cared about the five thousand-person parade two days ago that had turned into a burning party in Brooklyn, and how the riot police had been forced to knock hundreds of people down using not just slumberguns, but eventually an Oxygen Bandit force field bubble. So what if the algorithms were kicking “Beau Monde” stories down into the hundreds, many pages back? It simply didn’t matter, in Leah’s opinion.
 

But before she replied, she thought of the destructed message’s last lines. Shadow had claimed that
Shift
, not just Beam Headlines, was being manipulated. He’d mentioned the scientific method, which is how Null spoke about experiments they conducted within systems. The method was always the same. As in the classic scientific method, hackers made a hypothesis then conducted an experiment to see if that hypothesis was correct. In Null, the “experiments” were always disruptive, like cutting open a pithed frog to find out what made it tick.

Leah made herself comfortable on the wood flooring, looked at her handheld’s screen, and sighed. Thanks to Pilloud’s FiGlass connection, she had plenty of bandwidth for a video call. She could even plug herself in so her avatar could meet his in a low-res simulation, but she wanted an arm’s distance between them. If Shadow was really managing to find members of his so-called Beau Monde via their Beam IDs as he claimed on his page, Leah didn’t want to chance what he might be able to find out about her through an avatar. Because really, who could find Beam IDs? One answer was extremely gifted and/or well-connected diggers and hackers. Shadow could be one of those, but two others who could find Beam IDs — clerics and NPS agents — seemed equally likely.

She replied:

hit me in diggle

Leah swiped away from mail and opened the Diggle app. Diggle had been developed by a Null named ZION (it was amazing how many members of a supposedly anonymous community couldn’t resist taking credit where credit was due, Leah/n33t and Shadow included) and bundled the code from scrambled mail communication into a transparent open-source chat environment. Each message, even within an exchange, was threaded through a handful of routing servers with co-optable space and re-routed based on a rotating cypher that Diggle essentially tossed back and forth to itself like a lone person juggling from one hand to the other. The resulting communication was faultlessly secure and based on NPS-level cryptology, but the keys were generated and exchanged within Diggle on the fly then exploded after use.