Sean Platt's Blog, page 16

The Beam S1: Chapter Six

Doc sat in an overstuffed chair in his apartment on the 47th floor of Tuco Towers, a conjoined pair of skyscrapers connected to one another by bridges. The bridges were a novelty and branding angle for Tuco and nothing more. Even if there was any point in going from one building filled with apartments of people you didn’t know to another, the people at the top of the towers were rich enough to afford hoverskippers. Even Doc could afford a hoverskipper. He didn’t have one because hoverskippers were (like the city’s ancient, horse-drawn hansom cabs) for tourists. He had his car, though, and while it would be clunky to climb into it through the magnetic port at the end of his hallway and cross to the other tower, he could do it. He’d do that before walking across those stupid bridges, which were mainly used by the Towers’ teenagers to hook up and fuck.

Right now, Doc was supposed to be watching a holo to unwind from a long day of scrambling, as a hustler like himself always did.

Instead, he was trying to watch the holo, but couldn’t move his mind from what he’d seen in the lab.

The upgrades he’d seen were troubling enough. Revolutionary new nanobots? Eyes that looked real but could do… well, whatever they could do? BioFi? What did it all mean? And how had that lab been there the whole time he’d been visiting Xenia… and yet they’d kept it from him? He was one of their best salesmen. Doc hadn’t just been plunked into Tuco Towers, where the rents were exorbitant because the security was top-notch. He’d earned his way into wealth. Xenia couldn’t possibly think he wouldn’t be able to sell those upgrades.

And that led to the most troublesome thing about Doc’s afternoon — a crawling certainty that the only reason Doc wasn’t supposed to see the upgrades in that lab was because his customers would never be allowed to buy them.

When Greenley (the salesman Doc had been mistaken for — a man whose elite clients were allowed buy those elite upgrades) had made his unfortunately timed appearance, Doc had realized the depth of the shit he’d landed in. He had learned, quite accidentally, just how far the field of human advancement had come. If what Killian had told him was even half true, people who used those upgrades would be almost like superheroes. How much of a person’s mind could be backed up on The Beam these days? How far had virtual meetings advanced? If the level of immersion that seemed possible was indeed possible, users of the new technology would be able to sit in a chair beside a canvas and feel themselves fully somewhere else. With a snicker, Doc’s mind immediately drifted to the applications in immersive porn. Just imagine the filthy knots into which fetishists could twist themselves when those new tricks came on board.

And that was just the stuff he’d seen. His new, unauthorized knowledge didn’t include the other devices Doc had seen around the lab — items Killian hadn’t had time to tell him about before they’d been interrupted. Some of those things had looked like weapons. Others had looked like spare body parts. The human arm hanging on the wall… what could it do? Could it shoot deadly rays like in old movies about the future? Could it punch a hole in Plasteel? Could it disrupt the life energy of anyone it touched, thus making it a hand of death? There was no way to know.

In the lab, Killian’s eyes had been panicked when he’d realized his mistake. The guard had advanced. A few minutes later, another two guards had entered and Doc had found himself surrounded. He hadn’t been able to help himself. He’d raised his hands. Killian, regaining his composure, had then laughed and told Doc that there had been a mistake, but that he wasn’t in Nazi Germany. Killian had smiled wide and waved the guards away, chastising them for giving their guest the wrong impression. But Killian, Doc noticed, still hadn’t unlocked the door, or told the armed men to leave.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Stahl,” Killian had told him. “We seem to have made an unfortunate mistake.”

“Hmm,” Doc replied, noncommittal.

“Fortunately, our gaffe is reversible.”

Doc had looked at the guards, his eyes wary. He was usually cool and in control, always smooth and often sarcastic — a sometimes-cocky asshole. But as he’d eyed the guards and their weapons (a sort he hadn’t seen before), Doc felt his usual persona melt away. He stood in the middle of the room unable to move.

“Oh, please,” said Killian, laughing. “What is this, a standoff?”

“I don’t know,” said Doc. “Is it?”

“Of course not,” said Killian. “You’re one of our best salesmen.” But he was merely mouthing the words. Killian hadn’t even known who he was, and still didn’t.

“Hmm,” Doc repeated. His arms had raised slightly from his sides when the guards had approached, even after he’d lowered them from over his head. He looked like a man about to sprint, once he determined the correct direction in which to run.

“But I hope you understand,” said Killian, “these upgrades are for a client who demands high levels of discretion.” But that, too, was bullshit. Doc, who was well-steeped in the art of bullshit, knew bullshit when he heard it. What he was seeing wasn’t a custom order. It was a product line. This wasn’t all for one company or person; it was for a whole class of people — a class that Doc, while well-off, wasn’t elite enough to represent. What he was seeing represented a widening of the gap. Doc thought, The rich get richer.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“So… and this is awkward, I know… we can’t allow you to remember these items. For the client’s privacy, you understand.”

“I see,” said Doc. And now, he did see. They were going to wipe his memory. They wouldn’t have a Gauss Chamber, because this was a lab, not a hospital. Wholesale erasure wouldn’t be necessary, anyway. They’d use a hand unit. Doc would lose the last fifteen minutes, and would later find himself unsure whether he’d seen any new wares this week or not. He’d probably call Nero on Monday and ask for a new appointment. Nero, duly briefed, would play along.

And so he’d told Killian that he understood, and he’d allowed Killian to wave him clean. Afterward, he’d affected the vacant, vaguely optimistic expression appropriate to a fresh wipe while a tech ran a small sensor above his long blond hair. The tech had declared him current as of approximately the time he’d been in the bathroom washing his face. Then Killian had led him out without hurry, knowing that Doc’s ability to form new memories would be impaired for several more minutes. He’d told him that there was nothing new this week, and had suggested Doc call Mr. Nero on Monday. Doc had thanked him, gone back down to the street, and had hailed a cab. He’d gotten the same cabbie as before. The cabbie had jerked the cab at every stoplight, nearly causing Doc to plow his face into the divider.

Sitting in his apartment, mulling his troubling (and unforgotten, unwiped) time at Xenia, Doc swiped the air to make the holo he’d been pretending to watch vanish. It was a stupid show anyway. Whiny people with their whiny problems. It wasn’t even distracting him. He could still see everything that had happened today, thanks to the wipe firewall he’d had implanted and the accompanying spoof under his hair. As a man who’d had to scrap and connive his way to success as a salesman, it wasn’t the first time someone had wanted Doc to forget what he’d seen.

“Canvas,” Doc said.

His wall chirped.

“Search biological enhancements.”

A large globe of Beam pages appeared in the air in front of him. Doc preferred his results visually clustered in an intuitive web, like a Beam-generated mind-map. Closest to Doc was a window showing a common distributor of artificial limbs, and beside it was Hammacher Schlemmer. Neither were helpful. He wasn’t looking for replacement parts, and Hammacher Schlemmer hadn’t changed in the fifty years it had been selling upgrades instead of shoe buffers from in-flight magazines. All of H-S’s add-ons were useless novelties for rich people who had literally nothing else to spend their credits on: bioluminescent toes to show users see where they were walking at night; tongue modifiers that made everything taste like ice cream. He frowned.

Doc held the index finger and thumb of each hand up in front of him, then peeled the web open between the limb distributor and Hammacher Schlemmer. Deeper pages rolled forward and the outer layer curled back like a banana peel. Nothing. He turned the globe, peeled the other way, following the H-S path, toward upgrades and away from medical limb replacement. But it wasn’t right.

“Search biological upgrades.”

This time, the front page was Omnipedia. Of course. But he didn’t want to know the theories behind biological enhancement, particularly the vanilla’d version. He twisted the web, spun it to find its edges, and saw that the scope was still wrong. He was already feeling discouraged. If Xenia had tried to wipe his mind to make him forget what he’d seen, what were the chances that it would be available, publicly, on The Beam?

Doc sighed, then looked down at his router, which he kept visible so that he could look at it and make himself less paranoid. The SECURE light was still lit. The router had been ridiculously expensive, and used AI/key encryption, a hybrid model ensuring that all but the most advanced systems would never know where his queries originated.

Duly secure, Doc said, “Search Series Six nanobots.”

This time, even the front page wasn’t close. He found a line of Series Six radial grass cutters and plenty on nanobots, but nothing related to both. He peeled the web and looked inside for the hell of it, but knew there was no point.

“Search BioFi 7.6.”

This time, the results were even less relevant. There was nothing at all on BioFi (except for one weblog in which the teen author had written that she’d scored poorly on a test in bio and then had run-on with the next sentence, about a friend named Fi) and a few useless hits that included the number 7.6. Doc exploded the BioFi weblog just to be sure, but the creator was a nondescript kid whose network pages held nothing. Even her parents seemed unremarkable.

“Visit Utopior Enhancements.”

Utopior’s virtual storefront appeared before him in a window, complete with a ping asking if he’d care for immersion. Doc touched the ping and his apartment became ghosts of furniture buried in a life-sized holo. Doc stood and wandered the exclusive shop’s aisles, paddling at his sides to scroll the store underfoot. He picked up holo objects and tapped a few for detail. Each time, an enhanced holo of the upgrade appeared in his hands, each time disappointing. Utopior was the most borderline-illegal shop he knew, and the kind of place he could get tossed in jail for visiting. This was supposed to be what the law was keeping from Doc, but even the fanciest upgrades here were nothing compared to what he’d seen at Xenia.

Doc sighed, swiped to close the store, and visited the other shops he’d hacked into over the years: Gillead, Philharmonic, even Fremd Geshenk, which trafficked with Eurasia and was home to any number of biological perversions. If you wanted an ear that could listen to seventy simultaneous pieces of music, you visited Philharmonic, but if you wanted a double cock or an asshole that could shrink to carry a pin or expand to swallow a bookcase, you went to FG. But in all of the stores, what he found paled in comparison to the equipment at Xenia by a factor of ten.

Doc shook his head, annoyed. Then he swiped the search away, rose, and circled the room snuffing lights by pinching his fingers at them. A tune rose as his canvas recognized his movements, and after that, Doc let the computers do the rest. The light in his bedroom came on low. The music was mellow, almost hypnotic, filled with subaural reverberations that would tune his CNS neurons while he slept. The bathroom light came on, beckoning him. Doc washed his face, changed, and tapped the mirror to bring up the next day’s weather. Much of the weather was artificial inside the NAU’s protective lattice, so predictions were usually accurate and conditions fairly good. Doc called up the report and swore. They were letting it rain tomorrow. He’d probably end up hiking through the city and getting soaked on his usual rounds, thanks to the fucking protestors.

Doc shook his head, left the bathroom without swiping the lights off, then watched as they went off anyway. He climbed into his bed, feeling it adjust to his body and warm beneath him. The music and lights dimmed. In ten minutes, they’d both be off, and so would Doc. After the same routine night after night, sleep came easy no matter the preoccupation of his mind.

But after just a few minutes, when the lights and music were only down to half volume, Doc heard a noise in the living room. He stopped and listened, then heard the noise again.

“Canvas,” he said.

He heard no answering chirp.

“Canvas.”

Nothing.

Doc turned, keyed at the headboard of his bed. When nothing happened, he felt his heart pound. Like almost every non-Organa citizen of the NAU (and, let’s be honest, plenty of Organa citizens, too), Doc wasn’t comfortable when severed from The Beam. The Beam comprised Doc’s extra senses. Since it was always there, he’d gotten used to knowing anything he wanted to know, being able to see wherever he wanted to see, and being able to tell with certainty that it was going to fucking rain tomorrow.

He checked his wrist. His nano tattoo was still working fine, and he saw that it was nearly midnight. But the enhancements in Doc’s body that required a Beam connection to function were quiet. He felt like he’d lost a limb, or several.

He jumped out of bed and called for lights, already forgetting his link was down. Then he tapped the wall to turn them on seconds later, forgetting again. He slammed his toe into the door jamb and winced, suddenly thinking that the glowing toe enhancement maybe wasn’t so stupid after all.

His heart pumped harder. Something was wrong.

He heard the sound again, but this time recognized it as the clatter of his doorknob. Someone was trying to break in. That wasn’t supposed to be possible. Tuco was tied down tight, inaccessible at the outer door and elevator to anyone without an embedded Beam ID that matched the supposedly unhackable resident roster. There were two guards at the door and a lobby attendant. And how could anyone pick his lock? There was a manual piece to the lock, of course — a plain old ordinary thing that fell on a deadbolt, to provide a tangible feeling of security — but of course, if his link was down, that deadbolt would be the only game in town. The Beam-enabled locks and security wouldn’t be functioning. There was supposed to be a triple-redundancy in the system — a box inside the door that wasn’t wired into The Beam, plus a failsafe in the lock itself. The power supply was supposed to be self-contained. But despite all of that, Doc could hear someone picking with regular tools, as if the lock were nothing more than a stick shoved through a hole.

“Who’s there?” Doc called out, feeling stupid. It was the kind of thing people used to do in old movies, back before identifiers and Beam tracking. Before locks that you could command to repel a specific person from your door if you wanted… and if your link was up.

Instead of getting an answer, Doc watched as his front door burst open and a silhouette sprinted toward him. He saw lights on in the hallway.

The intruder was halfway toward him, running. Had he been discovered? The guy wasn’t fucking around. Was he here to wipe Doc’s memory for good? Or was he here to wipe Doc — as in “wiped from existence”?

The intruder’s thundering feet told Doc that the intruder hadn’t come for tea.

Doc turned, grabbed a lamp, and swung. He was swinging mostly blind in the dark apartment, but his swing hit paydirt. He felt his arms shudder as the lamp found something hard. The attacker grunted, staggered back, and slammed into the wall. A picture (a real one in a frame; his mother had given it to him and he’d laughed) fell at the attacker’s side. Doc heard glass shatter. He tried to see the intruder’s face by the wan city light through his windows, but it was too dark.

The attacker leapt up. The blow had only disoriented him.

Before his pursuer could gain his feet, Doc sprinted to the end of the hall at the back of his apartment in his boxers, yanked open the door at its end, and jumped into his car. Then he disengaged the magnetic docking lock, fired the engine, and whirred away, leaving his attacker’s silhouette in the door behind him.

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The Beam S1: Chapter Five

Nicolai sat to the side of the lectern, looking on as a cluster of glass eyes watched Isaac Ryan deliver the speech Nicolai had written for him. The speech was thick with rhetoric, because rhetoric worked. People didn’t want to hear new information. They wanted to hear the same old things over and over, until they began to sound true.

Nicolai listened to his words pouring from Isaac’s mouth, annoyed. Annoyed with himself for writing them, and annoyed with the people watching Isaac’s persuasive dark eyes on their tablets, walls, and countertops for believing them. There was nothing in the speech that was literally untrue, of course, but there was nothing in it that was really true, either. The whole thing was bullshit… shades of meaning cobbled together in such a way that, when taken together, appeared to say something.

Isaac’s speech explained how the Enterprise — his own party’s opposition — was only concerned with itself. It was and always had been the party of the selfish. Enterprise’s organizers had said, “We will not take care of you,” and people had flocked to their ranks. Those people couldn’t be blamed, said Nicolai’s words on Isaac’s lips. The party attracted gamblers who were happy to trade the security of aid (all expenses paid and credits supplied for living expenses, like in the Directorate) for a shot at greatness. But how many people among the Enterprise ever became great? How many “amazing creative talents” ever earned a more than a handful of credits’ worth of income? But on the other end, how many among the Enterprise starved because their party wouldn’t provide for them when they failed? How many were downtrodden because those in the Enterprise’s upper echelon wouldn’t reach down and help their brothers and sisters to stand?

Nicolai listened as Isaac attempted to soothe the Directorate unrest that had culminated in the riot at Natasha Ryan’s concert. Nicolai was particularly proud/ashamed of that bit of spin doctoring. “We forgive and understand those people who were responsible for causing the riot and seek only to help them rise up,” Isaac told the lenses in front of him. It was so perfect/hideous. Forgiving the rabble-rousers showed the Directorate’s compassionate heart. You can harm us and we will still forgive you, Isaac’s quote said, because we are family.

What a bunch of bullshit, thought Nicolai.

But that was true of politics in general, was it not? If Nicolai were an Enterprise speechwriter, he’d be doing the same things as he did for the Directorate, just doling out bullshit of a different flavor. He’d be writing words for Isaac’s brother Micah instead, telling the NAU that the Directorate were the greedy ones. They were the Robin Hoods who wanted to  tax the profits that Enterprise members had worked hard to earn from the sweat of their own brows and wills. Why should the Directorate (many of whom chose to sit around all day without working) benefit from the Enterprise’s intellect and guts?

“There is no perfect system,” Isaac said from the lectern. “There will always be problems, but we cannot draw flame from a match of unsteady premise. We cannot abandon those who are unable to succeed on their own, as the Enterprise does. The Directorate is committed to providing for our members — for every single one. You will never starve as a member of the Directorate. As more and more tasks become automated by AI and service robots, you will not truly need to work. We have the best of both worlds. We receive what we need without having to break our backs to get it. When turbulence approaches, always remember who we are and what we have. We cannot riot. Riots make us look like a mob. We are no such thing! We believe in our family, and our family is proud!”

None of it was untrue. Directorate members were not required to work. But it was also not really true, because a Directorate living was meager. You got a place to live, you got your services and healthcare taken care of, and you got a stipend for living expenses. But the technology that handled base tasks and made it possible not to work was a double-edged sword, because it gave members things to want. Too many Directorate party members spent their credits on gadgets, then found themselves short on food. So what did they do? They took some of those jobs back in order to earn extra credits. All of their work was based on a fixed income, with few legitimate chances for advancement. Nicolai couldn’t live like that. He was Directorate, but only in the way Isaac was. Both of their “fixed credit allowances,” based on their positions, were so high that it felt unlimited. Isaac had even found a slippery way to reclassify Natasha as Directorate. She was a self-made performer who’d come up Enterprise, but now received an exorbitant salary. The irony was that while her scrappiness had gotten Natasha to where she was, her flat pay rate meant that no matter whether her next album and holoconcerts thrived or flopped, she’d generate exactly the same number of credits.

There was something unappealing to Nicolai about guarantees. Risk — the Enterprise’s bread and butter, which the Directorate thought of as gambling — was more exciting. Risk felt like standing on the top of a cliff, feeling your heart beat out of your chest. You might die if you jumped from that cliff, and it was smarter to head over to the wading pool where things were safe. But Nicolai, who’d grown up wealthy, had fled Rome as it burned, trekking through the Wild East with only a pack and a crossbow. He knew the rewards that came from risk. But that had all ended when he’d arrived at the NAU border and met Isaac, and the other bookend had snapped into place. From rich to rich, from safe to safe. Nicolai’s rewarding reckless was lost in the forever between.

Still, Nicolai had that seed of adventure and self-determination deep inside him. He wore his black hair too shaggy for a man who could afford follicle-pausing treatments, and wore small, round glasses that had stopped being necessary a hundred years earlier with the advent of Lasik eye surgery. Nicolai could afford eyes that could see through walls, but he wore glasses and instead used his credits for creativity add-ons that were experimental at best and reckless at worst. He had a wetchip in his cortex that scanned his mind when he worked on his books, tried to draw or paint, or touched the keys of his piano. The chip watched the firing patterns that came with creativity, then fired those neurons while tuning down centers that seemed most responsible for internal criticism. “Seemed” was the operative word. Creativity was one of the least understood emergent properties, and tinkering with it was considered pseudoscience at best. Even his dealer, Doc, warned him to proceed slowly lest he do damage that couldn’t be undone, but Nicolai swore that every time he used his creativity chip, he found inspiration more easily. Each time, he got a little bit more out of his own way. Every day, he was inching closer to writing more stories and books… and maybe one day, fewer bullshit political speeches.

“The NAU, even today, still has the world’s only stable government,” said Isaac, looking earnestly at the glass eyes in front of him. “Our two parties were formed at a time of unrest, as our borders closed, as our enemies tried to storm our gates. And in the midst of that unrest, the Enterprise decided it was more important to fight over the resources we had and let the strongest survive. It was short-sighted then, and it’s short-sighted now. One citizen should not be rewarded if another must suffer. In the Directorate, we are all equal.”

Nicolai felt his gut tighten. That was the only outright lie in the speech. But it was okay; that particular lie had been told often enough that nobody knew it was a lie. Repetition had turned it true. The spirit of Directorate “equality” said that everyone was taken care of and had a chance to advance. In reality, “equality” meant a ton of low-level managers, number crunchers, data shufflers, and representatives from industries that could easily be automated, all juxtaposed with the highly paid Directorate elite. Nicolai himself was paid well, but there seemed to be a secret club above his pay grade, in the realm of the Isaacs and the Natashas. He’d heard Isaac and Natasha use the term “Beau Monde.” Although Nicolai probably wasn’t supposed to so much as know the phrase (he being merely in the 95th or so percentile), he suspected it referred to the truly elite — the one percent of the population that possessed 99 percent of the wealth.

But as Nicolai had written and Isaac had said, no system was perfect. There were a lot of starving artists and failed entrepreneurs in the Enterprise. Maybe the Directorate system was the best that could be done. Nicolai couldn’t make up his mind. In an ideal world, he’d knock down the iron rule that said you chose one party or the other, and would plunk himself squarely in the middle.

Nicolai looked out across the live audience — a group of several hundred Directorate who’d come to the Orpheum to watch Isaac Ryan speak in person. Their faces were pleased and optimistic, their mouths set in determination. A few nodded along. Part of their fervor was probably due to the add-on Isaac had in his throat — a little gadget that caused his voice to reverberate at the most psychologically persuasive frequencies — but mostly it was Nicolai’s words, coming from Isaac’s mouth. One day Nicolai would finish his novel. One day he’d be known for something other than speeches… if, in fact, he got any credit for the speeches at all.

Nicolai’s fingers twitched — an unconscious gesture he made when he wanted time to hurry.

He’d written the speech; he knew it was almost over. When it was, the crowd would applaud (of course; he could see them dying to shower Isaac with praise right now) and for another night, the Directorate’s image in the minds of its members would be secure. They would sleep having decided to remain in the Directorate when Shift came. Their earlier dissatisfaction would seem less vital, less insistent. Groups who had previously felt inequity would feel kinship instead.

In the glow of post-speech adoration, Nicolai would shake a few hands as Isaac liked him to, then run off on a very important errand. Listening to the speech hadn’t moved him toward pacification. Listening to his own hypocrisy coming from Isaac’s lips made him want to do something very, very Enterprise. He wanted nothing more right now than to run over to Doc’s and pick up his newest purchase — a 2.0 version of his current wetchip. He’d paid a fortune for it and was dying to try it out, to explode into an impulsive, reckless, unstable tsunami of creativity. The new chip was supposed to be safer, deeper, and much, much more effective.

He’d had a frustrating few days. First the riot at Natasha’s concert, then the panicked call from Isaac. He hadn’t been able to reach Kai Dreyfus, who not only calmed him but also helped him to think. Kai knew all about Nicolai’s implant. She’d always encouraged him to write his books and make his art. And sure, she was a whore, and a whore would tell her clients whatever they wanted to hear. But Nicolai, always a good judge of character, suspected that Kai might just be the only honest person in his life.

But everything would be fine once he got out there and got his new implant. It wouldn’t matter that he’d done plenty of his own whoring here tonight.

Onstage, Isaac closed his speech.

Applause.

Heads nodded in the live audience, just as they would be nodding in Directorate households all across the NAU.

Nicolai smiled a plastic smile, shook hands, and muscled through too many minutes of mingling. Then he slipped out, hailed a hovercab, and soared through the city toward Doc’s apartment.

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The Beam S1: Chapter Four

It was only 8am, and already the streets were filled with assholes.

Thomas “Doc” Stahl sat in a cab, looking down at his wrist. As he straightened his arm and rolled it back, the tattoo faded away. It was an unpopular upgrade, and people who didn’t know Doc sometimes commented that looking at his wrist to see the time was something that made him look stupid, not retro. The local time was on every canvas, every surface in any public building, in the corner of every heads-up display (retinal, projected, or even the poorest VR glasses in the ghetto), and available for the asking at just about any place in the NAU. Most people in the better parts of the city had cochlear implants for audio calls, and even some of the bums had ancient phones. The time was on every digital billboard, every screen.

But Doc hadn’t gotten the watch upgrade because he wanted to see the time on his wrist. He’d gotten it because he liked the affect of looking down. The gesture conveyed class when he wanted it to, and it conversely conveyed “fuck you, hurry up” about a thousand times better than anything else a man could do. People hadn’t worn functioning watches for over fifty years, but tapping one’s wrist still meant “let’s hurry up” in the same way people still referred to “getting something on tape” when they meant making a recording. And looking down at a cocked wrist was still singularly insulting in a way that checking a display could never be. It told the person he was talking to that he gave less than a shit about whatever they were telling him, and that they were just wasting his precious time.

“Run them down,” Doc told the driver.

“Hey, they’ve got a right to protest,” the balding man in the driver’s seat said without turning back.

Doc drew a deep breath, then exhaled, watching the line of protesters through the cab’s window. He touched the glass, brought up a tint panel, and dragged a screen across the glass to block his view. The cabbie would, of course, be sympathetic. Here he was, carting some uppity Enterprise man around in his cab while a bunch of his fellow low-end Directorate protested the same uppity Enterprise bastards. Doc wanted to argue — to point out to the cabbie that every single one of those protesters could have chosen to make their own way in the Enterprise instead of accepting a fixed government dole that was barely adequate — but his words would fall on deaf ears and possibly result in an “accidentally” higher cab fare. Directorate members didn’t want to hear that they’d made the wrong choice. And you know what? Doc thought. They wouldn’t move over to Enterprise when Shift came, either. It was easier to bitch about how the system was unfair and suggest taxing the wealthy members of the Enterprise so that Directorate stipends could be increased. All while half of the fucking Directorate sat on their asses and didn’t work at all, because so much could be automated.

“Look, fella,” said Doc. “I’m not trying to be uppity. But I’ve got an eight-thirty sixteen blocks down, and that parade ain’t getting any thinner. Can we go around?”

The cabbie looked at the meter and they both watched the fare click up. “Not really.”

“Can I ask you a question?” said Doc.

“Hell, you can do anything,” said the cabbie.

“You don’t have to work. This cab could drive itself. So why do it?” Doc wasn’t trying to be rude. He wanted to know. Besides, Doc — always an entrepreneur and a fierce determiner of his own future — believed there was a little Enterprise logic in everyone.

The cabbie opened the window and stuck out his arm. “Scintillating conversation,” he said.

“But it could have an AI driver, and you could sit in your house and…”

“Sometimes the dole ain’t enough,” said the cabbie. He hooked his arm over the headrest and looked Doc over from top to bottom. Doc was wearing jeans, boots, and a simple suitcoat, but it was all expensive. Doc’s shoulder-length blonde hair had a sheen that could only be maintained by nanos. “Not that you’d know that.”

Doc wanted to debate, but it was pointless. The cabbie had already judged him, just like Directorate protesters always leapt to judge the well-off Enterprise every six years, in the weeks preceding Shift. He wanted to argue that he’d scraped his way up from the bottom, but he stopped when he remembered that he was talking to a man who’d taken a job that existed solely so that he could take it. If the cabbie died, AI would drive the cab the next day and the city would save money. It was a loop that existed only within itself.

Doc fished a twenty-credit note from his pocket and pushed it toward the driver. The fare stood at eight-seventy. Doc told him to keep the change and announced his plans to walk the rest of the way. As he exited the cab, the driver gave him an angry look. Doc had meant the tip as a make-peace gesture, but of course the driver had taken it as condescension.

Doc skirted the protesters, stuffing his annoyance low, figuring they were doing him a favor. Yes, the streets would be thick with assholes for a while, but Doc felt that there was no objective “good” or “bad” about anything. A self-made person understood that it wasn’t what happened to you in life that mattered, but what you did with those happenings. So yes, this all meant opportunity. The protestors wanted an end to decadence and inequality between the rich (who could afford the best upgrades) and the poor (who had no upgrades and accessed The Beam via old consoles and handhelds). Doc didn’t usually sell upgrades to the truly rich or truly poor; he sold mainly to the upper-middle, middle, and lower classes. This hullabaloo meant he had an opportunity to show the poorer of his customers that they could, indeed, afford upgrades on his easy payment plans. And for the upper tier of customers? Well, they’d buy fancier upgrades than ever if they thought their rights were being threatened. They’d consume out of fear. They’d consume to justify their previous consumption. And they’d consume to raise their middle fingers — to show the protestors that they intended to do whatever the fuck they wanted.

Doc cocked his arm and the nanobot-generated tattoo reappeared on his wrist, seconds ticking off near where his forearm began to thicken. He had fifteen minutes. And there wasn’t a cab — hover, wheeled, or pedi; human- or AI-driven — to be seen. The rails would take him too far out of his way. He’d have to run, and he was going to be late.

Doc hoofed it toward Xenia Labs, referring to his wrist every few minutes like a compulsion. Twelve blocks left. Eight blocks. By the time he had five blocks remaining, his time was up and he was sweaty as hell. He sold an upgrade that short-circuited perspiration and cooled the user via a rather toxic coolant circulated and (hopefully) contained by nanos, but Doc didn’t have it. Now, approaching Xenia, he wished he did, despite the occasional disastrous side-effect. He was going to look and smell disgusting. Then, because he decided he might as well embarrass himself fully, Doc tapped his ear and rattled off the voice message to Nicolai that he kept forgetting to send. Nicolai had been bugging him for days. Doc let him know that his new upgrade was in and that he could stop harassing Doc about it and come pick it up. With Doc running, Nicolai would get the message and hear his dealer panting. Not exactly the professional image Doc hoped to convey, but what the hell.

He kept running, his boots smacking pavement. He arrived at Xenia ten minutes late, rushed into a bathroom, and splashed cold water on his hot face. The bathroom didn’t have a groomer, so he ran his fingers through his blonde mane. His suitcoat was dark. Hopefully it would hide his sweat-stained pits. He took a final look in the mirror, trying to feather his hair away from the sides of his face where he refused to stop sweating. He failed. Doc’s hair stayed plastered to his skin like a dark blond halo.

That done, he crossed the hall to Xenia’s suite and trotted up to the receptionist. The girl behind the desk had three different clips on her ears. Doc wondered if she ever hit the wrong one and ended up rattling off her hilarious drunken stories to her boss instead of her girlfriend by mistake.

“Hey, sweetheart,” said Doc. “My name is Thomas — although people call me Doc — and I’m here to see…”

“Oh, yes!” the girl said brightly. “You’re the salesman. You’re early. Mr. Killian is in with a distributor. I apologize that he’s a little behind. He’s been tied up with a bunch of loose ends. The other day, some protestors beat in the door of our warehouse and disturbed a swarm of nanos that had been developed for police use. It was almost a disaster. You wouldn’t believe the mess, but luckily nobody was hurt, and now…”

Doc held up a hand. “Hang on a second, darlin’. I’m here to see Mr. Nero.” Every other Friday, Doc stopped by to see Nero for more stock and to see what was new, if anything. Nero was a prick of immeasurable proportions and despised even the slightest delay, but he also cut Doc a tremendous wholesale deal since Doc moved so many upgrades. When Nero wasn’t being pricky (which was rare), he sometimes told Doc that none of the other independent salesmen could sell to the wide spectrum that Doc did. Most of the reps who sold Beam-enabled personal upgrades catered to the low or high end of the market, but Doc could sell to both and everyone in between. Doc sold rudimentary tablets and handhelds to people below the line, but also sold memory and creativity enhancers to those near the top of the food chain. He didn’t discriminate where profit was concerned

The usual desk jockey — an uppity little cocksucker named Templeton — knew Doc and would have rebuked him for his lateness. But Templeton wasn’t here, and his replacement had no clue.

“Oh, Mr. Nero isn’t here,” said the girl. “He’s dealing with the police. The swarm, like I said. You’ll be meeting with Mr. Killian. Have a seat over there.” She pointed to a chair in the waiting area, near a plant.

Doc’s heartbeat was still coming down from his run, so he forced himself to breathe slowly and sit. While he waited, he tried to fan his armpits and cool off. He wasn’t late after all. This Mr. Killian wasn’t even ready for him. Doc wondered if Nero had told Killian to give him his usual discount. He’d be pissed if he had to pay full price and would grill Nero about it in two weeks if he did. Nero had a big bark, but ultimately spoke credits. If Doc threatened to move and start buying from Yeardley, he’d immediately cough up a rebate to cover the discount.

Ten minutes later, a tall man in a white lab coat with dark black hair appeared at the end of a hallway and greeted Doc. Doc rose and shook the man’s bony, clammy hand.

“I’m sorry we’re so chaotic today,” said Killian. “We had a bit of an incident with the protestors, see, and…”

“I heard,” said Doc. He thought of adding something about how obnoxious the protestors were to grease the conversational skids, but he’d yet to gauge the man’s political temperature.

“Well, it’s led to a bit of a kerfuffle. Anyway, I apologize. Don’t let your first impression get to you! We’re ordinarily very composed and professional around here, and if you’re going to…”

Doc laughed good-naturedly. “It’s hardly my first time here.”

Killian stopped and looked at Doc, confused. “Really? I understood I was introducing you to our product line.”

Doc shrugged. “Have you gotten new products in lately?”

“Oh yes.” Killian’s confused look vanished, something delighted replaced it. “We get new shipments constantly. The pace at which we’re cracking the neural nut, so to speak, is staggering. Once the Series Six nano software patch was developed and we learned that we could up-or-down-regulate CNS neurons, the cortex became our playground. What Einstein said about how we only use ten percent of our brains? Well, that leaves a lot to uncover. I can’t discuss it all yet because it’s preliminary, but let’s just say that what’s becoming possible by the week has us all quite excited.” Killian’s eyes had grown wide. He seemed positively giddy with discovery.

“I haven’t seen the Series Six nanos,” said Doc.

“Really? How long have you been in this game?”

Doc gave his disarming smile. “Long enough.”

“Well, they’re hardly new,” said Killian. “But of course, you wouldn’t call them Series Six, would you?” Doc had a moment in which he thought Killian was going to slap his own forehead. “You’d call them Paradigm.”

“Oh, of course,” said Doc. But he’d never heard of Paradigm nanos, either.

“Anyway, I don’t mean to imply that it’s all about nanos. The neural mapping field is also very promising, of course,” Killian added, making for a doorway at the end of the hall that Doc had never been through before. He’d thought it was a utility room.

“Of course,” said Doc.

They reached the door. Killian bared his arm and allowed a concealed scanner to read his Beam ID, then used his fingers to draw a complicated pattern on a swipe screen near the door. Doc was looking directly at Killian’s hands, but he’d never be able to replicate the pattern. It seemed almost random.

The door beeped and hissed open. “Well, come on in,” said Killian, leading the way.

Once inside the room, Doc’s breath evaporated. The lab was stark white, and every surface chattered with Beam activity. Even the floor under Doc’s boots hummed in response. The room was filled with devices Doc had never seen before, arranged on what almost looked like display racks. There were long work benches circling the room’s perimeter. Some of these seemed to be staffed by electronics workers who were peering at tiny devices through magnifiers, but other areas looked like biological wet benches. Doc saw vials of reagents, manual and auto pipettes, and what looked like jars filled with gel.

“Most of the actual production is automated,” said Killian, “but for research — at the macro and not nano level, of course — it’s all done by human hands unless it’s too precise or dangerous. Our technicians all have the latest ocular implants. You’ve seen these?” Killian snatched something from a rolling cart and then extended his hand. Two eyeballs stared up at Doc.

At first he was repulsed, but Doc couldn’t resist reaching out and taking one of the things between his fingers. It was soft and squishy and slimy, exactly like it looked.

“Interior is carbon nanotubes,” said Killian, dropping the remaining eye to the floor and then stomping on it with his shoe. He reached down and retrieved the eye, which was completely unharmed. “Just let Moe try to poke you in the eyes with these suckers,” he said, miming a Three Stooges eye-jab. Hardware is all NextGen biologic, grown with synthetic neurons and innately dependent on resident Series Six nanos.”

He tossed the other eyeball to Doc, who caught it. Doc looked down, shocked. The best ocular upgrades Nero had shown him were either small sensors implanted at the back of the cornea or full robotic orbs made of glass.

“The software is uploaded via BioFi, of course, same as your skills downloads.”

“Skills downloads?” He ignored “BioFi,” which seemed to be the less important of the two totally foreign things Killian had said.

Killian waved his hand. “Like learning ballet or whatever.”

“Oh,” said Doc, mystified.

“And that’s the other thing. This is BioFi version 7.6, which enables zottabytes of data to be transmitted in minutes. We could operate at much lower speeds and fidelities for skills transfers, of course,” Killian continued, “but we do still get better fidelity with a hard connection. And I don’t have to tell you what the arrival of 7.6 means for the transfer of meta-neural data.”

“You can say that again,” said Doc, feigning a laugh.

“It’s just all so exciting to us,” said Killian, still giddy. “And for you too, if you’re to educate your customers. You know about the dislocation paradigm?”

“Well…”

Killian was so excited, Doc didn’t even have to pull a response from his ass. The scientist rushed to explain: “With an upload, I mean. Where people worry about emergent properties like consciousness, identity, and all of that, because who wants to become just bits in an archive, without being who they were before?”

“Not me,” said Doc.

“Exactly. But what we’ve done, thanks to the arrival of 7.6 and the speeds it allows (especially when tethered; you don’t have to go wireless), is to create a buffer during the transfer process, allowing neural data to exist not just within the body and not just within The Beam, but effectively in both, with sixteen separate redundancies to ensure that…”

A bell-like noise cut Killian off. He and Doc turned to look at a rectangular screen that had appeared on the wall to Doc’s right. The screen showed the girl Doc had met at the front desk, still seated. Something had changed in her manner. Before, she had been bubbly and exuberant, but now she seemed somehow bothered.

“Um… Mr. Killian?” she said.

Killian smiled. “Yes, Vanessa!”

“Um… there’s someone here to see you.”

“Well, I’m in with a client now,” he said, then swiped the screen closed. A moment later, it opened again.

“Mr. Killian?”

“Yeeeees…” 

“You really should talk to him.”

“Well, then, Vanessa,” said Killian, annoyed, gesturing toward Doc. “Maybe you’d like to explain to Mr. Greenley why…”

But of course, Doc wasn’t Mr. Greenley. He suddenly understood why Killian thought it was his first time here, why the girl thought he’d arrived early rather than late, and why none of what Killian was taking for granted made a molecule of sense to him.

“That’s the issue,” said Vanessa, looking side to side nervously. “The person out here to see you is Mr. Greenley.”

Behind Doc, a magnetic door lock clicked into place, and an armored guard began walking toward him.

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The Beam S1: Chapter Three

The trick to being a good escort, Kai knew, was to make the man she was with feel like he was the only person in the world she’d ever care about. That meant she couldn’t discuss other clients, leave remnants or mementos of other clients around, half-ass her affection, or talk business. For the time she was booked, Kai became her client’s girlfriend, wife, confidant — whatever he wanted. She kept extensive records of each client’s background in a characteristics file in her canvas. Subtle cameras in her apartment and embedded in her retinas recorded every second of their every interaction, and a sophisticated AI algorithm stripped the footage for relevant details.

Client A had three kids. His oldest knew about his dalliances, but didn’t care.

Client B had a cluster of moles on his arm that Kai had once said looked like the constellation Orion, and he’d thought that was delightfully clever.

Client C had insecurities surrounding his manner of dress; she’d once innocently commented on his shoes and incited a mopey incident that it had taken her hours to rescue him from.

Client D liked to fuck her from behind every single time, because he wanted to pretend that she was his wife, who he was desperately attracted to but who’d turned icy after their only child.

When a night with Kai ended, it was like she and the client pressed a giant pause button on their relationship. When the client booked her again, their relationship resumed. They always picked up exactly where they’d left off. An intuitive program in Kai’s canvas even told a ‘bot, through her Beam connection, to arrange the apartment exactly as it had been when the client had last left. A man could leave a half-eaten pizza in Kai’s fridge, then wander back a month later and pull a piece from the fridge as if it were the same pizza. If he’d left crusts in the box, the same number of crusts would still be there, just as his memory told him they would be.

Being a great escort was only half about the sex. Men didn’t just need sex from her. If all they wanted was physical release, they could beat off. Kai knew her clients didn’t come simply to insert tab A into slot B. They came to feel wanted, to feel desired, to feel understood and comfortable. So yes, she had to move as they wanted and do the things that pleased them. But she also had to stock her racks with the towels they liked, have their preferred sheets on the bed (in both thread count and color), and set her walls to project the art most pleasing to their eye. Each client wasn’t just a man. He was a project.

So when Nicolai’s call came through, his identity rang into a small cochlear implant in Kai’s ear, too quiet for her current client — a new man who liked it a little rough — to hear. And because she was busy smacking her new client around, she couldn’t take Nicolai’s call even though she very much wanted to. Nicolai was her favorite… but right now, this man was her boyfriend. And because Kai was her new client’s girlfriend at the moment, she wouldn’t get calls from other men because she was his and his alone. So as Kai’s petite frame sat atop her man’s back in red lingerie with her black hair swinging in her face, she sighed internally as she subtly cocked her head to decline the call.

Her current boyfriend, she thought as she slapped him across the back with a small black crop, was an asshole. And playing coy.

First of all, his name clearly wasn’t Ralph McGuinness, as he’d told her it was. Kai’s AI software had already filtered that name through the Beam servers and found nobody close to his description. Second, the AI had already analyzed the timber of his voice and determined (quite redundantly, in Kai’s opinion) that he was probably lying. None of this was really unusual. All of Kai’s clients were wealthy, and hence were more often than not people of significant standing. Many of them were high-ranking officials within either Enterprise or Directorate. Those kinds of men didn’t want people to know they visited an escort, but it usually didn’t matter because Kai always found them out no matter what bullshit story they fed her. It was her business to know. The more she knew about a client, the better she could satisfy him. If she knew, for instance, that a man who claimed to own a textile company was in fact up for a senate seat, she’d know those days he was in most need of relief and which topics she should and should not broach. Knowing a man’s true identity helped her know which opinions and leanings she should pretend to have, and guess at how empowered or subservient to be.

And of course, if Kai knew a man’s true identity, she could attach video of the acts, infidelities and atrocities they committed together to those identities in her database. A bit of information like “A man calling himself ‘Ron Barber’ likes to dress in young girls’ panties” was of limited use, but “The Commissioner of Such and Such likes to dress in young girls’ panties” was quite valuable indeed. Kai had never, ever, ever revealed any of the millions of secrets she’d collected over the years… but a girl had to have a Plan B (or a nest egg) saved for the inevitable rainy day.

She looked down at her client’s back, then rose up enough to turn him over onto his back. He had a handsome face with a square jaw, with a five o’clock shadow spread across it. He had hazel eyes and sandy blonde hair. His chest and arms were well-muscled. In most ways, he was an ideal client for Kai, if for no other reason than that she would probably have been attracted to him anyway. He’d come at her with such flair and bravado that she’d decided on impulse to quote him twice her normal rate. He hadn’t blinked. So he was rich, and probably connected.

“Have you had enough?” said Kai.

“Not even close,” he said.

She slapped him across the face. “Speak when spoken to, Ralph,” she said.

He smiled — not at her command, but at the name. He knew she knew, and found it hilarious.

She hit him again, harder.

The smile widened.

He’d hired her for the entire evening and night. Seventeen hours. “Ralph” had picked her up at five, and she was his until ten in the morning. They’d gone to a ridiculously expensive dinner, and he’d become moderately lubricated with a multi-hundred-credit bottle of champagne. Then they’d headed to the Aphora, where they’d watched what Kai felt was perhaps the most raw, heartbreaking performance from Natasha Ryan she’d seen in all the years Kai had spent following her. Then those assholes had started booing, and things had quickly fallen apart. Kai had been totally shocked by the incident, but throughout it all “Ralph” had seemed totally nonplussed. That in itself was a clue to something. Kai wondered what her canvas’s AI would make of it, if anything.

As she straddled her client with her hand cocked back, Kai looked down at the mystery man. She probably didn’t truly need to know who he was. She might never see him again, and he might simply be a horny man with a ton of credits to blow. But Kai didn’t like a puzzle she couldn’t crack, and so far, she hadn’t been able to crack this one. She had a tiny nano-enhancement in the index finger of her right hand that allowed her to read Beam IDs without a scanner, but the man either didn’t have one (unthinkable; he was too conservative-looking to be an Organa) or had had it encrypted. So she’d used another enhancement to sample DNA from a piece of his hair, but again, she came up empty. It made no sense that he’d be off the grid. He had to be hiding something. But how? And why?

“Take off that bra,” he said, reaching up to paw at Kai’s small breasts through the lace.

“I give the orders here,” she said, then slipped her bra off and tied it around her client’s head at the mouth, halfway gagging him.

Kai hid it well, but she was pissed. Or rather, she was indignant. After her years in this business (more years than she’d care to admit, though she looked twenty-five at most), she’d come to see information as an entitlement. “Ralph” wasn’t doing anything overt to keep her out, but the mere fact that he represented an impenetrable wall irked her something fierce. Kai wanted to hit him again to vent her frustration, but he’d like it too much.

Even if she didn’t need to know who he was, she absolutely did.

Kai climbed off her client. He twitched to the side, reaching for her ass. She dodged the hand, then slapped it away. Oh yes, he was quite the character. He couldn’t decide if he was the sub or the dom. Or perhaps he was the bad boy who was an asshole… and hence needed to be taught a lesson.

“Where are you going?” he slurred around the bra in his mouth.

“What fucking business is it of yours?” She gave him the smallest of sexy smiles, to make sure he understood that this was all still just part of the play.

“Come back here,” he said.

Kai turned, fast, and grabbed her client by the chin. “You’re bad,” she said. “You ask too many questions.”

“I’m bad,” he mumbled between his compressed cheeks. Further down, his biology indicated that the way she was treating him wasn’t a problem.

“I’m going to have to punish you.”

“Oh no,” he said, falling back onto the bed.

Kai reached into the endtable and removed a pair of handcuffs. Before closing the drawer, she also palmed a small vial with a tiny sponge on its top.

“I’ll have to restrain you,” she said, securing the first handcuff to the headboard.

“Mercy,” said the man, now smiling openly.

Kai straddled him to reach the second cuff and he responded beneath her. As she raised his arm to secure the second cuff, she discreetly swabbed her neck with the sponge on the vial. Then, as she lowered her face toward his, she tucked the vial under the mattress.

The man inhaled, drawing her scent. As he did, his eyelids fluttered.

“Hey Ralph,” said Kai.

“Hey,” he said. “I’ve been bad.”

“Very bad. Kiss my neck.”

She pushed her neck against his mouth, moaning. It would take at least a half hour for the engineered pheromone to soften his brainwaves, but it didn’t matter. She was a girl of her word, and the man had paid for a service. So she removed the rest of their clothing and delivered.

Afterward, with “Ralph” satisfied and flagging, Kai resumed kissing his neck, giving him more of the pheromone. After a while his movements grew sluggish. His eyelids started to flutter again as he drifted into something between sleep and wakefulness.

“Hey Ralph,” she said.

“Mmm,” he said.

“Relaxed?”

“Mmm,” he repeated.

Kai reached behind him, untied the bra gag, and tossed it aside. She ran a red-painted nail down his chest, idly. “What’s your name, beautiful?”

“Ralph.”

Kai laughed girlishly. “No, silly. What is it really?”

Ralph started to snore lightly. She shook him.

“What’s your name, baby?”

“Ralph,” he slurred.

Then he fell asleep. But it was okay. His brainwaves should have loosened even if his tongue hadn’t, and he’d be imperturbably asleep for hours now. She could get what she wanted directly from the source.

“Let’s get you online, ‘Ralph,’ ” she said, picking up her diagnostic tablet and setting it beside him on the bed. Something inside her was sizzling. It shouldn’t bother her so much that she couldn’t get “Ralph’s” identity, but the only people she’d run into before with a level of identity encryption she hadn’t been able to hack like a cheap lock were a few unlucky subjects during her dalliances as an amateur assassin. Usually, when someone was locked up this tight, someone else, somewhere, wanted him dead. What were this man’s secrets? And if she didn’t discover them, might those same secrets come back to haunt her, as a girl who’d once given him a good time?

Kai unfolded her sleeping client’s hand, laid it on the tablet screen, and scanned it. No identity came up. No surprise there, but it wasn’t what she was after. Usually, a person could access their personal array of upgrade diagnostics via their Beam ID, voice recognition, retinal scan, or fingerprint/palmprint, and usually those first-degree cross-pollinations were vulnerable to one such as Kai. “Ralph’s” Beam ID might have been hidden, sure… but unless whoever had done his encryption was especially thorough, his handprint and Beam ID should still both be connected — not to his identity, but to each other — in the lesser-protected protocols within his upgrades.

Kai swiped the surface of the wall behind the bed. A screen appeared. She watched the tablet scan his hand, then began poking around in the diagnostic tools. He’d had a few upgrades (there were several types of nanos in his system and he seemed to have an extra memory buffer, for instance) but she couldn’t access stats on any of them. Kai tried to use his palmprint to identify him to the system, but found she’d need a password.

And… FUCK. There was a firewall between her canvas, the tablet, and the lowest identification protocols. So much for finding his Beam ID through a backdoor.

Kai looked down at the naked man on her bed, lying on his stomach with one strong arm up. She wondered if any of his muscularity was natural, or if it was all the work of nanos. Even as a woman who’d cheated her way to a flat stomach and gravity-defying breasts, she found herself strangely judgmental of Ralph’s muscles. It was probably because she was feeling so resentful about his secrets, but she suddenly thought that if he hadn’t grown those arms himself, he was a fucking pussy.

Yes, she was letting it get to her. But Kai Dreyfus was a girl who always got what she wanted, and she didn’t like this one bit. The idea that someone had put up such a thorough firewall around this man’s true identity made her wary. Who was this man on her bed? What was he up to? Was he just here for a good time, or did he know something about Kai? Did he know the secrets she’d taken over the years — and if so, what might he be planning to do to retrieve them?

She slapped his sleeping face lightly, playfully.

“What are you hiding, buttercup?” she asked him.

Regardless, it would be prudent to wipe his memory. It would be impossible to do a decent job with all the protections in place, but she might be able to force a soft reset with a few nanos who could go in and manually induce some light damage to his hippocampus. She’d have to be careful. Too many nanos and he’d end up burned. She didn’t want him burned, just mildly forgetful. Then she wanted to get him the fuck out of her apartment.

Kai pulled up the diagnostic screen, checked for perimeter protection at his ears, and found none. Then she pulled a small lancet from a sterile pouch, slid it into a doser attached to a nano pack, and gave instructions to six scavengers. She pushed the lancet into the skin behind his ear, tossed it into the garbage, and started to clean. She could have the doorman take him away. She’d owe the doorman a quickie for the favor, but it was okay. The doorman was kind of hot.

Just as Kai was about to retrieve her tablet, something on the screen caught her eye. It looked like a software tag left by the developer who’d put her mystery man’s protections in place. She chuckled. Watch it be Doc. But of course, that was stupid. Doc didn’t deal in upgrades this sophisticated.

But when she looked closer, she saw that it wasn’t an identifier tag at all. It was a prime sequence — a piece of code that was meant to form an interface with another piece from an external source. It meant he was prepped for an upgrade that could be taken on and off of his body, like enhanced glasses. But as much as she tapped her tablet and searched her mind, Kai couldn’t place the prime sequence. It certainly wasn’t for enhanced glasses.

Mystified, she entered the code into her canvas and sent it to her network on The Beam.

The response returned three words that, to Kai, meant nothing but smelled like poison: Stark Centurion Program.

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The Beam: S1 Chapter One

Hey there Outlaw,

We’re going to be running chapters of The Beam, first Season One E1, then the same for S2E1. These are going to come fast and furious, with a recap in between them, then we’ll be at Season 2. You’re going to be very, very happy!

Enjoy:

The Beam: S1 Chapter One

Of all the truths and lies perpetrated about Natasha Ryan in The Beam news feeds and so-called independent media, the only story that truly bothered Natasha was the one claiming her voice was enhanced by an add-on called an Audibox.

Rumor said that once, when Natasha had gone in for a resurfacing of the skin on her long neck and aristocratic chin (a job nanobots were notoriously bad at, given that it involved so many dying surface cells), she’d discreetly called a high-end enhancement dealer and ordered an implant that would subtly tune the reverberations of her larynx and make her perfect pitch that much more perfect. Beam reporters didn’t have details on exactly how the Audibox worked (seeing as its existence was a damnable lie), but they claimed it worked via biofeedback and that Natasha had needed to train herself to use it — to hold discreet notes in her mind so the Audibox could help her produce them. But that was utter and total bullshit. If she’d have to train herself to use a device, why wouldn’t she use that same time to train herself to sing properly instead?

None of the other lies bothered Natasha nearly as much. The gossip sheets claimed she’d cheated on Isaac with his brother. They claimed she’d been so early to try nanobot injections (nearly predating The Beam’s 1.5 iteration, back when it was known as the Crossbrace project) that she’d been over forty when her first album had dropped — a fact that would make her almost a hundred today. Both were bullshit. She’d cheated, but never any of the times the press had accused her of it and never with Micah. And when she’d released Via Persephone in ’36, she’d been twenty, as claimed. And as to the rest? Well, Natasha denied most of what came up about her on sheets inside The Beam, but the truth was that most of those stories were true. It was hard to argue too much without losing the ability to look yourself in the eye, so Natasha usually allowed her winning smile to speak for her, neither denying nor accepting.

As she stood in the spotlight on the Aphora Theater’s stage, the footlights nearly blinded her to the crowd. Still, she could see them well enough to know what her unenhanced voice (still raw and naked, as had been her signature since her debut) was doing to them. A girl with Natasha’s credits and social circle couldn’t be blamed for having a filter lens installed while she was getting a surgical eye lift, or for directing her circulating nanobots to spend extra time on her rod cells so as to see better in the dark. Because oh… what she could see! The dress circle in the front, decked in the very best finery, hung from her every note, their eyes wet and dreamy. The main floor (decked in still-decent finery) leaned forward, their lips slightly parted, occasionally holding hands. Even the lottery and contest winners at the back (in mismatched suits that shone at the elbows; God bless their hearts for trying) were rapt with attention.

Natasha didn’t need any goddamn Audibox in her throat to sound amazing. She was Natasha Fucking Ryan. Some singers could shatter glass with their voices, but Natasha Fucking Ryan could shatter hearts. She hadn’t risen to fame. She’d taken fame by the balls and demanded her due. Back then, in 2036, she’d been a fat girl with a dream, standing on stage as nature had made her. Today she was thin, supple, beautiful, and would live longer — and yes, she had had some help, but her voice hadn’t changed. Her pitch hadn’t been enhanced, nor the power of her songs altered. No one wrote Natasha’s lyrics other than herself, and while the source of the soul-tearing torment beneath her songs had changed, the torment itself remained. The people watching her performance would never know the elite nature of her daily hardships, but they all knew what it was like to be human. And in the end, human was human.

Natasha held up her arms, raising her voice an octave, increasing her volume precisely without artificial help. She held it, cascaded down, and ended in an elasticized note that trembled to a whisper. The crowd followed her movements, their eyes and chins lowering subconsciously. She could almost see pieces of their souls wisp from their chests and float away. Right now, Natasha could make them do anything. Right now, every person watching — live or via the Beam feed — was totally in love with her, as they always had been.

Natasha brought her hands down as her voice shimmered away. She lowered her head, looking toward the foot of the stage. Her posture caved, curling her shoulders down and forward, defeated. The note collapsed, then died. The lighting director dimmed the lights on cue. The last thing the crowd saw in the faltering light were Natasha’s eyes — her deep green irises, soulful enough to penetrate all the way to the cheap seats — as they wet, as they fell, as the crowd hushed.

The spotlight winked out. The stage fell dark. For a moment, there was nothing, not even a whisper. The world had vanished.

Then, all at once, the hall erupted in applause. The house lights came up, and Natasha watched as the crowd stood, beating their hands together, most of their faces plastered with tears. In the back, where inhibitions were lower, the questionably dressed attendees jumped and clapped overhead, cheering, whistling, crying out. The stage light went bright. Natasha bowed. A rose landed at her feet, followed by another. A full bouquet.

Natasha bowed again, her heart full.

The few people who hadn’t already stood came to their feet. Their faces didn’t look reluctant or goaded; they looked overwhelmed. It had taken them a while to rise because they hadn’t felt emotionally capable of standing. These last applauded slowly and quietly, because it was all they could muster. Yes, Natasha had done her job well.

She bowed again and again, letting her face portray more exultation and overwhelm than she actually felt. The room’s emotional swell was impressive, but adoration had long ago stopped giving Natasha a high. These days, it merely saved her from depression, and got her back to normal.

She could hear a few people in the crowd calling her name.

Natasha, we love you!

Natasha, you’re beautiful! 

Get off the stage, bitch!

Her head jerked up. Something else landed on the stage amidst the roses. It was a tomato. An honest-to-God tomato.

Natasha wasn’t the only person who’d heard the anonymous heckler. All across the crowd, heads searched the room, looking to see who dared to ruin the mood and the moment. The voice had seemed to have come from Natasha’s right. But then from the other side, a chorus of boos burst out, becoming a taunting chant.

Natasha was turning to find the source of the discord when some sort of heavy rubber ball struck the stage at her side and skittered away, making her jump. Boos bounced through the crowd from every direction. Natasha spied a few of the people making the boos, hands clapped to mouths and faces angry. The offenders were among the most shabbily dressed, their appearances unenhanced, the grit of below-the-line living embedded in their skin. There were only a few of them, but they were so loud … and they looked so angry. It was a species of anger Natasha vaguely remembered but had mostly forgotten: the anger she’d once had for those who had plenty when she’d had so little. It was the anger of a young girl whose family had barely gotten by — who’d seen the way the rich got richer during the disaster years, while the rest of the world crumbled.

Now, that same anger was booing her. Hating her. Throwing things at her.

A shoe struck the stage. Who would throw a shoe? How would they ever get home? The shoe was heavy — someone’s idea of a dress shoe simply because it was black. The shoe nearly hit Natasha’s foot. She jumped back, shocked.

The man who’d thrown it yelled, “Thieving cunt!”

And Natasha thought, This is Directorate. 

Natasha stepped back, away from the tomato, the shoe, and the rolling rubber ball as if they were bombs. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. She’d poured her heart out. They were supposed to love her. She wasn’t supposed to be booed. She wasn’t supposed to be the whipping girl for the world’s social woes. She’d gotten her fame and fortune through hard work, clawing her way through the same system that was in front of everyone. The difference was, she had taken a chance. She had gambled. They — the bastards who were booing her — had just accepted their government dole and complained. Who were they to boo her? But that was what the venue got for selling cheap seats, for giving away tickets as promotions. Elegant affairs were supposed to be accessible only to elegant people — especially this close to Shift, when things always went to crap and when mixing classes was always a recipe for disaster.

The boos grew louder. It was so unfair. Natasha’s well-deserved applause had been shocked into silence, and a handful of loudmouths were getting all the attention. And this was going out on the Beam feed, too, so everyone was watching her moment crumble thanks to a handful of assholes. Soon, boos were the only sounds in the seats, oddly harmonizing with the thunking of objects landing onstage.

A well-dressed man, his eyes offended on Natasha’s behalf, jumped onto one of the jeering miscreants. The booing man fought back, throwing them both over a chair. Those around them stepped away. One of the malcontents closer to the stage turned to stare at Natasha as if she’d caused the fight and threw something at her. Natasha flinched away. Whatever the man had thrown struck and shattered a light, and with the explosion of glass and sparks, the paralysis remaining in the seats started to crumble. A few of the rabble in back began changing sides, apparently swayed by well-reasoned arguments from the troublemakers — sage truisms such as Get the diamonds out of your ass! And Fuck you!

“Natasha!” hissed a voice. She turned to see Jane, her tour manager, beckoning her.

Natasha looked out at the brawl unfolding in the theater — the same theater that, moments earlier, had harbored a sea of adoring fans. What had gone wrong? She looked back at Jane. In the second it took to look away, Jane had easily grown twice as impatient. She had doubled the size of her gestures, and the number of arms used to make them. Her eyes looked angry, baffled by Natasha’s stupidity.

“Natasha!” Jane repeated. “Get the hell over here, will you?”

“They threw a tomato,” was all Natasha could say.

Jane rushed forward and grabbed her star by the wrist, then began to pull on Natasha’s arm nearly hard enough to yank the limb from its socket. Natasha’s high heels threatened to spill her, but she’d had years and years of practice at remaining stylish and beautiful even under duress, and managed to keep her footing. She shambled along behind Jane like a dog on a leash. They stepped through a black curtain as something broke on stage. It sounded like glass or porcelain.

“Your hover,” said Jane. “Go with James. Now. Get the fuck out of here.”

“But I’m supposed to sign autographs,” Natasha said, dazed.

Jane jabbed at the curtain with a pointed finger. The gesture made the black drape swing, and Natasha saw through it that security and police had come to the front of the stage. The crowd was trying to climb up. Were they trying to escape the melee, or had they all turned on her?

“You want to sign for this crew?” said Jane. “You’ll need a riot mask. They’re falling apart out there!”

“Why?”

James’s hand was already replacing Jane’s on her wrist, and a moment later, the bodyguard’s strong arm was around her shoulder as well. Jane was supposed to manage tour dates, James was supposed to protect her. Only Jane would yank her along. James, on the other hand, knew better ways to move her.

“Come on, Ms. Ryan,” he said. James shaved his head, but wore a brown porkpie hat like a hipster. It was a strange look to counterpoint his broad, muscular body.

“I need Kiki.”

“I have your dog, Ms. Ryan. Come with me. It’s not safe here.”

“But they love me. They’re supposed to love me,” she said. Beyond the curtain, there was a yell, the scampering of feet, and the thump of a police slumbergun, followed by the sound of a body hitting the polished wood floor.

“Come with me. Come on. Let’s get you home.”

Natasha allowed herself to be led toward her hovercar. She was so catatonic that James had to buckle her in before taking his spot up front behind the steering fork. There was a small pink bag beside her on the seat. As the hover climbed, she reached inside it, pulled out the small white dog, and set him on her lap. She proceeded to tell Kiki that it was all fine, that Shift always caused a little unrest, and that other than the actions of a few rabblerousers, the performance had gone quite well. They loved her. They really did.

As James steered the craft into the thin traffic above District Zero and banked it toward Natasha’s penthouse, the star looked down and saw a dozen or more police cars arrive at the foot of the Aphora, their presence incongruous amongst the limousines and high-end hovers. She watched police swarm from their vehicles like ants rushing the theater, face-shields donned and slumbers held across their chests.

“It’s fine, Kiki,” said Natasha, petting her dog in short, quick strokes.

Kiki accepted his owner’s reassurances without protest or disagreement.

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The Beam S1: Chapter Two

“Isaac.”

After touching his flashing countertop to take the incoming call as voice-only with track-and-follow (necessary because he always paced while talking), Nicolai Costa said his one-word greeting, then listened as Isaac blabbed on for three full minutes to unburden himself. Yes, Nicolai was Isaac’s speechwriter. Yes, he was Isaac’s right-hand man, and yes, he was his chief advisor. But really, the core of Nicolai’s value to Isaac was as a buffer. Nicolai wasn’t responsible for giving Isaac information so much as he was responsible for intercepting information that would only worry or confuse him. And on the other side of the buffer, it wasn’t Nicolai’s job to act on Isaac’s fears and worries so much as to listen to them, then assure Isaac that it would all be okay. Nicolai didn’t precisely do most of what Isaac wanted done. It was Nicolai’s job to determine what actually needed to be done versus what was just Isaac being Isaac, then to handle things in whatever way he saw fit.

“They threw shit at her, Nicolai. Tomatoes. Fucking tomatoes, like Vaudeville. It took fifty police to stop what almost became a full-scale riot. She’s terrified. Well, of course, this is Natasha, so she’s not outwardly terrified, but she is just the same. I can see it. But she’s also… hang on, Nicolai.”

Nicolai had seen this move before and knew what was coming. Isaac was going to run out to his patio to say something he didn’t want Natasha to hear. Despite taking the call as voice-only, Nicolai could almost see Isaac scamper outside in his mind. Couldn’t Natasha see right through it? His departure had to say more than his words ever could.

Nicolai paced, waiting. He crossed the bank of windows looking out onto the city night below. As he passed his grand piano, his fingers feathered the keys. He kept promising himself he’d learn to play it one of these days, but a man only had so much time. Right now, he had his work writing for Isaac, plus his private creative writing projects. The piano would have to wait.

“You still there?” said Isaac’s voice. It seemed to be right in front of Nicolai.

“Where would I be?”

“I’d know, if you’d use video like a normal person.”

“Not everyone wants to be on video all the time, Isaac. What if I’m naked?”

Isaac made an impatient noise and continued. “Anyway, I was going to say that Natasha is hurt. Not like injured, but like… well, you know how she is.”

Nicolai knew. Natasha had practically grown up in the spotlight, and appreciation was, for her, like blood to a vampire.

“I understand.”

“The rioters were from our own party, from the Directorate. I don’t like it. It makes us look like a mob.”

“Of course it was our people,” said Nicolai. “Enterprise don’t riot.” And it was true. There were plenty of Enterprise members in the rabble (there were more Enterprise than Directorate below the line, actually, seeing as Directorate received support from their party whether they worked or not) but those poor Enterprise were starving artists, not disgruntled workmen. Artists didn’t rise up. When artists took a gamble and failed their way into ghettos, they sat in dark corners, slit their wrists, and listened to Morrissey drawl on from a century in the past.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, Isaac. Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. But I have a speech tomorrow. A speech to these… these fuckers.”

Nicolai couldn’t help but chuckle, keeping the sound low in his throat. He paced his apartment as Isaac’s voice followed.

“I’ll rewrite your speech,” Nicolai said. “This could be good. Don’t worry. I can spin anything.”

Isaac blurted. “How could it be good?”

“Unrest over inequity should actually work in our favor, not against us. Sure, Natasha is your wife and you’re Mr. Directorate, but where’s most of the wealth outside of Directorate leaders? Is it in the Directorate?”

“Well… no…”

“Of course not. So do you see what I’m saying?”

Isaac was probably nodding. It was an affect some people had when they took most of their calls via video.

“So get some rest,” said Nicolai. “Tell Natasha I said it’ll all be fine. I’ll get you a new draft of the speech and you’ll see. This is good. We want the Directorate upset. If they aren’t upset, they might decide to go Enterprise when Shift comes. But if they are angry and make noise, then not only will it solidify them against a common opponent and make them want to stay where they are, but their bitching will also raise the antenna of some of the complacent Enterprise — folks who are living below the line and might move to us just so they don’t starve. You’ll see.”

Isaac mumbled, mollified.

Nicolai said his goodbye and then swiped the air, ending the call. A beep said he was alone again, so he made another circuit of his apartment, looking out over District Zero.

As he paced, Nicolai looked at his piano — an astonishing black and white trophy appropriate to a man of his station. The thing was worth thousands upon thousands of credits — and was, as Nicolai saw it, a giant status symbol begging in vain to be used for the creation of art. Nicolai didn’t have room for any more art in his life, though. He told himself for the millionth time that his scattered bursts of creative writing were enough. They would have to be. Eventually, he’d find time for music, just as he’d find time to birth a painting on the decorative easel that now supported a plant.

He plopped onto his couch, swiped a square in the air with his fingers, and watched as the overhead Beam projector gave him a screen. Then he reached over and grabbed a keyboard from the endtable beside him. A canvas as expensive as Nicolai’s could project him an airboard, but Nicolai had never understood how people could use those things. It was neat to wave your fingers in the air as if hitting keys, but without tactile feedback, the experience was clunky at best. Such failures of common sense understanding were almost standard in a lot of modern (elite) technology. Sure, it was neat and cool and fun. But was it practical? In Nicolai’s opinion, airboards were for people who wanted to pretend they were writing but never actually did.

His fingers clacked on keys. Words lit the screen. This went on for a while, until Nicolai realized he was just rehashing Directorate propaganda and rewriting an old speech — one of the few standard speeches from the party’s archives that had been given by Directorate leaders over and over and over again. He had told Isaac that unrest was good, but the problem was that Nicolai didn’t know if he actually believed it. You couldn’t quell unrest; you could only redirect it. Those people had come after Natasha because she was at the top of the credit/income ladder, not because of her party affiliation. Nicolai couldn’t make that class-based anger vanish, so his best bet was to refocus it in a useful way. The rioters’ problems — and all of the problems plaguing the Directorate — were the result of the Enterprise. They control the wealth. They are keeping you down.

With a strange punched-in-the-gut feeling, Nicolai realized that it wasn’t the first time such deflection had been used. Back when there had been mass immigration into America (in the days before it joined the North American Union), economic woes were usually blamed on foreigners coming in and taking jobs. Before that, the default enemy was the Jews.

Nicolai swiped the window closed, then set the keyboard back on the end table. He stood, walked to his window wall, and once again took in the streets of District Zero below. The city was alive with light, but the sky above it was a smooth nothingness. Nicolai missed being able to see the stars and the moon through the Shell miles above as he had in his youth, but night objects weren’t bright enough to blast through the three-layered defensive barrier like the sun did. The nights seemed so dark, even in the city. It was the price you paid for protection.

From all the way up high, the city seemed peaceful. But that was the thing about distance: from far enough away, everything became an average. There were rich and there were poor. There were Enterprise and Directorate. There was the NAU and the Wild East, out past the ant farm wall that covered the continent. But if you kept pulling back, eventually everything averaged out to people. And when the Mars project was finished — and if the elite then moved a planet away — the only thing needed to restore a sense of equity would be to zoom out another level or two.

Nicolai sighed. He had to clear his head. He needed someone to talk to and to be with who wouldn’t care about socioeconomic woes. Someone who could make the world vanish for a few hours at an exorbitant price — or sometimes longer than a few hours, if she was feeling generous.

“Canvas,” Nicolai said to his empty apartment.

A single chirp answered him.

“Get me Kai Dreyfus.”

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Top 10 Moments From The Beam S1

Sean asked me to design a contest for our wonderful and attractive readers — something that would reward the winner with a free print copy of their choice between print copies of The Beam: Season One or The Beam: Season Two when it’s released May 1.

This is what I came up with. That’s right; I wrote a full damn post for a contest. Let it never be said that I phone things in.

As I write this, I’m just finishing up the second season of what is now officially Realm & Sands’s largest work: The Beam. And … WOW. If you enjoyed Season One, you’re going to lose it for Season Two.

I absolutely love The Beam. I love all of our stuff, but the world offered by The Beam (not to mention the mind-fucking things we can do in a world filled with nano-bots and an omnipresent, hyperconnected AI-and-nanobot-rich version of the Internet) is off the hook. Writing The Beam ticks all of my boxes. It’s the ultimate what-if playground.

As Sean and I write, we’re investigating what our actual present implies about humanity’s future. Readers tell us that what’s most intriguing is the inevitability of our world. For me (perhaps troublingly, given the whole “inevitable” issue) The Beam asks one question more than any other: Just because we can do something … should we?

I could go on and on, but let’s just say that if you like Realm & Sands (or either of us individually) and haven’t read The Beam, you’re missing our most ambitious work. Fortunately, there are ways to solve that problem. You can start reading The Beam now with the first episode of Season One, which is free here, or you can go ahead and grab the entire first season for 20% off as part of the sale we’re running in lead-up to Season Two’s release. (Not to sound all salesman-like, but you should grab it now because the discount is temporary. And you know you can trust us to write something awesome anyway, right?)

Anyway, I’ve been delving a lot into Season One stuff as we finish up Season Two, and I wrote this list of my favorite things from Season One as I got all giddy and creation-crazed. These are the things we needed to sync up with … then exceed … in Season Two.

By the way, most of what follows are reasonably spoiler free, and only the last three items in the list contain even minor spoilers. So you can fairly safely read most of it even if you’ve yet to read The Beam, but you also can’t yell at me if you think I spoiled something, seeing as I just gave that disclaimer and because my lawyers say so.

Now pay attention, Beam fans, because here’s where the contest comes in.

Read my list below.

Enjoy and get all excited for Season Two. (This step is mandatory.)

Then, being careful not to spoil things yourself, tell me YOUR favorite moments in the comments.

A week from now, Sean and I will pick our favorite from your responses, and send you a phat print version of Season Two (or Season One if you prefer) when it’s ready.

Okay. Get your nanobots ready, and keep reading. Here are my top ten moments and scenes, in no particular order.

#1: Doc Discovers Technology That’s Way, Way, Way Too Advanced

The Beam actually existed before I got my hands on it. Sean and another writer had written a complete season, and as I began writing, I did so with the knowledge that I was, in a way, recapitulating someone else’s work. As a result, I was walking on eggshells, torn between wanting to write my own version of the story and pay due respect to the original.

The first option was the correct one, of course, but I needed permission. I had to see the series take on its own life before I could trust it … and this was the first scene where that started to happen.

Basically — and this isn’t a spoiler, as it’s a backbone upon which so much else is later placed — Thomas “Doc” Stahl is a dealer in biological upgrades that people use to add extra functionality to their own bodies, in conjunction with the Beam network. He covers the spectrum of buyers, from the poorest people to the wealthiest. Or so he thinks.

Sean’s story beats called for me to send Doc into Xenia Labs, where he’s mistaken for the sort of high-end dealer that Doc didn’t realize existed. He’s shown technology he’s never seen — technology apparently reserved for the very richest people in the North American Union. It’s supposed to be a secret … and once Doc knows and the Xenia folks learn his true identity … well, let’s just say he’s got a problem.

This scene surprised me. I have a biology and genetics background, it came out and started waving its flag as Doc was shown true-to-life replacement limbs, told about mind and memory uploading capabilities, and more. It allowed me to take ownership of a series that was started by another for the first time.

#2: The Enterprise vs. Directorate Parties

This isn’t a scene, but learning about the politics of The Beam told us both what the story would really be about.

In brief, the NAU in 2097 is divided between two parties, and every six years (in an election-like event known as Shift), citizens can choose which party they’d like to belong to, with no take-backs until the next Shift.

The Directorate is very socialist, with all services provided and a fixed income paid. The Enterprise is pure capitalist, where members either succeed on their own (with no cap on income) or fail (without a safety net).

In Enterprise, you either win big or die trying. In the Directorate, you shake your head at the nuts in Enterprise, accept a mediocre but secure living, and never have to worry.

In our world, parties are headed by dual presidents, but the presidents don’t matter nearly as much as the media darlings who act as the parties’ faces: Directorate Czar of Internal Satisfaction Isaac Ryan and his brother Micah, Enterprise’s Director of Capital Protection. The power struggle between the brothers and their parties quickly became one of The Beam’s central plots.

As I was exploring Micah and Isaac’s exploits, I emailed Sean and said something like, “Is it a problem that this story seems to be much more about people than technology?” Because, see, I hadn’t written sci-fi before. I’d read plenty, and the thing everyone remembers is the technology.

Or do they?

No, they don’t. Not for the best sci-fi. Stories that have all sorts of gizmos but wooden characters bore us. Stories about people engage us.

Sean told me not to sweat it. The story being rich with character and politics crystalized its reality. Because no matter how much time passes, people will stay people … and never stop scheming.

#3 Kai Kicks Some Ass

Kai Dreyfus is an elite escort with a sideline as a professional assassin. She’s augmented out the wazoo, sporting retinal cameras, seductive pheromone generators, and a sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithm that makes sure she’s always delivering what her customers want and need most.

We knew Kai would be tough when she was conceived, but what surprised me was how engaging Kai turned out to be. Although she’s technically a prostitute (something that isn’t vilified in 2097), she most certainly isn’t a whore. Kai does what she wants, and lines her desires with her income opportunities. She’s funny and fiercely loyal. And holy shit can she kick ass.

There’s a scene early-on in Season One where Kai is cornered by tech savants known as “Beamers” who come at her not only two at a time, but with high-powered weapons. I won’t blow the scene for you if you’ve not read it, but suffice to say that I, as the first-draft writer, had no idea how Kai was going to extricate herself. The way she does is … well … the only word is awesome. It makes you believe in Girl Power. Then Kai keeps you believing again and again after that.

Kai quickly became one of our favorite characters. She also, in a way, sparked a spin-off.

#4: The Birth of The Future of Sex and Plugged

You may already know that Sean and I work with (produce is a fair word) an erotica author named Lexi Maxxwell (link somewhat NSFW). We’d already co-written a sitcom (Adult Video) with Lexi, with us wireframing and writing the comedy and Lexi adding extremely dirty sex scenes. So when we began asking author friends to write their own, non-essential stories in the Beam world, Lexi’s topic was predictable.

She wanted to write a Kai story, given Kai’s profession, but we told her no. Our rule for “Beam world” stories is that while they should enhance the experience of the world for Beam readers, they must not be required. Canon characters (like Kai) were off-limits. But Lexi could write about the sex industry that Kai represented, and did. Sean and I, unable to keep our big noses out of Lexi’s business and intolerant of free time, hopped in and flat-out collaborated with her on FOS.

We won’t go into detail about FOS here, because you can read Lexi’s introductory post about it here, on her blog. (In fact, you can read the entire first book in the series for free on her blog here.) While The Future of Sex is in no way required for Beam continuity (it would be unfair to ask readers who may not be into sex-heavy stuff to wade through it), it is much more sci-fi than erotica, and adds a hell of a lot to our world. You’ll love it if such things don’t weird you out. (Oh, and for you skittish dudes out there: remember that Lexi, not us, wrote the sticky parts. And by the way, Lexi is hot.)

The other sideline project — again noting that I’ve cheated here and am not strictly talking about stuff in The Beam: Season One — was a Malcolm Gladwell style book called Plugged: How Hyperconnectivity and The Beam Changed the Way We Think. We consider Plugged to be the unofficial “Beam Season 1.5,” and wrote it from the perspective of a fictional future author in order to answer questions we ourselves had while writing Season One. Again, you don’t need to read Plugged to mine full enjoyment from The Beam, but we think you’d like it a lot. If you’ve left us a review for Beam Season One (or have read it and are willing to), we’ll give you Plugged for free here.

#5 Natasha and Isaac Ryan Fight … and Fight … and Fight

Fights are bar-none my favorite things to write. Maybe it’s because the lines come quickly when emotions are high, or maybe it’s because conflict is the engine that drives stories. Maybe it’s because in writing fights, I get to be more clever than I am in real life, putting biting words in the mouth of another that I myself would never say.

Whatever the reason, we fell in love with Natasha and Isaac immediately because although we understand why they are how they are, we just can’t bring ourselves to like or respect them. Isaac is spineless. Natasha is spoiled and domineering. In fact, a few people told us in reviews that they couldn’t bring themselves to like Natasha. That meant we’d done our jobs, because she’s reprehensible.

Still, these two bickering marrieds (rich, beautiful, and eternally young despite being in their eighties with a half-century of matrimonial baggage behind them) are sympathetic in their own way, once you get below their skin. They’re terrible now, but Sean and I knew they weren’t always so jaded. Once upon a time, they loved each other enough to come together. And once upon a time, Natasha sung her heart out to earn her fame — no matter how much she phones in her stardom today.

We said before that people will never stop being people, and that politics will never stop being politics. The Ryans let us keep poking those coals, because marriage has politics, too … and wait until you see how such personal matters spill into the fore in Season Two.

#6: Noah West’s Meeting with Ben Stone

In one of the flashbacks, Noah meets for the first time with Ben Stone, CEO of Evercrunch, a Dropbox-style firm that Noah ends up schooling on its business. I love this scene for a few reasons.

For one, it tells us a lot about Noah West’s backstory — Noah being an iconic character throughout the rest of the series and formerly without a point-of-view chapter of his own. We learned why Noah was how he was, and we got to like him. We grew to respect him for his insights.

If you’re still finding it odd that we talk about our characters as if they were real people, let me repeat it: we’re barely ahead of our readers on the story curve. The whole world (including us) knew that Noah was the genius behind The Beam, but we didn’t know how he’d formed his first ideas, what made The Beam different, or anything about how it worked. Until this scene, The Beam was simply “a network,” or perhaps “a highly connected version of the Internet.”

After eavesdropping on Noah’s conversation with Stone, we began to form even more bridges between our current world and The Beam. That was important. The Beam is a work of science fiction, not fantasy — and that means that while we could invent our own miracles, we would always need to explore the ways in which we could move from where we are today to where we will be. Much of our storytelling moves forward, from 2097 on. But the underpinning moves in the other direction, slowly filling the years between now and then.

#7: Doc and Omar Go To Starbucks

This scene was fun, but I’m choosing it because it represents a whole class of scenes and mentions that occur throughout Seasons One and Two.

In our opinion, a common science fiction mistake is to burn the world before building a new one. In extremely distant tales like Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, this strategy makes sense. But come on, folks … are we really supposed to believe that in a mere 83 years, nothing of what we know today will have survived? We’ll all be floating around galleys full of buttons and switches with labels like “jettison the quizblorg” and “zotz!”, and we’ll all watch nothing but movies made by robots?

We don’t buy it. This is the corporate age, and while certain iconic elements of today will vanish, many will stay. We chose Starbucks. It’s not your grandmother’s Starbucks (and we delighted in writing the holographic attendants pushing expensive coffee-at-home products on a weary Doc), but it’s motherfucking Starbucks, all right.

Side note: If you’re looking for a good read and have already bought everything we have (but only if you’ve done that) check out Jennifer Government by Max Barry if for no other reason than the hilarious way it treats the future rise of corporations.

#8: Stephen York’s Diary

THIS SECTION CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS. 

After Leah finds a mysterious book, the section that follows contains a bunch of dated excerpts from that book. Sean and I agree that this section forms the beating heart of Season One … which is interesting, because we had no idea even how to handle it when the idea came up.

Sean originally gave me an outline, beat by beat, for the diary. I WTF’d all over them. How the hell was I supposed to write a diary? And why would anyone care? But what happened, as I explored, was that I got to unfold The Beam’s life history — as well as one of its intimate creators, whose opinions about his creation are ambivalent at best.

What many readers don’t realize is that for some writers — present company most certainly included — much of the world is unknown before it’s written. Details form before our eyes as if by magic. The diary is so central for us because we learned as much writing it as our readers did reading. It was in that section that the term “Crossbrace” — the first version of The Beam, launched in the 40s — was conceived and named. We learned what the world outside the NAU lattice thought of The Beam.

We sowed many of the seeds that we (and by “we,” I mean “Sterling Gibson”) later explored in Plugged as a result of questions raised by the diary. We learned what may have happened to Noah West — and what, as Season Two draws to a close, we believe will happen next.

In our actual world, it is the events in people’s lives that create meaning. I think the reason the diary was so compelling to us was that through it, Stephen York became a real person, with real thoughts and desires and motivations and regrets. We’ll be writing fallout from what he wrote there for seasons to come.

#9: SerenityBlue’s 8-Year-Old Receptionist

THIS SECTION CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.

We weren’t sure who SerenityBlue would turn out to be (although thank God Sean let me change Serenity’s name; she appeared in the original, unpublished version of The Beam as “@SerenityBlue”), but we did know we wanted her to be mystical, intuitive, and a little angelic. If she was going to be around others, it seemed right that they should be children … and that those children should be the innocent embodiments of possibility that the Beam itself had somehow lost.

My first thought was that Leo and Leah should be greeted by someone as they entered Serenity’s school, and I figured it should be a student. Now in truth, that first kid is someone I know: my son, Austin. He’s not able to manipulate The Beam quite as well (though maybe when he’s in his 60s, he’ll find the knack), but all the mannerisms are there. Austin is a pacer. He walks and he talks, and for (currently) a 9-year old, he’s stunningly creative and outside-the-box. He’s an artist. And he was the kind of person I figure Serenity would definitely shepherd.

What I like about Serenity’s students is that they take amazing feats for granted — given that those feats are inside us all the time, and that we adults have been trained to forget. They see magic in the mundane and mundane in magic.

I won’t say much more about Serenity’s students here, but I will say that that lobby scene — where the simple boy creates a beach that’s more real than even the best Beam adepts could create — set serious machines in place that we anticipate beginning to manifest in Season 3 or 4.

#10: Nicolai Under Siege

THIS SECTION CONTAINS ** SOMEWHAT LARGER ** BUT MORE AWESOME SPOILERS. 

Bar none, this is my favorite action sequence of Season One. It’s so awesome that I changed that line of text above. See it? I have to spoil some things. The scene is too awesome not to.

I don’t recall the original story beat for this scene, but it was vague, the way I like it. It called for Nicolai to “somehow” elude the bandits who’d laid siege to his family’s mansion. Sean told me later that in the original version, Nicolai led the rabble around to the back, where they came face-to-face with a big cannon.

That’s kind of cool, but I think we can all agree that the specter of floating ministars made of liquid metal are much fucking cooler. (Side note: the Orion scenes were fun for a similar reason. I’m apparently gifted at dreaming up torture — enough that I made Sean’s wife sick reading it.)

We wanted to have fun with this scene, but we also wanted to establish a few things about Nicolai. For one, he’d once been wealthy. That gave his later station below Isaac some context, and told us a few things about Nicolai’s modesty and sense of duty. We wanted to establish that Nicolai was a stone-cold badass, despite his smooth, intellectual, Johnny Depp exterior. And despite Nicolai’s position in modern society, we wanted the reader to know that he’d paid his dues aplenty. You’re supposed to feel that while the Micahs and Isaacs may hold all the cards today, it would be the Nicolais who’d survive if the world returned to shit.

But the very, very best thing about this scene was something we’d never intended. I won’t go into detail because this is the biggest spoiler of all, but let’s just say that the revelation at the very end of Season One — the cliffhanger that may have made you loathe us while simultaneously salivating for Season Two — came about as a direct result of this flashback. I thought, “What if X?” Sean loved it, then we made it happen.

Oh, and just wait until you see how that cliffhanger resolves!

Okay, those are my top ten. What are yours?

Enter your favorite scenes below in the comments, but please keep your answers as spoiler-free as possible. If someone has already given your scene or if one of mine is your favorite, enter it anyway but tell us why it was awesome. Maybe you can articulate better than me or the other commenter. Style counts.

Oh, and you folks who haven’t yet finished The Beam, you probably shouldn’t read the comments. People will spoil things regardless of that last sentence because that’s how things go and we’re all excited.

A week from today, Sean and I will read through your comments, pick the one we like best, and will send you a print (and ebook) copy of The Beam: Season Two when it’s released on May 1, or Season One if you prefer that now.  

It’s almost time for The Beam’s second season. So let’s hear it below!

Want to explore the world of The Beam before Season Two launches on May 1st? Get Season One now while it’s on sale for 20% off… or try it for free!

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Q&A With Celebrated Author Sterling Gibson

We’ve already told you about Sterling Gibson: who he is, why he matters, and most importantly, why he wrote Plugged.

Please feel free to ask Sterling any question that you would like in the comments. He will do his best to answer every one, then we’ll publish his responses on the blog soon.

Thanks for playing.

>> CLICK HERE TO TRY THE BEAM EPISODE ONE FOR FREE <<

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>> GET THE BEAM S1 (EPISODES 1-6) FOR JUST $7.99 HERE <<

The Disassociation Paradigm

The following is an excerpt from Sterling Gibson’s book, Plugged , published November 2097. 

SARAH LANGDON IS 43 AND looks very old.

In reality, Sarah looks how 43 is supposed to look. In her community — a small Organa settlement outside District 6 in Ontario, not far from the consolidated Great Lake — aging is considered beautiful and a badge of honor. The Organas believe that Sarah’s 43 years are an achievement, and that she should wear the small wrinkles and few gray hairs in her otherwise dark-brown pony tail with pride. Not that 43 is old even among the Organas; life expectancy of an Organa child born today, barring accidents or violence, is still in the low 90s. But if 43 is an achievement worthy of a few wrinkles, 75 is a larger achievement worthy of many more wrinkles and much more gray hair. And 95, like the settlement’s grand dame, Mama Beatrice? Well, that’s a four-star general’s worth of honor, making even her creaking bones something like a trumpet flourish.

The reason Sarah looks so old isn’t because she is old; it’s because we’ve grown used to a new standard of age. Even if you’ve never gone into a rejuvenation clinic for a bolus of scavenger and repair nanobots, you’re still getting a few in every glass of fortified milk, in every yogurt that claims “active cultures and repair,” and with every vaccine. Anti-dust mite nanos, standard in any Beam-enabled house built after 2075, clean their home’s owners as well as the floors and walls, keeping them healthier and younger looking. And if your home has a HEMA filtration system (which it almost certainly does even if you live far below the line), that system is removing countless floating pathogens and bugs while constantly moistening your air to tighten and smooth your skin. No one questions any of this; 30 today is 30 is 30 is 30, and we accept it in the way we know that cobalt is blue.

But compare photos of 2097 NAU citizens to year 2000 Americans and you’ll find that today’s 65 (even without rejuvenation treatments) looks virtually identical to 2000’s 45. When you add in the fact that most above-the-line citizens today get at least a nanoinjection or two in their lives, the chasm widens. Then there’s those higher on the ladder, who can afford more comprehensive treatments and better nanobots. Many of the richest 80-years-plus men and women today look like they’re in their late 20s by year 2000 standards, and the clock hasn’t even had time to prey on those folks yet. Given that telomere lengthening treatments seem practically capable of pausing aging (rather than simply making it look that way), we may yet see life expectancies of upper-class citizens reach 200 or greater. If those folks ever get around to dying, it’s possible they’ll do it looking mid-40s when they do.

When I say that Sarah looks very old, I mean that she looks like a 43-year-old woman is supposed to look. She looks like any other Organa woman her age — very close to how a 43-year-old woman would have looked in the year 2000 or how she’d look today outside the NAU.

“Most people don’t get our way of living, and that’s kind of the point,” says Sarah. “Kind of a cliché, but true: one of the ways we know we’re on the right track is if we’re living opposite of the average person.”

What Sarah doesn’t really understand, though, is that even the Organa’s “opposite” way of living — mostly disconnected from The Beam, in basic shelters with few amenities, clustered in communities that work cooperatively and ride horses for transportation — still relies heavily on technology. Sarah, for instance, likes early-century punk rock music, which she says carries many of the same anti-establishment overtones of the modern Organa movement. But although she doesn’t play that music through a Beam canvas as it streams from her cloud cache, she’s still playing it on an old 44.1 kHz device called an iPod because there is simply no truly non-electronic way to listen. The music itself was created with bits and electricity, even though if they’re almost 100-year-old bits and electricity. Many Organas don’t have Beam IDs, but they still sometimes send mail, and mail has to come from an address … which, of course, identifies the sender. And what about mail? There are orthodox Organas who shuttle paper back and forth like they did in the 20th century, but paper has gone from “the way things are” to almost a luxury. Papery delivery is nearly impossible unless you want to box and ship it, so the orthodox either waste money or hand deliver their missives. And if they’re hand-delivering letters, why bother sending them at all?

The Organa face the same dilemma as every fringe group in history: They want to live outside of society, but society surrounds them. The whole world doesn’t live as they do, so unless they want to cut themselves off entirely, the choice isn’t whether to “sell out” or not; it’s how much they can sell out and still look themselves in the mirror each morning.

“So, fine, we live under a big, protective dome,” Sarah said as we sat on hand-built wooden chairs in her commune’s meeting room. “And we’re safe from Wild East incursions like the rest of you. We have controlled weather, because we can’t help it. And yeah, sometimes we have to ride mag trains to get where we want to go. We communicate with other groups like ours using mail, and when we get sick, we visit non-commune doctors, sometimes, when we’re scared. But that’s how it is, and we don’t want to just shut the 10 or so of us here inside our own dome and live like cavemen. Because that wouldn’t be true to our ideals, either. It’s no more natural or right for people to cut themselves off entirely than it is to have implants in their eyes that let them record their lives, or have other implants that let them receive mail straight to their brains. We’re like the Quakers or Amish used to be, driving buggies to mainstream construction jobs where there were electric lights and power tools. We do our best, and sacrifice where we must.”

The Organa get plenty of criticism — people say they’re just a fashion and that “listening to music on old devices” is hardly a sacrifice worthy of someone committed to her ideals — but it’s hard to not be swayed by their thoughts on what happened during the early 2030s. I happened to mention what I’d observed with Victor Salieri to Sarah. She had an immediate answer. So immediate, in fact, it had the feel of a foundation principle — of something the Organa have spent time discussing.

“He disassociated,” she told me. “Like everyone.”

The Organa movement took form after the fall in 2026 and through Reconstruction. It seems to have popped up from nowhere, but Sarah claims that one of the largest rallying points that Organa had through its inception was how the Internet created a “culture of indifference” in the pre-NAU. The reason I couldn’t find anyone to tell me about the early ‘30s with any true emotion, Sarah says, is because the Western world immediately scrambled to put screens between themselves and reality in 2030 when networks came online.

“They needed that distance,” she says, a touch of understanding percolating through her disgust. “Mama Beatrice lived through that period, and swears she was no better than anyone. It’s her greatest point of shame — the reason she’s the most orthodox among us today. She had lived through four years of absolute horror. Mama Beatrice lost her entire family — most in a storm and the rest in a civil uprising outside Washington D.C. — and had to make her way across the country with a small band of travelers, always on the move to stay away from highwaymen. Every time they stopped somewhere, bandits saw their nightly fires and raided. She was robbed more times than she could count, raped three or four times, and nearly killed twice. When Chicago came back online, she was nearby. Lights suddenly came on in a house where her group was hiding. There was an old iPhone Ruby plugged into the kitchen. She heard it beep and ran for it — ‘like I used to run for food’ is how she puts it.”

I later spoke to Mama Beatrice, but she was less helpful than Salieri had been. She’d been so traumatized by her time in hell that the familiar charging beep of that mobile was like the clucking of a mother hen. She took the phone with her and looked at it constantly, charging it when she found electricity. For the longest time, all she did was play games installed by the previous owner.

“The others searched for food, and I played something called Angry Birds,” she said with a sorrowed chuckle, her wrinkled, arthritic hands shaking atop the curve of a polished wood cane. “Like I was in a trance.”

It’s possible she was; psychologists estimate that in 2030, as much as half the U.S. population was suffering from undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic shock. What pulled Mama Beatrice from her bird-flinging game and back into reality was the day the Ruby’s display indicated the presence of an open network. There were still paid networks before the Second Black Thursday, but the Doodad revolution had opened free access to anyone who didn’t care about voice telephony. Once that access was back, Mama Beatrice jumped on it. She describes it as a breath of fresh air — much better than her games from a forgotten age because it proved there were still other humans in the world. Good people who lived in cities, who had consolidated enough to share, and were calling the rest of them home.

Beatrice describes her relationship with the Ruby as being like that between a drowning woman and her life preserver. Even after she’d settled in Chicago — even after she found herself clothed, fed, cleaned, and sharing a roof with seven other friendly refugees — she couldn’t break away. She got herself a mail account and managed to track down surviving friends and relatives halfway across the country. As the Internet came back up, she followed first damage from the disasters, then the progress of recovery. Millions upon millions had died; weather had grown hotter and harsher; once-great rivers had run dry. Over 10 percent of the world’s population had lived near the coasts, and by the time the ice caps were gone, the coasts had vanished and all of those people (those who lived, anyway) had moved inland. Drought had taken over from there, killing much of the world, starting with its crops.

As horridly as Beatrice had clung to negative news, she soldered herself to any shred of possible positive news as well. Cities rebuilt, then reached out to those in surrounding areas once stabilized. The government was fragmented, but had grown past its ego and was working so closely with Canada and Mexico’s governments that the three might as well have been one. Refugees began coming from other countries, and the U.S. took them. Earthquakes had shattered vast areas and caused worldwide tsunamis, but the U.S./Canada/Mexico, at least, had already developed fairly reliable prediction systems that could tell people when they were likely to strike in time to get out. Strategic use of explosives along fault lines had allowed the earth’s plates to “break where and when we want them to,” relieving the pressure. People began taking charge. Lights stayed on in Chicago. Police patrolled the streets. People felt safer by the day. Clean water was available, piped from the lake. Food wasn’t a problem.

Above all, the network continued to thrive. I’ve found some unconfirmed indications that this was deliberate — that those in charge realized how starving citizens like Beatrice were for any opiate to move their mind from troubles. No one was making new videos in the early ‘30s, but old ones were available in abundance. By early 2031, it was possible for citizens in Districts Zero through 10 (Two sprang from Chicago) to sit around for most of the day and simply watch vidstreams and Internet news. Many did; Beatrice was among them.

It wasn’t all entertainment. Quickly, news of the world’s plight began to surface. This is how we know of the terrible events that occurred between 2030 and 2034 or 36 — the “blackout” period during which I could find no good sources. I asked Beatrice to fill me in, and found her information as plain and emotionless as Victor Salieri’s. The difference was that while Salieri thought he was giving me the straight dope, Beatrice knew that what she had to offer was, in her own words, “a heap of indifferent bullshit.”

Here’s an excerpt from Mama Beatrice’s book, Callous. Amazingly, this account is handwritten on paper in a single holographic manuscript, seemingly as penance:

We turned our heads. We looked away. We watched the world fall apart, but did it through the screens of our Doodads and smart phones and computers and televisions. Watching it that way gave us the illusion of caring — because hey, we were paying attention, weren’t we? — without any of the connection that marks genuine caring. We had distance when we watched everything happen through a filter. It felt like a movie, or maybe a video game. Video games looked every bit as real as that footage. In fact, video games seemed more real because at least we knew they were games, and that was how we could explain what we saw. The footage of the Wild East, by contrast, was too terrible for us to really believe without imagining it as a game dreamed by some sick mind.

 

At the beginning, all air traffic overseas had shut down, so everything we saw came to us from the Easterners themselves. They were using whatever power sources they had and whatever networks they had managed to get back up specifically to put the footage online. It was a call for help. They were reaching out to us — or to any of the other global brothers they’d so recently clasped hands with to solve the world’s problems. They were begging for help. Just a few years earlier, the entire planet had come together in harmony. But when the chips were down — when we’d begun to recover and they hadn’t — old ties vanished. We watched their cries for help through our screens as if they were another entertainment stream, not terribly different from the old Friends reruns sharing screen space. The rest of the world died and shouted for their brothers to help them. We lay back on our couches with our bellies full and said, “That’s YOUR fucking problem.”

Want to explore the world of The Beam before Season Two launches on May 1st? Get Season One now while it’s on sale for 20% off… or try it for free!

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The Beam S2 Cover

The Beam is unique in our lineup (along with Unicorn Western) because it is hand drawn, rather than designed on the back of a stock photo, like most everything we do.

Both S1 and S2 of The Beam have been beautifully rendered by artist Eric Dagley.

For both seasons we gave Eric an excerpt from the season that we felt represented the larger themes of that story. In the first season that meant some of the ways in which technology was affecting something as core to who we are as the human brain.

Here is the cover from this season. What do you think our themes are?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Want to explore the world of The Beam before Season Two launches on May 1st? Get Season One now while it’s on sale for 20% off… or try it for free!

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