Episode 1 - The Beam

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.

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