Episode 1 - The Beam

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.

Doc sat in an overstuffed chair in his apartment on the 47 th 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 of 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