Episode 1 - The Beam

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,