Episode 1 - The Beam

didn’t pay for your everything? You’ve developed no skills, and have no faith in your ability to make your own living. You know that as much as you’re in the raff now, you’d be trampled in Enterprise. So what can you do? You can’t improve your financial or living situation no matter which party you’re in, so the best thing to do is to argue that it’s not your fault. So you raise your Directorate flag and start telling the world that the Enterprise is greedy and evil. You bitch, and you riot. Maybe you throw a few tomatoes.”
    “But why would they riot there?” said Craig. “Natasha is Directorate, not Enterprise.”
    Micah gave a sideways smile. “Really? I had no idea.”
    The agents snickered again.
    Of course Natasha was Directorate. Her husband, Micah’s brother Isaac, was Directorate too. The same question had been raised early on, when Micah had first instructed the agents to go undercover and riot at the concert.
    “This isn’t really about parties, Craig. Think about it. This is about haves and have-nots. But rioting and protesting ‘rich people’ is shooting at a moving target. It’s hard to define the enemy — the group that’s ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’ — if the differentiator is their credit balances. But if we can make this whole thing — this feeling of pre-Shift unrest — about Enterprise and Directorate? Then we give people a them that’s clear and well-defined. Having a clear them solidifies people, which is why we’re here to begin with. We’re trying to create a them in the eyes of the Enterprise. We stage riots as if the Directorate were causing them. The Enterprise starts to hate and distrust the Directorate more than ever. Us versus them . Solidarity. Strength. Generally making the other side look like shit. You see?”
    Craig said nothing, either mollified or pretending to be. But what Craig felt or thought was immaterial. Micah, as always, knew what he was doing.
    With Shift approaching, the senate’s balance of power was up for grabs. More citizens in Enterprise meant more Enterprise seats in the senate. Shift seldom resulted in much movement between the parties, seeing as people seldom changed their natures. The choice, for most people, was a crapshoot. Would you rather have a living provided for you and not really need to work, but know you’d be stuck with a barely sufficient lifestyle for the next six years? Or would you rather roll the dice at building a bigger future by making your own living… knowing that if you failed, there was no safety net? The lushest spires and the lowliest gutters were disproportionately filled with people who’d chosen Enterprise, whereas the low end of the middle were mostly Directorate. Those Directorate weren’t excited about life, but their situations weren’t dire enough to motivate change. The way Micah saw it, Shift really was a “pick-your-poison” scenario for most people, with both options equally toxic. The Directorate was mostly downtrodden but complacent. The best way to shake that complacency — and gain a few new members — was to show that life in the Directorate wasn’t a bed of mediocre-smelling roses.
    Micah looked around the group of seven agents. He had managed to spot them all in the feed, but he’d had to enter a 3-D projection, augment, and rotate for quite a while to find some of them. That was good. They were supposed to be invisible.
    Now, in Micah’s office, all of the agents were all nodding, ready to do whatever their fearless leader said. All except for Jason Whitlock. Whitlock’s bearing bothered Micah. He’d given his report just like all of the others, but he seemed somehow off . He wasn’t articulating well. He seemed distracted, and kept turning his gaze to the window. He also seemed to be forgetting large parts of the evening. Whitlock had commented earlier that he’d been shocked by how short the concert was. When another agent told him that it had lasted over three hours, he’d seemed surprised. So Micah had quizzed him, and he hadn’t remembered a single title out of Natasha’s 27 song performance. He’d made guesses, but it seemed as if he were pulling them from the Beam Top 50 list rather than memory.
    “It’s late,” said Micah. “Go home, everyone. Good job. We’ll talk tomorrow, same time.”
    The gathering began to disperse. Micah approached Whitlock and set hand to shoulder.
    “Jason.”
    Whitlock looked up.
    “You seem distracted.”
    “Just