Episode 1 - The Beam

vent system that, these days, was used more for distributing pacifying pheromones than temperature-controlled air.
    But once he crossed from the old part of the station to the new section Quark had added after the company had started to take over the whole fucking world, all of the noises changed.
    When Quark had initiated its partnership with the police to handle Beam-related crimes, they’d built this tomb-like monstrosity. You had to submit to a Beam ID scan to enter, and once inside, every surface was wired. Dominic watched a digital shadow of himself walk along the wall to his right. Beneath his feet, as he made those odd, clacking footsteps, he watched red footprints appear below his shoes. Walking in the annex, Dominic always felt judged. Because he was.
    “Good afternoon, Captain Long,” said a deep, soothing voice that seemed to come from everywhere.
    “Fuck off,” said Dominic, annoyed. This entire wing represented an invasion of his body’s privacy, and he resented it.
    “I can recommend a masseuse for that pain in your shoulder,” said the voice, unperturbed.
    “No offense, Noah,” said Dominic, “but get your sensors off my body.”
    “You’re carrying a lot of tension,” said the voice.
    Dominic shook his head. In order to enter the secure Quark wing, you had to walk through this bullshit gauntlet of holier-than-thou. The old police station was on the north side of the building. The Quark wing was on the south side, and you could only enter it through the old station, via this long white hallway. Quark PD’s offices and cells were in the wing’s center, and the hallway wrapped around it in a 360-degree spiral. If Dominic were nervous or uptight in a way that might suggest aggression, his posture and gait would betray it and the hallway would stop him. If too many people (or too much weight) tried to leave the wing’s core through the hallway, the hallway would stop them. And that was only on the surface. There were a billion other things the hallway gauged, assessed, and calculated. It was watching his eyes, scanning his body for weapons, talking to any nanobots he had in his system regardless of their encryption (Dominic had none) and measuring his breath’s temperature. Dominic didn’t understand most of it and didn’t want to. To him, the hallway was a perfect example of how The Beam had gone too far.
    “This job makes me tense,” he said.
    “I’m sorry,” the voice replied, its deep timber adjusting in a way Dominic knew was intended to soothe him, setting up subaural resonance to shift his brainwaves. You could resist it if you knew what was happening, so Dominic did. “Would you like me to set up an appointment with a counselor?”
    Dominic rolled his eyes. “Decades of development in artificial intelligence and still stupidity abounds,” said Dominic.
    “What do you mean, Captain Long?”
    “You don’t know what stress is,” said Dominic.
    “I did when I was alive,” said the voice.
    Dominic reached the hallway’s end. Synthetic response surfaces gave way to plain beige floor tiles, and once again Dominic found himself inside what was more or less just a police station — albeit a squeaky clean, technologically enabled, and window-free one. But this station — Quark’s station — wasn’t the anomaly. The station on the other side of the building was the anomaly. The old station hadn’t changed much since the unrest in the 30s, when it was built amidst supposition that the entire country could fall at any time. That was before America had joined the NAU, back when leftover optimism and the unbridled air of discovery from the 20s still hung in the air like the scent of soured wine. The old station still accessed The Beam through terminals and wasn’t gesture-enabled. Part of that was sensible (opening the Fi to general access could lead to security problems with all of the nutjobs coming and going), but most of it was due to apathy and short-sightedness. Police funding, even now, still got fucked right up the butt.
    Dominic stopped at a flat silver panel in the foyer that looked almost like a full-length mirror. An Asian woman appeared in its surface and seemed to walk toward him, holding a clipboard.
    “How are you, Dominic?” she said.
    “Fine, Akari,” he replied. The woman in the panel was as artificial as Noah, the voice in the hallway, but the programmers had soothed out Akari’s idiot edges. There were iterations of Noah on The Beam that were