Episode 1 - The Beam

nearly as sharp as the real Noah had once been, but the station’s copy was — in Dominic’s mind, anyway — beyond obnoxious. Akari was also cute, and Dominic was a sucker for cute girls, no matter his level of annoyance.
    “How can I help you?” she said.
    “I got a call about the breach at QuarkTechnic.”
    Akari looked down at her clipboard — an affect the programmers had added to make her seem more real. “Of course. Holding room fifteen.”
    “Thank you.”
    Dominic walked through the Quark station, peering around at the officers working their full gesture canvases. One was rotating a relational web, peeling it back to search through the Beam’s pages. Another sat with her eyes closed, probably downloading images into an implant behind her retinas. Dominic wanted to swear. You had to be half cyborg to work here. It was one of the many things Dominic hated about the annex, aside from the sheer presumptuousness of it all. Quark thought it was important enough to impress itself into the fabric of the police themselves. What a load of bullshit.
    Dominic arrived at holding room fifteen. Beside the door was another silver panel, this one smaller than the one at the entrance. Akari appeared, visible from the chest up, still holding her clipboard.
    “I can read,” said Dominic, his testiness returning in a wave. The fucking Beam was always checking on him, as if he was as burned as the nutjobs they picked up on the street. There was a large black “15” printed beside the door. He didn’t need Akari to confirm that he was in the right place.
    “It’s not that, Dominic,” she said. “This suspect is classified security beta. I’m going to need a palm scan.” She held up her hand. It looked like she was on the other side of a window and had planted her palm against it from the inside.
    “You scan-raped me on the walk in. What did I have for breakfast, Akari? What, exactly, is in my colon right now?”
    “I apologize, Captain,” she said, subtly shifting in formality. “But I still require the scan.”
    Dominic grunted and set his large, beaten-up policeman’s hand against Akari’s small, delicate one.
    “Thank you,” she said. In front of Dominic, the door swung open.
    The room was small and white. Inside, two Quark cops were interrogating their subject at a rather cliched wooden table. One stood. The other sat at the table’s edge. Dominic assumed the standing one was supposed to be the bad cop, and the seated one was the friendly good cop.
    Across the table was a woman who appeared to be in her twenties (though who could say these days?) who gave Dominic a tiny smile when he entered. Her hair was matted in giant dreadlocks that were dyed a bright, almost luminescent pink. She had a small silver ring through the right side of her lower lip and another in her eyebrow. The ear on her other side had two piercings connected by a short silver chain. Her index fingers were both tattooed with swirls of black ink.
    “Sorry I’m late,” said Dominic.
    The bad cop wasted no pleasantries and handed him a small tablet with a look of resentment. Quark cops didn’t like the regular cops any more than the regular cops liked the Quarks. Dominic was only here because he was the captain, and because this was a high-level inquiry.
    “Leah,” said Dominic, reading from the tablet. “That’s it. No last name. No Beam ID.”
    “It’s not a crime to not have a Beam ID,” said the young woman. “Nor to not have a last name.”
    The standing cop gave her a look, then addressed Dominic. “She’s been arrested before. We have her code on file. She really does seem to have no last name. Registered simply as ‘Leah’, a student at QuarkTechnic. She was flagged trying to access a classified section of The Beam nowhere near her access level.”
    Dominic handed the tablet back to the Quark cop, looked at the girl and waited for her response.
    “It was an accident,” she said. “I was trying to order lunch.” She looked at the Quark cops. “Donuts.”
    The standing cop moved toward her, but Dominic held up a hand.
    “She was in Quark’s server. Got through the Blanket, which in itself requires a 128-bit encryption key.”
    “You can’t hold that against me,” Leah said. “Who still uses 128-bit encryption? I was composing a nursery rhyme and accidentally accessed the server. Luckily some citizen scouts stopped me before I accidentally went any further. I hear the next level of security was a