Episode 1 - The Beam

velvet rope.”
    Dominic stared at her.
    “A thick one,” she added, then circled her fingers to show the rope’s girth.
    Dominic shifted his gaze to the seated cop. He was the only one who hadn’t spoken, and was thereby Dominic’s final hope of learning something useful.
    “What’s she talking about?”
    “All you need to know is that she was where she wasn’t supposed to be, getting at stuff she wasn’t supposed to get.”
    “Cake recipes,” said Leah. “Quark’s are the best.”
    “128 bit is old technology, but the Blanket still blunts brute force hacks enough to give us time to cut off people who try to get in,” said the seated cop. “There’s data there not suitable for public consumption, but it’s fairly innocuous. She burned through it so fast we couldn’t stop her. Naturally she was traced, and Quark on-site at Technic brought her in. She was transferring terras of data from one lane to another. Not even to a slip drive for the road. She won’t tell us why.”
    “It was an accident,” said Leah. Her hands were cuffed in front of her, but she still managed to tip her chair back on its rear legs. She hadn’t yet nursed the gall to put her legs up on the table.
    “So she didn’t remove anything from the server?” asked Dominic.
    “No.”
    “And she didn’t breach your inner security?”
    “No…”
    “So what’s the crime?”
    “Digital trespassing,” said the standing cop.
    “You brought her in here for that?” said Dominic. “Aren’t there jaywalkers you should be hunting?”
    Dominic was annoyed. Hacking was a multi-tiered thing, and the lines between modification and true hacking were gray at best. Most kids could break the security on their canvases to access porn, and the ability required to do it, back in the early computing age, would have sent them to jail for life. But in a world where encryption could be enhanced with conscious choices made by Beam-resident AI codemakers, using a brute-force algorithm was a lot more like hopping a fence and entering a neighbor’s yard than breaking into a house. Sometimes people out on The Beam couldn’t resist taking shortcuts. It was technically illegal, but only barely.
    “Digital trespassing at Quark,” said the cop sitting on the desk.
    Dominic actually laughed. These pompous assholes.
    “We want to hold her and check out her known associates,” said the other cop.
    “The associates from my file?” said Leah. “Oh sure, call Binky. Tell him I said hi. I haven’t seen him since we burned the preschool firewall so our naptimes could coincide.”
    “Shut it,” the cop snapped, turning.
    Dominic met the cop’s eyes and shook his head.
    “You’re just going to let her go? This is Organa shit. Just look at her.”
    “That’s not fair,” said Leah. “I haven’t judged you based on the way you look.” Dominic watched the woman’s eyes, willing her not to continue. But then her will broke and she added, “So, which enhancement did you order to make your jagger bigger and longer?”
    The cop moved toward her again, but Dominic held up his hands.
    “Ms…” Dominic began, then remembered that she didn’t have a last name. “Leah,” he said instead. “What were you trying to do at QuarkTechnic?”
    The girl brought her chair down to four legs and leaned forward, elbows to knees. Her green eyes settled on Dominic’s with a smile. “Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. I was trying to change my grades. Satisfied?”
    “You were at Quark,” said the standing cop.
    “A mistake.” She gave the cop a look. “Your encryption looks the same, and you’d know that if you’d look for yourself. And frankly, you share a lot of the same backdoors.”
    “There are no backdoors at Quark.”
    Leah laughed.
    The cops turned to Dominic. The standing one said, “Look. I don’t want to pull rank because you’ll bluster and pretend you outrank me, but we both know that what Quark says goes in the end. If you let her go…”
    The Quark cop was right; you didn’t step into a state-run institution like the police and build yourself a new wing staffed by superior forces if you didn’t have a lot of power. So to counter, Dominic went on the offensive.
    “I’m not going to let her go, you idiot,” he snapped. “I’m going to interrogate her. Properly. She needs to be in the public police system, not your proprietary one. If the Organas found out that Quark booked someone without going through proper channels and