Episode 1 - The Beam

by ‘left,’ I mean like left , way off into…”
    “I get it. So he ran out. Met some girl. Got wasted and went on a bender.”
    “Not Nicolai.”
    Dominic shook his head slowly. “What do you want me to do, Isaac?”
    “Track him.”
    “I can’t track anyone.”
    “Via city surveillance. Just tell me where he was last registered.”
    “I don’t have access to…”
    Isaac tapped his countertop. In the communication window, Dominic’s eyes popped at something to his right.
    “You’ve been temporarily promoted,” said Isaac.
    “Is this the entire city?” said Dominic, now reaching off-frame to grab and grasp at something.
    “I don’t know. I’m not a cop.”
    “I don’t even know what to do with…”
    “Look,” Isaac snapped, “just find him, okay?”
    Dominic nodded, still wide-eyed at whatever data had just become available to Dominic the Commissioner that had been unavailable to Dominic the Captain. He killed the call with a promise to call back once he knew more.
    The apartment was again too quiet. Isaac considered turning on some music or a vidstream, but knew it would only make his mind rebel and fight even harder than it already was to dampen his decaying spirits. So Isaac turned into the line of fire, opting to face whatever the world had waiting for him head-on.
    He walked over and sat on his couch.
    “Canvas.”
    Chirp.
    “Visit Beam headlines.”
    A holographic ball appeared above the coffee table. The page at the cluster’s front was The Beam’s main news feed. Isaac reached toward the ball and gestured with his fingers to bring the feed closer to enlarge it. Unsurprisingly, Micah’s speech had been voted to the top. Eight of the other remaining top ten stories on the front page were all reactions to the speech. The final item was a story about one of Natasha’s pretentious singer friends, Gregory Whitman, who’d punched a waiter in a drunken fit a few nights before. In spite of his dour mood, Isaac chuckled, then pulled the story from the page and tossed it to the side like a ball of trash. He scanned the reactions to Micah’s speech. Four were from Directorate outlets and hence meant nothing. In the public eye, Micah’s speech would be an open wound until brother Isaac replied. Isaac wasn’t even really the right person to reply, but the public was obsessed with the Ryan brothers and had been since the beginning. Micah and Isaac would always be yin and yang to the citizenry, no matter their job titles.
    But of course, there would be no reply from Isaac without Nicolai.
    Isaac grabbed the four Directorate responses and tossed them, then scanned the remainders. One was from an Enterprise toady, and the other three were meaningless us-too responses. Isaac didn’t bother to toss them. He grabbed the top headline (“Micah Ryan Claims Riots Were Inevitable”) and pulled it forward, then dragged it open like parting curtains. The page contained some meaningless text and video. Isaac had seen the speech already, when angry and panicky from news that the video existed. He was calmer now. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he remembered.
    There was a POV feed where you could slot in your avatar if you wanted to use an A/V immersion rig and pretend you had a front-row seat, but like all lower-end feeds, the only thing it provided over simple viewing was peripheral vision. Isaac touched the video’s top-favorited bookmark to set the vidstream playing, driving the knifelike feeling in his stomach deeper into his gut.
    The bookmark started the video at three minutes and seven seconds in. Micah’s perfectly groomed head smiled from atop his perfectly beautiful suit. His smile collapsed and he resumed speaking after what, in the full speech, had been a brief pause for effect.
    “The recent unrest is the exclusive doings of Directorate raff,” said Micah, addressing his Enterprise audience. “Maybe these idle minds would be better served with work, where they might mine more from their days through concrete uses of their time.”
    Isaac gritted his teeth. He wished Nicolai were here. Nicolai would be able to couch the insult in a way that bleached its sting. The debate over work was hotly contested between the parties, but whenever Nicolai broached it, the fact that a person didn’t have to work in the Directorate seemed like an obviously, self-evidently good thing. Still, Micah had turned that little Directorate benefit on its head, same as he always did. Micah made work sound