Episode 1 - The Beam

noble. But when the Directorate provided everything a person needed, why not rest? Why not spend your time learning more and exploring, rather than slaving away through your life’s every minute?
    Micah gave a carefree, charming toss of his head and turned his palms up, feigning something between realization and resignation. “Maybe it’s the nature of the Directorate to act as a mob,” he said, sounding almost defeated. “Maybe the rioters are angry. Maybe they feel that there has been an injustice. That’s how an idle mind thinks — it sees only the thing it wants rather than the effort required to achieve it. The rioters are targeting symbols of aspiration: music halls, restaurants, sports stadiums, places where dreams have been forged from the steel of human spirit. So maybe they feel that the people they look up to have been given everything whereas they’ve been given nothing. But it’s not true! No member of the Enterprise believes they have been given anything. We have built what we have; they are prevented by their party from building what they want. Is it any surprise that they’re angry? The Directorate preaches equality. And that much is true. The party doles out mediocrity in equal measure.” Micah leaned into the audience. “When everyone is equal, no one has value. These riots are a clear sign of the Directorate’s faltering moral compass and its eventual, inevitable collapse.”
    Isaac, watching and feeling a mixture of anger and panic — panic because, to his horror, he found himself agreeing with Micah (a persuasive ability that was one of the younger Ryan’s many significant talents) — didn’t have to have already seen the video to know what was coming. He knew his brother well enough to anticipate his denouement .
    “Shift is coming,” Micah said. “So to all in the Directorate who are rightfully, justifiably angry about those things you want but cannot have, I ask this: stop destroying what you wish could be yours. Stop blaming others for achieving their dreams. Stop believing that the only way to stand tall is to eradicate the things that make others stand above you. The things that anger you were achieved through hard work… and if you work hard, you can make them for yourself. Do you understand? You can have the things you want! In 28 days, you will face a choice: you may choose to remain in mediocrity, or you may choose to stop settling for what is given to you, and instead become what you were meant to be.”
    Isaac stood from the couch and, in a single motion, threw his fist in a giant roundhouse toward his brother’s head. His canvas took the punch as a swipe and closed the projection, but Isaac’s momentum caused him to tumble onto the floor and bang his head on the coffee table. Then, insultingly, the canvas’s sexy voice asked him if he was all right and indicated that he was bleeding. Isaac touched his scalp, felt blood, and snapped that he was fine.
    He was getting to his feet to head into the bathroom and treat his wound (Natasha still hadn’t emerged from her office despite Isaac’s crash) when a trilling noise indicated a new call.
    It was Dominic Long, who told Isaac that Nicolai was last traced entering the apartment of one Thomas “Doc” Stahl, but that Doc had also gone missing or off-grid.
    Isaac swore and said the police and city surveillance were beyond incompetent. Dominic said that the riot and then Isaac’s speech had set city tempers flaring, and that Micah’s speech today had made things ten times worse. Isaac cut Dominic off with an announcement that he was officially a captain again and snapped that he wanted some answers.
    Dominic, unintimidated, stared at Isaac and told him that he wasn’t the only one, and to get in line.

The bullet train dropped Leah at the end of its line, in Pillman, a tiny city situated just where the hills started but well before the mountains. Pillman was well-trafficked and circled by an expressway and had excellent Beam coverage, but it was one of the last towns that did. Past Pillman were a series of increasingly rustic burgs that could access The Beam through a fiber line, but the line had been laid thirty years earlier, back before The Beam was the carrying the seemingly bottomless capacity it did now. Access was spotty, and few people in the area had fully Beam-enabled houses. Many had only small personal canvases or even just handhelds, living as people had a hundred years earlier, spending large