Episode 1 - The Beam

unconnected meant not just unplugging from The Beam’s omniscient data stream… but also from electricity, phone, mail (except hand-couriered OldMail written on paper), vidstreams, most music, and even the simplest conveniences like central cleaning, mechanized washing and mending, banks, and so on. Finding power tools without a Beam chip was nearly impossible except in specialty antique stores at exorbitant prices, so the purists had to build with hand saws and hammers. Orthodox Organas lived much like the pioneers who had settled the NAU, back even before it was called America. Most Organas weren’t that dedicated, which was why so few were truly orthodox.
    Leah, kneeling amongst the flowers, thought it was bullshit.
    In a few minutes, Leo would be chewing her out about getting arrested in the city and about her new nanobot fabricators, which Dominic would likely have told him about. But again: bullshit . Didn’t Leo have his own add-ons, even if they weren’t in his body? Didn’t everyone? Sure, most of the Organas didn’t have nanos in their blood. Sure, they didn’t have chips in their heads. Sure, many of them didn’t even have Beam IDs, thanks to Leah. Sure, they had to access Beam terminals like vagrants, without any of the cookies that caused systems to remember who they were. But did they not ride mag trains? Did they not communicate via mail when they were on the grid? Did they not use rolling sidewalks and stairs? Did they not have bank accounts and pay their electric bills in the only way The Beam allowed — by fingerprint?
    Despite their fashions and their posturing and their horses and their ritualistic use of moondust, the people in the village were still all connected. They could unplug, but they never would. Organa was fashionable as an ideal, but like most ideals, it fell apart the minute someone realized they’d need to light a candle if they wanted to piss in the middle of the night. Leah, at least, was honest about who she was.
    She found Leo in the meeting hall, reading a book. A paper book, which was its own kind of irony. Organa life was supposed to be spartan and full of self-denial, but Leo’s books were a symbol of wealth among the poor. Old pulp paperbacks were everywhere in the poorer neighborhoods, but good, sturdy hardbacks like Leo’s were impossible to find. Each would bring a fortune at auction.
    Leo looked up, closed the book, and set it on the table beside him. He was sitting alone in a circle of chairs that were often used for moondust parties. His legs were crossed and his old, wrinkled face looked at Leah from under a head of gray hair. Two pony tails braided with feathers hung at the sides of his head, and a blue headband with a sun stitched on it wrapped his forehead.
    “Well,” he said.
    “Hey Leo.”
    “You got caught.”
    She’d known this was coming. Leo had told her to lay low, no exceptions. He wanted her to hack the Quark server, scout for holes in the inner security layers, and transfer everything out that she could possibly get safely onto a slip drive. But Leo was a data hoarder. Brick by brick, he was recreating the most innocuous, most useless parts of Quark’s dataset. It was pointless. Everything Leah brought back was obsolete by the time she returned, and Quark was always gathering new data faster than she could bring it back for Leo to stick somewhere and never get around to cataloguing.
    “Check.”
    “You did it on purpose. So you could try out some new hole in your head.”
    That was how Leo thought of enhancements and add-ons — as “holes in the head.” To an old guy like Leo, biological enhancement was about drilling holes and shoving chips into brains. No wonder he didn’t get it.
    “I wanted to see what was on the other side,” said Leah.
    Leo looked at her for a long moment, narrowing his gray steel eyes. He reached toward a dish beside his book where he’d set a carved wooden pipe. The concoction he smoked was laced with moondust, and Leah could smell the drug blended in with the burning tobacco. It had an acrid, almost chemical scent. To Leah, it was the smell of space.
    Leo puffed the pipe, looked at Leah again, then set the pipe aside.
    “Sit down,” he said.
    “I’d rather stand.”
    “Sit down, Leah.”
    She watched the old man with the ponytails and headband, trying to decide if this was an argument worth having. She decided it wasn’t. Yet. So Leah sat in the chair farthest from Leo, opposite him in the