Episode 1 - The Beam

circle, and crossed her arms across her chest.
    “You think we move too slow,” said Leo.
    “Yes.”
    “You think that we’re fighting a losing battle.”
    Leah tried to decide how she wanted to answer. It was a trick question. She believed in Organa, but she argued for it on shaky ground — she with her new nano fabricating implants.
    “I think that we need to keep up,” she said. “Quark is taking chances, and they get smarter every time. I got caught because I wanted to, because…”
    Leo shook his head side to side. Leah watched him and trailed off. Then, reservedly, he picked up the pipe and puffed it again.
    “I know why you got caught. I know about your new implants. I seem to recall telling you not to get them.”
    “We need a presence on the inside. And now thanks to me, we have one. We have…”
    “We have a traceable path right back to our front doors!” Leo snapped, his voice rising. “We have a girl who thinks she’s so goddamn smart that she doesn’t need to listen! We have someone who forgets that she’s not the only Organa in this game!”
    “Dominic will erase my record,” she said.
    Leo laughed a humorless laugh. “Oh, I see. And you were talking to the average person on the street, right? Beat cops who will just forget about you. The Beam doesn’t forget, Leah. They have you coming and going. They know every feature on your face, and they have a voice record of everything you said. You’re blind if you think that data stayed in the station, or that Dominic has access to a tenth of it. Who really controls the cops? Who polices the police? Do you really think The Beam will forget you? You were where you shouldn’t have been, and now your footprints are in there forever.”
    “The station is a black box, Leo,” Leah protested. “They don’t have lines out. I tried telling you that. They cut it totally off and batch hand-selected datasets semi-weekly. You’d know that if you listened.”
    “ You need to listen!”
    “Oh, I do? Tell me, Leo… why do you have me? Is it because you understand systems better than I do? Is it because this is all just on the tip of your tongue but you’d rather have someone else handle it to make your life easier? The Beam knows too much, does it? But you still think of it like a monster. It’s not a monster. It’s a system. The system will always do what’s best for the system. It responds to stimulus-response, same as you. When you go home and search The Beam to find one of these expensive books of yours, the system is on your side because you’re spending credits. It doesn’t care about your other face, where you pretend to hate it.”
    Leah felt her heart racing, felt blood pulsing up her neck in a furious blush of mounting rage. She waited for Leo’s angry response, but instead of becoming cross, the old man just dropped his head.
    “Fine,” he said. “We’re all hypocrites. But you are still part of a team. You’re important to us, but if you endanger the team by being reckless, then you’re useless. You are the only one here who I’d give this much latitude, but I can only take so much, Leah. You talk back. You question every plan. You’re given direction to do one thing and you do something else, almost automatically. You throw your knowledge and what you can do in everyone’s faces. The idea of getting deliberately caught! Do you know what Laura said when she heard? She wants you kicked out. If you’d gotten caught on accident, that’d be one thing, but there are already rumors about you hotdogging with new enhancements, and people already suspect that you have others…”
    “Fuck them!” said Leah.
    “Really.”
    “Yes! Do you want to get into Quark, or do you want to bang tambourines and do moondust and dance in circles? I’ve done more to advance this group’s mission with my add-ons than a thousand Lauras with her braided necklaces and soul dance bullshit!”
    “All right. You want to know the truth? I’ll tell you the truth. But if you say I told you this, I’ll deny it, and people will believe me, not you.” Leo sighed again, leaned forward, and set aside his pipe. “In order for the Organa movement to have a prayer of success, a small percentage of us must sell out. That’s why you got your training, and why we don’t discuss it here. It’s why I looked the other way when you got your first enhancement, and then your second. It’s why I’ll deny you got this new one. But you have to listen to