Episode 1 - The Beam

slip drives, stolen paper records, plans, and boxes upon boxes filled with Organa propaganda — just in time, just in advance of the raid. Most in the village wrote it off as coincidence, but Crumb had returned to normal after the police had left, no longer yammering on about an impending Indian attack.
    Leah said she remembered.
    “That’s how he’s been with West, as if something’s jarred him loose. He used to be all over the place, but now everything is Noah West this and Noah West that.”
    “He’s crazy, Leo.”
    “It’s like he’s trying to warn us. We tried to crack his head when he first arrived, back in the sixties, but we’ve never gotten anything from him. We wrote it off because like you said, we just figured he was crazy. But it’s always bugged me. Why was Dominic called to take him in when a sweeper could have done the job? Why was he ordered to federal Respero? He should have gone into the state system, and then either been contained or dispatched without ceremony. But they were all over Dominic, remember? And that’s what got him thinking that maybe his gut feeling to save Crumb meant something.”
    Leah shrugged, her gesture asking what came next.
    Leo tapped his chin with his thumb. “I want you to ride with Crumb to Bontauk. They have the closest hardwired connection to The Beam. Don’t say I told you so, but I don’t think I have to explain why I’m asking you to do it?”
    “My port. And my ID spoof.”
    “Yes. But not for you. For him. I don’t want him scanned, even by something simple like a handheld. Not until we know more.”
    Leah was shaking her head. “It’s just Crumb,” she said.
    “Yes,” said Leo. “But my instincts have never failed me, and they’re all ringing that there’s something to this.”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know. But until we know more, I’ll be getting the same brand of wretched sleep I’ve been getting for too long.”
    Leah stood, brushed at her sarong, and picked up her backpack. “What do your instincts say about my getting caught breaking into Quark?” she said.
    Leo stood and pulled something from a satchel at his side, then handed it to Leah. It was a small, collapsible slumbergun.
    “That either way, it’s a good idea for you to keep that with you.”

Stephen York stood on the dirt, kicking at it, willing his feet to do what he told them. After a while, they did. He stopped kicking and fell still. Then he leaned back and crossed his arms. Soon he realized his arms were twitching, so he pinched them harder to his sides. He told his mind and body to still; he needed to concentrate for what was coming.
    He began reciting prime numbers, like a mantra.
    One. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen.
    In between numbers, York tried to decide what the last few days of foreboding could mean. His mind kept wanting to slip, but he held it down, focusing on the numbers. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-three. He could keep going. He had, over and over and over. He knew up to 3571 by heart because he had once memorized the first five hundred primes while studying cyphers and encryption. It was a relatively useless skill, but today, he was grateful for it. Like an old man searching his mind for names from his youth, York felt that reciting the primes was a way to keep him sharp. He walked through the list repeatedly, feeling like he was running a stone over his thoughts, trying to hone their edge. Still, his thoughts kept slipping. His memories were there, quiet and orderly deep inside him, but they kept threatening to fall away. Some thoughts were stickier than others. Through simple repetition, some memories had become grooved and conditioned. Like the primes. He’d had reason enough to recite his wife’s name that he knew it without thinking. He knew his bank account number. He knew the access codes he’d used back when he’d helped develop Crossbeam decades ago. He could remember line after line of code — all obsolete today, of course. But doing reasoning with that archive of knowledge? Plumbing it in order to draw conclusions? That was hard. Maybe impossible.
    He felt like his mind was inside a literal box. He kept rapping his mental shoulders and knees on that confining box because there wasn’t enough room to maneuver. That was the firewall, of course. He’d helped develop some of that technology too, but the details weren’t as well-rehearsed as his wife’s name or the prime numbers and so he couldn’t access much about