The Beam: Season Two Read online

  Table of Contents

  Previously on The Beam

  EPISODE 7

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  EPISODE 8

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  EPISODE 9

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  EPISODE 10

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  EPISODE 11

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  EPISODE 12

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Get the Next Season of The Beam!

  Thanks for Reading!

  More Beam

  Other Books By Realm & Sands

  About the Authors

  Previously on The Beam

  Previously, in The Beam: Season One…

  NATASHA AND ISAAC RYAN

  Famous singer Natasha Ryan is performing a grand concert for a blended-class audience: elite citizens and some lottery-winning, lower-income attendees. Her performance ends, and Natasha flees as a riot erupts, presumably caused by Directorate Party members who are upset about inequity leading up to Shift — the event in which citizens choose their party (Enterprise or Directorate) for the next six years…and, by doing so, decide the balance of power in the NAU government.

  Afterward, Natasha’s husband, Isaac (the Directorate’s Czar of Internal Satisfaction and symbolic head) makes a post-riot speech defending his party only to be hit with a powerful rebuttal from Enterprise. Isaac desperately tries to reach his speechwriter, Nicolai, but Nicolai isn’t responding and appears to have gone missing. He calls the District Zero police captain, Dominic Long, who tells him that Nicolai was last recorded at the home of one Thomas Stahl, but that both men are now off-grid.

  Isaac juggles politics while Natasha throws a tantrum, demanding attention from Isaac. He chastises her for being self-consumed while their party faces calamity, potential Senate defections, and a missing speechwriter. She accuses him of caring about work more than her then storms into her office to summon her lover in the Viazo — a perfectly realized immersive simulation spot available only to the NAU's most elite citizens, who are known internally as the “Beau Monde.”

  Meanwhile, Isaac heads into a separate part of the Viazo in order to book a virtual vacation for him and Natasha, hoping to make up for lost time. While discussing his available options, the agent informs Isaac that he is out of money, and that his entire 15-million credit limit has nearly been spent by Natasha. Enraged, Isaac storms out to confront his wife. In the living room, Natasha is unfazed by his anger and blames him for making her shift from her old party of Enterprise to his Directorate, ignoring her needs, and preventing her from living the life she could as a true artist.

  Livid, Isaac prepares for his upcoming speech then delivers an impassioned cry for the Directorate cause, listing the several flaws in the Enterprise agenda. He delivers the speech live, only to later realize he’d already been pre-empted by his younger brother Micah, Enterprise’s head of Capital Protection.

  Things continue to decay between Isaac and Natasha. She threatens to shift to Enterprise, and Isaac taunts her to go ahead and return to Enterprise to live without a net. Natasha calls his bluff and declares this to be a brilliant idea. She’ll use her time prior to Shift — now just weeks away — to create media buzz for her triumphant shift back to the party of the fearless. The buzz will prep society for her return while at the same time emasculating and embarrassing Isaac. He caves and begs Natasha to reconsider. She refuses, running off to Micah to plan while Isaac follows along like a begging dog.

  NICOLAI COSTA

  Isaac calls Nicolai in a panic, ranting about how Natasha was terrorized during the riots. Nicolai, who has always wanted to be an artist but who “whored himself out” in his job with Isaac, rewrites Isaac’s speech but gets angry with himself, frustrated that he’s repeatedly writing the same tired political rhetoric. Later, Nicolai listens to Isaac recite the speech, Nicolai’s own words promising the public security in Directorate’s safety and supposed equality. After the speech, Nicolai rushes to his biological enhancement dealer, Doc, hoping to pick up his newest upgrade — a very non-Directorate brain chip that enhances creativity. But on arrival at Doc’s, Nicolai finds the apartment empty and then is ambushed by intruders.

  After enduring a round of torture at the hands of mysterious assailants, Nicolai awakes in his own apartment, safe, with no memory of the torture or knowledge that he is now missing days. He sees many messages from a panicky Isaac and goes to speak with his boss in person. Their exchange quickly sours. As Nicolai realizes his missing memories, his concern falls on deaf ears because Isaac is clearly worried only about himself. Nicolai, irate and overdue for a shift to Enterprise himself, informs Isaac that he will be resigning and, like Natasha, moving into Enterprise.

  Later, Nicolai is alone at the park, considering his options — returning to Isaac, defecting to Micah, or ending up in the gutters as an Enterprise washout before Shift — when Kai calls, relieved to hear that he’s still alive. Kai confirms that Nicolai’s mind has been wiped and suggests they meet in person. She has a plan for how to solve their many problems and says she needs to get inside the Ryans’ penthouse, indicating that Doc and a new man named Whitlock are waiting nearby. On the ride over, Kai details Nicolai’s capture, torture, and escape.

  Following events in the penthouse, Nicolai calls Micah Ryan and tells him that he’ll shift to Enterprise. Micah is happy to hear the news and tells Nicolai that based on his lineage, the move to Enterprise is almost destiny. Micah reveals that he knows all of Nicolai’s past — that his house in Italy was besieged, and that his father, Salvatore, was the uncredited father of hovertech nanobots. At the very end of their conversation, Micah reveals that not only are hovertech nanos responsible for many inventions including The Beam itself, but that Nicolai unknowingly brought the first of them into the NAU himself, all the way from Salvatore’s secret research and weaponry arsenal.

  KAI DREYFUS

  Kai Dreyfus, escort and sometime assassin, is visited when her client Doc shows up from nowhere, claiming he’s being pursued, and takes Kai on a sudden flight from her apartment. She takes Doc to her contact Stanford, a man who can maybe help him out of his jam. Inside Stanford’s building, however, she’s ambushed by tech die-hards and must fight her way out. She defeats several but is eventually captured and rendered unconscious.

  Kai wakes to find herself in a cell with Doc and Nicolai, her favorite client. The two men circle one another like dogs for Kai’s affection (and due to an overabundance of testo
sterone) until a man named Alix Kane enters to interrogate Doc about access to Xenia Labs that Doc should never have been given — and that Kane feels he connived his way into for reasons of industrial espionage. After denials from all three prisoners, Kane brings a strange machine into the room and explains that it's an upgraded version of an outlawed torture device. Kane tells the men that the torture will start with Kai.

  Kai is submerged into a sadistic and hideously painful simulation, tortured in ways that a conscious body shouldn't be able to tolerate. Doc pleads for her release and offers himself in her place. Kane summons a guard who unstraps Kai and instructs the Beamer to prepare Doc…and eliminate Kai.

  Kai is barely conscious as men carry her to a disposal room, but Kai’s highly enhanced system, equipped with a “possum” mode, slowly reboots. Still not at full strength, she is able to escape. Exhausted, she releases a homing device in her fingernail to her powerful client Micah Ryan in hopes of rescue, slumps into an abandoned cottage, and curls into a fetal position to await a timely death.

  Before she expires, though, Kai is rescued by two of Micah's armored men. Micah makes her repay the favor by promising to murder Doc, a friend of Kai’s who knows too much about the doings of Xenia Labs, in which Micah has a substantial stake. Unwilling to do what must be done, Kai thinks up a devious plan to get out of her and Doc’s predicament.

  DOC STAHL

  Upgrades dealer Thomas "Doc" Stahl is mistaken for a privileged, high-access Beau Monde salesman while at Xenia Labs and sees many next-generation tech and bio-enhancements that he should never have seen. Security discovers that Doc isn’t who Xenia believed him to be and wipes his memory. Doc’s memory is protected by an upgrade, though, and later he tries to make sense of what he saw. He eventually gives up but then is attacked by an intruder in his apartment.

  Doc flies through traffic, ditching his tail and making it to Kai’s apartment. Outside Stanford’s building, he is ambushed and captured then finds himself imprisoned with Kai and another of his clients, Nicolai. After some bickering and posturing between the men, the torturers arrive. Doc is threatened but maintains that his transgression at Xenia was a mistake and wasn’t premeditated. Kane shifts gears and questions Doc about a man named Omar Jones. Doc was not in cahoots with Omar to steal from Xenia, however, and can give Kane no secrets. Kane refuses to believe Doc and continues with his torture.

  Moments from death, Doc is saved by Kai, who has returned to rescue him with a pair of armored men sent by Micah Ryan. After much debate, Kai convinces Doc to go with them for treatment. He agrees but, imagining duplicity, escapes at the first opportunity. He flees and meets Omar at a Starbucks. Omar tells Doc about something called Project Mindbender and Micah’s involvement in it. He points an accusing finger toward Kai, telling Doc that she fits the description of Micah’s hit girl.

  Kai meets Doc later, and she tells him that he’s going to have to be part of a simulated murder to keep them both alive. He agrees to an immersion that’s worse than he could ever imagine — a sim wherein Kai painfully “kills” him for the memory benefit of Micah’s soldier Jason Whitlock — and then flees, knowing he has to stay hidden but unsure how it’s even possible to stay hidden from a man such as Micah.

  MICAH RYAN

  Micah congratulates his team of insurgents — Enterprise agents who conducted the riots in the name of Directorate, to make Isaac and his party look bad — following their return from the riot at Natasha Ryan’s concert. He then meets, via a simulation, with Killian — the man who accidentally allowed Doc to enter the restricted area of Xenia Labs. Micah learns of the mix-up and Doc’s capture…but also the capture of his presumed accomplices. When he learns that torturer Alix Kane is involved, he shows apprehension, knowing that the whole thing is likely out of control.

  Following the call, Micah orders his man Jason Whitlock to gather surveillance on Killian and communicate anything out of the ordinary then receives a distress call from his assassin, Kai. Kai, who should never have been taken in by Kane’s men, sounds near death. He eventually locates her far-off signal, somewhere outside of Manhattan, just close enough for Whitlock and his partner to reach in twenty minutes if they bend a few laws.

  After finding Kai, blanking and freeing Nicolai, and extricating Doc from torture, Whitlock calls his boss to apprise him of the situation — a situation that includes Doc’s escape. Micah erupts when he learns this, and, after belittling Whitlock, he directs him to tell Kai that she must execute Doc after they find him again…and if she refuses, Whitlock must kill Kai. He warns Whitlock that if both Kai and Doc are alive by day’s end, Whitlock won’t be.

  DOMINIC LONG

  Captain Dominic Long is called into the District Zero Police Department after the department nabs a hacker trying to break into Quark — a hippie Organa named Leah whom Dominic knows but must pretend he doesn’t. Dominic lets Leah go after her interrogation and tells her to be more careful. Organa leader, Leo Booker, calls Dominic to thank him for freeing Leah then asks Dominic to smuggle more of the illegal drug Lunis his way because the Organa inventory is getting dangerously low. Dominic tells Leo that there have been issues with shipments of “moondust” through his black market connections but promises a successful run very soon.

  After a rough day at DZPD and a rougher night, Dominic wakes from the worst moondust hangover of his life. He returns to the office to discover there was a security breach the night before. Records of Dominic’s past indiscretions (involving the old man Crumb and Dominic’s refusal to send him to Respero) might have been obtained during the rudimentary hacking. It’s the last thing Dominic needs with so much on his mind.

  On Leo’s dust-smuggling errand, Dominic runs out to meet his supplier, Omar Jones, in a secluded warehouse, still doing his best to convince himself that he’s not dirty despite his many dirty deeds and is instead subverting the rules in the interest of the larger “right.” The meeting turns out to be a setup, and Dominic is taken down by a nanobot swarm. He’s then dragged into an interrogation room where he’s questioned by Special Agent Austin Smith. The other cop realizes that without giving some of himself, he won’t be able to crack Dominic, so he uses a bot to hide their conversation and tells Dominic that he is a good cop who has done a few wrong things for the right reasons. Dominic opens up, but despite Austin’s theories, he insists that the Organa are in no way violent or planning a widespread revolt. Austin counters with damning evidence, painting the supposedly pacifistic Leo Booker as being quite old, highly enhanced, and the former leader of anti-establishment organization called Gaia’s Hammer — once a powerful enemy of the state that has since been expunged from history. Austin tells Dominic that if he flips on Leo, the arrest, the headache, and everything else troubling Dominic can all go away.

  LEAH

  Leah, a young Organa who is paradoxically a prodigious hacker, leaves the DZPD station after being dismissed by Dominic then travels to the Organa compound in the Appalachian Mountains. Outside the village, she chats with Crumb, the old man who has rambled in front of the place for her entire life. She then goes to see Leo, the man who raised her like a father. Leo tells Leah that Crumb has been saying strange things. He wants her to use the Beam connection in some nearby ruins to look into Crumb’s mind. The crazy old man has been behaving more peculiarly than ever, and keeps spouting off about Noah West, the man who fathered The Beam.

  Leah takes Crumb to an abandoned estate in the outskirts with a hard line to The Beam and links the line to his mind — and her mind to his — hoping to see what makes the old man tick.

  As she undertakes a moondust-enhanced tour of Crumb’s brain, Leah finds that some sort of internal firewall prohibits her from accessing Crumb’s thoughts and memories. She disengages from the link, but Crumb seems to want her to dig deeper. After some creative exploring deeper within their connection, she discovers a small back door in his heavily firewalled mindscape. Accessing it, Leah sees an image of a journal bearing the name Stephen York. Then
, as she feels their shared reality beginning to crumble, she pulls back to the world and finds Crumb unconscious on the floor.

  Leah calls Leo and gets Crumb to a mountain hospital, but soon after check-in, Crumb disappears. Leah heads into District Zero to search the core Beam network for clues, but on the ride in has foreign dreams that seem not to belong to her. She panics, thinking that her implant is malfunctioning, but rather than seeking an upgrade dealer or doctor upon arrival in the city, she finds herself heading to the place she saw in those odd visions: a restaurant in old Chinatown.

  When she locates the restaurant, she is given unexplained access to what appears to be a high-end computer lab in disguise. In the stark and abandoned room, she finds the journal she saw in Crumb’s mind: the one belonging to a mystery man named Stephen York. She leaves the restaurant with the journal — which contains images showing Noah West sitting with a man who seems to be a younger version of Crumb — and more questions than ever.

  Exploring later, Leah discovers that the journal describes the thirty years Stephen York spent working with Noah West. It details America's fall, the rise of the NAU in its place, the formation of the Enterprise and Directorate parties, and the development of the old Crossbrace network before it evolved into The Beam. Leah calls Leo and lets him know what she found, and Leo heads into the city to meet her.

  Leah and Leo, following a spooky sort of simpatico Leah seems to have with The Beam, track the missing Crumb and end up at what appears to be a school. Inside, a young boy greets the pair and leads them through the most realistic simulation either has ever seen…without using a simulator to do it. The boy then takes them into a room where they find Crumb sleeping. A mysterious, angelic woman named SerenityBlue approaches Leah, and they go back and forth about Crumb, York, The Beam, and the nature of reality. Crumb awakes and tries to let Leah know that he is okay and that SerenityBlue is helping him. Crumb and Leah find an odd, familiar breed of comfort in her presence, but they soon realize that they see her as two entirely different people. Leo returns to the room and is shocked to realize that he sees her as Leah’s twin. Serenity responds by saying to Leah, “So that’s why you seem so familiar.”