The Beam: Season One

The Beam: Season One Read Free Page A

Book: The Beam: Season One Read Free
Author: Sean Platt
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(elite) technology. Sure, it was neat and cool and fun . But was it practical? In Nicolai’s opinion, airboards were for people who wanted to pretend they were writing but never actually did.  
    His fingers clacked on keys. Words lit the screen. This went on for a while, until Nicolai realized he was just rehashing Directorate propaganda and rewriting an old speech — one of the few standard speeches from the party’s archives that had been given by Directorate leaders over and over and over again. He had told Isaac that unrest was good, but the problem was that Nicolai didn’t know if he actually believed it. You couldn’t quell unrest; you could only redirect it. Those people had come after Natasha because she was at the top of the credit/income ladder, not because of her party affiliation. Nicolai couldn’t make that class-based anger vanish, so his best bet was to refocus it in a useful way. The rioters’ problems — and all of the problems plaguing the Directorate — were the result of the Enterprise. They control the wealth. They are keeping you down.
    With a strange punched-in-the-gut feeling, Nicolai realized that it wasn’t the first time such deflection had been used. Back when there had been mass immigration into America (in the days before it joined the North American Union), economic woes were usually blamed on foreigners coming in and taking jobs. Before that, the default enemy was the Jews.  
    Nicolai swiped the window closed, then set the keyboard back on the end table. He stood, walked to his window wall, and once again took in the streets of District Zero below. The city was alive with light, but the sky above it was a smooth nothingness. Nicolai missed being able to see the stars and the moon through the Shell miles above as he had in his youth, but night objects weren’t bright enough to blast through the three-layered defensive barrier like the sun did. The nights seemed so dark, even in the city. It was the price you paid for protection.
    From all the way up high, the city seemed peaceful. But that was the thing about distance: from far enough away, everything became an average. There were rich and there were poor. There were Enterprise and Directorate. There was the NAU and the Wild East, out past the ant farm wall that covered the continent. But if you kept pulling back, eventually everything averaged out to people. And when the Mars project was finished — and if the elite then moved a planet away — the only thing needed to restore a sense of equity would be to zoom out another level or two.  
    Nicolai sighed. He had to clear his head. He needed someone to talk to and to be with who wouldn’t care about socioeconomic woes. Someone who could make the world vanish for a few hours at an exorbitant price — or sometimes longer than a few hours, if she was feeling generous.  
    “Canvas,” Nicolai said to his empty apartment.  
    A single chirp answered him.  
    “Get me Kai Dreyfus.”

Chapter 3

    The trick to being a good escort, Kai knew, was to make the man she was with feel like he was the only person in the world she’d ever care about. That meant she couldn’t discuss other clients, leave remnants or mementos of other clients around, half-ass her affection, or talk business. For the time she was booked, Kai became her client’s girlfriend, wife, confidant — whatever he wanted. She kept extensive records of each client’s background in a characteristics file in her canvas. Subtle cameras in her apartment and embedded in her retinas recorded every second of their every interaction, and a sophisticated AI algorithm stripped the footage for relevant details.  
    Client A had three kids. His oldest knew about his dalliances, but didn’t care.  
    Client B had a cluster of moles on his arm that Kai had once said looked like the constellation Orion, and he’d thought that was delightfully clever.  
    Client C had insecurities surrounding his manner of dress; she’d once

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