The Beam: Season Two by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant

Author:Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant [Platt, Sean & Truant, Johnny B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Realm & Sands
Published: 2014-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Sam couldn’t get comfortable.

He was sitting in a Starbucks chair, in a private cubicle near the back, using his own laptop canvas rather than one of the Starbucks access points. He didn’t need coffee (hypercaffeine made his obsessiveness and distractibility worse), but he’d accidentally ordered a full-octane brew anyway when he’d come in, flustered for no good reason, and had sipped it compulsively once it arrived through the Warp delivery table. The mug was now beside him, mostly empty. He could feel the drug running around inside his head, bouncing between skull and cortex.

After sending the Null forum message to Integer7, Sam had lapsed into a panicky stew, alternating between feeling that he was doing what needed to be done and feeling that he’d tossed a lit match into a pool of fossil fuel.

Something was fishy with Shift. He needed help to get inside, and that meant adding flies to the ointment. The only body large enough and anarchical enough to disrupt Shift was Null. Getting them to move would require the arm-in-arm efforts of both Shadow and Integer7. And so back in the park, he’d taken a necessary step in contacting the man (or woman, or kid in his basement, or brain in a vat, or whatever), but it’s not like Integer7 was stable. Integer7 had a history of saying some pretty crazy shit. Just like how Shadow had his own history of saying crazy shit.

“It’s cool, man.” Sam shifted in his chair, trying to convince himself. “Be cool.”

But no matter what Sam said to himself, he refused to listen. He couldn’t be cool. He’d never been cool…except when he was Shadow — because Shadow was always in control. Shadow was everything that Sam wanted to be. Shadow said what he meant and never thought about it twice. Shadow could stand (digitally) in front of a large audience and lead them boldly forward. Shadow didn’t burn soup or let baths overflow. And if Sam had to guess, Shadow probably didn’t have to convince himself, out loud and alone in a Starbucks cubicle, that everything was cool.

It had been three hours since he’d messaged Integer7. After sending the message, Sam had immediately switched over to his masked mail account and had waited for a reply to arrive, any messages there having been routed through six different anonymous remailers. The page refreshed automatically, but Sam still clicked reload over and over. This went on for 120 seconds, and then the panic started.

Integer7 always responded immediately to queries. Clearly, he’d gotten the message but thought that Shadow was crazy. Or he thought Shadow was a problem and was quietly rallying his own Null group to bomb Shadow’s page at its newly relocated address, to expose him for the insurgent (or fraud) that he was. Somehow, Sam began to feel, Integer7 even knew who Shadow was. He knew that Shadow wasn’t a large, intimidating revolutionary with a chiseled jawline. He knew he was actually a scrawny kid in his twenties — a Generation N with glasses and tattoos that fooled nobody into believing he was older.

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