The Beam: Season One by Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant

They were going to wipe his memory. They wouldn’t have a Gauss Chamber, because this was a lab, not a hospital. Wholesale erasure wouldn’t be necessary, anyway. They’d use a hand unit. Doc would lose the last fifteen minutes, and would later find himself unsure whether he’d seen any new wares this week or not. He’d probably call Nero on Monday and ask for a new appointment. Nero, duly briefed, would play along.  
    And so he’d told Killian that he understood, and he’d allowed Killian to wave him clean. Afterward, he’d affected the vacant, vaguely optimistic expression appropriate to a fresh wipe while a tech ran a small sensor above his long blond hair. The tech had declared him current as of approximately the time he’d been in the bathroom washing his face. Then Killian had led him out without hurry, knowing that Doc’s ability to form new memories would be impaired for several more minutes. He’d told him that there was nothing new this week, and had suggested Doc call Mr. Nero on Monday. Doc had thanked him, gone back down to the street, and had hailed a cab. He’d gotten the same cabbie as before. The cabbie had jerked the cab at every stoplight, nearly causing Doc to plow his face into the divider.  
    Sitting in his apartment, mulling his troubling (and unforgotten, unwiped) time at Xenia, Doc swiped the air to make the holo he’d been pretending to watch vanish. It was a stupid show anyway. Whiny people with their whiny problems. It wasn’t even distracting him. He could still see everything that had happened today, thanks to the wipe firewall he’d had implanted and the accompanying spoof under his hair. As a man who’d had to scrap and connive his way to success as a salesman, it wasn’t the first time someone had wanted Doc to forget what he’d seen.  
    “Canvas,” Doc said.  
    His wall chirped.  
    “Search biological enhancements.”  
    A large globe of Beam pages appeared in the air in front of him. Doc preferred his results visually clustered in an intuitive web, like a Beam-generated mind-map. Closest to Doc was a window showing a common distributor of artificial limbs, and beside it was Hammacher Schlemmer. Neither were helpful. He wasn’t looking for replacement parts, and Hammacher Schlemmer hadn’t changed in the fifty years it had been selling upgrades instead of shoe buffers from in-flight magazines. All of H-S’s add-ons were useless novelties for rich people who had literally nothing else to spend their credits on: bioluminescent toes to show users see where they were walking at night; tongue modifiers that made everything taste like ice cream. He frowned.
    Doc held the index finger and thumb of each hand up in front of him, then peeled the web open between the limb distributor and Hammacher Schlemmer. Deeper pages rolled forward and the outer layer curled back like a banana peel. Nothing. He turned the globe, peeled the other way, following the H-S path, toward upgrades and away from medical limb replacement. But it wasn’t right.
    “Search biological upgrades.”  
    This time, the front page was Omnipedia. Of course. But he didn’t want to know the theories behind biological enhancement, particularly the vanilla’d version. He twisted the web, spun it to find its edges, and saw that the scope was still wrong. He was already feeling discouraged. If Xenia had tried to wipe his mind to make him forget what he’d seen, what were the chances that it would be available, publicly, on The Beam?
    Doc sighed, then looked down at his router, which he kept visible so that he could look at it and make himself less paranoid. The SECURE light was still lit. The router had been ridiculously expensive, and used AI/key encryption, a hybrid model ensuring that all but the most advanced systems would never know where his queries originated.
    Duly secure, Doc said, “Search Series Six nanobots.”  
    This time, even the front page wasn’t close. He found a line of Series Six