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

fucking rain tomorrow.  
    He checked his wrist. His nano tattoo was still working fine, and he saw that it was nearly midnight. But the enhancements in Doc’s body that required a Beam connection to function were quiet. He felt like he’d lost a limb, or several.  
    He jumped out of bed and called for lights, already forgetting his link was down. Then he tapped the wall to turn them on seconds later, forgetting again. He slammed his toe into the door jamb and winced, suddenly thinking that the glowing toe enhancement maybe wasn’t so stupid after all.  
    His heart pumped harder. Something was wrong.  
    He heard the sound again, but this time recognized it as the clatter of his doorknob. Someone was trying to break in. That wasn’t supposed to be possible. Tuco was tied down tight, inaccessible at the outer door and elevator to anyone without an embedded Beam ID that matched the supposedly unhackable resident roster. There were two guards at the door and a lobby attendant. And how could anyone pick his lock? There was a manual piece to the lock, of course — a plain old ordinary thing that fell on a deadbolt, to provide a tangible feeling of security — but of course, if his link was down, that deadbolt would be the only game in town. The Beam-enabled locks and security wouldn’t be functioning. There was supposed to be a triple-redundancy in the system — a box inside the door that wasn’t wired into The Beam, plus a failsafe in the lock itself. The power supply was supposed to be self-contained. But despite all of that, Doc could hear someone picking with regular tools, as if the lock were nothing more than a stick shoved through a hole.  
    “Who’s there?” Doc called out, feeling stupid. It was the kind of thing people used to do in old movies, back before identifiers and Beam tracking. Before locks that you could command to repel a specific person from your door if you wanted… and if your link was up.
    Instead of getting an answer, Doc watched as his front door burst open and a silhouette sprinted toward him. He saw lights on in the hallway.  
    The intruder was halfway toward him, running. Had he been discovered? The guy wasn’t fucking around. Was he here to wipe Doc’s memory for good? Or was he here to wipe Doc — as in “wiped from existence”?  
    The intruder’s thundering feet told Doc that the intruder hadn’t come for tea.  
    Doc turned, grabbed a lamp, and swung. He was swinging mostly blind in the dark apartment, but his swing hit paydirt. He felt his arms shudder as the lamp found something hard. The attacker grunted, staggered back, and slammed into the wall. A picture (a real one in a frame; his mother had given it to him and he’d laughed) fell at the attacker’s side. Doc heard glass shatter. He tried to see the intruder’s face by the wan city light through his windows, but it was too dark.  
    The attacker leapt up. The blow had only disoriented him.  
    Before his pursuer could gain his feet, Doc sprinted to the end of the hall at the back of his apartment in his boxers, yanked open the door at its end, and jumped into his car. Then he disengaged the magnetic docking lock, fired the engine, and whirred away, leaving his attacker’s silhouette in the door behind him.

Chapter 7

    Nicolai touched the glass front of a store as he passed and glanced at the time. It was nearly midnight. It was late, but Doc’s message had said he could come by and pick up his new creativity chip whenever. Nicolai, realizing how overly eager it made him look, intended to take Doc up on his offer.  
    He hadn’t been able to come straight over, and the delays had given him upgrade blue balls. Once he’d left the Orpheum, he’d been summoned back by Isaac, who was in a celebratory mood and wanted the speechwriter to have his due. Nicolai said it was quite all right and told Isaac to take the credit, but Isaac was having none of it. Besides, Isaac said, Natasha wanted to thank him. Then