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

 
    In the middle of the hub, one man’s gaze lingered for too long, so Kate rammed his side without apology. It didn’t work, though. When she glanced back, the man was smiling, as if she’d flirted back at him.  
    Kate rolled her eyes then decided to distract herself by doing what the men were doing: checking out hot girls. A disproportionate number of people on the moon were extremely wealthy — and the wealthy, thanks to their nano and youth treatments, were usually beautiful. She caught sight of a trio of women crossing the hub, all three in short skirts as if attending a business meeting or a stripper convention. They might have been old enough to be Kate’s mother, but hey — firm boobs were firm boobs. She should know. She could barely stop pawing at her own.  
    Kate passed them. She smiled. They smiled. And her heartbeat rose again as she sighed, wishing she had time to stop.
    At the far end of the hub, she took the tube that led to the external airlock. Once through the passageway, she was pleasantly surprised to see that her transport had already been delivered and converted for ground travel. Maybe she could stay on schedule after all. And maybe, if she hurried through the rest of her trip, she could even find those girls on the way out, with time to spare.
    Kate slid into the transport, closed the hatch, and for the third time looked down at her wrist to check the time. But her nanowatch had left with her penis, and despite the watch upgrade’s uselessness, she missed it. She hadn’t been able to see the time on the back of her wrist since before the genetic refurb and Beam ID reset — since before she’d had to go into hiding from Micah Ryan, just two weeks ago, when she’d still been Doc Stahl.  
    The transport’s canvas chirped. The soft female voice said, “Where would you like to go, Miss Rigby?”  
    “To find my cock.”  
    “I’m sorry,” said the canvas. “I don’t know that location.”  
    Kate sighed. “Then take me to Digger Base.”

Chapter 6

    April 17, 2055 — District Zero

    Dom approached Mr. Booker’s desk, sucked up his courage, then set his tablet in front of the teacher. He wanted to slam it on the desk (he’d seen this sort of thing plenty in vidstreams, done with paper, and it looked so much better), but a tablet was a tablet, and he’d already broken one this year.  
    Mr. Booker looked up. “Yes?”  
    Dom met his eyes. Mr. Booker wore glasses but didn’t have bifocals, so he tended to look over their tops, the way he was looking at Dom now. The entire thing was antiquated and clumsy (why didn’t he just get eye surgery or a Crossbrace-enabled implant?), but that was how Mr. Booker was. He wore his hair long, often in a ponytail. He had a wardrobe of brightly colored shirts. He bicycled to work; he used pencils and paper; he wore glasses and peered over their tops. Dom’s father said his biology teacher was a leftover hippie, but Dom always wondered what he was left over from. Mr. Booker wasn’t old enough to pick up the early century or late prior-century fashions Dom had found when poking around on Crossbrace. It was as if he’d pulled his philosophies and look from the air then tried them on and discovered that he liked their fit.  
    Dom picked up the tablet then set it back down on the desk. Apparently, he hadn’t faux-slammed it pointedly enough.  
    “You’re giving me your tablet? Thanks, Dom.”  
    “Why did you fail me?” Dom demanded.  
    “Because you did poorly on the test.”
    “I only missed three. Out of twenty.”  
    Booker shrugged.  
    “That’s 85 percent. I got 85 percent of the questions right.”  
    “Very good. You may pass math.”  
    “Failing is 50 or less.”  
    Booker looked up then closed the slim volume he’d been reading — bound and printed on paper, of course. He removed his glasses and set them aside.  
    “Yes, yes it is. And let me ask you something, Dom. Does it seem right to you that you can get