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

unrest in the 30s, when it was built amidst supposition that the entire country could fall at any time. That was before America had joined the NAU, back when leftover optimism and the unbridled air of discovery from the 20s still hung in the air like the scent of soured wine. The old station still accessed The Beam through terminals and wasn’t gesture-enabled. Part of that was sensible (opening the Fi to general access could lead to security problems with all of the nutjobs coming and going), but most of it was due to apathy and short-sightedness. Police funding, even now, still got fucked right up the butt.  
    Dominic stopped at a flat silver panel in the foyer that looked almost like a full-length mirror. An Asian woman appeared in its surface and seemed to walk toward him, holding a clipboard.
    “How are you, Dominic?” she said.  
    “Fine, Akari,” he replied. The woman in the panel was as artificial as Noah, the voice in the hallway, but the programmers had soothed out Akari’s idiot edges. There were iterations of Noah on The Beam that were nearly as sharp as the real Noah had once been, but the station’s copy was — in Dominic’s mind, anyway — beyond obnoxious. Akari was also cute, and Dominic was a sucker for cute girls, no matter his level of annoyance.
    “How can I help you?” she said.  
    “I got a call about the breach at QuarkTechnic.”  
    Akari looked down at her clipboard — an affect the programmers had added to make her seem more real. “Of course. Holding room fifteen.”  
    “Thank you.”  
    Dominic walked through the Quark station, peering around at the officers working their full gesture canvases. One was rotating a relational web, peeling it back to search through the Beam’s pages. Another sat with her eyes closed, probably downloading images into an implant behind her retinas. Dominic wanted to swear. You had to be half cyborg to work here. It was one of the many things Dominic hated about the annex, aside from the sheer presumptuousness of it all. Quark thought it was important enough to impress itself into the fabric of the police themselves. What a load of bullshit.
    Dominic arrived at holding room fifteen. Beside the door was another silver panel, this one smaller than the one at the entrance. Akari appeared, visible from the chest up, still holding her clipboard.  
    “I can read,” said Dominic, his testiness returning in a wave. The fucking Beam was always checking on him, as if he was as burned as the nutjobs they picked up on the street. There was a large black “15” printed beside the door. He didn’t need Akari to confirm that he was in the right place.  
    “It’s not that, Dominic,” she said. “This suspect is classified security beta. I’m going to need a palm scan.” She held up her hand. It looked like she was on the other side of a window and had planted her palm against it from the inside.  
    “You scan-raped me on the walk in. What did I have for breakfast, Akari? What, exactly, is in my colon right now?”  
    “I apologize, Captain,” she said, subtly shifting in formality. “But I still require the scan.”  
    Dominic grunted and set his large, beaten-up policeman’s hand against Akari’s small, delicate one.  
    “Thank you,” she said. In front of Dominic, the door swung open.  
    The room was small and white. Inside, two Quark cops were interrogating their subject at a rather cliched wooden table. One stood. The other sat at the table’s edge. Dominic assumed the standing one was supposed to be the bad cop, and the seated one was the friendly good cop.  
    Across the table was a woman who appeared to be in her twenties (though who could say these days?) who gave Dominic a tiny smile when he entered. Her hair was matted in giant dreadlocks that were dyed a bright, almost luminescent pink. She had a small silver ring through the right side of her lower lip and another in her eyebrow. The ear on her other side had two piercings