Episode 1 - The Beam

So much for finding his Beam ID through a backdoor.
    Kai looked down at the naked man on her bed, lying on his stomach with one strong arm up. She wondered if any of his muscularity was natural, or if it was all the work of nanos. Even as a woman who’d cheated her way to a flat stomach and gravity-defying breasts, she found herself strangely judgmental of Ralph’s muscles. It was probably because she was feeling so resentful about his secrets, but she suddenly thought that if he hadn’t grown those arms himself, he was a fucking pussy.
    Yes, she was letting it get to her. But Kai Dreyfus was a girl who always got what she wanted, and she didn’t like this one bit. The idea that someone had put up such a thorough firewall around this man’s true identity made her wary. Who was this man on her bed? What was he up to? Was he just here for a good time, or did he know something about Kai? Did he know the secrets she’d taken over the years — and if so, what might he be planning to do to retrieve them?
    She slapped his sleeping face lightly, playfully.
    “What are you hiding, buttercup?” she asked him.
    Regardless, it would be prudent to wipe his memory. It would be impossible to do a decent job with all the protections in place, but she might be able to force a soft reset with a few nanos who could go in and manually induce some light damage to his hippocampus. She’d have to be careful. Too many nanos and he’d end up burned. She didn’t want him burned, just mildly forgetful. Then she wanted to get him the fuck out of her apartment.
    Kai pulled up the diagnostic screen, checked for perimeter protection at his ears, and found none. Then she pulled a small lancet from a sterile pouch, slid it into a doser attached to a nano pack, and gave instructions to six scavengers. She pushed the lancet into the skin behind his ear, tossed it into the garbage, and started to clean. She could have the doorman take him away. She’d owe the doorman a quickie for the favor, but it was okay. The doorman was kind of hot.
    Just as Kai was about to retrieve her tablet, something on the screen caught her eye. It looked like a software tag left by the developer who’d put her mystery man’s protections in place. She chuckled. Watch it be Doc. But of course, that was stupid. Doc didn’t deal in upgrades this sophisticated.
    But when she looked closer, she saw that it wasn’t an identifier tag at all. It was a prime sequence — a piece of code that was meant to form an interface with another piece from an external source. It meant he was prepped for an upgrade that could be taken on and off of his body, like enhanced glasses. But as much as she tapped her tablet and searched her mind, Kai couldn’t place the prime sequence. It certainly wasn’t for enhanced glasses.
    Mystified, she entered the code into her canvas and sent it to her network on The Beam.
    The response returned three words that, to Kai, meant nothing but smelled like poison: Stark Centurion Program.

It was only 8am, and already the streets were filled with assholes.
    Thomas “Doc” Stahl sat in a cab, looking down at his wrist. As he straightened his arm and rolled it back, the tattoo faded away. It was an unpopular upgrade, and people who didn’t know Doc sometimes commented that looking at his wrist to see the time was something that made him look stupid, not retro. The local time was on every canvas, every surface in any public building, in the corner of every heads-up display (retinal, projected, or even the poorest VR glasses in the ghetto), and available for the asking at just about any place in the NAU. Most people in the better parts of the city had cochlear implants for audio calls, and even some of the bums had ancient phones. The time was on every digital billboard, every screen.
    But Doc hadn’t gotten the watch upgrade because he wanted to see the time on his wrist. He’d gotten it because he liked the affect of looking down. The gesture conveyed class when he wanted it to, and it conversely conveyed “fuck you, hurry up” about a thousand times better than anything else a man could do. People hadn’t worn functioning watches for over fifty years, but tapping one’s wrist still meant “let’s hurry up” in the same way people still referred to “getting something on tape” when they meant making a recording. And looking down at a cocked wrist was still singularly insulting in a way that checking a display could never be. It told