Read Episode 1 - The Beam for Free Online Page B

just doling out bullshit of a different flavor. He’d be writing words for Isaac’s brother Micah instead, telling the NAU that the Directorate were the greedy ones. They were the Robin Hoods who wanted to tax the profits that Enterprise members had worked hard to earn from the sweat of their own brows and wills. Why should the Directorate (many of whom chose to sit around all day without working) benefit from the Enterprise’s intellect and guts?
    “There is no perfect system,” Isaac said from the lectern. “There will always be problems, but we cannot draw flame from a match of unsteady premise. We cannot abandon those who are unable to succeed on their own, as the Enterprise does. The Directorate is committed to providing for our members — for every single one . You will never starve as a member of the Directorate. As more and more tasks become automated by AI and service robots, you will not truly need to work. We have the best of both worlds. We receive what we need without having to break our backs to get it. When turbulence approaches, always remember who we are and what we have. We cannot riot. Riots make us look like a mob. We are no such thing! We believe in our family, and our family is proud!”
    None of it was untrue. Directorate members were not required to work. But it was also not really true, because a Directorate living was meager. You got a place to live, you got your services and healthcare taken care of, and you got a stipend for living expenses. But the technology that handled base tasks and made it possible not to work was a double-edged sword, because it gave members things to want. Too many Directorate party members spent their credits on gadgets, then found themselves short on food. So what did they do? They took some of those jobs back in order to earn extra credits. All of their work was based on a fixed income, with few legitimate chances for advancement. Nicolai couldn’t live like that. He was Directorate, but only in the way Isaac was. Both of their “fixed credit allowances,” based on their positions, were so high that it felt unlimited. Isaac had even found a slippery way to reclassify Natasha as Directorate. She was a self-made performer who’d come up Enterprise, but now received an exorbitant salary. The irony was that while her scrappiness had gotten Natasha to where she was, her flat pay rate meant that no matter whether her next album and holoconcerts thrived or flopped, she’d generate exactly the same number of credits.
    There was something unappealing to Nicolai about guarantees. Risk — the Enterprise’s bread and butter, which the Directorate thought of as gambling — was more exciting. Risk felt like standing on the top of a cliff, feeling your heart beat out of your chest. You might die if you jumped from that cliff, and it was smarter to head over to the wading pool where things were safe. But Nicolai, who’d grown up wealthy, had fled Rome as it burned, trekking through the Wild East with only a pack and a crossbow. He knew the rewards that came from risk. But that had all ended when he’d arrived at the NAU border and met Isaac, and the other bookend had snapped into place. From rich to rich, from safe to safe. Nicolai’s rewarding reckless was lost in the forever between.
    Still, Nicolai had that seed of adventure and self-determination deep inside him. He wore his black hair too shaggy for a man who could afford follicle-pausing treatments, and wore small, round glasses that had stopped being necessary a hundred years earlier with the advent of Lasik eye surgery. Nicolai could afford eyes that could see through walls, but he wore glasses and instead used his credits for creativity add-ons that were experimental at best and reckless at worst. He had a wetchip in his cortex that scanned his mind when he worked on his books, tried to draw or paint, or touched the keys of his piano. The chip watched the firing patterns that came with creativity, then fired