The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  “The tattoos!”

  “Something to do with the Gyre,” she said. “Abstract.”

  “Cultural appropriation. Lovely. Couldn’t be worse. On her face? Neck?”

  “No, fortunately. If you can talk her into the jumpsuit we’re printing on the moby, we may still have a project.”

  He looked at the ceiling. Imagined it opening. Himself ascending. Into he knew not what.

  “Then there’s the matter of our Saudi backing,” she said, “which is considerable. Visible tattoos would be a stretch, there. Nudity’s nonnegotiable.”

  “They might take it as a signal of sexual availability,” he said, having done so himself.

  “The Saudis?”

  “The patchers.”

  “They might take it as her offer to be lunch,” she said. “Their last, either way. She’s a death cookie, Wilf, for the next week or so. Anyone so much as steals a kiss goes into anaphylactic shock. Something with her thumbnails, too, but we’re less clear about that.”

  He wrapped his waist in a thick white towel. Considered the carafe of water on the marble countertop. His stomach spasmed.

  “Lorenzo,” she said, as an unfamiliar sigil appeared, “Wilf Netherton has your feed, in London.”

  He almost vomited, then, at the sudden input: bright saline light above the Garbage Patch, the sense of forward motion.

  3.

  PUSHING BUGS

  She managed to get off the phone with Shaylene without mentioning Burton. Shaylene had gone out with him a few times in high school, but she’d gotten more interested when he’d come back from the Marines, with that chest and the stories around town about Haptic Recon 1. Flynne figured Shaylene was basically doing what the relationship shows called romanticizing pathology. Not that there was a whole lot better available locally.

  She and Shaylene both worried about Burton getting in trouble over Luke 4:5, but that was about all they agreed on, when it came to him. Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. She had a feeling they were just convenient, but it still scared her. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes. For Burton, they were a way around whatever kept him in line the rest of the time.

  She leaned forward now, to squint under the table for the black nylon case he kept his tomahawk in. Wouldn’t want him going up to Davisville with that. He called it an axe, not a tomahawk, but an axe was something you chopped wood with. She reached under, hooked it out, relieved to feel the weight. Didn’t need to open it, but she did. Case was widest at the top, allowing for the part you’d have chopped wood with. More like the blade of a chisel, but hawk-billed. Where the back of an axe would’ve been flat, like the face of a hammer, it was spiked, like a miniature of the blade but curved the other way. Either one thick as your little finger, but ground to edges you wouldn’t feel as you cut yourself. Handle was graceful, a little recurved, the wood soaked in something that made it tougher, springy. The maker had a forge in Tennessee, and everyone in Haptic Recon 1 got one. It looked used. Careful of her fingers, she closed the case and put it back under the table.

  She swung her phone through the display, checking Badger’s map of the county. Shaylene’s badge was in Forever Fab, an anxious segment of purple in its emo ring. Nobody looked to be up to much, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. Madison and Janice were gaming, Sukhoi Flankers, vintage flight sims being Madison’s main earner. They both had their rings beige, for bored shitless, but then they always had them that way. Made four people she knew working tonight, counting her.

  She bent her phone the way she liked it for gaming, thumbed HaptRec into the log-in window, entered the long-ass password. Flicked GO. Nothing happened. Then the whole display popped, like the flash of a camera in an old movie, silvered like the marks of the haptics. She blinked.

  And then she was rising, out of what Burton said would be a launch bay in the roof of a van. Like she was in an elevator. No control yet. And all around her, and he hadn’t told her this, were whispers, urgent as they were faint, like a cloud of invisible fairy police dispatchers.

  And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.

  Camera down giving her the white rectangle of the van, shrinking in the street below. Camera up, the building towered away forever, a cliff the size of the world.

  4.

  SOMETHING SO DEEPLY EARNED

  Lorenzo, Rainey’s cameraperson, with the professional’s deliberate gaze, steady and unhurried, found Daedra through windows overlooking the moby’s uppermost forward deck.

  Netherton wouldn’t have admitted it to Rainey, or indeed to anyone, but he did regret the involvement. He’d let himself be swept up, into someone else’s far more durable, more brutally simple concept of self.

  He saw her now, or rather Lorenzo did, in her sheepskin flying jacket, sunglasses, nothing more. Noted, wishing he hadn’t, a mons freshly mohawked since he’d last encountered it. The tattoos, he guessed, were stylized representations of the currents that fed and maintained the North Pacific Gyre. Raw and shiny, beneath some silicone-based unguent. Makeup would have calculated that to a nicety.

  Part of a window slid aside. Lorenzo stepped out. “I have Wilf Netherton,” Netherton heard him say. Then Lorenzo’s sigil vanished, Daedra’s replacing it.

  Her hands came up, clutched the lapels of her open jacket. “Wilf. How are you?”

  “Glad to see you,” he said.

  She smiled, displaying teeth whose form and placement might well have been decided by committee. She tugged the jacket closer, fists sternum-high. “You’re angry, about the tattoos,” she said.

  “We did agree, that you wouldn’t do that.”

  “I have to do what I love, Wilf. I wasn’t loving not doing it.”

  “I’d be the last to question your process,” he said, channeling intense annoyance into what he hoped would pass for sincerity, if not understanding. It was a peculiar alchemy of his, the ability to do that, though now the hangover was in the way. “Do you remember Annie, the brightest of our neoprimitivist curators?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “The cute one?”

  “Yes,” he said, though he hadn’t particularly thought so. “We’d a drink together, Annie and I, after that final session at the Connaught, when you’d had to go.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’d been dumbstruck with admiration, I realized. It all came out, once you were gone. Her devastation at having been too overawed to speak with you, about your art.”

  “She’s an artist?”

  “Academic. Mad for everything you’ve done, since her early teens. Subscriber to the full set of miniatures, which she literally can’t afford. Listening to her, I understood your career as if for the first time.”

  Her head tilted, hair swung. The jacket must have opened as she raised one hand to remove the sunglasses, but Lorenzo wasn’t having any.

  Netherton’s eyes widened, preparing to pitch something he hadn’t yet invented, none of what he’d said so far having been true. Then he remembered that she couldn’t see him. That she was looking at someone called Lorenzo, on the upper deck of a moby, halfway around the world. “She’d particularly wanted to convey an idea she’d had, as the result of meeting you in person. About a new sense of timing in your work. She sees timing as the key to your maturation as an artist.”

  Lorenzo refocused. Suddenly it was as if Netherton were centimeters from her lips. He recalled their peculiarly brisk nonanimal tang.

  “Timing?” she asked, flatly.

  “I wish I’d recorded her. Impossible to paraphrase.” What had he said previously? “That you’re more secure, now? That you’ve always been brav
e, fearless really, but that this new confidence is something else again. Something, she put it, so deeply earned. I’d planned on discussing her ideas with you over dinner, that last time, but it didn’t turn out to be that sort of evening.”

  Her head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention. “If things had gone differently,” he heard himself say, “I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Annie would tell you that the entrance you’re considering is the result of a retrograde impulse, something dating from the start of your career. Not informed by that new sense of timing.”

  She was staring at him, or rather at whoever Lorenzo was. And then she smiled. Reflexive pleasure of the thing behind her eyes.

  Rainey’s sigil privacy-dimmed. “I’d want to have your baby now,” she said, from Toronto, “except I know it would always lie.”

  5.

  DRAGONFLIES

  She’d forgotten to pee. Had to leave the copter autopiloting a perimeter, fifteen feet out from the client building, and run out to Burton’s new composting toilet. Now she tugged up the zip on her cutoffs, fastened the button, tossed a scoopful of cedar sawdust down the hole, and bashed out through the door, making the big tube of government hand sanitizer he’d slung on the outside thump and slosh. Smacked its white plastic, catching some, rubbed it across her palms and wondered if he’d lifted the tube from the VA hospital.

  Back inside, she opened the fridge, grabbed a piece of Leon’s homemade jerky and a Red Bull. Stuck the lopsided strip of dried beef in her mouth as she sat down, reaching for her phone.

  Paparazzi were back. Looked like double-decker dragonflies, wings or rotors transparent with speed, little clear bulb on the front end. She’d tried counting them, but they were fast, moved constantly. Maybe six, maybe ten. They were interested in the building. Like AI emulating bugs, but she knew how to do that herself. They didn’t seem to be trying to do anything, other than dart and hover, heads toward the building. She edged a couple, saw them dart away, gone. They’d be back. It felt like they were waiting for something, evidently on the fifty-sixth floor.

  Building was black from some angles, but really a very dark bronzy brown. If it had windows, the floors she was working didn’t, or else they were shuttered. There were big flat rectangles on the face, some vertical, some horizontal, no order to them.

  The fairies had gone quiet as she’d passed twenty, according to the display’s floor indicator. Some level of stricter protocol? She wouldn’t have minded having them back. It wasn’t that interesting up here, swatting at dragonflies. On her own time, she’d have been checking out views of the city, but she wasn’t being paid to enjoy the scenery.

  Seemed to be at least one street that was transparent, down there, lit from below, like it was paved with glass. Hardly any traffic. Maybe they hadn’t designed that yet. She thought she’d seen something walking, two-legged, at the edge of woods, or a park, too big to be human. Some of the vehicles hadn’t had any lights. And something huge had sailed slowly past, out beyond the receding towers, like a whale, or a whale-sized shark. Lights on it, like a plane.

  Tested the jerky for chewability. Not yet.

  Went hard at a dragonfly, front camera. Didn’t matter how fast she went, they were just gone. Then a horizontal rectangle folded out and down, becoming a ledge, showing her a wall of frosted glass, glowing.

  Took the jerky out of her mouth, put it on the table. The bugs were back, jockeying for position in front of the window, if that was what it was. Her free hand found the Red Bull, popped it. She sipped.

  Then the shadow of a woman’s slim butt appeared, against the frosted glass. Then shoulder blades, above. Just shadows. Then hands, a man’s by their size, on either side, above the shadows of the woman’s shoulder blades, his fingers spread wide.

  Swallowed, the drink like thin cold cough syrup. “Scoot,” she said, and swept through the bugs, scattering them.

  One of the man’s hands left the glass, its shadow vanishing. Then the woman stepped away, the man’s other hand staying where it was. Flynne imagined him leaning there, against the glass, and that there hadn’t been the kiss he’d expected, or if there had been, not the hoped-for result.

  Moody, for a game. You could open a serious relationship show with that. Then his remaining hand was gone. She imagined an impatient gesture.

  Her phone rang. Put it on speaker.

  “You good?” It was Burton.

  “I’m in,” she said. “You in Davisville?”

  “Just got here.”

  “Luke show?”

  “They’re here,” he said.

  “Don’t mess with them, Burton.”

  “Not a chance.”

  Sure. “Anything ever happen, in this game?”

  “Those cams,” he said. “You edging them back?”

  “Yeah. And sort of a balcony’s folded out. Long frosted glass window, lights on inside. Saw shadows of people.”

  “More than I’ve seen.”

  “Saw a blimp or something. Where’s it supposed to be?”

  “Nowhere. Just keep those cams back.”

  “Feels more like working security than a game.”

  “Maybe it’s a game about working security. Got to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Leon’s back. Kimchi dogs. Wishes you were here.”

  “Tell him I’ve got to fucking work. For my fucking brother.”

  “Do that,” he said, was gone.

  She lunged at the bugs.

  6.

  PATCHERS

  Lorenzo captured the moby’s approach to the city. His hands, on the railing, and Netherton’s, on the upholstered arms of the room’s most comfortable chair, seemed momentarily to merge, a sensation nameless as the patchers’ city.

  Not a city, the curators had insisted, but an incremental sculpture. More properly a ritual object. Grayly translucent, slightly yellowed, its substance recovered as suspended particulates from the upper water column of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. With an estimated weight of three million tons and growing, it was perfectly buoyant, kept afloat by segmented bladders, each one the size of a major airport of the previous century.

  It had less than a hundred known inhabitants, but as whatever continually assembled it seemed also to eat cams, relatively little was known about them.

  The service cart edged fractionally closer to the arm of his chair, reminding him of the coffee.

  “Get this now, Lorenzo,” Rainey ordered, and Lorenzo turned to focus on Daedra, amid a scrum of specialists. A white china Michikoid knelt, in a Victorian sailor outfit, lacing Daedra’s artfully scuffed leather high-tops. A variety of cams hovered, one of them equipped with a fan to flutter her bangs. He assumed the wind test indicated she was going in without a helmet.

  “Not bad,” he said, admiring the cut of the new jumpsuit in spite of himself, “if we can keep her in it.” As if she’d heard him, Daedra reached up, tugged the zip slightly, then a bit more, exposing a greasy arc of abstracted Gyre-current.

  “Went clever on the print file for the zip,” Rainey said. “Hope she doesn’t try it lower, not until she’s down there.”

  “She won’t like that,” he said, “when she does.”

  “She won’t like it that you lied to her about the curator.”

  “The curator may have had remarkably similar thoughts. We won’t know until I speak with her.” He picked up the cup without looking at it, raised it to his lips. Very hot. Black. He might survive. The analgesics were starting to work. “If she earns her percentage, she won’t care about a stuck zip.”

  “That’s assuming the powwow’s productive,” Rainey said.

  “She has every reason to want this to be successful.”

  “Lorenzo’s put a couple of larger cams over the side,” she said. “They’ll b
e there soon. Ringside.”

  He was watching the costumers, makeup technicians, assorted fluffers and documentarians. “How many of these people are ours?”

  “Six, including Lorenzo. He thinks that Michikoid is her real security.”

  He nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see him, then spilled coffee on the white linen robe as feed from two speeding cams irised into his field, to either side of Daedra.

  Feed from their island always made him itch.

  “About a kilometer apart now, heading west northwest, converging,” Rainey said.

  “You couldn’t pay me.”

  “You don’t have to go there,” she said, “but we do both need to watch.”

  The cams were descending through tall, sail-like structures. Everything simultaneously cyclopean and worryingly insubstantial. Vast empty squares and plazas, pointless avenues down which hundreds might have marched abreast.

  Continuing to descend, over dried crusts of seaweed, bleached bones, drifts of salt. The patchers, their prime directive to cleanse the fouled water column, had assembled this place from recovered polymers. What shape it had taken was afterthought, offhand gesture, however remarkably unattractive. It made him want to shower. Coffee was starting to seep through the front of his robe.

  Now Daedra was being helped to don her parafoil, which in its furled state resembled a bilobed scarlet backpack, bearing the white logo of its makers. “Is the ’foil her placement,” he asked, “or ours?”

  “Her government’s.”

  The cams halted abruptly, simultaneously finding one another over the chosen square. Descended, above diagonally opposite corners, each capturing the other’s identical image. They were skeletal oblongs, the size of a tea tray, matte gray, around a bulbous little fuselage.

  Either Lorenzo or Rainey brought the audio up.

  The square filled with a low moaning, the island’s hallmark soundscape. The patchers had wormed hollow tubes through every structure. Wind blew across their open tops, generating a shifting, composite tonality he’d hated from the moment he’d first heard it. “Do we need that?” he asked.