Burton was sitting in the Airstream’s open door, wearing an old gray sweater, light blue boxer shorts, unlaced boots. His legs seldom got any sun, but now his face was whiter than they were. She stopped in front of him, the jug bumping her knee one last time. “Well?”
“Didn’t tell me it makes you puke,” he said.
“Didn’t ask me. Anything.”
He looked up at her. “You were asleep. Saw that thing on the bed, still hooked up, and there was Edward. You know I saw Conner use his. You’d have done the same.”
“Hey, Flynne,” called Conner, from inside, “wassup?”
“Coffee.”
“Bring it. Wounded warrior here.”
“What did you do?” she asked Burton.
“Turned up in your girlfriend, there. Got up, threw up, dropped the first one came running in.”
“Shit. Who?”
“Pigtail. Funeral suit.”
“Ossian. Tell me you haven’t fucked everything up.”
“Ash doctored him. With something like a cross between a bull’s balls and a jellyfish. Are those contacts she’s got?”
“They’re like a piercing or something. How much speed, intensity, and violence of action exactly did you whip on things?”
“He’s pissed at me, not you.”
“How long were you there?”
“About three hours.”
“Doing what?”
“Getting set up. Getting my ass out of your girlfriend and into something that won’t make me blush. Talking corporatization with four-eyes. Who’s your girl supposed to be, anyway?”
“Nobody seems to know.”
“Every time I’d pass a mirror, I’d jump. Does sort of look like you.”
“Just the haircut.”
“Wounded fucking warrior here!” cried Conner.
“Get up,” said Flynne. “Let me by.”
Burton stood. She stepped up and past him. Conner was propped up on the bed with Burton’s pillow and one of Macon’s blue duffels behind him, wearing one of his Polartec body socks. So much of him missing. She remembered him running, in the other peripheral.
“What?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Just remembered,” she said, “didn’t bring cups.”
“Burton got cups,” Edward said, from his seat in the Chinese chair. He bent over and fished a yellow resin mug out of a transparent Hefty gear box.
She put the Thermos jug down on the table beside the white cables leading to her phone. “I thought that thing was custom-made for my head.”
“You have more hair,” Edward said. “I padded it out in back with Kleenex, keeps it pressed against his forehead. That and the saline, seems to do it.”
“Print him his own. I don’t want anybody using mine. Or my peripheral.”
“Sorry,” Edward said, unhappy.
“I know he made you.”
“No way he’s getting in my sweet golden boy either,” said Conner, prissily, from the bed.
“They got him something,” Edward said. “Came back here for a few minutes, then he went again.”
“A peripheral?” she asked.
“Little Muppet-assed thing,” said Burton, behind her.
She turned. He had some color back in his face. “Muppet?”
“Six inches tall. Put a kind of cockpit on this exoskeleton, where the head would go, put the Muppet in that. Synched ’em. I was doing backflips.” He grinned.
She remembered the headless white machine. “You were in that exercise thing?”
“Ash didn’t want me in your girl.”
“Neither do I. Put your pants on.”
He and Edward did a dance in the narrow space, Burton getting to his clothes rod and Edward getting to Conner, on the bed, with the yellow mug in his hand. Edward sat on the bed, holding the mug so Conner could slurp coffee. Burton pulled a brand-new pair of cammies off a hanger. “Come here a minute,” he said to her, and went out, carrying his pants. She followed him. “Close the door behind you.” He took one foot out of the unlaced boot, balancing, as he put his leg through the leg of his cammies, then his foot back into the boot, then repeated this with the other leg. “You go outside the house, when you were there?” He was buttoning the fly.
“Just in the back garden. And up in a quad, virtual.”
“Hardly anybody,” he said. “You get that? Biggest city in Europe. See many people?”
“No. Just in one place, but it’s a kind of tourist attraction, and Netherton told me they mostly weren’t real, after we got back. And it’s too quiet, in the backyard. For a city.”
“I got the quad ride too, with Ash, when she’d fixed the pigtail up, while he was getting my Muppet ready for the exo.”
“Cheapside?”
“Nothing cheap about it, just lonely. We went out over the river, low. Floating islands, some kind of tidal generator. I might’ve seen fifty, a hundred people, the whole flight. If they were people. And hardly any vehicles, nothing really like traffic. It’s the way heritage games looked, before they got updated. Before they could really do much in the way of crowds. If it’s not a game, where is everybody?”
She remembered her own first view of the city, as she rose straight up, feeling that.
“Asked her,” he said.
“So did I. What did she say?”
“Said there aren’t as many people as we’re used to. What did she tell you?”
“Changed the subject. She tell you why?”
“Said she’d explain when she had more time.”
“What do you think?”
“You know she thinks it all sucks, up there?”
“She say that?”
“No, but you can feel it. That she does. Can’t you?”
She nodded.
64.
STERILE
The bar was locked. He pressed his thumb against the oval of brushed steel again. Nothing happened.
But this seemed inconsequential, he noted, as he lowered his hand. Perhaps how it would feel to have had the laminates installed, in Putney. Sufficiently uncharacteristic a thought that he glanced around, as if to be sure that no one had seen him entertain it. He was, he judged, in some complex bio-pharmacological state, the Medici having toyed with his dopamine levels, receptor sites, something. Enjoy it, he advised himself, though perhaps it wasn’t quite that simple.
From Ash, he’d understood that he’d fallen immediately and deeply asleep, on stretching out upstairs, before waking to Burton’s arrival. The Medici, she’d said, had emulated the effect of much more REM sleep than he’d actually gotten, and done other things as well. But after he’d helped her get Ossian into the chair, to have his shoulder repaired, she’d insisted that Netherton go back to sleep. Which he had, after a second application of the Medici. Having just seen it do something very unpleasant looking to Ossian, not to mention bloody, this had seemed less than fastidious, though he knew that at its nanoscale of operation it was constantly sterile.
He’d awakened again, and descended the cheese-grater stairs, alone except for the peripherals in their respective cabins. Flynne’s friend Conner had left his on Lev’s grandfather’s baronial bed, arms spread cruciform, ankles primly together.
Lowbeer’s sigil appeared now, with its coronet, pulsing. He happened to be looking in the direction of the desk, its thronelike chair behind it, so that the sigil momentarily suggested the crown of some ghost executive of Milagros Coldiron, itself a sort of ghost corporation.
“Yes?”
It stopped pulsing. “You’ve slept,” Lowbeer said.
“Flynne’s brother arrived,” he said, “unexpectedly.”
“He was rigorously selected by the military,” she said, “for an unusual integration of objective calculation and sheer impulsivity.”
Netherton moved his head slightly, placing the sigil over the window, but then it looked as if a coronet-headed figure were outside, looking in. “I suppose,” he said, “that he does seem more balanced than the
other one.”
“He wasn’t, initially,” she said. “Their service records have survived here, from before Lev touched their world. Both were damaged, to various extents.”
Netherton moved to the window, thinking he’d seen a pulse of squidlight. “I didn’t like him using her peripheral.” Another arch pulsed and he saw Ossian, walking toward the Gobiwagen in a peculiar way, arms at his sides and slightly bent, hands held forward at the waist. “Ossian looks as though he’s pushing something that isn’t there,” he said.
“A Russian pram. I’m having a technical in Lev’s stub take it apart.”
“A pram?” Then he remembered the cloaked buggy, in the entranceway.
“We make it very difficult to secure prohibited weapons. The ones extracted from that pram will be entirely sterile.”
“Sterile?” Thinking of the Medici.
“Devoid of identification.”
“Why would you want them?”
“Have you eaten?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“No.” He realized that he was actually hungry.
“Best wait, then,” said Lowbeer.
“Wait?”
But her sigil was gone.
65.
BACKDOOR TO NOW
Fab was one end of the strip mall, the end nearest town, Sushi Barn the other, three empty stores in between. The one next to Fab had done pretty well when those little paintball robots were hot. One next to that had been nails and hair extensions. She couldn’t remember the one between that and Sushi Barn ever having been anything but vacant.
Burton pulled the rental into the lot, parked in front of the former mini-paintball place, windows pasted over on the inside with sticky gray plastic, starting to peel at the corners. “This is ours now,” he said.
“What is?”
“This.” Pointing straight ahead.
“Rented it?”
“Bought it.”
“Who did?”
“Coldiron.”
“They bought that?”
“Bought the mall,” he said. “Closed on it this morning.”
“What’s that mean, ‘closed’?”
“Ours. Papers are going through right now.”
She didn’t know whether it was harder to imagine having the money to buy this place, or to imagine wanting to. “What for?”
“Macon needs a place to keep his printers, we need a place to work out of. Shaylene’s back room won’t cut it. She’s already sold the business to Coldiron—”
“She has?”
“That meeting she had with you, then what she saw Macon fabbing. Got herself right in. We can’t be running our end out of a trailer down by the creek. So we centralize here. Gets the heat away from Mom, too.”
“Guess it does that, anyway,” she said.
“We’ve got drones over here, more on the way. Carlos is on that. It’ll cut us out of that dumbfuck with lawyers driving over from Clanton, bags of cash. Might as well be builder money, that way. Can’t put it in the bank, can’t pay taxes on it, and we get a haircut every time any’s laundered. If we’re working for Coldiron USA, incorporated right here, that’s a salary. Salary and shares. Corporate headquarters.”
“So what does Coldiron USA do?”
“Property development,” he said, “today. Lawyers have papers for you to sign.”
“What lawyers?”
“Ours.”
“What papers?”
“Incorporation stuff. Buying the mall. Your contract as CCO of Milagros Coldiron USA.”
“I am fucking not. What’s CCO?”
“Chief communications officer. You are. You just haven’t signed yet.”
“Who decided? Not me.”
“London. Ash told me when I was up there with them.”
“So what are you, if I’m CCO?”
“CEO,” he said.
“Know how stupid that sounds?”
“Talk to Ash. You’re CCO, communicate.”
“We aren’t doing that timely a job communicating ourselves, Burton,” she said. “You keep agreeing to shit without asking me first.”
“It’s all moving that fast,” he said.
Conner’s Tarantula swung, growling, into the empty parking lot, to brake beside them, coughing the smell of fried chicken until he killed the engine. She looked down, saw him grinning up at her.
“What did they put him in?” Burton asked her.
“Cross between a ballet dancer and a meat cleaver,” she said, as Conner squinted up at her. “Martial arts demonstrator.”
“Bet he was loving that,” said Burton.
“Too much,” she said, and opened her door. Burton got out on his side, walked around front.
Conner twisted his head, to see her. “Let’s get back where there’s all the fingers,” he said.
She rapped him with a knuckle, hard, on top of his stubbled head. “Don’t go forgetting who took you up there. My brother’s gone native there. Thinks we’ve got a startup going, that he’s CEO of. Don’t get like that.”
“Fingers, legs ’n’ shit, that’s all I want. Brought my catheter. In a ziplock, on the back of the trike.”
“Now that’s exciting,” she said.
Burton was unstrapping him.
“Lady, gents,” said Macon, opening the blank gray glass door from inside, “our North American flagship and headquarters.” He wore a blue business shirt, with a striped tie that was mostly black. Every button buttoned, but the crisp tails weren’t tucked into his holey old jeans.
“Not casual Friday,” Flynne said, seeing Shaylene, behind Burton, in a navy skirt-suit, still managing her big hair thing but looking surprisingly office-ready.
“Hey, Shaylene,” Burton said. He bent over and picked up Conner, like you’d pick up a ten-year-old who couldn’t walk. Conner slid his left arm, his only arm, around Burton’s neck, like he was used to it.
“Conner,” Shaylene said. “How’re you doing?” She seemed different now, Flynne wasn’t sure how.
“Hangin’ in,” said Conner, and used his crooked arm to pull himself up to where he could give Burton a big wet smack on the cheek.
“Could just drop an asshole on the concrete,” Burton said, like he was thinking out loud.
“Let’s get in out of the public eye,” Conner said. Macon stepped back, out of the doorway. Burton carried Conner in, Flynne behind them. Then Shaylene, who closed the door behind her. One big room, lit by shiny new work-LEDs on clean yellow cables. Musty smell. Gyprock walls randomly patched with paint, showing where counters and dividers had been before. Someone had sawn a doorway through, just a raw door-shaped hole, from the back room of Fab. Covered with a blue tarp, on the Fab side. A couple of new electric saws lay beside it on the floor.
Further back, there were three new hospital beds, partially extracted from their factory bubble wrap, white mattresses bare, and three IV stands, plus a lot of white foam cartons, stacked high as Flynne’s head. “What’s all this?” she asked.
“Ash tells me what we’ll need, I order it,” Macon said.
“Looks like you’re setting up a ward,” Flynne said. “Smells, for a hospital.”
“Plumber’s on the way to fix that,” Shaylene said. “Electrical’s good to go, and the mini-paintball guys put in a shitload of outlets. Going to try to get it cleaned up, working around whatever we wind up doing here.”
“Those beds are for us,” Flynne said to Burton. “We’re going back together, aren’t we?”
“Conner first,” Burton said, carrying him to the nearest bed and putting him down on it.
“Just finished printing him a new phone,” said Macon. “Same as yours, Flynne. Ash wants him to acclimate more, work out. They can run training sequences for him through the peripheral’s cloud AI.”
Flynne looked at Macon. “You sound pretty well up on things there,” she said.
“Biggest part of the job,” Macon said. “It mostly makes its own kind of sense, then you hit something
that seems impossible, or just completely wrong, and she either explains it or tells you to ignore it.”
She looked back and saw Burton and Shaylene talking. Couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Shaylene’s thing about Burton looked to her to be gone. “She sell Fab, to them?” she asked Macon.
“Did,” he said. “Don’t know what she got for it, but they’ve totally got her attention. Which is good, because I’m too busy to wrangle stuff that’s late, and she’s a natural at that.”
“She get along with Burton?”
“Just fine.”
“Used to be awkward,” Flynne said, “like a whole day or two ago.”
“I know,” Macon said. “But before this, she’d managed to feed herself, and a bunch of other people in this town, with a business that wasn’t Hefty, wasn’t building drugs, and was at least partly unfunny. That way, I’d say she hasn’t actually changed much. Just gotten more focused.”
“I wouldn’t have expected she’d get over that, about Burton.”
“What’s changing here,” he said, “is economics,” and the look on his face reminded her of being in Civics with him, when they’d studied the electoral college. He’d been the only one who really got it. She remembered him sitting up straight, explaining it to them. Same look.
“How’s that?”
“Economy,” he said. “Macro and micro. Around here’s micro. Pickett’s not the biggest money in this county anymore.” He raised his eyebrows. “Macro, though, that’s mega weird. Markets all screwy everywhere, everybody’s edgy, Badger’s buzzing, crazy rumors. All just since Burton came back from Davisville. That’s us, causing all that. Us and them.”
“Them?” She remembered how good he’d been at math, better than anybody, but then they’d graduated and he’d had family needed taking care of, college no option. He was one of the smartest people she knew, good as he was at helping you forget it.
“Ash tells me there’s somebody else, up there, able to reach back here. You know about that?”
The Peripheral Page 24
