The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  “Is that a peripheral of you?” Flynne asked, looking at the other Daedra.

  “What does it look like?” Daedra asked. “It’s giving my talk. Or Mary is, with it. She’s a voice actress.”

  Mary had gotten to her feet, the white paper in her hand.

  “Take it somewhere,” Daedra said. “We’re having a talk.”

  Mary took the Daedra-peripheral’s hand and led it away, around a corner. Flynne watched her go, feeling embarrassed.

  “You think you’re safe here,” Daedra said.

  “Yes,” said Flynne, all she could think of to say.

  “You aren’t, at all. Whoever you are, you’ve let this idiot bring you here.” She was looking at Wilf, who put his glass of water down on the piece of furniture nearest him, looking pained. “Take that apart,” Daedra said, apparently to the two robot girls, pointing at Conner. And one of them, instantly, too quick to follow, was squatting upside down on the ceiling, white mantis-arms lengthening.

  Flynne saw Conner smile, but then he was gone, a blank curved wall surrounding Flynne, Wilf, Daedra. It was just there, or seemed to be. Flynne reached over and rapped it with the peripheral’s knuckles. Hurt.

  “It’s real,” Daedra said. “And whoever was operating your guard is now wherever you started from, whenever, telling whoever is there that you’re in trouble.” She was right about Conner. If the robots wrecked Lev’s brother’s peri, Conner woke up in the back of Coldiron, beside Burton. “But not understanding how much.”

  The man from the balcony stepped through the wall, then. Just stepped through it, like it wasn’t there, or like he and it could temporarily occupy the same space and time.

  “How’d you do that?” she asked, because you couldn’t see that and not ask.

  “Assemblers,” he said. “It’s what we do here. We’re protean.” He smiled.

  “Protein?”

  “Without fixed form.” He waved his hand through the wall, a demonstration. He crossed to the side she thought Conner would be behind, stuck his face into it, instantly withdrew it. “Get them some help,” he said to Daedra.

  “I can’t move,” said Netherton.

  “Of course you can’t,” said the man. He looked at Flynne. “Neither can she.”

  And he was right.

  Two more robot girls ran out of the wall, where he’d come through, and back into it, where he’d stuck his head in, and then they were gone.

  115.

  DISSOCIATIVE STATE

  Probably they were using something akin to whatever they’d used during the security scans, Netherton thought, as the elevator descended. Something that induced a dissociative state. It was difficult to complain about a dissociative state. It even seemed to take the place of a drink.

  But there was something else in effect, something that reduced his freedom of movement. He could move his eyes, and walk when Daedra or this friend of hers told him to, stand where they indicated he should, but he couldn’t, for instance, raise his hands, or—he’d tried—clench a fist. Not that he felt particularly like clenching a fist.

  The elevator doors had appeared in the circular wall. Quite a lot of assemblers, to do that. He vaguely recalled there being restrictions, on too wholesale a use of assemblers, but they didn’t seem to apply here, or were perhaps being ignored.

  Flynne, beside him, seemed much the same, her peripheral reminding him of when she wasn’t using it.

  “Out,” said Daedra, and pushed him, when they reached the bottom.

  The lobby now. Daedra’s friend led the way, and when he happened to glance to the left, Netherton found that he did too, without having meant to. Then they were both looking ahead again, through the glass, out to where the gray bouncy castle had been, but no longer was. There was a black car waiting, not as long as the ZIL. The gray-clad Michikoids from the bouncy castle were arranged in two lines, facing one another, two-by-two, and as the glass doors sighed open and he stepped out between them, he felt a faint celebratory elation, at the formality of it all.

  Halfway to the car he heard, or perhaps felt, a single, extended, uncomfortably low bass-note, seemingly from somewhere above them. Daedra’s friend, evidently hearing it too, began to run, toward the car, whose rear door was open now. Netherton running with him, of course. Through a confetti storm of what Netherton supposed might once have been a window, though the glittering, slightly golden bits seemed soft as mulch, and as harmless.

  Something white, round and smooth, arced down into the street, beyond the waiting car. Bouncing back up, well above the car’s roof.

  The head of a Michikoid.

  Then a white arm, bent at the elbow, fingers clawed, struck the roof of the car, reminding him of the frozen silhouette of a severed hand he and Rainey had seen, on the feed from the patchers’ island.

  Someone, he supposed Daedra’s friend, shoved him, painfully, into the waiting, pearl-gray interior. And screamed, very close to his ear, amid an explosion of what he assumed must be blood.

  116.

  CANNONBALL

  Summers they’d all go to the town pool, which was beside the Sheriff’s Department and the town jail, and Burton and Conner would do cannonballs off the high board, curled up with their heads on their bent knees, hands holding their ankles in, against their haunches, to come up, laughing, to cheers, or sometimes just to Leon, executing a massive belly flop off the same board, making fun of how hard they tried.

  And that was what she thought of, when Daedra looked up at the weird sound. Which made her look up too, that copycat thing they had. Artifacts of image-capture strobing, in a descending line, around Conner’s peripheral, in its black suit, coming down cannonball on the balcony man and the Michikoid behind him, trying to get him into the car. So that mostly he took out that Michikoid. Blood like some gross-out anime, the Michikoid and Conner’s peripheral exploding two feet from her, like bugs on a windshield.

  Someone, Daedra, grabbed her by the top of the back of her dress, hauling her in, kicking her hard in the ankle, probably just out of how pissed she was. And balcony man screaming, hugging his right arm, covered with blood, Flynne wasn’t sure whose, as another Michikoid bundled him into the car, the door closing behind it.

  “Newgate,” Daedra said, over the man’s sobs of pain, and they pulled away.

  117.

  ITS GRANITE FACE, BRISTLING WITH IRON

  One of the two Michikoids was treating the bearded man’s right arm with a Medici. It had placed it on his right shoulder, where it now bulged and sagged, down across his lap, having engulfed the arm below. Blood swirled, through the yellowish fluid that filled the thing. The man’s eyes were closed, his face relaxed, and Netherton envied him whatever dissociative state he might be enjoying.

  Netherton himself was feeling entirely too associative, whatever had been used to induce his prior state having been abruptly shut off, possibly by the impact of Penske’s peripheral. Either that or the dissociative field had been local to Edenmere Mansions, already some distance behind them. Whichever, he was now also free of the compulsion to imitative movement, or so he assumed, else wouldn’t his eyes be closed?

  He turned his head to look at Flynne, beside him on the wide rear seat. She seemed to be very definitely present in the peripheral now. There was a smear of Penske’s blood across her cheek, or rather the blood from his ruined peripheral. Her dress was spattered with blood as well, but it scarcely showed on the black fabric. She gave him a look he couldn’t read, if indeed there was anything to be read.

  The Michikoid, squatting in front of the bearded man, removed the Medici. It shrank, dwindled, the fluid within it darkening. Cleaners were at work on the compartment’s gray carpet, perfectly ordinary beige hexapods, removing the blood. Daedra and the bearded man sat at opposite ends of a backward-facing banquette, a second Michikoid between them, this watching Netherton and Flynne, having produced several pairs of shiny black spider-eyes for the purpose. Its arms had lengthened, both ahead and behind the elbow
, and its hands were now knifelike white china fins, like the blades of two elegantly threatening spatulas.

  Daedra looked from the bearded man to Netherton. “If I’d known how you’d fuck things up, I’d have killed you myself, the day I met you.”

  This wasn’t something he’d ever had to respond to, before. He maintained his expression, which he hoped was neutral.

  “I wish I had,” Daedra said. “If I’d known more about your stupid gift, what a stub was, I’d never have accepted. But you knew the Zubovs, or their one useless son, and I thought they’d be good to know. And Aelita hadn’t become a problem yet.”

  “Be quiet,” said the bearded man, opening his eyes. “This isn’t secure. We’ll be there shortly, and you can say whatever you like.”

  Daedra frowned, never liking to be told what to do. She adjusted the top of her dress. “Feeling better?” she asked him.

  “Considerably. That was a broken collarbone, three broken ribs, and mild concussion.” He looked at Netherton. “We’ll start with those for you, shall we? Upon arrival.”

  The windows depolarized, Netherton assuming the man had done that. He saw that they were turning onto Cheapside, and his immediate impulse was to warn them that they were violating a cosplay zone. But then he saw how utterly empty the street was. No carts, no cabs, no drays, no horses to pull them. They were headed west, past the shops vending shawls and feathers, scent and silver, all the fancy goods he’d strolled past with his mother, surreptitiously capturing the magic of the painted signs. He wondered where those images were today. He had no idea. The sidewalks were virtually empty, yet shouldn’t have been. They should have been bustling still, the day just ending. Yet the few lone walkers looked lost, confused, anxious. They were people, it struck him, so were unable to have followed whatever signal had gone out, to all those cloud-driven peripherals enacting the visible lives of cabmen, piecework tailors, gentlemen of leisure, street boys. As the car passed, they turned away, as he’d seen people turn away in Covent Garden, at the first glimpse of Lowbeer’s tipstaff.

  “It’s empty,” said Flynne, sounding simply disappointed.

  Netherton leaned to the side, peering around the tall back of the gray banquette, and saw, through the windscreen, the glowering bulk of Newgate. He’d only walked that far with his mother once, and she’d quickly turned around, repelled by the structure’s pitted granite flanks, spiked with iron.

  At the City’s westernmost gate, she’d told him, for more than a thousand years, had stood a jail, and this its ultimate and final expression. Or had been, rather, as it had been torn down in 1902, at the start of that oddly optimistic age before the jackpot. To be rebuilt, then, by the assemblers, a few years before his birth. The klept (she would never have called it that in front of him) having deemed its return a wise and necessary thing.

  Before them now, the very iron-bound wicket gate, of nail-studded oak, that he’d stared up at as a child. The one his mother told him had frightened Dickens, though he’d confused that with the Dickens being frightened out of someone.

  It had frightened him then. And did now.

  118.

  BALCONY MAN

  It wasn’t Conner. Not Conner. It was the peripheral. Lev’s brother’s. Pavel. Wilf called it Pavel. Called it the dancing master. And Conner had meant to do that. Had tried to kill this asshole with it. Was okay. Was back in his white bed, beside Burton, totally pissed that he’d missed. Even so, fifty-five floors, straight down, he’d come that close. No way he’d been aiming for the robot girl.

  She knew she’d seen it, could tell you what had happened, but she couldn’t remember seeing it. That might be whatever the robot girls used to do the searches and scans, in that inflatable security tent, going into the party. Like the stuff they gave you for surgery. You didn’t sleep, exactly, but you didn’t remember.

  Now it looked like they’d shut that Cheapside down.

  And then she saw what Wilf was craning his neck at. Like a huge squashed stone pineapple, prickly with black iron spikes. Built to scare the shit out of people. So weird that she wondered why she’d never seen it in National Geographic. You’d figure it would be a big tourist thing.

  Then the cardoor was open and the robot girls were getting them out, making sure they didn’t try to run.

  Nobody to meet them. Just her, Wilf, Daedra, balcony man, and the two robot girls, their white faces flecked with the peripheral’s blood, like a robot skin disease. She had a robot girl’s white hand around her upper arm, guiding her from behind. The other one had Wilf.

  In through a gate that reminded her of a Baptist anime of hell she’d seen. Burton and Leon had thought the fallen women were hot.

  Into this thing’s shade, its coldness. Iron-barred doors, painted white but rust still coming through. Flagstone floors like paths in some very wrong garden. Dull lamps, like the eyes of big sick animals. Little windows, looking like they didn’t go anywhere. Up a narrow stone stairway, where they had to go one at a time. It was like the intro segment for a Ciencia Loca episode, paranormal investigators, going someplace where a lot of people had suffered and died, or maybe just where the feng shui was so totally fucked that it sucked in bad vibes like a black hole. But she’d probably have to go with suffered and died, by the look of it.

  When they got to the top of the stairway, she looked back at her robot girl, saw that it had sprouted extra eyes on that side of its face, just to keep better track of her. Neither Daedra nor the balcony man were saying anything at all. Daedra was looking around like she was bored. Now they crossed a court, open to the cloudy glow of sky, and entered something like a narrow, prehistoric Hefty Inn atrium, four floors of what looked to be cells, up to a glass roof, little panes set in dark metal. Lights flickered on, thin bright strips beneath the railings on the floors of cells. She guessed that wouldn’t have been original. The robot girls marched them to a pair of whitewashed stone chairs, really simple, like a kid would build from blocks of wood, but much bigger, and sat them both down, side by side and about six feet apart. Something rough moved, against each of her wrists, and she looked down to see that she was fastened to the tops of the slabs that formed the chair’s arms, her wrists in thick rusted cuffs of iron, polished brown with use, like they’d been there a hundred years. It made her expect Pickett might walk in, and for all she knew, given the way things were going, she felt like he might.

  The stone seat was cold, through the fabric of her dress.

  “We’re waiting for someone.” Balcony man was talking to her. He seemed to have gotten over what Conner had tried to do to him, physically anyway.

  “Why?” she asked him, like he’d tell her.

  “He wants to be here when you die,” he said, watching her. “Not your peripheral. You. And you will, where you really are, in your own body, in a drone attack. Your headquarters is surrounded by government security forces. It’s about to be leveled.”

  “So who is it?” All she could think to say.

  “The City Remembrancer,” said Daedra. “He had to stay to hear my appreciation.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of Aelita,” Daedra said. Flynne remembered the peripheral, the embarrassed actress. “You didn’t manage to ruin our celebration, if that was what you had in mind.”

  “We just wanted to meet you.”

  “Really?” Daedra took a step closer.

  Flynne looked at the man instead. He looked back, hard, and then it was like she was up by the fifty-seventh floor again, seeing him kiss the woman’s ear. Surprise, he’d said. She fucking knew he’d said that. And she saw the SS officer’s head pop, the red mist blown with the horizontal snow. But those had just been pixels, and it wasn’t really France. The man from the balcony was looking back at her like there was nothing else in his entire world, right then, and he wasn’t some accountant in Florida.

  “Be calm,” said the scratchy thing, not words so much as wind across some cold dry ridge, making her flinch.

  He smiled, th
inking he’d caused that.

  She looked at Wilf, not knowing what to say, but then she looked back at the man from the balcony. “You don’t have to kill everybody,” she said.

  “Really? No?” He thought that was funny.

  “It’s about me. It’s because I saw you lock her out on the balcony.”

  “You did,” he said.

  “Nobody else did.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Say I go back. Say I go outside. In the parking lot. Then you don’t need to kill everybody.”

  He looked surprised. Frowned. Then like he was considering it. He raised his eyebrows. Smiled. “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we have you. Here, and there. Shortly you’ll be dead, there, and that very expensive toy you’re wearing will become my souvenir of this ridiculous episode.”

  “You’re a horrible piece of shit,” said Wilf, not sounding angry, but like he’d just come to that conclusion, and was still a little surprised by it.

  “You,” the man said to Wilf, cheerfully, “forget that you aren’t present virtually. So you, unlike your friend, can die right here. And will. I’ll leave you with these units, instructing them to beat you very nearly to death, restore you with their Medicis, then beat you again. Rinse. Repeat. For as long as that lasts.”

  And she saw how Wilf couldn’t help but look at the robot girls then, and how they both grew extra sets of spider-eyes, looking back at him.

  119.

  SIR HENRY

  Netherton moved his wrists slightly in the metal cuffs, having decided that looking at the Michikoids wasn’t a good idea. The restraints appeared to have been embedded in the chair’s granite arm for several centuries, but he assumed that assemblers had made them, and that his wrists were in them now because assemblers had made them temporarily flexible, and had briefly animated them. But they were, at the moment, solid.