The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  The bearded man had just promised to have him repeatedly beaten almost to death by Michikoids, he noted, and he was thinking about assemblers, about faux antiques. Perhaps he was finding his own dissociative state. Or perhaps he was about to start screaming. He looked at Daedra. She looked back, without seeming to see him, then up, apparently at the glass roof, four floors above. And yawned. He didn’t think the yawn was for his benefit. He looked up at the roof himself. It reminded him of a dress Ash had worn, it seemed years ago. Ash seemed so utterly normal, from this vantage, this moment. The girl next door.

  “I do hope you have this quite entirely sorted out, Hamed,” said a mellow but rather tired voice.

  Netherton, lowering his gaze, saw a tall, very sturdy-looking older man, in perfect Cheapside cosplay, his coat long and caped, a top hat in his hands.

  “New Zealand looked slightly pushy, I thought,” the bearded man said, as the other crossed from the top of the stairway.

  “Good evening, Daedra,” the stranger said. “You gave a most moving testimony to your late sister’s many sterling qualities, I thought.”

  “Thank you, Sir Henry,” Daedra said.

  “Sir Henry Fishbourne,” Netherton said, remembering the City Remembrancer’s name, and immediately regretted having said it.

  The Remembrancer peered at him.

  “I won’t introduce you,” said the bearded man.

  “Quite,” said the Remembrancer, and turned to look at Flynne. “And this is the young lady in question, albeit virtually physical?”

  “It is,” said the man.

  “She looks rather the worse for wear, Hamed,” said the Remembrancer. “It’s been a long day for us all. I should be getting along. I need to be able to confirm the successful result to our investors.”

  “You’re al-Habib,” Netherton said to the bearded man, not quite believing it. “You’re the boss patcher.”

  The Remembrancer looked at him. “I don’t like this one at all. Can’t say you seem very organized tonight, Hamed.”

  “I’m killing him as well.”

  The Remembrancer sighed. “Forgive my impatience. I’m quite tired.” He turned to Daedra. “A very nice chat with your father, earlier. Always a pleasure.”

  “If you can look like the boss patcher, and then look like that,” said Netherton, to the bearded man, “why didn’t you simply change your appearance again, after you realized that you’d been seen?”

  “Branding,” said the bearded man. “Investment in persona. I represent the product. I’m known to the investors.” He smiled.

  “What product?”

  “The monetization, variously, of the island I created.”

  “Doesn’t it belong to the patchers as well?”

  “They have endemic health issues,” said Hamed al-Habib, bright-eyed, smiling, “of which they aren’t yet aware.”

  120.

  VESPASIAN’S CUBE

  Sir Henry’s involvement surprises me,” said Lowbeer’s bone-static, like a full-body migraine that could talk. “He must have suffered some well-concealed setback in his affairs. That’s usually the way.”

  “What way?” she asked, forgetting they weren’t alone, and that even when she was, tonight, she wasn’t supposed to speak to Lowbeer.

  “Way?” asked al-Habib, sharply.

  Faint warmth at her wrists. She looked down, seeing the iron cuffs crumble, collapse, like they’d only been pressed from dry, rust-brown talc. Beneath her right hand, the granite was going to talc too, spurting up between her fingers, drifting like smoke. And up from within what had been the chair arm’s surface rose something hard and smooth. The candy-cane gun, its parrot-head handle pressing back against the base of her thumb, like it was alive, eager.

  “Finish it,” the balcony man said to the man with the hat, as if he sensed something, and she knew he meant the Homes drones hitting Coldiron. “Tell your people. Now.”

  “Surprise,” Flynne said, and she was back on Janice’s couch, full of the wakey Burton had given her, but now she was standing up, raising the gun, and the white bump that was the trigger didn’t even seem to move. Not a sound. Nothing happened.

  Then the balcony man’s head fell off, having somehow become a skull, perfectly dry and brown, like you’d see in almost any issue of National Geographic, and then the top of his body caved in, inside his clothes, collapsed with a dry clatter of bone, every bit of softer tissue gone, as his knees gave way, so that the last parts of him in her field of vision, just for a second, were his hands, untouched by whatever had happened. She looked at the gun, its barrel slick as candy a kid had just licked, then down at the brown skull, on the stone floor in front of what was left of him, his legs and lower torso. It must seal the blood in, she thought, remembering the gloss of sliced red brick, like raw sliced liver, in the shadows of the Oxford Street greenway. A brown bone was poking out of the front of his black suit, like a dry stick. “Just as well,” said the static, “that you don’t legally exist here. Death by misadventure.”

  The robot girls started for her, then, but the whitewashed stone wall to her right was smoking, a big square of it falling down, dust, and out of the black hole shot this big red block. Cube, cuboid, thing. A nursery red. Cheerful. She heard the ceramic-looking shells of the robot girls shatter, between it and the far wall. Just hung, shivering, a few feet off the ground, like it was glued there, making a faint revving sound, like internal combustion motorcycles but really far away. Then it flipped, up and off the wall, the robots dropping to the stone floor in pieces, and came down on one of its eight corners without making a sound. And just stayed there, balanced, red, impossible.

  “Security,” said the man with the black hat, softly. “Red. Red.”

  Was he warning someone about the red thing?

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wilf, who must have discovered that his cuffs had crumbled too, starting to stand up too. “Sit the fuck down, Wilf,” she said. He did.

  “Hey, Henry,” said a smoothly upbeat male voice, from the head of the stairwell, “sorry I broke your car.” The exoskeleton stepped through the arch, the homunculus on its massive shoulders, under the bell jar. It stopped, seemed to look at the man in the hat, except it didn’t have any eyes you could see.

  “Red,” said the man, softly.

  “Sorry I killed your driver and your security detail,” said the infomercial voice, like it was apologizing for not having 2-percent milk.

  The cube rotated slightly, on the corner it was balanced on. Lowbeer appeared, on a square panel covering most of the nearest face. “You’ll be unhappy to learn, Sir Henry,” Lowbeer said, but not in that bone-static voice, “that your successor is your longtime rival and chief thorn-in-side, Marchmont-Sememov. It’s an inherently awkward position, City Remembrancer, but I’d thought, until this, that you’d done rather well, considering.”

  The tall man said nothing.

  “A real estate and development scheme, with resource extraction?” Lowbeer said. “And for that you’d see fit to deal with someone on the order of al-Habib?”

  The tall man was silent.

  Lowbeer sighed. “Burton,” she said, and nodded.

  The exoskeleton raised both its arms. The creepily tanned hands were gone, or else in black robotic gloves, both of them in fists now. A little hatch flipped open, on top of the exoskeleton’s right wrist, and the other candy-cane gun popped out. From a second, slightly larger hatch, on the left wrist, emerged Lowbeer’s tipstaff, gilt and fluted ivory. Burton had a better idea of how to aim it, because the tall man just blinked to bone entirely, his empty clothes falling straight down, with a rattle, and his tall hat rolling in a circle on the floor.

  “So who do I have to kill,” Flynne said, showing them she still had her own candy-cane gun, “to get somebody to fucking do something, back in the stub, about stopping fucking Homes from killing us all with drones, like right fucking now? Please?”

  “Sir Henry’s death has deprived your compet
itor of the sort of advantage that Lev and I afford you now. I took the liberty of effecting that immediately, upon Sir Henry’s arrival here, this evening, assuming he would prove guilty. Which has resulted in a shift of influence, allowing for Homeland Security’s withdrawal, their orders rescinded.”

  “Shit,” said Flynne, lowering the gun, “what did we have to buy to do that?”

  “A sufficient share of Hefty Mart’s parent corporation, I gather,” said Lowbeer, “though I haven’t had the details yet.”

  “We bought Hefty?”

  “Some considerable share of it, yes.”

  “How can you buy Hefty?” It was like buying the moon.

  “May I stand up?” Wilf asked.

  “I want to go home now,” said Daedra.

  “I imagine you do,” said Lowbeer.

  “My father’s going to be very angry with you.”

  “Your father and I,” said Lowbeer, “have known one another for a long time, I’m sad to say.”

  Now Ash was in the doorway, in her chauffeur outfit, Ossian behind her, in a black leather coat, the wooden pistol-box under his arm. He crossed to Flynne, eyes on the candy-cane barrel, keeping out of its way. He put the box down on the arm of her chair, where the iron cuff had been, lifted its lid, carefully took the gun from her hand, placed it in its felted recess, and closed the box.

  “Goodnight, Miss West,” said Lowbeer, and the screen went blank.

  “We’ll be going now,” said Ash. She looked at Daedra. “Except for you.”

  Daedra sneered at her.

  “And that,” said Ash, gesturing with her thumb at the red cube. Which flung itself, somehow, straight up and then to the side, crashing with a big clang into the white-barred cell doors of the second level, a few lights going out. Then it threw itself to the far side just as loudly. Then somersaulted, fell, to land again on a single point. And began to spin, its corners blurring past, inches from Daedra’s chin. She didn’t move at all.

  “Out,” said Ash, “now.”

  And then they were single-filing the stairway, Ossian behind her. “What’s Conner doing to her?” she asked, over her shoulder.

  “Reminding her of the potential of consequences, at least,” said Ossian, “or attempting to. Won’t harm a hair on her head, of course. Or do a bit of good. Father’s a big American.”

  Above them, the sound of crashing iron.

  121.

  NOTTING HILL

  There was a park where the assemblers had long since collected, from beneath the deeper oligarchic burrowings in Notting Hill, the various excavating machines which the pre-jackpot wealthy had entombed in situ, back when removing them from whatever deepest point would have cost more than abandoning them beneath concrete. Mechanical sacrifices, like cats walled up in the foundations of bridges. The assemblers, going everywhere, had found them, bringing them to a certain park, their method having been exactly that by which Lowbeer had introduced the Russian pram’s gun to the arm of the peripheral’s interrogation chair, or brought Conner’s terrible cube straight up through the granite foundations of Newgate, astronomical numbers of the microscopic units being employed in shifting particles of whatever intervening matter from front to back, or top to bottom, of the object being moved, solids seeming thereby to migrate through other solids, the way al-Habib had stepped through the curved wall, in Edenmere Mansions.

  The rescued excavators, perfectly restored, had been arranged in a circle, their blades and scoops uplifted, paint and windscreens gleaming, to become a favorite of the area’s children, Lev’s among them.

  Passing this now in the ZIL, on the way back to Lev’s, the streets quite empty, he saw the moon catch the edge of a digger’s upraised scoop.

  He looked at Flynne’s peripheral. She was gone now, back to Coldiron to check on everyone, and he was anxious to reach the Gobiwagen, to access the Wheelie, to see her there, to see what was going on.

  Lowbeer’s sigil appeared. “You did very well, Mr. Netherton,” she said.

  “I scarcely did anything.”

  “Opportunities to do very badly were manifold. You avoided them. The major part in any success.”

  “You were right about al-Habib. And the real estate. Why did he kill her?”

  “It’s still unclear. She’d been involved with him for some time, apparently was instrumental in bringing her sister aboard. She may have been jealous of his relationship with Daedra, which was largely simultaneous with your own. The aunties’ latest iterations suggest she may have been considering shopping him to the Saudis, or perhaps was merely toying with the thought. They’re a fantastically unpleasant family. I’ve known her father since I was Griff’s age. A co-conspirator in the Gonzalez assassination, so I expect Griff will soon be dealing with him in that light. In our own continuum, however, he’s far too well-connected ever to be troubled by any of this. She’ll need a good publicist, now.”

  They were turning into Lev’s street.

  “Daedra?”

  “Flynne,” said Lowbeer. “That Hefty Mart buyout has attracted another magnitude of media attention in the stub. We’ll speak tomorrow, shall we?”

  “Certainly,” said Netherton, and then the coronet was gone.

  122.

  COLDIRON MIRACLES

  Conner was under his crown, when she opened her eyes, nobody waiting to help her out of hers, and Burton’s bed was empty. There was background noise that made no sense, but then she heard Leon’s loudest jackass laugh, so she guessed it was a party. She left her crown there on the pillow, sat up, got her shoes on, and went to look around the edge of a blue tarp.

  Most of the other blue tarps, except the ones walling off the ward space, were gone, taken down, making the former mini-paintballer franchise the single room it originally was, or at least the part inside the shingle wall. All the lights were on, bright, and people were sitting on desks, standing around, drinking beers, talking. Carlos had his arm around Tacoma, who was looking like she was about to laugh. Most of Burton’s vets that she remembered were there, some she didn’t, some still wearing the black armored jackets, but nobody carrying a bullpup, just open beers. And Brent Vermette, in jeans and a Sushi Barn t-shirt with SO FUCKING KILL ME across Hong’s artwork, in that fat drippy graffiti marker (because, it turned out, he’d taped a protest video before Homes had even reached the town limits, and doing that would be a factor in what got him on the board as chief council a week later). Madison was talking to him, grinning like Teddy Roosevelt’s teeth, vest full of pens and flashlights, Janice beside him. Janice saw Flynne and came right over, gave her a big hug. “Don’t know what you did, but you saved everybody’s ass.”

  “I didn’t,” Flynne said, “it was Lowbeer and them. Where’s Griff?”

  “D.C. Doing business with Homes. Or to them, more like it. Getting them a new director, Tommy told Madison.”

  “Where’s Tommy?”

  “Here somewhere. Just saw him with Macon and Edward.” Janice looked around, didn’t see any of them, looked back to Flynne. “They found Pickett.”

  “His body?”

  “His builder ass, unfortunately.”

  “Where?”

  “Nassau.”

  “He’s in Nassau?”

  “He’s on Homes’ dirtiest no-fly list, is where he is, since Griff got on the phone.” Janice took a swig of her beer. “Meanwhile, looks like your brother’s finally falling for Shaylene.”

  Flynne followed the direction of her glance, and saw Burton, on one of those little mobility cart things, a beer in his hand, saying something to Shaylene, who was sitting on the edge of a desk, leaning toward him.

  “Hasn’t happened in the biblical sense,” Janice said, “because she wouldn’t want him popping any stitches. Matter of time, though, looks to me.”

  “Burton’s cute sister,” said Conner, behind her, and she turned to find him propped in a wheelchair, Clovis holding its handles.

  “How’s Daedra?” she asked Conner.

 
“Getting new tattoos to commemorate it all? Sent her home in a cab.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Berated her ass. Made loud noises. Don’t think it actually impressed her that much.” He looked at Janice. “Beer for a wounded warrior?”

  “You got it,” said Janice, and was gone.

  “Harsh on Pavel, though,” Flynne said.

  “Lowbeer told me to go for it, if I got the chance. That suit had some wingsuit capabilities built in, so I wasn’t just diving blind. Idea was, we’d take Hamed out before he had a chance to pull the trigger on Homes’ drones, back here. Didn’t happen, though. Why I wasn’t Air Force, I guess. Lowbeer’s ordered a brand-new one to replace it. Plus one for me.”

  “Easy Ice,” Macon greeted her. He was holding hands with Edward, a beer in his other hand.

  “Gimme a pull on that beer, Macon,” Conner said, so Macon held his out, tipping it so Conner could get a drink. Conner wiped his mouth with the back of what was left of his hand.

  And then she saw Tommy coming, from the front of the building, right through where the big sandbox for the paintball tanks had been, beaming at her, like she was some kind of miracle.

  123.

  COMPOUND

  Back from her Wednesday afternoon walk with Ainsley, along the Embankment, she put on Tommy’s oldest Sheriff’s Department shirt, one that still had a Deputy Sheriff’s patch on it. It was the most comfortable thing to wear over her bump, and it felt like him. Maybe they were getting like Janice and Madison, that way, but he basically wore the same thing every day, in uniform or out, and she had Coldiron’s stylists for anything public. She just had to keep them from making her wear some new designer thing, which could feel like a job in itself.

  She went into the kitchen, to get a glass of juice from the fridge, and stood there drinking it, wondering, the way she still did, how they could’ve built something like this without assemblers. They’d built it about a hundred yards from the old house, in what had been disused pasture before, and there was no way to tell it hadn’t been built in the nineteen-eighties, then kept up, and gradually remodelled a little, by someone who could afford that but not much else. And they’d done it all without ever making a sound, and really fast. Tommy said they’d used a lot of different adhesives, none of them toxic. So that if you saw a nail head, that wasn’t really a nail, but just there to look like one. But having so much money for a project that it just didn’t matter, she’d learned, was a lot like having assemblers.