Agency

by William Gibson

  In Oakland, now, headed to where the drones had been printed, she assumed. Where Sevrin had manipulated lowball cryptocurrencies to pay for them. Where currently she knew no one at all.

  Nimitz, she remembered, passing a sign, was the older, familial name for this highway along the waterfront. Recalling the names of neighborhoods here she’d heard of but never seen, walled magically away behind shared embankment: Ghost Town, Dogtown, Cypress Village, Lower Bottoms.

  Turning left then, away from the Posey Tube, into vaguely familiar nonresidential streets. Slowing, after a few more turns, to park. Cutting the ignition.

  She’d once had an interview near here, but couldn’t remember what for. Releasing the barista’s waist, she got stiffly off the bike, legs unsteady. She removed the helmet, emerging into silence, lack of vibration. She pulled down the filtration mask.

  Lowering a centerstand, he pulled the bike back, front wheel slightly leaving the pavement. She looked up at the four-story gray building, industrial, not new, and then around, at the empty street behind her, a wholesale fruit business opposite, its name in Chinese and English. He dismounted, removed his helmet, then his mask, and walked toward the building.

  She followed him, helmet under her arm.

  The entrance was unmarked. Beyond unwashed glass doors, a drab foyer, a rectangle of gray cardboard taped to its rear wall. FABRICANT FANG 3RD FLOOR, in green marker.

  The elevator, enameled a dull gray, reminded her of card catalogs in old public libraries. He pushed the button for the third floor. The door shuddered shut. She half expected thumbnails to appear, then remembered.

  The elevator stopped, door clanking open.

  “Welcome to Fabricant Fang,” said the man who’d brought the drones to Wolven + Loaves, and taken away the Franklins. “I’m Dixon.” Bearded, ball-capped, in a black t-shirt and brown workpants, orange plastic sonic-protection muffs hugging his neck.

  “I’m Verity,” she said, stepping out. Behind her, the door made an impatient sound. She turned, saw the barista preventing it from closing, his helmet slung on its strap from his wrist. With his other hand he passed the Faraday pouch to the bearded man and took Verity’s helmet. He gestured impatiently with it, indicating the down jacket. She zipped out of it and draped it over her helmet, which he withdrew, into the elevator, then released the door, which jolted shut. Sound of his descent.

  “Come meet Kathy,” the bearded man said.

  Along a hallway, walls the dingy beige of the foyer below. He opened one of a pair of brown-painted steel doors, into bright light and a low tumult of small sounds. “Don’t worry about your ears,” he said, touching an orange plastic muff. “I just wear these because I get tired of it.”

  Stepping past him into a factory loft, shadow-free fluorescent light and this quiet cacophony of rustling, clicking, buzzing. Machines, busy rows of them. The walls were white-painted concrete block. To her left, steel-framed windows with old-fashioned privacy glass, horizontally ridged. A smell like scorched polyester. She recognized some of the machinery from tours Stets had been given: deposition printers, injection molders . . .

  “Kathy Fang.” A woman, offering her hand.

  Verity took it. “Verity Jane.”

  “Expecting you.” Handshake firm.

  “How?”

  “We received a text.” Chinese-American, late thirties in a gray sweatshirt and mom jeans that probably weren’t ironic.

  “She texted you?”

  “Never uses the same number twice. But she’d told us recently that we’d hear, if she had to go away.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That she was going away. That you were on your way, from the city.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “She bought something from us. We’ve been modifying it to her specifications. It’s for you.”

  Remembering her phone, Verity looked back at the man who’d introduced himself as Dixon. “He has my phone,” she said to the woman, “and everything Tulpagenics issued me. I want my phone.”

  “Sorry. Needs to stay pouched,” the woman said.

  “Eunice tell you that?”

  “In the same text, but we’d insist anyway.”

  “The drones were made here?”

  “They seriously slowed us down, on a run of mandibles.”

  “Mandibles?”

  “Between those drones and finishing your boy, we put a kink in the costuming pipeline for a semi-big second sequel.”

  “Boy?”

  “We’d gotten hold of plans ourselves, had fabbed most of it. Then Eunice contacted us, offering plans for the rest, plus her own modifications, in exchange for exclusive option to buy. The plans for the modifications alone would have been worth it to us. We did the job. This morning she phoned, told us she was picking up the option, and to expect you. Payment’s been delivered. Here you are.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “I don’t know. She said we could trust you, as well as anyone she sends to help you. If I knew more, I’d tell you. We build things here. Meet specs. Keep our mouths shut. Film and television production are secretive industries.” She gestured down an aisle bisecting the rows of repetitively restless machinery, the length of the long room, to another pair of brown doors. “Come and see him,” she said, starting down the aisle, without looking to see whether Verity followed.

  36

  GONE

  Gone,” Ash said, when Netherton answered her pulsing sigil.

  Rainey had just placed an egg salad sandwich and a glass of milk on the kitchen table, beside the controller.

  “That would be Eunice?” he asked.

  “Neither Johns Hopkins nor the University of Washington are hosting her now,” Ash said. “Johns Hopkins continues to provide a better gateway than we had previously, and I’ve retained what little access we had to Cursion’s back chatter. She hasn’t been mentioned.”

  “Where does that leave us, then?”

  “Verity Jane.”

  “Why did you choose her?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want our nascent agent emulating any personalities at Cursion. Verity’s not sociopathic.”

  “This Jane?” he asked.

  “Verity. Jane’s her surname.”

  Netherton picked up half of his sandwich. “Tell me more, while I eat.”

  “We obliquely put Eunice in touch with fabricators. She ordered four small military-grade aerial drones. We then managed to contact them ourselves, discovering that they were already building, for themselves, a passable knockoff of a bipedal combat drone. Verity Jane may already be with them, in Oakland. Wherever she is, she finds herself in a very different situation than the one she woke to Monday. Via the drone represented by the sim you practiced with, you’ll soon be having a conversation with her. A woman with no idea of stubs, and no particular reason to believe anything you say.”

  His mouth full, Netherton nodded dubiously, momentarily forgetting that she couldn’t see him.

  37

  TOP-HEAVY

  Slightly smaller than Joe-Eddy’s bedroom, the room beyond the second set of brown doors, less brightly lit, was empty, aside from a metal folding chair and something that reminded Verity of an Italian heater her mother had had, an electric oil-filled radiator, squat yet dynamic-looking. This one, though, was strapped to a hand trolley, tilted back against the wall. Her mother’s had been teal, chrome trim. This one, various shades of gray. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Your guy,” Kathy Fang said, behind her, in the doorway.

  Verity turned. “‘Guy’?”

  “A drone,” Kathy Fang said. Dixon was behind her, his earmuffs on.

  “It flies?”

  “Has legs,” Dixon said. “Wheels too. Can’t fly.”

  Verity turned back, seeing that it did have legs, short ones, two of them,
currently positioned between the trolley’s two plump tires. “Why’s it strapped in like that?”

  “Keeps it from falling over while the gyros are off,” Kathy Fang said. “It’s still charging.” She indicated a flat rectangular unit on the floor, like the charger for an electric bicycle but larger, a red LED glowing at one end. “That goes green, it’s ready.”

  “For what?”

  “For whoever it is you’re supposed to meet.”

  Verity looked at the chair.

  “Once you’ve met them, there’s a more comfortable space for you upstairs. Wave when they’re here and Dixon will take you up. We have mandibles need overseeing.” She stepped back, closing the door.

  There were two unopened bottles of water on the floor beside the chair. She sat down, bent to pick one up, unscrewed the top, and drank.

  With the bottle in her hand, she looked at the thing. The LED on the charger was still red. “Eunice?”

  Which felt stupid, and made her sad when there was no answer.

  38

  THE HANDSHAKE

  Netherton remembered Flynne using a county-fabbed controller, printed in a plastic resembling icing sugar, to first interface with the peripheral they’d found for her in London.

  Seated on the couch now, with the controller from the Denisovan Embassy activated, eyes closed, its cams showed him their flat, in that anachronistic squashed-circle format familiar from the sim. The upper segment was currently presenting the windows directly behind him, with their view of the mews.

  “Waiting for the handshake,” Ash said, likely in the yurt, in Dalston, attended by her tattoos and the tardibot.

  “What handshake?”

  “Your controller must perform one with Johns Hopkins APL.”

  “Why, if Eunice is no longer there?”

  “It’s our best present gateway to adequate connectivity. University of Washington’s slower.”

  A short tone sounded.

  “What was that?”

  “The handshake,” she said. “We’re in.”

  The display filled with another room, smaller, bare. A woman in a tweed jacket leaned tensely forward on a chair, staring at him narrowly.

  “We are indeed,” he said to Ash, surprised at the awe he felt.

  “Are what, indeed?” the woman in the stub asked. She had a plastic bottle of what looked like water in one hand.

  “In,” said Netherton, rattled. “Sorry. Didn’t realize you could hear me. Do you have a phone?” Thinking of an implant, but then he remembered that she wouldn’t.

  “They took them both,” she said.

  “How are we communicating?”

  “It must have a speaker. And a microphone.”

  She meant the drone, he decided. “You’re Verity?”

  “You first.”

  “Wilf,” he said, “Wilf Netherton.”

  “Where are you?”

  “London.”

  “Why am I speaking with you?”

  “Eunice,” he said, “though I’ve never spoken with her myself.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She frowned. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m here to offer assistance.”

  She was up now, stepping forward.

  “I can’t see you, when you’re that close,” he said.

  “Cams?”

  “Of course.”

  “I can’t see them.”

  “They probably look like small round holes,” he said, “about two millimeters in diameter.”

  Extreme close-up of gray tweed. The high-resolution texture of an alternate universe.

  “Like Robertson heads,” she said, whatever that might mean.

  39

  STUMPY

  Verity glanced over at the brown doors. Beyond which Kathy Fang and Dixon supposedly worked their field of mandibles. “Your name’s Will?”

  “Wilf. Netherton.”

  “What do you do, Wilf?”

  “Public relations.”

  “Where?”

  “London.”

  “Who for?”

  “Freelance,” he said. “Where are we?”

  “Oakland.” She remembered Eunice’s final message. How she should trust the people the barista took her to. “If you’re in London, why didn’t they just put me on a phone?”

  “Who?”

  “Kathy Fang.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Eunice bought this thing from her. You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

  “I know someone who knows Eunice. Or knows of her. It’s complicated.”

  One of its feet moved then, or tried to, but was restrained by the lower of the two heavy canvas straps. She took a step back.

  “Why can’t I move its foot?” he asked anxiously.

  “It’s strapped in.”

  “Into what?”

  “The kind of trolley you’d use to move a washing machine. Two wheels, balloon tires, handle at the top?”

  “I see the handle in the rear display. Hadn’t realized what it was. I’m restrained?”

  “Gyros,” she said, becoming aware of the faint hum of their engines as she said it. “You’re top-heavy without them, so they’ve strapped you in to keep you from falling over. Sounds like they’re running now.”

  “Could you free me, please?”

  She considered the length of the thing’s arms, imagining it reaching up to strangle her, then saw that it seemed handless as well as headless. “And you’re still plugged into the charger but the light’s green now.”

  “Would you mind unplugging that as well?”

  “Want me to get them in here?”

  “Who?”

  “Kathy and Dixon. They built it.”

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d rather you did it.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “I’ve seen a model of it. In an instructional sim.”

  “Stumpy as it is, it’s still intimidating.”

  “Stumpy?” He sounded disappointed.

  “Might be a meter, a little over?”

  “I’d assumed it would be taller.”

  “If it weren’t quite as wide as it is through the shoulders, it would look like SpongeBob.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You don’t have SpongeBob, in England?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m not even sure I can get these fasteners undone. Don’t move at all, until I tell you to. When I do, move slowly. This is creepy.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Approaching it again, she bent, standing the water bottle on the floor, to study the identical friction-lock devices that held the two straps taut. She caught herself waiting for Eunice’s instructive pictograph hands to appear. “Damn.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. Let me concentrate.”

  40

  BABY STEPS

  Ask her to tilt the trolley forward,” Ash said, “into the vertical, supporting it there as you step out.”

  He assumed that Verity couldn’t hear her, but would hear him if he responded.

  “Mute is one tap,” Ash said, “maxillary central incisors, either one. Unmute is another tap.”

  He touched his upper front teeth with his tongue. “Why?”

  “It might fall on you, if you step off when it’s unsupported. This isn’t a real combat drone, but a hobbyist’s reasonably accurate reconstruction of a research prototype for one.”

  “Hold on,” he said, and tapped his teeth again. A familiar close-up of tweed. “How’s that going?”

  “Kind of a ratchet, with a safety catch.” Metal clanged against metal. “
One more. Okay. Now the charger.” She must have knelt, the tweed dropping out of sight, brown hair very close to the cameras. “Good to go.” She stood.

  “Another favor?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “If you could tilt the trolley forward, into the vertical, and steady it there, while I step off? This is my first time on the actual drone. I’ve only walked in the sim.” He tapped his teeth. “How did you know it was tilted back?” he asked Ash.

  “Trigonometry,” Ash said, he assumed likewise muted.

  Verity reached behind him, over his head. The angles Ash had used altered, as Verity grasped what he now recognized as the trolley’s handle, bringing it forward. “I have my toe in front of a wheel,” she said.

  He tapped again. “May I try now?”

  “No sudden moves,” Verity said.

  He advanced the left foot, then lowered it, finding the floor. “Good?”

  “It’s on the floor,” she said.

  He repeated the sequence with the right foot.

  “You’re clear of the trolley,” she said.

  “May I keep walking?”

  “Your call.”

  He took two more steps, then extruded the small wheels from their housings beneath the feet.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Wheels,” he said. “They’re individually powered. But it can also freewheel, for skating. I haven’t skated yet.”

  “Why doesn’t it have hands?”

  “It has manual capacities,” Netherton said to Verity, and surprised himself by partially raising the arms, “but I haven’t yet had any demonstrated.” The wrists tapered smoothly to complexly irregular stumps. He flexed his own right hand, inadvertently causing several odd-looking elements to snap out, then instantly retract.