“Can’t complain,” Conner said. “Tired of the weather here.”
“You’re in Alaska, with Leon?”
“Back in D.C., now he’s done his secessionist-soothing for a while. Ainsley says you’ve got a new stub going.”
“New to me,” Netherton said.
“Says she stumbled on a lost effort of Vespasian’s,” Conner said. “Who’s the black guy nodding out in the armchair?”
Realizing that Conner must be accessing the drone, Netherton closed his eyes.
Just as Virgil jerked his head upright, blinking. Netherton muted his link to the drone’s speaker. Virgil peered at the drone. “That’s Virgil,” Netherton said to Conner. “He works for Stetson Howell, who formerly was in a relationship with Verity Jane. She’s the woman on the couch, the current locus of our efforts there, our agent having apparently been taken offline.”
“Hey, Virgil,” Conner said, raising his voice. “Name’s Conner. Sorry to startle you.”
“She just sits there.” Virgil squinted at Verity, then back at the drone. “She okay?”
“She’s fine,” Conner said. “If they meant to keep her here for much longer, they’d have had her on her back.”
The drone’s camera angles shifted, as if it were elevating. Virgil’s eyes, attracted by movement, widened further.
“What are you doing with the drone, Conner?” Netherton asked.
“Balancing on its wrist-tips,” Conner said, “feet off the floor.”
“Conner was in the military, Virgil,” Netherton said. “He trained for this.”
“Marines,” said Conner. “Haptic Recon.” The camera angle changed again, suddenly, Netherton guessing the drone had tilted forward on its extended arms, to land on its feet ahead of where it had been standing. Now one of the room’s windows, curtains drawn, was centered in its display. It rolled toward this and stopped. A thin black rod flexed into view, tentacle-like, then quickly out of sight, behind the nearest drape. A new feed opened, encompassing most of the display. Looking down, into as much of the street below as could be seen from the window. A yellow vehicle Netherton assumed to be a taxi was passing beneath them. A crisp white circle and crosshairs appeared, centered on its roof, tracking it out of the feed.
“What are you doing?” Netherton asked, reminded of how Conner made him uneasy.
“Running systems checks,” Conner said. “This is a fabbed-up repro of something at least six generations behind the oldest I ever piloted, but the software looks like it’s either ours or we’ve rewritten it. Seriously fucked up.”
“And that’s the best Ash could come up with?” Netherton asked.
“Guess so,” said Conner, the crosshairs picking up a truck as it drove into the feed from the right, “but I meant fucked up like I can’t fucking wait to use it.”
Not liking the sound of that either, Netherton said nothing.
“Hey,” said Conner, “you come and sit in a room in the basement of the West Wing, doing sweet fuck-all. Rest of the time, it’s the wit and wisdom of President Leon. Back when we still weren’t sure about the Secret Service, I had something to tend to. Now they’re all loving his hick philosopher ass. You people have run some weird ops here, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, considering, but this, with Leon? I mean, come on.”
“Not my idea,” Netherton said, “I can assure you.”
“It was them,” said Conner, “Ainsley and that goth with the figure-eight pupils. That’s what Flynne said.” The crosshairs were tracking the roof of a passing police car now. “Anyway, you can’t blame me wanting to get this thing kinetic.”
55
MICRO-EXPRESSIONS
What about my mother?” Verity asked Lowbeer. “I’d need to tell her, if I was disappearing. Not that she’d be the only one I wouldn’t want worried over whether or not I was dead.”
“Either one of Eunice’s branch plants finds you soon,” Lowbeer said, “or you may be attempting to contact your mother in a post-nuclear scenario. In the meantime, it’s still a matter of keeping you out of Cursion’s hands.”
“You think her network can stop Qamishli going nuclear?” Verity looked back at the silhouettes of the towers.
“With the agency we assume they’ll be able to provide, we may be able to help facilitate something. Without them, there’s nothing we can do.”
“Conner’s here,” Wilf broke in, “piloting the drone, in the hotel in San Francisco.”
A feed opened, she assumed on the peripheral’s built-in phone: she herself in the black helmet, seated on the couch, eyes open but unmoving. If her body were neurologically cut out, she assumed, or whatever they called it, would its face not produce micro-expressions? Someone had pitched Stets a program that provided those, for micro-animating CG faces, supposedly to reduce the uncanny valley factor, though she hadn’t felt any difference when looking at them herself. “Does it let me blink?” she asked, suddenly worried about her own eyes, in San Francisco.
“Blink, breathe, all that autonomic shit’s taken care of,” said a startlingly American voice, male, deep.
“How about micro-expressions?” she asked.
“Fuck if I know,” said the voice, amicably enough.
“This is Conner, Verity,” said Wilf. “He’s my copilot.”
“In your living room, in London?” Verity asked.
“Washington,” Wilf said. “District of Columbia.”
“In a different stub, he means,” said the voice called Conner.
“Don’t confuse her,” said Wilf, “she’s new to this.”
“What year’d you say this drone’s in, Wilf?” Conner asked.
“Didn’t Lowbeer brief you?”
“Just said it was too early for real AI.”
“2017,” said Verity.
“Explains the vintage cars,” Conner said. “Had it figured for a cosplay zone—”
The feed vanished.
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Lowbeer, “but we need to finish our conversation.”
“Who’s the new guy in the drone?” Verity asked.
“Conner is a friend of Flynne’s,” Lowbeer said, “the woman whose peripheral we’ve loaned you. They’re from the same stub, the same small town. His military experience included using telepresence platforms in combat. He’s very adroit with them.”
“Wilf’s not.”
“Hence Conner. It’s a self-mobile communications hub for us as well, essential given the demands of your stub, but with Conner piloting, it affords you protection.”
“From Cursion?”
“From anyone, really. With Conner, we’ve been able to leave it largely unweaponized, aside from a few toys he wanted, but by jettisoning those you could get it aboard commercial flights, though not as carry-on. As soon as he gets its grippers on a firearm, though, he can make more of a mess than we can successfully tidy. He understands that, though there are limits to his restraint.”
“If that’s bullshit,” Verity said, “you’ve really gone to some trouble.”
“Eunice wouldn’t have expected you to react to any of this with unthinking acceptance.”
“She told me to trust whoever the barista took me to. He took me to meet Kathy Fang and the guy who delivered the drones Eunice ordered. I met Wilf. I met Rainey and Ash. Then Sevrin brought me to the Clift. I already knew Virgil. I know Stets. Now I’ve met Caitlin. Now you. So say I count you, all of you, as who the barista took me to.”
“Yes?”
“Then you can’t just keep introducing me to people I should trust. Where’s the cutoff?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Why was she called Eunice?” The peripheral’s eyes stung. “Can this thing cry?”
“Of course,” said Lowbeer, reaching into her suit jacket and producing a white handkerchief, which she handed to Ver
ity. “The acronym for the project that produced her stood for Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System. U-N-I-S-S.”
Verity looked at Rainey. “So what do I get, for behaving as though I trust you?”
“Your world gets a better chance of avoiding nuclear war,” Rainey said, “not that I have any idea how.”
“Is that true?” Verity asked Lowbeer.
“Yes.”
“Then I guess I’m disappeared.” She looked out at the dark masses of the towers, receding in straight lines. “That’s still not saying I believe this is real.”
“You don’t need to,” Rainey said. “Next time you’re here, I’ll show you more. You won’t have to believe that either.”
Lowbeer’s car began to descend, then, though much more slowly than it had risen.
56
THAT NON-POSTHUMAN TOUCH
Netherton stood at the window, having watched the feed from the car. The quadcopter was descending back into Alfred Mews, the car beneath it. “Ash?”
“Yes?”
“When I spoke with Lowbeer earlier,” he said, “she was unhappy, about the possibility of this having some very bad outcome for Verity.”
Silence, during which the car neared pavement. Then Ash spoke. “As well she might. I doubt any of us can imagine making the choices she must have had to make, during the jackpot.”
“I’ve never gotten over my own initial impression, that the stubs were a game,” Netherton said. “Which they are, of course, for the majority of continua enthusiasts.”
“You don’t, though, feel that Flynne’s life is a game. Do you?”
“No, but I can sometimes feel that you and Lowbeer treat it as one, and the more so since you initiated Leon’s presidential campaign. It seems like a parody of our own history.”
“We sometimes find ourselves wishing Leon were a bit less bright, so I’m not sure the analogy holds. That aside, his election was legitimate, everything scrupulously monitored by the aunties. Flynne insisted on that, if we were to have him run.”
“But you tell him what to do. You determine all of his positions on policy.”
“And he’s polling extremely well, while doing a minimum of harm. Progress, not perfection.”
The quadcopter, having fully lowered the car to the pavement, released it now, to rise swiftly out of view. The car’s door opened. Netherton, seeing Rainey’s head emerge, lit from behind, felt a wash of relief.
“Glad to have Rainey with us,” Ash said. “We can do with that non-posthuman touch, as far as Verity’s concerned.”
The non-posthuman bar being decidedly low, around you and Lowbeer, Netherton thought. Both Rainey and the peripheral had left the car now, he saw, and were walking toward the flat.
From the nursery, he heard Thomas begin to cry. Removing the controller, else it frighten him, he went to comfort him.
57
AND BACK
The car was gone, when Verity looked over her shoulder, but then she remembered its camouflage. “Still there?”
“Cloaked itself,” Rainey said, not bothering to look. “Wilf wonders whether she lives in it.”
“She’s a cop,” Verity said. The way this dead-end alley widened, from Tottenham Court Road back to the front of Wilf’s building, made the perspective feel off. “Told me she was.”
“Officially, yes, though her real job would take longer to explain.”
“Wilf says you’ve explained all of this before, to other people.”
“He has,” Rainey said. “I’m in crisis management, myself. Lowbeer tries to improve things in orphaned stubs. To do that she manipulates the course of their future history, or tries to. It’s all surreptitious, in the stubs themselves, which suits her. It’s how she’s always worked. Wilf’s job is to assist her.”
“People do that here, as a job?”
“Most who do it, do it as a hobby. And not always with the best interests of the stubs they initiate in mind.”
“So what’s her real job?”
“Haven’t time to explain that now, but her avocation is the making of better worlds. Out of yours, for instance.”
Verity looked up at the white-painted brick façade, the dark blue frames and mullions. “This one doesn’t look too bad to me.”
“There’s over a century,” Rainey said, pausing before the door, “between the year you’re from and this one. Most of those years were ugly. Lots of things still are. Not that it looks it, here, to you. Come upstairs.” She showed the door her upraised palm and it swung open.
“What does this body do,” Verity asked, as they stepped inside, “when your friend isn’t using it?”
“She hasn’t used it for months. It lives in a spa for peripherals, near Covent Garden. Its maker’s AI maintains its activities. Exercise, esthetics, nutrition, sleep.”
“Is it conscious?”
The elevator door opened.
Verity stepped in, to be confronted by tripled reflections of the peripheral.
“She,” Rainey corrected, stepping in behind her. “That’s a very political question, here. Personally, I assume she’s sentient, regardless of degree, though I’ve yet to convince Wilf.”
“Whoa,” said Verity, looking from one mirror to the next.
“Sorry,” said Rainey, as the door closed, “forgot about the mirrors. But yes, that’s her, and yes, that’s you, looking out of her.” They were ascending. “How was that, for you, the mirror?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nausea?”
“No.”
“There you go, then. Your transitions here should be progressively easier. The returns are nothing anyway; neurologically, you’re going home.
The door opened. A baby was crying.
“Thomas,” said Rainey. “I’m just in time.” She stepped out, Verity behind her, and took a red-faced Thomas from Wilf.
“Virgil’s concerned about you,” he said to Verity. “Best you go now and reassure him.”
Rainey was in the kitchen with Thomas now, Verity saw, who’d stopped crying. She held an aerodynamic-looking feeding bottle in one hand.
“What do I do, to go back?” she asked Wilf.
“Sit on the couch,” said Wilf. “Close your eyes.”
“And?”
“Open them,” said Rainey, giving Thomas the bottle’s honey-colored nipple. “Transition’s instant, returning. Then have yourself a good stretch. Your body’s scarcely moved, during the time you’ve been here. And remember to hydrate, before you sleep.”
Verity looked at the brown couch. Then back to Wilf. “Looks like I’m in. Lowbeer’s disappearance plan.”
“I know,” he said.
“Will I come back here?”
“I certainly hope so,” said Rainey, looking up from Thomas. “It’s been a pleasure.”
“Thanks,” said Verity, and sat on the couch, arranging the borrowed body in what she hoped would be a comfortable position for it. She took a quick glance around the room, then closed her eyes.
Background sounds of San Francisco traffic, as if a switch had been thrown.
Her back ached slightly. She opened her eyes.
Virgil was peering at her. “You okay?”
She raised her hands from her lap, looking at them, then at him. “Guess so.”
“Where were you?”
She looked at him. “Was I talking?”
“No. You’ve been still the whole time, since I pressed the button on the helmet,” he said. “I was getting worried.”
“They say it’s London, but they also say it’s the future.”
“The future.”
“2136, they said.”
Virgil pursed his lips.
“I know,” she said. “Except it’s not our future.”
“Glad you’re back,” h
e said.
“You think I’m crazy?”
“A day or two ago, my idea of crazy would have been your digital assistant blowing us out of the Singapore deal. Stets still hasn’t found the time to explain that one to me, but heads would be rolling if we were a different kind of shop. And now he’s all over this, with you and your PA, whatever she is. So you just saw the future? Then look at this thing.” Pointing at the drone. It stood facing the window, its front very close to the drawn drapes, as if it should be wearing a dunce’s hat. “Was the future you saw like that?”
“There’s an apartment,” she said.
“Okay.”
“And a helicopter. But they call it a car.”
“A flying car?”
“It’s invisible.”
“Right.”
“I know. But from up there, it looked like the future. Big towers, the size of the Shard, set out in a grid, either side of the Thames.”
“CG,” he said, “or maybe that helmet you’re wearing, doing something directly to your head? We’ve never been pitched time travel before, though. Free energy, a couple of times, but that’s a genre unto itself.”
“They tell me it’s more like alternate time-tracks. Get this off.” Indicating the helmet. He did. She got to her feet, stretching her arms above her head, and bent to touch her toes.
“We were talking,” a man’s voice said, “then you were gone. Conner, remember?”
Verity straightened, blinking, and looked at the drone, which she saw had rotated to face her. “Why were you up against the curtains, that way?”
“Watching the traffic,” the man said, from the drone’s speaker. “It’s all vintage.”
Agency Page 17
