William Gibson - Zero history

“Isn’t she in Paris?”

“She’ll be on the train we take.”

“He cultivates this stuff,” she said. “Makes sure it’s in the mix. Hires people who’ll go off the reservation, lead him somewhere new. Harnessing chaos, Garreth said.”

“Who’s Garreth?”

“My friend. He enjoyed hearing about Hubertus. I think Hubertus made a lot of sense to him. I thought it might be the jumping-off thing. That Hubertus erects his life, and his business, in a way guaranteed to continually take him over the edge. Guaranteed to produce a new edge he’ll have to go over.”

“He believes that stasis is the real enemy,” Milgrim said, glad to put any space at all between himself and Hollis’s moment of crossness. “Stability’s the beginning of the end. We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward. He told me,” remembering, “that that would be the problem with being able to perceive the order flow. The potential for stasis.”

“The what?’

“The order flow. He was talking about secrets, once. In Vancouver, when I first met him. He loves secrets.”

“I know,” said Hollis.

“But not all secrets are information people are trying to conceal. Some secrets are information that’s there , but people can’t have it.”

“There where?”

“It just is , in the world. I’d asked him what piece of information he’d most want to have, that he didn’t have, if he could learn any secret. And he said that he’d want something nobody had ever been able to have.”

“Yes?’

“The next day’s order flow. Or really the next hour’s, or the next minute’s.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s the aggregate of all the orders in the market. Everything anyone is about to buy or sell, all of it. Stocks, bonds, gold, anything. If I understood him, that information exists, at any given moment, but there’s no aggregator. It exists, constantly, but is unknowable. If someone were able to aggregate that, the market would cease to be real.”

“Why?” She looked out the window, over the taut black wire supporting its gray linen curtain. “Our cab’s here.”

“Because the market is the inability to aggregate the order flow at any given moment.” He pushed his chair back, stood, and popped the last of the croissant into his mouth. Chewing, he bent and picked up his bag. He swallowed, then drank off what was left of his coffee. “I’ll give you your computer on the train.”

She was leaving some change on the tablecloth. “You can have it, if you need it.”

“But it’s yours.”

“I bought it three months ago, thinking I might start another book,” she said, standing. “I’ve opened it about three times. I have a little e-mail on it, but I’ll put that on a thumb drive. If I need a computer, Blue Ant can pay for it.” She started for the desk, where she’d left her bag.

Milgrim followed, order flow forgotten in his surprise at being offered such a gift. Since he’d been with Hubertus, he’d been provided with things, but they all felt like equipment. It wasn’t personal. Hollis was offering him something that he’d thought of as hers.

And she’d already given him her art book, he remembered. He could read more of it on the train to London.

They gave their keys to the man at the desk, and went out to the waiting cab.

As the train pulled out of the Gare du Nord, past rain-streaked concrete and intricate calligraphies of spray-paint, she gave Milgrim the Air’s white charger, and two other white cables whose purpose she’d never been sure of. Then she cleaned out what little e-mail she had, copying it to the USB drive on her key ring, shaped like an actual key, purchased in the West Hollywood Staples when she began her book. She changed the machine’s name to “Milgrim’s Mac,” wrote its password on a slip of paper for him, and loaned him the USB modem that Inchmale had talked her into signing up for the month before. She didn’t know how to remove her e-mail account, but she hadn’t given him the password for that, and she could get it sorted in London.

His delight in the gift had a direct and childlike simplicity that saddened her. She suspected he’d not been given a gift in a long time. She’d have to remember to get the dongle back, though, or she’d be paying for his cellular time.

She watched as he sank instantly into whatever it was that he did on the Net, like a stone into water. He was elsewhere, the way people were before their screens, his expression that of someone piloting something, looking into a middle distance that had nothing to do with geography.

She sat back, staring at French vegetation hurtling past, punctuated by a dark staccato of power poles. Bigend wanted her to go straight to Cabinet. That was good. She needed to see Heidi, needed Heidi to get her over the hump, get her to phone Garreth’s emergency number. And if phoning produced no result, she’d do what Milgrim suggested, cut a deal with Bigend. Bigend drove a hard bargain. She couldn’t imagine what she might have that he most wanted, but she didn’t want to find out. And Garreth, she was fairly certain, would be unhappy to have Bigend aware of him. She’d never told anyone anything at all about Garreth, other than Heidi, and now Milgrim. What Garreth and the old man did, insofar as she understood it, was just too peculiarly up Bigend’s alley, she’d always thought. It seemed a bad idea, putting Bigend and Garreth together in any way, and she hoped she could avoid it.

She looked over at Milgrim, lost in whatever he was doing. Whatever he was, she found she trusted him. He seemed peeled, somehow, transparent, strangely free of underlying motive. Seemed used as well. Bigend had created him, or would feel that he had; had cobbled him up from whatever wreckage he’d initially presented. That was what Bigend did, she thought, putting her head back and closing her eyes. She supposed it was what he was doing with her as well, or would, if he could.

She was asleep before they reached the tunnel.

Milgrim didn’t open Twitter as he settled, opposite Hollis, in their business-class carriage, into what he still thought of as her computer. Instead, he opened the bookmarks menu and selected the URL for the page with the photograph of Foley modeling an olive-drab jacket and a black porn-rectangle.

He scrolled down, past other jackets, modeled by other young men with rectangles, to a shot of black-gloved hands. “Kevlar knit liners,” read the description, “for increased cut-resistance, Velcro closure strap with embossed logo. Superior grip for apprehension and control.”

Having sometimes been an apprehended suspect himself, he blinked. Frowned. Though the gloves actually reminded him more of Fiona, her armor. He saw her pale jawline above the upright belted collar of her black jacket. As if a wing had grazed him.

He glanced guiltily across the table at Hollis, but found her apparently asleep, her eyes swollen. He tried to imagine her boyfriend, jumping off the world’s tallest building, wherever she’d said that was.

He looked back at the specialized apprehender gloves. What would the embossed logo be, exactly? It didn’t say. The whole site was like that. No-name. Sketchy. Half-finished. No contact information. Why was Foley there? How had Winnie known where to find him? He’d heard Bigend refer to “ghost sites,” the sites of defunct businesses or product lines, still sitting there, forgotten, unvisited. Was this one of those, or something unfinished? There was something unconvincing about it, amateurish.

He went to Google, typed in “Winnie Tung Whitaker.” Stopped. Remembering Bigend and Sleight talking about the collection of search terms, about access to that. He imagined Winnie’s PDA alerting her to the fact of someone just having Googled her. Was that possible? On being introduced by Bigend to the current iteration of the internet, Milgrim had decided it was best to assume that anything was possible. Often, he’d been disappointed to learn that something wasn’t. Otherwise, better safe than sorry.