William Gibson - Zero history

Milgrim sighed, filled the bottle, capped it, finished in the grimy toilet, flushed by pulling a chain, then put the bottle in the sandwich bag, the sandwich bag in the paper bag, handed the paper bag to the driver, then washed his hands in cold water. There didn’t seem to be any soap.

As they left the room, Milgrim saw the reflection of the bright screens in Shombo’s eyes.

He closed the door carefully behind him.

The driver handed Milgrim a crisp manila envelope of a pattern suggesting deeply traditional banking practices. Within it, Milgrim felt the sealed bubble-pack containing his medication.

“Thanks,” said Milgrim.

The driver, without a word, took his leave, Voytek bustling irritably to lock the door behind him.

He’ll be right down,” said Jacob, smiling and luxuriantly bearded as ever, when he met her at Blue Ant’s entrance. “How was Paris? Would you like coffee?”

“Fine, thanks. No coffee.” She felt ragged, and assumed she looked it, but also better, since Heidi had forced her to make the call. Looking up at the lobby’s used-eyeglasses chandelier, she welcomed whatever distraction or annoyance Bigend might be able to provide.

And here he suddenly came, the optically challenging blue suit muted, if that could be the word for it, by a black polo shirt. Behind him, silent and alert, his two umbrella-bearing minders. Leaving Jacob behind, he took Hollis’s arm and steered her back out the door, followed by the minders. “Not good , Jacob,” he said to her, quietly. “Sleight’s.”

“Really?”

“Not entirely positive yet,” he said, leading her left, then left again at the corner. “But it looks likely.”

“Where are we going?”

“Not far. I’m no longer conducting important conversations on Blue Ant premises.”

“What’s happening?”

“I should have the whole phenomenon modeled. Have some good CG visualizations done. It’s not clockwork, of course, but it’s familiar. I’d guess it takes a good five or six years to cycle through.”

“Milgrim made it sound like a palace coup, some kind of takeover.”

“Overly dramatic. A few of my brightest employees are quitting. Those who haven’t gotten where they’d hoped to, with Blue Ant. So few do, really. Someone like Sleight tries to quit with optimal benefits, of course. Builds his own golden parachute. Robs me blind, if he can. Information flows out, before these parties depart, to the highest bidders. Always more than one golden parachutist.” He took her arm again and crossed the narrow street, in the wake of a passing Mercedes. “Too many moving parts for a solo operator. Sleight, probably Jacob, two or three more.”

“You don’t seem that alarmed.”

“I expect it. It’s always interesting. It can shake other things out. Reveal things. When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.”

“What does that mean?”

“Increased risk. Increased opportunity. This one comes at an inopportune time, but then they do seem to. Here we are.” He’d stopped in front of a narrow Soho shopfront, one whose austerely minimalist signage announced TANKY amp; TOJO in brushed aluminum capitals. She looked in the window. An antique tailor’s dummy, kitted out in waxed cotton, tweed, corduroy, harness leather.

He held the door for her.

“Welcome,” said a small Japanese man with round gold-framed glasses. There was no one else in the shop.

“We’ll be in back,” said Bigend, leading Hollis past him.

“Of course. I’ll see that you aren’t disturbed.”

Hollis smiled at the man, nodded. He bowed to her. He wore a tweed hacking jacket with sleeves made partially of waxed cotton.

The back office in Tanky amp; Tojo was tidier, less shabby than she expected spaces like this to be. There was no evidence of employees attempting to alleviate boredom, no stabs at humor, no wistful pockets of nonwork affect. The walls were freshly painted gray. Cheap white shelving was piled with plastic-wrapped stock, shoe boxes, books of fabric samples.

“Milgrim and Sleight were in South Carolina,” said Bigend, seating himself behind the small white Ikea desk. One of its corners, facing her, was chipped, revealing some core material that resembled compacted granola. She sat on a very Eighties-looking vanity stool, pale violet velour, bulbous, possibly the last survivor of some previous business here. “Sleight had arranged for us to have a look at a garment prototype. We’d picked up interesting industry buzz about it, though when we got the photos and tracings, really, we couldn’t see why. Our best analyst thinks it’s not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas.”

“For what?”

“The new Mitty demographic.”

“I’m lost.”

“Young men who dress to feel they’ll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren’t, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who’re actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another.”

“ ‘Gear-queer’?”

Bigend’s teeth showed. “We had a team of cultural anthropologists interview American soldiers returning from Iraq. That’s where we first heard it. It’s not wholly derogatory, mind you. There are actual professionals who genuinely require these things-some of them, anyway. Though they generally seem to be far less fascinated with them. But it’s that fascination that interests us, of course.”

“It is?”

“It’s an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. Equipment fetishism. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity.”

“Sounds like fashion, to me.”

“Exactly. Pants, but only just the right ones. We could never have engineered so powerful a locus of consumer desire. It’s like sex in a bottle.”

“Not for me.”

“You’re female.”

“They want to be soldiers?”

“Not to be . To self-identify as. However secretly. To imagine they may be mistaken for, or at least associated with. Virtually none of these products will ever be used for anything remotely like what they were designed for. Of course that’s true of most of the contents of your traditional army-navy store. Whole universes of wistful male fantasy in those places. But the level of consumer motivation we’re seeing, the fact that these are often what amount to luxury goods, and priced accordingly. That’s new. I felt like a neurosurgeon, when this was brought to my attention, discovering a patient whose nervous system is congenitally and fully exposed. It’s just so nakedly obvious. Fantastic, really.”

“And it ties into military contracting?”

“Deeply, though not simply. A lot of the same players, where the stuff actually originates. But your civilian buyer, your twenty-first-century Walter Mitty, needs it the way a mod, in this street, in 1965, needed the right depth of vent on a suitcoat.”

“It sounds ridiculous to me.”

“Almost exclusively a boy thing.”

“Almost,” she agreed, remembering Heidi’s IDF bra.

“Milgrim and Sleight were in South Carolina because it seemed someone there might be on the brink of a Department of Defense contract. For pants. Since it’s something we’ve been looking to get into ourselves, quite actively, we decided to have a closer look at their product.”

“ ‘They’ who?”