William Gibson - Zero history

Then he heard a low whistle. “Here,” Fiona called softly, “get under.”

He found her huddled under a thin tarp, in one of the more esoteric new camouflage patterns Bigend was interested in. He couldn’t remember which one, but now he saw how well it worked.

“Not with the penguin! Get your controller. Hurry.” She sat cross-legged, spoke quietly, her own iPhone glowing green on her lap. She pulled the balloon down, unclipped its tether at either end, and released it. It rose slowly, burdened with the Taser. Milgrim took the penguin’s iPhone from his pocket, squatted beside her, and she drew the fabric around them both, leaving heads and hands exposed. “Get on it,” she said. “Fly. Take it up, away from the road. I can’t talk now, work of my own.” He saw she wore one of the earplug headsets. “You’re looking for a tall man. He was wearing a raincoat, overcoat. No hat. Short hair, probably gray. He has a parcel, something wrapped in paper, a few feet long.”

“Where?”

“Lost him. Tap the green circle if you want night vision, but it’s no help on the penguin unless you’re right up on something.”

Milgrim turned on his iPhone, saw a blank glowing screen, then realized that the penguin’s camera was seeing empty sky. It was so much nicer, he instantly realized, when you didn’t have to worry about bumping the wall or ceiling of the cube. He swam higher, strangely free.

“Is this guy wearing a hockey jersey with a face painted on it?” She showed him her screen. Looking down on a figure in a huge pullover of some kind, the back presenting a grotesque and enormous face.

“Looks Constructivist,” he said. “El Lissitzky? He’s breaking into that car?” The man stood close to a black sedan, his back to the camera on Fiona’s helicopter.

“Locking it. Already broke in, now he’s locking it.” Her fingers moved and the image blurred, her drone, compared to the air penguin, moving with startling speed.

“Where are you going?” Meaning the drone.

“Have to check the other three. Then I have to set it down, save batteries. Been in the air since I got here. Are you looking for the man with the parcel?”

“Yes,” said Milgrim, and sent the penguin swimming down, into the relative darkness of the Scrubs. “Who are the other three?”

“One’s Chombo. Then the one from that car, that tried to block you in, in the City.”

Foley.

“The other one’s a footballer, with metal hair.”

“Metal hair?”

“More like a mullet. Big lad.”

Hollis stood behind him, trying to pretend she was watching someone play a game, something tedious and self-importantly arcane, on multiple screens. Something that didn’t matter, was of no great importance, on which nothing depended.

A game with undergraduate production values. No music, no sound effects. Garreth the dungeon master, defining the quests, setting tasks, issuing gold and sigils of invisibility.

Better to look at it that way, but she couldn’t make it stick. She leaned back, against aubergine-coated automotive steel, the coolness of it, and watched the video feed from Fiona’s drone.

Whatever Fiona was flying felt hummingbird-swift, capable of brilliantly sudden pause and sustained hover, but also of elevator-like ascents and descents. All in the pale green monochrome of night vision. Her cameras were better than Milgrim’s, expensively optimized. Hollis, with no idea what it might look like, imagined it a huge dragonfly, its body the size of a baguette, the pulsing wings iridescent.

It had hovered, watching four men emerge from a black sedan. A Mercedes hire-car, Garreth had said, having somehow checked plate numbers.

Two of the men were tall, broad-shouldered, and efficient-looking. Another, shorter, almost certainly Foley, limped. The fourth, whose posture she now recalled from Los Angeles and Vancouver, a perpetual petulant slump, was Bobby Chombo, Bigend’s pet mathematician. That same annoying haircut, half of his thin face lost behind an unwashed diagonal curtain. There he’d been, below Fiona’s dragonfly, as if in a pale green steel engraving, wrapped in what looked like a robe or dressing gown. Neurasthenic, she remembered Inchmale delighting in calling him. He’d said that neurasthenia was coming back, and that Bobby was ahead of the curve, an early adapter.

Garreth took it for granted that one of the taller men, the one in the dark raincoat, carrying a rectangular package, was Gracie. This based, Hollis gathered, on the other’s having some kind of archaic rocker hair, hair that reminded her of one of Jimmy’s junkie friends, a drummer from Detroit.

When the four of them, Foley seeming to be leading Chombo, had moved on, away from the car, Garreth had had Fiona dip down to read the car’s plate number, and peek through the window, in case they’d left someone to watch it, a complication that Hollis gathered would have required some other and more unpleasant skill on Pep’s part. The car had been empty, and Fiona, aloft again, had found them easily, still moving, but the one Garreth thought was Gracie was gone, missing, and still was, his package with him. Fiona had been unable to look for him then, because Garreth had needed her back at the car, so that he could vet Pep’s arrival and subsequent burglary, which had taken all of forty-six seconds, passenger-side door, complete with lockup.

Pep, following instructions, hadn’t been wearing the messenger bag, and Hollis assumed he’d deposited the other party favor, whatever it might be, in the car, that being evidently the plan. And then he was gone, his dual-engined electric bicycle, utterly silent, capable of an easy sixty miles per hour, never having intersected with the focal cones of any of the cameras showing on the screen of Garreth’s laptop. Had it, Garreth said, the resulting image of a riderless bicycle might have negated the whole exercise.

The camera-map, on Garreth’s laptop, was grayscale, the cones of camera-vision red, each one fading to pink as it spread from its apex. Occasionally, one of them would move as an actual given camera motored on its axis. She had no idea where this particular display was being darknetted from, and she was glad that she didn’t.

The screen that offered Milgrim’s video feed, she thought, seemed entirely out of step with the operation, and perhaps for that reason she found herself going back to it, though it wasn’t very interesting. With Gracie still unaccounted for, she felt Garreth’s nerves. He could have used someone who knew what they were doing, she guessed, on another drone like Fiona’s.

Whatever Milgrim was flying, it seemed leisurely, almost comical, though capable of invigorating bursts of sustained forward motion. Having been instructed, via Fiona, to make a circuit of the area, looking for Gracie, he had, though Garreth had complained that he was too high. Now he was cruising, she saw, above vegetation scrubby enough to warrant the name, Garreth apparently having forgotten about him. But nothing had been expected of Milgrim and his drone, she knew. He’d been given the job to keep him out of Bigend’s hands.

The sound of a very long zipper being stealthily undone. She glanced to the right and saw Heidi touch her upraised forefinger to her lips.

“Our two,” Garreth said to the headset, “are starting for point now. Put it down about twenty meters west of point. We’ll have to run with the batteries you have.” That would be Fiona.

As he spoke, Heidi slipped through the fly and slowly lowered the zipper, closing it behind her.

Point, Hollis knew, would be the GPS coordinates that Gracie had specified as the site of the exchange.

On Fiona’s screen, the perspective suddenly dropped to knee-height, then raced forward over darkly blurred grass, as if from the viewpoint of a hyperkinetic child.