Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“Medical issues, requiring compound phage therapy, but she’s sufficiently back in circulation that I’ve asked her to look into Eunice.”

“She still has the shop, in Portobello?”

“The Clovis Limit, yes. Says the stock’s become the better part of her memory.”

“Have you inquired in the county? Your younger self, there, has every sort of Washington connection. Including presidential, currently.”

“Of course,” Lowbeer said, “but nothing turned up.”

Getting up, Netherton padded into the kitchen in his stocking feet. “Espresso,” he said to their maker, something Rainey generally wouldn’t allow him to do, insisting he make it himself. “Decaf,” he added, remembering but obeying another of her rules. “So you’ve encouraged this AI to increase its own functionality. Is that all?” Watching the maker pump a tiny stream of steaming caffeine-free espresso into the waiting cup.

“Yes,” Lowbeer said, “though that seems a basic part of the package with her, increasing agency. I must mention, though, that the aunties currently estimate that Eunice’s stub may be ending, at least for our purposes. So we’ve that to consider as well.”

“Ending?” Netherton took his first bitter sip, assuming he’d misheard.

“Yes,” said Lowbeer.

“Pardon me,” Netherton said, “but ‘ending’?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Nuclear war.”

“Ash mentioned something, but I didn’t imagine it was that serious,” Netherton said, looking down at the steaming black liquor in the small white china cup, the kitchen’s ceiling fixture reflected in it, surrounded by pale brown crema.

“It’s extremely serious. Qamishli,” Lowbeer said. “The crisis began there, though of course it’s playing out more broadly.”

Like a name from one of Thomas’s storybooks. But then he remembered more of what Ash had said. “Would that be in Turkey?”

“Syria. A town near the Turkish border, in the northeast, across from the Turkish city of Nusaybin. A complicated place, even by the standards of the region in that day.”

Netherton drank off his decaf, the gesture as denatured as the brew, and returned the cup to the maker. “Would that be your work, then, this crisis?”

“Most definitely not. It came with the territory, taking us entirely by surprise. Vespasian’s final stub promises to become exactly the sort of thing he most enjoyed inflicting.”

“Can you prevent it?”

“That depends on our available agency there. At the moment, we’ve none. The aunties give it grim odds.”

“You told me they weren’t involved.”

“Not in the sense you’re accustomed to, but there are no better actuaries.”

I like it,” Stets said, when Verity had finished. He leaned forward on the built-in bench, hands on his black brace, allowing it, rather than his injured leg, to take the weight of his torso. He looked up, at Eunice’s stern avatar. “A Silicon Valley ghost story,” he said. “Assuming Eunice is real.”

“Thing is,” Eunice said, “I’m here. Realness is kinda sorta.”

“So why here, exactly, right now?” he asked.

“I want to know where I come from. The infrastructure. Be some Area 51 shit, for real. And I need to protect Verity, ’cause I was dropped into her life uninvited. You’re the only serious player she knows.”

Stets looked at Verity. “You buy that?”

“Feels like she’s convincing me,” Verity said, “but then I start to think it’s Stockholm syndrome.”

“Text Phil Bartell,” Eunice said. Who was Stets’ firm’s chief financial officer, Verity knew. “Have him take my call. Verity’s PA. About the Singapore deal.”

Stets was staring at the screen.

“That’s what she’s like,” Verity said.

“Bartell deep-dives the docs I’ve left in his Dropbox,” Eunice said, “he’ll see it’s a bad deal. But I need to run the broad outline past him, right now, stop him closing. You’ve already signed off on it.”

“How do you know that, Eunice?” Stets asked. “How do you even know there’s a deal?”

“Maybe you can help me find out how I do. Text him. He’s about to close.”

Stets took a phone from one of his shorts pockets. He thumb-typed. Sent. Looked at Verity, then at his phone, then up at the screen. “He’ll take your call.”

“Already did,” she said. “I’m speaking with him now.”

He levered himself up from the bench, clicked the brace, and crossed the trailer to a bar counter, favoring his braced leg. He opened a bottle of water. His phone pinged. He looked down at it. “Says you’re right. Asks how you knew. Puts it more coarsely than that.”

“You called it when you said it’s a ghost story. When he runs down those docs for you, I think you’ll see I just saved a bunch of your bacon.”

“Thank you,” he said, “assuming this is all true, Verity’s story and now this. Which I now effectively do. Where do we go from here?”

“Verity and I go back to the Mission, preferably minus the gig-economy surveillance crew who tailed us over here.”

“If they know where I’m staying,” Verity asked, “and we’re going back to Joe-Eddy’s, why’s it matter?”

“We aren’t going straight back to Joe-Eddy’s,” Eunice said. “There’s somewhere I need you to be seen, in order for somebody to have the time to finish doing something somewhere else. That means getting out of here unobserved, to somewhere we won’t be seen transferring to a car I’ll send.”

“Virgil can manage that,” Stets said with a questioning look for Verity.

“Okay by me,” she said.

He thumbed a single key.

What you describe, Ainsley, would’ve been NGP,” said Clovis Fearing, in Victorian mourning dress Netherton imagined Ash would fancy, though she’d accessorize it more perversely.

Fearing’s face was a palimpsest of wrinkles and mottle, though looking younger, for all of that, than he remembered her. She was the only person he knew in London who addressed Lowbeer by her given name, though Flynne and others in the county all did.

“NGP?” asked Lowbeer.

“Next Generation Projection,” said Fearing, her teeth startlingly white. “Funded out of Special Operations Command, but managed by Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Used a lot of COTS tech, Commercial Off the Shelf. Some of that was out of China Lake, Naval Air Weapons Station, which was early into swarming microdrones. With effort toward acquiring bleeding-edge hardware from Silicon Valley. That would have been DIUx, Defense Innovation Unit, Experimental.”

“Indeed,” said Lowbeer, eyebrows raised.

“Close?” asked Fearing, fixing Lowbeer with her sharp old eyes.

“Could you look for mention of the name Eunice?”

“Eunice?”

“In any related context, please.”

Fearing’s eyes rolled up, terrifying when entirely white, then down again. “That would be U-N-I-S-S,” she said. “UNISS. Closest match.”

“Meaning?”

“Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System,” Clovis said, clearly pleased.

“That’s extremely helpful, Clovis,” Lowbeer said. “Thank you so much. Would there be more?”

“No,” said Fearing. “Bit-rot’s been at all the likely archives, and I’ve cross-checked my own stock. Nothing on it, but it was definitely NGP.”

Netherton, finding none of this particularly interesting, was looking at the oversized bronze head of a bearded man, directly behind Fearing, its neck having been crudely severed from whatever figure it must once have topped.

“Lee,” said Fearing, noting the direction of Netherton’s gaze.