Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“But it didn’t happen. That war.”

“Decades of background dread did,” her mother said.

“How’s Lyle?” Her stepfather.

“They’ve planted his prostate with radioactive seeds. Sounds like something would grow, but really it’s for the opposite. Still has to get up a lot, in the night.”

“How’s that for you?”

“I can usually get back to sleep. You?”

“New job. Just started.”

“Like it?”

“Seems okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“What I was doing before.”

“Stets is engaged.”

“I know, Mom,” Verity said.

Her mother had been galvanized, Verity supposed understandably, by her daughter having received so much attention as the girlfriend of a billionaire tech investment wizard. And now seemed, in Verity’s opinion, insufficiently ready to let that go. But at least they’d bounced comfortably enough over the topic of her stepfather.

“I hear Daisy tearing after something in the yard,” her mother said. “She’ll wake Lyle. Gotta go.”

“Okay,” Verity said, “love you, Mom.”

“Love you too, hon. Bye.”

Verity lay there in the dark, looking up at nothing. Joe-Eddy still hadn’t started snoring again.

“How was she?” Eunice asked, from the headset beside her.

“You didn’t listen?”

“You were talking with your mother.”

“She’s okay. My stepfather’s got cancer. It’s being treated. And he’s racist, which didn’t come up.”

“Plenty of both around,” Eunice said.

“Took me a while to get that he doesn’t realize he is. Makes me wonder if I’d know I was.”

“How you can tell you’re on the right track, anyway,” Eunice said. “Stepdad’s the one positive he’s not.”

“You just look him up?”

“Didn’t need to. Try and get some sleep.”

Verity put her phone on the floor.

Closing her eyes, she imagined Daisy the Labradoodle chasing something, in her mother’s yard.

Netherton gingerly settled the controller across his forehead. It fit as worryingly well as he’d assumed it would. Closing his eyes, he swiped the tip of his tongue across the backs of his upper front teeth, right to left. The resulting feed was the sort of squashed circle sometimes employed in older full-surround devices. Its lower, thicker half showed the view ahead, the upper, narrower half the view behind. On the lower half, the simplest possible game space. Featureless blue sky, a horizontal plane of yellow, gridded to the horizon in black-lined perspective.

He opened his eyes, finding the headless figure, smaller now, arms at its sides, alone on that yellow plane.

“Grid’s in meters,” Ash said. “Here’s a jump from standing, knees bending backward.” It bent its knees backward, shoulders canting slightly forward, and sprang toward them, a full three squares.

“Like a bird,” he observed.

“No. Birds have knees like ours, but we mistake their ankles for their lower legs.”

Could that be true? he wondered.

“Regardless,” she said, “each wheel has its own motor. They’re extended now, under power.” It rolled smoothly toward Netherton, legs immobile, turned, circled back. “It can also jump with wheels under power.”

“How did you learn to do this?”

“Practice, on this period sim. Easier than you’d think.” She raced it toward the horizon, executing a leap that amounted to flying. To land again, still speeding along. “Stop making those tense little sounds,” she said.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were subvocalizing.”

“How will I be controlling it?”

“It’s not a Wheelie. Nor a peri,” she said, doing something that caused the circular feed to fold seamlessly around his head, a full 360 of vision.

He stood alone, as if he were the thing itself, upright on the metrically gridded plane. “Neural cut-out’s in effect,” she said. “Raise your right arm. It will do the same, but your right arm won’t actually move.”

He did. “Like a peri.”

“It can’t emulate the movements of a human body as accurately, given its form. It somewhat approximates them, within available ranges. What you’re going to be doing now, for the most part, is internalizing those ranges. Advance your right foot.”

He did.

“Your left.”

He did, seeing the perspective change slightly.

“That’s with your wheels retracted,” she said. “Now repeat, indefinitely, as we learn to walk. Toward the horizon.”

“Will it all be this tedious?”

“Jumping at speed is quite euphoric, with a little practice, but first you must learn to walk.”

“How far?”

“Until you don’t have to think about it.”

He got on his way then, toward the horizon that seemed to grow no closer, meter by square yellow meter.

Joe-Eddy woke her with a stoneware mug of coffee, the product of one or another single-cup device sharing a crowded shelf in his kitchen cabinet. He was wearing the orange plaid shirt-jacket. At least it fit him.

“McWolven time,” he said, putting the mug down on the café chair, beside the Tulpagenics glasses and the headset. He returned to the kitchen.

She vacated what he called her larva costume and occupied the bathroom, where her bag now hung, unfolded, on the back of the door. When she was finished there, and trusting in Eunice’s glitch this time, dressed, she went back to the living room and put on the glasses and the headset.

“We have a Tulpagenics employee on Wolven’s webcam,” Eunice said, showing Verity a thumbnail of a pink-haired girl. “Reading her as coincidental. She’s a receptionist, wasn’t there when you went in to see Gavin. She’s with her sister and three Facebook friends. They all fit my local face-mapping.”

“The Uber outfit isn’t represented?” Verity asked.

“What Uber outfit?” asked Joe-Eddy, coming back along the hallway in the white Korean AR goggles, flip-flops now replaced with age-inappropriate fluorescent sneakers.

“Followrs,” said Eunice, Verity guessing she was showing him something.

He stood, reading empty air. “Been hoping that whole story was The Onion ,” he said.

“I’ve taken care of them,” Eunice said, “for this morning, anyway. Gavin had a dozen headed for the Mission earlier, so I downloaded the app and paid for each of them to be followed by two more, and each of those by two more, till I’d used up all the Followrs in SF and they were pulling people in from Oakland.”

“Nice,” said Joe-Eddy, admiringly.

“Can they tell it was you?” Verity asked.

“Gavin’s going to have his suspicions,” Joe-Eddy said.

“You know him?” Verity asked.

“No, but Eunice, last night, or one of her new parts, left some files for me.”

“I don’t get this ‘new parts’ part,” Verity said.

“Say somebody wrote a self-replicating platform,” he said, “then loaded Eunice, whatever we mean by that, as core entity. The platform spawns subagents as it encounters situations that might benefit from attention. They then provide that attention. Recruiting me in Frankfurt, say, or compiling a dossier on Gavin. Then they report back, show their work, and get subsumed into her Borg.”

“I told her that,” Eunice said.

“He makes it easier to understand,” Verity said.

“There’s a school of scenario-spinning,” Joe-Eddy continued, “that sees the most intense AI change drivers as machine-human hybrids. Radical augmentations of human consciousness, not code trying to behave like it. So here’s Eunice, and that’s how she self-describes, experientially. Scenario fits, wear it till you need a new one.”