Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“Stetson Howell’s fiancée,” Rainey answered. “He and Verity split up a year ago. Amicably, though I doubt she’s met Caitlin before.”

“Whose idea was it, to bring me here?” Netherton heard Verity ask, the elevator ascending.

“Stets’,” the man called Virgil said, “and because I know people here, staff.”

“Why’s she here?” Verity asked him.

“She wants to be. Only reason there is, with her.”

“You say she’ll be okay,” Verity said.

“She’s a grown-up,” Virgil said. “The media attention’s something she was used to before she met him. Considering she’s the hot new flavor in global architecture, at least as far as the media are concerned, not to mention a looker, she’s easy to get along with. We all like her.”

“Who’s Virgil?” Netherton asked Rainey.

“Howell’s so-called assistant,” she said, “though he’s actually a key advisor, which is evidently how he likes it. Virgil, I mean.”

The elevator stopped, its door opening.

And then the drone was out, canted sharply back on the corset’s wheels, Virgil towing it, giving Netherton a view of passing ceiling fixtures. Along a wide pale lilac corridor, past doors painted palest daffodil.

Virgil briskly setting the pace, Netherton guessed, lest Verity change her mind.

Verity stopped Virgil with a hand on his wrist, beside a shallow alcove, its rear wall hung with a floor-to-ceiling oval of unframed mirror. A rest area, she supposed, if your idea of rest involved a ghostly acrylic occasional chair, beneath a precariously tall, worryingly anamorphic floor lamp.

She propped her bag on the phantom chair, put the charger down on it, then unzipped and removed the black hoodie, draping it across bag and chairback. Turning to the mirror, she straightened her jacket. To little effect, she thought.

“Caitlin’s casual,” Virgil says. “Has sweaters so old the elbows are out, but old-school cashmere. How they do.”

“How who do?”

“Old Franco-Irish money and shit,” he said.

She checked her makeup in the mirror. Or lack of it, she decided, what she saw being what they’d get. Then took ChapStick from her purse and used it anyway.

“I’ll carry your stuff,” he said, leaning the drone’s handle against the chair and picking up the charger. “You can make an entrance, shake hands if you need to.”

“Food in either pocket of the hoodie,” she said. “Don’t squash it. I’ll keep my bag.”

He gingerly draped the hoodie over the charger. “This for that?” he asked, indicating first the charger, then the drone.

“Yeah.”

“What is it?” he asked, meaning the drone itself.

“Those headless military robot dog-things on YouTube? It’s like that,” she said.

“Legless, though?”

“They’re retracted.”

“Keep ’em that way,” he said, reaching for its handle. She shouldered her bag and they started along the corridor.

He stopped, only a few doors along, and passed her the handle, taking his phone from a trouser pocket. Thumb to the screen. She heard a door-chain rattle.

Stets opened the door nearest them, smiling, gesturing her in. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” She pulled the drone in, surprised by its weight, Virgil behind her. Heard Stets closing and rechaining the door.

Rooms here might be either a disappointment or a relief, she knew, looking around, depending on how the lobby décor grabbed you. Lilacs and lavenders were dialed down, the furniture blond wood, the only once-edgy touch provided by acrylic bedside and coffee tables in a deep shade of burnt orange-peel. A bigger room than she’d previously seen here. Glimpsing another adjacent, a woman just entering from it. “Caitlin Bertrand,” she said, resembling, as Verity recalled a gossip site having put it, a young but brutally determined Françoise Hardy. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Verity Jane. Pleased to meet you too.”

“And this,” Stets said, behind her, “must be it.”

Turning, she saw him looking down at the drone. “Why’m I here, Stets?”

“Eunice,” he said, looking up at her.

“She’s gone.”

“She phoned me, after you left with Virgil. More detail on Singapore, at first, but it became a wider conversation.” He glanced at the drone. “Is this listening to us?”

“We are, Mr. Howell,” said Ash.

“That’s Ash,” Verity said. “At least two more in there with her.”

“My colleague, Wilf Netherton,” said Ash.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Wilf.

“And Rainey,” Ash said, “his wife.”

“She’s with the baby,” Wilf said.

“What are you?” Stets asked, as though he were asking about the weather.

“British,” said Ash.

Verity gave Virgil the drone’s handle, taking the hoodie from him. He put the charger down, on what she supposed was a minibar. She sat on the couch, sinking into lilac leather, Muji bag beside her. “Sorry,” she said, “I have to eat something. Right now.” Finding a pocket, she drew out Kathy Fang’s pizza, the napkins gone spottily translucent with grease. Unwrapping it, she took a bite.

“Would you rather have room service?” Virgil asked.

She shook her head, swallowed.

“Let her enjoy it,” Caitlin said, settling on the couch beside Verity, who was taking a second bite.

Verity pawed with her free hand through the hoodie on her lap, coming up with the napkin-wrapped mega-canapé, which she passed to Caitlin, who promptly unwrapped it, nibbled a corner, then bit off a third of it.

Stets was in front of them now, manipulating something at his knee, through the fabric of his loose gray track pants. A click. She remembered the brace. He lowered himself, facing her, onto a circular lilac hassock.

“They tell me,” Verity said to him, after swallowing the last of the pizza, “that they don’t know Eunice personally, but know people who do.”

“Are you familiar with the strategic concept of competitive control areas?” Ash asked.

“Yes,” Stets said.

“Your military has been developing a noetic agent, optimized for operating in them. If local infrastructure didn’t offer adequate connectivity, it could be delivered as a portable, self-supporting, self-actuating unit. Eunice was one result, though still very much a prototype when we discovered her. She’d already been appropriated by Cursion, who intended to spin off a civilian product offering some of her original functionality. Which spared us direct contact with your military research and development sector, where we would have been more likely to encounter people able to recognize us as anomalous.”

“AI?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes,” Ash said, “but the project meshed, early on, with efforts to upload complex human skill sets. So an AI slash upload. Hybrid.”

“When she spoke with me,” Stets said, “I gathered something like that.”

“And this is that?” Caitlin asked, eyeing the drone.

“No,” said Ash, “this is simply a drone we’re employing, for physical telepresence.”

“It evidently hasn’t been designed for retail,” Caitlin said, “which is always interesting in itself.”

“Undo the fastenings on its wheeled wearable,” Ash said.

Virgil squinted at Stets. “Assuming it can move,” he said, “are you sure we want it to?”

“Eunice’s advice,” Stets said, “and she particularly stressed this, was that I should trust whoever Verity brought us.”

“That must have been quite a call,” Virgil said, tilting his head quizzically at Stets.

“It was,” Stets said.

Virgil squinted at Stets. “So you’ll trust whoever’s in control of this thing, its capacities currently unknown, because something that convinced you it was AI told you you should?”