Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“This concerns your deeper state function.”

“Which we’ve certainly touched on before. Would you like a seat?”

“I’ll stand,” Netherton said, glancing at the candlelit conversation pit, which suggested a séance. “Lev Zubov’s father’s uncle says that unnamed figures in the klept are questioning the continued need for your office.”

She glanced to one side, appearing to watch something. “He told you this in the Denisovan Embassy?”

“Were you listening?” Netherton asked, one of his core fears being that Lowbeer eavesdropped on literally everything, constantly, though she denied that ability.

“I wasn’t, no,” she said. “I was able to hear him greet you, and ask you to take a seat. Then nothing, until you asked him about not liking Cheyne Walk. The zero-connectivity bots would explain the sizable ellipsis, as well as guarantee his father’s involvement.”

“It’s to do with the stubs,” Netherton said, “exactly as I’ve feared. That you steer them away from the klept becoming as powerful in them as it is here.”

“He expects you to tell me this?”

“He insisted. But only you.”

“Once again, then,” she said, “the divide between the ambitions of conspirators and the desire, among those bringing us word of those ambitions, to preserve whatever aspect of the status quo they themselves hold dear.” The blank buff walls had become windows now, the car itself, Netherton assumed from experience, remaining cloaked. “That’s often how this sort of thing comes to my attention.”

“He warned that I might be in danger as well.”

“It’s possible, certainly,” she said, “but these conspiracies have so far always been successfully neutralized. The only novel thing about this one is my tinkering with stubs offering a fresh rationale for my removal.”

“I’ve worried about them reacting this way.”

“This is a routine if infrequent aspect of my work,” she said. “They should only react to me with terror, but need occasionally to be reminded. Who knows of this so far, that you’re aware of?”

“Lev, his father, the unnamed uncle who supposedly informed his father, myself, and you.”

“Keep it that way, please,” she said, making intensely blue eye-contact. “Don’t mention it to Rainey until it’s been resolved.”

“My mother told me about you,” Netherton said, surprising himself, “when I was a small child. Not you specifically, but a figure in a story, benevolent but frightening. She called that figure the Adjustor. Adjustor of destinies, she said, for those who threatened the stability of the klept. When I was older, I came to understand that you, or rather someone in your role, actually existed.”

She looked toward the white candle. “It was never envisioned as a solo position. There were a number of us, originally. I’m simply the last. Should the klept ever truly decide to be done with me, they need only deny me access to the technology that keeps me alive and functional.”

“Rainey guesses they can’t afford to do that, since they can’t be certain you haven’t hidden the most damaging information about them where it will pop up if they remove you.”

“You’ve married a woman of great acuity, Mr. Netherton,” Lowbeer said, turning her blue gaze back to him, from the candle.

“My mother’s story,” Netherton said, “held that everything would invariably collapse, if the klept were left to their own resources. Do you believe that?”

“But for the occasional pruning,” she said, “under the auspices of an impartial eye, yes. Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours. They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought. The results of our species’ insults to nature did much of their work for them. No brakes magically appeared then, and I don’t see them appearing now, absent someone free to act, with sufficient agency, against their worst impulses. The biosphere only survives, today, by virtue of what prosthetic assistance we can afford it. The assemblers might keep that going, were the klept to founder. But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.”

Netherton blinked, swallowed. “China, too?”

“We do still share the biosphere with China,” she said. “And trade with them, to what extent they allow.”

“You killed Vespasian, didn’t you?”

Her eyes met his. Hers, if original, were over a hundred years old. “I used to regret not having come across him sooner,” she said, “thus having had the opportunity to kill him earlier, but now I have to consider the opportunity he’s provided us, however inadvertently, in Eunice’s stub.”

Netherton heard the door open behind him, signaling the end of the meeting.

“Verity’s asleep in the hotel in San Francisco,” Lowbeer said. “When she wakes, speak with her. I’m here, should you need me.”

“You knew Lev phoned me,” Netherton said. “Did you know it was about this?”

“That it might be along these lines. The conversation tripped something the aunties had in place, that I hadn’t been aware of.”

Verity woke to men’s voices, in another room, conversational but indistinct. She opened her eyes, to less-than-emphatic sunlight at the edges of unfamiliar drapes.

“Russians,” someone said, “Facebook…” The one called Conner, who sounded southern. Then recognizing Virgil as he responded, though she couldn’t distinguish any of it.

She squinted at the bedside clock. 8:25 a.m.

Unzipping the liner, she pulled it down, emerged from the sheets, and noticed the white bathrobe crumpled on the foot of the bed. Putting it on, she went to the door.

“—get how super fucked it all sounds to you,” she heard Conner say, “but that’s how it went down.”

“How what went down?” she asked, opening the door.

Virgil looked up from where he sat, stocking feet up on the couch. “Conner’s scaring the shit out of me,” he said, mildly, and smiled.

“Wait’ll I tell you the arc over the rest of the season,” Conner said, from the drone’s speaker. It stood facing the window, drapes open on gray morning.

“Any coffee?” she asked.

“Here,” Virgil said, indicating a tray on the lilac hassock. “Fresh croissants.”

“Save me some.” Closing the door and going into the bathroom, she discovered further evidence that she’d managed to shower before getting into bed. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, put on jeans, a clean t-shirt, sneakers, and went to the other room.

“You sleep?” she asked Virgil, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the carafe on the tray.

“Couple hours,” he said. “Conner spelled me. You?”

“Woke that one time, slept after that.”

“2136?” he asked.

“What about it?” She tried a sip of black coffee.

“You think that’s really the year, there?”

She added milk and sugar. “Maybe.” She looked up at him. “Does that make me crazy?” She sat on the edge of the hassock, beside the tray.

“I’m crazy too,” Virgil said, “but I’ve been up half the night, with Conner. Where you went, according to him, used to be the future of where he is. They still have a common past, but it forked a few years ago. And they both share a past with us, up until something that happened here, prior to the 2016 election, but he doesn’t know what.”

She looked up from the freshly torn croissant she was spreading with jam. “I don’t think I can even grasp that, forget entertaining it.”