Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“Certainly is,” the woman said.

“Show Verity where it is. And have the stylist find something for her.”

“Will do,” the woman said, and soon Verity was in the Airstream’s coffin-narrow matte-white shower, sluicing off bug parts and road dust, whether imagined or not. Very hot, the pressure steady through a complicated showerhead. When she’d rinsed her hair, she turned off the water, stepped out, and put the gray robe back on. After toweling her hair and face, she retrieved the glasses and put them on.

A feed opened.

Panoramic, the POV speeding across a rocky khaki plain, under intensely blue sky. Whitish tire tracks stretched ahead, the image juddering with the movement of the unseen vehicle. Distant mountains, darker than the plain. Black husks she guessed were burnt tires, like big three-dimensional commas.

“Eunice?” Something exploded, silently, ahead and to the left, whiting out a windshield she hadn’t known was there. The feed closed. “What was that?”

Her. Navy Chief Marlene Miller.

“Marlene?”

Miller. I’m built on her skill set.

“You’re… her?”

I’m me. Her personality, near as I can tell, wasn’t that much like mine. They were trying to upload her military skill set, not her persona. She enlisted in 2000, did two Bahrain deployments, four in Iraq, three in Afghanistan. SEAL teams did shorter deployments then, a few months at a time. UNISS project got going in 2015. She volunteered for that between Iraq, which was where she saw Inception , and Afghan deployment. Her favorite movie, so that was where I got that from. It’s in the transcription of an interview she did for the project, at the Naval Postgraduate School.

“And you think that video’s the last thing she saw?”

Can’t prove it, but she died near Marjah. Afghanistan. An IED. Those mountains are near Marjah. I got a video match for them.

“How long have you known?”

Ash gave me the documentation. Read it all simultaneously, multitasking. Just now.

“Where did they get it?”

Conner’s stub.

“How do you feel?”

A pause.

Lots.

A single light rap on the door. “Verity?” It was Carol, the assistant who’d shown her the shower. “Ready to try a few things on?”

You need something to wear.

“You okay?” Carol asked.

Get dressed. We’ll talk after.

Unwrap Conner,” Netherton heard Virgil say. Whatever had draped them was immediately pulled up and away, the display revealing a long, quite narrow room, where people stood talking. He recognized Verity’s facially pierced motorcyclist, but no one else aside from Virgil, who stood in front of the drone, staring down at it. “That rifle has to go,” Virgil said. “It’s probably unregistered, may be stolen.”

Conner sighed audibly, the rifle’s complicated muzzle disappearing from the upper half of the feed. Now the gun appeared in the lower half. Conner removed its magazine, as Netherton had learned to call it in the county. He placed this on a nearby ledge, then did something with the gun’s mechanism, producing a single unfired round, which he stood on end beside the magazine. “Shooter wore gloves. Don’t get anyone’s prints on it.”

“Bring gloves,” Virgil said to his manual phone. “Something we need off the premises.”

Now Stets and Caitlin entered, the door opened for them by Verity’s motorcyclist. Stets wore a black blazer above black trousers loose enough for his leg brace, Caitlin a soft black suit that Netherton suspected was cashmere. Seeing them made him feel as though he were in a green room, prior to a client’s media appearance.

“Is Verity there?” Rainey asked, beside him on the couch.

He muted. “I don’t see her.”

“Where are you now?”

“Feels like the staging area for whatever this is. Is Thomas asleep?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Phone me. I’ll patch you through.” Her sigil pulsed. “It feels like a less private version of Lowbeer’s car,” he said.

“It’s a trailer,” she said, having evidently taken in the scene. “A caravan. Who are these people?”

“Aside from Virgil, Stets and Caitlin, and Verity’s friend with the jewelry, I’ve no idea. People working on the event, I suppose.”

“Can they hear me?” Rainey asked.

“They can now,” Netherton said, unmuting her.

Conner had positioned the drone, with its charger against the wall, near the entrance, its legs fully retracted.

“Who’s on board?” Stets asked Virgil, looking down at the drone.

“Conner piloting,” said Virgil, “and Wilf.”

“And Rainey,” Netherton said.

“Hello,” said Rainey. “I’m curious as to what it is you’re preparing for. We seem to be in the wings of something, very pre-curtain.”

“We share your curiosity,” Stets said, “but it’s just now become clearer. She’s saying hello to the world tonight. I’ll introduce her, then she’ll say whatever it is she decides to. Then we’ll join the audience and celebrate.”

“That’s it?” Netherton asked.

“She’s the first fully autonomous AI,” Stets said. “That we know of, I should say, as we weren’t previously aware of her either. She’ll be the first to announce herself, anyway, so the evening, however brief and last-minute, will be of some historic significance.”

“People, it seems to me,” Virgil said, dryly, “have tended to be fairly dubious about the idea of fully autonomous artificial intelligence.”

“Ever the skeptic,” said Stets, smiling. “We’ve thought of that ourselves, but circumstances have variously forced our hand.”

“Here’s Verity,” said Rainey. Netherton saw her emerging from the single room at the far end of the trailer. She wore black trousers, a black turtleneck, and a very simple bronze silk jacket, the dressiest thing Netherton had yet seen her in. She’d had her hair trimmed, and looked considerably fresher, he thought. He watched as she stopped to speak with her motorcyclist, by his coffee machine, who took out a pad and pencil and wrote. Then, as he turned and walked toward them, Verity knelt and crawled under a fold-down table.

The motorcyclist tore the top sheet from his pad and passed it to Stets.

Stets took it, read it, looked up. “She says she and Eunice are having a conversation, that this is their only opportunity before the event, and requests we respect their privacy.”

“Then don’t disturb them,” Caitlin said, “obviously.”

A woman in surgical gloves, whom Virgil called Carol, had arrived for Conner’s rifle. Picking it and its magazine and the lone cartridge up, with what Netherton thought of as a full-nappy expression, she exited.

“Mute,” Rainey said, quietly. He did.

“Muted,” he said.

“You’re the one person I know,” she said, “whose job is reliably weirder than mine.”

Sitting under the table had been Eunice’s idea, and the most logical solution in terms of privacy, but it made Verity expect to see her mother’s legs, or her father’s shoes. “Nobody knew you were coming back?” she asked.

“I didn’t know what the branch plants had been doing, or that I could be recompiled,” Eunice said, her voice startling Verity. “Then I just wasn’t there, except as pieces, on every branch plant. And when you aren’t there, you don’t know you’re not there.”

“No more text?”

“We might as well talk,” Eunice said. “Keeps me less preachy.”