Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“So if they smuggled you in pieces out of wherever Cursion had you, where did they take you?”

“Server farms, at companies the Manzilian bought with money I helped Sevrin make.”

“Where are they?”

“Not just Brazil. My ass is distributed. Multinational. Seriously untethered noetics.”

“But the branch plants knew you wanted to do this, so they started getting Stets and Caitlin to put it together?”

“They aren’t like that. They have a kind of flocking potential, like swallows. But I don’t think anybody really knows how this all works yet. Ainsley thinks it’s a by-product of the original project having tried to do something else. Or like a mutation.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“We’ve been talking, Ainsley and me. We have similar warfighting theories, similar experience. She’s using that experience in stubs she finds. People who started them got bored with it, like kids and aquariums. Ours is one, Conner’s is another. We’re wondering whether working covertly is necessarily optimal for me, here. Not that I’d want to give it up entirely.”

“You want to go public, but as rogue military AI?”

“Kinda sorta, but I wouldn’t want you doing my PR.”

“How does Stets fit in?”

“It’s not business. That’s crucial. He’s spending a lot of money, tonight, helping me to introduce myself to what he’s taken to calling heritage humans, but the closest thing we have to a deal is that I’ve promised never to repay him.”

“Like he’s doing it to see what happens next,” Verity said, “and how things are connected, but somehow you know it’s not just idle curiosity?”

“You’ve got his number, as far as I can tell. Caitlin’s like that too. They’re a lot alike.”

“Okay,” she said, “can we talk about the woman you say you’re based on?”

“Marlene. I’m not much like her, personally. I’m another by-product. In Lowbeer’s time line, AI at my level didn’t emerge till later. Whatever the UNISS project developed didn’t surface, there. But she says hybridization with human consciousness was an unanticipated result of attempting to reproduce advanced skill sets, ones involving modeling human emotions. I couldn’t do what I was originally built for without lots of that.”

“You feel like you have emotions, to me.”

“Where’s the line between modeling them and having them, though? But I know I can’t just make them go away.”

Verity looked out at legs. More of them now. From down here, it looked like a casual occasion for drinks. With Grim Tim’s tuxedo pants over scuffed engineer boots, like a waiter, back and forth from his machine, taking people coffee. “What are you going to do tonight?”

“Introduce myself. Won’t be getting too autobiographically specific, though. Then I’ll give ’em the URL of a website we got up today.”

“How many people, here?”

“A little over a hundred. There’s room for more but it’s about the bylaw budget.”

“You livestreaming it?”

“In the top thirty languages, by number of speakers. Then up on the site and YouTube.”

“Not that I’m not interested, but I keep remembering the world’s supposed to be almost ending. Any news on that?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s looking all better,” Eunice said, “but in the past couple of hours it seems to have started looking a little better.”

Verity considered. “That you? Doing something?”

“Nope. That’s the president. Plus, as our London pals remind me, the United States having a fully functioning State Department. We did check her work, though. Close to perfect, except for one little thing, something she did for the right reasons but then couldn’t see why it hadn’t worked.”

“You did something.”

“Say she’s gotten to see why it didn’t work. But if it comes together now, the way we hope it will, that’s her victory, ’cause she did all the rest of it right. If she hadn’t, we couldn’t have done shit anyway. And like I said, it’s still pretty crisis-y. Like your hair.”

“Crisis-y?”

“No, I like it.”

“How can you see it?”

“Conner’s got a cam on you, from across the room.”

Verity looked for the drone, finding it beyond the crowd of legs, which had started to thin.

“Call your mom lately?” Eunice asked.

“No,” Verity said, checking the time on the phone Virgil had given her, “but it’s 11:30 here and she’s in Michigan.”

“She’s posting pugs on Pinterest again. That phone in your hand would do. Cursion can’t trace it. Assume they’ll be recording, though.”

“You going?”

“Have to firm up some decisions. Talk after I go on?”

“You okay?”

“Butterflies.”

“Seriously?”

“Call your mom.”

Verity dialed her mother’s number, getting it right on the second try.

Qamishli?” Rainey asked, from the kitchen, having tired of the feed from the drone.

Netherton muted. “Haven’t heard anything,” he said, “but here’s Verity, out from under the table, headed our way.”

“Give her my best.”

“I will.”

“Looking good,” Conner said, as Verity arrived.

“Not healthgoth, anyway,” she said. “I’ve seen fashion spreads of what she wears to show new projects.”

“Rainey sends her best,” Netherton said.

“Not in there with you?”

“Not currently. She’s anxious for news of Qamishli.”

“Eunice just told me it’s better, but nothing like all better.”

He quickly muted. “She says it’s slightly better, but I have to get back.”

“Thanks!” Rainey said.

He unmuted.

“Give her mine, then,” Verity said. “Virgil, is there a schedule for this?”

“An order, but not a schedule,” Virgil said. “But that’s three items, not counting what comes after them, and they’re all probably very brief. Then we either meet and greet the audience here or get hauled off and booked. We seem to be close to go, though. Caitlin just got her drone display up, outside, and they can’t stay out there indefinitely. Stets is ready. You get caught up with Eunice?”

Ash’s sigil pulsed. As Verity began to speak, Netherton muted the drone’s audio input.

“We have Kevin Pryor in the building,” Ash said, “Cursion’s top operative.”

“Where is he?” Netherton asked.

“Thirty-fourth floor, at the moment,” she said. “We won’t know how he got there until we can go over the security footage. And perhaps not then, because he seems quite good at this sort of thing. He’s resting, it seems, or more likely biding his time. He shouldn’t be able to reach us on the fifty-second, according to the blueprints, but Stets’ property includes part of the fifty-first, infrastructure space, in which the former owner constructed an illicit back door. We assume he’s aware of that. Conner will be taking the drone down. I recommend you have a break from the drone now.”

“Why?”

“To avoid the trauma of witnessing someone being killed by a bipedal combat drone.”

“No,” Netherton said, surprising himself.

“No?” Ash sounding at least as surprised.

“I can’t just sit on the couch and imagine it all. I have to be there tonight. Will we miss Eunice speaking?”

“Depends on Conner, I suppose. Or for that matter on Pryor. But it’s your decision.”

“I’ll stay.”

“Very well.”

Her sigil gone, he unmuted the drone’s audio.

“—a little fireworks,” Virgil was saying, “digital ones. Minimalist. Visually very quiet. A lot of our bylaw budget’s going for that, because we’re doing it with drones, lots of them, no permission. Then, depending on SFPD’s mood, Stets’ lawyers, and what connections Cursion might have, we’ll see.”