Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence,” she said, her pallor blending perfectly with the wall. Her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth, beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure. “We tend to assume their drive to upload to have been about preservation of the individual consciousness of those who could afford it, but the military had a more meritocratic goal. They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets. Not personality but expertise.”

He nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing.

“There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas, CCAs, where criminal organizations or extremists exerted greater control over the territory than any government. Our laminar agent, in the stub, was based on someone with that sort of expertise.”

“Laminar?”

“A term of art, though we’ve been able to learn almost nothing about it. Competitive control areas were complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators. Hence a project to replace such operators with autonomous AI, piped directly into the goggles of local recruits. Black boxes, stand-alone, in backpacks, to run special ops. Recruiting assets, arranging assassinations…”

“Were they effective?”

“We don’t know. Our agent, for all the apparent sophistication of her platform, seems to be an early prototype.”

“Did we have this project here?”

“We’ve found no record.”

“You communicate with it?”

“Her. Given the technological asymmetry, she’s been rather like an operative whose handlers are recurrent figures in a dream.”

“Poetically put,” he said.

“Quoth Lowbeer.” Behind her, a black herd of horns galloped past, deep in the perspective of a landscape imagined on a seamless scrim of her own skin. “Are you enjoying parenthood?”

“Yes,” said Netherton, “I am.” Had something been done to her lips? he wondered. They seemed fuller.

Now the furtive head of a carnivore surfaced alertly, on the savannah of cloned skin, then dropped out of sight. “I would never have imagined you a parent,” she said.

“It affects my professional availability, of course,” he said, “which you should keep in mind with regard to this new stub. Rainey and I take our responsibilities very seriously. She’s getting back into things, workwise, so I’ll be doing more solo parenting.”

“What sort of work?”

“Public relations. A Toronto firm. Specialists in crisis management.”

“When it comes to crisis management, Wilf, in the matter of this particular stub, nothing can be scheduled to your convenience. You’ll be constantly on call, as am I. Eunice is depending on us, though she doesn’t know it yet.”

“Eunice?”

“Joyous victory.”

“Pardon me?”

“The meaning of her name. She’s an intermittently hierarchical array, complexly conterminous. Or that’s my best bet, currently.”

He blinked. “Has she peripherals?”

“She’s in process of acquiring several small aerial drones. Military grade, by the standard of her day. And the shop that fabricated them has recently completed a functional replica of a bipedal combat-reconnaissance platform.”

“And you simply found her?”

“Nothing simple about it. I found her in the hands of entrepreneurs, corrupt former government employees, who had obtained her irregularly. They supposed that repurposing her for civilian markets could be profitable, but hadn’t gotten on with it. We nudged them. More recently, we nudged them into hiring someone to work with her, whom we suggested would have an advantageous effect. That’s going rather well.”

“How so?”

“She isn’t letting them monitor her interaction with their new employee.” Wings passed silently behind her, across the wall. “Exactly the sort of independence we’re looking for. They’re impressed too, but now they’ve enough of an idea of her potential degree of agency that we fear time may be short.”

Rainey’s sigil pulsed. “Sorry,” he said to Ash, “phone.” He turned his head. “Yes?”

“Coming home for dinner?” Rainey asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Dalston. Business. Visiting Ash.”

“Lucky you,” Rainey said. Her sigil dimmed.

“Rainey,” he said to Ash, turning back to her. “Sends you her best.”

Verity’s phone woke her, its ring silenced, vibrating on the floor. Freeing an arm from the mummy-bag liner, zipped to just above her chin, she groped beneath the couch.

Eunice had screened Inception for her, the night before, with pauses to reference the infographic she’d mentioned. Something about this had changed her attitude to Eunice, she’d realized as she was falling asleep, though she didn’t know exactly what or why. Returning her to Gavin had seemed the wisest option, but then something about her earnestly nerdy exposition of the film had been the start of a growing empathy. Somehow rooted, she thought now, in a sense of someone afflicted with extremely busy but only intermittently connected suburbs of the self.

“Breakfast,” Eunice said, as Verity got the phone to her ear, “Wolven Plus Loaves.”

“That’s not a plus,” Verity said, “it’s an ‘and.’”

“Says plus.”

“The plus sign is a hipster ampersand.”

“Breakfast rush about over, but they’ve still got the Egg McWolven. You eat, I’ll brief you.”

The sack of hundreds, she remembered now, was in the bedroom closet, Eunice having insisted it not be left out on the workbench. She extricated herself from the liner, folded it, then slid her toes under the thongs of Joe-Eddy’s flip-flops.

In the kitchen, she ran tap water through the Pikachu-shaped filtration unit on the faucet, half-filled a clean glass, and drank.

In the bathroom, still feeling half asleep, she used the toilet, washed her hands and face, brushed her teeth, then went to the bedroom for clean underwear, jeans, a fresh t-shirt, sneakers. Assuming it would be chilly out, she added a burnt-orange plaid Japanese wool shirt-jacket of Joe-Eddy’s, from the denim otaku shop and a good two sizes too large.

Back in the living room, she disconnected the glasses from their charger and put them on. The cursor appeared, Eunice looking at the headset, which was on its own charger.

Hey.

Taking the headset off the charger, Verity settled the bud in her ear.

“We need to get you down there,” Eunice said.

“Why?”

“Because we need the Franklins there. In that Dyneema tote you put them in, last night.”

“Dyneema?”

“Stuff it’s made of. The tote.”

“Why?”

“Somebody wanted to make a stylin’ tote.”

“The money.”

“It’ll be picked up. Better there than here.”

Verity wasn’t sure what she’d have done with the money, if she’d decided to return Eunice to Tulpagenics, which she no longer felt inclined to do. Having someone take it away didn’t seem that bad an option, so she went back into the bedroom, to the closet, for the black tote. Dyneema appeared to be a sort of upscale Tyvek.

Deciding not to bother covering the headset, she went downstairs, out, and into Wolven + Loaves, two doors to the right. Exposed brick and smokily lacquered steel, patisserie-fragrant. At the counter, she asked for a brew coffee and the McWolven, a mutant savory muffin, its core a soft-boiled egg, mysteriously absent its shell. After she’d paid, she watched the boy behind the counter tong hers onto a white china plate. He put the plate on a Soviet-looking plastic tray, in a shade of gray akin to her Tulpagenics frames, then added her mug of coffee, plus tableware rolled in a paper napkin.