Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“That’s the rental next door. Nonresidential. Lessee’s Vietnamese.”

“So Joe-Eddy’s probably never been up here?”

“He agile?”

“No.”

“Hang on,” Eunice said. “Over the edge.” The drone’s POV zipped toward Valencia, over the front parapet, and dove for the sidewalk below. Verity gasped. A frozen instant, inches above the concrete sidewalk, then it whipped back up, to look into Wolven + Loaves, where a young Asian man sipped something from a white mug, seated exactly where Verity had been, minutes before. Eunice face-captured him.

“Eunice, what is it you think you’re doing?”

“Always just finding out,” Eunice said, the drone shooting up, to overlook the rooftop again. “Aren’t you?”

The tardibot having seen Netherton to Ash’s door, claws clacking, he stood alone, on uneven pavement, awaiting the car Ash had summoned.

Where Ash’s road intersected the high street rose the side of a 1930s cinema. High up, on the windowless wall facing him, on a Moderne lozenge, steel-rimmed Prussian blue capitals spelt RIO. He’d taken Rainey there once, he remembered now, to a Kurosawa festival, having by then forgotten that it overlooked Ash’s weird hacienda.

The car, on arrival, proved to be a front-loading single-seater, the smallest of its three wheels in the rear. Like a solo sauna that had escaped from a day spa, Netherton thought. It opened its single door. “Good evening, Mr. Netherton,” it said, as he got in.

He gave it the address in Alfred Mews as the door closed, then phoned Rainey. “On my way,” he said, her sigil brightening as they pulled out onto the high street.

“How’s Ash?” she asked.

“She’s lost the bifocal eyes. And the tattoos. Told me she’s seeing someone.”

“Make you any less irritable around her?”

“No.”

“This was business, I take it?” Her joke.

“Lowbeer. Has a new project.”

“A stub,” she said.

“How did you know?”

“From all you say, she’s obsessed with them.”

“How’s Thomas?”

“Sleeping.” She opened a feed of his son, curled in his crib.

“I’ll be there soon.”

“Bye, then,” she said.

Thomas vanished. Rainey’s sigil dimmed.

He watched the passing shops, the few pedestrians. A couple stood talking, in the doorway of a pub.

He closed his eyes, which caused the single seat’s headrest to improve its support. When he opened them, the car was at a traffic signal, still in Hackney.

Through the windshield, at a pedestrian crossing, he saw something tripodal, perhaps three meters tall, which was also waiting, draped in a cloak of what appeared to be damp-blackened shingle.

Hackney, he thought irritably, glaring at it. Always gotten up as something it wasn’t.

Down under Joe-Eddy’s workbench, two inches above dust bunnies and a gum wrapper someone had folded as small as humanly possible, Verity was navigating the five-inch-wide canyon between the wall and an unused piece of drywall when Eunice opened the feed.

It was divided equally into six, each showing her a stranger, two of them female. “Who are they?” she asked, straightening up in the workstation chair and putting the drone into hover with the unbranded controller Eunice had downloaded to her phone.

“From something like Uber,” Eunice said, “but for following people.”

“You’re shitting me. What’s it called?”

“Followrs,” said Eunice, the spelling blipping past in Helvetica. “You really haven’t been online much this year, have you?”

“Who’re they following?” Already knowing the answer.

“You.”

Verity looked more closely. A young Latina in the lower right corner was shown at a different angle, the image in a different resolution. “Lower right, that’s in 3.7?”

“Getting that one off a cam I found there. Two more from street cams. Only have four drones, and you’re using one to dick around with under furniture.”

The girl in 3.7 seemed engrossed in her phone. “What’s she doing?”

“Candy Crush Saga. Nondigital surveillance is weaponized boredom.”

Another feed showed a white man seated behind the wheel of a car, looking straight ahead, apparently unaware of the drone in front of him. Having that forgettable a face would be a plus, she supposed, for doing this.

“Gavin put them onto you. He thinks it’s untraceable.”

Verity started backing out from behind the plasterboard. “If they’ve got somebody in 3.7,” she said, “that means they were watching us last night.”

“Somebody from Cursion was. Name’s Pryor. Found him on a couple of security cams, along the street. Facial recog’s a deep dive. Nasty. The six from Followrs are low-risk, though. The one in the car is behind on his child support, but that’s the worst of it, recordwise.” The feed blinked off.

“What do they want?” Verity asked, as the drone cleared the end of the plasterboard.

“Sight of you. Since I’m keeping Tulpagenics from being able to monitor us, Gavin’s got these guys on it.”

Verity flew the drone into the kitchen, where she was seated at the table, Pelican case open in front of her. Something took the drone over then, maybe Eunice, maybe the case. It hovered above the case, adjusted position, then descended, straight down into one of the square holes in the foam. “You found them by using the drones?” she asked Eunice.

“That and banking faces.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“You won’t like this at all,” said Eunice, “but it means you need to go and see Stetson Howell.”

“Won’t happen. Which is to say zero fucking way.”

“You need somebody they’d have a harder time messing with,” Eunice said. “He’s the best you’ve got. I did a relationship tree, shows that anybody else you know who’s got the kind of juice you need, you met through him. And none of them have anywhere near as much reason to help you.”

“I don’t ‘have’ Stets.” She resisted the urge to throw the phone across the kitchen, reminding herself it was hers, and that she was talking with Eunice over the headset and Tulpagenics’ phone.

“You don’t think he’s an asshole, either.”

Verity’s phone rang, caller unknown, making her reconsider throwing it across the room. “Hello?”

“Verity? Stets.”

“Stets,” she said, blankly.

“I have your new PA on the other line. She thinks we should meet.”

“She does?”

“Says this morning may be your only available slot for a while. Virgil will pick you up. Twenty minutes?”

Virgil Roberts, who looked, people agreed, like Janelle Monáe had a twin brother, and appeared to non-insiders to be Stets’ meta-gofer, but among other things was his resident pitch-critic. “Okay,” she said, “twenty minutes. See you.” Finger-swiping to end it. “Dammit, Eunice—”

“Best I got right now in the might-work-like-a-motherfucker department. Okay?”

“Shit,” said Verity, in what she reluctantly recognized as the relatively affirmative, and twenty minutes later was climbing into the passenger seat of an electric BMW.

“How are you?” Virgil asked, grinning, extending his right hand to give her left an upside-down squeeze.

“Complicated. Where are we going?”

“Fremont,” he said, as Eunice facially recognized him, the street name meaning nothing in particular to Verity. He pulled back into Valencia traffic.

“How are you, Virgil?” she asked.

“Working for the man. Mostly wrangling a lot of reno details, but on what I’d call a heroic scale. You working?”

“Pied-à-terre,” Eunice said, an aerial shot filling the glasses. Sunlit uppermost stories of a tower, its massive verticality penetrating a photoshopped bed of cotton-candy fog. “The fiancée’s regooding them the top two floors. Footprint’s about three tennis courts.” Then it was gone.