William Gibson - The Peripheral

Gaming having taught her to pay attention to anything that didn’t fit, she tried to get a quick second look, down-cam, at the backpack. Couldn’t find it.

It overtook and passed her as she reached the thirty-seventh floor. Moving that way, it no longer reminded her of a backpack, but of the black egg case of an almost-extinct animal called a skate, that she’d seen on a beach in South Carolina, an alien-looking rectangle with a single twisted horn at each corner. Tumbling straight up the building now, in a smooth sequence of sticky-footed somersaults. Caught itself with the two tips of whichever pair of horns, or legs, was leading, flipped over, then propelled itself higher with the pair it had just used to grip the surface.

Following it up-cam, she tried to rise more quickly, but that still wasn’t under her control. Lost sight of it again. Maybe there had been a way for it to enter the building. She’d watched Macon print little pneumatic bots, like big leeches, that moved something like that, but slower.

Her mother called the skate case a mermaid’s purse, but Burton said the local people had called them devil’s handbags. It had looked like it ought to be dangerous, poisonous, but it wasn’t.

Kept an eye out for the thing, the rest of the way up to the fifty-sixth floor, where she found the same balcony folded down but the window frosted, disappointing. Guessed she’d missed the party, but maybe she could get an idea how it had gone. Bugs didn’t seem to be around. Whatever had kept the ride up like an elevator was gone now. She ran a quick perimeter check, hoping for another window, but nothing had changed. No bugs, either.

Back to the frosted glass. Gave it five minutes there, five more, then ran another perimeter. On the far side, a grate she hadn’t noticed before was steaming.

Starting to miss the bugs.

Down-camera, a very large vehicle with a single headlight went by, fast.

She’d just gotten around to the window again when it depolarized, and there was the woman, saying something to someone she couldn’t see.

Flynne stopped, let the gyros hold her there.

No sign there had ever even been a party. Room didn’t look the same at all, like the little bots had been moving serious furniture. The long table was gone. Now there were armchairs, a couch, rugs, softer lighting.

The woman wore striped pajama bottoms and a black t-shirt. Flynne guessed she’d only recently gotten out of bed, because she had the bedhead you could have with hair that good.

Check for bugs, she reminded herself, but they still weren’t there.

The woman laughed, as if the person Flynne couldn’t see had said something. Had that been her ass against the window, the time before? Was she talking to the man who’d kissed her, or tried to? Had that worked out after all, the party great, and then they’d spent the night together?

She forced herself to do another perimeter, a slow one, watching for bugs, the runaway backpack, anything. The steam had gone, and now she couldn’t see where the grate had been. That gave her the feeling that the building was alive, maybe conscious, with the woman inside it laughing, high up in the bugless night. Thinking that, she felt close heat in the trailer, sweat trickling.

Darker now. So few lights in the city, and none at all on the big blank towers.

Coming back around, she found them standing at the window, looking out, his arm around her. Just that much taller than she was, like a model from an ad where they didn’t want to stress ethnicity, dark hair and the start of a beard to match, expression cold. The woman spoke, he answered, and the coldness Flynne had seen was gone. The woman beside him wouldn’t have seen it at all.

He wore a dark brown robe. You smile a lot, she thought.

Part of the glass in front of them was sliding sideways, and as it did, a skinny horizontal rod rose from the forward edge of the ledge, bringing up a quivering soap bubble. The rod stopped rising. Bubble became greenish glass.

She remembered the SS officer, when she’d worked for Dwight. Face of the man at the window reminded her.

She’d crouched for three days on Janice and Madison’s couch, taking her old phone when she ran to the bathroom and back, so as not to miss her chance to kill him.

Janice brought her the herbal tea Burton made her have with the wakey he’d left, white pills, built two counties over. No coffee, he said.

The SS officer was really an accountant in Florida, the man Dwight played against, and nobody had ever killed him. Dwight never fought, himself, just relayed orders from the tacticians he hired. The Florida accountant was his own tactician, and a stone killer to boot. When he won a campaign, which he usually did, Dwight lost money. That kind of gambling was illegal, and federally, but there were ways around that. Neither Dwight nor the accountant needed the money they won, or cared about what they lost, not really. Players like Flynne were paid on the basis of kills, and on how long they could survive in a given campaign.

She’d gotten to feeling that what the accountant most liked, about killing them, was that it really cost them. Not just that he was better at it than they were, but that it actually hurt them to lose. People on her squad were feeding their children with what they earned playing, and maybe that was all they had, like she was paying Pharma Jon for her mother’s prescriptions. Now he’d gone and done it again, killed everyone on her squad, one after another, taking his time, enjoying it. He was hunting her now, while she circled, alone, deeper into that French forest and the flying snow.

But then Madison called Burton, and Burton came over, sat on the couch beside her, watching her play, and told her how he saw it.

How the SS officer, convinced he was hunting her, wasn’t seeing it right. Because really, now, Burton said, she was hunting him. Or would be, as soon as she realized she was, while his failure to see it was a done deal, fully underway, growing, a wrong path. He said he’d show her how to see it, but he’d need her not to sleep. He gave Janice the white pills, drew a dosing schedule on a napkin. The accountant would sleep, in Florida, leaving his character on some very good AI, but Flynne wouldn’t.

So Janice had given her the pills according to the napkin, and Burton had kept coming around, on some schedule of his own, to sit with her and watch, and tell her how he saw it. And sometimes she felt him jerk, haptic misfire, while he was helping her find her own way of seeing it. Not to learn it, he said, because it couldn’t be taught, but to spiral in with it, each turn tighter, further into the forest, each turn closer to seeing it exactly right. Down into that one shot across the clearing she found there, where the sudden mist of airborne blood, blown with the snow, was like the term balancing an equation.

She’d been alone on the couch, then. Janice heard her scream.

Got up, walked out on their porch, puked up tea, shaking. Cried while Janice washed her face. And Dwight gave her so much money. But she never once walked point for him again, or ever saw that ragged France.

So why was this all up in her now, watching this guy with the little beard squeeze the woman beside him closer? Why, when she’d run her perimeter around the corner, did she take it up to fifty-seven and double back?

Why was she all Easy Ice now, if this wasn’t a shooter?

Ash, flesh white as paper, was pulling down the lower lid of Netherton’s left eye. Her hand quite black with tattoos, a riot of wings and horns, every bird and beast of the Anthropocene extinction, overlapping line drawings of a simple yet touching precision. He knew who she was, but not where he was.