William Gibson - The Peripheral

It was breathing.

Sweat broke from her hairline, in the hot dark of the trailer. She wiped it with the back of her forearm, but some ran into her eyes, stung.

She nudged the copter closer. Saw the thing bulge, then flatten.

She had only a vague idea of what she was flying. A quadcopter, but were the four rotors caged, or exposed? If she’d seen herself reflected in a window, she’d know, but she hadn’t. She wanted to get closer, see if she could trigger an image, the way proximity had done when she’d dropped on that bug. But if her rotors were exposed, and she touched the thing with one, she’d go down.

It swelled again, along a central vertical line, paler than the rest.

Below her, they were at the railing, the woman’s hands on the rod along the top, the man behind her, close, maybe holding her waist.

It flattened. She nudged herself a little closer.

It opened, narrowly, along that vertical line, paler edges curling slightly back, and something small arced out, vanishing. Something scored the forward-cam then, a fuzzy gray comma. Again. Like a gnat with a microscopic chainsaw, or a diamond scribe. Three, four more scratches, insect-quick, flicking like a scorpion’s tail. Trying to blind her.

She pulled herself back, fast, then up, whatever it was still slashing at her forward-cam. Found the pull-down and dead-dropped, tumbling three floors before she let the gyros catch and cup her.

It seemed to be gone. Cam damaged but still functional.

Fast, left.

Up, fast. Passing fifty-six, with the cam on her right she saw him take the woman’s hands, place them over her eyes. From fifty-seven, she saw him kiss her ear, say something. Surprise, she imagined him saying, as she saw him step back, turn.

“No,” she said, as the thing split open. A blur, around the slit. More of them. He glanced up, found it there. Expecting it. Never paused, never looked back. He was about to step back inside.

She went for his head.

She was half up out of the chair, as he saw the copter, ducked, catching himself on his hands.

He must have made a sound then, the woman turning, lowering her hands, opening her mouth. Something flew into her mouth. She froze. Like seeing Burton glitched by the haptics.

He came up off his hands, a track star off blocks. Through the opening, the door in the window, which simply vanished as soon as he was inside, became a smooth sheet of glass, then polarized.

The woman never moved, as something tiny punched out through her cheek, leaving a bead of blood, her mouth still open, more of them darting in, almost invisible, streaming over from the pale-edged slit. Her forehead caved in, like stop-motion of Leon’s pumpkin of the president, on top of the compost in her mother’s bin, over days, weeks. As the brushed-steel railing lowered, behind her, on the soap-bubble stuff that was no longer glass. Without it to stop her, the woman toppled backward, limbs at angles that made no sense. Flynne went after her.

She was never able to remember any more blood, just the tumbling form in its black t-shirt and striped pants, less a body every inch it fell, so that by the time they passed the thirty-seventh, where she’d first noticed the thing, there were only two fluttering rags, one striped, one black.

She pulled up before the twentieth, remembering the voices. Hung there in the gyros’ slack, full of sorrow and disgust.

“Just a game,” she said, in the trailer’s hot dark, her cheeks slick with tears.

She took it back up, then, feeling blank, miserable. Watching dark bronze sweep past, not bothering to try to see the city. Fuck it. Just fuck it.

When she got to fifty-six, the window was gone, the balcony folded back up over it. The bugs were back, though, the transparent bubbles on their business ends facing where the window had been. She didn’t bother shooing them.

“That’s why we can’t have anything nice,” she heard herself say, in the trailer.

Fifteen minutes,” said Lev, scrambling eggs on the kitchen’s vast French stove, bigger than either of the ATVs slung from davits on the stern of his grandfather’s Mercedes. “Most of that is reading their terms-of-service agreement. They’re in Putney.”

Netherton at the table, exactly where he’d been earlier. The windows looking onto the garden were dark. “You can’t be serious,” he said.

“Anton had it done.”

The scarier of Lev’s two older brothers. “Good for him.”

“He had no choice,” Lev said. “Our father organized the intervention.”

“Never thought of Anton as having a drinking problem,” Netherton said, as if this were something he was quite accustomed to being objective about. He was watching two Lego pieces, one red, one yellow, as they morphed into two small spheres, between the Starck pepper grinder and a bowl of oranges.

“He no longer does.” Lev transferred scrambled eggs, flecked with chives, to two white plates, each with its half of a broiled tomato, which had been warming on the stovetop. “It wasn’t only for drinking. He had an anger management problem. Aggravated by the disinhibition.”

“But haven’t I seen him drinking,” Netherton asked, “here, and recently?” He was fairly certain that he had, in spite of having a firm policy of flight if either brother appeared. Fully spherical now, the two Legos began to roll slowly toward him, across worn pine.

“Of course,” said Lev, adjusting the presentation of the eggs with a clean steel spatula. “We’re not in the dark ages. But never to excess. Never to the point of intoxication. The laminates see to that. They metabolize it differently. Between that and the cognitive therapy module, he’s doing very well.” He came to the table, a white plate in either hand. “Ash’s Medici says you’re not doing well, Wilf. Not at all.” He put one plate in front of Netherton, the other opposite, and took a seat.

“Dominika,” Netherton said, reflexively trying to change the subject. “She’s not joining us?” The two Legos had stopped moving. Still spherical, side by side, they were directly in front of his plate.

“My father would have disowned Anton, if he’d refused treatment,” Lev said, ignoring the question. “He made that absolutely clear.”

“Gordon wants in,” Netherton said, having just noticed the thylacine at the glass door, darkness behind it.

“Tyenna,” corrected Lev, glancing at the animal. “She’s not allowed in the kitchen when we’re eating.”

Netherton quickly flicked the red Lego off the table. He heard it click against something, roll. “Hyena?”

“Medici doesn’t like the look of your liver.”

“Eggs look wonderful-”

“Laminates,” Lev said, evenly, looking Netherton in the eye, the heavy black frames of his glasses accentuating his seriousness, “and a cognitive therapy module. Otherwise, I’m afraid this will have to be your last visit.”

Fucking Dominika. This was about her. Had to be. Lev had never been like this. The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence.

Lev looked up, then, and to the side. “Excuse me,” he said, to Wilf. “I have to take this. Yes?” He gestured at Netherton’s eggs: eat. He asked something, briefly, in Russian.

Netherton unrolled his knife and fork from the cool heavy napkin. He would eat the eggs and tomato in exactly the way a healthy, relaxed, responsible individual would eat them. He had never felt less like eating eggs, or broiled tomato.

Lev was frowning now. He spoke again in Russian. At the end of it, “Aelita.” Had he really said her name, or only something in Russian that had sounded like it? Then a question, also in Russian, which, yes, definitely culminated in her name. “Yes,” he said, “it is. Very.” His hand came up, to scratch the skin just above his left nostril with the nail of his index finger, something Netherton knew he did when he was concentrating. Another question in Russian. Netherton dutifully tried the eggs. Tasteless. The thylacine was gone now. You almost never saw them leaving.