William Gibson: The Peripheral

The couple who’d been up against the window weren’t there. Nobody human was. Robots, little low beige things that moved almost too fast to see, were vacuuming the floor, while three almost identical robot girls were arranging food on a long table. Classic anime robot babes, white china faces almost featureless. They’d built three big flower arrangements and now they were transferring food from carts to trays on the table. When the carts came in, rolling themselves to the table, the blur of beige parted just enough to let them through. Flowed around them like mechanical water, perfectly tight right-angle turns.

She was enjoying this a lot more than Burton would have. She wanted to see the party.

There were shows where you watched people prep for weddings, funerals, the end of the world. She’d never liked any of them. But they hadn’t had robot girls, or super-fast Roombas. She’d seen videos of factory robots assembling things, almost that fast, but nothing the kids had Shaylene print out for them ever moved that way.

She dropped toward two bugs, hovered, scoping one of the robot girls without changing focus. This one was wearing a quilted vest with lots of pockets, little shiny tools sticking up in them. She was using something like a dental pick to individually arrange things, too small to see, on top of sushi. Round black eyes in the china face, wider apart than human eyes, but they hadn’t been there before.

She bent her phone a little more, to give her fingers a rest. Scattering the bugs.

The whirling beige on the floor vanished, like a light turned off, all except for one poor thing, looking like a starfish, that had to hump itself out of sight on what seemed to be wheels in the tips of its five points. Broken, she guessed.

A woman entered the room. Brunette, beautiful. Not boy-game hot. Realer. Like Flynne’s favorite AI character in Operation Northwind, the French girl, heroine of the Resistance. Simple dress, like a long t-shirt, a dark gray that went to black where her body touched it, reminding Flynne of the shadows on the window. It migrated down, of its own accord, off her left shoulder entirely, as she walked the length of the table.

Robot girls stopped what they were doing, raised their heads, all eyeless now, shallow sockets smooth as their cheekbones. The woman walked around the end of the table. Cam bugs surged.

Heard her fingers on her phone, whipping the copter side to side, up, down, back. “Fuck off,” she told them.

The woman stood at the window, looking out, left shoulder bare. Then the dress climbed smoothly back, covering her shoulder, neckline rising in a V, then rounding.

“Fuck off!” Lunging at the bugs.

Window polarized again, or whatever that was. “Fuck you,” she said to the bugs, though it probably wasn’t their fault.

Ran a quick perimeter check, in case another window might have opened and she’d miss something. Nothing. Not a single bug, either.

Back around, the bugs were already bobbing, waiting. She flew through them, making them vanish.

Tongued the cud of jerky away from her cheek and chewed. Scratched her nose.

Smelled hand sanitizer.

Went after the bugs.

The boss patcher, unless he wore some carnival helmet fashioned from keratotic skin, had no neck, the approximate features of a bullfrog, and two penises.

“Nauseating,” Netherton said, expecting no reply from Rainey.

Perhaps a little over two meters tall, with disproportionately long arms, the boss had arrived atop a transparent penny farthing, the large wheel’s hollow spokes patterned after the bones of an albatross. He wore a ragged tutu of UV-frayed sheet-plastic flotsam, through whose crumbling frills could be glimpsed what Rainey called his double dickage. The upper and smaller of the two, if in fact it was a penis, was erect, perhaps perpetually, and topped with what looked to be a party hat of rough gray horn. The other, seemingly more conventional, though supersized, depended slackly below.

“Okay,” Rainey said, “they’re all here.”

Between the oculi of the twin feeds, Lorenzo was studying Daedra in profile as she faced the five folding steps to the top of the moby’s railing. Head bowed, eyes lowered, she stood as if in prayer or meditation.

“What’s she doing?” asked Rainey.

“Visualization.”

“Of what?”

“Herself, I’d imagine.”

“You cost me a bet,” she said, “getting together with her. Someone thought you might. I said you wouldn’t.”

“It wasn’t for long.”

“Like being a little bit pregnant.”

“Briefly pregnant.”

Daedra raised her chin then, and touched, almost absently, the color-suppressed American flag patch over her right bicep.

“Money shot,” said Rainey.

Daedra took the steps, dove smoothly over the railing.

A third feed irised into place between the other two, this one from below.

“Micro. We sent in a few yesterday,” said Rainey, as Daedra’s parafoil unfurled, red and white, above the island. “The patchers let us know they knew, but nothing’s eaten any yet.”

Netherton swiped his tongue from right to left, across the roof of his mouth, blanking his phone. Saw the unmade bed.

“How does she look to you?” Rainey asked.

“Fine,” he said, getting up.

He walked to the vertically concave corner window. It depolarized. He looked down on the intersection, its wholly predictable absence of movement. Free of crusted salt, drama, atonal windsong. Across Bloomsbury Street, a meter-long mantis in shiny British racing green, with yellow decals, clung to a Queen Anne façade, performing minor maintenance. Some hobbyist was operating it telepresently, he assumed. Something better done by an invisible swarm of assemblers.

“She seriously proposed to do this naked,” Rainey said, “and covered in tattoos.”

“Hardly covered. You’ve seen the miniatures of her previous skins. That’s covered.”

“I’ve managed not to, thank you.”

He double-tapped the roof of his mouth, causing the feeds, left and right, from their respective corners of the square, to show him the boss patcher and his cohort of eleven, looking up, unmoving.

“Look at them,” he said.

“You really hate them, don’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Look at them.”

“We’re not supposed to like their looks, obviously. The cannibalism’s problematic, if those stories are true, but they did clear the water column, and for virtually no capital outlay on anyone’s part. And they now arguably own the world’s single largest chunk of recycled polymer. Which feels like a country, to me, if not yet a nation-state.”

The patchers had shuffled into a rough circle, with their scooters and kick-bikes, around their boss, who’d left his penny farthing on its side at the edge of the square. The others were as small as the boss was large, compactly disgusting cartoons of rough gray flesh. They wore layers of rags, gray with sun and salt. Modification had run rampant, of course. The more obviously female among them were six-breasted, their exposed flesh marked not with tattoos but intricately meaningless patterns expressed in pseudo-ichthyotic scaling. They all had the same bare, toeless, shoe-like feet. Their rags fluttered in the wind, nothing else in the square moving.

On the central feed, Daedra soared down, swinging out wide, up again. The parafoil was altering its width, profile.

“Here she comes,” said Rainey.

Daedra came in low, along the widest of the intersecting avenues, the parafoil morphing rhythmically now, braking, like speeded-up footage of a jellyfish. She scarcely stumbled, as her feet found the polymer, throwing up puffs of salt.