William Gibson: The Peripheral

The parafoil released her, instantly shrinking, to land on four unlikely legs, but only for a second or two. Then it lay there, bilobed again, logo uppermost. It would never have fallen logo-down, he knew. Another money shot. The feed from the micro closed.

On the two feeds from the cams above the square, from their opposing angles, Daedra spent momentum, running, keeping impressively upright, into the circle of small figures.

The boss patcher shifted his feet, turning. His eyes, set on the corners of his vast, entirely inhuman head, looked like something a child had scribbled, then erased.

“This is it,” said Rainey.

Daedra raised her right hand in what might either have been a gesture of greeting, or evidence that she came unarmed.

Her left, Netherton saw, was beginning to unzip the jumpsuit. The zipper jammed, a palm’s width beneath her sternum.

“Bitch,” said Rainey, almost cheerfully, as a micro-expression, curdled fury, crossed Daedra’s face.

The boss patcher’s left hand, like a piece of sporting equipment fashioned from salt-stained gray leather, closed around her right wrist. He lifted her, her carefully scuffed shoes parting with the translucent pavement. She kicked him, hard, in his slack stomach, just above the ragged plastic tutu, salt jumping from the point of impact.

He drew her closer, so that she dangled above the horn-tipped pseudo-phallus. Her left hand touched his side then, just below the ribs. Her fingers were curled, but loosely, her thumb against gray flesh.

He shivered, for an instant. Swayed.

She raised both feet, planted them against his stomach, and pushed. As her fist came away, it looked as though she were extracting a length of scarlet measuring tape. A thumbnail. As long, when it fully emerged, as her forearm. His blood very bright, against a world of gray.

He released her. She landed on her back, instantly rolling, the nail shorter by half. He opened his vast maw, in which Netherton saw only darkness, and toppled forward.

Daedra was already on her feet, turning slowly, each of her thumbnails concave and slightly curving, the left slick with the patcher’s blood.

“Hypersonic,” said an unfamiliar voice on Rainey’s feed, ungendered, utterly serene. “Incoming. Deceleration. Shockwave.”

He’d never heard thunder here, before.

Six spotless, white, upright cylinders, perfectly evenly spaced, had appeared above and slightly outside the circle of patchers, all of whom had dropped their bikes and scooters and taken a first step toward Daedra. A vertical line of tiny orange needles danced up and down each one, as the patchers, in some way Netherton was unable to grasp, were shredded, flung. The oculi of Lorenzo’s feeds froze: on one the perfect, impossible, utterly black silhouette of a severed hand, almost filling the frame.

“We are so fucked,” said Rainey, her amazement total, childlike.

Netherton, seeing the Michikoid, on the deck of the moby, sprout multiple spider-eyes and muzzle-slits, in the instant before it vaulted the railing, could only agree.

London.

She’d turned the LEDs down, finding that made it easier to spot the bugs. She left them that way now. She’d been hoping to get the ride down the side of the building, back to the van, because she’d be off duty then, free to look at things, but they’d just bumped her straight out.

Unbent her phone, cracked her knuckles, then sat in tacky twilight, image-searching cities. Hadn’t taken long. Curve in the river, texture of the older, lower buildings, contrast between that and the tall ones. Real London didn’t have as many tall ones, and in real London tall ones were more clustered together, came in more shapes and sizes. Game London, they were megastacks, evenly spaced but further apart, like on a grid. Their own grid, she knew, London never having had one.

She wondered where to leave the paper with the log-in. Decided on the tomahawk case. As she was putting it back under the table, her phone rang. Leon. “Where is he?” she asked.

“Homes,” he said, “protective custody.”

“Arrested?”

“No. Locked up.”

“What did he do?”

“Acted out. Homes were all grinning and shit, after. They’d liked it. Gave him a Chinese tailor-made cigarette.”

“He doesn’t smoke.”

“He can swap it for something.”

“Took his phone?”

“Homes take everybody’s phone.”

Looked at hers. Macon had only just printed it for her the week before. She hoped he’d gotten everything right, now Homeland computers would be looking at it. “They say how long he’ll be in for?”

“Never do,” said Leon. “Make more sense if it’s till Luke’s gone.”

“How’s that looking?”

“’Bout the same as when we got here.”

“What happened?”

“Big old boy, holding up one end of a God-hates-everything sign. Burton says tell you same time, same place. What you’re doing for him. Till he’s back. Says an extra five for every other one.”

“Tell him they’re all an extra five. What they’d be paying him.”

“You make me glad I don’t have a sister.”

“You got a cousin, dickbag.”

“No shit.”

“Keep track of Burton, Leon.”

“’Kay.”

She checked Shaylene on Badger. Still there, still ringing purple. She’d ride over there. Maybe see Macon, ask him about Burton’s phone, and hers.

The place was a drinking closet for tourists, Netherton supposed, a walled-in 1830s archway in a corner of the lower level of Covent Garden, staffed by a lone Michikoid he kept expecting to erupt in targeting devices. There was a full-sized, vigorously authentic-looking pub sign, depicting what he took to be maenads, a number of them, mounted above a bar long enough for four stools, and the curtained snug where he now sat, awaiting Rainey. He’d never seen another customer in the place, which was why he’d suggested it.

The curtain, thick burgundy velour, moved. A child’s eye appeared, hazel, under pale bangs. “Rainey?” he asked, though certain it was her.

“Sorry,” the child said, slipping in. “They didn’t have anything in adult. Something popular at the opera tonight, so everything in the neighborhood’s taken.”

He imagined her now, stretched on a couch in her elongated Toronto apartment, a bridge across an avenue, diagonally connecting two older towers. She’d be wearing a headband, to trick her nervous system into believing the rented peripheral’s movements were hers in a dream.

“I’m right off Michikoids,” she said, looking ten, perhaps younger, and in the way of many such rentals, like no one in particular. “Watched the one from the moby, while it was guarding Daedra. Nasty. Move like spiders, when they need to.” She took the chair opposite his, regarded him glumly.

“Where is she?”

“No telling. Her government sent in some kind of aircraft, but of course they blanked the extraction. Ordered the moby away.”

“But you could still watch?”

“Not the extraction, but everything else. Big guy down on his face, the rest of them sliced and diced. No more of them turned up, so no more casualties. Good for us, in theory, assuming the project in any way continues.”

“Would your friend care for something, sir?” the Michikoid asked, from beyond the curtain.

“No,” he said, as there was no point in putting good liquor into a peripheral. Not that this place had any.

“He’s my uncle,” she said, loudly, “really.”

“You suggested we meet this way,” Netherton reminded her. He took a sip of their least expensive whiskey, identical to their most expensive, which he’d sampled while waiting for her.