William Gibson - The Peripheral

“I don’t get that about you,” she said.

“About what?”

“How you don’t seem to like your own tech-level, but you don’t like people who opt out of it either.”

“They don’t opt out of it. They volunteer for another manifestation of it, but with heritage diseases. Which they then believe make them more authentic.”

“Nostalgic for catching colds?”

“If they could look as though they catch them, but avoid any discomfort, they would. But others, insisting on the real thing, would mock them for their inauthenticity.” The Wheelie’s tablet rotated, creaking slightly. “Everything’s blue.”

“They hung tarps, to break up the space. This blue’s Homes surplus. Cheapest stuff at Hefty is always Homes blue.”

“Homes?” he asked.

“Homeland Security. Question for you, different topic. Are the people brought in to work here trying to look local? I just saw a girl wearing jeans I’d figure she’d gnaw her legs off to get out of.”

“Ash brought in wardrobe stylists. And less demonstrative vehicles.”

“The parking lot out front looks like a BMW dealership.”

“It probably doesn’t, now.”

“Luke still across the street?”

“I think so, but Ossian’s exploring buying them out.”

“Buying a church?”

“You may already own several. Coldiron’s acquisition strategy is entirely situational. If buying a church facilitates the next takeover, they buy the church.”

“Why’s it called that? Coldiron?”

“Spell-correct. Ash chose ‘milagros’ because she likes them. Not miracles but small metal charms, offerings to the saints, representing various suffering body parts. Calderón is a partner in a Panama City law firm Lev nearly hired, but didn’t. Ash liked the sound of it, then liked the look of the accidental result.”

“You don’t hang out a lot with artists?”

“I don’t, no.”

“I would, if I could. What kind of music do you like?”

“Classical, I suppose,” he said. “What kind do you like?”

“Kissing Cranes.”

“Cranes?”

“Like storks.”

“Kissing?”

“It’s an old German trademark, knives and razors. You have Badger?”

“Music?”

“A site. Keeps track of your friends and stuff.”

“‘Social media’?”

“I guess so.”

“It was an artifact of relatively low connectivity. If I remember correctly, you already have less of it than there was previously.”

“Now there’s mostly just Badger. And darknet boards, if you’re into that. I’m not. Hefty owns Badger. My peripheral there?”

“Back cabin.”

“Can I see her?”

He reached up, giant fingers fumbling, and did something to his cam. She saw the room with the tacky marble desk, the little round leather armchairs. On the Wheelie screen it looked like a grifter bank, but for puppets. He got up, went into the back, along the skinny passage of slick wood, to where her peripheral, in a silky-looking black sweatshirt and black tights, lay on the ledgelike bunk, eyes closed.

“Totally looks like somebody,” she said. It really did. It was the opposite of something they’d build to meet some general idea of beauty. And if she understood correctly, nobody knew who it looked like. It was like the pictures in a box at a yard sale, nobody remembering who those people were, or even whose family, let alone how they came to be there. It gave her a sense of things falling, down some hole that had no bottom. Whole worlds falling, and maybe hers too, and it made her want to phone Janice, who was out at the house, and see how her mother was doing.

As he left the rear cabin, the Wheelie window vanished, taking the sigil of the emulation software with it. She’d gone to phone about her mother, and perhaps to sleep. He’d heard it in her voice, that she needed that. The attack, her brother’s wound, the business with the party time. But still she had that way of simply going forward.

He pictured the peripheral’s upturned face, eyes closed. It wasn’t sleeping, but where was it, within itself? But then it didn’t, as he understood it, possess a self to be within. Not sentient, yet as Lowbeer had pointed out, effortlessly anthropomorphized. An anthropomorph, really, to be disanthropomorphized. Though when she was present in it, or perhaps through it, was it not some version of her?

He saw the two glasses on the desk before he realized that the bar was still open. Enrobed in a sudden ponderous nonchalance, he moved to pick them up, returning as casually to the open bar, a glass in either hand. As he put them down, the bar’s door slid down. Lev’s sigil appeared. He fought the urge to block the door with his arms, palms flat on the gold-veined marble, fingers spread. Surely it wouldn’t crush his hands.

“What are you doing?” asked Lev, as Netherton heard the door’s lock click.

“I was with Flynne,” he said, “in that toy peripheral. But she had to phone her mother.” He pressed both hands against pale glassy veneer, feeling the German solidity, the complete lack of movement.

“I’m grilling sandwiches,” Lev said. “Sardines on Italian bread, pickled jalapeño. Looking tasty.”

“Is Lowbeer there?”

“She suggested the sardines.”

“I’ll be right up.”

As he was going out the door, he remembered that he was still wearing the headband, with its vaguely Egyptianate, milkily translucent giant sperm of a cam. He took it off and put it in his jacket pocket.

When he’d crossed the garage, taken the bronze elevator, and made his way to the kitchen, he saw through the mullioned doors that Conner was in the garden, on hands and knees, snarling at Gordon and Tyenna. The peripheral’s features lent themselves terrifyingly to this, seeming to expose more teeth than the two creatures possessed between them, in spite of their peculiarly long jaws. They were facing him, side by side, as if ready to spring, their musculature looking even less canine than usual, their stiff tails in particular. Carnivorous kangaroos, in wolf outfits with Cubist stripes. Netherton felt an oddly intense gratitude, just then, for their not having, as the drop bears had, hands.

The kitchen smelled smokily of grilled sardines. “What’s he doing out there?” Netherton asked.

“I don’t know,” said Lev, at the stove, “but they love it.”

Now the two creatures lunged at Conner simultaneously. He fell between them, flailing, wrestling with them. They were making a high-pitched, repetitious coughing sound.

“Dominika’s gone to Richmond Hill, with the children,” Lev said, checking flattened panini in a sandwich press.

“How is she?” Netherton asked, as unable as ever to read the domestic temperature of Chez Lev.

“Rather annoyed with the time I’ve been devoting to all of this, but her taking the children there was my idea. And Lowbeer’s.” He nodded in her direction.

“Lev’s father’s house,” Lowbeer said, seated at the pine table, “is literally untouchable. Should we earn the enmity of anyone of genuine consequence, in the next forty-eight hours or so, Lev’s family will be secure.”

“Whom would you expect to anger?” Netherton asked.

“Americans, primarily, though I wouldn’t be so worried about them. They are likely, though, to currently have allies in the City. It’s beginning to look as though my assumption was correct, that the motive in Aelita’s death will prove to have been sadly quotidian.”

“Why is that?”

“The aunties, continually mulling it over. A process akin to repetitious dreaming, or the protracted spinning of a given fiction. Not that they’re invariably correct, but over a sufficient course they do tend to find the likely suspects.”