William Gibson - The Peripheral

That mirror was the newest thing in Jimmy’s, a place that had been old when her mother had gone to high school. Everything old in Jimmy’s had at some point been painted in one or another generation of dark shiny brown, including the floor. The onions were starting to sizzle for the lunch dogs. Stung her eyes. She’d have the smell in her hair.

Hefty Mart would be open. She’d walk up and down the aisles, while forklifts brought in shrink-wrapped pallets. She liked it in there, early. She’d spend one of the shiny new fives on two bags of groceries, things that would keep in the cupboard. The neighbors had all grown more vegetables than they knew what to do with, out of a random stretch of rain. Then she’d go by Pharma Jon and put another five against her mother’s prescriptions. Then ride home, get the panniers unloaded, contents into the pantry, lucky if she didn’t wake anybody but the cat.

The edge of the counter was trimmed with LEDs like the ones in Burton’s trailer, under a sloppier application of polymer. She’d never seen them on, but it had been at least a year since she’d been in here with the place in bar mode. She pressed the polymer with her thumb, feeling it give.

Burton and Leon, before they enlisted, learned you could use a syringe to inject this same stuff, still liquid, into the part of a shotgun shell that held the shot, then quickly epoxy over the hole you’d made. The polymer stayed wet in there, most of the time anyway, between the little lead balls, so it didn’t expand. When you fired one, it solidified as the shot left the barrel, producing a weird, potato-shaped lump of polymer and lead, so slow that you could almost see it tumble out of the barrel. Heavy, elastic, they’d bounce these off the concrete walls and ceilings, in the county storm shelter, trying to hit things around corners. Leon had gotten keys to the place. Looked weird when you weren’t in there with everybody else, hiding from a tornado. Burton, after a while, actually could hit things around corners, but the sound of the Mossberg hurt her ears, even with earplugs.

Burton had been different then. Not just thinner, gangly, which seemed impossible now, but messy. She’d noticed, the night before, how everything she hadn’t touched, in the trailer, was perfectly squared up with the edge of something else. Leon said the Corps had turned Burton into a neatfreak, but she hadn’t really thought about it before. She reminded herself to take that empty Red Bull can out to the recyc bin, spend some time straightening things up.

Girl brought her eggs.

She heard Conner’s trike pass again, out beyond the parking lot. Nothing else on the road sounded like that. Police pretty much gave him a pass, because he ran mostly late at night.

She hoped he was on his way home.

H e’d wanted to impress her, and what better way than to offer her something money couldn’t buy? Something that had felt to him like a ghost story, when Lev had first explained it.

He’d told her about it in bed. “And they’re dead?” she’d asked.

“Probably.”

“A long time ago?”

“Before the jackpot.”

“But alive, in the past?”

“Not the past. When the initial connection’s made, that didn’t happen, in our past. It all forks, there. They’re no longer headed for this, so nothing changes, here.”

“My bed?” She spread her arms and legs, smiled.

“Our world. History. Everything.”

“And he hires them?”

“Yes.”

“What does he pay them with?”

“Money. Coin of their realm.”

“How does he get it? Does he go there?”

“You can’t go there. Nobody can. But information can be exchanged, so money can be made there.”

“Who did you say this is?”

“Lev Zubov. We were at school together.”

“Russian.”

“Family’s old klept. Lev’s the youngest. Man-child of leisure. Has hobbies, Lev. This is his latest.”

“Why haven’t I heard of it before?”

“It’s new. It’s quiet. Lev looks for new things, things his family might invest in. He thinks this one may be out of Shanghai. Something to do with quantum tunneling.”

“How far back can they go?”

“Twenty twenty-three, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”

“Remind me of it later.” She reached for him.

On the walls, the framed flayed hides of three of her most recent selves. Her newest skin beneath him, unwritten.

Ten at night now, in the kitchen of Lev’s father’s Notting Hill house, his house of art.

Netherton knew there was a house of love as well, in Kensington Gore, several houses of business, plus the family home in Richmond Hill. The Notting Hill house had been Lev’s grandfather’s first London real estate, acquired midcentury, just as the jackpot really got going. It reeked of the connections allowing it to quietly decay. There were no cleaners here, no assemblers, no cams, nothing controlled from outside. You couldn’t buy permission for that. Lev’s father simply had it, and likely Lev would too, though his two brothers, whom Netherton avoided if at all possible, seemed better suited to exercise the muscular connectedness needed to retain it.

He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window, as it did its stiff-tailed business beside an illuminated bed of hostas. He wondered what its droppings might be worth. There were competing schools of thylacinery, warring genomes, another of Lev’s hobbies. Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing, Lev had said. Or perhaps Dominika had a feed from its eyes. She didn’t like him. Had disappeared when he’d arrived, upstairs, or perhaps down into the traditionally deep iceberg of oligarchic subbasements.

“It’s not that simple,” Lev said now, placing a bright red mug of coffee on the scarred pine table in front of Netherton, beside a yellow bit of his son’s Lego. “Sugar?” He was tall, brownly bearded, archaically bespectacled, ostentatiously unkempt.

“It is,” Netherton said. “Tell her it stopped working.” He looked up at Lev. “You told me it might.”

“I told you that none of us have any idea when or why it started, whose server it might be, let alone how long it might continue to be available.”

“Then tell her it stopped. Is there any brandy?”

“No,” said Lev. “You need coffee. Have you met her sister, Aelita?” He took a seat opposite Netherton.

“No. I was going to. Before. They didn’t seem to be that close.”

“Close enough. Daedra didn’t want it. Neither would I, frankly. We don’t do that sort of thing, if we’re serious about continua.”

“Didn’t want it?”

“Had me give it to Aelita.”

“To her sister?”

“He’s part of Aelita’s security now. A very minor part, but she knows he’s there.”

“Fire him. End it.”

“Sorry, Wilf. She finds it interesting. We’re having lunch on Thursday, and I hope to explain that polts aren’t really what continua are about. I think she may get it. Seems bright.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you had your hands full. And frankly you weren’t making a great deal of sense, at that point. Daedra rang, told me you were sweet, that she didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but why didn’t I give it to her sister, who likes odd things. It didn’t feel to me as if you were slated to be a very permanent part of her life, so I didn’t think it would matter. And then Aelita rang, and she seemed genuinely curious, so I gave it to her.”