William Gibson - The Peripheral

“No,” said Tacoma. “Better.”

“Am I alone back here to reduce the chance of one of Burton’s boys trying to do what Reece did?”

“Or worse. What kind of burrito? Want milk and sugar in your coffee?”

“They just have the one burrito. Milk and sugar.” She looked over at the Wheelie Boy, on the seat beside her, and wondered where Wilf was. She’d fallen asleep on the foam, after phoning Janice at the house.

Tacoma was talking to someone on her earbud. She slowed, Jimmy’s parking lot up ahead, and Flynne saw a boy in a white t-shirt come running out across the gravel, something in his hands. He passed it, through an open window, to someone in the SUV, which had almost but not quite stopped. The SUV pulled out again. Tacoma sped up, matching its speed, maintaining a fixed distance.

When Jimmy’s was out of sight, Flynne saw something lift out of the SUV, headed back toward them. It became a small quadcopter, toting a fabbed cornstarch travel tray with a silver-foil bundle and a paper cup clipped in it.

“Watch this with the bed,” Tacoma said, without looking back.

Flynne turned in time to see a rectangular hatch in the bed cover sliding open. The drone matched their speed, then lowered itself through the opening. Then came right back up, minus the tray with the burrito and coffee, climbing out of sight as the hatch closed beneath it. “How do we get it?”

“Doing an airlock thing now,” Tacoma said.

A hatch slid up, in the back of the passenger cab. Flynne undid her seatbelt, got down on hands and knees and crawled back. With her head through the opening, she saw the tray, pulled it out. The foil was warm. They kept their breakfast burritos ready to go, at Jimmy’s, under a heat lamp.

She managed to get back into the seat with the tray on her lap, hearing the hatch close behind her, refastened her seatbelt, and peeled the foil off one end of the burrito. “Thanks.”

“We aim to please.”

Jimmy’s breakfast burritos were gross. Scrambled eggs and chopped-up bacon, green onions. Exactly what she wanted right now.

“Good morning,” said Netherton, from the Wheelie.

She had her mouth full of burrito. Nodded.

“I hope you had a good night’s sleep,” he said. The Wheelie’s tablet whined, turning, then tilted back, so he could see out the window. Nothing but sky, unless there were drones there.

She swallowed, drank some coffee. “Slept okay. You?”

“I slept in the Gobiwagen’s jacuzzi,” he said.

“Were you wet?”

“When it’s not a bath, it’s an observation cupola. Conner’s peripheral has the master bedroom. He was here peripherally, earlier. He played with Lev’s analogs in the garden. Watched us have sandwiches, in Lev’s kitchen. Then I came back down with him. He put his peri to bed, off for more of whatever it is she has him training on. Where are we going?”

“My house.”

The tablet straightened up, panned left to right, back again.

“This is kind of a limo, disguised as a truck,” Flynne said. “Bombproof. That’s Tacoma.”

“Hey,” said Tacoma, keeping her eyes on the road.

“Hello,” said Netherton.

“Tacoma works for Griff,” Flynne said. “Or with him.”

“Or for you, if it comes to that,” Tacoma said.

“I still don’t get that.”

“Look at it this way,” Tacoma said. “Everything you can see outside of this vehicle, except for the sky and the road, you own. Bought it all in the meantime. Everything, a good twenty miles back, from either side of the road.”

“You’re shitting me,” Flynne said.

“Coldiron owns most of the county now,” Tacoma said, “hard as it might be to prove it in court. KCV’s gone full matryoshka on that.”

“What’s that?” Flynne asked.

“Know those Russian dolls, nest inside each other? Matryoshka. Shells within shells. So it isn’t that obvious that you own all this land.”

“Not me. Coldiron.”

“You and your brother,” Tacoma said, “own the majority of Coldiron between you.”

“Why do they?” asked Netherton.

“And who exactly is this talking head on the toy?” asked Tacoma, and Flynne realized that she was watching them, as she drove, on cams Flynne hadn’t known were there.

“Wilf Netherton,” said Flynne. “He’s Coldiron, from London.”

“You’re on the list, then, Mr. Netherton,” Tacoma said. “Sorry. Had to ask. Tacoma Raeburn.”

“Raeburn?” Flynne asked. “You her sister?”

“Yep.”

“And you’re named Tacoma because-”

“Didn’t want me called Snoqualmie. You from the future, Mr. Netherton?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m in the future that would result from my not being there. But since I am, it isn’t your future. Here.”

“What do you do, in the future, Mr. Netherton, if you don’t mind my asking? What do people do there generally?”

“Wilf,” he said. “Publicity.”

“That’s what people do?”

“That would be one way of looking at it,” he said, after a pause, which seemed to satisfy Tacoma, or maybe she just didn’t want to be too pushy.

Flynne finished her burrito. When they passed the spot where Conner had killed the men in the stolen cardboard, it felt more like a story than something that had happened at that particular place, and she was okay with that.

By daylight her house was different. He reminded himself that none of this was about assemblers. Natural processes only. He associated untidiness with klept privilege. Lev’s house, for instance: its absence of cleaners, as opposed to the corridor beneath Impostor Syndrome, its spotless sameness uniform through every uninhabited room in London.

The vehicle in front of them had continued on, beyond the house, then halted. In front of it, a smaller version had already stopped. Flynne had said that the smaller one was a bomb sniffer, operated by her cousin, who must be among the six who now emerged from the larger vehicle, all in identical black jackets. Four held stubby rifles. The fifth, who didn’t, might be Flynne’s cousin, who also wore some odd headpiece. Tacoma, the driver, had parked near the largest tree, the one he and Flynne had sat under in the moonlight. He recognized their bench, which he now saw was made of sawn lengths of graying wood, their once-white protective coating worn with use.

Out of the car now, tucked under her arm, he couldn’t adjust the Wheelie Boy’s camera quickly enough to compensate for her movement. He glimpsed the vehicle that had been following them, identical to the one in front, and four more black-coated men, each with a black rifle.

Then Flynne was striding toward the house, Tacoma evidently beside her. “Get them out of sight,” Flynne said to Tacoma, whom he couldn’t see. “Bullpups and jackets’ll worry my mother.”

“Got it,” he heard Tacoma say, and wondered what bull pups were. “Says your cousin’s coming in.”

“You stay here,” Flynne said, stepping up onto the planked veranda. “Keep Leon here. Don’t let him inside while I’m with my mother. No such thing as a serious conversation, him around.”

“Got it,” Tacoma said, stepping into the frame of the Wheelie’s camera. “We’ll be right here.” She indicated a sort of settee, in the same style as the bench under the tree, but with frayed fabric cushions.

Still carrying him, Flynne opened a curiously skeletal door, its thin frame tautly stretched with some sort of fine dark mesh, and stepped into the shade of the house. “I have to talk with my mother,” she said, and set him down on something, a table or sideboard, level with her waist.

“Not here,” he said. “On the floor.”