William Gibson - The Peripheral

“Why do they look like that?” Flynne raised an eyebrow at Netherton.

“They were built into a high-security pram,” Netherton said, “as an antikidnapping measure.”

“Are they guns?”

“Best think of them as that,” Ash said. “Never point one at anyone you don’t want to kill. There’s a relationship between what happens when you depress this stud,” she indicated a point on the inner curve of the parrot-head handle, “and the position of the barrel. Though not exclusively, so not entirely like a gun in that regard. Once the system acquires a biological target, on being triggered, it dispatches assemblers, which seek and find the target regardless. Pick one up.”

The peripheral leaned forward, tapped the gun nearest her with the nail of her index finger. “Like an old derringer, but made of peppermint.” She used both hands to lift it from its recess, neatly managing, Netherton noted, to not point it at any of them. It lay on her open palm.

“It’s deactivated, currently,” said Ossian, “after considerable effort. You can try the grip.”

She closed her hand around the parrot’s head, extended the thing, its festive barrel pointing at a palm-sized bald patch on Ash’s velour tent. “I’m taking these to Wilf’s ex’s party?”

“You certainly aren’t,” said Ash. “Weapons of any sort are proscribed, and you’ll be scanned thoroughly, prior to admission. In any case, these happen to be as blatantly illegal as anything in London today.”

“Then why are you showing them to me?” She returned the thing to its fitted recess, sat back.

“Under certain conditions,” Ash said, “as I understand it, one of these may be delivered to you. We’re showing them to you now so you’ll recognize them, if necessary, and know how to use them.”

“Point and click,” Ossian said. “Has absolutely no effect on inorganic material. Soft tissue only.” He lowered the lid.

“Second order of business,” said Ash, opening her hand, palm up, to reveal what Netherton assumed was a Medici, but red. “This will install a cognitive bundle that will enable you to sound something like a neoprimitivist curator. If not to another neoprimitivist curator, though I’d imagine that’s debatable.”

“It will?” Flynne asked, eyeing the thing. “How?”

“Think of it as a disguise. You no more need to operate it than you need to operate a mask. Certain specific sorts of query will trigger it.”

“And?”

“You’ll spout a reasonably high grade of facile nonsense.”

“Will I know what it means?”

“It won’t mean anything,” said Ash. “Were you to keep it up, you’d shortly repeat yourself.”

“Bullshit baffles brains?”

“One hopes. I’ll need to install it in your peripheral now.”

“Where did you get it?” Flynne asked.

“Lowbeer,” said Ossian.

“The back of your hand, please,” said Ash.

Flynne placed the peripheral’s hand palm down on the table, beside the corroded base of Ash’s display, spread its fingers. Ash pressed the red Medici gently against the back of the peripheral’s hand, where it remained, seeming to do nothing at all.

“Well?” Flynne asked, looking up at Ash.

“It’s loading,” Ash said.

Flynne looked at Netherton. “What have you been doing?” she asked.

“Waiting for you. Admiring your guns. Yourself?”

“Talking with Griff.” He couldn’t read her expression. “They’re talking about defenses for our house. Stuff that’s supposed to not bother my mother.”

“The mystery man,” said Ossian. “So you’ve actually met him.”

Flynne looked at him. “Sure.”

“Any idea how she recruited him?” Ossian asked.

“No,” Flynne said, “but wouldn’t it figure that she’d be good at that?”

“No doubt,” said Ossian. “But we seem to be increasingly following his orders, with next to no idea of who he might be.”

“No idea who she is, either,” Flynne said. “Maybe he’s like that.”

Ash leaned forward to remove the Medici, then tucked it into her reticule. “We’ll just test it,” she said to Flynne. “Tell us, please, why you think Daedra West’s art is important today.”

Flynne looked at her. “West’s oeuvre obliquely propels the viewer through an elaborately finite set of iterations, skeins of carnal memory manifesting an exquisite tenderness, but delimited by our mythologies of the real, of body. It isn’t about who we are now, but about who we would be, the other.” She blinked. “Fucking hell.” The peripheral’s eyes were wide.

“I’d hoped for something in a more colloquial register,” said Ash, “but I suppose that’s a contradiction in terms. Try not to let it run on. The thinness will show.”

“I can interpret, for Daedra,” Netherton suggested.

“Quite,” said Ash.

In the elevator, she tried thinking about what Wilf had told her about Daedra’s art, wondering if she might hear that bullshit voice in her head, but she didn’t. “What is that thing that talks?” she asked him.

“Cognitive bundle,” he said, as the doors opened. She smelled Lev’s cooking from the kitchen. “It constructs essentially meaningless statements out of a given jargon, around whatever chosen topic. I won’t walk you up. You’ve been there before.” He’d stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“I said it,” she said, “but I didn’t think it.”

“Exactly. But that isn’t evident to anyone else. And it wasn’t bad, for a collage from rote.”

“Creeps me out.”

“I think it’s actually a good idea, in our situation. Best you get upstairs.”

“Try the Wheelie, when I get back.”

“Where is it?”

“On a chair in the back of Coldiron. By the beds.”

“Good luck,” he said.

She turned and climbed the stairs, with their runner of patterned carpet, to turn at the landing, up again. At the top, furniture gleamed softly, glass sparkled. She wished she could’ve stopped to look at the things, but here was Lowbeer, at the double doors, only one of them partially open, her hand on the knob. “Hello,” she said. “Please come in.” Into that green again, gilt trim. A single lamp, incandescent element behind glass cut like diamonds. “Griff is sorting out protection for your mother, I understand.”

Flynne looked at the long table, its dark top perfectly smooth but not too glossy. It no longer felt to her like Santa’s Headquarters here. She wished it did. A very business-y room, almost an office. She looked at Lowbeer, who was wearing another one of her suits. Saw Griff there, more strongly than she’d expected. “He’s you,” she said. “He’s you when you were younger.”

Lowbeer’s head tilted. “Did you guess, or did he confide in you?”

“You have the same hands. Netherton saw the tray on our mantel. Said he’d seen one in Clovis’s store here. That she’s an old woman. I guess once I thought of her being there, and here, at the same time. .” She stopped. “But it isn’t the same time. I guessed you might be there too.”

“Exactly,” said Lowbeer, closing the door.

“Am I here, that way?” Flynne asked.

“Not that we’ve been able to determine. Your birth record survives. No death record. But things became messy, as I understand Netherton’s explained to you. Records, during the deeper jackpot, are incomplete to nonexistent, and more so in the United States. There was a military government there, briefly, that erased huge swathes of data, seemingly at random, no one seems to know why. If you were alive today, you’d be about my age, and that would mean either that you were wealthy or very well connected, which tend to be the same thing, here. Which should mean that I’d be able to have found you.”