William Gibson - The Peripheral

“You okay?” asked Clovis, eyeing her narrowly.

“Jet lag, maybe,” Flynne said. Standing up. Clovis was obviously ready to catch her if she fell. “I’m okay. Burton okay?”

“Fine. Been back to pee, again to have dinner and hydrate. Walter Reed’s happy with him.”

Flynne went over to the chair where she’d left the Wheelie. Clovis had collapsed the telescoping rod the tablet rode on, and propped a tablet of her own against the back of the chair, on a wadded sweatshirt. The Wheelie was watching the Ciencia Loca episode about spontaneous human combustion. “Hey,” she said, “hi.”

“Wah!” said Netherton, startled. The Wheelie’s spherical body rotated backward on fixed wheels, tilting its tablet and camera up at her. “That was frightening me,” he said. “I kept imagining my body igniting, in the Gobiwagen’s observation cupola. It came on after the news and I couldn’t change it.”

“Want to watch the rest? Second half’s scuba stuff, the old tip of lower Manhattan.”

“No! I came to see you.”

“I’ve got to eat. I’ll take you to Sushi Barn.”

“What’s that?”

“Hong’s restaurant. It’s at the other end of the mall. Madison’s cut holes through and built a hamster run with shingle bags.” She checked her reflection in a plastic-framed mirror that someone, probably Clovis, had taped to a blue tarp with aquamarine duct tape. “That crown is hell on my hair.” She sat down on the chair, put the Wheelie on the floor, and put her sneakers on. The Wheelie extended its tablet, whirred, and wheeled across the floor, tablet swiveling. “Stay there,” she said, getting up. She crossed to it, picked it up, and ducked through the slit.

“This is bizarre,” he said, on the other side. “It looks like some primitive game.”

“Boring game.”

“They all are. What is it for?”

“If we’re under attack, we can walk through this to Sushi Barn and get the shrimp special.”

“Does that make sense?”

“It’s a guy thing. But I think it was Lowbeer’s idea, as interpreted through Burton and my friend Madison.”

“Who is Madison?”

She stepped through the hole in the central wall. “My friend’s husband, nice guy. Plays Sukhoi Flankers.”

“What’s that?”

“Flight sim game. Old Russian planes. Lowbeer is Griff.”

He didn’t say anything. She stopped, between the shingle-bag walls, raised the Wheelie Boy. “‘Is Griff’?” he asked.

“Griff. Becomes her. But not exactly. Like this isn’t her past anymore, so he won’t have her life, because none of this happened to her when she was him.” She started walking.

“You somehow seem,” he said, “to simply accept all these things.”

“You’re the one living in the future, with nanobots eating people, spare bodies, government run by kings and gangsters and shit. You accept all that, right?”

“No,” he said, just before she ducked through, into Hong’s kitchen, “I don’t. I hate it.”

Tommy came in and squatted down on his haunches at the foot of her foam, hat in his hand. She was groggy from the pill she’d let Tacoma give her, but she’d had her best sleep in about a week. “Sit on the foam, Tommy, you’ll wreck your knees.”

“Best they got for you in here?” he asked, swiveling on his heels and dropping his butt on the corner of the slab.

“Hospital beds feel like hospital. And Burton and Conner both fart a lot. What’s that with Luke 4:5 packing up? Are we sure we didn’t buy them?”

“You sure shit didn’t buy ’em,” he said. “Why I’m waking you up before anybody wants me to. To tell you about that.”

“What?” She got up on her elbows.

“I think the other guys pulled them out because they’re a media magnet. Not that much on their own, anymore, but you add something else to the mix, media’ll be all over it. Or even if they just do something off-script, like leaving here now, they’re more interesting, maybe just for a news cycle. Like your PR operation’s been dialing them down, keeping your face pretty much out of it, but there’s still been a blip from them leaving.”

“So why would someone want them to leave?”

“So they won’t be an add-on draw when something else hits town,” he said. “Something they really don’t want any spare attention on, if they can help it.”

“Like what?”

“Homes. A strategic shitload of Homes. Vehicles, personnel. Grif’s connections are showing two big convoys headed this way. Serious lot of white trucks. Meanwhile, over at what’s left of Pickett’s, Ben Carter’s cousin’s in that quite sizable detachment of Homes, right there. And he’s telling Ben that the rumor’s they’re headed here, today, to mop up the armed remnants of the evil Cordell Pickett’s multicounty drug empire. Which incidentally they’re now behaving as though they put a stop to, as opposed to your vigilante brother, his best friend, and a prosthesis from the Veterans Administration.”

“They’re coming here?”

“Don’t doubt it.”

“And we’re the evil remnants?”

“You got it.”

“They’re that corrupt?”

“In today’s modern world, yeah, at least as of maybe twenty-four hours ago. They sure are. But you’re probably holding too big a stake in one of the prime corrupters to want to have too much of an attitude about that.”

“And when they get here?”

“We’ll resist arrest. Regardless what we might actually do, we’ll have resisted arrest. Those stacks of shingles won’t stop smart munitions. This is exactly the kind of improv urban fortress they were designed to be used against. The roof on this building might as well not be there, and Homes has real attack drones anyway. Wouldn’t matter if we were in bunkers. Plus your brother’s boys are constitutionally disinclined to go peacefully, in spite of odds.”

“Why’s it happening now?”

“Griff’s best bet is that both the two hands are slap up to the top of the handle of the bat, and there’s no room for another. Just worked out that way. They bought whatever it took to get Homes in their pocket, and there’s nothing left for us to buy to get ’em into our ours.”

“What if Griff got tight with Gonzales?”

“I think he already is, though you can probably still see some daylight between them. But there’s politics, and Homes isn’t on her side of the table, president or no.”

“When do they get here?”

“This evening. But they tend to operate after midnight.”

“You could just meet ’em as they come in and help keep order, Tommy. I don’t see that this has to be your fight.”

“Fuck that,” he said, perfectly pleasantly. “You want a breakfast burrito? Brought you one.”

“How come I can’t smell it?”

“Had ’em double-bag it, so it wouldn’t ruin my uniform,” he said, reaching into one of his jacket’s big side pockets.

He was trying to sleep on a granite bench in the tall cold hall of Daedra’s voice mail, while trains, or perhaps mobies departed, dimly announced by gravely incomprehensible voices. Light pulsed.

He opened his eyes. He lay on the leather cushions in the cupola. Out in the darkness of the garage, another pulse. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, peered out.

Squidlight again, on Ossian, upholding, in one hand, on a hanger, dark clothing. Beside him Ash, grim-faced, though no more than usual, dressed in what seemed a chauffeur’s uniform, black, the breast of its stiff tunic crossed with frogs of black silk cord. She wore a large hat, like some Soviet commodore, its gleaming patent bill obscuring her eyes.