William Gibson - The Peripheral

Netherton raised the coffee with both hands, drank, considered. Decided that what Lev had just told him actually solved the problem. He no longer had a connection with Daedra. He’d indirectly introduced a friend to the sister of someone he’d been involved with. He didn’t know that much about Aelita, other than that she was named after a Soviet silent film. There hadn’t been much mention of her in Rainey’s briefing material, and he’d been distracted. “What does she do? Some sort of honorary diplomatic position?”

“Their father was ambassador-at-large for crisis resolution. I think she inherited a sliver of that, though some might say Daedra’s more the contemporary version.”

“Thumbnails and all?”

Lev wrinkled his nose. “Are you sacked?”

“Apparently. Not formally, yet.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Fail forward. Now that you’ve explained things, I see no reason for Daedra’s sister not to keep her polt.” He drank more coffee. “Why do you call them that?”

“Ghosts that move things, I suppose. Hello, Gordon. Pretty boy.”

Following Lev’s gaze, Netherton found the thylacine, upright on its hind legs on the small patio, gazing in at them. He really badly wanted a drink, and now he remembered where he thought he might likely find one. Just the one, though. “I need to think,” he said, standing. “Mind if I go and stroll the collection?”

“You don’t like cars.”

“I like history,” Netherton said. “I don’t fancy walking the streets of Notting Hill.”

“Would you like company?”

“No,” Netherton said, “I need to ponder.”

“You know where the elevator is,” said Lev, getting up to let the thylacine in.

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic , shelved in the hall. Downstairs, she found lukewarm coffee in the pot on the stove, then went out back for a shower, in the fading light. Sun had warmed the water just right. Came out of the stall wrapped in Burton’s old bathrobe, rubbing her hair with a towel, ready to dress for the job.

Something she’d gotten from Burton and the Corps, that you didn’t do things in the clothes you sat around in. You got yourself squared away, then your intent did too. When she’d been Dwight’s recon point, she’d made sure she got cleaned up. Doubted she’d be doing that again, even though it was the best money she’d made. She didn’t like gaming, not the way Madison and Janice did. She’d done it for the money, got so good at one particular rank and mission in Operation Northwind that Dwight wouldn’t have anybody else. Except that he would, by now.

She wanted to be sharp tonight, not just for the job. She wanted to see as much as she could of that London. Maybe it was a game she could get into. Burton said it wasn’t a shooter. She wanted to know more about the woman, see more of how she lived.

She went back upstairs, dug through the clothes piled on the armchair. Found her newest black jeans, which were still really black, and the short-sleeved black shirt from when she’d worked at Coffee Jones. Sort of military, patch pockets and those strap things on the shoulders. She’d taken the Coffee Jones embroidery off, left the FLYNNE in red script over the left pocket. Her sneakers didn’t work with black, but they were all she had. She was planning on having Macon fab her some funny ones, but she hadn’t found any she really liked, for him to copy.

Back in the kitchen, she made herself a ham and cheese sandwich, snapped it into Tupperware, bent her phone around her left wrist, and headed down to the trailer in the dark, listening to a new Kissing Cranes track. Leon rang her before the chorus. She left it on her wrist. “Hey,” she said. “Get him out yet?”

“Homes getting ready to let ’em all go. Luke’s decided the Lord’s work’s about done, for now.”

“So what have you been doing?”

“Fucking the dog. Shot a bunch of pool, slept in the car, kept my ass off the street.”

“Talk to Burton again?”

“No,” he said, “they put ’em all in the center of the track at West Davis High. I could go up in the bleachers and watch him playing cards, or eating MREs, or sleeping. Not much point.”

Maybe dull enough to keep Burton from going up there next time, but she doubted it. “When they let him out, you get him to call me.”

“Will do,” Leon said.

As Kissing Cranes came back on, she saw the tube of hand sanitizer on the door of the composting toilet. It was covered with QRs and requisition numbers, their ink starting to fade. But she’d already used the toilet in the house.

As she opened the trailer’s door, it struck her that Burton never locked it, didn’t even have a lock. Nobody was coming in without him asking.

She’d forgotten how hot it would get, sitting closed all day. Leon wanted to AC it, but Burton wasn’t interested. He usually wasn’t there in the daytime. Maybe her shirt and jeans hadn’t been a good idea. She put the sandwich in the fridge, got the windows open as far as she could. A gold and black spider had started spinning a web across one of the foam tunnels, outside.

She tidied up a little, straightening things. As she moved around, the Chinese chair tried to adjust itself for her. She wasn’t sure she’d want to live with that, but when she finally sat down on it, it was just right.

Took her phone off, bent it to her preferred controller angle, waved it above his display. Checked Badger. Shaylene was already back at Fab, still showing anxiety, and Burton was now indicated off-map. Which turned out to be the Hefty Mart parking lot in Davisville, which she guessed would be filled with big white Homeland trucks, one of them with Burton’s phone locked up in it. She frowned. Homes would know that she’d just checked that, which was okay. What wasn’t okay would be if they noticed that her phone was funny. Nothing to be done about it, though. She got out of Badger and back into the searches she’d run for London the night before.

She kept hoping Burton would phone, that they’d already let him out, but really it felt like they would, from what Leon said, so she kept clicking, deeper into random London. City in the game was London for sure, but with something bigger and harder-looking grown up out of it.

When it was time, she got the log-in out of the tomahawk case, waved a finger for Milagros Coldiron SA, and entered the string.

This time, she’d planned what she’d look at, going up.

She got a closer look at the van as the copter emerged. More like an armored car than a van. Sort of heavy shouldered, like Conner’s trike. The bay she’d come out of was square, dark. She heard the voices, urgent still and just as impossible to understand.

Same time of day she’d arrived before, late dusk. Wetter clouds, the building’s black-bronze face dull with condensation.

Next she located the street she’d noticed before, the one that seemed to be paved with something like glass, lit from underneath. Water under there, moving?

Looked for vehicles, seeing three.

As the counter at ten o’clock ticked off the twentieth floor, the voices were gone.

She first noticed it, the gray thing, as she passed the twenty-third. A dry gray, against the wet dark metal. Color of dead skin pulled from a blister. Size of a child’s backpack.

Then she was past it, giving her full attention to a check in three directions, point recon style. Big dark towers, same height, far apart, in their grid across the older city, hers most likely one of them. No whale-thing in the sky.