William Gibson - The Peripheral

“Is that a peripheral of you?” Flynne asked, looking at the other Daedra.

“What does it look like?” Daedra asked. “It’s giving my talk. Or Mary is, with it. She’s a voice actress.”

Mary had gotten to her feet, the white paper in her hand.

“Take it somewhere,” Daedra said. “We’re having a talk.”

Mary took the Daedra-peripheral’s hand and led it away, around a corner. Flynne watched her go, feeling embarrassed.

“You think you’re safe here,” Daedra said.

“Yes,” said Flynne, all she could think of to say.

“You aren’t, at all. Whoever you are, you’ve let this idiot bring you here.” She was looking at Wilf, who put his glass of water down on the piece of furniture nearest him, looking pained. “Take that apart,” Daedra said, apparently to the two robot girls, pointing at Conner. And one of them, instantly, too quick to follow, was squatting upside down on the ceiling, white mantis-arms lengthening.

Flynne saw Conner smile, but then he was gone, a blank curved wall surrounding Flynne, Wilf, Daedra. It was just there, or seemed to be. Flynne reached over and rapped it with the peripheral’s knuckles. Hurt.

“It’s real,” Daedra said. “And whoever was operating your guard is now wherever you started from, whenever, telling whoever is there that you’re in trouble.” She was right about Conner. If the robots wrecked Lev’s brother’s peri, Conner woke up in the back of Coldiron, beside Burton. “But not understanding how much.”

The man from the balcony stepped through the wall, then. Just stepped through it, like it wasn’t there, or like he and it could temporarily occupy the same space and time.

“How’d you do that?” she asked, because you couldn’t see that and not ask.

“Assemblers,” he said. “It’s what we do here. We’re protean.” He smiled.

“Protein?”

“Without fixed form.” He waved his hand through the wall, a demonstration. He crossed to the side she thought Conner would be behind, stuck his face into it, instantly withdrew it. “Get them some help,” he said to Daedra.

“I can’t move,” said Netherton.

“Of course you can’t,” said the man. He looked at Flynne. “Neither can she.”

And he was right.

Two more robot girls ran out of the wall, where he’d come through, and back into it, where he’d stuck his head in, and then they were gone.

Probably they were using something akin to whatever they’d used during the security scans, Netherton thought, as the elevator descended. Something that induced a dissociative state. It was difficult to complain about a dissociative state. It even seemed to take the place of a drink.

But there was something else in effect, something that reduced his freedom of movement. He could move his eyes, and walk when Daedra or this friend of hers told him to, stand where they indicated he should, but he couldn’t, for instance, raise his hands, or-he’d tried-clench a fist. Not that he felt particularly like clenching a fist.

The elevator doors had appeared in the circular wall. Quite a lot of assemblers, to do that. He vaguely recalled there being restrictions, on too wholesale a use of assemblers, but they didn’t seem to apply here, or were perhaps being ignored.

Flynne, beside him, seemed much the same, her peripheral reminding him of when she wasn’t using it.

“Out,” said Daedra, and pushed him, when they reached the bottom.

The lobby now. Daedra’s friend led the way, and when he happened to glance to the left, Netherton found that he did too, without having meant to. Then they were both looking ahead again, through the glass, out to where the gray bouncy castle had been, but no longer was. There was a black car waiting, not as long as the ZIL. The gray-clad Michikoids from the bouncy castle were arranged in two lines, facing one another, two-by-two, and as the glass doors sighed open and he stepped out between them, he felt a faint celebratory elation, at the formality of it all.

Halfway to the car he heard, or perhaps felt, a single, extended, uncomfortably low bass-note, seemingly from somewhere above them. Daedra’s friend, evidently hearing it too, began to run, toward the car, whose rear door was open now. Netherton running with him, of course. Through a confetti storm of what Netherton supposed might once have been a window, though the glittering, slightly golden bits seemed soft as mulch, and as harmless.

Something white, round and smooth, arced down into the street, beyond the waiting car. Bouncing back up, well above the car’s roof.

The head of a Michikoid.

Then a white arm, bent at the elbow, fingers clawed, struck the roof of the car, reminding him of the frozen silhouette of a severed hand he and Rainey had seen, on the feed from the patchers’ island.

Someone, he supposed Daedra’s friend, shoved him, painfully, into the waiting, pearl-gray interior. And screamed, very close to his ear, amid an explosion of what he assumed must be blood.

Summers they’d all go to the town pool, which was beside the Sheriff’s Department and the town jail, and Burton and Conner would do cannonballs off the high board, curled up with their heads on their bent knees, hands holding their ankles in, against their haunches, to come up, laughing, to cheers, or sometimes just to Leon, executing a massive belly flop off the same board, making fun of how hard they tried.

And that was what she thought of, when Daedra looked up at the weird sound. Which made her look up too, that copycat thing they had. Artifacts of image-capture strobing, in a descending line, around Conner’s peripheral, in its black suit, coming down cannonball on the balcony man and the Michikoid behind him, trying to get him into the car. So that mostly he took out that Michikoid. Blood like some gross-out anime, the Michikoid and Conner’s peripheral exploding two feet from her, like bugs on a windshield.

Someone, Daedra, grabbed her by the top of the back of her dress, hauling her in, kicking her hard in the ankle, probably just out of how pissed she was. And balcony man screaming, hugging his right arm, covered with blood, Flynne wasn’t sure whose, as another Michikoid bundled him into the car, the door closing behind it.

“Newgate,” Daedra said, over the man’s sobs of pain, and they pulled away.

One of the two Michikoids was treating the bearded man’s right arm with a Medici. It had placed it on his right shoulder, where it now bulged and sagged, down across his lap, having engulfed the arm below. Blood swirled, through the yellowish fluid that filled the thing. The man’s eyes were closed, his face relaxed, and Netherton envied him whatever dissociative state he might be enjoying.

Netherton himself was feeling entirely too associative, whatever had been used to induce his prior state having been abruptly shut off, possibly by the impact of Penske’s peripheral. Either that or the dissociative field had been local to Edenmere Mansions, already some distance behind them. Whichever, he was now also free of the compulsion to imitative movement, or so he assumed, else wouldn’t his eyes be closed?

He turned his head to look at Flynne, beside him on the wide rear seat. She seemed to be very definitely present in the peripheral now. There was a smear of Penske’s blood across her cheek, or rather the blood from his ruined peripheral. Her dress was spattered with blood as well, but it scarcely showed on the black fabric. She gave him a look he couldn’t read, if indeed there was anything to be read.