William Gibson - The Peripheral

She took the empty juice glass over to the sink, washed it out, put it in the drying rack, and looked out the window, up the hill to where they’d built the pad that Marine One landed on, when Felicia came to see her. You couldn’t see that there was anything there at all, even when you were standing on it. Satellites couldn’t even tell it was there, because it was built with Coldiron science, emulating tech from up the line.

They’d talk in the kitchen, usually, when Felicia came, while Tommy sat out in the living room and shot the shit with the Secret Service, or anyway the ones he liked. Sometimes Brent came out from town, usually with Griff, when Felicia was there, and then it was more structured, about stockpiling vaccines against diseases they wouldn’t even have known were out there, or what countries to best put the phage factories in, or climate stuff. She’d met Felicia a little after Vice President Ambrose had had his embolism, and that had been awkward, both because Felicia only ever spoke of Wally, as she called him, with what seemed like a real and painful fondness, and because Flynne knew that he’d died after Griff had shown her footage of her own state funeral, and explained to her exactly what had led up to that.

There was a jelly jar beside the drying rack, full of some of Conner’s old toes, fingers, a thumb. He’d given them to Flora, Lithonia’s daughter. They were some early iterations that Macon had printed back at the old Fab, with machines he’d had printed somewhere else, before they’d built the barn. Flora had forgotten them, that morning, when she’d been up to visit. She’d painted their nails sloppily pink, and Flynne saw that the thumb was moving a little, which had been the problem with the first few batches they’d printed. Watching Conner play squash, sometimes, she’d remember how fast Macon and Ash and Ossian had been able to get him up to speed. Now he never took the composite prosthesis off, the various parts of it, just wore them constantly, but up the line he still had his version of Pavel. She couldn’t imagine using a different peripheral herself. “Hell no,” Leon had said, at dinner once, when she’d said that, “that would be like having a whole other body.” And then he’d made Flora scream, by telling her that if Flynne had a boy, she’d name him Fauna.

Now it was time to go down and have lunch with them. Her mother, Lithonia, Flora, and Leon, who was living in her old room now. Lithonia, it had turned out, was an amazing cook, so now Madison was sandblasting the inside of the old Farmer’s Bank, for a restaurant Lithonia and her cousin would start there, nothing too fancy but a break from Sushi Barn and Jimmy’s. Jimmy’s wasn’t likely to become a chain, and if it did, Leon said, it would be a sign that the jackpot was coming anyway, in spite of everything they were doing.

Her mother, now that all her medications were being made by Coldiron, and custom-made at that, no longer needed the oxygen. In the meantime, if anyone else needed anything, they’d bought Pharma Jon, whose profit margin, on Flynne’s suggestion, they’d slashed by half, instantly making it the single most beloved chain in the country, if not the world.

Picking up the jelly jar, she went out, without bothering to lock the door, and down along to the path they’d been wearing between the two houses, which was starting to look as though it had always been there.

She’d told Ainsley, earlier, walking on the Embankment, how she sometimes worried that they weren’t really doing more than just building their own version of the klept. Which Ainsley had said was not just a good thing but an essential thing, for all of them to keep in mind. Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. And this was true, Ainsley had said, of the very worst monsters, among whom she herself had so long moved. Her job in London, she’d said, might seem to Flynne to be a patient caretaker amid large and specially venomous animals, but that wasn’t the case.

“All too human, dear,” Ainsley had said, her blue old eyes looking at the Thames, “and the moment we forget it, we’re lost.”

Living with Rainey was a little like having a cognitive implant, he thought, getting out of bed and looking down at her, but nicer in so many ways. He’d scarcely been aware that she had freckles, for instance, or that they were so widely distributed, or, indeed, that he liked freckles. Now he covered some of his favorites with the corner of the duvet and went to clean his teeth.

Her sigil appeared, before he could start. “Yes?”

“Coffee,” she said, and he could hear her from the bedroom as well as on his phone.

“I’ll use the machine as soon as I’ve brushed my teeth.”

“No,” she said, “that’s a real Italian downstairs, in that fake news agent’s. I want his espresso.” She made it sound pornographic. “His crema.”

“Phone him.”

“You ruined my career, put me in a position that forced me to resign from an enviable government position, and ultimately resulted in my being threatened by assassins in the pay of New Zealand’s secret state, and you won’t bring me a decent human-made coffee? And a croissant, from that place across the street.”

“All right,” said Netherton. “Let me brush my teeth. I did rescue you from those darknet kiwis, who were hardly state assassins, and bring you here, under the protection of the British secret state. So to speak.”

“Crema,” she said, sleepily.

He brushed his teeth, remembering how Lowbeer had had to get her out of Canada, then into England, and how they’d wound up in bed together, not for the first time but definitely the first time he hadn’t been drunk. And how he’d confessed, in possibly the single most awkward morning-after moment of what seemed a long career of them, his feelings for Flynne, or possibly her peripheral, or both, with Rainey pointing out that she, Flynne, had recently become his client. And hadn’t he, she asked, had ample proof of what could come of having it off with clients? But Flynne wasn’t Daedra, he’d protested. But what he was, most definitely, Rainey had said, was someone so immature as to believe that his own erotic projections should have actual weight in the world. And then she’d pulled him back into bed and argued it differently, though from the same position, and he’d begun, he supposed, to see it her way. And soon it had become apparent that Flynne and Sheriff Tommy were a couple, and here he was dressing, in their newly shared flat, to go down to the street, on a sunny Soho afternoon, grateful as ever that plans to implement a Cheapside-style cosplay zone here had never been implemented.

He was coming out of the baker’s when Macon’s sigil appeared. “Yes?”

“If we fly your boy to Frankfurt, will you be able to brief the German PR team, tomorrow morning, ten your time?”

“Where is it, now?”

“On the runaway in Cairo, cleared for takeoff. We’ve got Flynne’s peri, the one for this hemisphere, in Paris, so if she’s available then, you could brief them together.”

“Sounds good. Anything else?”