The Peripheral (3 page)

PATCHERS

L
orenzo captured the moby’s approach to the city. His hands, on the railing, and Netherton’s, on the upholstered arms of the room’s most comfortable chair, seemed momentarily to merge, a sensation nameless as the patchers’ city.

Not a city, the curators had insisted, but an incremental sculpture. More properly a ritual object. Grayly translucent, slightly yellowed, its substance recovered as suspended particulates from the upper water column of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. With an estimated weight of three million tons and growing, it was perfectly buoyant, kept afloat by segmented bladders, each one the size of a major airport of the previous century.

It had less than a hundred known inhabitants, but as whatever continually assembled it seemed also to eat cams, relatively little was known about them.

The service cart edged fractionally closer to the arm of his chair, reminding him of the coffee.

“Get this now, Lorenzo,” Rainey ordered, and Lorenzo turned to focus on Daedra, amid a scrum of specialists. A white china Michikoid knelt, in a Victorian sailor outfit, lacing Daedra’s artfully scuffed leather high-tops. A variety of cams hovered, one of them equipped with a fan to flutter her bangs. He assumed the wind test indicated she was going in without a helmet.

“Not bad,” he said, admiring the cut of the new jumpsuit in spite of himself, “if we can keep her in it.” As if she’d heard him, Daedra
reached up, tugged the zip slightly, then a bit more, exposing a greasy arc of abstracted Gyre-current.

“Went clever on the print file for the zip,” Rainey said. “Hope she doesn’t try it lower, not until she’s down there.”

“She won’t like that,” he said, “when she does.”

“She won’t like it that you lied to her about the curator.”

“The curator may have had remarkably similar thoughts. We won’t know until I speak with her.” He picked up the cup without looking at it, raised it to his lips. Very hot. Black. He might survive. The analgesics were starting to work. “If she earns her percentage, she won’t care about a stuck zip.”

“That’s assuming the powwow’s productive,” Rainey said.

“She has every reason to want this to be successful.”

“Lorenzo’s put a couple of larger cams over the side,” she said. “They’ll be there soon. Ringside.”

He was watching the costumers, makeup technicians, assorted fluffers and documentarians. “How many of these people are ours?”

“Six, including Lorenzo. He thinks that Michikoid is her real security.”

He nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see him, then spilled coffee on the white linen robe as feed from two speeding cams irised into his field, to either side of Daedra.

Feed from their island always made him itch.

“About a kilometer apart now, heading west northwest, converging,” Rainey said.

“You couldn’t pay me.”

“You don’t have to go there,” she said, “but we do both need to watch.”

The cams were descending through tall, sail-like structures. Everything simultaneously cyclopean and worryingly insubstantial. Vast empty squares and plazas, pointless avenues down which hundreds might have marched abreast.

Continuing to descend, over dried crusts of seaweed, bleached bones, drifts of salt. The patchers, their prime directive to cleanse the fouled water column, had assembled this place from recovered polymers. What shape it had taken was afterthought, offhand gesture, however remarkably unattractive. It made him want to shower. Coffee was starting to seep through the front of his robe.

Now Daedra was being helped to don her parafoil, which in its furled state resembled a bilobed scarlet backpack, bearing the white logo of its makers. “Is the ’foil her placement,” he asked, “or ours?”

“Her government’s.”

The cams halted abruptly, simultaneously finding one another over the chosen square. Descended, above diagonally opposite corners, each capturing the other’s identical image. They were skeletal oblongs, the size of a tea tray, matte gray, around a bulbous little fuselage.

Either Lorenzo or Rainey brought the audio up.

The square filled with a low moaning, the island’s hallmark soundscape. The patchers had wormed hollow tubes through every structure. Wind blew across their open tops, generating a shifting, composite tonality he’d hated from the moment he’d first heard it. “Do we need that?” he asked.

“It’s so much of the feel of the place. I want our audience to have that.”

Something was moving in the distance, to his left. “What’s that?”

“Wind-powered walker.”

Four meters tall, headless, with some indeterminate number of legs, it was that same hollow milky plastic. Like the discarded carapace of something else, moving as if animated by an awkward puppetry. It rocked from side to side as it advanced, a garden of tubes atop its length no doubt contributing to the song of the plastic island.

“Have they sent it here?”

“No,” she said. “They set them free, to wander with the wind.”

“I don’t want it in the frame.”

“Now you’re the director?”

“You don’t want it in the frame,” he said.

“The wind’s taking care of that.”

The thing went stiffly on, swaying, on its hollow translucent legs.

On the upper deck of the moby, he saw, her support staff had been withdrawn. The white china Michikoid remained, checking the parafoil, hands and fingers moving with inhuman speed and precision. The ribbon on its sailor cap fluttered in the breeze. A real one, the cam with the fan absent now.

“And here we are,” said Rainey, and he saw the first of the patchers, one cam shifting focus.

A child. Or something the size of one. Hunched over the handlebars of a ghostly little bike, the bike’s frame the same salt-crusted translucence as the city and the wind-walker. Unpowered, it seemed to lack pedals as well. The patcher progressed by repeatedly scuffing at the avenue’s surface.

The patchers repelled Netherton even more than their island. Their skin was overgrown with a tweaked variant on actinic keratosis, paradoxically protecting them from UV cancers. “There’s only the one?”

“Satellite shows them converging on the square. One dozen, counting this one. As agreed.”

He watched the patcher, gender indeterminate, advancing on its kick-bike, its eyes, or possibly goggles, a single lateral smudge.

SURVEILLANT

T
hey were prepping for a party, behind the frosted glass. She knew because it was clear now, like that trick Burton taught her with two pairs of sunglasses.

The bugs were right on it, so she was right on them, doing what she could to vary the angle of attack. She’d found a pull-down for hotdogging, so she could make the copter behave in ways they were less ready for. She’d almost gotten one that way, dropping on it. Proximity had triggered image-capture, bug in extreme close, but that was gone right away, no way of calling it up. Looked like something Shaylene might print at Forever Fab. A toy, or a really ugly piece of jewelry.

She was supposed to chase bugs, not catch them. They’d have a record of everything she did anyway. So she’d just shoo bugs, but while she did that, she was getting more than a glimpse of what was going on inside.

The couple who’d been up against the window weren’t there. Nobody human was. Robots, little low beige things that moved almost too fast to see, were vacuuming the floor, while three almost identical robot girls were arranging food on a long table. Classic anime robot babes, white china faces almost featureless. They’d built three big flower arrangements and now they were transferring food from carts to trays on the table. When the carts came in, rolling themselves to the table, the blur of beige parted just enough to let them through. Flowed around them like mechanical water, perfectly tight right-angle turns.

She was enjoying this a lot more than Burton would have. She wanted to see the party.

There were shows where you watched people prep for weddings, funerals, the end of the world. She’d never liked any of them. But they hadn’t had robot girls, or super-fast Roombas. She’d seen videos of factory robots assembling things, almost that fast, but nothing the kids had Shaylene print out for them ever moved that way.

She dropped toward two bugs, hovered, scoping one of the robot girls without changing focus. This one was wearing a quilted vest with lots of pockets, little shiny tools sticking up in them. She was using something like a dental pick to individually arrange things, too small to see, on top of sushi. Round black eyes in the china face, wider apart than human eyes, but they hadn’t been there before.

She bent her phone a little more, to give her fingers a rest. Scattering the bugs.

The whirling beige on the floor vanished, like a light turned off, all except for one poor thing, looking like a starfish, that had to hump itself out of sight on what seemed to be wheels in the tips of its five points. Broken, she guessed.

A woman entered the room. Brunette, beautiful. Not boy-game hot. Realer. Like Flynne’s favorite AI character in Operation Northwind, the French girl, heroine of the Resistance. Simple dress, like a long t-shirt, a dark gray that went to black where her body touched it, reminding Flynne of the shadows on the window. It migrated down, of its own accord, off her left shoulder entirely, as she walked the length of the table.

Robot girls stopped what they were doing, raised their heads, all eyeless now, shallow sockets smooth as their cheekbones. The woman walked around the end of the table. Cam bugs surged.

Heard her fingers on her phone, whipping the copter side to side, up, down, back. “Fuck off,” she told them.

The woman stood at the window, looking out, left shoulder bare.
Then the dress climbed smoothly back, covering her shoulder, neckline rising in a V, then rounding.

“Fuck off!” Lunging at the bugs.

Window polarized again, or whatever that was. “Fuck you,” she said to the bugs, though it probably wasn’t their fault.

Ran a quick perimeter check, in case another window might have opened and she’d miss something. Nothing. Not a single bug, either.

Back around, the bugs were already bobbing, waiting. She flew through them, making them vanish.

Tongued the cud of jerky away from her cheek and chewed. Scratched her nose.

Smelled hand sanitizer.

Went after the bugs.

DOUBLE DICKAGE

T
he boss patcher, unless he wore some carnival helmet fashioned from keratotic skin, had no neck, the approximate features of a bullfrog, and two penises.

“Nauseating,” Netherton said, expecting no reply from Rainey.

Perhaps a little over two meters tall, with disproportionately long arms, the boss had arrived atop a transparent penny farthing, the large wheel’s hollow spokes patterned after the bones of an albatross. He wore a ragged tutu of UV-frayed sheet-plastic flotsam, through whose crumbling frills could be glimpsed what Rainey called his double dickage. The upper and smaller of the two, if in fact it was a penis, was erect, perhaps perpetually, and topped with what looked to be a party hat of rough gray horn. The other, seemingly more conventional, though supersized, depended slackly below.

“Okay,” Rainey said, “they’re all here.”

Between the oculi of the twin feeds, Lorenzo was studying Daedra in profile as she faced the five folding steps to the top of the moby’s railing. Head bowed, eyes lowered, she stood as if in prayer or meditation.

“What’s she doing?” asked Rainey.

“Visualization.”

“Of what?”

“Herself, I’d imagine.”

“You cost me a bet,” she said, “getting together with her. Someone thought you might. I said you wouldn’t.”

“It wasn’t for long.”

“Like being a little bit pregnant.”

“Briefly pregnant.”

Daedra raised her chin then, and touched, almost absently, the color-suppressed American flag patch over her right bicep.

“Money shot,” said Rainey.

Daedra took the steps, dove smoothly over the railing.

A third feed irised into place between the other two, this one from below.

“Micro. We sent in a few yesterday,” said Rainey, as Daedra’s parafoil unfurled, red and white, above the island. “The patchers let us know they knew, but nothing’s eaten any yet.”

Netherton swiped his tongue from right to left, across the roof of his mouth, blanking his phone. Saw the unmade bed.

“How does she look to you?” Rainey asked.

“Fine,” he said, getting up.

He walked to the vertically concave corner window. It depolarized. He looked down on the intersection, its wholly predictable absence of movement. Free of crusted salt, drama, atonal windsong. Across Bloomsbury Street, a meter-long mantis in shiny British racing green, with yellow decals, clung to a Queen Anne façade, performing minor maintenance. Some hobbyist was operating it telepresently, he assumed. Something better done by an invisible swarm of assemblers.

“She seriously proposed to do this naked,” Rainey said, “and covered in tattoos.”

“Hardly covered. You’ve seen the miniatures of her previous skins. That’s covered.”

“I’ve managed not to, thank you.”

He double-tapped the roof of his mouth, causing the feeds, left and right, from their respective corners of the square, to show him the boss patcher and his cohort of eleven, looking up, unmoving.

“Look at them,” he said.

“You really hate them, don’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Look at them.”

“We’re not supposed to like their looks, obviously. The cannibalism’s problematic, if those stories are true, but they did clear the water column, and for virtually no capital outlay on anyone’s part. And they now arguably own the world’s single largest chunk of recycled polymer. Which feels like a country, to me, if not yet a nation-state.”

The patchers had shuffled into a rough circle, with their scooters and kick-bikes, around their boss, who’d left his penny farthing on its side at the edge of the square. The others were as small as the boss was large, compactly disgusting cartoons of rough gray flesh. They wore layers of rags, gray with sun and salt. Modification had run rampant, of course. The more obviously female among them were six-breasted, their exposed flesh marked not with tattoos but intricately meaningless patterns expressed in pseudo-ichthyotic scaling. They all had the same bare, toeless, shoe-like feet. Their rags fluttered in the wind, nothing else in the square moving.

On the central feed, Daedra soared down, swinging out wide, up again. The parafoil was altering its width, profile.

“Here she comes,” said Rainey.

Daedra came in low, along the widest of the intersecting avenues, the parafoil morphing rhythmically now, braking, like speeded-up footage of a jellyfish. She scarcely stumbled, as her feet found the polymer, throwing up puffs of salt.

The parafoil released her, instantly shrinking, to land on four unlikely legs, but only for a second or two. Then it lay there, bilobed again, logo uppermost. It would never have fallen logo-down, he knew. Another money shot. The feed from the micro closed.

On the two feeds from the cams above the square, from their opposing angles, Daedra spent momentum, running, keeping impressively upright, into the circle of small figures.

The boss patcher shifted his feet, turning. His eyes, set on the corners of his vast, entirely inhuman head, looked like something a child had scribbled, then erased.

“This is it,” said Rainey.

Daedra raised her right hand in what might either have been a gesture of greeting, or evidence that she came unarmed.

Her left, Netherton saw, was beginning to unzip the jumpsuit. The zipper jammed, a palm’s width beneath her sternum.

“Bitch,” said Rainey, almost cheerfully, as a micro-expression, curdled fury, crossed Daedra’s face.

The boss patcher’s left hand, like a piece of sporting equipment fashioned from salt-stained gray leather, closed around her right wrist. He lifted her, her carefully scuffed shoes parting with the translucent pavement. She kicked him, hard, in his slack stomach, just above the ragged plastic tutu, salt jumping from the point of impact.

He drew her closer, so that she dangled above the horn-tipped pseudo-phallus. Her left hand touched his side then, just below the ribs. Her fingers were curled, but loosely, her thumb against gray flesh.

He shivered, for an instant. Swayed.

She raised both feet, planted them against his stomach, and pushed. As her fist came away, it looked as though she were extracting a length of scarlet measuring tape. A thumbnail. As long, when it fully emerged, as her forearm. His blood very bright, against a world of gray.

He released her. She landed on her back, instantly rolling, the nail shorter by half. He opened his vast maw, in which Netherton saw only darkness, and toppled forward.

Daedra was already on her feet, turning slowly, each of her thumbnails concave and slightly curving, the left slick with the patcher’s blood.

“Hypersonic,” said an unfamiliar voice on Rainey’s feed, ungendered, utterly serene. “Incoming. Deceleration. Shockwave.”

He’d never heard thunder here, before.

Six spotless, white, upright cylinders, perfectly evenly spaced, had appeared above and slightly outside the circle of patchers, all of whom had dropped their bikes and scooters and taken a first step toward Daedra. A vertical line of tiny orange needles danced up and down
each one, as the patchers, in some way Netherton was unable to grasp, were shredded, flung. The oculi of Lorenzo’s feeds froze: on one the perfect, impossible, utterly black silhouette of a severed hand, almost filling the frame.

“We are so fucked,” said Rainey, her amazement total, childlike.

Netherton, seeing the Michikoid, on the deck of the moby, sprout multiple spider-eyes and muzzle-slits, in the instant before it vaulted the railing, could only agree.