The Peripheral (33 page)

METRIC OF CAUTION

H
e was in the shower, off the Gobiwagen’s master bedroom, when Rainey’s sigil appeared. “Hello,” he said, eyes closed against shampoo.

“Is it still true,” she asked, “that you don’t know who you actually work for?”

“I’m unemployed.”

“I do,” she said. “More or less.”

“Do what?”

“Know who you work for.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our last date, so to speak.”

“Yes?”

“Your friend.”

“Lev?”

“The one I met.”

“I don’t work for her.”

“But you do what she tells you to.”

“I suppose I do,” he said. “For obvious reasons.”

“So would I, if I were in your situation.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t want to know. I made a few discreet inquiries. Now anyone I asked about her, however privately, no longer knows me. Retroactively. Never have. Some have gone to the trouble of scrubbing me from group images. As metrics of caution go, that one’s telling.”

“It isn’t something I can discuss now. Not this way.”

“No need. I’m calling to tell you that I’ve tendered my resignation.”

“From whatever new version of the project?”

“From the Ministry. I’ll be looking at the private sector.”

“Really?”

“Whatever it is you’re doing, Wilf, it isn’t good to know about. But I don’t, so I’ll keep it that way.”

“Then why call me?”

“Because in spite of myself I still give a shit about you. I have to go now. Whatever it is, consider getting out of it. Goodbye.” Her sigil vanished.

He waved his hand, stopping the shower, stepped out, groped for one of Lev’s grandfather’s thin black linen towels, dried his eyes and face.

He looked into the bedroom, where Penske had left the dancing master lying perfectly straight on the huge bed, like the carved lid of a knight’s sarcophagus, hands crossed upon its chest.

“‘Whatever it is,’” he said, quoting Rainey. Surprised to discover that he missed her, and that now he supposed he would have cause to continue to.

ISOPOD

W
ith Burton on the middle bed, blood on the sheets, under a drone surgical unit like the carapace of a giant pill bug, made of that same color plastic as Clovis’s pistol, the back room of Coldiron looked like a field hospital. The drone, controlled by a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, was sucked down tight around him, navel to just above his knees, and making a surprising amount of noise, as it did whatever they were making it do. Clunks and clicks as it worked on him. Extracting the shapeless bullet fragment, which it extruded on a little tray, patching the artery, closing up the hole in his leg. That was the plan, anyway. Hydrostatic shock hadn’t been that bad, Griff had told her, the ricochet off concrete having spilled a lot of energy. Otherwise, at that range, the impact itself might have killed him, in spite of the armor stopping the bullet.

The drone was somewhere else peripherals might come from, she thought, reminding her she had the Wheelie Boy on her lap, on the edge of the bed furthest from Conner. When she couldn’t look at Burton anymore, because he was unconscious, with a clear tube up his nose, sticky monitor-dots on his forehead and bare chest, and a couple of different tubes in his arm, she’d look over at Conner, face smooth and quiet, running something seventy years in the future, or at Griff, phone to his ear, nodding, talking but too low for her to hear. Then, when she could again, she’d look back at Burton.

The drone kept clunking. A pill bug was an isopod, not an insect.
The biggest ones lived in the ocean. Was that high school or
National Geographic
? She couldn’t remember.

Clovis had gone to take a shower. Cold to start, she’d said, and fully dressed, because that would probably get most of Burton’s blood out of her clothes. Flynne hadn’t even known there was a shower. Clovis said it was on a hose, in a janitorial closet, with a drain in the floor, and right then it didn’t seem particularly strange, Clovis explaining that, standing there with Burton’s blood all over her. He’d needed a transfusion, but they’d had plenty of blood, his type. Which meant they had Flynne’s type too, because they were the same. And they’d had this drone, that Clovis said was what the Secret Service kept handy in case the president got shot, and was maybe even being run by the same surgeons.

If Conner hadn’t been under the crown, she’d have had to explain it all to him. Not that she knew anything about it, other than what she’d seen. Tommy had phoned for some deputies to clean things up in the alley, after, get whoever had been waiting in those squidsuits out of there, and there hadn’t been one single siren. Shooters hadn’t been local, or the deputies would’ve let Tommy know who they were by now. And it was like nobody in town had heard the shooting.

There was something wrong with her now, she decided, looking over at her brother’s face while the drone clicked and whirred, all those little pill-bug legs doing whatever they were doing. She’d seen them glittering, as Carlos and Griff lifted it and put it down over him, Clovis kneeling by the bed with her bloody bright blue finger still stuck in his thigh, pressing on the artery, and then she’d pulled her finger out as the drone came to life, making its noises.

The thing that was wrong was that she’d gone to where she’d been that time in Operation Northwind, but now she couldn’t scream on the couch, or walk out on Janice’s porch to puke on the grass. Just sit here, on the edge of the bed she guessed would be hers, with the ringing in her ears, and beyond it the edges of Griff’s accent, talking softly
on his phone. She felt like Burton would be okay, but it worried her that she couldn’t feel more about it.

“You don’t look so good,” Tommy said, sitting down beside her and taking her hand, just like that was natural.

And she remembered Wilf’s hand, in that Oxford Street greenway, and the thing with floppy red wings, high up in the wet gray branches. “My ears are ringing,” she said.

“Be lucky if you don’t get any permanent loss,” he said. “Part of what you’re feeling now’s just decibel level. Affects your nervous system.”

“They were like the first four in that car,” she said. “Then those two down below the trailer. Dozen people dead, because of us.”

“You aren’t making them come after you.”

“I can’t tell anymore.”

“Not a good time to try to figure it out. But I’ve got something I have to run by you, while our man here’s on the phone. Not a good time for that either, but I have to do it.” He was looking at Griff.

“What?”

“I don’t want them using that shit on Luke 4:5. Not on anybody.”

“Party time?”

“You wouldn’t call it that, if you had any better idea what it does.”

“Burton said it’s a war crime.”

“It is,” he said, “and good reason. It’s an aerosol. They’d have a single little bird go down the line, painted black, tonight, spray ’em all.”

“What’s it do?”

“Stimulant, aphrodisiac, and, I have trouble pronouncing this, psychotomimetic.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It duplicates the condition of being totally serial-killer sadist bugfuck.”

“Fuck . . .”

“You wouldn’t want it on your conscience. Don’t want it on mine.”
He looked over at Burton. “Now I feel like shit for riding his ass, for what they did at Pickett’s.”

“He told me you were unhappy. Didn’t seem to hold it against you.”

“They didn’t know they’d set off those tanks of precursor. What they put on Conner’s gobot might’ve been fine just for Pickett and a few of his posse, which is frankly something I couldn’t hold against anybody. But they did blow up some poor assholes with no better way to make a living, on my watch, some of whom I knew to say hello to.” He gave her hand a squeeze, then let go of it.

She wondered who it was, up the line, had given Ash those crazy eyes, and whether they could do the same to somebody here, with the isopodal drone? Or if they might know how to fix whatever it was about Burton’s haptics that glitched him? Crazy things to wonder, but she felt a little better now. She reached over for Tommy’s hand again, because holding it and hearing his voice was making that Operation Northwind thing go away.

YOU GUYS

H
e was down in the well beneath Lev’s grandfather’s desk, looking for the Wheelie Boy headband. Flynne’s blank sigil seemed to be wherever he looked. “Positive it’s here,” he said, noticing a few pale flattened blobs of gum on the bottom of the marble desktop, near the chair. He imagined Lev pressing them there as a child. His fingers brushed something on the well’s carpeted floor. It moved. He fumbled for it. “Here it is.” He crawled up from beneath the desk, prize in hand.

“Fiddle with the cam,” she said. “You had it too close to your nose, last time.”

He sat in the chair, put the band on, tried to center the cam, and tongued the roof of his mouth. The sigil of the Wheelie Boy emulation app appeared, the feed opened, her blank sigil disappearing. She was seated at a table, against a backdrop of dull blue. The unit seemed to be on the table in front of her, but he didn’t try to move it, or change the angle or direction of its cam. “Hello?”

“Get it a little higher, more in line with your eyes.”

He tried to do that.

“Better,” she said. “Your nose is smaller.” She looked tired, he thought.

“How are you?”

“They fucking shot my brother.”

“Who did?”

“Guys in squidsuits. Clovis and Carlos killed ’em.”

“And your brother?”

“He’s asleep. They gave him something. Government drone gave him a long-distance operation. Got the bullet out, patched a hole in his artery, cleaned everything, stitched him up.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No. Feel fucked, but that’s not the problem.”

“What problem?”

“Lowbeer’s English boy. Back here. Griff. Gryffyd. Holdsworth. Tommy thinks Griff’s what he calls an intelligence liaison. Has diplomatic cover or some shit, out of their embassy in Washington. Lots of connections, government stuff. Our government, I mean. He got squidsuits and a micro-drone for Burton, to get me out of Pickett’s. Got the pill bug they used on Burton—”

“Pill bug?”

“No time. Just listen.”

“Griff is the problem?”

“Lowbeer. Griff’s setting up to do something here, to Luke 4:5—”

“Who?”

“They’re just assholes. You listen to me, okay?”

He nodded, then imagined that on the Wheelie Boy’s tablet.

“The competition’s using them to embarrass us, and probably hoping to get Burton out there so somebody can shoot him. He doesn’t like ’em to begin with, so they’re good bait. But Griff’s got this chemical weapon, called party time. Like every really bad builder drug rolled into one, but worse. If what it makes you do doesn’t kill you in the process, you’re liable to commit suicide from remembering what you did. Tommy says builders can’t find a survivable recreational dose. Go homeopathic on it, it monsters you out just as bad. Clovis already put me on the antidote. Griff’s planning to use it on Luke 4:5, and I’d bet tonight.”

“Then how is Lowbeer your problem?”

“She calls the shots. Either it’s her idea or his, but if it’s his, she signed off on it. Using that shit on anybody is just too crazy. Too mean. It’s your world.”

“My world?”

“Different way of doing things. Stone cold. But I’m not letting it happen, neither is Tommy, and if Burton were conscious, neither would he.”

“How would you stop it?”

“By letting her know I’m not going to the party with you, if they do that. They use it, we smash up the crowns, print new phones with different numbers, and pretend you guys don’t exist. Whatever shit comes down, we deal with it. And fuck you. Not you personally. You guys.”

“Seriously?”

“Shit yes.”

He looked at her.

“So?” she asked.

“So what?”

“You in?”

“In?”

“You tell her. She wants to talk to me, I’m right here. But they put any party time on those sorry assholes across the road, you’re going to that party alone. Me and my family, we’ll be out of the future business.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Call her,” she said. “I’m going to go talk to Griff.”

“Why would you do this? Without her, you’ll be in a desperate position. So might we, for that matter. And you’re doing it for the sake of . . . assholes?”

“They’re assholes. We’re not. But we’re only not assholes if we won’t do shit like that. You calling her?”

“Yes. But I don’t know why.”

“Because you’re not an asshole.”

“I wish I believed that.”

“Everybody’s got one. And an opinion to go with it, my mother says. It’s how you behave makes the difference. Now I’m going to turn you off and go tell Griff.” And she did.

MISSION STATEMENT

S
he was three steps into the back before she realized she was carrying the Wheelie Boy like a teddy bear. Not hugging it, but sort of in her arms. Fuck it.

They turned and looked at her. The red-haired notary from Klein Cruz Vermette, in cammies now and a Clovis-style crotch pouch. Blue surgical gloves. Seemed like she’d just finished putting clean sheets on Burton’s bed. Someone must’ve had to help her, because the pill bug was still all over him. She’d spread one relatively unstained sheet on the floor, between Burton’s bed and Conner’s, which was empty, and had a big ball of blood-stiff sheets on top of that. Clovis was beside Conner’s bed, in fresh clothes, doing something to the white crown on the table there. Griff was at the foot of Burton’s bed, phone to his ear, and as she came in, just his eyes moved.

“Where’s Conner?” she asked.

“Shower,” Clovis said. “Macon took him.”

“How’s Burton?”

“Vitals look good, Walter Reed says. They want him to sleep longer, so it’s still sedating him.”

“I will,” said Griff, to his phone, “thank you.” He lowered it.

“Need to talk,” she said, wishing she hadn’t brought the Wheelie.

“Yes, but not about what you assume we do.”

“The fuck we don’t.”

“Herself.” Holding up his phone. “Wiping party time off the mission statement.”

“You won’t do it?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Huh.” All pissed off, she wondered, and nowhere to go? “Was that shit her idea in the first place?”

“It was,” he said. “I didn’t feel it was appropriate, or advisable. She told me I was unaccustomed to operating from a position of strength.” With that, he gave her a look she couldn’t read. “Could we have a moment, Clovis, please?” The KCV girl, bloody sheet ball folded in the cleaner one, was on her way out. Clovis turned and followed her.

“Now she says she won’t do it?” She watched Clovis’s back vanish around the blue tarp. “Why?”

“Your conversation with the publicist.”

“She listened?”

“Assume she can access anything, any platform, always.”

“So she sits, and listens?”

“She has global intelligence feeds, analytical tools of tremendous functionality. The systems I work with here would surprise you, I imagine, but I have to take her word for what hers are capable of. She doubts anyone fully comprehends them, herself included, as they’ve become largely self-organizing. Having had to evolve from the sort I use today, I suppose. Which means that if you mention anything that concerns her, over or within reach of any platform whatsoever, she learns of it immediately. And at this point, I suppose, anything you speak of concerns her.”

“No party time?”

“Canceled.”

“But you couldn’t convince her yourself, that it sucked?”

“It’s a literally atrocious idea. Using it would constitute, morally and legally, an atrocity. Coldiron’s brand would be attached to something horrific, no matter how effectively we were able to spin the blame. Coldiron is concerned about the townspeople not being priced out of chili dogs, but willing to condone dosing religious protesters, however repellant, with something that turns them into homicidal erotomaniacs?”

“Coldiron knew? Who?”

“No. I knew. And Clovis.”

“She told me. But not what it was. Tommy told me what it does.”

“I had to bring him in. He needed to be prepared, to be ready to tidy up. I’m delighted you’ve put a stop to it.”

She looked at him. “I still don’t see why you couldn’t talk her out of it.”

“Because there’s a way in which I lack agency, in all of this. By virtue of more pressing concerns.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Lowbeer knows the history of her world, and the secret history of ours. The history that produced Lowbeer’s world includes the assassination of the president.”

“Gonzales? You shitting me?”

“She never finished her second term.”

“She gets elected again?”

“Exactly. And in Lowbeer’s view, Gonzales’s assassination was pivotal, a tipping point into the deeper jackpot.”

“Shit—”

“We may be able to change that.”

“Lowbeer knows how to fix history?”

“It isn’t history yet, here. She knows, in large part, what really happened here. But now the two have diverged, will continue to. The divergence can be steered, to some extent, but only very broadly. No guarantee of what we’ll ultimately produce.”

“She’s trying to stop the jackpot?”

“Ameliorate it, at best. We are, very much, already in it, here. She hopes, as do I, that the system in which she operates can be avoided in this continuum. She believes, and I agree, that a necessary step in that is the prevention of the assassination of Felicia Gonzales.”

She stared at him. Was this the loopiest bullshit ever, even after the past week? His pale gray eyes were wide, serious. “Who kills the president?”

“The vice president, not to put too fine a point on it.”

“Ambrose? Wally fucking Ambrose? He kills Gonzales?”

“What Coldiron and your competitor are doing could affect that outcome, but by crashing the global economy, which is a danger in itself. But I can’t know all of what she knows. It isn’t as though she could brief me, and in any case she’s far more experienced than I am. Were she to tell me the use of party time was necessary to prevent the assassination, I’d use it.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s explained her world to me. She’s shared the course of her career, her life. I don’t want it to go that way here.”

“Cute sister,” bellowed Conner, “where’s hot nurse?” His surviving arm, tattooed down its length with “
FIRST IN, LAST OUT
” in gang-style lettering, was pale around Macon’s neck. Macon himself was bare-chested, in wet shorts, hair matted from carrying Conner under the shower. He’d managed to get Conner mostly back into his Polartec. Now he carried him to his bed, put him down, helped him get his arm into the sole sleeve.

“Going back for my clothes,” Macon said, then looked at Flynne and Griff. “You two okay?”

“Fine,” said Flynne.

“Burton good?” Conner asked, squinting at her unconscious brother.

“Hospital says,” she said.

“Head office canceled the distribution,” Griff said to Macon.

“Okay,” said Macon. “You going to tell me what it would have been?”

“Another time,” Griff said.

Macon raised his eyebrows. “I’ll get my clothes.” He went out.

“Hot nurse said squidsuit fuckers popped a cap in his ass,” Conner said. “Girl’s a baller. Macon says she took down half of them. Fucking Carlos, he only got two.”

“Why aren’t you up in the future,” Flynne asked him, “flying your washing machine?”

“Man’s got to eat.”

Hong stepped sideways through the narrow vertical slit in the barricade, a foam box in one hand. “Shrimp bowl?”

“That’s me,” said Conner.

Hong saw Burton, raised his eyebrows. “He okay?”

“Wasn’t your cooking did it,” Conner said, “it was Jimmy’s. Nearly died of the runs.”

Flynne looked at Griff, who widened his eyes slightly, as if to say their real conversation was over, for a while at least.

Gonzales? Was he shitting her? Was Lowbeer shitting him?