The Peripheral (5 page)

THYLACINE

H
e’d wanted to impress her, and what better way than to offer her something money couldn’t buy? Something that had felt to him like a ghost story, when Lev had first explained it.

He’d told her about it in bed. “And they’re dead?” she’d asked.

“Probably.”

“A long time ago?”

“Before the jackpot.”

“But alive, in the past?”

“Not the past. When the initial connection’s made, that didn’t happen, in our past. It all forks, there. They’re no longer headed for this, so nothing changes, here.”

“My bed?” She spread her arms and legs, smiled.

“Our world. History. Everything.”

“And he hires them?”

“Yes.”

“What does he pay them with?”

“Money. Coin of their realm.”

“How does he get it? Does he go there?”

“You can’t go there. Nobody can. But information can be exchanged, so money can be made there.”

“Who did you say this is?”

“Lev Zubov. We were at school together.”

“Russian.”

“Family’s old klept. Lev’s the youngest. Man-child of leisure. Has hobbies, Lev. This is his latest.”

“Why haven’t I heard of it before?”

“It’s new. It’s quiet. Lev looks for new things, things his family might invest in. He thinks this one may be out of Shanghai. Something to do with quantum tunneling.”

“How far back can they go?”

“Twenty twenty-three, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”

“Remind me of it later.” She reached for him.

On the walls, the framed flayed hides of three of her most recent selves. Her newest skin beneath him, unwritten.

Ten at night now, in the kitchen of Lev’s father’s Notting Hill house, his house of art.

Netherton knew there was a house of love as well, in Kensington Gore, several houses of business, plus the family home in Richmond Hill. The Notting Hill house had been Lev’s grandfather’s first London real estate, acquired midcentury, just as the jackpot really got going. It reeked of the connections allowing it to quietly decay. There were no cleaners here, no assemblers, no cams, nothing controlled from outside. You couldn’t buy permission for that. Lev’s father simply had it, and likely Lev would too, though his two brothers, whom Netherton avoided if at all possible, seemed better suited to exercise the muscular connectedness needed to retain it.

He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window, as it did its stiff-tailed business beside an illuminated bed of hostas. He wondered what its droppings might be worth. There were competing schools of thylacinery, warring genomes, another of Lev’s hobbies. Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing, Lev had said. Or perhaps Dominika had a feed from its eyes. She didn’t like him. Had disappeared when he’d arrived, upstairs, or perhaps down into the traditionally deep iceberg of oligarchic subbasements.

“It’s not that simple,” Lev said now, placing a bright red mug of coffee on the scarred pine table in front of Netherton, beside a yellow bit of his son’s Lego. “Sugar?” He was tall, brownly bearded, archaically bespectacled, ostentatiously unkempt.

“It is,” Netherton said. “Tell her it stopped working.” He looked up at Lev. “You told me it might.”

“I told you that none of us have any idea when or why it started, whose server it might be, let alone how long it might continue to be available.”

“Then tell her it stopped. Is there any brandy?”

“No,” said Lev. “You need coffee. Have you met her sister, Aelita?” He took a seat opposite Netherton.

“No. I was going to. Before. They didn’t seem to be that close.”

“Close enough. Daedra didn’t want it. Neither would I, frankly. We don’t do that sort of thing, if we’re serious about continua.”

“Didn’t want it?”

“Had me give it to Aelita.”

“To her sister?”

“He’s part of Aelita’s security now. A very minor part, but she knows he’s there.”

“Fire him. End it.”

“Sorry, Wilf. She finds it interesting. We’re having lunch on Thursday, and I hope to explain that polts aren’t really what continua are about. I think she may get it. Seems bright.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you had your hands full. And frankly you weren’t making a great deal of sense, at that point. Daedra rang, told me you were sweet, that she didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but why didn’t I give it to her sister, who likes odd things. It didn’t feel to me as if you were slated to be a very permanent part of her life, so I didn’t think it would matter. And then Aelita rang, and she seemed genuinely curious, so I gave it to her.”

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.

EASY ICE

U
nstuck 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 F
LYNNE
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.

Gaming having taught her to pay attention to anything that didn’t fit, she tried to get a quick second look, down-cam, at the backpack. Couldn’t find it.

It overtook and passed her as she reached the thirty-seventh floor. Moving that way, it no longer reminded her of a backpack, but of the black egg case of an almost-extinct animal called a skate, that she’d seen on a beach in South Carolina, an alien-looking rectangle with a single twisted horn at each corner. Tumbling straight up the building now, in a smooth sequence of sticky-footed somersaults. Caught itself with the two tips of whichever pair of horns, or legs, was leading, flipped over, then propelled itself higher with the pair it had just used to grip the surface.

Following it up-cam, she tried to rise more quickly, but that still wasn’t under her control. Lost sight of it again. Maybe there had been a way for it to enter the building. She’d watched Macon print little pneumatic bots, like big leeches, that moved something like that, but slower.

Her mother called the skate case a mermaid’s purse, but Burton said the local people had called them devil’s handbags. It had looked like it ought to be dangerous, poisonous, but it wasn’t.

Kept an eye out for the thing, the rest of the way up to the fifty-sixth floor, where she found the same balcony folded down but the window frosted, disappointing. Guessed she’d missed the party, but maybe she could get an idea how it had gone. Bugs didn’t seem to be around. Whatever had kept the ride up like an elevator was gone now. She ran a quick perimeter check, hoping for another window, but nothing had changed. No bugs, either.

Back to the frosted glass. Gave it five minutes there, five more, then ran another perimeter. On the far side, a grate she hadn’t noticed before was steaming.

Starting to miss the bugs.

Down-camera, a very large vehicle with a single headlight went by, fast.

She’d just gotten around to the window again when it depolarized, and there was the woman, saying something to someone she couldn’t see.

Flynne stopped, let the gyros hold her there.

No sign there had ever even been a party. Room didn’t look the same at all, like the little bots had been moving serious furniture. The long table was gone. Now there were armchairs, a couch, rugs, softer lighting.

The woman wore striped pajama bottoms and a black t-shirt. Flynne guessed she’d only recently gotten out of bed, because she had the bedhead you could have with hair that good.

Check for bugs, she reminded herself, but they still weren’t there.

The woman laughed, as if the person Flynne couldn’t see had said something. Had that been her ass against the window, the time before? Was she talking to the man who’d kissed her, or tried to? Had that worked out after all, the party great, and then they’d spent the night together?

She forced herself to do another perimeter, a slow one, watching for bugs, the runaway backpack, anything. The steam had gone, and now she couldn’t see where the grate had been. That gave her the feeling
that the building was alive, maybe conscious, with the woman inside it laughing, high up in the bugless night. Thinking that, she felt close heat in the trailer, sweat trickling.

Darker now. So few lights in the city, and none at all on the big blank towers.

Coming back around, she found them standing at the window, looking out, his arm around her. Just that much taller than she was, like a model from an ad where they didn’t want to stress ethnicity, dark hair and the start of a beard to match, expression cold. The woman spoke, he answered, and the coldness Flynne had seen was gone. The woman beside him wouldn’t have seen it at all.

He wore a dark brown robe. You smile a lot, she thought.

Part of the glass in front of them was sliding sideways, and as it did, a skinny horizontal rod rose from the forward edge of the ledge, bringing up a quivering soap bubble. The rod stopped rising. Bubble became greenish glass.

She remembered the SS officer, when she’d worked for Dwight. Face of the man at the window reminded her.

She’d crouched for three days on Janice and Madison’s couch, taking her old phone when she ran to the bathroom and back, so as not to miss her chance to kill him.

Janice brought her the herbal tea Burton made her have with the wakey he’d left, white pills, built two counties over. No coffee, he said.

The SS officer was really an accountant in Florida, the man Dwight played against, and nobody had ever killed him. Dwight never fought, himself, just relayed orders from the tacticians he hired. The Florida accountant was his own tactician, and a stone killer to boot. When he won a campaign, which he usually did, Dwight lost money. That kind of gambling was illegal, and federally, but there were ways around that. Neither Dwight nor the accountant needed the money they won, or cared about what they lost, not really. Players like Flynne were paid on the basis of kills, and on how long they could survive in a given campaign.

She’d gotten to feeling that what the accountant most liked, about killing them, was that it really cost them. Not just that he was better at it than they were, but that it actually hurt them to lose. People on her squad were feeding their children with what they earned playing, and maybe that was all they had, like she was paying Pharma Jon for her mother’s prescriptions. Now he’d gone and done it again, killed everyone on her squad, one after another, taking his time, enjoying it. He was hunting her now, while she circled, alone, deeper into that French forest and the flying snow.

But then Madison called Burton, and Burton came over, sat on the couch beside her, watching her play, and told her how he saw it.

How the SS officer, convinced he was hunting her, wasn’t seeing it right. Because really, now, Burton said, she was hunting him. Or would be, as soon as she realized she was, while his failure to see it was a done deal, fully underway, growing, a wrong path. He said he’d show her how to see it, but he’d need her not to sleep. He gave Janice the white pills, drew a dosing schedule on a napkin. The accountant would sleep, in Florida, leaving his character on some very good AI, but Flynne wouldn’t.

So Janice had given her the pills according to the napkin, and Burton had kept coming around, on some schedule of his own, to sit with her and watch, and tell her how he saw it. And sometimes she felt him jerk, haptic misfire, while he was helping her find her own way of seeing it. Not to learn it, he said, because it couldn’t be taught, but to spiral in with it, each turn tighter, further into the forest, each turn closer to seeing it exactly right. Down into that one shot across the clearing she found there, where the sudden mist of airborne blood, blown with the snow, was like the term balancing an equation.

She’d been alone on the couch, then. Janice heard her scream.

Got up, walked out on their porch, puked up tea, shaking. Cried while Janice washed her face. And Dwight gave her so much money. But she never once walked point for him again, or ever saw that ragged France.

So why was this all up in her now, watching this guy with the little beard squeeze the woman beside him closer? Why, when she’d run her perimeter around the corner, did she take it up to fifty-seven and double back?

Why was she all Easy Ice now, if this wasn’t a shooter?