The Peripheral (9 page)

ARCHAISM

L
istening to her, Netherton found he lost himself, not unpleasantly. Her accent fascinated him, a voice out of pre-jackpot America.

There had been a Flynne Fisher in the world’s actual past. If she were alive now, she’d be much older. Though given the jackpot, and whatever odds of survival, that seemed unlikely. But since Lev had only touched her continuum for the first time a few months earlier, this Flynne would still be very like the real Flynne, the now old or dead Flynne, who’d been this young woman before the jackpot, then lived into it, or died in it as so many had. She wouldn’t yet have been changed by Lev’s intervention and whatever that would bring her.

“Those voices,” she said, having finished her account of the first shift, “before the twentieth floor. Couldn’t make them out. What were they?”

“I’m not familiar with the particulars of your brother’s assignment,” he said, “at all.” She was wearing what he took to be a rather severe black military shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, with epaulets, and something in scarlet, possibly cursive, above the left pocket. She had dark eyes, dark brown hair that might as well have been cut by a Michikoid. He wondered if she’d been in the same unit Lev had mentioned her brother having been in.

Ash was giving him the girl’s feed, and had centered it in his field of vision to facilitate eye contact. He was supposed to keep his head down, pretend to be viewing her on the dead monitor, but he kept forgetting to.

“Burton said they were paparazzi,” she said. “Little drones.”

“Do you have those?” She made him conscious of how vague his sense of her day actually was. History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome. Too much of it and you became Ash, obsessed with a catalog of vanished species, addicted to nostalgia for things you’d never known.

“You don’t have drones, in Colombia?”

“We do,” he said. Why, he wondered, did she appear to be seated in a submarine, or perhaps some kind of aircraft, its interior coated with self-illuminated honey?

“Ask her,” said Lev, “about what she witnessed.”

“You’ve described your first shift,” said Netherton. “But I understand there was an event, during your second. Can you describe that?”

“The backpack,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Like a little kid’s knapsack, but made out of some shitty-looking gray plastic. Tentacle thing at four corners. Sort of legs.”

“And when did you first encounter this?”

“Came out of the hatch in the van, same deal, straight up. Past twenty, those voices were gone, like before. Then I spotted it, climbing.”

“Climbing?”

“Somersaulting, like backflips. Moving right along. Passed it, lost track. Thirty-seventh, it caught up with me, passed me. Lost it again. Got to fifty-six, got control of the copter, there’s no bugs. Did the perimeter, no paparazzi, no sign of the gray thing. Then the window defrosted.”

“Depolarized.”

“What I thought,” she said. “Saw the woman I saw before the party. Party’s over, different furniture, she’s in pj’s. Somebody else there, but I couldn’t see. Saw her make eye contact, laugh. Did another perimeter. They were at the window, when I got back.”

“Who?”

“The woman,” she said. “Guy beside her, early thirties maybe, dark hair, some beard. Kind of racially nonspecific. Brown bathrobe.” Her expression had changed. She was looking in his direction, or in the direction of his image on her phone, but she was seeing something else. “She couldn’t see the look on his face, because she was beside him, had his arm around her. He knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That it was about to kill her.”

“What was?”

“Backpack. I knew they’d see the copter. A door was opening, in the glass. A kind of railing was rolling up, for the balcony. They were going to step out. I had to move. I went like I was making another perimeter, but I stopped around the corner. Took it up to fifty-seven, doubled back.”

“Why?”

“Look on his face. Just wrong.” Her face still, utterly serious. “It was over the window, on the front of fifty-seven. Morphed so it looked like the rest of the shit on the building, same kind of shape, same color, but everything else was wet. It was dry. Sort of breathing.”

“Breathing?”

“Swelling, going flat, swelling. Just a little.”

“You were above them?”

“They were at the railing, looking out. Toward the river. I wanted to get an image, didn’t know how. I’d managed it by accident, with a bug, first shift. Figured there was a proximity trigger, but I didn’t know exactly what I was flying. When I got a little closer, it spit something. Fast, too small to see. Started hitting the camera I had on it. Taking a bite out each time. I killed the props before it could spit any more, dropped about three floors, caught myself. Biter’s gone, I took it left, then straight up. He was behind her. Putting her hands over her eyes. Kissing her fucking ear. Whispering something. ‘Surprise.’ I bet he said ‘surprise.’ He was stepping back, turning, headed in. And those things are coming out of it, lots of them. Saw him look up. He
knew. Knew it would be there.” She looked down, as if at her hands. Back up at him. “I tried to ram his head. But he was fast. Went down on his knees. Then they were inside her, eating her. And he was up and in and the door was gone and the window went gray. I think the first one killed her. Hope it did.”

“This is horrible,” said Ash.

“Hush,” ordered Lev.

“She was leaning back against the railing,” she said, “and it started to roll down, retract. She went over. Fell. I followed her down. They ate her up. Almost to the ground. Just what she was wearing. That was all that was left.”

“Is this the woman you saw?” asked Netherton, raising Ash’s matte print of a headshot from Aelita’s site.

She looked at it, from seventy-some years before, in a past that was no longer quite the one that had produced his world, and nodded.

CELTIC KNOT

S
he lay in bed, the curtains closed, not sure what she felt. Sick sad shit in the game that looked like London, Conner and his Tarantula in the parking lot at Jimmy’s, Burton telling her about Coldiron, about somebody taking a contract out on him because of what she’d seen, then getting home with him to his posse of other vets.

And finally telling her story to Wilf Netherton, who’d looked like a low-key infomercial for an unnamed product. Burton hadn’t been around, when that was finished, so she’d walked up the hill alone, wondering why, if the thing she’d been in was a game of some kind, somebody would want to kill Burton, thinking he’d been there instead of her. For having seen a kill in a game? When she’d asked Netherton about that, he’d said he didn’t know, like he didn’t know why there was no capture, wasn’t anxious to know, and that she shouldn’t be either. Which had felt to her like when he was realest.

Her mother, up early, had been making coffee in the kitchen, in her bathrobe older than Flynne was, with the oxygen tube under her nose. Flynne had kissed her, declined coffee, been asked where she’d been, said Jimmy’s. “Older than dirt, Jimmy’s,” her mother had said.

She’d taken a banana and a glass of filtered water upstairs. Saved some of the water for brushing her teeth. Noticed, as she always did when she brushed them, that the brass fittings on the sink had once been plated, but now there were only little flecks of chrome left, mostly near the porcelain.

She’d gone back into her room, closed the door, taken off her
debadged Coffee Jones shirt, her bra and jeans, put on a big USMC sweatshirt of Burton’s and gotten into bed.

To sort of vibrate, exhausted but far from sleep. Then she remembered that she had an app for Burton and Leon’s drone games on her old phone, and that Macon would have moved it to her new one along with the rest of her stuff. She got the phone from beneath the pillow and checked. There it was. She launched it, selected a top-down view, and saw a low satellite image of their property, the roof she lay under a gray rectangle, while above it moved, in a complicated dance, the twenty drones, each one shown as a point of light, weaving something she knew to call, if only from tattoos, a Celtic knot. Each one to be replaced by one of the twenty spares, then recharged, in rotation.

Burton won a lot of drone games, was really good at them, Haptic Recon 1 having been about them, so many ways. Even, she’d heard someone say, that Burton himself had been a sort of drone, or partially one, when he’d still had the tattoos.

Watching the drones weave their knot above her house seemed to help. Soon she thought she might be able to sleep. She closed the app, shoved her phone under the pillow, closed her eyes.

But just before she did sleep, she saw the woman’s t-shirt and striped pajama pants, fluttering and turning, down into the street.

Fuckers.

ANATHEMA

T
he thylacine preceded Lev into the Mercedes, its claws ticking dryly on pale wood. It regarded Netherton beadily and yawned, dropping a jaw of quite noticeably undoglike length, like a small crocodile’s but opening in the opposite direction.

“Hyena,” Netherton greeted it unenthusiastically. He’d spent the night in the master cabin, which made the gold-veined desk seem austere.

Lev frowned, Ash behind him.

Ash wore what he’d come to think of as her sincerity suit, a long-sleeved one-piece cut from dull gray felt, an antique aluminum zip running from crotch to throat. It was covered with a multitude of patch pockets, some of them stapled on. Wearing it, he’d noted before, seemed to dampen her more florid gestural tendencies, as well as hiding her animals. It signified, he assumed, that she wished to be taken more seriously.

“So you’ve slept on it,” Lev said, absently bending to stroke Tyenna’s flanks.

“Have you brought coffee?”

“The bar will make you whatever you like.”

“It’s locked.”

“What would you like?”

“An Americano, black.”

Lev went to the bar, applied his thumb to the oval. It opened instantly. “An Americano, black,” he said. It produced one, almost
silently. Lev brought it to him, steaming. “What did you make of her story?” Passing him the cup and saucer.

“Assuming she told me the truth,” Netherton said, watching as Tyenna closed her mouth and swallowed, “and if that was Aelita she saw . . .” He caught Lev’s eye. “Not an abduction.” He sipped his coffee, which was painfully hot but quite good.

“We’d hoped to find out what her building says happened,” Lev said.

“I hadn’t,” Ash said, “rumor having it that it doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t what?” Netherton asked.

“Say,” said Ash. “Or know.”

“How could her building not know?” Netherton asked.

“In the sense that this house doesn’t know,” said Lev. “That can also be arranged on a temporary basis, but it requires . . .” He made a small, quick, multifingered, pianist-like, iconically Russian gesture: klept, but of some degree not to be spoken of.

“I see,” said Netherton, who didn’t.

“We’re going to need capital, in the stub,” said Ash. “Ossian is reaching the end of what he can improvise. If you wish to maintain a presence—”

“Not a presence,” said Lev. “It’s mine.”

“Not exclusively,” said Ash. “Our visitors didn’t hesitate to book themselves an assassination, on coming through the door. If they outcapitalize us, we’ll be helpless. Your family’s quants, however . . .” Netherton decided that she’d donned the felt suit before attempting to convince Lev to allow his family’s financial modules access to the stub. He looked at Lev. It was not, he decided, going to be easy.

“Ossian,” Lev said, “can optimize manipulation of virtual currencies in their online games. He’s working on it.”

“If our visitors were to buy a politician,” said Ash, “or the head of an American federal agency, we’d find ourselves playing catch-up. And possibly losing.”

“I’m not interested in creating a mess more baroque than the one
they’re historically in,” said Lev. “That’s what happens, with too much interference. As it is, I’ve let Wilf talk me into letting someone use polts like some ludicrous form of artisanal AI.”

“Best get used to it, Lev.” Ash almost never used his name. “Someone else has access. It stands to reason that whoever it is is better connected than we are, since we’ve absolutely no idea how to get into anyone else’s stub.”

“Can’t you,” asked Netherton, “just jump forward and see what happens? Look in on them a year later, then correct for that?”

“No,” said Ash. “That’s time travel. This is real. When we sent our first e-mail to their Panama, we entered into a fixed ratio of duration with their continuum: one to one. A given interval in the stub is the same interval here, from first instant of contact. We can no more know their future than we can know our own, except to assume that it ultimately isn’t going to be history as we know it. And, no, we don’t know why. It’s simply the way the server works, as far as we know.”

“The idea of bringing in family resources,” said Lev, “is anathema.”

“My middle name,” Ash was unable to resist pointing out.

“I know that,” said Lev.

“I suppose,” Netherton said to Lev, putting his empty cup down on its saucer, “that it’s been one of a very few places in your life where there’ve been none. Family resources.”

“Exactly.”

“In that case,” Ash said, “plan B.”

“Which is?” Lev asked.

“We feed a combination of historical, social, and market data to freelance quants, plus information we obtain in the stub, and they game us a share of the economy there. They won’t grind as finely, as powerfully, as quickly, as your family’s finance operation, but it may be enough. And you’ll have to pay them. Here, with real money.”

“Do it,” said Lev.

“Formal notice, then,” she said, “that my first recommendation was
use of your family’s quants. These children at the LSE are bright, but they aren’t that.”

“Children?” asked Netherton.

“If we find ourselves undercapitalized,” Ash said to Lev, “you won’t be able to blame me.”

Netherton decided then that really she’d wanted Lev to do what he’d just agreed to, which surprised him. He hadn’t thought of her as that effectively manipulative. Probably it had been Ossian’s idea. “Well, then,” he said, “this has been fascinating. I hope you’ll remember to keep me up-to-date. Delighted to have been able to help.”

They both stared at him.

“Sorry,” he said, “I have a lunch date.”

“Where?” asked Ash.

“Bermondsey.”

She raised an eyebrow. A drawing of a chameleon flicked its head up, out of her collar band of stiff gray felt, and withdrew as quickly, as if seeing them there.

“Wilf,” said Lev, “we need you here.”

“You can always reach me.”

“We need you,” said Lev, “because we’ve called the police.”

“The Met,” said Ash.

“On the basis of the polt’s sister’s story,” said Lev, “and given what we know of the situation here, we’d no choice but to alert legal.” That would be his family’s solicitors, whom Netherton assumed would constitute something of an industry unto themselves. “They’ve arranged a meeting. Of course you’ll have to be there.”

“Detective Inspector Lowbeer will be expecting you,” said Ash. “Very senior. You wouldn’t want to disappoint her.”

“If Anathema’s your middle name,” Netherton asked her, “is Ash your first?”

“That would be Maria,” she said. “Ash is my surname. There was a final
e
, but my mother had it amputated.”