Zero History

by William Gibson

  “Thank you,” said Milgrim. “Thanks for the banana.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Milgrim crossed the road, hearing the van start behind him, drive away. He kept walking. Through grass, across a paved walk, into more grass. Such a peculiar, slightly ragged emptiness, the grass uneven. None of the landscaping, the deep architecture, the classical bones, of this city’s parks. Waste ground. The grass was wet, though if it had been raining earlier, he hadn’t noticed. Dew, perhaps. He felt it through his socks, though Tanky & Tojo’s brogues were better for this than pavement, the black lugs digging in. Walking shoes. He imagined walking somewhere with Fiona, somewhere as wide as this but less spooky. He wondered if she liked that. Did motorcycle people like walking? Had he ever liked walking? He stopped and looked up at London’s luminous, faintly purple sky, all the lights of Europe’s largest city caught, held there, obscuring all but a few stars. He looked back, across the wide, well-lit road, to an ordinary, orderly jumble of housing he didn’t culturally understand, houses or flats or condos, and then back to the oddness of these Scrubs. It felt as though you could score here. He couldn’t imagine that a city this size wouldn’t conduct drug traffic in a place like this.

  Then he heard a low whistle. “Here,” Fiona called softly, “get under.”

  He found her huddled under a thin tarp, in one of the more esoteric new camouflage patterns Bigend was interested in. He couldn’t remember which one, but now he saw how well it worked.

  “Not with the penguin! Get your controller. Hurry.” She sat cross-legged, spoke quietly, her own iPhone glowing green on her lap. She pulled the balloon down, unclipped its tether at either end, and released it. It rose slowly, burdened with the Taser. Milgrim took the penguin’s iPhone from his pocket, squatted beside her, and she drew the fabric around them both, leaving heads and hands exposed. “Get on it,” she said. “Fly. Take it up, away from the road. I can’t talk now, work of my own.” He saw she wore one of the earplug headsets. “You’re looking for a tall man. He was wearing a raincoat, overcoat. No hat. Short hair, probably gray. He has a parcel, something wrapped in paper, a few feet long.”

  “Where?”

  “Lost him. Tap the green circle if you want night vision, but it’s no help on the penguin unless you’re right up on something.”

  Milgrim turned on his iPhone, saw a blank glowing screen, then realized that the penguin’s camera was seeing empty sky. It was so much nicer, he instantly realized, when you didn’t have to worry about bumping the wall or ceiling of the cube. He swam higher, strangely free.

  “Is this guy wearing a hockey jersey with a face painted on it?” She showed him her screen. Looking down on a figure in a huge pullover of some kind, the back presenting a grotesque and enormous face.

  “Looks Constructivist,” he said. “El Lissitzky? He’s breaking into that car?” The man stood close to a black sedan, his back to the camera on Fiona’s helicopter.

  “Locking it. Already broke in, now he’s locking it.” Her fingers moved and the image blurred, her drone, compared to the air penguin, moving with startling speed.

  “Where are you going?” Meaning the drone.

  “Have to check the other three. Then I have to set it down, save batteries. Been in the air since I got here. Are you looking for the man with the parcel?”

  “Yes,” said Milgrim, and sent the penguin swimming down, into the relative darkness of the Scrubs. “Who are the other three?”

  “One’s Chombo. Then the one from that car, that tried to block you in, in the City.”

  Foley.

  “The other one’s a footballer, with metal hair.”

  “Metal hair?”

  “More like a mullet. Big lad.”

  79. DUNGEON MASTER

  Hollis stood behind him, trying to pretend she was watching someone play a game, something tedious and self-importantly arcane, on multiple screens. Something that didn’t matter, was of no great importance, on which nothing depended.

  A game with undergraduate production values. No music, no sound effects. Garreth the dungeon master, defining the quests, setting tasks, issuing gold and sigils of invisibility.

  Better to look at it that way, but she couldn’t make it stick. She leaned back, against aubergine-coated automotive steel, the coolness of it, and watched the video feed from Fiona’s drone.

  Whatever Fiona was flying felt hummingbird-swift, capable of brilliantly sudden pause and sustained hover, but also of elevator-like ascents and descents. All in the pale green monochrome of night vision. Her cameras were better than Milgrim’s, expensively optimized. Hollis, with no idea what it might look like, imagined it a huge dragonfly, its body the size of a baguette, the pulsing wings iridescent.

  It had hovered, watching four men emerge from a black sedan. A Mercedes hire-car, Garreth had said, having somehow checked plate numbers.

  Two of the men were tall, broad-shouldered, and efficient-looking. Another, shorter, almost certainly Foley, limped. The fourth, whose posture she now recalled from Los Angeles and Vancouver, a perpetual petulant slump, was Bobby Chombo, Bigend’s pet mathematician. That same annoying haircut, half of his thin face lost behind an unwashed diagonal curtain. There he’d been, below Fiona’s dragonfly, as if in a pale green steel engraving, wrapped in what looked like a robe or dressing gown. Neurasthenic, she remembered Inchmale delighting in calling him. He’d said that neurasthenia was coming back, and that Bobby was ahead of the curve, an early adapter.

  Garreth took it for granted that one of the taller men, the one in the dark raincoat, carrying a rectangular package, was Gracie. This based, Hollis gathered, on the other’s having some kind of archaic rocker hair, hair that reminded her of one of Jimmy’s junkie friends, a drummer from Detroit.

  When the four of them, Foley seeming to be leading Chombo, had moved on, away from the car, Garreth had had Fiona dip down to read the car’s plate number, and peek through the window, in case they’d left someone to watch it, a complication that Hollis gathered would have required some other and more unpleasant skill on Pep’s part. The car had been empty, and Fiona, aloft again, had found them easily, still moving, but the one Garreth thought was Gracie was gone, missing, and still was, his package with him. Fiona had been unable to look for him then, because Garreth had needed her back at the car, so that he could vet Pep’s arrival and subsequent burglary, which had taken all of forty-six seconds, passenger-side door, complete with lockup.

  Pep, following instructions, hadn’t been wearing the messenger bag, and Hollis assumed he’d deposited the other party favor, whatever it might be, in the car, that being evidently the plan. And then he was gone, his dual-engined electric bicycle, utterly silent, capable of an easy sixty miles per hour, never having intersected with the focal cones of any of the cameras showing on the screen of Garreth’s laptop. Had it, Garreth said, the resulting image of a riderless bicycle might have negated the whole exercise.

  The camera-map, on Garreth’s laptop, was grayscale, the cones of camera-vision red, each one fading to pink as it spread from its apex. Occasionally, one of them would move as an actual given camera motored on its axis. She had no idea where this particular display was being darknetted from, and she was glad that she didn’t.

  The screen that offered Milgrim’s video feed, she thought, seemed entirely out of step with the operation, and perhaps for that reason she found herself going back to it, though it wasn’t very interesting. With Gracie still unaccounted for, she felt Garreth’s nerves. He could have used someone who knew what they were doing, she guessed, on another drone like Fiona’s.

  Whatever Milgrim was flying, it seemed leisurely, almost comical, though capable of invigorating bursts of sustained forward motion. Having been instructed, via Fiona, to make a circuit of the area, looking for Gracie, he had, though Garreth had complained that he was too high. Now he was cruising, she saw, above vegetation scrubby enough to warrant the name, Garreth apparently having forgotten about him. But noth
ing had been expected of Milgrim and his drone, she knew. He’d been given the job to keep him out of Bigend’s hands.

  The sound of a very long zipper being stealthily undone. She glanced to the right and saw Heidi touch her upraised forefinger to her lips.

  “Our two,” Garreth said to the headset, “are starting for point now. Put it down about twenty meters west of point. We’ll have to run with the batteries you have.” That would be Fiona.

  As he spoke, Heidi slipped through the fly and slowly lowered the zipper, closing it behind her.

  Point, Hollis knew, would be the GPS coordinates that Gracie had specified as the site of the exchange.

  On Fiona’s screen, the perspective suddenly dropped to knee-height, then raced forward over darkly blurred grass, as if from the viewpoint of a hyperkinetic child.

  Milgrim, she saw, had reached the end of the scrub, and was turning slowly around for more.

  I hope she just had to pee, thought Hollis, glancing back at the long plastic zipper.

  80. FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE

  Look,” said Fiona, “it’s you.”

  Garreth had ordered her aloft again. Now she showed Milgrim her iPhone, the camo tarp rustling around them.

  “That’s Ajay?” Two figures on the little screen, from a high angle, steel-engraved in washed-out green. One of them shuffling, dejected, head down, shoulders too wide for Milgrim’s jacket. The other man was short, broad, something round and flat on his head. Ajay’s hands were together, crossed, just above crotch-level, in what looked like a gesture of modesty. Handcuffed.

  Fiona swung down, hovered, catching them as they passed, into and out of frame. Milgrim thought Ajay was doing a good job of conveying abject surrender, but otherwise he didn’t see the resemblance. Chandra seemed to have done a better job with the spray-on hair this time.

  The other man, Milgrim thought, looked as if someone had subjected the Dalai Lama to the gravity of a planet with greater mass than Earth’s. Short, extremely sturdy, age-indeterminate, he wore a sort of beret, level across his forehead, with a pom-pom on top.

  As the subjects left her frame, Fiona’s thumbs moved, whirling the point of view back up, reminding Milgrim to check his own iPhone, where he found his penguin looking at grass and low bushes.

  When he glanced back, Fiona had found three more figures, approaching on the Scrubs.

  One was Chombo, still furled in his tissue-thin coat, and looking much more convincingly unhappy than Ajay’s Milgrim. To Chombo’s left came Foley, limping visibly, wearing darker pants than the ones that had elicited his nickname. He still had his cap, though, and the short dark jacket he’d worn in Paris. On Chombo’s right, Milgrim saw, to his horror, was the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, Winnie’s other Mike, the one with the mullet and the knife in his Toters.

  “He wants you over here,” Fiona said, meaning where her drone was, “looking for the one I lost. Move.”

  Milgrim sank his concentration into the bright little rectangle, penguin-space, his thumbs tapping. He rolled, corrected for it, swam higher in the air.

  Fiona’s drone’s night vision was so much better than the penguin’s. The penguin’s suffered from a kind of infrared myopia; the darker it was, the closer he had to get, and the brighter he had to make the penguin’s infrared LEDs. Which were none too bright to begin with, according to Fiona. The grass below presented in a sort of cheesy pointillism, monochrome, faintly green, stripped of detail. Though if anyone were there, he thought, he’d see them.

  And then he found Chombo, and Foley, and the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, still walking.

  He had the penguin on auto-swim. He took over, stilled the wings, and let momentum carry him out in the gentle arc provided by his adjustment of the tail, something he was already better at.

  Over something in the grass.

  A hole? A large rock? He tried to slow himself, using the wings in reverse, but this caused him to roll, catching a blank screen of light-pollution. He righted himself. Nothing below. He began to swim down, using the wings on manual.

  A man sat on the grass, cross-legged, something rectangular on his lap. A dark coat, short pale hair. Then gone, the penguin, in spite of Milgrim’s best efforts, having overshot, glided on.

  Fiona had told him, twice, how lucky they were to have no breeze tonight, all calm in the Thames Valley, yet he couldn’t steer the penguin well enough to see a man somewhere immediately below him. He took a deep breath, lifted his thumbs from the screen. Let things settle. Let the penguin become a simple balloon, up in the windless air. Then start again.

  “Twenty feet off site,” he heard Fiona say, very quietly, “and closing.”

  81. ON SITE

  I saw him,” Hollis said, not quite believing it herself. “I think Milgrim saw him too, but then he was gone.”

  “I know,” said Garreth, “but we’re go now.”

  Fiona’s drone hovered as Ajay and the man called Charlie reached the other three, who now stood waiting. Charlie put his hand on Ajay’s arm, stopping him. Ajay stood with his head lowered.

  Now Foley led Chombo forward. Chombo squirmed, looking in every direction, and Hollis saw the black O of his mouth. Foley jabbed his hand into Chombo’s ribs.

  Garreth touched the switchbox. “Hit him,” he said.

  She saw Ajay blur, or teleport, across the space separating him from Foley. Whatever befell Foley, on Ajay’s arrival, was equally, invisibly fast, with Ajay seeming to have spun and grabbed Chombo before Foley had hit the grass.

  Now Charlie, the short, fridge-shaped man with the plaid tam, was between those two and the man with the mullet.

  She never saw the man’s knife, only the way he held his hand, as he closed with Charlie, and then she saw him fall, though Charlie seemed only to have stepped back. The man rolled, sprang up, almost as quickly as Ajay had pounced on Foley, lunged again, fell.

  “Charlie tried to teach me that, once,” said Garreth, “but I couldn’t bring myself to be sufficiently superstitious.”

  By now the man was on the ground again, without Charlie ever having seemed to touch him.

  “Why does he keep falling?”

  “Some kind of Ghurka feedback loop. But your Foley’s not getting up. Hope Ajay didn’t overdo it.”

  Hollis glanced up, saw Milgrim’s screen. The gray-haired man. A rifle— “He has a gun—”

  “Fiona,” he said, “shooter. Under the penguin. Now.”

  82. LONDON EYE

  Thumbing the wings to rotate, slowly, just briefly enough, in opposite directions, had brought the penguin around, but had presented Milgrim with the iconic silhouette of a Ruchnoy Pulemyot Kalashnikova, for which he’d instantly lost all English.

  It lay across Gracie’s legs, metal shoulder-stock unfolded, as Gracie attached the curved magazine, a humble unit about which Milgrim, in his period of government employment, had known an absurd amount. The Russian for terminologies for every piece of machinery used to produce them: stampers and spot-welders and so many more. He’d noticed them ever since, on television screens, those magazines: ubiquitous objects in the world’s harsher places, never auguring good.

  “Fuck,” from Fiona, beside him, just the least little plosive. Then: “On it.”

  Gracie pulled something back, on the side of the rifle, released it, sat up and forward, bringing his knees up, settling the orthopedic-looking stock against his shoulder.

  The penguin paddling down, it seemed, of its own accord, as Gracie leaned his cheek in. Barrel moving, slightly—

  Jerking, as something dark and rectangular shot beneath it. Fiona’s drone.

  Gracie looked up. Through the penguin, directly at Milgrim. Who must have done that awkward thing, though he could never remember it, the configuration she’d shown him in the cube.

  Something smashed Gracie down, and sideways, out of his sniper’s posture, an idiot giant’s invisible hand, the penguin jerking simultaneously, image blurring. Milgrim never saw the wires at al
l, those fifteen feet of them, but he supposed they were very thin.

  Gracie rolled on his back, convulsed as Milgrim fired the Taser again. “Galvanism,” the word recalled from high school biology. Gracie grabbed invisible strings. Milgrim tapped the screen again. Gracie jerked again, held on.

  “Stop!” Fiona said. “Garreth says!”

  “Why?”

  “Stop!”

  Milgrim raised both thumbs, obedient now, terrified that he’d done something irrevocable.

  Gracie sat up, clawing at his neck, then gave the invisible string a vicious yank, blurring the image again.

  And then the penguin was rising, slowly, away from him. Milgrim’s thumbs went to the wings. Nothing happened. He tried the tail, tried auto-swim. Nothing. Still rising. He saw Gracie stagger to his feet, sway, then run, out of frame, as the penguin, freed of its unaccustomed ballast of Taser, ascended of its own accord into the calm predawn air of the Thames Valley.

  He thought he glimpsed the wheel of the London Eye, just as Fiona thrust her own iPhone in front of his.

  83. PLEASE GO

  What was that?” she asked.

  “Milgrim,” he said, shaking his head, “Tasered Gracie. It’s a good thing I’m retiring. Milgrim just saved our bacon.”

  “Milgrim had the Taser?”

  “On his balloon. Hello? Darling?” To the headset now. “Get us over the car, please. And hurry, you’re running on fumes.”

  “Who was Gracie trying to shoot?”

  “Chombo first, I imagine. Do Big End the most harm that way. Either when he saw that we weren’t dealing in good faith, or because he’d planned to all along. Initially, I thought he might just play it straight, local rules, get Milgrim, make his point. Hoping he wouldn’t go the full American on us, in London, in a public place, dead of night. Mad, really. But Milgrim’s secret agent thinks it’s a midlife crisis. If he’d fired, the area would be knee-deep in police in another minute, and entirely the wrong kind. Which would actually put him where we want him, though then they’d likely have us too.”