The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  “You may find your reentry disorienting,” said Ash, beside her, in the elevator.

  “I didn’t, before.”

  “There’s a cumulative effect, aside from jet lag.”

  “Jet lag?”

  “The endocrine equivalent. You’re five hours behind London time, where you are, plus there’s an inherent six-hour difference between the time here and the time in your continuum.”

  “Why?”

  “Purely accidental. Established when we happened to manage to send our first message to your Colombia. That remains fixed. Do you suffer much, from jet lag?”

  “Never had it,” Flynne said. “Flying’s too expensive. Burton had it in the Marines.”

  “Aside from that, the more time you spend here, the more likely you are to notice dissonance on returning. Your peripheral’s sensorium is less multiplex than your own. You may find your own sensorium seems richer, but not pleasantly so. More meaty, some say. You’ll have gotten used to a slightly attenuated perceptual array, though you likely don’t notice it now.”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “Not really. But best be aware that it happens.”

  The bronze doors opened.

  Ossian drove them to Netherton’s RV in a golf cart that made no more noise than the elevator. Netherton had taken the seat beside hers. She could smell the whiskey. Conner sat behind him. Those rafters lit up, one after another, as the cart rolled under them. Past grilles and headlights of all those old cars. She turned, looking back at Conner. “Who’ve you got at your place, when you get back?”

  “Macon, maybe.”

  “Ash says it might be weird for me. Might be weird for you too. Like jet lag and stuff.”

  Conner grinned, through the peripheral’s bone structure but somehow it was totally him. “I can do that standing on my head. When we coming back?” He widened the peripheral’s eyes.

  “I don’t know, but it won’t be that long. You need to eat, sleep if you can.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Trying to find out what’s going on,” she said, as she saw that headless robot exercise thing, standing where they’d left it.

  54.

  IMPOSTOR SYNDROME

  I wouldn’t have imagined this as your sort of place,” Ash said, looking at what Netherton knew to be only the first of several themed environments, this one hyper-lurid dawn in a generic desert. Something vaguely to do with downed airships, it was on the floor above the Kensington High Street showrooms of a designer of bespoke kitchens. She’d driven him here in one of Lev’s father’s antiques, an open two-seater reeking of fossil fuel.

  “I was here once with friends,” he said. “Their idea, not mine.”

  She was enfolded, or encased, depending, in a Napoleonic greatcoat apparently rendered in soot-stained white marble. When she was still, it looked like sculpted stone. When she moved, it flowed like silk. “I thought you hated this sort of thing.”

  “You’re the one telling me Lowbeer wants me to approach Daedra now. She insists I not phone from Lev’s.”

  “She also insists on returning you there herself,” she said. “Please be careful. We can’t protect you, here. Particularly not from yourself.”

  “You should stay, really,” he said, trusting that she wouldn’t, “have a drink.”

  “You probably shouldn’t, but it isn’t my decision.” She walked away, into a cheesily augmented surround rivaling the one in Lev’s father’s blue salon.

  “Your pleasure, sir?” inquired a Michikoid he hadn’t heard approaching. Its face and slender limbs were scoured aluminum, under something resembling the remnants of an ancient flight suit.

  “Table for one, cloaked, nearest the entrance.” He extended his hand, allowing it to access his credit. “Not to be approached by anything other than serving units.”

  “Of course,” it said, and led him toward something aspiring, and failing, to look as though it were constructed from bits of derelict airships, roofed with netted bulges of gasbag, within which faint lights leapt and shuddered.

  There was music here, of some genre he didn’t recognize, but a cloaked table would allow the option of silence. Splintered sections of fuselage, wooden propellers, none of it genuine, though he supposed that that might be the point. A thin crowd, this early in the evening, and relatively inactive. He spotted Rainey’s Fitz-David Wu, though almost certainly not the same one. This one wore a retro-proletarian one-piece, one pale cheek artfully daubed with a single smudge of dark grease. It was neutrally eyeing a tall blonde, one emulating, he supposed, some iconic pre-jackpot media asset.

  The Michikoid decloaked his table. He took a seat, was cloaked, ordered whiskey. He dialed the silence up, sat watching the peripheral dumb show, waiting for his drink. When a different Michikoid had arrived with his whiskey, he decided that the place did at least offer decent drink. Otherwise, he wasn’t sure why he’d chosen it. Possibly because he’d doubted anyone else would be willing to put up with it. Though perhaps he’d also had in mind that it might provide some perspective on the fact of Flynne, in however lateral a way. Not nearly lateral enough, he decided, looking at the peripherals.

  He wasn’t a peripheral person, something his one prior visit here should have definitively proven. He and the others had had a cloaked table then as well. He remembered wondering why anyone would choose to indulge in such behavior, when they could be almost certain of invisible observers. That was what the clientele paid for, someone had said, an audience, and weren’t they themselves, after all, paying to watch? Here, at least, in this first room, it was a purely social exhibitionism, and for that he was grateful.

  This would be as stimulating, he decided, as sitting alone in Ash’s tent. Though he was glad to not be in Lev’s basement. And of course there was the whiskey. He signaled a passing Michikoid, who could see him, to bring another.

  Whoever the operators of these peripherals were, wherever they were, they were everything he found tedious about his era. And all of them, he supposed, sober, as they were all couched, somewhere, under autonomic cutoff, so unable to drink. People were so fantastically boring.

  Flynne, he thought, was the opposite of all of this, whether in her peripheral or not.

  Now Lowbeer’s sigil appeared, pulsing, as the Michikoid was delivering his drink, momentarily obscuring its artfully weathered nonface. “Yes?” he asked, not having expected the call.

  “Courrèges,” Lowbeer said.

  “What about her?”

  “You’re definitely proceeding with that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Be certain,” she said. “It’s someone’s life. You’ll be sending her on her way.”

  “Where?”

  “To Brazil. The ship departed three days ago.”

  “She’s gone to Brazil?”

  “The ship has. We’ll send her to catch up with it, retroactively altering the passenger manifest. She’ll be entirely unavailable during the voyage. Practicing a form of directed meditation she requires in order to be accepted by the neoprimitives she hopes to study.”

  “That seems rather elaborate,” said Netherton, preferring looser, more readily rejigged deceptions.

  “We don’t know who Daedra may know,” said Lowbeer. “Assume your story will be examined in considerable depth. It’s a simple story. She left three days ago, for Brazil. Neoprimitives. Meditation. You don’t know the name of the airship, or her exact destination. Please restrain yourself in the invention of extraneous detail.”

  “You’re the one fond of elaboration, I thought,” said Netherton, and allowed himself a very small sip of whiskey.

  “We won’t be monitoring digitally. Too evident a footprint. Someone in the club will be reading your lips.”

  “So much for cloaking?”

  “You might as well be convinced you’re invisible when you close your eyes,” said Lowbeer. “Call her now, before you finish that drink.”

  “I will,” said Netherton,
looking down at his whiskey.

  Her sigil was gone.

  He looked up, expecting to find someone watching him, in spite of the cloaking, but the peripherals were busy with one another, or with pretending not to be, and the Michikoid waitstaff all smoothly eyeless. He remembered the one on Daedra’s moby sprouting at least eight eyes, in pairs of different sizes, black and spherical and blank. He drank some whiskey.

  He imagined Annie Courrèges boarding some government craft, whisked out to a moby en route to Brazil. Her own plans, whatever they had been, as suddenly and irrevocably altered as anyone’s would be, should someone like Lowbeer decide to alter them. Lowbeer wasn’t simply the Met. No one Lowbeer’s age was simply anything. He looked up at those lights, dimly flitting within the sagging bladders of an imaginary airship, and noticed for the first time that they were vaguely figural. Captive electrical souls. Who designed these terrible things?

  He drank off the very last of his whiskey. Time to phone Daedra. But first he’d have another.

  55.

  COMPLICATED

  Eyes closed, she didn’t recognize the sound of rain on the foam over the Airstream, a dull steady smacking. Eyes open, she saw the polymer-embedded LEDs.

  “With us now?” asked Deputy Tommy Constantine.

  Turned her head so fast that she almost lost the white crown, managing to catch it with both hands as it tipped off her head.

  He was sitting beside the bed, facing her, on that beat-up little metal stool, in a black Sheriff’s Department jacket beaded with rain. He held his gray felt hat on his knees, protected by a waterproof cover.

  “Tommy,” she said.

  “Sure am.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “On your property, about an hour. In here, a little under two minutes. Edward’s up to your house to get a sandwich. Didn’t want to, but he hadn’t eaten since noon and I told him it was the better part of valor.”

  “Why’re you here?”

  “Thing is,” he said, “strangers keep getting killed out this way.”

  “Who?”

  “Right on your property, this time. Down in the woods, there.” He indicated the direction.

  “Who?”

  “Young men, two of ’em. Your brother figures them to have been pretty much like him, or anyway like these boys he always has around. Who I am by the way increasingly unconvinced are just out here in the pissing rain all night, every night, for some kind of drone competition with their opposite numbers two counties over. Burton figures these two particular veterans to have been operators in the military, specialists, because they got all the way in under your drone cover, just like that, and would have made it the rest of the way if somebody, I’m inclined to guess Carlos and Reece, hadn’t been posted down there with rifles, the old-fashioned way.”

  She was sitting up now, stocking feet on the floor’s polymer coating, with the crown on her lap, and it struck her how she and Tommy were sitting there, both holding stupid-looking hats. And how she really did wish, even in whatever this was about, that she had lip gloss on. “What happened?”

  “They aren’t telling me.”

  “Who?”

  “Burton and them. I’d imagine, one thing being another, Carlos and Reece, with night-vision, took one look at those other two boys, who were also wearing night-vision, and shot ’em both dead.”

  “Fuck,” said Flynne.

  “What I thought when I got the call.”

  “From Burton?”

  “Sheriff Jackman. Who I figure your brother did call. Who called me, starting off by reminding me about our new arrangement.”

  “What new arrangement?”

  “That I’m not officially here.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’m here to help out Burton. You too, I guess, but Jackman didn’t mention you.”

  She looked at him, stuck for what to say.

  “Why,” he asked, “if you don’t mind my asking, have you been sleeping, if that was sleeping, with some kind of sugarloaf cake on your head? And what, and this is what I’ve really been wanting to ask somebody for the last little while, the actual fuck is going on out here?”

  “Out here?” Her own voice sounded incredibly stupid to her.

  “Out here, in town, with Jackman, with Corbell Pickett, over in Clanton, at the statehouse . . .”

  “Tommy—” she said, and stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Are you and Burton building some kind of drugs out here?”

  “Have you been working for Pickett, all this time?”

  He tilted his hat forward a little, to let a couple of little pools of rain roll off the plastic-covered brim. “Haven’t met the man. Haven’t had anything directly to do with him before. He gets Jackman reelected, so Jackman has ways of making it clear to me what’s Corbell’s business and what isn’t, and I do my best, around that, to enforce the law in this county. Because somebody’s got to. And if we all woke up one day and Corbell and that building economy had been taken up to heaven, after a few weeks most people around here wouldn’t have any money for food. So that’s complicated too, and sad if you ask me, but there it is. How about you?”

  “We aren’t builders.”

  “The basic flow of cash in the county’s changed, Flynne, and I mean overnight. Your brother’s paying Corbell to fuck with elected officials at the statehouse. There hasn’t really been much of any other kind of cash around here, not for quite a while. So pardon my jumping to conclusions.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Tommy.”

  He looked at her. Tilted his head. “Okay.”

  “Burton got hired by a security company. In Colombia. Who say they’re working for a game company. They hired him to fly a quadcopter in what he figured was a game.”

  Tommy was looking at her a different way now, but not like he thought she was crazy. Yet.

  “Started substituting for him,” she said, “when he was up in Davisville. Now we’re both working for them. They’ve got money.”

  “Must have a lot of it, if you can get Corbell Pickett to hop around.”

  “I know,” she said. “This is all weird, Tommy. It’s its whole own level of weird. Better if I don’t try to explain much more of it, right now, if you’re okay with that.”

  “Those four boys in the car?”

  “Somebody fucked up. In the security company. I saw something, by accident, and I was the only witness.”

  “Can I ask what?”

  “A murder. Whoever sent those boys wants to get rid of Burton, because they figure I was him. Probably our whole family, in case he told somebody.”

  “That’s why Burton’s got the drones up, and boys sitting down in the woods.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the two tonight?”

  “Probably more of the same.”

  “And all this money coming in?”

  “The company in Colombia. They need me to ID the killer, or anyway an accessory, and I saw him and he’s guilty as shit.”

  “In a game, you said?”

  “That’s too complicated, for now. Believe me?”

  “I guess,” he said. “What’s going on here with the money’s unlikely enough, I figured whatever was behind it wouldn’t be garden variety.” He drummed his fingers, very lightly, on the plastic hat cover. “What’s that thing you were sleeping under?” He raised an eyebrow. “Beauty treatment?”

  “User interface,” she said, and lifted it to show him. “No hands.” She carefully put it down, still cabled, on the bed.

  “Flying?” he asked.

  “Walking around. It’s like another body. Wasn’t sleeping. Telepresent, somewhere else. Disconnects your body here, when you do it, so you don’t hurt yourself.”

  “You okay, Flynne?”

  “Okay how?”

  “You seem pretty calm about all this.”

  “Sounds batshit, you mean?”

  “Y
ep.”

  “Way crazier than I’ve told you. But if I get crazy about how crazy it is, then everything’s really fucked.” She shrugged.

  “‘Easy Ice.’”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Burton. Suits you, though.” He smiled.

  “That was just games.”

  “This isn’t?”

  “The money’s real, Tommy. So far.”

  “Your cousin just won the lottery, too.”

  She decided not to get into that.

  “Ever met Corbell Pickett?” he asked.

  “I haven’t even seen him, since he did the Christmas parades with the mayor.”

  “Neither have I, in person,” he said, and looked at what was probably his grandfather’s wristwatch, the old-fashioned kind that only told the time, “but we’re about to. Up at the house.”

  “Who says?”

  “Burton. But I’d guess it’s Mr. Corbell Pickett’s idea.” He carefully put his hat on, using both hands.

  56.

  THE LIGHT IN HER VOICE MAIL

  It just seemed to happen, as he most liked it to. Lubricated by the excellent whiskey, his tongue found the laminate on his palate of its own accord. An unfamiliar sigil appeared, a sort of impacted spiral, tribal blackwork. Referencing the Gyre, he assumed, which meant the patchers were now being incorporated into whatever the narrative of her current skin would become.

  On the third ring, the sigil swallowed everything. He was in a wide, deep, vanishingly high-ceilinged terminal hall, granite and gray.

  “Who’s calling, please?” asked a young Englishwoman, unseen.

  “Wilf Netherton,” he said, “for Daedra.”

  He looked down at his table in the bar, his empty glass. Glancing to the right, he saw the circle of bar floor, scoured aluminum, that surrounded the round table, set now, with a jeweler’s precision, into Daedra’s granite floor, the demarcation a function of the club’s cloaking mechanism. Unable to see the bar, or the Michikoids, he realized that he was also unable to signal for another drink.