“Have what?” Netherton asked.
Ossian seemed quite satisfied now. “It didn’t fancy that first gentle touch, did it? Projected assemblers. Ate the better part of Zubov’s father’s leather upholstery, and the biological elements of our left manipulator. They wouldn’t believe me, that the bugger never sleeps. Has no off switch. Waiting all this time to kill anyone who tried to get it out of the pram. We’ll have them both, though, now, in short order. And the one that triggered expended no more than a few thousand bugs. Millions yet to go. Can’t be reloaded, you know, not this side of Novosibirsk Oblast.”
The gilt coronet appeared.
“Is she safe?” Netherton asked.
“Told you I don’t know,” said Ossian.
Netherton moved away from the Bentley.
“Apparently, yes,” said Lowbeer.
“Ossian tells me that Ash thinks you’re overreacting. That was his word.”
“She’s bright, Ash, but unaccustomed to operating from strength. Pickett is entirely unlikely to find his place in our scheme of things. And someone did recently attempt to kill you, Mr. Netherton. Pickett, we can assume, already has some relationship, at whatever remove, with whoever ordered that. Would you like to go there?”
“Go where?”
“Lev’s stub.”
“That’s impossible. Isn’t it?”
“Physically, yes. Virtually, however crudely? Child’s play.”
“It is?”
“A bit too literally in this case,” she said, “but yes.”
75.
PRECURSORS
Homes would put you totally away, if they caught you trying to fab a squidsuit. More than printing parts to make a gun full-auto, more than building most drugs. She’d never expected to see one, except in videos, let alone be wearing one.
The night out back of Pickett’s seemed impossibly quiet, what little she could see of it from the suit. She kept expecting somebody to yell, start shooting, set off an alarm. Nothing. Just the wheels of this ATV, crunching over gravel. Electric, so new she could smell it. Paid for with some of Leon’s lottery win, she guessed, or that Clanton money. She could feel it had major torque, like if you put a blade on it you could grade this road up right. They’d run rappelling rope through the factory gear-anchors, to make it easier to hold on. Had those skeleton wheels, nonpneumatic. On the gravel they shaped themselves like mountain bike tires, but when Burton swung right, off the gravel, she saw them widen out. Even quieter on the grass.
“Macon?” Not sure he could hear her.
“Here,” said the gnat in her ear. “Getting you gone. Talk later.”
She couldn’t see where they were going. Burton’s suit was too close to the part of hers she was supposed to see through, so they were doing that mutual feedback thing, trying to emulate each other, ramping them both up into a headachy swarm of distorted hexagons. Ciencia Loca had had that on. Now Burton braked, cut the motor. She felt him swing his leg over, get off the ATV. Heard him rip his suit’s Velcro, then he reached over and ripped hers, near her neck. Night air on her face. He reached in, squeezed her upper arm. “Easy Ice,” he said. She could barely hear him, with the earplugs. She pulled the left one out, on the orange string. “Keep ’em in,” he said, “might get loud.” So she pressed it back in, turning her head to do that, and there was Conner, in his anime-ankled VA prosthesis, behind Burton, in the shadow of a metal shed.
Then she saw it couldn’t be him, because the torso and both limbs were all wrong. Lumpy, like someone had stuffed one of his black Polartec unitards full of modeling clay, too much of it. And had put, in dreamlike randomness, she saw, stepping closer, one of those shitty-looking Gonzales masks on it, the president’s iconic acne scars rendered as stylized craters across exaggerated cheekbones. She looked into the empty eyes. Blank paleness.
Carlos stepped around it, bullpup under his arm. All in black. Burton too, under the open squidsuit. Carlos wore a black beanie pulled down over his brows, his eyes solid black with night-vision contacts. “Need your suit for our guy,” Carlos said. She let it fall around her ankles, stepped out of it. Hex-swarm gone, it instantly did grass. Carlos picked it up and started undoing zips, more Velcro. Draped it over the big tall backpack she now saw the prosthesis wore. Burton was putting his own suit on it from the front, the Gonzales mask poking out through an unzipped slit. They worked on this, making little Velcro noises, joining the suits. If you did it right, the two suits wouldn’t do that feedback thing and hex out. The black of their clothes swirled on the squidstuff. When they were done, they both stepped back, and it became the shadow it stood in.
“Outfit’s go,” Burton said, to somebody who wasn’t there.
The thing took a first step, out of shadow. The mask was all you could really see of it, except for the ankles and feet. Like a glitch in a buggy game. The dog-leash man’s blood would still be on it somewhere. She couldn’t remember his face. It took another step, another. That gait she remembered, Conner going to the fridge, but leaning forward, here, under the weight of the pack. Tramping out, flat-footed, thick-ankled, to the gravel. She couldn’t see the mask now. It was headed back, toward Pickett’s ugly, flood-lit house. “What are you doing?” she asked Burton.
He raised an index finger to his lips, mounted the ATV, motioning for her to get on behind him. Carlos climbed on behind her, reaching around to grab a stretch of rappelling rope, and Burton took off, across the grass, away from the gravel road.
Pickett had a golf course, she saw, as Burton drove further from the house, the sheds and machinery. The moon was coming up. Smoothness of the turf, polymer or GM grass. She saw a raccoon freeze, seeing them, its head turning as they passed.
Beyond the green, the land slanted up, into uncut pasture with a few paths through it, maybe made by cattle or horses. She could see white up ahead, and then she saw it was that same ugly fence, but along a different stretch of road. Two figures in black rose up, as they drew closer, running to the fence, lifting a length of it between them and moving it aside. Burton drove through the gap without slowing, out onto blacktop Pickett must have paid the county to keep in such good shape, then they were on that, speeding up.
About half a mile on, Tommy was waiting by his big white car, in a Sheriff’s Department helmet and his black jacket. Burton slowed, pulling up beside him. “Flynne,” Tommy said, “you okay?”
“I guess so.”
“Anybody hurt you?” Tommy was looking at her like he could see inside her.
“No.”
Still looking inside her. “We’ll take you home.”
Burton got off the ATV, walked across the road, and stood with his back to them, peeing. She climbed off. Carlos scooted himself forward, to the driver’s part of the saddle, took the handlebars, started the engine, swinging around. He was gone into the dark before Burton could cross the road again, headed back the way they’d come, she guessed to pick up the other two.
Tommy opened the passenger-side door for her and she got in. He went around, opened the driver-side passenger door, then his own, got in. Burton got in behind him and they both closed their doors.
“You okay, Flynne?” Tommy asked, again, looking over at her.
She closed her door.
He started the car, and they drove for a while in the dark, opposite direction to the one Carlos had gone in. He put the headlights on.
“Pickett’s a dick,” she said
“Knew that,” Burton said. “Was it Reece?”
“Pickett said they’d kill him if he didn’t bring me. Said Homes could find him anywhere.”
“Figured,” Burton said.
But she didn’t want to talk about Reece, or whatever else it was that they were doing. She didn’t feel like she could talk to Macon through the bug, because they’d hear her, and Tommy was concentrating on the road. So it felt like a long ride back to town, and everything that had happened before felt kind of like a dream, but still going on.
They were almo
st to town when Burton said, to whoever it was that wasn’t there, “Do it.”
They saw the light from it, the fireball, behind them, throwing the cruiser’s shadow ahead of it on the road. Then they heard it, and later she’d think she could’ve counted off the miles, like after a lightning strike.
“Goddamn,” Tommy said, slowing. “What the hell did you do?”
“Builders,” Burton, said, behind her, “still managing to blow their own asses up.”
Tommy said nothing. Got back up to speed. Just looking at the road.
She hoped Reece hadn’t stopped at all, had got out of the county, headed someplace interstate, gone. She didn’t want to ask Burton about that.
“You feel like a coffee, Flynne?” Tommy asked her, finally.
“Too late for me, thanks,” she said, her voice like somebody else’s, someone none of this ever happened to, and then she just cried.
76.
EMULATION APP
The headband Ash was extending looked like the one Lowbeer had used to take him back to the patchers’ island, but with the addition of a clear bendable cam, its milkily transparent head like a very large sperm. “I’m not going back there,” he said, grateful for the expanse of Lev’s grandfather’s desk.
“You aren’t being asked. You’ll be visiting Flynne. At very low resolution.”
“I will?”
“We’ve already installed the emulation app in your phone.”
He leaned forward, took the thing from her. It weighed no more than the other one, but the spermlike cam lent it something at once Egyptianate and cartoonish. “They have peripherals?”
“I’ll let you find that out for yourself.”
77.
WHEELIE BOY
You got a bug in your stomach?” Janice finally asked, from the dark at the foot of the bed. “And one in your ear?”
Flynne was sitting up against her pillows, in her underpants and the USMC sweatshirt, moonlight streaming in her window. “One in my stomach’s a tracker,” she said, “from a Belgian satellite security service. Me, Macon, Burton, Conner, we all got one, that I know of.”
“One in your ear?”
“Burton took it.”
“How’d he get it out?”
“Macon flew it out. Into a pill bottle. I thought it was some future-ass thing they showed Macon how to fab, but he says it’s from here, last season’s military.”
“The one you swallowed showed them where you were?”
“Or I wouldn’t be here now. Reece bagged my phone.”
“Macon’s made you a new one. Got it right here. How hard would it be to get that thing out of your stomach?”
“Six months, it just lets go, Macon said.”
“And?”
“You shit it out, Janice.”
“In the toilet?”
“On your friend’s head.”
“Happens daily,” said Janice, from the dark, “kind of people I know. But you’d just trust Belgians, telling you you’d pooped out their tracker bug?”
“Macon would. Where’s Madison?”
“Building a fort. Over at your new world headquarters, next to Fab.”
“Why?”
“Burton told him to. Gave him a Hefty charge card. Said improvise.”
“Out of what?”
“About two hundred pallets of those faux-asphalt roof tiles, mostly. The kind made of shredded bottles, old tires and shit. Leaves ’em in their bags, has Burton’s guys stack ’em like bricks, seven feet high, two bags deep. Stop some serious ammunition, that stuff.”
“Why?”
“Ask Burton. Madison says if it’s about Homes coming after us, won’t be any help at all. And Homes is all over what’s left of Pickett’s place. Got Tommy over helping them.”
“Must be getting sick of driving, there and back.”
“You didn’t get raped or anything, did you?”
“No. Pickett just mentioned maybe dislocating my jaw. Not like his heart was in it, though. I think he mainly just wanted the most money he could get for me.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” said Janice.
“What is?”
“Why I hope the fucker’s dead.”
“If you’d seen how they delivered that bomb, you’d know it wasn’t liable to be sneaking up on anybody, even with a squidsuit on.”
“Here’s hoping anyway,” said Janice.
“How’d they get squidsuits?”
“That Griff.”
“Who?”
“Griff. Ironside people sent him, right away.”
“Coldiron.”
“He was here almost as soon as Burton knew you were off the reservation. Jet helicopter, landed over in the pasture there.” Janice pointed, hand emerging into moonlight. “I never got a look at him. Madison did. Sounded English, Madison said. Probably where they got that micro-drone too.”
“What is he?”
“No idea. Madison says that copter came from D.C. Says it was Homes.”
“Homes?”
“The copter.”
Pickett had people in Homes, Flynne remembered Reece saying. “Guess I’m behind the curve again.” If she wasn’t in the future, she thought, she was getting kidnapped and rescued.
“With Pickett’s place all blown to shit, we get to wake up tomorrow and see who looks like their main source of income’s gone tits up. Here’s the phone Macon made you.” She passed it to Flynne, out of the dark.
“I’d rather have mine back.” Pissed her off, all the hours she’d put in at Fab to pay for that.
“Yours got flown to Nassau.”
“Nassau?”
“Somebody in a lawyer’s office there. They took it out of a Faraday bag, a little after Burton and them broke you out of Pickett’s. Macon bricked it.”
Flynne remembered Pickett saying he’d have her call Netherton, try to get more money for her than the others were offering.
“Macon said Pickett has fancy lawyers, in Nassau,” Janice said, “but not as fancy as yours, and not as many.”
“All of three, that I know of.”
“Lots more now, in town. Housing and feeding them’s a growth industry. Timely one, too.”
“He put my apps and stuff on it?” Flynne raised her new phone, sniffed. Fresh.
“Yeah, plus some major encryption, runs in background. He says to change your passwords on everything. And don’t just use your birthday or your name backwards. And there’s a Hefty Wheelie Boy for you, in that tote there, on your desk.”
“A what?”
“Wheelie Boy.”
“The fuck?”
“Macon got it off eBay. New old stock. Mint in box.”
“Huh?”
“Back in grade school. Like a tablet on a stick? Bottom’s like a little Segway. Remember those things? Motors, two wheels, gyros to keep ’em upright.”
“Looked stupid,” Flynne said, remembering them now.
Janice’s phone chimed. She checked it, the screen lighting her face. “Ella needs me.”
“If it’s anything serious, get me. Otherwise, I’m going to try to sleep.”
“I’m glad they got you back okay. You know that?”
“I love you, Janice,” Flynne said.
When Janice had gone downstairs, she got up, put on her bedside light, brought the tote back to the bed. There was a box inside with a picture of a Hefty Wheelie Boy on the lid. Like a red plastic flyswatter stuck into a softball the same color, two fat black toy tractor tires on either side of that. Swatter part was a mini-tablet with a cam, on a stick. Marketed as toys, baby monitors, long-distance friendship or sad romance platforms, or even a kind of low-rent virtual vacation. You could buy or rent one in Vegas or Paris, say, drive it around a casino or a museum, see what it saw. And while you did, and this was the part that had put her off, it showed your face on the tablet. You wore a headpiece with a camera on a little boom, which captured your reaction as you saw things through the Wheelie, and people who were
looking at it saw you seeing that, or them, and you could have conversations with them. She remembered Leon trying to gross her out, telling her how people were getting sexy with them, all of which she’d hoped he’d made up.
Back on the bed, opening the box, she thought this must have been part of where peripherals were going to come from. Wheelie Boy, in its cheap-ass way, had been one.
There was a yellow sheet from a Forever Fab notepad inside. DR’S ORDERS, FULLY CHARGED + HARDASS NCRYPT—M in thick flu-pink marker.
She lifted the thing out and tried to stand it up, but it fell over backward, tablet in the moonlight like a black hand mirror. On the bottom of the red ball, a white button. She pressed it. Gyros spun themselves up with a little squawk, the red plastic rod with the tablet on the end suddenly upright on the bed, black wheels moving independently in the sheets, turning it left, then right.
She poked the black screen with her finger, knocking it back, the gyros righting it.
Then it lit, Netherton’s face on it, too close to the cam, eyes wide, nose too big. “Flynne?” he said, through a cheap little speaker.
“Shit the living fuck,” she said, almost laughing, then had to yank the sheet over her legs because she just had her underpants and the sweatshirt on.
78.
FRONTIERLAND
Feed from the thing’s cam, in full binocular, reminded him of still images from an era prior to hers, though he couldn’t remember the platform’s name. She looked down at him, over knees draped in pale fabric.
“It’s me,” he said.
“No shit,” she said, reaching out, fingertip becoming enormous, to flick him, the cam platform, whatever it was, backward. To be arrested by whatever it stood on. Briefly showing him a low, artisanal-looking surface he assumed must be the ceiling. A horizontal seam, as if glued paper were starting to peel. Then it righted itself, with an audible whirr.
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