The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  But he probably wouldn’t have gotten a look yet at how much dress-up was going on, or maybe dress-down. While she’d slept, it seemed, all the Klein Cruz Vermette people had started competing to look like a stylist’s idea of county, a few even sporting tattoos she hoped were fake, or anyway the kind that faded to nothing after a year or so. Way too into it. Tommy, this morning, had said that was because they weren’t just getting paid shitloads of money, but potential shares in Coldiron too. Said that even the ones who weren’t very qualified were getting some of the highest salaries in the state, period, right then, and it made them giddy and determined and paranoid all at once, not to mention way too nice to her. Tacoma wasn’t, though, because she wasn’t just KCV. Griff had said she was with him, when Flynne had asked him, but that was all he’d say. It looked to Tommy, though, like Clovis and Tacoma were both “acronym,” but no telling which agency. Too smart to be Homes, he said, and not asshole enough for the really big ones. Where that fit with Griff being English, Flynne didn’t know.

  Tommy and Griff were both needed in town today. They were only letting her go out alone because Griff still wanted her to talk her mother into the safe house in Virginia. Clovis would stay with Burton, and to do the helmet thing for the surgeons in D.C. Macon and Edward were sleeping, after their run on government wakey. She’d seen them curled up together on a foam, under a sleeping bag, Macon snoring, Edward in his arms. She guessed that not having to dose Luke 4:5 with party time, or what Griff would have thought was party time, had cut the two of them some much-needed slack.

  So here she was, just her and the Wheelie Boy, in the back of this stealth-limo truck, two rows of seats behind the front seats, then the back window, then the pickup bed with a flat hardshell cover. For all she knew, they might have a rocket launcher under there.

  “Air con good?” Tacoma asked her.

  “Fine,” she said. Tacoma had told her the truck could drive under water if it had to, popping up a breather tube for the engine. There weren’t any bodies of water around to seriously do that in, that Flynne knew of, and just as well. She looked up now and saw the cow-drone, more or less where she’d last seen it, but pretending to graze. She’d seen bullet streaks on the concrete wall back of Coldiron and Fab, thinking how lucky it was that Burton had been the only one to catch a ricochet. The way they’d gone out to the truck this morning, they’d been out of Luke 4:5’s sight, at least until they got on Porter, and by then they were far enough away that it didn’t matter. And anyway Luke were mostly still sleeping, in identical black pup tents they’d pitched in the lot opposite the mall, in tight rows, like insect eggs, Leon said, or slime mold. Now she knew that they hadn’t really been targeted with a drug that turned you into a homicidal sex maniac, she found herself feeling less kindly disposed toward them. Like why couldn’t Griff and Tommy, between them, figure out some relatively low-impact, legally nonatrocious way to get them the fuck out of town? Made a mental note to ask about that. “Any chance we could get the breakfast burrito and some coffee, at Jimmy’s?” she asked Tacoma.

  “Pretty serious dog and pony with security here,” Tacoma said, “but say I call them, they bring it out to you?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Well, not to you directly. Lead car, up front. Then we get it droned back to us, don’t have to stop.”

  “Complicated.”

  “Protocol. Jimmy’s brings it directly to us, I’ve got to stop, unseal, even if it’s just the window.”

  “Unseal?”

  “Vehicle’s hermetic, except for filtered intakes.”

  “Lot of trouble, for a burrito.”

  “They’re spending as much money as they can on keeping your ass intact and present. You’ve already been kidnapped once. Those shooters last night could’ve been more interested in you than your brother.”

  Flynne hadn’t thought of that. “You as good with a gun as Clovis?”

  “No,” said Tacoma. “Better.”

  “Am I alone back here to reduce the chance of one of Burton’s boys trying to do what Reece did?”

  “Or worse. What kind of burrito? Want milk and sugar in your coffee?”

  “They just have the one burrito. Milk and sugar.” She looked over at the Wheelie Boy, on the seat beside her, and wondered where Wilf was. She’d fallen asleep on the foam, after phoning Janice at the house.

  Tacoma was talking to someone on her earbud. She slowed, Jimmy’s parking lot up ahead, and Flynne saw a boy in a white t-shirt come running out across the gravel, something in his hands. He passed it, through an open window, to someone in the SUV, which had almost but not quite stopped. The SUV pulled out again. Tacoma sped up, matching its speed, maintaining a fixed distance.

  When Jimmy’s was out of sight, Flynne saw something lift out of the SUV, headed back toward them. It became a small quadcopter, toting a fabbed cornstarch travel tray with a silver-foil bundle and a paper cup clipped in it.

  “Watch this with the bed,” Tacoma said, without looking back.

  Flynne turned in time to see a rectangular hatch in the bed cover sliding open. The drone matched their speed, then lowered itself through the opening. Then came right back up, minus the tray with the burrito and coffee, climbing out of sight as the hatch closed beneath it. “How do we get it?”

  “Doing an airlock thing now,” Tacoma said.

  A hatch slid up, in the back of the passenger cab. Flynne undid her seatbelt, got down on hands and knees and crawled back. With her head through the opening, she saw the tray, pulled it out. The foil was warm. They kept their breakfast burritos ready to go, at Jimmy’s, under a heat lamp.

  She managed to get back into the seat with the tray on her lap, hearing the hatch close behind her, refastened her seatbelt, and peeled the foil off one end of the burrito. “Thanks.”

  “We aim to please.”

  Jimmy’s breakfast burritos were gross. Scrambled eggs and chopped-up bacon, green onions. Exactly what she wanted right now.

  “Good morning,” said Netherton, from the Wheelie.

  She had her mouth full of burrito. Nodded.

  “I hope you had a good night’s sleep,” he said. The Wheelie’s tablet whined, turning, then tilted back, so he could see out the window. Nothing but sky, unless there were drones there.

  She swallowed, drank some coffee. “Slept okay. You?”

  “I slept in the Gobiwagen’s jacuzzi,” he said.

  “Were you wet?”

  “When it’s not a bath, it’s an observation cupola. Conner’s peripheral has the master bedroom. He was here peripherally, earlier. He played with Lev’s analogs in the garden. Watched us have sandwiches, in Lev’s kitchen. Then I came back down with him. He put his peri to bed, off for more of whatever it is she has him training on. Where are we going?”

  “My house.”

  The tablet straightened up, panned left to right, back again.

  “This is kind of a limo, disguised as a truck,” Flynne said. “Bombproof. That’s Tacoma.”

  “Hey,” said Tacoma, keeping her eyes on the road.

  “Hello,” said Netherton.

  “Tacoma works for Griff,” Flynne said. “Or with him.”

  “Or for you, if it comes to that,” Tacoma said.

  “I still don’t get that.”

  “Look at it this way,” Tacoma said. “Everything you can see outside of this vehicle, except for the sky and the road, you own. Bought it all in the meantime. Everything, a good twenty miles back, from either side of the road.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Flynne said.

  “Coldiron owns most of the county now,” Tacoma said, “hard as it might be to prove it in court. KCV’s gone full matryoshka on that.”

  “What’s that?” Flynne asked.

  “Know those Russian dolls, nest inside each other? Matryoshka. Shells within shells. So it isn’t that obvious that you own all this land.”

  “Not me. Coldiron.”

  “You and your brother,” Tacoma sa
id, “own the majority of Coldiron between you.”

  “Why do they?” asked Netherton.

  “And who exactly is this talking head on the toy?” asked Tacoma, and Flynne realized that she was watching them, as she drove, on cams Flynne hadn’t known were there.

  “Wilf Netherton,” said Flynne. “He’s Coldiron, from London.”

  “You’re on the list, then, Mr. Netherton,” Tacoma said. “Sorry. Had to ask. Tacoma Raeburn.”

  “Raeburn?” Flynne asked. “You her sister?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you’re named Tacoma because—”

  “Didn’t want me called Snoqualmie. You from the future, Mr. Netherton?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I’m in the future that would result from my not being there. But since I am, it isn’t your future. Here.”

  “What do you do, in the future, Mr. Netherton, if you don’t mind my asking? What do people do there generally?”

  “Wilf,” he said. “Publicity.”

  “That’s what people do?”

  “That would be one way of looking at it,” he said, after a pause, which seemed to satisfy Tacoma, or maybe she just didn’t want to be too pushy.

  Flynne finished her burrito. When they passed the spot where Conner had killed the men in the stolen cardboard, it felt more like a story than something that had happened at that particular place, and she was okay with that.

  98.

  BICENTENNIAL

  By daylight her house was different. He reminded himself that none of this was about assemblers. Natural processes only. He associated untidiness with klept privilege. Lev’s house, for instance: its absence of cleaners, as opposed to the corridor beneath Impostor Syndrome, its spotless sameness uniform through every uninhabited room in London.

  The vehicle in front of them had continued on, beyond the house, then halted. In front of it, a smaller version had already stopped. Flynne had said that the smaller one was a bomb sniffer, operated by her cousin, who must be among the six who now emerged from the larger vehicle, all in identical black jackets. Four held stubby rifles. The fifth, who didn’t, might be Flynne’s cousin, who also wore some odd headpiece. Tacoma, the driver, had parked near the largest tree, the one he and Flynne had sat under in the moonlight. He recognized their bench, which he now saw was made of sawn lengths of graying wood, their once-white protective coating worn with use.

  Out of the car now, tucked under her arm, he couldn’t adjust the Wheelie Boy’s camera quickly enough to compensate for her movement. He glimpsed the vehicle that had been following them, identical to the one in front, and four more black-coated men, each with a black rifle.

  Then Flynne was striding toward the house, Tacoma evidently beside her. “Get them out of sight,” Flynne said to Tacoma, whom he couldn’t see. “Bullpups and jackets’ll worry my mother.”

  “Got it,” he heard Tacoma say, and wondered what bull pups were. “Says your cousin’s coming in.”

  “You stay here,” Flynne said, stepping up onto the planked veranda. “Keep Leon here. Don’t let him inside while I’m with my mother. No such thing as a serious conversation, him around.”

  “Got it,” Tacoma said, stepping into the frame of the Wheelie’s camera. “We’ll be right here.” She indicated a sort of settee, in the same style as the bench under the tree, but with frayed fabric cushions.

  Still carrying him, Flynne opened a curiously skeletal door, its thin frame tautly stretched with some sort of fine dark mesh, and stepped into the shade of the house. “I have to talk with my mother,” she said, and set him down on something, a table or sideboard, level with her waist.

  “Not here,” he said. “On the floor.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but stick around.” She put the Wheelie down on the floor, then turned and was gone.

  He activated the thing’s tires, in opposite directions, slowly, the camera rotating with the spherical chassis. The room looked very tall, but wasn’t. The camera was quite close to the wooden floor.

  There was the mantelpiece, the one with the commemorative plastic tray whose duplicate he’d seen in Clovis Fearing’s shop in Portobello Road, a pale oblong propped against the wall. He rolled forward, the camera bobbing annoyingly, until he could make out “Clanton Bicentennial,” and the dates. And seventy-some years on from the year of celebration, he sat at Lev’s grandfather’s desk in the Gobiwagen, the band of the Wheelie-emulator across his forehead, looking back through this clumsy toy at this strange world, in which worn things weren’t meticulously distressed, but actually worn, abraded by their passage through time. A fly buzzed heavily past, above the Wheelie Boy. Anxiously, he tried to track it, then remembered that here it was more likely a fly than a drone, and that the mesh on the weirdly fragile auxiliary door was meant to keep it out. He turned the camera, studying the shabby, shadowy tableau of lost domestic calm. At the end of its arc, he discovered a cat glaring at him, on its haunches. As he saw it, it rushed the Wheelie, hissing, batting it fiercely back, the rear of the tablet striking the wooden floor. As the gyro whined, righting the Wheelie, he heard the cat push the mesh door far enough open to escape, and then the sound of it closing.

  The fly, if it was the same one, could be heard buzzing, somewhere deeper in the house.

  99.

  AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES

  I’m not going anywhere,” her mother said, propped on pillows against the chipped varnish of the bedstead, the prongs of the oxygen tube in her nose.

  “Where’s Janice?”

  “Picking peas. I’m not going.”

  “Dark in here.” The roller blind was down, drapes drawn together over it.

  “Janice wanted me to sleep.”

  “Didn’t you sleep last night?”

  “I won’t go.”

  “Who wants you to go?”

  “Leon. Lithonia. Janice too, but she won’t admit to it.”

  “Go where?”

  “Northern fucking Virginia,” her mother said, “as you know perfectly well.”

  “I just recently heard about that idea myself,” Flynne said, sitting down on the white candlewick bedspread.

  “Is Corbell dead?”

  “Missing.”

  “You kill him?”

  “No.”

  “Try to?”

  “No.”

  “Not like I’d blame you. All I know is what I see on the news, and lately what little I can pry out of Janice and Lithonia. Is all of this happening because of whatever it is you and Burton are doing, that landed Corbell Pickett in my living room?”

  “I guess so, Mom.”

  “Then what the hell is it?”

  “I’m not even sure. Burton thought he was moonlighting for some company in Colombia. Turns out they’re in London. Sort of. They’ve got a lot of money. To invest. One thing and another, they set up a branch office here and hired Burton and me to run it, or at least act like we do.” She looked at her mother. “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Kind of sense the world makes,” her mother said, drawing the candlewick up under her chin, “there’s death and taxes and foreign wars. There’s men like Corbell Pickett doing evil shit for a dollar, only real money anybody local and civilian makes here now, and there’s decent-enough people having to work for their own little bit of that. Whatever you and Burton are doing, you aren’t going to be changing any of that. Just more of the same. I’ve been here all my life. So have you. Your father was born where Porter meets Main, when they still had a hospital. I’m not going anywhere. Particularly not anywhere Leon tells me I’m going to like.”

  “Man in our company suggested that. He’s from London.”

  “I don’t give two shits, where he’s from.”

  “Remember how hard you tried to get me not to talk like that?”

  “Nobody was trying to make you move to northern Virginia. And I wouldn’t have let them, either.”

  “You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here. I t
hought Virginia was a nonstarter the minute I heard it.”

  Her mother peered at her over the clenched bedspread. “You and Burton aren’t making the economy about to crash, are you?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Lithonia. Smart girl. Gets it off one of those things they wear over one eye.”

  “Lithonia said we were making the economy crash?”

  “Not you. Just that it might. Or anyway that the stock market’s weirder than anybody’s ever seen it.”

  “I hope not.” She stood up, went and kissed her mother. “I’ve got to call them now,” she said. “Tell ’em you’re not going anywhere. They’ll need to get you more help around the place. Friends of Burton’s.”

  “Playing soldier?”

  “They were all in the service, before.”

  “Think they’d’ve got their fill of it,” her mother said.

  Flynne went out and found Janice in the living room, in plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a black Magpul t-shirt, her hair in four stumpy pigtails. She was holding an old ceramic bowl with most of the edge chipped off, full of fresh-picked peas. “Ella’s not going anywhere,” Flynne said. “They’re just going to have to make her safer out here.”

  “I figured,” said Janice. “Why I didn’t try to push it.”

  “Where’s Netherton?”

  “Guy on the Wheelie Boy?”

  “Here,” said Netherton, wheeling out of the kitchen.

  “In the kitchen if you need me,” said Janice, stepping past the Wheelie.

  “Did you speak with your mother?” Netherton asked.

  “She’s definitely not going anywhere. I have to call and sort that with Griff and Burton and Tommy. They’ll have to protect her out here, whatever happens.”

  The Wheelie had kept going. Was across the room now, in front of the fireplace. She watched the tablet tilt back. “This tray,” he said, voice tiny at that distance, on the little speakers.

  “What?”

  “On the mantelpiece. Where did you get it?”