Agency

by William Gibson

  “Hey yourself.” She pulled the drone in, surprised by its weight, Virgil behind her. Heard Stets closing and rechaining the door.

  Rooms here might be either a disappointment or a relief, she knew, looking around, depending on how the lobby décor grabbed you. Lilacs and lavenders were dialed down, the furniture blond wood, the only once-edgy touch provided by acrylic bedside and coffee tables in a deep shade of burnt orange-peel. A bigger room than she’d previously seen here. Glimpsing another adjacent, a woman just entering from it. “Caitlin Bertrand,” she said, resembling, as Verity recalled a gossip site having put it, a young but brutally determined Françoise Hardy. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Verity Jane. Pleased to meet you too.”

  “And this,” Stets said, behind her, “must be it.”

  Turning, she saw him looking down at the drone. “Why’m I here, Stets?”

  “Eunice,” he said, looking up at her.

  “She’s gone.”

  “She phoned me, after you left with Virgil. More detail on Singapore, at first, but it became a wider conversation.” He glanced at the drone. “Is this listening to us?”

  “We are, Mr. Howell,” said Ash.

  “That’s Ash,” Verity said. “At least two more in there with her.”

  “My colleague, Wilf Netherton,” said Ash.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Wilf.

  “And Rainey,” Ash said, “his wife.”

  “She’s with the baby,” Wilf said.

  “What are you?” Stets asked, as though he were asking about the weather.

  “British,” said Ash.

  Verity gave Virgil the drone’s handle, taking the hoodie from him. He put the charger down, on what she supposed was a minibar. She sat on the couch, sinking into lilac leather, Muji bag beside her. “Sorry,” she said, “I have to eat something. Right now.” Finding a pocket, she drew out Kathy Fang’s pizza, the napkins gone spottily translucent with grease. Unwrapping it, she took a bite.

  “Would you rather have room service?” Virgil asked.

  She shook her head, swallowed.

  “Let her enjoy it,” Caitlin said, settling on the couch beside Verity, who was taking a second bite.

  Verity pawed with her free hand through the hoodie on her lap, coming up with the napkin-wrapped mega-canapé, which she passed to Caitlin, who promptly unwrapped it, nibbled a corner, then bit off a third of it.

  Stets was in front of them now, manipulating something at his knee, through the fabric of his loose gray track pants. A click. She remembered the brace. He lowered himself, facing her, onto a circular lilac hassock.

  “They tell me,” Verity said to him, after swallowing the last of the pizza, “that they don’t know Eunice personally, but know people who do.”

  “Are you familiar with the strategic concept of competitive control areas?” Ash asked.

  “Yes,” Stets said.

  “Your military has been developing a noetic agent, optimized for operating in them. If local infrastructure didn’t offer adequate connectivity, it could be delivered as a portable, self-supporting, self-actuating unit. Eunice was one result, though still very much a prototype when we discovered her. She’d already been appropriated by Cursion, who intended to spin off a civilian product offering some of her original functionality. Which spared us direct contact with your military research and development sector, where we would have been more likely to encounter people able to recognize us as anomalous.”

  “AI?” Caitlin asked.

  “Yes,” Ash said, “but the project meshed, early on, with efforts to upload complex human skill sets. So an AI slash upload. Hybrid.”

  “When she spoke with me,” Stets said, “I gathered something like that.”

  “And this is that?” Caitlin asked, eyeing the drone.

  “No,” said Ash, “this is simply a drone we’re employing, for physical telepresence.”

  “It evidently hasn’t been designed for retail,” Caitlin said, “which is always interesting in itself.”

  “Undo the fastenings on its wheeled wearable,” Ash said.

  Virgil squinted at Stets. “Assuming it can move,” he said, “are you sure we want it to?”

  “Eunice’s advice,” Stets said, “and she particularly stressed this, was that I should trust whoever Verity brought us.”

  “That must have been quite a call,” Virgil said, tilting his head quizzically at Stets.

  “It was,” Stets said.

  Virgil squinted at Stets. “So you’ll trust whoever’s in control of this thing, its capacities currently unknown, because something that convinced you it was AI told you you should?”

  “Under the circumstances,” Stets said, “yes.”

  Virgil looked from Stets to Caitlin, then to Verity, then knelt beside the drone. Verity heard hook and loop fasteners being separated. Soon the black case was folded out flat around it on the carpet.

  Legs extruding, it rose, spidery arms still crossed, to step forward, surprising Verity with its steadiness. Now it executed a bow toward Caitlin and Verity. Upright again, it stepped briskly to the orange acrylic coffee table, reaching for a Bay Area lifestyle magazine, small white tongs snicking out from the tips of its arms. Picking the magazine up, it flicked rapidly through, stopping at a page it then displayed to them. A black-and-white portrait of Caitlin. “Design documents Fang originally worked from hadn’t specified manipulators,” Ash said. “We had help with that from a veteran who piloted similar drones in combat.”

  It flipped the magazine shut, returning it to the table.

  “You introduced Eunice to whoever built this?” Stets asked.

  “We put them in her way,” Ash said. “She formed her own relationship with them. Our communication with Eunice was limited.”

  “Why was that?” Stets asked.

  “That’s complicated,” Ash said. “Perhaps it could wait.”

  “Would it have to do with her having had me fabricate something myself?” he asked.

  Verity, Caitlin, and Virgil all looked at him. Then back to the drone.

  “Which would be?” asked Ash.

  “An interface device,” Stets said, producing from behind the lilac couch a large carrying case, in rigid black foam, which he placed on the minibar, beside the drone’s charger. It hadn’t looked very heavy. He unfastened latches that reminded Verity of the drones’ Pelican case, and lifted top and sides away as one, revealing a white, featurelessly feminine foam head in a black cycling helmet. Studded with a variety of black components, it looked like a not-very-enthusiastic cyberpunk cosplay accessory.

  “A neural cut-out controller,” Wilf said. “I’m wearing one now. Ash is controlling the drone through it.”

  “I thought she wasn’t with you,” Verity said.

  “By phone,” Wilf said, “via my controller.”

  “Could I do that?”

  “No,” said Wilf.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said.

  “You all say that.”

  “Would you like something more to eat?” Caitlin asked her. “We keep forgetting that you’ve had an extremely long day.” With a look for Stets and Virgil.

  “I’d like my own phone back,” Verity said. “Short of that, I need to use the bathroom.” She got up.

  “I’ll show you where things are,” Caitlin said, standing.

  Verity picked up her bag and followed Caitlin into the larger room.

  “Is this business,” Caitlin asked, closing the door behind them, “or something else?”

  “Business seemed to be how Eunice made things happen,” Verity said, putting her bag down on the bed, “but she didn’t seem to me to be about it.”

  “You could say the same of Stets, but I’m sure you know that,” Caitlin said.
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  “I do, but they’re different.”

  “I agree,” said Caitlin. “I gather you knew her better than the others.”

  “Yes, but that was from Monday, till this afternoon.”

  “Stets doesn’t think of her as human,” Caitlin said, “but speaks of her as though she was.”

  “I keep feeling like she was,” Verity said, a tear suddenly sliding down her left cheek.

  Caitlin plucked tissues from a dispenser in the bathroom, brought them to her. “You’ll be safe here with Virgil. Stets and I will return to Fremont. You must be exhausted. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “The trailer?”

  “Yes. And your Londoners will stay with you as well, because Eunice told Stets that she didn’t want you out of the drone’s sight. You seem to be at the center of something extraordinary. It’s captured Stets’ imagination in a way I haven’t seen before. Where this goes will affect me, unquestionably. But everyone I’ve come to admire, in Stets’ crew, liked you very much.”

  Verity looked at her. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Get some sleep,” And then she was gone, back through the door, closing it behind her.

  Verity turned, taking in the room.

  Larger, with a larger bed, a larger television. A square lilac mega-hassock at its center, six feet on a side, atop it a tray with an ice bucket and glasses.

  She picked up her bag and took it into the bright bathroom, unzipped and unfolded it, hanging it behind the door, which she then closed. Pulling down the central interior zipper, she found it seemed like everything she’d had at Joe-Eddy’s was there, including, she saw, neatly rolled at the bottom, her mummy-bag liner. Cosmetics in the horizontally zipped pocket to the right, oral hygiene and hair products to the left. Behind the toothpaste, as she’d noted on Fabricant Fang’s roof, her passport. She checked its unsmiling photograph of a visibly younger self, one who hadn’t yet met Stets. Flipping pages, she read her time with him in stamps from places she might never otherwise have visited. Closing it, she tucked it back where she’d found it, brushed her teeth, used the toilet, washed her face and hands, and returned to the first room.

  To find Virgil standing with the cosplay helmet in his hands, Caitlin and Stets beside him. “They want you to try it,” he said, with a nod in the direction of the drone.

  “London,” said Ash. “Come and see.”

  “There’s something I can use there?” Verity asked. “Like the drone?”

  “Nothing like the drone,” Ash said. “You’ll see.”

  “What would I need to do?”

  “Sit on the couch. Virgil will help you with fit and conductivity. You might get a bit of saline paste in your hair, but it washes out. Close your eyes when we tell you to. Open them.”

  She looked from the drone to Virgil, then to the lilac leather of the couch, then to Stets and Caitlin, beside Virgil.

  “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” said Caitlin.

  “Would you?” Verity asked her.

  “I would,” said Caitlin. “Out of curiosity, if nothing else.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Verity, “but it can’t be that simple.”

  “It’s slightly more complicated,” said Ash.

  Verity went to the couch and sat down.

  50

  FROM FLORAL STREET

  They’ve a controller,” Netherton said to Rainey, having muted himself before he opened his eyes. She sat at the far end of the couch, legs drawn up beneath her chin, feet bare.

  Lowbeer’s sigil appeared. “I underestimated Howell’s resources,” she said. “Eunice’s as well. She seems to have proactively copied circuity in the drone. She’d likely no more in mind than Verity being able to control the drone in her stub, should that prove necessary, but you’re about to have a visitor.”

  “We are?” Netherton asked.

  “Flynne’s peripheral, arriving at your flat shortly,” Lowbeer said.

  “Verity, in Flynne’s peripheral?” he asked.

  “Excellent!” said Rainey, overhearing.

  “Where’s it kept,” Netherton asked, not having thought of this before, “when Flynne isn’t using it?”

  “A peri spa, in Floral Street,” said Lowbeer.

  “What does it do there?”

  “It sleeps,” Lowbeer said, “receives nutrition, does aerobics and yoga, and is cosmetically maintained.”

  Had she added sex and recreational drugs, it occurred to him, she might have been describing the lifestyles of any number of acquaintances from his bachelor days.

  “She’s entering the mews,” Lowbeer said, her sigil fading.

  “Entering the mews now,” Netherton repeated, for Rainey’s benefit. She got up, to walk around and behind the couch, to the window.

  Eyes open, Netherton joined her.

  An approaching figure crossed a patch of lamplit pavement.

  “Go down and bring her up,” said Rainey.

  “It’s not Flynne,” he said.

  “Don’t make her have to ring.”

  Starting to remove the controller, he thought better of it. The peri would be on its manufacturer’s AI. No one in it to see him, let alone think his headgear ridiculous.

  As he descended the two flights Rainey insisted were healthier than the lift, he remembered having first seen it, before it had become Flynne’s, in the lurid blue dusk of an upper parlor of what Lev archly termed his father’s house of love, a monstrosity of erotic kitsch in Kensington Gore. It had noted him, he recalled, with a benign disinterest, as though he’d attracted the attention, such as it was, of a giant semisentient orchid.

  It had, Lev had explained, no digestive tract, hence neither ate nor defecated, so required twelve-hourly infusions of a concentrated nutrient as well as regular hydration.

  It waited now, he saw, beyond the foyer’s steel-mullioned door, with that same expression, brown eyes regarding him from beneath brown hair. Someone, Lowbeer perhaps, had told him, after he’d first encountered it, that it was ten years old, though appearing to be in its early thirties. It seemed no older now.

  “Come in,” he said, the door opening in response to his invitation. “This way,” indicating the lift, which opened at their approach.

  It wore black trainers with bright white soles, loose gray trousers cinched at the ankles, and a black kimono-cut jacket. And looked, in the confusing way of situations like this, like Flynne. Not that it actually bore any more than a passing resemblance to her, but that he was so accustomed now to experiencing it as her physical avatar.

  51

  CONSTRUALS

  Tell me what to do,” Verity said to Ash.

  The drone stood facing her. The conductive gel Virgil had spread across her forehead felt cool. She worried about getting it in her eyes.

  “The unit in London,” Ash said, from the drone’s speaker, “is exponentially more sophisticated than this one.”

  Several cars honked simultaneously on Geary. Verity wondered if Ash could hear them. “How can I operate that, if Wilf can barely walk in this one?”

  “Interface transparency,” Ash said. “You needn’t learn to control it. If anything, you’ll need to learn not to try to.”

  “Where is it, there?”

  “Wilf and Rainey’s flat, Fitzrovia. It’s only just arrived.”

  “What happens here, when I’m there?”

  “Nothing. You’ll be neurologically elsewhere.”

  “Why’s the one in London so next-level?”

  “You’re about to find out,” said Ash, “if you’ll close your eyes.”

  Verity did.

  “There’s something you might watch for,” Ash said, “as we activate the controller. I assume you’re experiencing entoptics now. A normal phosphene display, that is. Possibly construals.”
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  “Possibly what?”

  “Construals. The left brain attempting to impose recognizable attributes on randomness. Faces in clouds, for example. The peripheral’s entoptics differ from yours, as would anyone’s. Knowing that, you may be able to visually distinguish the threshold of neurological transition as entoptic difference, the arrival of a different phosphene display. But please keep your eyes closed until Wilf asks you to open them. Probably no more than ten seconds.”

  “Why?”

  “Transitioning with your eyes open, or opening them immediately after transitioning, induces nausea. When you do open them, try to move slowly at first. There may be dysmorphia as well, but it’s relatively transient.”

  “Dysmorphia?” Eyes still closed, wondering if she were beginning to experience construals.

  “The specific symptoms mimic postural hypotension,” Rainey said. “Dizziness on standing, possibility of fainting.”

  “Are these alpha builds? The drone, the controller, whatever Wilf has in London?”

  “No,” Ash said. “Ready?”

  “Do it,” Verity said, as horns sounded again on Geary.

  A diagonal edge of differently textured blood-dark swept smoothly past, behind her lids, right to left, horns simultaneously lost to the silence of a different room.

  “Keep them closed,” said Wilf, startlingly near.

  “Okay,” she said, simultaneously realizing that this wasn’t her voice.

  “It’s like borrowing another body,” Rainey said, from another direction. “You’re accessing its full sensorium.”

  “Open them now,” Wilf said.

  She did, into the brighter, warmer light of a smaller room, its walls a pale but decidedly non-lilac gray, reminding her of the frames of the Tulpagenics glasses.

  “Hello,” said a dark-haired man she took to be roughly her age, in a silly-looking silvery headpiece. He was peering at her, as if over glasses he wasn’t wearing. Having, she guessed from his position, just gotten up from beside her, from the couch on which she now sat, which was smaller than the one in the suite at the Clift, and brown.