She looked toward the white candle. “It was never envisioned as a solo position. There were a number of us, originally. I’m simply the last. Should the klept ever truly decide to be done with me, they need only deny me access to the technology that keeps me alive and functional.”
“Rainey guesses they can’t afford to do that, since they can’t be certain you haven’t hidden the most damaging information about them where it will pop up if they remove you.”
“You’ve married a woman of great acuity, Mr. Netherton,” Lowbeer said, turning her blue gaze back to him, from the candle.
“My mother’s story,” Netherton said, “held that everything would invariably collapse, if the klept were left to their own resources. Do you believe that?”
“But for the occasional pruning,” she said, “under the auspices of an impartial eye, yes. Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours. They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought. The results of our species’ insults to nature did much of their work for them. No brakes magically appeared then, and I don’t see them appearing now, absent someone free to act, with sufficient agency, against their worst impulses. The biosphere only survives, today, by virtue of what prosthetic assistance we can afford it. The assemblers might keep that going, were the klept to founder. But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.”
Netherton blinked, swallowed. “China, too?”
“We do still share the biosphere with China,” she said. “And trade with them, to what extent they allow.”
“You killed Vespasian, didn’t you?”
Her eyes met his. Hers, if original, were over a hundred years old. “I used to regret not having come across him sooner,” she said, “thus having had the opportunity to kill him earlier, but now I have to consider the opportunity he’s provided us, however inadvertently, in Eunice’s stub.”
Netherton heard the door open behind him, signaling the end of the meeting.
“Verity’s asleep in the hotel in San Francisco,” Lowbeer said. “When she wakes, speak with her. I’m here, should you need me.”
“You knew Lev phoned me,” Netherton said. “Did you know it was about this?”
“That it might be along these lines. The conversation tripped something the aunties had in place, that I hadn’t been aware of.”
61
CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST
Verity woke to men’s voices, in another room, conversational but indistinct. She opened her eyes, to less-than-emphatic sunlight at the edges of unfamiliar drapes.
“Russians,” someone said, “Facebook . . .” The one called Conner, who sounded southern. Then recognizing Virgil as he responded, though she couldn’t distinguish any of it.
She squinted at the bedside clock. 8:25 a.m.
Unzipping the liner, she pulled it down, emerged from the sheets, and noticed the white bathrobe crumpled on the foot of the bed. Putting it on, she went to the door.
“—get how super fucked it all sounds to you,” she heard Conner say, “but that’s how it went down.”
“How what went down?” she asked, opening the door.
Virgil looked up from where he sat, stocking feet up on the couch. “Conner’s scaring the shit out of me,” he said, mildly, and smiled.
“Wait’ll I tell you the arc over the rest of the season,” Conner said, from the drone’s speaker. It stood facing the window, drapes open on gray morning.
“Any coffee?” she asked.
“Here,” Virgil said, indicating a tray on the lilac hassock. “Fresh croissants.”
“Save me some.” Closing the door and going into the bathroom, she discovered further evidence that she’d managed to shower before getting into bed. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, put on jeans, a clean t-shirt, sneakers, and went to the other room.
“You sleep?” she asked Virgil, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the carafe on the tray.
“Couple hours,” he said. “Conner spelled me. You?”
“Woke that one time, slept after that.”
“2136?” he asked.
“What about it?” She tried a sip of black coffee.
“You think that’s really the year, there?”
She added milk and sugar. “Maybe.” She looked up at him. “Does that make me crazy?” She sat on the edge of the hassock, beside the tray.
“I’m crazy too,” Virgil said, “but I’ve been up half the night, with Conner. Where you went, according to him, used to be the future of where he is. They still have a common past, but it forked a few years ago. And they both share a past with us, up until something that happened here, prior to the 2016 election, but he doesn’t know what.”
She looked up from the freshly torn croissant she was spreading with jam. “I don’t think I can even grasp that, forget entertaining it.”
“Man got it right,” Conner said. “Hardly anybody does, the first time.”
“It feels like this is Lowbeer’s show,” Verity said, “so what does she actually do?” She saw Virgil’s attention sharpen, at this.
“On the books,” Conner said, “she’s just a cop. But the klept has her there to keep things stable. Their culture produces more than enough assholes, all scrambling for a bigger piece for themselves, to bring the whole thing down. But the other side of that coin’s stagnation, if the same big boys on top try to stay forever, so I think she may cover that too.”
“Klept?”
“The result,” said Virgil, “if Conner’s being straight with me, of paths we fortunately didn’t take.”
“No such luck,” Conner said. “You’re still plenty liable to get there, and so are we. And we’ve had four years now of future folks fiddling with us, trying to prevent that. Shit, we don’t even have those fancy phones of theirs yet.”
Virgil’s phone rang. He put it to his ear. “Sure is,” he said. “She’s having the continental breakfast.” He offered her the phone.
“How are you?” Stets asked. “Did you sleep?”
“I did, thanks. You?”
“Yes, but we’ve been having a very busy morning. Eunice’s branch plants have found us.”
“They’ve survived her?”
“Thrivingly.”
“What are they like?”
“Not like her at all.”
“She told me they did things behind her back. Like bring Joe-Eddy back from Germany. It was a surprise for her.”
“They’re keeping up the tradition with us. Our surprise this morning is that we’re hosting an event on very short notice. But I have to run now. We’ll speak later. Take care of yourself.”
“You too,” she said. He hung up. She passed the phone to Virgil.
“Rose Garden in ten,” Conner said, “got it.”
“Say what?” Virgil asked.
“My day job,” Conner said. “President’s taking questions from the press in half an hour, likes me to check if the translation from future-ese to folk wisdom’s solid. You need me, I’ll be right on it.”
“Break a leg,” said Virgil.
Verity, her mouth full of croissant and raspberry jam, said nothing.
“Anybody else in there?” Virgil asked the drone.
Silence.
“Money,” Virgil said, “for Stets, is a by-product of satisfying his own curiosity. He’s still amazed that most people who do what he does are in it mainly for the money. And Caitlin’s the same. So you get two curiosities like that, what could be more attractive than this crazy shit?”
“You’re supposed to be the house skeptic,” she said. “I keep hoping you’ll talk me out of it being real.”
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“Conner’s been telling me his stub’s history. Same as ours, up to the election.”
“What election?”
“The president,” he said.
She saw the monochrome mural in Clarion Alley. The overt threat.
“They aren’t our future, that London,” he said. “Their past got him instead.”
She looked over at him, speechless.
“I know,” he said, nodding, “but here we sit, engaged in whatever this is, while lots of people expect the world to end, and real soon now.”
“I just agreed to disappear myself, supposedly to increase the chance of that not happening.”
“Who says?”
“Lowbeer. Met her in 2136.”
Virgil grinned. “Congratulations. You’ve crossed over.”
“To what?”
“To believing this shit. What’s disappeared look like, to her?”
“She says I’ve already done it, by being off Cursion’s radar, but I still don’t like the sound of it.”
“Me neither,” he said.
62
SHOE-BUTTON EYES
Rainey was at the kitchen table when Netherton came in, Thomas in his high chair. She was tickling one of the nanny’s pandaforms for his amusement. It lay on its back on the red tabletop, Thomas crooning excitedly as it thrashed about.
“Hello,” Netherton said, bending to kiss her forehead.
“Hello. How’s Lev?”
“Unhappy.” Straightening up. “Cheyne Walk is full of relatives, of course. Bit too klepty for his taste.” He glanced at the couch, seeing the controller where he’d left it. “Where’s the peri?”
“She called for one of the spa’s cars, to take her back to Floral Street. Place looks like a cross between a capsule hotel and a morgue. Had her take me through it on their site. Guests are all female. Bodies, semibiologic or not, which are legally someone else’s property, are an inherently creepy proposition.”
“Yes,” said Netherton, opening the refrigerator, “though in this case you wouldn’t know Flynne nearly as well, without that peri. If a different one were being rented for her, each visit, you wouldn’t have the same bond.”
“True, and neither would I have anything like the same sense of London, if she hadn’t wanted to see it all. I wouldn’t have visited the cosplay zones, for instance, because you don’t.”
“They’re for children,” he said, “and tourists. We can take Thomas, when he’s older.”
“Cheapside’s great,” she said. “The smell of it.”
“That’s mainly feces. Human as well as equine.”
“The crowds.”
“Bots, most of them.”
“It gives you a better sense of what it was like than any augmented reality,” she said. “Carnaby Street is AR, for instance, and spectral in comparison. And visitors aren’t required to dress for it, which makes it visually inconsistent.”
Not seeing anything in the refrigerator that appealed, he closed it. “I should check on the stub,” he said, glancing at the controller, uncomfortable with not being able to tell her what Lev, or for that matter Lowbeer, had told him. He looked down at a third of the nanny, squirming to escape Rainey’s tickling. It seemed to look back at him, out of shoe-button eyes.
“Go ahead,” said Rainey. “Seems like a good idea.”
He went to the couch, sat down beside the controller, picked it up, and put it on.
63
USERS
What would happen if I used this to call my mother?” Verity asked Virgil, indicating a hotel phone.
“Is she on cell?” Virgil asked, still on the couch with his feet up.
“Landline. She only turns her cell on if she’s out with it and needs to make a call.”
“Assuming Cursion’s tapped it, they’d record the conversation, probably be able to get the room number. According to your IT lady in the future—”
“Ash,” Verity said.
“She says Cursion aren’t, in themselves, a big deal. That they’re ex-government, so unconnected to state power. Which doesn’t make her happy, though, because she says that makes them liable to fuck us up without even meaning to. No street smarts. Way she thinks reminds me of what I do for Stets.”
“Except for what you do for Stets, not many people would’ve heard of him.”
“I didn’t hear you say that,” he said, and smiled. “But thanks. To the man’s credit, though, I know he tends to agree. But back to Cursion. Ash says Gavin’s their front in the industry, an actual businessperson with a background in technology. If you called your mother, those are the kind of people you might alert to our whereabouts. Hers too, though they probably already have that.”
“Stets still doesn’t have anyone exclusively on security?”
“Few of us do keep an eye on things,” he said.
“I know. You always did.”
“Caitlin doesn’t have security staff either. Her father has people in Paris, when she and Stets visit him, but they all have gray hair. The ones we notice, anyway.” He put one of his feet down and dug in a pants pocket. “Speaking of phones, I took delivery of this one while you were sleeping.” He leaned over to hand her a phone. “Not in your name.” He passed her a black charger, its cable wound around it, and a pair of black earbuds. “Not okay to phone your mother on, or anyone else Cursion might know you know, but you’ve got the web, and it’s programmed to dial fresh burners of ours.”
“Where’s mine?”
“With whoever built this controller for Stets, apparently, but I don’t know how it got there.”
She remembered dropping it into the barista’s Faraday pouch, at Fabricant Fang, along with the Tulpagenics phone and the gray-framed glasses. She’d seen him give the pouch to Dixon.
The drone coughed. “Wilf here.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Back in our flat. Went out to meet a friend. Upset about where he’s living, after a divorce.”
“What’s wrong with where he’s living?”
“Too near relatives of his,” Wilf said.
She tried to imagine his future London with completely boring problems, realizing she expected all future problems to be inherently interesting.
“Hello, Virgil,” Wilf said.
“Hey,” Virgil said. “Conner said he had to go and do something in the Rose Garden. Why’s he in the White House?”
“He and the president, Leon Fisher,” Ash said, “are both from the same small town. This is Leon’s first year in office, so it’s helpful for him to have someone there from home.”
“But that didn’t happen, in your past?” Virgil had both his feet on the floor now, and was sitting up.
“That’s correct,” said Wilf.
“Conner says it isn’t time travel, because of that,” Virgil said. “That time travel, physically, is impossible.”
“We can establish digital contact with our own past,” Wilf said, “provided sufficient infrastructure exists there to allow it. Doing so initiates a new continuum, one in which that message was received. In ours, right now, it wasn’t.”
“So you could get in touch with us here, yesterday?” Virgil asked. “Our yesterday?”
“No,” said Wilf, “but if we could, that would be the start of a new stub, because that didn’t happen in your past.”
“Why can’t you?” Verity asked.
“Initiation results in a one-to-one temporal ratio. If I initiate a stub, leave it, then return, the same amount of time has passed in the stub.”
“Conner told Virgil that the election last year went the other way, there,” Verity said. “Did it?”
“Yes,” said Wilf.
“So you’re in another stub?” she asked.
“No,” said Wilf, “because that was in our past, and all
stubs branch from ours.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Virgil asked.
“Because,” said Wilf, “we’ve the means of initiating stubs and you don’t.”
“So what if you reached back to your own last Tuesday?” Virgil asked.
“That’s impossible,” Wilf said.
“Why?” Verity asked.
“We need to reach quite a distance back, in order to make contact. Though not too far, else the resulting new stub lack sufficient infrastructure to receive our data. There’s a window, that way. I’m told yours is the earliest stub known to have been viably initiated.”
“So what you do,” Virgil said, his eyes narrowed, “is colonize alternate pasts.”
“I don’t think colonization’s the best metaphor,” Wilf said, something about the ease with which he said it suggesting to Verity that this wasn’t the first time. “There’s no possibility of resource extraction. No transferable financial gain.”
“How about something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk?” Virgil asked, Verity recognizing this as what he really did for Stets.
“I don’t know it,” Wilf said.
“Like Uber, but for information labor,” Virgil said.
“We have AI for that,” Wilf said. “We could manipulate your markets, make money there, and pay you with it, but our AI is free, essentially, so it wouldn’t be worth it.”
“Art,” said Virgil. “Music. Literature.”
“Yes,” said Netherton. “But still, in practice, there’s no real economic basis.”
“Then why do you do it?” Verity asked.
“In your case,” Wilf said, “initially, we want to avert nuclear war in your stub. For most users, though, it’s simply a pastime.”
“A pastime,” Virgil said, flatly.
“Users?” Verity asked.
“Hobbyists,” Wilf said.
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