Agency

by William Gibson

  Stepping down from the car, he noticed two crinolined women staring blankly at him, or rather, he assumed, at what they might be able to see of the car’s decloaked door. He took them to be visitors. The bots who made the place look populous ignored anomalies, while the relative few who chose to live here tended to scowl at breaks in continuity.

  The sky was his favorite thing about the place, day or night, some effect removing the shards entirely, along with whatever other tokens of the present would otherwise have been distantly visible. The hour now, he saw, was late enough for the street to be slightly less crowded, but with no suggestion of that Lowbeerian depopulation he expected when meeting her in a public place. Gentlemen were strolling after dinner with cigars, ladies of the night were abroad, and a veritable museum of antique criminality was afoot, this last being one of the most popular attractions.

  “Thank you for coming,” said Lowbeer, at his elbow, causing him to start.

  “Rainey mentioned Fearing,” he said.

  “Indeed,” said Lowbeer. The top hat altered the look of her features, he thought, due mainly to concealing the white quiff, which ordinarily lent her face animation. Without it, she looked studious, and a bit owlish. Like his own costume, hers suggested mourning, perhaps in deference to Fearing’s perpetual bereavement. “This way, please.” Ushering him in the direction of St. Paul’s. “Have you attended the commemoration, here, of the Second Great Fire? December twenty-ninth and thirtieth.”

  “I haven’t,” Netherton said. “What do they do?” He stepped around a beggar boy, a bitter-looking double amputee on a wheeled pallet, almost certainly a bot.

  “Gobshite,” he heard it call harshly after him.

  “They use the system that conceals the shards to reenact the fire,” Lowbeer continued, “the result of German incendiary bombs in 1940. Sunset on the second evening is particularly memorable. This way, please.” She turned left, down a narrow passageway, the two of them unable to quite walk abreast. Here the odors of the cosplay zone, artificial though he knew them to be, strongly reminded him of how much he disliked them generally. Somewhat away from the fresh manure of the street now, there was an eye-stingingly ammoniac reek of urine. This lessened as they continued, but not entirely.

  “Here we are, then,” said Lowbeer, stopping unexpectedly, a thick wooden door, previously unnoticed, partially opening to Netherton’s immediate left. Fearing, dimly backlit by candlelight, squinted ferociously at him over something thrust forward in both hands, her arms outstretched from the shoulders. A pistol, Netherton saw, of the county’s era, and exactly the sort he knew her younger self to favor.

  “Good evening, Clovis,” said Lowbeer, removing her top hat.

  “Don’t dawdle,” Fearing said, taking a step back and partially lowering the pistol.

  Lowbeer promptly stepped in, opening the door further. Netherton followed, remembering to remove his derby.

  Fearing, her gun now in one hand, a brass candelabra in the other, its half-consumed white tapers flickering, nodded toward a dark narrow gap behind her. “Go ahead,” she said, “it’s straight back.”

  73

  SINGULARITY

  Virgil brought them lunch: hamburgers from a ranking Dogpatch bistro that didn’t do takeout but had been susceptible to his PA moves, which Verity knew to be potent. Simultaneously arranging, with the same skill set and whatever amount of cash, for the van, its freshly applied vegan wholesaler signage fitting right in, to park behind this hipster supermarket.

  She kept thinking the day was overcast, as she ate her burger, then remembering that that was the window tint. The sun was now solidly out.

  The drone was stationed at the passenger door, its back to the van’s interior, the thin black camera-tentacle protruding out and up, through a narrow gap at the top of the right front window, to scope for aerial drones. Conner might have it on automatic now, she guessed, as he’d said nothing since Virgil had gone to pick up lunch, and neither had Ash.

  “Am I interrupting lunch?” asked Rainey, from the drone.

  “You aren’t,” Verity said. “Where’s Wilf?”

  “Cheapside,” said Rainey.

  “That’s a neighborhood?”

  “A street. But also the most popular cosplay zone. Victorian. Visitors have to dress for it. Most of the apparent population are bots.”

  “Bots?”

  “Like a peripheral, but inorganic, nonsentient, usually remotely directed. There are a few permanent actual residents, though, and that’s why Wilf’s there. Gone with Lowbeer to visit a friend of hers, the only person I know who’s as old as she is.”

  “How old?” Verity asked.

  “Well,” Rainey said, “Lowbeer herself is alive in your stub, in 2017. A child, there.”

  Verity stared at the drone, over her brown cardboard box of forgotten fries.

  “She and her friend are both a hundred and twenty-something,” Rainey said. “Their biological clocks keep getting reset, so we’re not just talking cosmetic treatments. Lowbeer has that cosmetic work done as well, but Clovis refuses. Says she’s old as dirt and might as well look it.”

  “Dirt?”

  “An expression of her day, she says.”

  “How long do people live, there?” Verity asked.

  “A hundred and sixty’s about the limit, for full functionality, that I know of, but it keeps increasing.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven,” Rainey said.

  “Will you live that long?”

  “Not unless someone who can afford it wants me to. And people who can afford it for themselves generally don’t want other people to have it.”

  “They don’t?”

  “Used to be that the one who died with the most toys won. Now it’s who can afford to live longest while holding on to the toys.”

  “Lowbeer and her friend are that rich?” Verity asked. Realizing she was still holding the box of fries, she put them down.

  “Neither of them are. Lowbeer became very important to some very wealthy people during the jackpot, so they started having her reset. She’s still important, more so actually, so she’s still being reset. Clovis gets it because she was married to a member of Parliament, when that was still a thing, and he helped enable some powerful people to come into a different sort of power. Evidently someone still remembers that.”

  “What’s this jackpot, then?” Verity asked, still looking at the back of the drone’s shoulders.

  “Fuck,” said Rainey, in an entirely different tone, “that was exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do.”

  Verity looked to Virgil, who seemed himself to have been squinting at the drone. Now he looked at Verity. “Been getting pieces of it from Conner,” he said. “Their time line, according to him, is one grim motherfucker.”

  “But you’ve changed things, so that we won’t necessarily get that,” Verity said, to Rainey.

  “If you have a nuclear war now,” Rainey said, “our idea of apocalypse would be the least of your worries. Unless you get a nuclear winter to reverse the warming, and we had people seriously floating the idea of trying that. You didn’t get Brexit, though, and you got a different American president, but as far as we know you’ll have the rest coming your way, if you don’t blow yourselves up.”

  “What they call the jackpot,” Virgil said, “all of that coming down together, Conner says. And none of it’s anything you haven’t heard of.”

  74

  OLD KLEPT

  Fearing had placed her pistol, and the candelabra, on the square, glass-topped, thoroughly non-period-correct table at which the three of them now sat.

  Netherton had seen her younger self shoot someone dead, with a gun like this, in the county. Possibly, he supposed, this very gun. Not that he’d been physically present, of course, hence in no danger, but he knew what these things could do
. And was himself, now, physically present. She’d placed it, he noted, so that its muzzle pointed at none of them.

  “I gather,” said Lowbeer, whose top hat was also on the table, “that your greeting us with a handgun is indicative of some concern.”

  “Making sure it was you. Anybody can look like anybody. Not that I don’t enjoy imagining overreacting, if it happened not to be you.”

  “Does this one have the switch for full automatic?” Netherton asked, having learned this one distinction about firearms in the county.

  “Double taps or nothing,” said Fearing, dismissively. “Sequential doubles, if you got the customers for them.”

  “So this sanguinary mood of yours, Clovis, is the result of your having made those inquiries for me?”

  “Sure is,” Fearing said.

  None of which encouraged Netherton, as the inquiries he’d hoped Fearing had been making would have been about whatever project had created Eunice, and thus safely in the past.

  He looked up at the wall of crates behind her, many of them apparently of wood. This room, or rather space, was at the far end of the passage she’d directed them down, and built of similar containers. He’d never given any thought to what private interiors might be like, in Cheapside. To judge by this one, rigorous period accuracy wasn’t an issue. While some of the crates were wooden, others were of tin, aluminum, and various kinds of plastic. The ceiling was lost to darkness, though light from the uneven pulsing of the candelabra suggested there might be a central plaster rosette overhead.

  “It isn’t Lev’s great-uncle,” Fearing said.

  “What isn’t?” Netherton asked.

  “The source,” said Lowbeer, “the irritant. Do you have an idea who that might be, Clovis?”

  “Have you considered Yunevich?” Fearing asked, briefly exposing a narrow radius of her extremely white teeth, the name meaning nothing at all to Netherton.

  Without the top hat, Lowbeer looked more herself, which was to say dangerous. “I thought it possible,” she said. “Are you certain?”

  “Essentially, yes. Which is why you’ve Wilf along, to hear the name. He’ll need to ask Zubov in person, in a secure situation.”

  “He has a troupe of dancing girls,” Netherton said. “Bots, I mean. Lev does. Zero connectivity, no onboard memory.”

  “We weren’t able to penetrate them when I observed Wilf’s meeting with Lev at the Denisovan Embassy,” said Lowbeer.

  “Where’d Lev find them?” Fearing asked.

  “They’re his father’s,” Netherton said.

  “His father’s old klept,” said Fearing, “his father’s uncle’s older klept still. They assume their opsec is gold standard, which in practice tends to mean it’s not. They mainly spy on each other.”

  “Why wouldn’t Lev simply have told me who it was, if they know?” Netherton asked.

  “He doesn’t, yet,” said Lowbeer. “Neither does the father. This is all a bit of klept protocol. They bring us word of a conspiracy. We determine that one exists. Only then do we ask them if those we suspect of conspiring are those they intended to alert us to. The key conspirator’s name will have been passed along to Lev, just prior to meeting with you, enabling him to answer when you speak it to him.”

  “Yune—” Netherton began, but Lowbeer kicked his shin before he could finish, beneath the glass table, causing him to almost drop the walking stick, which he’d been holding across his thighs.

  “Do not voice the name,” said Lowbeer, “until you’re alone with Lev.”

  “We aren’t secure, here?” Netherton asked, wincing.

  “Until the situation’s resolved,” Lowbeer said, “observe that extra degree of discipline. It isn’t that you’re particularly open, quite the contrary, but you also have a tendency to forget yourself when excited.”

  “Very well,” Netherton said, resisting the urge to rub his aching shin, “what exactly do you need me to do?”

  “Contact Lev,” said Lowbeer, “meet him, with his troupe deployed. Ask him if said individual is in fact involved. I’ll debrief you afterward, in the car.”

  “Tonight? I’m quite short on sleep.”

  “Lev himself is currently asleep,” said Lowbeer, as if it were perfectly normal for her to know this, as Netherton in fact assumed it might well be. “Phone him in the morning.”

  75

  JACKPOT

  Over the drone’s shoulders, through the tinted window, Verity watched two men, Japanese, smoking cigarettes behind the hipster supermarket.

  In white t-shirts, pants, aprons, they sat on red plastic milk crates, like the one she’d clumsily stepped up on, wearing the silicosis bootees, to enter Virgil’s truck.

  Was it legal, to smoke cigarettes this close to a supermarket? Were they too near a food preparation area? She was thinking about asking them for one, even though she’d never before smoked one, after Rainey had finished telling them about the jackpot.

  They’d all sat there, in the van, saying nothing, with Sevrin methodically finishing his fries. Virgil, Verity knew, had already heard at least some of this from Conner. She looked over at him now. He’d just opened a brown glass bottle of ginger beer. His eyes met hers. “I know,” he said, “right?”

  “Sorry,” Rainey said. “I really am. I understand that it’s too much, all at once. I’ve never told anyone before, who didn’t know. Wilf and Ash have. I wish it had been them.”

  “Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?” Verity asked. “The knowing, for decades, and then managing to do almost nothing to stop it?”

  “Not really,” said Rainey. “But it isn’t as if people in your era get all the blame. It began with the use of fossil fuels, in what amounted to a centuries-long event. And it isn’t as if we assume it’s over. We’re barely getting by, as it is, using the shards, or using assemblers as pollinators, and everything else we use them for.”

  “Assemblers?” Virgil asked.

  “Molecular assemblers. Nanotechnology.”

  “I thought that was supposed to change everything,” Verity said. “The singularity?”

  “We were in our real singularity all along,” Rainey said. “We just didn’t know it. When relatively functional nanotech did arrive, we used that to blunt some effects, slow things down. Trying anything on a larger scale has increasingly been deemed too big a gamble.”

  The two smokers were stubbing out their cigarettes now, getting up, brushing their hands on their aprons, their break over, centuries into the singularity they might never recognize as such.

  Virgil passed her the ginger beer. She drank reflexively, not tasting it. “So what you’re trying to do, here, with us, is change that?”

  “To mitigate the effects, here. You’re further back than we’ve been able to reach before. You’ve had two radically different outcomes already, due to intercontinual contact. Those are resulting in countless others. The United States, for instance, in this crisis we never had, actually has an ambassador to Turkey. We wouldn’t have had one.”

  “Then why are we sitting here, behind a supermarket?” Verity asked. “If we’re supposed to be saving the world?”

  “The next move is Eunice’s network’s,” Ash said. “What have you been discussing?”

  “Hearing how our world ends,” said Virgil, “and yours begins.”

  “Ah,” said Ash, “explains the mood. Rainey spilled the beans?”

  “Sorry,” said Rainey. “She’s a sharp listener.”

  White Helvetica appeared, across the back of the drone.

  Hit the 5th speed dial. It’s Stets. He can actually talk, has a phone like this and no lawyers watching him. J-E

  76

  CAME A COACHMAN

  It seemed colder out, the passageway retaining a dankness Netherton hoped had nothing to do with urine, ersatz or otherwise. He saw Lowbe
er draw something vaguely familiar from a topcoat pocket, gold and ivory glinting in her hand, reflecting candlelight in the instant before Fearing closed the door behind them. Her tipstaff, he remembered, in the sudden dark, a nastily mutable badge of authority, a cologne atomizer one moment and a handgun the next, but always of ivory, trimmed with gold, with somewhere, invariably, a small symbolic coronet. He hadn’t seen her produce it since shortly after he’d first met her, but associated it with trouble of a very immediate sort. “Why do you have that out?” he asked.

  “Go ahead of me toward Cheapside,” she said. “Be prepared to do as I say.”

  Netherton did, almost immediately aware of an approaching racket from the direction of the street, as of running boots over cobble, echoing off the walls of the passage.

  “Keep walking,” Lowbeer said.

  He did, noting the darkness in the passageway decreasing in a peculiar yet familiar way. Another effect of hers and, like the tipstaff, something he hadn’t seen recently. Assemblers in the very fabric of the City, subtly lighting her way.

  Now they were in that particularly foul-smelling stretch, and here a running figure in high black boots appeared, smiling pleasantly, a dented top hat jammed low over its forehead. Quite tall, broad-shouldered, and bearing a massive mallet of some kind, partially upraised, it ran straight toward them.

  “Down,” ordered Lowbeer, which Netherton would certainly have obeyed, had their assailant not been literally atop him then, shoving him aside with its massive weapon. Which reeked, Netherton noted, of claret, but by then he’d instinctively poked his stick at the man’s waistcoated midsection, a large gloved hand batting it aside, then seizing the ebony shaft and flinging it away, to clatter hollowly on the wall beside them.

  Leaving, Netherton discovered, the stick’s handle still in his hand, with something still protruding from it. As of its own accord, his hand thrust this forward again, producing a bright flash of light, accompanied by a brief but vicious sizzling.