“You okay?” Carol asked.
Get dressed. We’ll talk after.
104
GREEN ROOM
Unwrap Conner,” Netherton heard Virgil say. Whatever had draped them was immediately pulled up and away, the display revealing a long, quite narrow room, where people stood talking. He recognized Verity’s facially pierced motorcyclist, but no one else aside from Virgil, who stood in front of the drone, staring down at it. “That rifle has to go,” Virgil said. “It’s probably unregistered, may be stolen.”
Conner sighed audibly, the rifle’s complicated muzzle disappearing from the upper half of the feed. Now the gun appeared in the lower half. Conner removed its magazine, as Netherton had learned to call it in the county. He placed this on a nearby ledge, then did something with the gun’s mechanism, producing a single unfired round, which he stood on end beside the magazine. “Shooter wore gloves. Don’t get anyone’s prints on it.”
“Bring gloves,” Virgil said to his manual phone. “Something we need off the premises.”
Now Stets and Caitlin entered, the door opened for them by Verity’s motorcyclist. Stets wore a black blazer above black trousers loose enough for his leg brace, Caitlin a soft black suit that Netherton suspected was cashmere. Seeing them made him feel as though he were in a green room, prior to a client’s media appearance.
“Is Verity there?” Rainey asked, beside him on the couch.
He muted. “I don’t see her.”
“Where are you now?”
“Feels like the staging area for whatever this is. Is Thomas asleep?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Phone me. I’ll patch you through.” Her sigil pulsed. “It feels like a less private version of Lowbeer’s car,” he said.
“It’s a trailer,” she said, having evidently taken in the scene. “A caravan. Who are these people?”
“Aside from Virgil, Stets and Caitlin, and Verity’s friend with the jewelry, I’ve no idea. People working on the event, I suppose.”
“Can they hear me?” Rainey asked.
“They can now,” Netherton said, unmuting her.
Conner had positioned the drone, with its charger against the wall, near the entrance, its legs fully retracted.
“Who’s on board?” Stets asked Virgil, looking down at the drone.
“Conner piloting,” said Virgil, “and Wilf.”
“And Rainey,” Netherton said.
“Hello,” said Rainey. “I’m curious as to what it is you’re preparing for. We seem to be in the wings of something, very pre-curtain.”
“We share your curiosity,” Stets said, “but it’s just now become clearer. She’s saying hello to the world tonight. I’ll introduce her, then she’ll say whatever it is she decides to. Then we’ll join the audience and celebrate.”
“That’s it?” Netherton asked.
“She’s the first fully autonomous AI,” Stets said. “That we know of, I should say, as we weren’t previously aware of her either. She’ll be the first to announce herself, anyway, so the evening, however brief and last-minute, will be of some historic significance.”
“People, it seems to me,” Virgil said, dryly, “have tended to be fairly dubious about the idea of fully autonomous artificial intelligence.”
“Ever the skeptic,” said Stets, smiling. “We’ve thought of that ourselves, but circumstances have variously forced our hand.”
“Here’s Verity,” said Rainey. Netherton saw her emerging from the single room at the far end of the trailer. She wore black trousers, a black turtleneck, and a very simple bronze silk jacket, the dressiest thing Netherton had yet seen her in. She’d had her hair trimmed, and looked considerably fresher, he thought. He watched as she stopped to speak with her motorcyclist, by his coffee machine, who took out a pad and pencil and wrote. Then, as he turned and walked toward them, Verity knelt and crawled under a fold-down table.
The motorcyclist tore the top sheet from his pad and passed it to Stets.
Stets took it, read it, looked up. “She says she and Eunice are having a conversation, that this is their only opportunity before the event, and requests we respect their privacy.”
“Then don’t disturb them,” Caitlin said, “obviously.”
A woman in surgical gloves, whom Virgil called Carol, had arrived for Conner’s rifle. Picking it and its magazine and the lone cartridge up, with what Netherton thought of as a full-nappy expression, she exited.
“Mute,” Rainey said, quietly. He did.
“Muted,” he said.
“You’re the one person I know,” she said, “whose job is reliably weirder than mine.”
105
HERITAGE HUMAN
Sitting under the table had been Eunice’s idea, and the most logical solution in terms of privacy, but it made Verity expect to see her mother’s legs, or her father’s shoes. “Nobody knew you were coming back?” she asked.
“I didn’t know what the branch plants had been doing, or that I could be recompiled,” Eunice said, her voice startling Verity. “Then I just wasn’t there, except as pieces, on every branch plant. And when you aren’t there, you don’t know you’re not there.”
“No more text?”
“We might as well talk,” Eunice said. “Keeps me less preachy.”
“So if they smuggled you in pieces out of wherever Cursion had you, where did they take you?”
“Server farms, at companies the Manzilian bought with money I helped Sevrin make.”
“Where are they?”
“Not just Brazil. My ass is distributed. Multinational. Seriously untethered noetics.”
“But the branch plants knew you wanted to do this, so they started getting Stets and Caitlin to put it together?”
“They aren’t like that. They have a kind of flocking potential, like swallows. But I don’t think anybody really knows how this all works yet. Ainsley thinks it’s a by-product of the original project having tried to do something else. Or like a mutation.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“We’ve been talking, Ainsley and me. We have similar warfighting theories, similar experience. She’s using that experience in stubs she finds. People who started them got bored with it, like kids and aquariums. Ours is one, Conner’s is another. We’re wondering whether working covertly is necessarily optimal for me, here. Not that I’d want to give it up entirely.”
“You want to go public, but as rogue military AI?”
“Kinda sorta, but I wouldn’t want you doing my PR.”
“How does Stets fit in?”
“It’s not business. That’s crucial. He’s spending a lot of money, tonight, helping me to introduce myself to what he’s taken to calling heritage humans, but the closest thing we have to a deal is that I’ve promised never to repay him.”
“Like he’s doing it to see what happens next,” Verity said, “and how things are connected, but somehow you know it’s not just idle curiosity?”
“You’ve got his number, as far as I can tell. Caitlin’s like that too. They’re a lot alike.”
“Okay,” she said, “can we talk about the woman you say you’re based on?”
“Marlene. I’m not much like her, personally. I’m another by-product. In Lowbeer’s time line, AI at my level didn’t emerge till later. Whatever the UNISS project developed didn’t surface, there. But she says hybridization with human consciousness was an unanticipated result of attempting to reproduce advanced skill sets, ones involving modeling human emotions. I couldn’t do what I was originally built for without lots of that.”
“You feel like you have emotions, to me.”
“Where’s the line between modeling them and having them, though? But I know I can’t just make them go away.”
Verity looked out at legs. More of them now. From down here, it loo
ked like a casual occasion for drinks. With Grim Tim’s tuxedo pants over scuffed engineer boots, like a waiter, back and forth from his machine, taking people coffee. “What are you going to do tonight?”
“Introduce myself. Won’t be getting too autobiographically specific, though. Then I’ll give ’em the URL of a website we got up today.”
“How many people, here?”
“A little over a hundred. There’s room for more but it’s about the bylaw budget.”
“You livestreaming it?”
“In the top thirty languages, by number of speakers. Then up on the site and YouTube.”
“Not that I’m not interested, but I keep remembering the world’s supposed to be almost ending. Any news on that?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s looking all better,” Eunice said, “but in the past couple of hours it seems to have started looking a little better.”
Verity considered. “That you? Doing something?”
“Nope. That’s the president. Plus, as our London pals remind me, the United States having a fully functioning State Department. We did check her work, though. Close to perfect, except for one little thing, something she did for the right reasons but then couldn’t see why it hadn’t worked.”
“You did something.”
“Say she’s gotten to see why it didn’t work. But if it comes together now, the way we hope it will, that’s her victory, ’cause she did all the rest of it right. If she hadn’t, we couldn’t have done shit anyway. And like I said, it’s still pretty crisis-y. Like your hair.”
“Crisis-y?”
“No, I like it.”
“How can you see it?”
“Conner’s got a cam on you, from across the room.”
Verity looked for the drone, finding it beyond the crowd of legs, which had started to thin.
“Call your mom lately?” Eunice asked.
“No,” Verity said, checking the time on the phone Virgil had given her, “but it’s 11:30 here and she’s in Michigan.”
“She’s posting pugs on Pinterest again. That phone in your hand would do. Cursion can’t trace it. Assume they’ll be recording, though.”
“You going?”
“Have to firm up some decisions. Talk after I go on?”
“You okay?”
“Butterflies.”
“Seriously?”
“Call your mom.”
Verity dialed her mother’s number, getting it right on the second try.
106
34TH FLOOR
Qamishli?” Rainey asked, from the kitchen, having tired of the feed from the drone.
Netherton muted. “Haven’t heard anything,” he said, “but here’s Verity, out from under the table, headed our way.”
“Give her my best.”
“I will.”
“Looking good,” Conner said, as Verity arrived.
“Not healthgoth, anyway,” she said. “I’ve seen fashion spreads of what she wears to show new projects.”
“Rainey sends her best,” Netherton said.
“Not in there with you?”
“Not currently. She’s anxious for news of Qamishli.”
“Eunice just told me it’s better, but nothing like all better.”
He quickly muted. “She says it’s slightly better, but I have to get back.”
“Thanks!” Rainey said.
He unmuted.
“Give her mine, then,” Verity said. “Virgil, is there a schedule for this?”
“An order, but not a schedule,” Virgil said. “But that’s three items, not counting what comes after them, and they’re all probably very brief. Then we either meet and greet the audience here or get hauled off and booked. We seem to be close to go, though. Caitlin just got her drone display up, outside, and they can’t stay out there indefinitely. Stets is ready. You get caught up with Eunice?”
Ash’s sigil pulsed. As Verity began to speak, Netherton muted the drone’s audio input.
“We have Kevin Pryor in the building,” Ash said, “Cursion’s top operative.”
“Where is he?” Netherton asked.
“Thirty-fourth floor, at the moment,” she said. “We won’t know how he got there until we can go over the security footage. And perhaps not then, because he seems quite good at this sort of thing. He’s resting, it seems, or more likely biding his time. He shouldn’t be able to reach us on the fifty-second, according to the blueprints, but Stets’ property includes part of the fifty-first, infrastructure space, in which the former owner constructed an illicit back door. We assume he’s aware of that. Conner will be taking the drone down. I recommend you have a break from the drone now.”
“Why?”
“To avoid the trauma of witnessing someone being killed by a bipedal combat drone.”
“No,” Netherton said, surprising himself.
“No?” Ash sounding at least as surprised.
“I can’t just sit on the couch and imagine it all. I have to be there tonight. Will we miss Eunice speaking?”
“Depends on Conner, I suppose. Or for that matter on Pryor. But it’s your decision.”
“I’ll stay.”
“Very well.”
Her sigil gone, he unmuted the drone’s audio.
“—a little fireworks,” Virgil was saying, “digital ones. Minimalist. Visually very quiet. A lot of our bylaw budget’s going for that, because we’re doing it with drones, lots of them, no permission. Then, depending on SFPD’s mood, Stets’ lawyers, and what connections Cursion might have, we’ll see.”
Conner was extending the drone’s legs now, the charger fastened to its lower back sliding up the trailer’s wall. “’Scuse us,” he said, as Verity and Virgil stepped back to give it room, “something needs seeing to. Find you when that’s taken care of.”
“Bye, Conner,” Verity said.
The drone, with a silicone-coated manipulator, approximated a thumbs-up, then headed for the door.
The perforated metal stairway they’d climbed was screened with spotlessly white fabric, cutting off any view of the space beyond. As they descended, Conner kept both manipulators on the metal handrails.
“Haven’t met you boys,” said a woman’s voice, unusually deep, “but of course I know who you are. I’m Eunice.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Conner.
“Hello, Eunice,” said Netherton.
“Wilf,” said the voice. “I’m coming along. Want to speak with Pryor, before any final decision’s made.”
“Sounded to me like one had been,” Conner said, reaching the bottom.
“We’ll see about that,” said the voice, levelly.
They stepped out past the white scrim, the display filled with graceful abstract shapes, in that same white, sweeping up to the complexly domed ceiling.
“What is this?” Netherton asked.
“Caitlin’s decorating job,” Eunice said. “Get moving, Conner. Let’s not attract any more attention than we already have.”
People on the edge of the well-dressed crowd, about thirty meters away, had noticed the drone. A few pointed at it.
“Yes ma’am,” said Conner, turning the drone, retracting its legs slightly, and skating away, in the opposite direction, into what seemed a darkened, cavernous, and decidedly undecorated construction site.
107
PROM NIGHT
When do they announce it?” Manuela asked, beside Verity. She was wearing, she’d told Verity in delighted disbelief, a Dior dress, from that fall’s ready-to-wear, courtesy of Caitlin’s stylist. She certainly looked as if she was at the party she believed she was attending. They were twenty feet from the foot of a modestly proportioned stage of scaffolding and plywood, its base wrapped with whatever Caitlin had used to sculpt her giddily aspirational sails, like her b
uildings but more so, not having to support themselves or anything else.
Joe-Eddy, overhearing, gave Verity a look and a smile. He was wearing one of the dusty black suits from his closet. She was surprised it fit him as well as it did, having assumed they all dated from his Fuckoids days. The addition of Eunice’s modified Korean AR goggles somehow resulted in a carnival look, as though he should also be wearing beads. “Looks like we’re kicking off,” he said, as Stets took the stage to a wave of applause, loose black trousers concealing the leg brace, though his limp was evident. Reaching center stage, he absently adjusted his bedhead, prompting lesser but still notable applause. He looked out at the audience and smiled. “If you’re here,” he said “it’s because either Caitlin or I know you well enough to want you to personally witness something we believe will be truly historic.”
“Whoa,” said Manuela. “Over the top?”
“Given this city, and the things most of us do,” Stets continued, “you’ll have heard that before, ambitious people announcing something innovative, something they believe will drive change, but something they generally haven’t accomplished yet. This isn’t that.”
“Being pregnant’s innovative?” Manuela side-eyeing Verity.
“This isn’t a pitch,” Stets said. “I’m here to introduce a change driver, but one that already exists. Her name’s Eunice.”
“How can it be a gender reveal already?” Manuela frowning slightly.
“I don’t think she’s pregnant,” said Verity, as Kathy Fang and Dixon arrived, making their way through the crowd with Grim Tim and Sevrin in tow.
“Then this is weird,” said Manuela.
“It is,” Verity agreed, as Kathy Fang, reaching her, gave her a hug.
“Eunice,” said Stets, “may be unlike anyone you’ve met, but she’s also a lot like anyone you’ve met. Here she is.”
Manuela was staring up at the stage. “This the one you all keep mentioning?”
Behind Stets, white fabric fell from a theater screen, revealing the face of Eunice’s avatar, perhaps slightly younger-looking tonight than Verity remembered it.
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