The Peripheral (16 page)

BULLSHIT ARTIST

A
fter showering, Netherton put on gray trousers, a black pullover free of any turtle’s neck, and a black jacket, chosen from the clothing Ash had provided.

It was the peripheral’s turn to shower. He could hear the pumps, and wondered what percentage of that was the same water he’d just used. The vehicle’s water management regime had been designed for desert exploration. Ash had warned him not to swallow any, in the shower. At least two pumps were running, whenever the shower was in use, one sucking every fallen drop away for recycling.

The sound of the shower stopped. After several minutes Ash emerged, followed by the peripheral, which looked, after showering, radiant, as though freshly created. Ash herself was still in her sincerity suit, but the peripheral wore the black shirt and jeans that Ash had based on the clothing Flynne had worn when he’d first spoken with her.

“Did you cut its hair?” he asked.

“We borrowed Dominika’s hairdresser. Showed him the files of your conversation. He was impressed, actually.”

“It doesn’t look like her. Well, the hair, a bit. Has this been done before? Someone from a stub using a peripheral?”

“The more I think of it, the more it seems a natural, but no, not that I know of. But continua enthusiasts are generally secretive, while peripherals of this grade tend to be very private possessions. Owners don’t often advertise the fact.”

“How will we do this, then, with Flynne?” The peripheral was
looking at him. Or wasn’t, but seemed to be. He frowned. It looked away. He resisted an urge to apologize.

“We’ll have her on a bunk,” Ash said, “in the rear cabin. There can be initial balance issues, nausea. I’ll greet her when she arrives, help her orient. Then I’ll bring her out to meet you. You can be at the desk, the way she’s seen you before. Continuity of experience.”

“No. I want to see her. Arrive.”

“Why?”

“I feel a certain responsibility,” he said.

“You’re our bullshit artist. Stick with that.”

“I don’t expect you to like me—”

“If I didn’t at all, you’d know it.”

“Have you heard from Lowbeer yet?”

“No,” she said.

Lowbeer’s sigil appeared, pulsing softly, gilt and ivory.

ZERO

E
verything in the trailer that Macon and Edward hadn’t brought in with them was squared away, at right angles. They’d unpacked their blue duffels and the cartons. Edward, seated in the Chinese chair, was cabling things to Burton’s display. One of the cables ran to the white controller, centered on the drum-taut army blanket on Burton’s bed. “Nothing’s wireless?” she asked.

“These aren’t just cables. They’re about a third of the device. Give me your phone.”

She handed him her phone, which he passed to Edward.

“Password?”

“Easy Ice,” she said, “lowercase, no space.”

“That’s such a shit password, it’s not even a password.”

“I’m a just normal fucking person, Macon.”

“Normal fucking people never do whatever it is you’re about to.” He smiled.

“Ready,” said Edward, who’d already cabled her phone, rolling the chair back from the table.

“Can we get the lights down?” asked Macon. “You’ll have your eyes closed, but this is still too bright. Otherwise, there’s an eyeshade for you.”

She went to the display, waved through it, turning the LEDs down to teen-boy sex pit. “Okay?”

“Perfect,” said Macon.

“How’s this going to work?” she asked him.

“You lay on the bunk here, head at a comfortable angle, wearing
this.” Indicating the controller. “Close your eyes. We’ll be here for you if you need us.”

“For what?”

He indicated a yellow plastic bucket with Hefty Mart stickers still on it. “Nausea’s a possibility. Inner ear thing. Phantom inner ear, she said, but I think that was shorthand for our benefit. You fast?”

“By accident,” she said. “I’m starving.”

“Use the toilet now,” said Macon. “Then we go.”

“I go.”

“I know. Pisses me off.”

“Jealous of the crown?”

“Curious. As I’ve ever been.”

“Whatever it is, I’ll tell you.”

“Not while it’s happening, you won’t. This thing works, you’ll be in an induced version of sleep paralysis.”

“Like how we don’t hurt ourselves when we’re dreaming we do things?” She’d seen an episode of
Ciencia Loca
about that, plus lucid dreaming and being hagridden.

“That’s it. Go use the ladies’ now. It’s time.”

When she came out of the trailer, she saw Burton and Carlos standing there, about fifteen feet away. She gave them the finger, went into the toilet, where there was no light at all, peed, hoped she didn’t get the cedar sawdust on the seat in the dark, came back out, used sanitizer, and stepped up into the trailer, ignoring Burton and Carlos. Closed the door behind her.

Macon and Edward were looking at her. “Take off your shoes,” said Macon.

She sat down on the bed, Macon carefully moving the controller aside for her. She got a closer look at it as she took her sneakers off. It looked tight as all of Macon’s top-end printing, tight as her phone, except for the sugarplum fairy stuff he’d fabbed it from. Edward was positioning Burton’s pillow. “Have any more pillows?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Bunch it in half. You have their log-in?”

“We do.” Macon produced a little plastic tube, showed her the Pharma Jon logo. “This’ll be cool.”

“That’s what they all say,” she said.

Macon put saline paste on his fingertip.

“Don’t get any in my eyes.”

He spread a line of chill wetness across her forehead, like some weird and possibly unwelcome blessing. Then he picked up the controller. “Pull your hair back.” She did, and he settled it on her head. “Fit?”

“I guess. It’s heavy. In front.”

“Our hunch is that the real deal weighs about as much as a pair of throwaway sunglasses, but this is the best we can do, short notice, on our printers. Pinch anywhere?”

“No.”

“Okay. So it’s heavy, right? I’m going to hold on to it while you lay back, slow, and Edward’ll position the pillow. Okay? Now.”

She lay back, straightened her legs.

“Because of the cable,” Macon said, “you need to keep your hands away from your head, your face, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’re running off our own batteries here, just in case.”

“Of what?”

“More doctor’s orders.”

She looked from him to Edward, just moving her eyes, then back to him. “So?”

He reached down, took her right wrist in his hand, squeezed it. “We’re here. Anything looks too funny, we get you out. We built in some very basic monitors, on our own. Vital signs.” He released her wrist.

“Thanks. What do I do?”

“Close your eyes. Count down from fifteen. About ten, should be a wobble.”

“Wobble?”

“What she called it. Keep your eyes closed, keep counting down to zero. Then open ’em. We see you open ’em, it hasn’t worked.”

“Okay,” she said, “but not until I say go.” Holding her head still, she looked up and to the right: the window, in the wall beside her. Up: the ceiling, tubes of lights glowing in polymer. Toward her feet: Burton’s display, Edward. To her left: Macon, the closed door behind him. “Go,” she said, closing her eyes. “Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.”

Pop.

That color like Burton’s haptics scar, but she could taste it inside her teeth. “Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.” It hadn’t worked. Nothing had happened. “Five. Four. Three.” She should tell them. “Two. One. Zero.” She opened her eyes. A flat ceiling sprang away, polished, six feet higher than the one in the trailer, as the room reversed, was backward, was other, weight of the crown gone, her stomach upside down. A woman’s eyes, close, weirdly blurred.

She didn’t remember sitting up but then she saw her own hands and they weren’t. Hers.

“If you need this,” the woman said, holding out a steel canister. “There’s nothing in you but some water.” Flynne leaned over, saw a face not hers reflected in the round, mirror-polished bottom. Froze. “Fuck.” The lips there forming the word as she spoke it. “What the fuck is this?” She came up off the bed fast. Not a bed. A padded ledge. She was taller. “Something’s wrong,” she heard herself say, but the voice wasn’t hers. “Colors—”

“You’re accessing input from an anthropomorphic drone,” the woman said. “A telepresence avatar. You needn’t consciously control it. Don’t try. We’re recalibrating it now. Macon’s device isn’t perfect, but it works.”

“You know Macon?”

“Virtually,” said the woman. “I’m Ash.”

“Your eyes—”

“Contact lenses.”

“Too many colors—” She meant her own vision.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We’d missed that. Your peripheral is a tetrachromat.”

“A what?”

“It has a wider range of color vision than you do. But we’ve found the settings for that and are including them in the recalibration. Touch your face.”

“Macon told me not to.”

“This is different.”

Flynne raised her hand, touched her face, not thinking. “Shit—”

“Good. The recalibration is taking effect.”

Again, with both hands. Like touching herself through something that wasn’t quite there.

She looked up. The ceiling was pale polished wood, shiny, inset with round flat little metal light fixtures, glowing softly. Tiny room, higher than it was wide. Narrower than the Airstream. The walls were that same wood. A man stood at the far end, by a skinny open door. Dark shirt and jacket. “Hello, Flynne,” he said.

“Human resources,” she said, recognizing him.

“You don’t look like you’re going to need this,” the woman called Ash said, putting the canister down on the cushioned ledge Flynne had awakened on. Awakened? Arrived? “Would you mind speaking to Macon now?”

“How?”

“By phone. He’s concerned. I’ve reassured him, but it would help if he could speak with you.”

“You have a phone?”

“Yes,” said the woman, “but so do you.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. Watch.”

Flynne saw a small circle appear. Like a badge in Badger. It was white, with a gif of a line drawing of an antelope or something,
running. She moved her eyes. The circle with the gif moved with them. “What’s that?”

“My phone. You have one too. I have Macon. Now I open a feed—”

A second circle expanded, to the right of the gif and larger. She saw Macon, seated in front of Burton’s display. “Flynne?” he asked. “That you?”

“Macon! This is crazy!”

“What did you do, here, just before we did the thing?” He looked serious.

“Had a pee?”

He grinned. “Wow . . .” He shook his head, grinned. “This is mission control shit!”

“He can see what I’m seeing,” said Ash.

“You okay?” Macon asked.

“Guess so.”

“You’re okay here,” he said.

“We’ll get her back to you, Macon,” Ash said, “but we need to speak with her now.”

“Send somebody up to the house to get me a sandwich,” she said to Macon, “I’ll be starving.”

Macon grinned, nodded, shrank to nothing, was gone.

“We could move to my office,” said the man.

“Not yet,” said Ash. She touched the pale wall and a section slid aside, out of sight.

A toilet, sink, shower, all steel. A mirror. Flynne moved toward it. “Holy shit,” she said, staring. “Who is she?”

“We don’t know.”

“This is a . . . machine?” She touched . . . someone. Stomach. Breasts. She looked in the mirror. The French girl in Operation Northwind? No. “That’s got to be somebody,” she said.

“Yes,” said Ash, “though we don’t know who. How do you feel now?”

Flynne touched the steel basin. Someone else’s hand. Her hand. “I can feel that.”

“Nausea?”

“No.”

“Vertigo?”

“No. Why is she wearing a shirt like mine, but silk or something? Has my name on it.”

“We wanted you to feel at home.”

“Where is this? Colombia?” She heard how little she thought this last might be true.

“That’s my department, so to speak,” said the human resources man, behind her. Netherton, she remembered. Wilf Netherton. “Come out to my office. It’s a bit roomier. I’ll try to answer your questions.”

She turned and saw him standing there, eyes wider than she remembered. Like someone seeing a ghost.

“Yes,” said Ash, putting her hand on Flynne’s shoulder, “let’s.”

Her hand, thought Flynne, but whose shoulder?

She let Ash guide her.

BODY LANGUAGE

F
lynne completely altered the peripheral’s body language, Netherton realized, as Ash directed her toward him. Inhabited, its face became not hers but somehow her.

He found himself backing down the corridor, barely shoulder-wide, away from that smallest of the Gobiwagen’s cabins. Unwilling to lose sight of her, out of something that felt at least partially like terror, he couldn’t turn his back.

Ash, earlier, had explained that peripherals, when under AI control, looked human because their faces, programmed to constantly register changing micro-expressions, were never truly still. In the absence of that, she’d said, they became uniquely disturbing objects. Flynne was now providing the peripheral with her own micro-expressions, a very different effect. “It’s fine,” he heard himself say, though whether to himself or to her he didn’t know. This was all much stranger than he’d anticipated, like some unthinkable birth or advent.

He backed into the scent of Ash’s flowers. Ash had had Ossian remove Lev’s grandfather’s displays, and the luggage as well, deeming them unnecessary, not conducive to “flow” in the space, so the flowers were at the end of the desk nearest two compact armchairs she’d raised from hidden wells in the floor. They’d reminded him of the seats in Lowbeer’s car, but slicker, unworn.

“They’re for you,” Ash said, indicating the flowers. “We can’t offer you anything to eat, or drink.”

“I’m fucking starving,” Flynne said, accent her own but the voice not as he recalled it. She looked at Ash. “I’m not? I—”

“Autonomic bleed-over,” Ash said. “That’s your own body’s hunger.
Your peripheral doesn’t experience it. It doesn’t eat, has no digestive tract. Can you smell them, the flowers?”

Flynne nodded.

“Colors more normal?”

Flynne hesitated. Took two deep, slow breaths. “They hurt, before. Not now. I’m sweating.”

“You’ve flooded its adrenal system. You won’t find the transition this unsettling again. There was no way we could cushion it for you, as a first-time user, other than have you prone, eyes closed, on an empty stomach.”

Flynne turned, slowly, taking in the room. “I saw you here,” she said to Netherton. “Looked this tacky, but I thought it was bigger. Where’s that atrium?”

“Elsewhere. Take a seat?”

She ignored his suggestion, went to the window instead. He and Ash had argued over whether or not to have the blinds closed. In the end, Ash had ordered Ossian into her workspace in the garage’s corner, leaving the blinds open. With no motion in the garage, the arches had faded to their faintest luminosity. Flynne bent slightly, peering out, but now the nearest arch sensed her movement, pulsed faintly, greenly. “A parking lot?” She must have seen Lev’s father’s cars. “Are we in an RV?”

“A what?” asked Netherton.

“Camper. Recreational vehicle.” She was moving her head, trying to see more. “Your office is in an RV?”

“Yes.” He wasn’t sure how that would strike her.

“Came here from a trailer,” she said.

A short promotional video précis, he recalled. “Pardon me?”

“A caravan,” said Ash. “Please sit down, both of you. We’ll try to answer your questions, Flynne.” She took a seat, leaving Flynne the one nearest the flowers.

Netherton seated himself at the gold-marbled desk, regretting its gangster pomp.

Flynne took a last look out the window, scratching the back of her neck, something he couldn’t imagine the peripheral doing on its own, then went to the remaining chair. She folded herself into it, knees high, wide apart. She leaned forward, raised her hands, studying the nails closely, then shook her head. She looked up at him, lowering her hands. “I used to play in a game,” she said, “for a man who had money. Did it because I needed the money. Man he had us play against was a total shit, but that was just sort of an accident. It wasn’t about making money, for either of them. Not like it was for us. It was a hobby, for them. Rich fucks. They bet on who’d win.” She was staring at him.

All his glibness, all his faithful machinery of convincing language, somehow spun silently against this, finding no traction whatever.

“You say you’re not builders.” She looked to Ash. “Some kind of security, for a game. But if it’s a game, why did someone send those men to kill us? Not just Burton, but all of us. My mother too.” She looked to him again. “How’d you know the winning number in the lottery, Mr. Netherton?”

“Wilf,” he said, thinking it sounded less like a name than an awkward cough.

“We didn’t,” said Ash. “That was why your cousin had to purchase a ticket. Your brother gave us the number of the ticket. We then interfered with the mechanism of selection, making his the winning number. No predictive magic. Superior processing speed, nothing more.”

“You sent that lawyer over from Clanton, with bags full of money? Make him win a lottery too?”

“No,” said Ash, who then looked irritably at Netherton, as if to say that he was supposed to be the one handling this. Which he was.

“This isn’t,” he said, “your world.”

“So what is it?” asked Flynne. “A game?”

“The future,” said Netherton, feeling utterly ridiculous. On impulse, he added the year.

“No way.”

“But it isn’t your future,” he said. “When we made contact, we set your world, your universe, whatever it is—”

“Continuum,” said Ash.

“—on a different course,” he finished. He’d never in his life said anything that sounded more absurd, though it was, as far as he knew, the truth.

“How?”

“We don’t know,” he said.

Flynne rolled her eyes.

“We’re accessing a server,” Ash said. “We know absolutely nothing about it. That sounds ridiculous, or evasive, but what we’re doing is something people do here. Perhaps,” and she looked at Netherton, “not unlike your two rich fucks.”

“Why did you hire my brother?”

“That was Netherton’s idea,” said Ash. “Perhaps he should explain. He’s been curiously silent.”

“I thought it might amuse a friend—” he began.

“Amuse?” Flynne frowned.

“I’d no idea any of this would happen,” he said.

“That’s true, really,” said Ash. “He was in a far messier situation than he imagined. Trying to impress a woman he was involved with, by offering her your brother’s services.”

“But she wasn’t impressed,” Netherton said. “And so she gave him, his services rather, to her sister.” He was in freefall now, all power of persuasion having deserted him.

“You may have witnessed her sister’s murder,” Ash said to Flynne.

The peripheral’s eyes widened. “That was real?”

“‘May’?” asked Netherton.

“She witnessed something,” Ash said to him, “but we’ve no evidence as to what, exactly.”

“Ate her up,” said Flynne. A drop of sweat ran down her forehead, into an eyebrow. She wiped it away with the back of her forearm, something else he couldn’t imagine the peripheral doing.

“If you consider how you’re able to be here now,” Ash said to her, “virtually yet physically, you may begin to understand our inability to know exactly what you saw.”

“You’re confusing her,” Netherton said.

“I’m attempting to acclimatize her, something you’re so far utterly failing to do.”

“Where are we?” Flynne demanded.

“London,” said Netherton.

“The game?” she asked.

“It’s never been a game,” he said. “It was easiest for us to tell your brother that.”

“This thing,” she indicated the cabin, “where is it, exactly?”

“An area called Notting Hill,” said Ash, “in a garage, beneath a house. Beneath several adjacent houses, actually.”

“The London with the towers?”

“Shards,” Netherton said. “They’re called shards.”

She stood, the peripheral unfolding with a slender but suddenly powerful grace from its awkward position in the chair. She pointed. “What’s outside that door?”

“A garage,” said Ash. “Housing a collection of historic vehicles.”

“Door locked?”

“No,” said Ash.

“Anything out there that’ll convince me this is the future?”

“Let me show you this.” Ash stood, the stiff fabric of her suit rumpled. She undid zips, from inner wrist to elbow, on both her sleeves, quickly folding them back. Line drawings fled. “They’re in a panic,” she said. “They don’t know you.” She put her thumb through the central zip’s aluminum ring, at the hollow of her neck, and drew it down, exposing a complexly cantilevered black lace bra, below which swarmed a terrified tangle of extinct species, their black ink milling against her luminous pallor. As if seeing Flynne, they fled again. To her back, Netherton assumed. Ash zipped up her suit, rezipped the sleeves in turn. “Does that help?”

Flynne stared at her. Nodded slightly. “Can I go out now?”

“Of course,” Ash said. “These aren’t contact lenses, by the way.”

Netherton, realizing that he hadn’t moved, possibly hadn’t breathed, since Flynne had stood up, pushed himself up from the desk, palms flat on the gold-veined marble.

“How can I be sure it isn’t a game?” Flynne asked. “At least half the games I’ve ever played were set in some kind of future.”

“Were you paid large sums to play them?” Netherton asked.

“Didn’t do it for free,” Flynne said, stepping to the door, opening it.

He managed to beat Ash there, at the cost of bruising his thigh on the corner of the desk. Flynne was at the top of the gangway, looking up at the arch nearest them, as its cells, sensing her there, luminesced.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Engineered from marine animals. Motion activated.”

“My brother used a squidsuit, in the war. Cuttlefish camo. What’s that?” Pointing, down, to the left of the gangway, to the white anthropomorphic bulk of the muscular-resistance exoskeleton.

“That’s yours.”

“Mine?”

“Your peripheral’s. An exercise device. You wear it.”

She turned toward him, placing her palm flat on his chest, pushing slightly, as if to test that he was there. “Don’t know whether to scream or shit,” she said. And smiled.

Breathe, he reminded himself.