The Peripheral (28 page)

EMULATION APP

T
he headband Ash was extending looked like the one Lowbeer had used to take him back to the patchers’ island, but with the addition of a clear bendable cam, its milkily transparent head like a very large sperm. “I’m not going back there,” he said, grateful for the expanse of Lev’s grandfather’s desk.

“You aren’t being asked. You’ll be visiting Flynne. At very low resolution.”

“I will?”

“We’ve already installed the emulation app in your phone.”

He leaned forward, took the thing from her. It weighed no more than the other one, but the spermlike cam lent it something at once Egyptianate and cartoonish. “They have peripherals?”

“I’ll let you find that out for yourself.”

WHEELIE BOY

Y
ou got a bug in your stomach?” Janice finally asked, from the dark at the foot of the bed. “And one in your ear?”

Flynne was sitting up against her pillows, in her underpants and the USMC sweatshirt, moonlight streaming in her window. “One in my stomach’s a tracker,” she said, “from a Belgian satellite security service. Me, Macon, Burton, Conner, we all got one, that I know of.”

“One in your ear?”

“Burton took it.”

“How’d he get it out?”

“Macon flew it out. Into a pill bottle. I thought it was some future-ass thing they showed Macon how to fab, but he says it’s from here, last season’s military.”

“The one you swallowed showed them where you were?”

“Or I wouldn’t be here now. Reece bagged my phone.”

“Macon’s made you a new one. Got it right here. How hard would it be to get that thing out of your stomach?”

“Six months, it just lets go, Macon said.”

“And?”

“You shit it out, Janice.”

“In the toilet?”

“On your friend’s head.”

“Happens daily,” said Janice, from the dark, “kind of people I know. But you’d just trust Belgians, telling you you’d pooped out their tracker bug?”

“Macon would. Where’s Madison?”

“Building a fort. Over at your new world headquarters, next to Fab.”

“Why?”

“Burton told him to. Gave him a Hefty charge card. Said improvise.”

“Out of what?”

“About two hundred pallets of those faux-asphalt roof tiles, mostly. The kind made of shredded bottles, old tires and shit. Leaves ’em in their bags, has Burton’s guys stack ’em like bricks, seven feet high, two bags deep. Stop some serious ammunition, that stuff.”

“Why?”

“Ask Burton. Madison says if it’s about Homes coming after us, won’t be any help at all. And Homes is all over what’s left of Pickett’s place. Got Tommy over helping them.”

“Must be getting sick of driving, there and back.”

“You didn’t get raped or anything, did you?”

“No. Pickett just mentioned maybe dislocating my jaw. Not like his heart was in it, though. I think he mainly just wanted the most money he could get for me.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” said Janice.

“What is?”

“Why I hope the fucker’s dead.”

“If you’d seen how they delivered that bomb, you’d know it wasn’t liable to be sneaking up on anybody, even with a squidsuit on.”

“Here’s hoping anyway,” said Janice.

“How’d they get squidsuits?”

“That Griff.”

“Who?”

“Griff. Ironside people sent him, right away.”

“Coldiron.”

“He was here almost as soon as Burton knew you were off the reservation. Jet helicopter, landed over in the pasture there.” Janice pointed,
hand emerging into moonlight. “I never got a look at him. Madison did. Sounded English, Madison said. Probably where they got that micro-drone too.”

“What is he?”

“No idea. Madison says that copter came from D.C. Says it was Homes.”

“Homes?”

“The copter.”

Pickett had people in Homes, Flynne remembered Reece saying. “Guess I’m behind the curve again.” If she wasn’t in the future, she thought, she was getting kidnapped and rescued.

“With Pickett’s place all blown to shit, we get to wake up tomorrow and see who looks like their main source of income’s gone tits up. Here’s the phone Macon made you.” She passed it to Flynne, out of the dark.

“I’d rather have mine back.” Pissed her off, all the hours she’d put in at Fab to pay for that.

“Yours got flown to Nassau.”

“Nassau?”

“Somebody in a lawyer’s office there. They took it out of a Faraday bag, a little after Burton and them broke you out of Pickett’s. Macon bricked it.”

Flynne remembered Pickett saying he’d have her call Netherton, try to get more money for her than the others were offering.

“Macon said Pickett has fancy lawyers, in Nassau,” Janice said, “but not as fancy as yours, and not as many.”

“All of three, that I know of.”

“Lots more now, in town. Housing and feeding them’s a growth industry. Timely one, too.”

“He put my apps and stuff on it?” Flynne raised her new phone, sniffed. Fresh.

“Yeah, plus some major encryption, runs in background. He says to change your passwords on everything. And don’t just use your
birthday or your name backwards. And there’s a Hefty Wheelie Boy for you, in that tote there, on your desk.”

“A what?”

“Wheelie Boy.”

“The fuck?”

“Macon got it off eBay. New old stock. Mint in box.”

“Huh?”

“Back in grade school. Like a tablet on a stick? Bottom’s like a little Segway. Remember those things? Motors, two wheels, gyros to keep ’em upright.”

“Looked stupid,” Flynne said, remembering them now.

Janice’s phone chimed. She checked it, the screen lighting her face. “Ella needs me.”

“If it’s anything serious, get me. Otherwise, I’m going to try to sleep.”

“I’m glad they got you back okay. You know that?”

“I love you, Janice,” Flynne said.

When Janice had gone downstairs, she got up, put on her bedside light, brought the tote back to the bed. There was a box inside with a picture of a Hefty Wheelie Boy on the lid. Like a red plastic flyswatter stuck into a softball the same color, two fat black toy tractor tires on either side of that. Swatter part was a mini-tablet with a cam, on a stick. Marketed as toys, baby monitors, long-distance friendship or sad romance platforms, or even a kind of low-rent virtual vacation. You could buy or rent one in Vegas or Paris, say, drive it around a casino or a museum, see what it saw. And while you did, and this was the part that had put her off, it showed your face on the tablet. You wore a headpiece with a camera on a little boom, which captured your reaction as you saw things through the Wheelie, and people who were looking at it saw you seeing that, or them, and you could have conversations with them. She remembered Leon trying to gross her out, telling her how people were getting sexy with them, all of which she’d hoped he’d made up.

Back on the bed, opening the box, she thought this must have been part of where peripherals were going to come from. Wheelie Boy, in its cheap-ass way, had been one.

There was a yellow sheet from a Forever Fab notepad inside.
DR’S ORDERS, FULLY CHARGED + HA
RDASS NCRYPT—M
in thick flu-pink marker.

She lifted the thing out and tried to stand it up, but it fell over backward, tablet in the moonlight like a black hand mirror. On the bottom of the red ball, a white button. She pressed it. Gyros spun themselves up with a little squawk, the red plastic rod with the tablet on the end suddenly upright on the bed, black wheels moving independently in the sheets, turning it left, then right.

She poked the black screen with her finger, knocking it back, the gyros righting it.

Then it lit, Netherton’s face on it, too close to the cam, eyes wide, nose too big. “Flynne?” he said, through a cheap little speaker.

“Shit the living fuck,” she said, almost laughing, then had to yank the sheet over her legs because she just had her underpants and the sweatshirt on.

FRONTIERLAND

F
eed from the thing’s cam, in full binocular, reminded him of still images from an era prior to hers, though he couldn’t remember the platform’s name. She looked down at him, over knees draped in pale fabric.

“It’s me,” he said.

“No shit,” she said, reaching out, fingertip becoming enormous, to flick him, the cam platform, whatever it was, backward. To be arrested by whatever it stood on. Briefly showing him a low, artisanal-looking surface he assumed must be the ceiling. A horizontal seam, as if glued paper were starting to peel. Then it righted itself, with an audible whirr.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Know what you look like?” Leaning over her knees.

“No,” he said, though the emulation software’s sigil depicted something spherical, two-wheeled, with a topmost rectangle upright on a thin projection. She reached past him, arm growing huge, and the feed filled with a promotional image of the thing on the sigil, rectangular screen tightly framing an eager child’s face.

“No hot synthetic bods, back here in Frontierland,” she said, “but we got Wheelie Boy. Where are you?”

“In the Gobiwagen.”

“The RV?”

“At my desk,” he said.

“That really your desk?”

“No.”

“Ugly-ass desk. Never was really any Coldiron?”

“There are companies, registered in that name, in your Colombia, your Panama,” he said. “And now in your United States of America. You’re an executive of that one.”

“But not there.”

“No.”

“Just Lev’s hobby? With your fuck-up and Lowbeer’s murder investigation on top of it?”

“To my knowledge.”

“Why are you here?”

“Lowbeer suggested it,” he said. “And I wanted to see. Is it day? Is there a window? Where are we?”

“Night,” she said. “My room. Bright moon.” She reached to the side, turning off a light source. Instantly, she was differently beautiful. Dark eyes larger. Daguerreotype, he remembered. “Turn around,” she said, doing it for him. “I have to put my jeans on.”

Her room, rotating the cam as far as he could, was like the interior of some nomadic yurt. Nondescript furniture, tumuli of clothing, printed matter. This actual moment in the past, decades before his birth. A world he’d imagined, but now, somehow, in its reality, unimaginable. “Have you always lived here?”

She bent, plucked him up, carrying him toward the window, into moonlight. “Sure.”

And then the moon. “I know this is real,” he said, “it must be, but I can’t believe it.”

“I can believe in yours, Wilf. Have to. You should try stretching a little.”

“Before the jackpot,” he said, instantly regretting it.

She turned him around then, away from the moon. Stood staring, moonlit, grave, into his eyes. “What’s that, Wilf, the jackpot?”

Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived.

THE JACKPOT

S
he sat with him on her lap, in the old wooden chair under the oak in the front yard.

Ben Carter, the youngest of Burton’s soldiers, who looked like he should still be in high school, sat on the front porch steps, bullpup across his lap, Viz in his eye, drinking coffee from a Thermos. She wanted some, but knew she’d never sleep at all if she had it, and Wilf Netherton was explaining the end of the world, or anyway of hers, this one, which seemed to have been the beginning of his.

Wilf’s face, on the Wheelie’s tablet, had lit her way downstairs. She’d found Ben on the porch steps, guarding the house, and he’d been all embarrassed, getting up with his rifle and trying to remember where not to point it, and she’d seen he had a cap like Reece had had, with the pixilated camo that moved around. He hadn’t known whether to say hello to Wilf or not. She told him they were going to sit out under the tree and talk. He told her he’d let the others know where she was, but please not to go anywhere else, and not to mind any drones. So she’d gone out to the chair and sat in it with Wilf in the Wheelie Boy, and he’d started to explain what he called the jackpot.

And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns, looking like Burton and his posse, or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that.

It was androgenic, he said, and she knew from
Ciencia Loca
and
National Geographic
that that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway. She’d looked across the silver lawn, that Leon had cut with the push-mower whose cast-iron frame was held together with actual baling wire, to where moon shadows lay, past stunted boxwoods and the stump of a concrete birdbath they’d pretended was a dragon’s castle, while Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years.

And hearing that, she just wondered if it could mean anything, really, when somebody told you something like that. When it was his past and your future.

What had they done, she’d asked him, her first question since he’d started, with all the bodies?

The usual things, he’d said, because it was never all at once. Then, later, for a while, nothing, and then the assemblers. The assemblers, nanobots, had come later. The assemblers had also done things like excavating and cleaning the buried rivers of London, after they’d finished tidying the die-off. Had done everything she’d seen on her way to Cheapside. Had built the tower where she’d seen the woman prepare for her party and then be killed, built all the others in the grid of what he called shards, and cared for it all, constantly, in his time after the jackpot.

It hurt him to talk about it, she felt, but she guessed he didn’t know how much, or how. She could tell he didn’t unpack this, much, or maybe ever. He said that people like Ash made their whole lives about it. Dressed in black and marked themselves, but for them it was more about other species, the other great dying, than the 80 percent.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

The shadows on the lawn were black holes, bottomless, or like velvet had been spread, perfectly flat.

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. She felt him stretch past that, to the future where he lived, then pull himself there, quick, unwilling to describe the worst of what had happened, would happen.

She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he’d sketched for her.

None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich
people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity. That was where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced eaten by these towers they’d built, which was the other thing the one she’d patrolled was there for, not just housing rich folks. And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged.

“The bullet was the eighty percent, who died?”

And he just nodded, on the Wheelie’s screen, and went on, about how London, long since the natural home of everyone who owned the world but didn’t live in China, rose first, never entirely having fallen.

“What about China?”

The Wheelie Boy’s tablet creaked faintly, raising the angle of its camera. “They’d had a head start,” he said.

“At what?”

“At how the world would work, after the jackpot. This,” and the tablet creaked again, surveying her mother’s lawn, “is still ostensibly a democracy. A majority of empowered survivors, considering the jackpot, and no doubt their own positions, wanted none of that. Blamed it, in fact.”

“Who runs it, then?”

“Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”

“The King of England?”

“The City of London,” he said. “The Guilds of the City. In alliance with people like Lev’s father. Enabled by people like Lowbeer.”

“The whole world’s funny?” She remembered Lowbeer saying that.

“The klept,” he said, misunderstanding her, “isn’t funny at all.”