92.
YOU GUYS
He was down in the well beneath Lev’s grandfather’s desk, looking for the Wheelie Boy headband. Flynne’s blank sigil seemed to be wherever he looked. “Positive it’s here,” he said, noticing a few pale flattened blobs of gum on the bottom of the marble desktop, near the chair. He imagined Lev pressing them there as a child. His fingers brushed something on the well’s carpeted floor. It moved. He fumbled for it. “Here it is.” He crawled up from beneath the desk, prize in hand.
“Fiddle with the cam,” she said. “You had it too close to your nose, last time.”
He sat in the chair, put the band on, tried to center the cam, and tongued the roof of his mouth. The sigil of the Wheelie Boy emulation app appeared, the feed opened, her blank sigil disappearing. She was seated at a table, against a backdrop of dull blue. The unit seemed to be on the table in front of her, but he didn’t try to move it, or change the angle or direction of its cam. “Hello?”
“Get it a little higher, more in line with your eyes.”
He tried to do that.
“Better,” she said. “Your nose is smaller.” She looked tired, he thought.
“How are you?”
“They fucking shot my brother.”
“Who did?”
“Guys in squidsuits. Clovis and Carlos killed ’em.”
“And your brother?”
“He’s asleep. They gave him something. Government drone gave him a long-distance operation. Got the bullet out, patched a hole in his artery, cleaned everything, stitched him up.”
“Were you hurt?”
“No. Feel fucked, but that’s not the problem.”
“What problem?”
“Lowbeer’s English boy. Back here. Griff. Gryffyd. Holdsworth. Tommy thinks Griff’s what he calls an intelligence liaison. Has diplomatic cover or some shit, out of their embassy in Washington. Lots of connections, government stuff. Our government, I mean. He got squidsuits and a micro-drone for Burton, to get me out of Pickett’s. Got the pill bug they used on Burton—”
“Pill bug?”
“No time. Just listen.”
“Griff is the problem?”
“Lowbeer. Griff’s setting up to do something here, to Luke 4:5—”
“Who?”
“They’re just assholes. You listen to me, okay?”
He nodded, then imagined that on the Wheelie Boy’s tablet.
“The competition’s using them to embarrass us, and probably hoping to get Burton out there so somebody can shoot him. He doesn’t like ’em to begin with, so they’re good bait. But Griff’s got this chemical weapon, called party time. Like every really bad builder drug rolled into one, but worse. If what it makes you do doesn’t kill you in the process, you’re liable to commit suicide from remembering what you did. Tommy says builders can’t find a survivable recreational dose. Go homeopathic on it, it monsters you out just as bad. Clovis already put me on the antidote. Griff’s planning to use it on Luke 4:5, and I’d bet tonight.”
“Then how is Lowbeer your problem?”
“She calls the shots. Either it’s her idea or his, but if it’s his, she signed off on it. Using that shit on anybody is just too crazy. Too mean. It’s your world.”
“My world?”
“Different way of doing things. Stone cold. But I’m not letting it happen, neither is Tommy, and if Burton were conscious, neither would he.”
“How would you stop it?”
“By letting her know I’m not going to the party with you, if they do that. They use it, we smash up the crowns, print new phones with different numbers, and pretend you guys don’t exist. Whatever shit comes down, we deal with it. And fuck you. Not you personally. You guys.”
“Seriously?”
“Shit yes.”
He looked at her.
“So?” she asked.
“So what?”
“You in?”
“In?”
“You tell her. She wants to talk to me, I’m right here. But they put any party time on those sorry assholes across the road, you’re going to that party alone. Me and my family, we’ll be out of the future business.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
“Call her,” she said. “I’m going to go talk to Griff.”
“Why would you do this? Without her, you’ll be in a desperate position. So might we, for that matter. And you’re doing it for the sake of . . . assholes?”
“They’re assholes. We’re not. But we’re only not assholes if we won’t do shit like that. You calling her?”
“Yes. But I don’t know why.”
“Because you’re not an asshole.”
“I wish I believed that.”
“Everybody’s got one. And an opinion to go with it, my mother says. It’s how you behave makes the difference. Now I’m going to turn you off and go tell Griff.” And she did.
93.
MISSION STATEMENT
She was three steps into the back before she realized she was carrying the Wheelie Boy like a teddy bear. Not hugging it, but sort of in her arms. Fuck it.
They turned and looked at her. The red-haired notary from Klein Cruz Vermette, in cammies now and a Clovis-style crotch pouch. Blue surgical gloves. Seemed like she’d just finished putting clean sheets on Burton’s bed. Someone must’ve had to help her, because the pill bug was still all over him. She’d spread one relatively unstained sheet on the floor, between Burton’s bed and Conner’s, which was empty, and had a big ball of blood-stiff sheets on top of that. Clovis was beside Conner’s bed, in fresh clothes, doing something to the white crown on the table there. Griff was at the foot of Burton’s bed, phone to his ear, and as she came in, just his eyes moved.
“Where’s Conner?” she asked.
“Shower,” Clovis said. “Macon took him.”
“How’s Burton?”
“Vitals look good, Walter Reed says. They want him to sleep longer, so it’s still sedating him.”
“I will,” said Griff, to his phone, “thank you.” He lowered it.
“Need to talk,” she said, wishing she hadn’t brought the Wheelie.
“Yes, but not about what you assume we do.”
“The fuck we don’t.”
“Herself.” Holding up his phone. “Wiping party time off the mission statement.”
“You won’t do it?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Huh.” All pissed off, she wondered, and nowhere to go? “Was that shit her idea in the first place?”
“It was,” he said. “I didn’t feel it was appropriate, or advisable. She told me I was unaccustomed to operating from a position of strength.” With that, he gave her a look she couldn’t read. “Could we have a moment, Clovis, please?” The KCV girl, bloody sheet ball folded in the cleaner one, was on her way out. Clovis turned and followed her.
“Now she says she won’t do it?” She watched Clovis’s back vanish around the blue tarp. “Why?”
“Your conversation with the publicist.”
“She listened?”
“Assume she can access anything, any platform, always.”
“So she sits, and listens?”
“She has global intelligence feeds, analytical tools of tremendous functionality. The systems I work with here would surprise you, I imagine, but I have to take her word for what hers are capable of. She doubts anyone fully comprehends them, herself included, as they’ve become largely self-organizing. Having had to evolve from the sort I use today, I suppose. Which means that if you mention anything that concerns her, over or within reach of any platform whatsoever, she learns of it immediately. And at this point, I suppose, anything you speak of concerns her.”
“No party time?”
“Canceled.”
“But you couldn’t convince her yourself, that it sucked?”
“It’s a literally atrocious idea. Using it would constitute, morally and legally, an atrocity. Coldiron’s brand would be attached to somet
hing horrific, no matter how effectively we were able to spin the blame. Coldiron is concerned about the townspeople not being priced out of chili dogs, but willing to condone dosing religious protesters, however repellant, with something that turns them into homicidal erotomaniacs?”
“Coldiron knew? Who?”
“No. I knew. And Clovis.”
“She told me. But not what it was. Tommy told me what it does.”
“I had to bring him in. He needed to be prepared, to be ready to tidy up. I’m delighted you’ve put a stop to it.”
She looked at him. “I still don’t see why you couldn’t talk her out of it.”
“Because there’s a way in which I lack agency, in all of this. By virtue of more pressing concerns.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Lowbeer knows the history of her world, and the secret history of ours. The history that produced Lowbeer’s world includes the assassination of the president.”
“Gonzales? You shitting me?”
“She never finished her second term.”
“She gets elected again?”
“Exactly. And in Lowbeer’s view, Gonzales’s assassination was pivotal, a tipping point into the deeper jackpot.”
“Shit—”
“We may be able to change that.”
“Lowbeer knows how to fix history?”
“It isn’t history yet, here. She knows, in large part, what really happened here. But now the two have diverged, will continue to. The divergence can be steered, to some extent, but only very broadly. No guarantee of what we’ll ultimately produce.”
“She’s trying to stop the jackpot?”
“Ameliorate it, at best. We are, very much, already in it, here. She hopes, as do I, that the system in which she operates can be avoided in this continuum. She believes, and I agree, that a necessary step in that is the prevention of the assassination of Felicia Gonzales.”
She stared at him. Was this the loopiest bullshit ever, even after the past week? His pale gray eyes were wide, serious. “Who kills the president?”
“The vice president, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Ambrose? Wally fucking Ambrose? He kills Gonzales?”
“What Coldiron and your competitor are doing could affect that outcome, but by crashing the global economy, which is a danger in itself. But I can’t know all of what she knows. It isn’t as though she could brief me, and in any case she’s far more experienced than I am. Were she to tell me the use of party time was necessary to prevent the assassination, I’d use it.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s explained her world to me. She’s shared the course of her career, her life. I don’t want it to go that way here.”
“Cute sister,” bellowed Conner, “where’s hot nurse?” His surviving arm, tattooed down its length with “FIRST IN, LAST OUT” in gang-style lettering, was pale around Macon’s neck. Macon himself was bare-chested, in wet shorts, hair matted from carrying Conner under the shower. He’d managed to get Conner mostly back into his Polartec. Now he carried him to his bed, put him down, helped him get his arm into the sole sleeve.
“Going back for my clothes,” Macon said, then looked at Flynne and Griff. “You two okay?”
“Fine,” said Flynne.
“Burton good?” Conner asked, squinting at her unconscious brother.
“Hospital says,” she said.
“Head office canceled the distribution,” Griff said to Macon.
“Okay,” said Macon. “You going to tell me what it would have been?”
“Another time,” Griff said.
Macon raised his eyebrows. “I’ll get my clothes.” He went out.
“Hot nurse said squidsuit fuckers popped a cap in his ass,” Conner said. “Girl’s a baller. Macon says she took down half of them. Fucking Carlos, he only got two.”
“Why aren’t you up in the future,” Flynne asked him, “flying your washing machine?”
“Man’s got to eat.”
Hong stepped sideways through the narrow vertical slit in the barricade, a foam box in one hand. “Shrimp bowl?”
“That’s me,” said Conner.
Hong saw Burton, raised his eyebrows. “He okay?”
“Wasn’t your cooking did it,” Conner said, “it was Jimmy’s. Nearly died of the runs.”
Flynne looked at Griff, who widened his eyes slightly, as if to say their real conversation was over, for a while at least.
Gonzales? Was he shitting her? Was Lowbeer shitting him?
94.
APOLLINARIS WATER
The bar was still locked, just as it had been some minutes before. He looked at his thumb on the oval of brushed steel, inset into the glassine veneer. He was, minus a drink, as ready as he ever expected to be to confront Lowbeer with the news of Flynne’s unwillingness to attend Daedra’s event. It wasn’t, after all, his decision, or his idea. Though he had, somehow, it seemed, become party to it.
He’d indicated to Flynne that he’d contact Lowbeer immediately, and shortly he would, certainly, but he wasn’t happy about it. He supposed he understood Flynne’s reason for taking this course, but it wasn’t his. Though perhaps it sprang from that strata of archaic self-determination he found so exciting in her. Exciting and problematic. Why did the two seem so often to be inextricably linked, he wondered? And wondered, remembering Ash’s parliament of birds, whether Lowbeer might have in any case been privy to his conversation with Flynne? He paced nervously to the window, peered out into the dark garage.
Saw squidlight pulse, as Lowbeer stepped beneath an arch, headed his way. He backed away from the window. Definitely her broad shoulders, white hair, the ladylike take on a City suit. He sighed. Found the panel that brought the armchairs up, selected two and raised them. Looked at the closed bar. Sighed again. Went to the door, opened it, stepped out. She was at the bottom of the gangway, smiling pinkly. “I was nearby,” she said, “for a chat with Clovis. You don’t mind my dropping in?”
“Do you know?” he asked her.
“About what?”
“Flynne’s decision.”
“I do,” she said. “After all these years, I still find it vaguely embarrassing. Though it wasn’t that I specifically asked to hear it. The aunties fetched it.”
He wondered if that was true, that she could still be embarrassed by her own acts of surveillance? Perhaps it was akin to his own unease at knowing she’d listened, when of course one did assume that the klept was entirely able to do that. Just as one assumed, to whatever extent, that that was always being done. “Then you heard me agree to convey Flynne’s terms.”
“I did,” she said, starting up, “and your bafflement at doing so.”
“Then you know that she won’t go, unless this so-called party time is removed from the equation.”
She paused, midway. “And how do you feel about that yourself, Wilf?”
“It’s awkward. I’m prepared to attend, as you know. But you’ve proposed to do something, in the stub, that she finds very offensive.”
“She doesn’t find it offensive,” she said, starting up again. “She finds it evil. As it would have been, had I followed through.”
“Did you intend to?”
She’d reached the top. Netherton stepped back. “I field-test operatives,” she said. “A part of my basic skill set.”
“You wouldn’t have done it?”
“I would have infected them with a mild strain of Norwalk virus, had she not protested, having made her and the others immune. And been disappointed, I suppose. Though I never felt there was much chance of that, really.” She entered the cabin.
“It was a trick?”
“A test. You’ve passed it yourself. You made the right decision, though without quite knowing why. I assume you did it because you like her, though, and that counts for something. I think I might like a drink.”
“You do?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“I can’t open it. But you
might be able to. There. Touch the oval with your thumb.”
She crossed to the bar, did as suggested. The door slid up, into the ceiling. “A gin and tonic, please,” she said. He watched as her drink rose, startling in its seemingly Socratic perfection, up out of the marble counter. “And you?” she asked.
He tried to speak. Couldn’t. Coughed. Lowbeer picked up her drink. He caught the scent of juniper. “Perrier,” he said, in what seemed a stranger’s voice, as alien an utterance as any in Ash’s parliament of birds.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the bar, young, male, German, “but we have no Perrier. May I suggest Apollinaris water?”
“Fine,” said Netherton, his voice his own now.
“Ice?” the bar asked.
“Please.” His water emerged. “I don’t understand why you’d test her,” he said. “If it was her you were testing.”
“It was,” she said, gesturing toward the armchairs. He picked up his scentless water and followed her. “I’ve a further role in mind, for her,” she continued, when they were both seated, “should we be successful at Daedra’s soiree. And perhaps one for you as well. I imagine you’re actually rather good at what you do, in spite of certain disadvantages. Disadvantage and peculiar competence can go hand in hand, I find.”
Netherton sipped the German mineral water, tasting faintly of what he supposed might be limestone. “What exactly are you proposing, if I may ask?”
“I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. In sending you to Daedra, I send you beyond the reach of my protection, and of Lev’s. It’s best that you know no more than you do now.”
“Do you,” Netherton asked, “know literally everything, about everyone?”
“I most certainly don’t. I feel hindered by a surfeit of information, oceanic to the point of meaninglessness. The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it’s easier said than done. Far easier.”