The Peripheral

  He looked back at the table he’d slept on, when it had been retracted, flush, into a recess in the floor. Now it was ready to serve as breakfast nook or gaming table, or a place to spread one’s maps of Mongolia. He wondered if Lev’s grandfather had ever made the journey. He remembered laughing at the vulgarity of what Lev called the Gobiwagen, the one time he’d been shown through, but he’d noted the bar, with its very handsome stock of liquor.

  “Keeping it locked from now on,” said Ossian, demonstrating his own degree of telepathy.

  “Where were you two?” He looked from Ossian to Ash, as if implying some impropriety. “I came down to find you.”

  Ossian raised his eyebrows. “Did you expect to find us here?”

  “I was exhausted,” Netherton said, “in need of refreshment.”

  “Tired,” said Ossian, “emotional.”

  Lev’s sigil appeared. “I thought sixteen hours was long enough for you to be unconscious,” he said. “Come to the kitchen. Now.” The sigil disappeared.

  Ash and Ossian, who’d heard nothing Lev had said, were staring at him, unpleasantly.

  “Thanks for the pick-me-up,” he said to Ash, and left, down the gangway. Into the submarine squidlight of the garage’s broad shallow arches, receding down a line of vehicles. Sensing his movement, living tissue coating the arch directly above him brightened. He looked back, and up, at the vehicle’s bulging flank. Ossian was watching, from an observation bay, smugly.

  As he walked to the distant elevator, past one vehicle after another, light followed him, the skin of one arch dimming as the next fluoresced.

  15.

  ANYTHING NICE

  Leon, the Halloween before, carved a pumpkin to look like President Gonzales. Flynne hadn’t thought it looked like her, but that it wasn’t racist either, so she left it out on the porch. Second day it was out there, she saw something had nibbled the inside of it, and pooped in it a little. She figured either a rat or a squirrel. Meant to take it around to the garden compost then, but forgot, and next day she found the president’s face caved in, pumpkin flesh behind it all eaten away, leaving the orange skin sagging, wrinkled. Plus there was fresh poop inside. She got the rubber gloves she wore for plumbing chores and carried it out back to the compost, where the wrinkled orange face gradually got uglier until it was gone.

  She wasn’t thinking of that as she hung in the cradle of the gyros, watching the gray thing breathe.

  It wasn’t gray now, but bronze-black. It had made itself straight, flat, with sharp right angles, but everything else on the face of the fifty-seventh floor, those flat squares and rectangles, was misted, sweating, running with condensation. The thing was perfectly dry, standing out a hand’s breadth from the surface behind it. The twisty legs had become brackets. Centered above the floor of the fold-out balcony directly beneath her.

  It was breathing.

  Sweat broke from her hairline, in the hot dark of the trailer. She wiped it with the back of her forearm, but some ran into her eyes, stung.

  She nudged the copter closer. Saw the thing bulge, then flatten.

  She had only a vague idea of what she was flying. A quadcopter, but were the four rotors caged, or exposed? If she’d seen herself reflected in a window, she’d know, but she hadn’t. She wanted to get closer, see if she could trigger an image, the way proximity had done when she’d dropped on that bug. But if her rotors were exposed, and she touched the thing with one, she’d go down.

  It swelled again, along a central vertical line, paler than the rest.

  Below her, they were at the railing, the woman’s hands on the rod along the top, the man behind her, close, maybe holding her waist.

  It flattened. She nudged herself a little closer.

  It opened, narrowly, along that vertical line, paler edges curling slightly back, and something small arced out, vanishing. Something scored the forward-cam then, a fuzzy gray comma. Again. Like a gnat with a microscopic chainsaw, or a diamond scribe. Three, four more scratches, insect-quick, flicking like a scorpion’s tail. Trying to blind her.

  She pulled herself back, fast, then up, whatever it was still slashing at her forward-cam. Found the pull-down and dead-dropped, tumbling three floors before she let the gyros catch and cup her.

  It seemed to be gone. Cam damaged but still functional.

  Fast, left.

  Up, fast. Passing fifty-six, with the cam on her right she saw him take the woman’s hands, place them over her eyes. From fifty-seven, she saw him kiss her ear, say something. Surprise, she imagined him saying, as she saw him step back, turn.

  “No,” she said, as the thing split open. A blur, around the slit. More of them. He glanced up, found it there. Expecting it. Never paused, never looked back. He was about to step back inside.

  She went for his head.

  She was half up out of the chair, as he saw the copter, ducked, catching himself on his hands.

  He must have made a sound then, the woman turning, lowering her hands, opening her mouth. Something flew into her mouth. She froze. Like seeing Burton glitched by the haptics.

  He came up off his hands, a track star off blocks. Through the opening, the door in the window, which simply vanished as soon as he was inside, became a smooth sheet of glass, then polarized.

  The woman never moved, as something tiny punched out through her cheek, leaving a bead of blood, her mouth still open, more of them darting in, almost invisible, streaming over from the pale-edged slit. Her forehead caved in, like stop-motion of Leon’s pumpkin of the president, on top of the compost in her mother’s bin, over days, weeks. As the brushed-steel railing lowered, behind her, on the soap-bubble stuff that was no longer glass. Without it to stop her, the woman toppled backward, limbs at angles that made no sense. Flynne went after her.

  She was never able to remember any more blood, just the tumbling form in its black t-shirt and striped pants, less a body every inch it fell, so that by the time they passed the thirty-seventh, where she’d first noticed the thing, there were only two fluttering rags, one striped, one black.

  She pulled up before the twentieth, remembering the voices. Hung there in the gyros’ slack, full of sorrow and disgust.

  “Just a game,” she said, in the trailer’s hot dark, her cheeks slick with tears.

  She took it back up, then, feeling blank, miserable. Watching dark bronze sweep past, not bothering to try to see the city. Fuck it. Just fuck it.

  When she got to fifty-six, the window was gone, the balcony folded back up over it. The bugs were back, though, the transparent bubbles on their business ends facing where the window had been. She didn’t bother shooing them.

  “That’s why we can’t have anything nice,” she heard herself say, in the trailer.

  16.

  LEGO

  Fifteen minutes,” said Lev, scrambling eggs on the kitchen’s vast French stove, bigger than either of the ATVs slung from davits on the stern of his grandfather’s Mercedes. “Most of that is reading their terms-of-service agreement. They’re in Putney.”

  Netherton at the table, exactly where he’d been earlier. The windows looking onto the garden were dark. “You can’t be serious,” he said.

  “Anton had it done.”

  The scarier of Lev’s two older brothers. “Good for him.”

  “He had no choice,” Lev said. “Our father organized the intervention.”

  “Never thought of Anton as having a drinking problem,” Netherton said, as if this were something he was quite accustomed to being objective about. He was watching two Lego pieces, one red, one yellow, as they morphed into two small spheres, between the Starck pepper grinder and a bowl of oranges.

  “He no longer does.” Lev transferred scrambled eggs, flecked with chives, to two white plates, each with its half of a broiled tomato, which had been warming on the stovetop. “It wasn’t only for drinking. He had an anger management problem. Aggravated by the disinhibition.”

  “But haven’t I seen him drinking,” Net
herton asked, “here, and recently?” He was fairly certain that he had, in spite of having a firm policy of flight if either brother appeared. Fully spherical now, the two Legos began to roll slowly toward him, across worn pine.

  “Of course,” said Lev, adjusting the presentation of the eggs with a clean steel spatula. “We’re not in the dark ages. But never to excess. Never to the point of intoxication. The laminates see to that. They metabolize it differently. Between that and the cognitive therapy module, he’s doing very well.” He came to the table, a white plate in either hand. “Ash’s Medici says you’re not doing well, Wilf. Not at all.” He put one plate in front of Netherton, the other opposite, and took a seat.

  “Dominika,” Netherton said, reflexively trying to change the subject. “She’s not joining us?” The two Legos had stopped moving. Still spherical, side by side, they were directly in front of his plate.

  “My father would have disowned Anton, if he’d refused treatment,” Lev said, ignoring the question. “He made that absolutely clear.”

  “Gordon wants in,” Netherton said, having just noticed the thylacine at the glass door, darkness behind it.

  “Tyenna,” corrected Lev, glancing at the animal. “She’s not allowed in the kitchen when we’re eating.”

  Netherton quickly flicked the red Lego off the table. He heard it click against something, roll. “Hyena?”

  “Medici doesn’t like the look of your liver.”

  “Eggs look wonderful—”

  “Laminates,” Lev said, evenly, looking Netherton in the eye, the heavy black frames of his glasses accentuating his seriousness, “and a cognitive therapy module. Otherwise, I’m afraid this will have to be your last visit.”

  Fucking Dominika. This was about her. Had to be. Lev had never been like this. The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence.

  Lev looked up, then, and to the side. “Excuse me,” he said, to Wilf. “I have to take this. Yes?” He gestured at Netherton’s eggs: eat. He asked something, briefly, in Russian.

  Netherton unrolled his knife and fork from the cool heavy napkin. He would eat the eggs and tomato in exactly the way a healthy, relaxed, responsible individual would eat them. He had never felt less like eating eggs, or broiled tomato.

  Lev was frowning now. He spoke again in Russian. At the end of it, “Aelita.” Had he really said her name, or only something in Russian that had sounded like it? Then a question, also in Russian, which, yes, definitely culminated in her name. “Yes,” he said, “it is. Very.” His hand came up, to scratch the skin just above his left nostril with the nail of his index finger, something Netherton knew he did when he was concentrating. Another question in Russian. Netherton dutifully tried the eggs. Tasteless. The thylacine was gone now. You almost never saw them leaving.

  “That’s odd,” said Lev.

  “Who was it?”

  “My secretary, with one of our security modules.”

  “What about?” Please, Netherton begged the uncaring universe, let Lev be more interested in this, now, than in any behavioral modification in Putney.

  “Aelita West’s secretary just canceled lunch. Tomorrow, in the Strand. I’d reservations for Indian. She’d wanted to know more about her polt. Your gift.”

  Netherton forced himself to take another half-fork of eggs.

  “The Met was listening in, when her secretary spoke with mine. We were surveilled.”

  “The police? Seriously? How did it know?”

  “She didn’t,” said Lev, annoyingly personalizing a program. “The security module did, though.”

  Klept as established as the Zubov family’s, Netherton assumed, was layered in byzantine tediousness. He refrained from saying so.

  “The security module interpreted it as being related to a very recent event,” Lev said, adjusting his black frames to peer at Netherton.

  “How could it know that?”

  “Any listener necessarily assumes a particular stance, informed by intention. Our module’s more sophisticated than that which was listening. The shape of their listening suggested what they were listening for.”

  So unexpectedly welcome was this distraction that Netherton had scarcely been paying attention, but now he realized that it fell to him to keep the conversation going, and as far away from Putney as possible. “What would that be, then?”

  “Serious crime, it assumed. Abduction, possibly. Even homicide.”

  “Aelita?” It struck Netherton as absurd.

  “Nothing so clear as that. We’re having a look. She held a reception, just this evening. While you were sleeping it off.”

  “You’ve been watching her?”

  “The security module’s done a retrospective, since her secretary’s call.”

  “What sort of reception?”

  “Cultural. Semigovernmental. It would originally have been about your project, in fact. One would assume celebratory, if Daedra hadn’t killed your man and had the cavalry in. Rather than cancel, it seems, Aelita reframed it. No idea what as. Security was excellent.”

  “Where was it held?”

  “Her residence. Edenmere Mansions.” Lev’s pupils moved as he read something. “She has the fifty-fifth through fifty-seventh floors. Daedra attended.”

  “She did? Did you have someone there?”

  “No,” said Lev, “but our modules tend to be a bit sharper than theirs. Eat.” His fork, neatly loaded with both eggs and tomato now, was almost to his mouth when he stopped, frowned. “Yes?” He lowered the fork. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t as though there hasn’t been the odd rumor that it’s possible. I’ll be down shortly.”

  “Secretary?” Netherton asked.

  “Ash,” Lev said. “She says that someone else is accessing our stub. Seems as though it has to do with your polt.”

  “Who?”

  “No idea. We’ll go down and see.” He began to eat his eggs and tomato.

  Netherton did the same, finding that with the distancing of Putney and liver lamination, and possibly the aftereffects of Ash’s Medici, they’d acquired flavor.

  The red Lego, spherical, now rolled slowly from behind the bowl of oranges, to join, becoming rectilinear again, with the tiniest of clicks, its yellow companion. He wondered what shape it had taken to get back up the table leg.

  17.

  COTTONWOOD

  Going back to Jimmy’s was a bad idea. Knew it soon as she’d walked into the dark and the dancing, the smell of beer and state weed and homegrown tobacco. The bull was leaning out of the mirror, eyeing a girl who might have been fourteen. The LEDs were pulsing to a song Flynne had never heard before and wouldn’t have wanted to again, and she was the oldest living thing in the building. Still wearing her improv security guard outfit. And she hadn’t even found Macon, over on the side of the lot where mostly black kids hung, where he did his funny business. She’d come because she still needed to ask him what Homes might have thought of the phone he’d made for her, but maybe she’d really just been hoping for someone to talk to. She hadn’t felt like the sandwich she’d made to eat after the shift, and she didn’t feel like she’d ever be hungry.

  That shit in the game. She hated that shit. Hated games. Why did they all have to be so fucking ugly?

  She got a beer, her phone dinging as Jimmy’s ran a tab. Took the bottle to a little round corner table, unwiped but mercifully empty, sat down, tried to look like the meanest old lady she could. Girl who’d passed her the beer had a Viz, like Macon and Edward had, a tangle like silver cobweb filling one eye socket, but you could still see the eye behind it, watching whatever the little units strung in the tangle were projecting. Hefty Mart had to scan your socket before they fabbed you one, so it would fit, and there weren’t any funny ones yet. Looked better on a black face, she thought, but most every kid here had one and it made her feel old, and more so that she thought they looked kind of stupid. It was something every year.

  “Look like you’ve come up short on the number of fucks you
need to not give,” Janice said, appearing out of the crowd with a beer of her own.

  “Short a few,” Flynne agreed, but no longer the oldest thing in Jimmy’s. She’d always liked Janice. She automatically looked around, because Janice and Madison weren’t usually very far apart. He was at a table with two boys, each one with a silver-tangled eye. He looked like Teddy Roosevelt, Madison, and most of what she knew about Teddy Roosevelt was that Madison looked like him. He had a mustache he trimmed but never shaved off, round titanium-wire glasses, and a moth-eaten wool cruiser vest, olive green, complicated breast pockets bristling with pens and little flashlights.

  “Want some company with it?”

  “Long as it’s you,” Flynne said.

  Janice sat down. She and Madison had that thing going, that some married people did, where they’d started to look like each other. Janice had the same round glasses but no mustache. They could have swapped outfits without attracting any attention. She was wearing cammies that were probably his. “You really don’t look too happy.”

  “I’m not. Worried about Burton. Homes had him for going up to Davisville and beating on Luke 4:5. No charges, just a public safety detention.”

  “I know,” Janice said. “Leon told Madison.”

  “He’s doing something on the side,” Flynne said, glad of the music, looking around, knowing Janice would understand about the disability money. “I filled in for him.”

  Janice raised an eyebrow. “You don’t give the impression you liked it much.”

  “Beta testing some kind of creepy-ass game. Serial killers or something.”

  “You played anything, since that time at our place?” Janice was watching her.

  “Just this. Twice.” Flynne felt differently uncomfortable. “You seen Macon?”

  “He was here. Madison was talking to him.”