Agency

13 Stets

Virgil parked in a white garage, beside several crisp trade vans, the polished concrete floor only lightly marked by tires. In front of them, massively framed in bronze-toned metal, a single equally bronze-toned elevator door. First owner, she assumed, doubting the architect fiancée was into faux-pharaonic kitsch.

They got out. He walked to the elevator, to swipe a card in a slot. The door hummed briskly open. He gestured for her to enter.

She did, finding herself reflected in rose-gold mirror.

“Hang on,” he said, from outside, “it’s fast.”

“You’re not coming?”

“Chores here. But I’ll take you back.”

“Okay,” she said, “thanks.”

“Fifty-second,” he said, as the door closed. She steadied herself on an oversized handrail, the ascent commencing, accelerating smoothly, as the glasses tiled with feeds, like horizontally displayed playing cards.

“Every cam in the building, except Stets’,” Eunice said, the elevator’s speed making Verity slightly light-headed. She saw vistas of cube farms, screen-lit faces in individual cubicles, a long service island in a kitchen the size of her condo, an angle down on a vacant swimming pool, a baby in its crib.

The elevator slowed, to stop with only the faintest bump, the feeds blinking out. The door opened behind her. She turned, to face an odd blue light.

A power tool yelped its way through something, at a distance. She turned back, to check her face in the mirror, then stepped out, into a confusing space made more so by that light. Whatever the building’s top several floors had contained had been stripped to raw concrete, little else, with only a small portion of the uppermost floor remaining. Scaffolding ran up to this, supporting a temporary zigzag of aluminum stairs. Blue plastic tarps, semitranslucent, like the ones covering the cardboard shanties she’d passed in the street, were laced together, strung taut, across walls of glass.

With a barely audible whirr, something detached itself from beneath the lapel of her tweed jacket and shot forward.

“Other one’s in the car with Virgil,” Eunice said, opening a feed from the microdrone, nothing but the blue of the tarps, then briefly blurred, as it zipped between two adjacent edges. To overlook the Bay, where something anomalously vast loomed in what was left of bad wildfire light, as though the horizon should sag beneath it.

“What’s that?”

“Container ship,” Eunice said. “Chinese. Not their biggest, but up there.” The saw or grinder scrawked again, echoes ringing metallically off concrete she supposed had recently been covered by Virgil’s marble.

“Verity!”

The ship vanished. She looked up.

His face above a bright yellow railing, topped with his trademark permanent bedhead. “Come up,” he called, as Eunice drew her lines around his nose. “I’d be down to greet you, but I’ve fucked up my knee.”

She walked to the scaffolding, started up the stairs, realizing she’d had no time to worry about how awkward it might be to see him again, and now here they were.

“What happened to you?” she asked, reaching the top, seeing the black articulated brace clamped around his left leg, under baggy black shorts and extending down to midcalf.

“Fell off a Honda.” A mesh nylon safety vest, over his black t-shirt, was crisscrossed with bands of fluorescent orange and reflective silver.

“I thought you hated motorcycles,” she said.

“It’s a plane.”

“A plane?”

“An HA-420. Took delivery last week. Looks like a Pixar character.”

“You fell off a plane?”

“Down the stairs, getting off. Nothing broke. Have to wear this for a while, have physio.” He rapped the brace with his left hand.

She went to him, instinctively making their hug the A-frame kind. He pecked her cheek, grinned. “Good to see you.”

“Good to see you.”

“Been a while.”

“I’ve been out of the media’s way.”

“So your PA was telling me.”

“Eunice.”

“Impressive. Where’d you find her?”

“She found me. What’s that?” she asked, seeing smooth silver behind him and glad to change the subject.

“Airstream Flying Cloud.”

“How’d you get it up here?”

“In our case, the model name says it all. With part of the roof temporarily off the building, temptation got the best of us.”

“How will you get it back down?”

“Caitlin wants to build it in. Like a secret fort.”

“Congratulations on your engagement,” she said, one of the more classically awkward things anyone ever had to say to an ex, and yet she didn’t feel it.

“Are you with anyone?” he asked, the other half of a perfect double whammy of awkwardness, and yet still nothing.

“No,” she said.

He gave her his hand, at the trailer’s open door, as she stepped up and in, then winced as he climbed up after her, leaving the door open.

“That looks painful,” she said.

“Not much.” He rubbed his braced leg through the black shorts. “Like something? Water? Coffee?”

“No, thanks,” she said. “What did she tell you?” And instantly the awkwardness was there, but it had nothing at all to do with them. It was, she realized, about Eunice.

“She started by explaining how she’d gotten the number she called me on, since that was the first thing I wanted to know. It’s not supposed to be possible, to do that.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No need. She then walked me through the vuln that had allowed it, and told me she was calling on your behalf, for the sake of preserving deniability on my part. So I could honestly claim to have had no contact with you, if that was what I wanted.”

“You believed her?”

He tilted his head. “Not necessarily. But she’d shown me a vulnerability I’d paid not to have. And she claimed to work for you.”

“Not that I’d put it that way myself.”

“You need help,” he said. “Not that she put it that way, but that was my impression.”

“Wouldn’t this thing drive a genius architect crazy?” Verity asked, looking around, hoping, if only temporarily, to change the subject.

“She ordered it from a dealer’s website. Took her about eight minutes. Said it gave her a sense of near-perfect irresponsibility.”

“Why the tarps, though?” Almost mentioning the container ship, but she caught herself. “View must be incredible.”

“Drones. Media. They want images of us. Failing that, of the space. And it’s all glass.”

“What’ll you do about that, if you live here?”

“There’s a lab in Tokyo that may have a fix for us. We’re sending Virgil to have a look. Feel like going?”

She heard the distant tool ring again, muffled by the trailer. “In the Honda?”

“That would be five refueling stops. Though you’d get to see Chuuk International.”

“See what?”

“The airport. Micronesia. The Honda would need to keep refueling, to make it to Tokyo.”

“Sorry, but I have a day job here. Just signed a contract.”

“Who with?”

“Tulpagenics. Know them?”

“No.”

“Belongs to a company called Cursion,” she said, catching the reaction. “You’ve heard of them.”

He nodded.

“What do you think?”

“Spook-flavored, carefully nonspecific overtones of criminality? Definitely not investment material, for us. What have they hired you to do?”

“Product evaluation of an alpha build.”

“And the product?”

She’d be breaking her NDA by telling him, she knew, and promptly did. “A customized virtual avatar, serious AI base.”

“Any good?”

“You seem to have thought so.”

His eyes widened.

“You said she was impressive,” Verity said. “These glasses are an interface.” A feed opened as she said this, angling down on the trailer’s silver roof, from gyroscopic stillness. “She can conference with us now, on my phone.”

“Bluetooth her there,” he said, indicating a blank section of veneered wall.

The feed corkscrewing down and in through the open door, Verity seeing her own face, the back of Stets’ head. Then the drone was on the ceiling, looking down at them, as Stets, unaware of it, flipped a screen from behind the veneer. She got out her phone, selecting the only Bluetooth option the environment offered.

“Hey,” said the black woman whose head filled the screen, her fade rising to the knife-edged plateau of a businesslike afro.

“You told me there wasn’t any there there, Eunice,” Verity said.

“This look is shopped from whatever, but it can be me in the meantime.”

“Hello, Eunice,” said Stets.

“Mr. Howell. A pleasure.”

“Stets,” he said. “What are you, Eunice?”

“Work in progress.”

“Whose creation?”

“Mine, from here on in.”

“What would you like to discuss?”

Verity saw that Eunice had his complete attention, a rare thing.

“Let’s ask Verity to tell you how we met. How that’s been for her. Then we could try to answer any questions you might have.”

“I’d like that,” he said.

So Verity did, starting with her first e-mail from Gavin and including everything she could remember, neither Eunice nor Stets saying a word. No interruptions, no questions. She described the Franklins, and the drones the Franklins had paid for, Stets looking even more interested.

When she was finished, she tried to remember when she’d last seen him this interested in anything. She didn’t think she had.