Agency

21 Bad Quality Control in Shenzhen

As Verity opened 3.7’s door, the same barista, face jingling, pushed a drink toward her. His back was turned before she’d picked it up. As she did, she glanced around the café.

The sole other female customer was young, Latina, intent on her phone.

“That’s her,” Eunice said.

“Hasn’t noticed me.”

“She’s not cut out for this,” Eunice said, “game physics designer.”

Verity, spotting a vacant table, carried her drink to it. As the girl glanced up, seeing her, Verity saw her thumbs became differently busy on her phone.

“Gavin knows you’re here,” said Eunice, as Verity sat down.

Gavin, Eunice had explained in the car, now had five bugs in Joe-Eddy’s apartment. Two in the living room, one in the kitchen, one each in bedroom and bathroom. Wireless, they looked like slightly rusty Robertson-head screws, the kind with a square hole instead of a slot or cross. The hole sheltered a pinhole video camera, the actual unit being not a screw but an inch-long cylinder, its diameter slightly smaller than that of the apparent head. Decent professional quality, according to Eunice, the profession remaining unspecified. The batteries required changing, but infrequently, and the men who’d put them there now had their own keys to the apartment.

“They’ll be able to record us?”

“They think they will, but what they’ll be getting is scripted bullshit I’m having a postproduction house assemble. With my input, of course, multitasking.”

“Postproduction house?”

“Expensive, but I’m paying for it with their money. Not that they know it yet.”

Verity thought to check her cup, finding VERITASS in pink paint pen. She glanced at the barista, whose back was still turned.

“I had zero idea she was even president, till Sevrin turned on the radio,” Eunice said. “Not that I thought it was anybody else.”

“What do you think that means?”

“I’m entertaining an upload hypothesis.”

“A what?”

“Transfer of someone’s consciousness, or some equivalent of it, to a digital platform. Sometime before the campaign year, let alone the election.”

“Can they even do that?”

“Not that I know of, but Area 51, right? And say they could, even a little? Wouldn’t they go ahead and try it?”

“So say they do, what?”

“Somebody gets a big-ass idea, sometimes, pure blue-sky, but there’s no existing tech to implement it. So they try to ballpark it. Go really hard in a radical direction, but on some half-assed implementation of whatever’s handy, best they can. Sometimes it works. Other times, it might do something they never imagined.”

Verity was watching the barista briskly wiping down the chrome-and-copper cuirass of the espresso console. “You think that’s your story?”

“Could be. Gavin’s laminar agent, high-end but half-assed.”

Verity looked over at the Followrs girl, their eyes awkwardly meeting, then glancing away. “How long do we have to be here?”

“On the brink of nuclear war?”

“No,” said Verity, “here, in 3.7.”

“They’re almost done, at Joe-Eddy’s. Running a final check now.”

“It sucks, that there’s one in the bathroom.”

“I’ll make that one look like it’s had a nervous breakdown,” Eunice said. “Bad quality control in Shenzhen. And bingo, right now, they’re done, leaving the apartment. They have a car waiting. We can go back now. Our girl here gets to go home too. Bring your drink if you want it.” Verity got up, the girl pretending unsuccessfully to not see her do it.

On the walk back to Joe-Eddy’s, Eunice demo’d feeds from all five cams. Nothing happening in Joe-Eddy’s, nobody there, just that horror-movie feel of any unoccupied webcam feed. The one in the kitchen watched the table and the window, this last still open a crack, just as Eunice had had her leave it, for the drones. “They left fruit?” Verity asked, noticing a bowl with apples, two bananas, a pear.

“My guy,” Eunice said. “I had someone drop by before they came. You didn’t have much in the fridge.” The feed disappeared. “We’ll stay in tonight. They’ll get a show. Script’s all ready.”

“Script?”

“What they’ll hear as your side of whatever we actually talk about. They still can’t hear me. If your mouth’s on camera, post’ll fix it so a lip-reader sees whatever we have you say.”

“Seriously? How’d they get in?”

“Brought a locksmith.”

“How’d your guy get in?”

“Made keys from images I’d captured of yours.”

Eunice’s drones, the two that had accompanied them to Stets’ place, which had both wound up, in 3.7, under the lapels of Verity’s blazer, were now aloft on Valencia, though Verity wasn’t getting their feeds.

When they reached Joe-Eddy’s, she took her keys from her purse, imagining Eunice image-capturing them, with either Joe-Eddy’s cam or the drones. She let herself in, the two drones ducking past, on either side of her head, and up the stairs. Closing the door behind her, she turned the deadlock, and slid the bolt into place, this last more satisfying than previously.

She climbed the stairs, uncomfortably remembering the man Eunice had shown her in Joe-Eddy’s living room, one of the two who’d planted the cams. She unlocked the apartment door.

Just inside, in Ikea’s cheapest black aluminum frame, hung a comically moody black-and-white group portrait of the Fuckoids, Joe-Eddy’s late-nineties band, Joe-Eddy himself posing with the Japanese Jazzmaster that now hung on the far wall. The photo was something she was so familiar with that she ordinarily didn’t see it. Now though, it hung level, as it only did when someone had just straightened it, since vibration from passing traffic would almost instantly have it crooked again. Had the guy with the wire-rims straightened it, or whoever he’d been with?

“Don’t,” Eunice said, “or he’ll know you noticed.”

Verity’s hand was raised, to restore the Fuckoids’ customary lack of kilter. Now she brushed her hair back with it instead, and kept walking. “Who’ll know?” she asked, when she reached the kitchen.

“Pryor,” said Eunice. “The one I showed you in the living room. Bad news.”