Agency

2 Our Hobbyist of Hellworlds

Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?”

You had him killed in Rotterdam, Netherton thought. Not that she’d ever said as much, or that he’d asked. “The one who made such horrific stubs? All war, all the time?”

“I’d wondered how he so quickly rendered them nightmares,” she said, pacing briskly on, beneath Victoria Embankment’s gray morning and the canopy of dripping trees. “Eventually, I looked into it.”

He lengthened his stride, keeping up. “How did he?” He hadn’t seen her since before Thomas’s birth, at the start of his parental leave. Now, he’d already gathered, that was coming to an end.

“I dislike calling them stubs,” she said. “They’re short because we’ve only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are. Vespasian discovered a simple way of exaggerating the butterfly effect, or so it seems. That even the smallest perturbation may yield large and unforeseen consequences. On making contact, he’d immediately withdraw. Then return, months later, study the results, and very deliberately and forcefully intervene. He achieved remarkable if terrible results, and very quickly. Investigating his method, I happened on another of his so-called stubs, one in which he’d initiated contact in 2015, several years before the earliest previously known contact. We’ve no idea how he managed the extra reach, but we now have access to that stub.” They were climbing shallow steps now, toward the river, to an overlook. “We may have a chance, there, of achieving radically better outcomes than previously.” They reached the top. “I need you back for that. Contact has necessarily been oblique, so far, due to technological asymmetry, but we think we’ve managed a workaround. Your experience in dealing with contactees may soon be very much in need.”

“Contact’s been oblique, you say?”

“The aunties, for instance”—her pet name for her office’s coven of semisentient security algorithms—“are of relatively little use.” Netherton grimaced at the very thought of them.

A dappled Thames chimera broke the surface then, red and white. It rolled, four meters head to tail, lamplike eyes clustered above cartoonish feeding palps. Diving, it left a shallow wake of beige foam.

“So you can’t put a team of quants on it,” he asked, “to secure as much in-stub wealth as might be needed?” Having, of course, seen her do exactly that.

“No. Even the simplest messaging can be quite spotty.”

“What can you do, then?”

“Laterally encourage an autonomous, self-learning agent,” she said. “Then nudge it toward greater agency. It helps that they’re mad for AI there, though they’ve scarcely anything we’d consider that. By tracing historical fault lines around AI research here, we found what we needed there.”

“Fault lines?”

“Between the most reckless entrepreneurialism and certain worst-case examples of defense contracting. I’ll tell you more over brunch—assuming you’ve time.”

“Of course,” he said, as he always did.

“I’m in a mood for the sandwiches,” she said, and turned from the river, apparently satisfied with their glimpse of the chimera.

“Salt beef,” he said, “with mustard and dill,” his favorite at the Marylebone shop she preferred. As accustomed to her as he was, he thought, he’d still be brunching with a semimythical autonomous magistrate-executioner, unique in her position. That being roughly her true occupation, as opposed to her formal position in law enforcement, or the personal projects she paid him to assist her with, however seriously she took them. Her true occupation being something he wished to have as little to do with as possible, ever.

They returned to her car, where it awaited them invisibly, a few dead leaves clinging to its roof, as though magically suspended.