Agency

38 The Handshake

Netherton remembered Flynne using a county-fabbed controller, printed in a plastic resembling icing sugar, to first interface with the peripheral they’d found for her in London.

Seated on the couch now, with the controller from the Denisovan Embassy activated, eyes closed, its cams showed him their flat, in that anachronistic squashed-circle format familiar from the sim. The upper segment was currently presenting the windows directly behind him, with their view of the mews.

“Waiting for the handshake,” Ash said, likely in the yurt, in Dalston, attended by her tattoos and the tardibot.

“What handshake?”

“Your controller must perform one with Johns Hopkins APL.”

“Why, if Eunice is no longer there?”

“It’s our best present gateway to adequate connectivity. University of Washington’s slower.”

A short tone sounded.

“What was that?”

“The handshake,” she said. “We’re in.”

The display filled with another room, smaller, bare. A woman in a tweed jacket leaned tensely forward on a chair, staring at him narrowly.

“We are indeed,” he said to Ash, surprised at the awe he felt.

“Are what, indeed?” the woman in the stub asked. She had a plastic bottle of what looked like water in one hand.

“In,” said Netherton, rattled. “Sorry. Didn’t realize you could hear me. Do you have a phone?” Thinking of an implant, but then he remembered that she wouldn’t.

“They took them both,” she said.

“How are we communicating?”

“It must have a speaker. And a microphone.”

She meant the drone, he decided. “You’re Verity?”

“You first.”

“Wilf,” he said, “Wilf Netherton.”

“Where are you?”

“London.”

“Why am I speaking with you?”

“Eunice,” he said, “though I’ve never spoken with her myself.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

She frowned. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m here to offer assistance.”

She was up now, stepping forward.

“I can’t see you, when you’re that close,” he said.

“Cams?”

“Of course.”

“I can’t see them.”

“They probably look like small round holes,” he said, “about two millimeters in diameter.”

Extreme close-up of gray tweed. The high-resolution texture of an alternate universe.

“Like Robertson heads,” she said, whatever that might mean.