Agency

4 The Sandwiches

When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.

Netherton had no idea how this was accomplished, and he was seldom, as now, much aware, during a given conversation, of the isolation. On leaving her company, though, he’d encounter a pedestrian, see someone cycling, or a vehicle, and only then be aware of emerging from her bubble of exclusion.

Seated with her now in a darkly varnished booth, in this ostentatiously pre-jackpot sandwich shop in Marylebone Street, he found himself eager for exactly that: their goodbye, his walk away, and that first glimpse of some random stranger, abroad in the quiet vastness of London.

“Salt beef good?” She was having Marmite and cucumber.

He nodded. “Do they still make Marmite? As opposed to assemblers excreting it as needed, I mean.”

“Of course.” She looked down at the perfectly rectangular remaining sections of her sandwich, her brilliantly white quiff inclining with her gaze. “It’s yeast, and salt. Manufactory’s in Bermondsey. Bots prepare it, but otherwise traditionally.”

Ask her something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected, she’d disconcertingly allow, in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be.

“How far back did Vespasian go,” he asked her now, “to initiate this stub?”

“Mid-2015.”

“When is it, there, now?”

“2017,” she said, “fall.”

“Much changed?”

“The outcome of the previous year’s American presidential election. Brexit referendum as well.”

“As the result of his initial contact?”

“Could have been the butterfly effect, of course. Though the aunties, in both cases, lean toward something causing a reduction in Russian manipulation of social media. Which we assume would have had a similar result in our own time line. But without the aunties being able to chew over a great deal of their data, there’s no assigning a more exact cause.”

“But why would Vespasian, of all people, have desired positive change? Assuming those outcomes were his intention, that is.”

“He was a sadist,” said Lowbeer, “and terribly clever at it. The irony of his producing beneficial change may well have amused him, given his greatest delight was in appallingly cruel suffering. In any case, when he failed to return,” and here their eyes briefly met, “to fine-tune and amplify course, as he always did, things went their own way.”

“How is it there, given that?”

“Grim,” she said, “what with every other ordering principle and incentive still in place. And they’ve a Mideast crisis now, as well, with drastic and immediate global implications. That aside, though, they’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”

“Are you there yourself, in the new stub? Your stub self, I mean?”

“I assume so,” she said, “as a young child. I find it best never to look at that.”

“Of course,” said Netherton, unwilling even to begin to imagine the experience.

“I’ve asked Ash to bring you up to date on what we’ve been doing there,” she said.

“Involved, is she?” Hoping, however faintly, not.

“From the start,” said Lowbeer.

“How wonderful,” Netherton said, resignedly, picking up the next section of his sandwich.