Agency

49 Suite

Verity stopped Virgil with a hand on his wrist, beside a shallow alcove, its rear wall hung with a floor-to-ceiling oval of unframed mirror. A rest area, she supposed, if your idea of rest involved a ghostly acrylic occasional chair, beneath a precariously tall, worryingly anamorphic floor lamp.

She propped her bag on the phantom chair, put the charger down on it, then unzipped and removed the black hoodie, draping it across bag and chairback. Turning to the mirror, she straightened her jacket. To little effect, she thought.

“Caitlin’s casual,” Virgil says. “Has sweaters so old the elbows are out, but old-school cashmere. How they do.”

“How who do?”

“Old Franco-Irish money and shit,” he said.

She checked her makeup in the mirror. Or lack of it, she decided, what she saw being what they’d get. Then took ChapStick from her purse and used it anyway.

“I’ll carry your stuff,” he said, leaning the drone’s handle against the chair and picking up the charger. “You can make an entrance, shake hands if you need to.”

“Food in either pocket of the hoodie,” she said. “Don’t squash it. I’ll keep my bag.”

He gingerly draped the hoodie over the charger. “This for that?” he asked, indicating first the charger, then the drone.

“Yeah.”

“What is it?” he asked, meaning the drone itself.

“Those headless military robot dog-things on YouTube? It’s like that,” she said.

“Legless, though?”

“They’re retracted.”

“Keep ’em that way,” he said, reaching for its handle. She shouldered her bag and they started along the corridor.

He stopped, only a few doors along, and passed her the handle, taking his phone from a trouser pocket. Thumb to the screen. She heard a door-chain rattle.

Stets opened the door nearest them, smiling, gesturing her in. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” She pulled the drone in, surprised by its weight, Virgil behind her. Heard Stets closing and rechaining the door.

Rooms here might be either a disappointment or a relief, she knew, looking around, depending on how the lobby décor grabbed you. Lilacs and lavenders were dialed down, the furniture blond wood, the only once-edgy touch provided by acrylic bedside and coffee tables in a deep shade of burnt orange-peel. A bigger room than she’d previously seen here. Glimpsing another adjacent, a woman just entering from it. “Caitlin Bertrand,” she said, resembling, as Verity recalled a gossip site having put it, a young but brutally determined Françoise Hardy. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Verity Jane. Pleased to meet you too.”

“And this,” Stets said, behind her, “must be it.”

Turning, she saw him looking down at the drone. “Why’m I here, Stets?”

“Eunice,” he said, looking up at her.

“She’s gone.”

“She phoned me, after you left with Virgil. More detail on Singapore, at first, but it became a wider conversation.” He glanced at the drone. “Is this listening to us?”

“We are, Mr. Howell,” said Ash.

“That’s Ash,” Verity said. “At least two more in there with her.”

“My colleague, Wilf Netherton,” said Ash.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Wilf.

“And Rainey,” Ash said, “his wife.”

“She’s with the baby,” Wilf said.

“What are you?” Stets asked, as though he were asking about the weather.

“British,” said Ash.

Verity gave Virgil the drone’s handle, taking the hoodie from him. He put the charger down, on what she supposed was a minibar. She sat on the couch, sinking into lilac leather, Muji bag beside her. “Sorry,” she said, “I have to eat something. Right now.” Finding a pocket, she drew out Kathy Fang’s pizza, the napkins gone spottily translucent with grease. Unwrapping it, she took a bite.

“Would you rather have room service?” Virgil asked.

She shook her head, swallowed.

“Let her enjoy it,” Caitlin said, settling on the couch beside Verity, who was taking a second bite.

Verity pawed with her free hand through the hoodie on her lap, coming up with the napkin-wrapped mega-canapé, which she passed to Caitlin, who promptly unwrapped it, nibbled a corner, then bit off a third of it.

Stets was in front of them now, manipulating something at his knee, through the fabric of his loose gray track pants. A click. She remembered the brace. He lowered himself, facing her, onto a circular lilac hassock.

“They tell me,” Verity said to him, after swallowing the last of the pizza, “that they don’t know Eunice personally, but know people who do.”

“Are you familiar with the strategic concept of competitive control areas?” Ash asked.

“Yes,” Stets said.

“Your military has been developing a noetic agent, optimized for operating in them. If local infrastructure didn’t offer adequate connectivity, it could be delivered as a portable, self-supporting, self-actuating unit. Eunice was one result, though still very much a prototype when we discovered her. She’d already been appropriated by Cursion, who intended to spin off a civilian product offering some of her original functionality. Which spared us direct contact with your military research and development sector, where we would have been more likely to encounter people able to recognize us as anomalous.”

“AI?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes,” Ash said, “but the project meshed, early on, with efforts to upload complex human skill sets. So an AI slash upload. Hybrid.”

“When she spoke with me,” Stets said, “I gathered something like that.”

“And this is that?” Caitlin asked, eyeing the drone.

“No,” said Ash, “this is simply a drone we’re employing, for physical telepresence.”

“It evidently hasn’t been designed for retail,” Caitlin said, “which is always interesting in itself.”

“Undo the fastenings on its wheeled wearable,” Ash said.

Virgil squinted at Stets. “Assuming it can move,” he said, “are you sure we want it to?”

“Eunice’s advice,” Stets said, “and she particularly stressed this, was that I should trust whoever Verity brought us.”

“That must have been quite a call,” Virgil said, tilting his head quizzically at Stets.

“It was,” Stets said.

Virgil squinted at Stets. “So you’ll trust whoever’s in control of this thing, its capacities currently unknown, because something that convinced you it was AI told you you should?”

“Under the circumstances,” Stets said, “yes.”

Virgil looked from Stets to Caitlin, then to Verity, then knelt beside the drone. Verity heard hook and loop fasteners being separated. Soon the black case was folded out flat around it on the carpet.

Legs extruding, it rose, spidery arms still crossed, to step forward, surprising Verity with its steadiness. Now it executed a bow toward Caitlin and Verity. Upright again, it stepped briskly to the orange acrylic coffee table, reaching for a Bay Area lifestyle magazine, small white tongs snicking out from the tips of its arms. Picking the magazine up, it flicked rapidly through, stopping at a page it then displayed to them. A black-and-white portrait of Caitlin. “Design documents Fang originally worked from hadn’t specified manipulators,” Ash said. “We had help with that from a veteran who piloted similar drones in combat.”

It flipped the magazine shut, returning it to the table.

“You introduced Eunice to whoever built this?” Stets asked.

“We put them in her way,” Ash said. “She formed her own relationship with them. Our communication with Eunice was limited.”

“Why was that?” Stets asked.

“That’s complicated,” Ash said. “Perhaps it could wait.”

“Would it have to do with her having had me fabricate something myself?” he asked.

Verity, Caitlin, and Virgil all looked at him. Then back to the drone.

“Which would be?” asked Ash.

“An interface device,” Stets said, producing from behind the lilac couch a large carrying case, in rigid black foam, which he placed on the minibar, beside the drone’s charger. It hadn’t looked very heavy. He unfastened latches that reminded Verity of the drones’ Pelican case, and lifted top and sides away as one, revealing a white, featurelessly feminine foam head in a black cycling helmet. Studded with a variety of black components, it looked like a not-very-enthusiastic cyberpunk cosplay accessory.

“A neural cut-out controller,” Wilf said. “I’m wearing one now. Ash is controlling the drone through it.”

“I thought she wasn’t with you,” Verity said.

“By phone,” Wilf said, “via my controller.”

“Could I do that?”

“No,” said Wilf.

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“You all say that.”

“Would you like something more to eat?” Caitlin asked her. “We keep forgetting that you’ve had an extremely long day.” With a look for Stets and Virgil.

“I’d like my own phone back,” Verity said. “Short of that, I need to use the bathroom.” She got up.

“I’ll show you where things are,” Caitlin said, standing.

Verity picked up her bag and followed Caitlin into the larger room.

“Is this business,” Caitlin asked, closing the door behind them, “or something else?”

“Business seemed to be how Eunice made things happen,” Verity said, putting her bag down on the bed, “but she didn’t seem to me to be about it.”

“You could say the same of Stets, but I’m sure you know that,” Caitlin said.

“I do, but they’re different.”

“I agree,” said Caitlin. “I gather you knew her better than the others.”

“Yes, but that was from Monday, till this afternoon.”

“Stets doesn’t think of her as human,” Caitlin said, “but speaks of her as though she was.”

“I keep feeling like she was,” Verity said, a tear suddenly sliding down her left cheek.

Caitlin plucked tissues from a dispenser in the bathroom, brought them to her. “You’ll be safe here with Virgil. Stets and I will return to Fremont. You must be exhausted. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“The trailer?”

“Yes. And your Londoners will stay with you as well, because Eunice told Stets that she didn’t want you out of the drone’s sight. You seem to be at the center of something extraordinary. It’s captured Stets’ imagination in a way I haven’t seen before. Where this goes will affect me, unquestionably. But everyone I’ve come to admire, in Stets’ crew, liked you very much.”

Verity looked at her. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome. Get some sleep,” And then she was gone, back through the door, closing it behind her.

Verity turned, taking in the room.

Larger, with a larger bed, a larger television. A square lilac mega-hassock at its center, six feet on a side, atop it a tray with an ice bucket and glasses.

She picked up her bag and took it into the bright bathroom, unzipped and unfolded it, hanging it behind the door, which she then closed. Pulling down the central interior zipper, she found it seemed like everything she’d had at Joe-Eddy’s was there, including, she saw, neatly rolled at the bottom, her mummy-bag liner. Cosmetics in the horizontally zipped pocket to the right, oral hygiene and hair products to the left. Behind the toothpaste, as she’d noted on Fabricant Fang’s roof, her passport. She checked its unsmiling photograph of a visibly younger self, one who hadn’t yet met Stets. Flipping pages, she read her time with him in stamps from places she might never otherwise have visited. Closing it, she tucked it back where she’d found it, brushed her teeth, used the toilet, washed her face and hands, and returned to the first room.

To find Virgil standing with the cosplay helmet in his hands, Caitlin and Stets beside him. “They want you to try it,” he said, with a nod in the direction of the drone.

“London,” said Ash. “Come and see.”

“There’s something I can use there?” Verity asked. “Like the drone?”

“Nothing like the drone,” Ash said. “You’ll see.”

“What would I need to do?”

“Sit on the couch. Virgil will help you with fit and conductivity. You might get a bit of saline paste in your hair, but it washes out. Close your eyes when we tell you to. Open them.”

She looked from the drone to Virgil, then to the lilac leather of the couch, then to Stets and Caitlin, beside Virgil.

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” said Caitlin.

“Would you?” Verity asked her.

“I would,” said Caitlin. “Out of curiosity, if nothing else.”

“I’ll do it,” said Verity, “but it can’t be that simple.”

“It’s slightly more complicated,” said Ash.

Verity went to the couch and sat down.