Agency

62 Shoe-Button Eyes

Rainey was at the kitchen table when Netherton came in, Thomas in his high chair. She was tickling one of the nanny’s pandaforms for his amusement. It lay on its back on the red tabletop, Thomas crooning excitedly as it thrashed about.

“Hello,” Netherton said, bending to kiss her forehead.

“Hello. How’s Lev?”

“Unhappy.” Straightening up. “Cheyne Walk is full of relatives, of course. Bit too klepty for his taste.” He glanced at the couch, seeing the controller where he’d left it. “Where’s the peri?”

“She called for one of the spa’s cars, to take her back to Floral Street. Place looks like a cross between a capsule hotel and a morgue. Had her take me through it on their site. Guests are all female. Bodies, semibiologic or not, which are legally someone else’s property, are an inherently creepy proposition.”

“Yes,” said Netherton, opening the refrigerator, “though in this case you wouldn’t know Flynne nearly as well, without that peri. If a different one were being rented for her, each visit, you wouldn’t have the same bond.”

“True, and neither would I have anything like the same sense of London, if she hadn’t wanted to see it all. I wouldn’t have visited the cosplay zones, for instance, because you don’t.”

“They’re for children,” he said, “and tourists. We can take Thomas, when he’s older.”

“Cheapside’s great,” she said. “The smell of it.”

“That’s mainly feces. Human as well as equine.”

“The crowds.”

“Bots, most of them.”

“It gives you a better sense of what it was like than any augmented reality,” she said. “Carnaby Street is AR, for instance, and spectral in comparison. And visitors aren’t required to dress for it, which makes it visually inconsistent.”

Not seeing anything in the refrigerator that appealed, he closed it. “I should check on the stub,” he said, glancing at the controller, uncomfortable with not being able to tell her what Lev, or for that matter Lowbeer, had told him. He looked down at a third of the nanny, squirming to escape Rainey’s tickling. It seemed to look back at him, out of shoe-button eyes.

“Go ahead,” said Rainey. “Seems like a good idea.”

He went to the couch, sat down beside the controller, picked it up, and put it on.