Agency

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What would happen if I used this to call my mother?” Verity asked Virgil, indicating a hotel phone.

“Is she on cell?” Virgil asked, still on the couch with his feet up.

“Landline. She only turns her cell on if she’s out with it and needs to make a call.”

“Assuming Cursion’s tapped it, they’d record the conversation, probably be able to get the room number. According to your IT lady in the future—”

“Ash,” Verity said.

“She says Cursion aren’t, in themselves, a big deal. That they’re ex-government, so unconnected to state power. Which doesn’t make her happy, though, because she says that makes them liable to fuck us up without even meaning to. No street smarts. Way she thinks reminds me of what I do for Stets.”

“Except for what you do for Stets, not many people would’ve heard of him.”

“I didn’t hear you say that,” he said, and smiled. “But thanks. To the man’s credit, though, I know he tends to agree. But back to Cursion. Ash says Gavin’s their front in the industry, an actual businessperson with a background in technology. If you called your mother, those are the kind of people you might alert to our whereabouts. Hers too, though they probably already have that.”

“Stets still doesn’t have anyone exclusively on security?”

“Few of us do keep an eye on things,” he said.

“I know. You always did.”

“Caitlin doesn’t have security staff either. Her father has people in Paris, when she and Stets visit him, but they all have gray hair. The ones we notice, anyway.” He put one of his feet down and dug in a pants pocket. “Speaking of phones, I took delivery of this one while you were sleeping.” He leaned over to hand her a phone. “Not in your name.” He passed her a black charger, its cable wound around it, and a pair of black earbuds. “Not okay to phone your mother on, or anyone else Cursion might know you know, but you’ve got the web, and it’s programmed to dial fresh burners of ours.”

“Where’s mine?”

“With whoever built this controller for Stets, apparently, but I don’t know how it got there.”

She remembered dropping it into the barista’s Faraday pouch, at Fabricant Fang, along with the Tulpagenics phone and the gray-framed glasses. She’d seen him give the pouch to Dixon.

The drone coughed. “Wilf here.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Back in our flat. Went out to meet a friend. Upset about where he’s living, after a divorce.”

“What’s wrong with where he’s living?”

“Too near relatives of his,” Wilf said.

She tried to imagine his future London with completely boring problems, realizing she expected all future problems to be inherently interesting.

“Hello, Virgil,” Wilf said.

“Hey,” Virgil said. “Conner said he had to go and do something in the Rose Garden. Why’s he in the White House?”

“He and the president, Leon Fisher,” Ash said, “are both from the same small town. This is Leon’s first year in office, so it’s helpful for him to have someone there from home.”

“But that didn’t happen, in your past?” Virgil had both his feet on the floor now, and was sitting up.

“That’s correct,” said Wilf.

“Conner says it isn’t time travel, because of that,” Virgil said. “That time travel, physically, is impossible.”

“We can establish digital contact with our own past,” Wilf said, “provided sufficient infrastructure exists there to allow it. Doing so initiates a new continuum, one in which that message was received. In ours, right now, it wasn’t.”

“So you could get in touch with us here, yesterday?” Virgil asked. “Our yesterday?”

“No,” said Wilf, “but if we could, that would be the start of a new stub, because that didn’t happen in your past.”

“Why can’t you?” Verity asked.

“Initiation results in a one-to-one temporal ratio. If I initiate a stub, leave it, then return, the same amount of time has passed in the stub.”

“Conner told Virgil that the election last year went the other way, there,” Verity said. “Did it?”

“Yes,” said Wilf.

“So you’re in another stub?” she asked.

“No,” said Wilf, “because that was in our past, and all stubs branch from ours.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Virgil asked.

“Because,” said Wilf, “we’ve the means of initiating stubs and you don’t.”

“So what if you reached back to your own last Tuesday?” Virgil asked.

“That’s impossible,” Wilf said.

“Why?” Verity asked.

“We need to reach quite a distance back, in order to make contact. Though not too far, else the resulting new stub lack sufficient infrastructure to receive our data. There’s a window, that way. I’m told yours is the earliest stub known to have been viably initiated.”

“So what you do,” Virgil said, his eyes narrowed, “is colonize alternate pasts.”

“I don’t think colonization’s the best metaphor,” Wilf said, something about the ease with which he said it suggesting to Verity that this wasn’t the first time. “There’s no possibility of resource extraction. No transferable financial gain.”

“How about something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk?” Virgil asked, Verity recognizing this as what he really did for Stets.

“I don’t know it,” Wilf said.

“Like Uber, but for information labor,” Virgil said.

“We have AI for that,” Wilf said. “We could manipulate your markets, make money there, and pay you with it, but our AI is free, essentially, so it wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Art,” said Virgil. “Music. Literature.”

“Yes,” said Netherton. “But still, in practice, there’s no real economic basis.”

“Then why do you do it?” Verity asked.

“In your case,” Wilf said, “initially, we want to avert nuclear war in your stub. For most users, though, it’s simply a pastime.”

“A pastime,” Virgil said, flatly.

“Users?” Verity asked.

“Hobbyists,” Wilf said.

“Just in it for the shits and giggles?” Virgil asked, looking at the drone.

“Ash,” sharply announcing herself. “Time to go.”

“Why?” Verity asked.

“Someone’s put up an image of you on something called Instagram. Taken last night, as you entered the hotel with Virgil. They recognized him as part of Howell’s inner circle. They didn’t recognize you, else they’d have identified you in the post, but others have in the meantime. I’ve sent you both the link.”

Virgil groaned. Consulted his phone. “They’re stretching it, IDing you in that hoodie. Could be anybody.” He showed Verity the photograph. She was on his far side, in the lobby’s lilac gloom, hood up, no more than a quarter of her face visible, and that with sunglasses.

“Pack,” said Ash. “It doesn’t look as though they have anyone in the lobby yet.”

“How do you know?” Virgil asked.

“We’re using Followrs, through a proxy,” Ash said. “We have one in the lobby now.”

Verity was already headed for her Muji bag, in the bathroom.