Agency

73 Singularity

Virgil brought them lunch: hamburgers from a ranking Dogpatch bistro that didn’t do takeout but had been susceptible to his PA moves, which Verity knew to be potent. Simultaneously arranging, with the same skill set and whatever amount of cash, for the van, its freshly applied vegan wholesaler signage fitting right in, to park behind this hipster supermarket.

She kept thinking the day was overcast, as she ate her burger, then remembering that that was the window tint. The sun was now solidly out.

The drone was stationed at the passenger door, its back to the van’s interior, the thin black camera-tentacle protruding out and up, through a narrow gap at the top of the right front window, to scope for aerial drones. Conner might have it on automatic now, she guessed, as he’d said nothing since Virgil had gone to pick up lunch, and neither had Ash.

“Am I interrupting lunch?” asked Rainey, from the drone.

“You aren’t,” Verity said. “Where’s Wilf?”

“Cheapside,” said Rainey.

“That’s a neighborhood?”

“A street. But also the most popular cosplay zone. Victorian. Visitors have to dress for it. Most of the apparent population are bots.”

“Bots?”

“Like a peripheral, but inorganic, nonsentient, usually remotely directed. There are a few permanent actual residents, though, and that’s why Wilf’s there. Gone with Lowbeer to visit a friend of hers, the only person I know who’s as old as she is.”

“How old?” Verity asked.

“Well,” Rainey said, “Lowbeer herself is alive in your stub, in 2017. A child, there.”

Verity stared at the drone, over her brown cardboard box of forgotten fries.

“She and her friend are both a hundred and twenty-something,” Rainey said. “Their biological clocks keep getting reset, so we’re not just talking cosmetic treatments. Lowbeer has that cosmetic work done as well, but Clovis refuses. Says she’s old as dirt and might as well look it.”

“Dirt?”

“An expression of her day, she says.”

“How long do people live, there?” Verity asked.

“A hundred and sixty’s about the limit, for full functionality, that I know of, but it keeps increasing.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven,” Rainey said.

“Will you live that long?”

“Not unless someone who can afford it wants me to. And people who can afford it for themselves generally don’t want other people to have it.”

“They don’t?”

“Used to be that the one who died with the most toys won. Now it’s who can afford to live longest while holding on to the toys.”

“Lowbeer and her friend are that rich?” Verity asked. Realizing she was still holding the box of fries, she put them down.

“Neither of them are. Lowbeer became very important to some very wealthy people during the jackpot, so they started having her reset. She’s still important, more so actually, so she’s still being reset. Clovis gets it because she was married to a member of Parliament, when that was still a thing, and he helped enable some powerful people to come into a different sort of power. Evidently someone still remembers that.”

“What’s this jackpot, then?” Verity asked, still looking at the back of the drone’s shoulders.

“Fuck,” said Rainey, in an entirely different tone, “that was exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do.”

Verity looked to Virgil, who seemed himself to have been squinting at the drone. Now he looked at Verity. “Been getting pieces of it from Conner,” he said. “Their time line, according to him, is one grim motherfucker.”

“But you’ve changed things, so that we won’t necessarily get that,” Verity said, to Rainey.

“If you have a nuclear war now,” Rainey said, “our idea of apocalypse would be the least of your worries. Unless you get a nuclear winter to reverse the warming, and we had people seriously floating the idea of trying that. You didn’t get Brexit, though, and you got a different American president, but as far as we know you’ll have the rest coming your way, if you don’t blow yourselves up.”

“What they call the jackpot,” Virgil said, “all of that coming down together, Conner says. And none of it’s anything you haven’t heard of.”