Agency

75 Jackpot

Over the drone’s shoulders, through the tinted window, Verity watched two men, Japanese, smoking cigarettes behind the hipster supermarket.

In white t-shirts, pants, aprons, they sat on red plastic milk crates, like the one she’d clumsily stepped up on, wearing the silicosis bootees, to enter Virgil’s truck.

Was it legal, to smoke cigarettes this close to a supermarket? Were they too near a food preparation area? She was thinking about asking them for one, even though she’d never before smoked one, after Rainey had finished telling them about the jackpot.

They’d all sat there, in the van, saying nothing, with Sevrin methodically finishing his fries. Virgil, Verity knew, had already heard at least some of this from Conner. She looked over at him now. He’d just opened a brown glass bottle of ginger beer. His eyes met hers. “I know,” he said, “right?”

“Sorry,” Rainey said. “I really am. I understand that it’s too much, all at once. I’ve never told anyone before, who didn’t know. Wilf and Ash have. I wish it had been them.”

“Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?” Verity asked. “The knowing, for decades, and then managing to do almost nothing to stop it?”

“Not really,” said Rainey. “But it isn’t as if people in your era get all the blame. It began with the use of fossil fuels, in what amounted to a centuries-long event. And it isn’t as if we assume it’s over. We’re barely getting by, as it is, using the shards, or using assemblers as pollinators, and everything else we use them for.”

“Assemblers?” Virgil asked.

“Molecular assemblers. Nanotechnology.”

“I thought that was supposed to change everything,” Verity said. “The singularity?”

“We were in our real singularity all along,” Rainey said. “We just didn’t know it. When relatively functional nanotech did arrive, we used that to blunt some effects, slow things down. Trying anything on a larger scale has increasingly been deemed too big a gamble.”

The two smokers were stubbing out their cigarettes now, getting up, brushing their hands on their aprons, their break over, centuries into the singularity they might never recognize as such.

Virgil passed her the ginger beer. She drank reflexively, not tasting it. “So what you’re trying to do, here, with us, is change that?”

“To mitigate the effects, here. You’re further back than we’ve been able to reach before. You’ve had two radically different outcomes already, due to intercontinual contact. Those are resulting in countless others. The United States, for instance, in this crisis we never had, actually has an ambassador to Turkey. We wouldn’t have had one.”

“Then why are we sitting here, behind a supermarket?” Verity asked. “If we’re supposed to be saving the world?”

“The next move is Eunice’s network’s,” Ash said. “What have you been discussing?”

“Hearing how our world ends,” said Virgil, “and yours begins.”

“Ah,” said Ash, “explains the mood. Rainey spilled the beans?”

“Sorry,” said Rainey. “She’s a sharp listener.”

White Helvetica appeared, across the back of the drone.

Hit the 5th speed dial. It’s Stets. He can actually talk, has a phone like this and no lawyers watching him. J-E