Agency

8 Joyous Victory

The yurt, as Ash called it, proved worse than Netherton could have imagined, having been fully lined, he’d discovered on entering, with her living cloned skin. A pallid veldt, across which roamed, grazed, and stalked the simple black line-drawings, animated tattoos, that had annoyed him when they’d worked together. Given the demodding of her eyes, he assumed she no longer wore them, and so had created this preserve for them, every creature depicted representing an Anthropocene extinction. He suspected the sheer yardage of flesh of making the air warmer, moister, but tried not to think about it, now that the two of them were settled on uneven layers of faded carpet.

“We’ve sourced something field-expedient,” she began, finding a level spot for her tea at the base of an incline of carpet, “from what little’s available there.”

“There’s difficulty communicating with the stub in general?”

“That’s what makes her field-expedient. She’s designed for autonomy.”

Netherton found himself looking at her eyes. “Those suit you,” he said, surprising himself.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It must have been quite a decision.”

“I’m in a new relationship,” she said, almost demurely.

“Delighted for you both. But please, don’t let me interrupt you.”

“She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence,” she said, her pallor blending perfectly with the wall. Her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth, beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure. “We tend to assume their drive to upload to have been about preservation of the individual consciousness of those who could afford it, but the military had a more meritocratic goal. They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets. Not personality but expertise.”

He nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing.

“There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas, CCAs, where criminal organizations or extremists exerted greater control over the territory than any government. Our laminar agent, in the stub, was based on someone with that sort of expertise.”

“Laminar?”

“A term of art, though we’ve been able to learn almost nothing about it. Competitive control areas were complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators. Hence a project to replace such operators with autonomous AI, piped directly into the goggles of local recruits. Black boxes, stand-alone, in backpacks, to run special ops. Recruiting assets, arranging assassinations…”

“Were they effective?”

“We don’t know. Our agent, for all the apparent sophistication of her platform, seems to be an early prototype.”

“Did we have this project here?”

“We’ve found no record.”

“You communicate with it?”

“Her. Given the technological asymmetry, she’s been rather like an operative whose handlers are recurrent figures in a dream.”

“Poetically put,” he said.

“Quoth Lowbeer.” Behind her, a black herd of horns galloped past, deep in the perspective of a landscape imagined on a seamless scrim of her own skin. “Are you enjoying parenthood?”

“Yes,” said Netherton, “I am.” Had something been done to her lips? he wondered. They seemed fuller.

Now the furtive head of a carnivore surfaced alertly, on the savannah of cloned skin, then dropped out of sight. “I would never have imagined you a parent,” she said.

“It affects my professional availability, of course,” he said, “which you should keep in mind with regard to this new stub. Rainey and I take our responsibilities very seriously. She’s getting back into things, workwise, so I’ll be doing more solo parenting.”

“What sort of work?”

“Public relations. A Toronto firm. Specialists in crisis management.”

“When it comes to crisis management, Wilf, in the matter of this particular stub, nothing can be scheduled to your convenience. You’ll be constantly on call, as am I. Eunice is depending on us, though she doesn’t know it yet.”

“Eunice?”

“Joyous victory.”

“Pardon me?”

“The meaning of her name. She’s an intermittently hierarchical array, complexly conterminous. Or that’s my best bet, currently.”

He blinked. “Has she peripherals?”

“She’s in process of acquiring several small aerial drones. Military grade, by the standard of her day. And the shop that fabricated them has recently completed a functional replica of a bipedal combat-reconnaissance platform.”

“And you simply found her?”

“Nothing simple about it. I found her in the hands of entrepreneurs, corrupt former government employees, who had obtained her irregularly. They supposed that repurposing her for civilian markets could be profitable, but hadn’t gotten on with it. We nudged them. More recently, we nudged them into hiring someone to work with her, whom we suggested would have an advantageous effect. That’s going rather well.”

“How so?”

“She isn’t letting them monitor her interaction with their new employee.” Wings passed silently behind her, across the wall. “Exactly the sort of independence we’re looking for. They’re impressed too, but now they’ve enough of an idea of her potential degree of agency that we fear time may be short.”

Rainey’s sigil pulsed. “Sorry,” he said to Ash, “phone.” He turned his head. “Yes?”

“Coming home for dinner?” Rainey asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Dalston. Business. Visiting Ash.”

“Lucky you,” Rainey said. Her sigil dimmed.

“Rainey,” he said to Ash, turning back to her. “Sends you her best.”