The Peripheral

123

Back from her Wednesday afternoon walk with Ainsley, along the Embankment, she put on Tommy’s oldest Sheriff’s Department shirt, one that still had a Deputy Sheriff’s patch on it. It was the most comfortable thing to wear over her bump, and it felt like him. Maybe they were getting like Janice and Madison, that way, but he basically wore the same thing every day, in uniform or out, and she had Coldiron’s stylists for anything public. She just had to keep them from making her wear some new designer thing, which could feel like a job in itself.

She went into the kitchen, to get a glass of juice from the fridge, and stood there drinking it, wondering, the way she still did, how they could’ve built something like this without assemblers. They’d built it about a hundred yards from the old house, in what had been disused pasture before, and there was no way to tell it hadn’t been built in the nineteen-eighties, then kept up, and gradually remodelled a little, by someone who could afford that but not much else. And they’d done it all without ever making a sound, and really fast. Tommy said they’d used a lot of different adhesives, none of them toxic. So that if you saw a nail head, that wasn’t really a nail, but just there to look like one. But having so much money for a project that it just didn’t matter, she’d learned, was a lot like having assemblers.

They’d built the barn that way too, but to look as old as the old house, or anyway on the outside. Macon and Edward lived there, and did all their really special printing there, stuff Coldiron needed to make sure didn’t get out too soon. Industrial espionage had been identified as a major concern from the get-go, because Coldiron was really about knowing how to do things that nobody else knew how to do, back here. And they were just at the beginning, really, of mining that jackpot tech-surge. Too much at once, Ainsley said, and everything would go batshit on them, so a big part of the program was trying to pace that. Sometimes, particularly since she’d been pregnant, she wished she knew where it was all going. Ainsley said they couldn’t know, but at least they knew one place where it wasn’t going if they could help it, so hold on to that.

It kept her centered, living here. She thought it kept them all centered. They had an unspoken agreement never to call it a compound, probably because they didn’t want anybody to think of it as one, but it was, really. Conner and Clovis had their own house another hundred or so yards away. Burton and Shaylene lived in town, in the residential wing of the Coldiron USA building. That stood, the whole block of it, where the strip mall with Fab and Sushi Barn had been. Hong had a new flagship Sushi Barn, just across the street, on the corner, looking kind of like the original but shinier, and there was a branch of Hefty Fab beside it. Flynne hadn’t wanted them to call it that, but Shaylene said Forever Fab wasn’t a name with good global legs, plus she’d just absorbed Fabbit in the merger, so she also needed something to call all the former Fabbit outlets. And now there was a Sushi Barn in every Hefty Mart, even if it was just the opposite end of the nubbins counter.

She didn’t really like the business part of it. She guessed she disliked it about as much as Shaylene liked it. Coldiron actually had less money now, way less, because as soon as Matryoshka had stumbled, then collapsed, cut off from Sir Henry’s financial modules, Coldiron had started to divest, to get the economy back to something more normal, whatever that meant now. But they still had more money than anyone could understand, or really keep track of. And Griff said that that was good, because they had plenty that needed to be done with it, more than they could know.

She took the empty juice glass over to the sink, washed it out, put it in the drying rack, and looked out the window, up the hill to where they’d built the pad that Marine One landed on, when Felicia came to see her. You couldn’t see that there was anything there at all, even when you were standing on it. Satellites couldn’t even tell it was there, because it was built with Coldiron science, emulating tech from up the line.

They’d talk in the kitchen, usually, when Felicia came, while Tommy sat out in the living room and shot the shit with the Secret Service, or anyway the ones he liked. Sometimes Brent came out from town, usually with Griff, when Felicia was there, and then it was more structured, about stockpiling vaccines against diseases they wouldn’t even have known were out there, or what countries to best put the phage factories in, or climate stuff. She’d met Felicia a little after Vice President Ambrose had had his embolism, and that had been awkward, both because Felicia only ever spoke of Wally, as she called him, with what seemed like a real and painful fondness, and because Flynne knew that he’d died after Griff had shown her footage of her own state funeral, and explained to her exactly what had led up to that.

There was a jelly jar beside the drying rack, full of some of Conner’s old toes, fingers, a thumb. He’d given them to Flora, Lithonia’s daughter. They were some early iterations that Macon had printed back at the old Fab, with machines he’d had printed somewhere else, before they’d built the barn. Flora had forgotten them, that morning, when she’d been up to visit. She’d painted their nails sloppily pink, and Flynne saw that the thumb was moving a little, which had been the problem with the first few batches they’d printed. Watching Conner play squash, sometimes, she’d remember how fast Macon and Ash and Ossian had been able to get him up to speed. Now he never took the composite prosthesis off, the various parts of it, just wore them constantly, but up the line he still had his version of Pavel. She couldn’t imagine using a different peripheral herself. “Hell no,” Leon had said, at dinner once, when she’d said that, “that would be like having a whole other body.” And then he’d made Flora scream, by telling her that if Flynne had a boy, she’d name him Fauna.

Now it was time to go down and have lunch with them. Her mother, Lithonia, Flora, and Leon, who was living in her old room now. Lithonia, it had turned out, was an amazing cook, so now Madison was sandblasting the inside of the old Farmer’s Bank, for a restaurant Lithonia and her cousin would start there, nothing too fancy but a break from Sushi Barn and Jimmy’s. Jimmy’s wasn’t likely to become a chain, and if it did, Leon said, it would be a sign that the jackpot was coming anyway, in spite of everything they were doing.

Her mother, now that all her medications were being made by Coldiron, and custom-made at that, no longer needed the oxygen. In the meantime, if anyone else needed anything, they’d bought Pharma Jon, whose profit margin, on Flynne’s suggestion, they’d slashed by half, instantly making it the single most beloved chain in the country, if not the world.

Picking up the jelly jar, she went out, without bothering to lock the door, and down along to the path they’d been wearing between the two houses, which was starting to look as though it had always been there.

She’d told Ainsley, earlier, walking on the Embankment, how she sometimes worried that they weren’t really doing more than just building their own version of the klept. Which Ainsley had said was not just a good thing but an essential thing, for all of them to keep in mind. Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. And this was true, Ainsley had said, of the very worst monsters, among whom she herself had so long moved. Her job in London, she’d said, might seem to Flynne to be a patient caretaker amid large and specially venomous animals, but that wasn’t the case.

“All too human, dear,” Ainsley had said, her blue old eyes looking at the Thames, “and the moment we forget it, we’re lost.”