The Peripheral

21

They never caught up with Leon. Maybe he actually did some pedaling, or more likely did some and used the hub at the same time. Her bike was propped against the oak in the front yard, Leon nowhere in sight, but a buddy of Burton’s, Reece, was sitting in the wooden lawn chair there, with a mandolin across his lap. As she and Burton got closer, after they left the car by the gate, she saw it wasn’t a mandolin but an Army rifle that looked like it had been telescoped back into itself, squashed front to back. A bullpup, they called that. Reece had a ball cap pulled down level with his eyebrows, the kind that continually altered its pattern. Reece had been something in the Army, special something but less special than HaptRec, and admired Burton in a way that she found unhealthy, though whether for Reece or Burton she wasn’t sure.

“Hey, Reece,” Burton said.

“Burton,” Reece said, touching the bill of his ball cap, close to a salute, but staying put in the chair. He had a Viz in his left socket, and now she was close enough to see moving light from it, reflected in his eye.

“Who else is here?” Burton asked, looking up at the dark house, white clapboard starting to lighten with the dawn.

“Duval’s up the hill,” Reece said, as Flynne watched a pixelated blob of tan migrate a little closer to where the button would have been on a regular ball cap. They didn’t have a button, Marine caps, because if someone hit you on top of your head, they could drive the button into your skull. “Carter’s around the back, Carlos down by the trailer. Got a net up, twenty units, twenty in reserve.” Twenty drones over the property, she understood, flying synchronously in repeating pattern, each of the three men monitoring a third of it. That was a lot of drones.

“We’re going to the trailer,” Burton said. “Tell Carlos.”

The bill of the ball cap bobbed. “Luke after you? Duval said he heard.”

“Luke’s not the problem,” Burton said. “Need to be expecting scarier company than that.” He put his hand on Reece’s shoulder for a second, then started down the hill.

“Night, Flynne,” said Reece.

“Morning,” she said, then caught up with Burton. “What did they look like,” she asked him, “the people who phoned you?”

“Remember the Sacrificial Anodes?”

She barely did. From Omaha or something. “Before my time.”

“She looked like the singer in the Anodes, Cat Blackstock, but with Halloween contact lenses. Other one was maybe my age, big boy, sloppy, some beard, antique eyeglasses. Used to people agreeing with him.”

“Were they Colombian? Latino?”

“English. From England.”

Remembering the city, the curve in the river. “Why did you believe them?”

He stopped, and she almost bumped into him. “I never said I believed them. Believe in the money they’ve been paying me, I can spend that. They put ten million in Leon’s Hefty Pal, I’ll believe in that too.”

“You believe somebody’s been hired to kill you?”

“I think Coldiron might believe it.”

“Enough to get Reece and them over here, with guns?”

“Can’t hurt. They like an excuse. Leon wins the lottery, he can spread a little around.”

“The lottery’s rigged?”

“Surprise you if it was?”

“You think they’re the government, Coldiron?”

“It’s money. Anybody offer you any, lately, aside from me?” He turned, starting down the path again. Birds were beginning to sing.

“What if it’s some kind of Homeland sting?”

Over his shoulder: “Told them you’d talk to them. Need you to do that, Flynne.”

“But you don’t know who they are. Why don’t they have video of everything? They were paying us to fly cameras.”

He stopped again, turned back. “There’s a reason there’s a website to sign up to kill people you never heard of. Same reason nobody in this county’s making a decent living, unless they’re building drugs.” He looked at her.

“Okay,” she said. “Not like I said I wouldn’t. It just feels crazy.”

“Homeland Security officer was telling me I should apply to get on with them. Guys working under him were rolling their eyes, behind his back. Hard times.”

They were almost to the unlit trailer now, its soft-looking paleness starting to show in the dark between the trees. It felt like she hadn’t been there for a long time.

A figure turned, barely visible past the trailer, beside the trail. Carlos, she guessed. He gave them a thumbs-up sign.

“Where’s the log-in?” he asked.

“Under the table. In your tomahawk case.”

“Axe,” he corrected, opening the door and climbing in. The lights came on. He looked down at her. “I know you think this is crazy, but this just might be a way out of our basic financial situation. Ways are thin on the ground, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I’ll talk to them.”

The Chinese chair got larger, for Burton. She got the slip of Fab paper out of the case, read Burton the log-in as he typed.

He was about to flick GO, when they had it entered, but she put her hand over his. “I’ll do it, but I can’t if you’re here. If anybody’s here. You want to listen from outside, that’s okay.”

He flipped his hand over, squeezed hers. Got up. The chair tried to find him. “Sit down before it has a breakdown,” he said, picking up the tomahawk, and then he was out the door, closing it behind him.

She sat down, the chair audibly contracting, a series of sighs and clicks. She felt the way she had at Coffee Jones, every time she’d had to go in the office in back and get shit from Byron Burchardt, the night manager.

She took her phone off, straightened it, used it as a mirror. Hair wasn’t doing so good, but she had lip gloss that Janice had brought a case of home from Hefty Mart when she’d worked there. Most of the writing was worn off the tube, just a nub left inside, but she got it out of her jeans and used it. Whoever she was going to talk to now, it wouldn’t be poor Byron, whose car had been run over by an autopiloted eighteen-wheeler on Valentine’s Day, about three months after he’d fired her.

She flicked go.

“Miss Fisher?” Just like that. Guy maybe her age, short brown hair, brushed back, expression neutral. He was in a room with a lot of very light-colored wood, or maybe plastic that looked like wood, shiny as nail polish.

“Flynne,” she told him, reminding herself to be polite.

“Flynne,” he said, then just looked at her, from behind an old-fashioned monitor. He was wearing a high black turtleneck, something she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen in real life before, and now she saw the desk was made of marble-look stuff, shot through with big veins of fake gold. Like the loan office in a grifter bank ad. Maybe that was Colombian. He didn’t look Latino to her, but neither did he have a beard or glasses, like the one Burton had described.

“How about you?” she said, sounding more testy than intended.

“Me?” He sounded startled, like he’d been lost, thinking.

“I just told you my name.”

The way he was looking at her now made her want to check over her shoulder. “Netherton,” he said, and coughed, “Wilf Netherton.” He sounded surprised.

“Burton says you want to talk to me.”

“Yes. I do.”

Like the ones Burton said he’d talked to, he sounded English.

“Why?”

“We understand that you were substituting for your brother, on his last two shifts-”

“Is it a game?” Hadn’t known what she was going to say. It just came out.

He started to open his mouth.

“Tell me if it’s a fucking game.” Whatever this was talking, she knew, was what she’d had going on since she’d quit playing Operation Northwind. Sometimes it felt like she’d caught Burton’s PTSD, sitting there on Madison and Janice’s couch.

He closed his mouth. Frowned slightly. Pursed his lips. Relaxed them. “It’s an extremely complex construct,” he said, “part of some much larger system. Milagros Coldiron provide it security. It isn’t our business to understand it.”

“So it’s a game?”

“If you like.”

“The fuck does that shit mean?” Desperate to know something but she didn’t know what. No way that that wasn’t a game.

“It’s a gamelike environment,” he said. “It isn’t real in the sense that you-”

“Are you for real?”

He tilted his head to the side.

“How would I know?” she asked. “If that was a game, how would I know you aren’t just AI?”

“Do I look like a metaphysician?”

“You look like a guy in an office. What exactly do you do there, Wilf?”

“Human resources,” he said, eyes narrowing.

If he was AI, she thought, somebody quirky had done the design. “Burton says you claim you can fix-”

“Please,” he interrupted, quickly, “this is hardly secure. We’ll find a better way to discuss that. Later.”

“What’s that blue light, on your face?”

“It’s the monitor,” he said. “Malfunctioning.” He frowned. “You took a total of two shifts for your brother?”

“Yes.”

“Will you describe them to me, please?”

“What do you want to know?”

“All you remember.”

“Why don’t you just look at the capture.”

“The capture?”

“If nobody was capturing that, what’s the point of me flying your camera?”

“That would be up to the client.” He leaned forward. “Will you help us out, here, please?” He actually looked worried.

He didn’t seem like someone she should trust, particularly, but at least he seemed like someone. “I started the first one in the back of a van or something,” she began. “Came up out of this hatch, controls on override. .”