The Peripheral

22

Listening to her, Netherton found he lost himself, not unpleasantly. Her accent fascinated him, a voice out of pre-jackpot America.

There had been a Flynne Fisher in the world’s actual past. If she were alive now, she’d be much older. Though given the jackpot, and whatever odds of survival, that seemed unlikely. But since Lev had only touched her continuum for the first time a few months earlier, this Flynne would still be very like the real Flynne, the now old or dead Flynne, who’d been this young woman before the jackpot, then lived into it, or died in it as so many had. She wouldn’t yet have been changed by Lev’s intervention and whatever that would bring her.

“Those voices,” she said, having finished her account of the first shift, “before the twentieth floor. Couldn’t make them out. What were they?”

“I’m not familiar with the particulars of your brother’s assignment,” he said, “at all.” She was wearing what he took to be a rather severe black military shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, with epaulets, and something in scarlet, possibly cursive, above the left pocket. She had dark eyes, dark brown hair that might as well have been cut by a Michikoid. He wondered if she’d been in the same unit Lev had mentioned her brother having been in.

Ash was giving him the girl’s feed, and had centered it in his field of vision to facilitate eye contact. He was supposed to keep his head down, pretend to be viewing her on the dead monitor, but he kept forgetting to.

“Burton said they were paparazzi,” she said. “Little drones.”

“Do you have those?” She made him conscious of how vague his sense of her day actually was. History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome. Too much of it and you became Ash, obsessed with a catalog of vanished species, addicted to nostalgia for things you’d never known.

“You don’t have drones, in Colombia?”

“We do,” he said. Why, he wondered, did she appear to be seated in a submarine, or perhaps some kind of aircraft, its interior coated with self-illuminated honey?

“Ask her,” said Lev, “about what she witnessed.”

“You’ve described your first shift,” said Netherton. “But I understand there was an event, during your second. Can you describe that?”

“The backpack,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Like a little kid’s knapsack, but made out of some shitty-looking gray plastic. Tentacle thing at four corners. Sort of legs.”

“And when did you first encounter this?”

“Came out of the hatch in the van, same deal, straight up. Past twenty, those voices were gone, like before. Then I spotted it, climbing.”

“Climbing?”

“Somersaulting, like backflips. Moving right along. Passed it, lost track. Thirty-seventh, it caught up with me, passed me. Lost it again. Got to fifty-six, got control of the copter, there’s no bugs. Did the perimeter, no paparazzi, no sign of the gray thing. Then the window defrosted.”

“Depolarized.”

“What I thought,” she said. “Saw the woman I saw before the party. Party’s over, different furniture, she’s in pj’s. Somebody else there, but I couldn’t see. Saw her make eye contact, laugh. Did another perimeter. They were at the window, when I got back.”

“Who?”

“The woman,” she said. “Guy beside her, early thirties maybe, dark hair, some beard. Kind of racially nonspecific. Brown bathrobe.” Her expression had changed. She was looking in his direction, or in the direction of his image on her phone, but she was seeing something else. “She couldn’t see the look on his face, because she was beside him, had his arm around her. He knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That it was about to kill her.”

“What was?”

“Backpack. I knew they’d see the copter. A door was opening, in the glass. A kind of railing was rolling up, for the balcony. They were going to step out. I had to move. I went like I was making another perimeter, but I stopped around the corner. Took it up to fifty-seven, doubled back.”

“Why?”

“Look on his face. Just wrong.” Her face still, utterly serious. “It was over the window, on the front of fifty-seven. Morphed so it looked like the rest of the shit on the building, same kind of shape, same color, but everything else was wet. It was dry. Sort of breathing.”

“Breathing?”

“Swelling, going flat, swelling. Just a little.”

“You were above them?”

“They were at the railing, looking out. Toward the river. I wanted to get an image, didn’t know how. I’d managed it by accident, with a bug, first shift. Figured there was a proximity trigger, but I didn’t know exactly what I was flying. When I got a little closer, it spit something. Fast, too small to see. Started hitting the camera I had on it. Taking a bite out each time. I killed the props before it could spit any more, dropped about three floors, caught myself. Biter’s gone, I took it left, then straight up. He was behind her. Putting her hands over her eyes. Kissing her fucking ear. Whispering something. ‘Surprise.’ I bet he said ‘surprise.’ He was stepping back, turning, headed in. And those things are coming out of it, lots of them. Saw him look up. He knew. Knew it would be there.” She looked down, as if at her hands. Back up at him. “I tried to ram his head. But he was fast. Went down on his knees. Then they were inside her, eating her. And he was up and in and the door was gone and the window went gray. I think the first one killed her. Hope it did.”

“This is horrible,” said Ash.

“Hush,” ordered Lev.

“She was leaning back against the railing,” she said, “and it started to roll down, retract. She went over. Fell. I followed her down. They ate her up. Almost to the ground. Just what she was wearing. That was all that was left.”

“Is this the woman you saw?” asked Netherton, raising Ash’s matte print of a headshot from Aelita’s site.

She looked at it, from seventy-some years before, in a past that was no longer quite the one that had produced his world, and nodded.