The Peripheral

25

From between her bedroom curtains she saw Burton come around the corner of the house, walking fast in bright sunlight, swinging the handle of the tomahawk. He held it as if the head were the T-shaped top of a walking stick, which meant its edges were clipped into a Kydex minisheath he or one of the others had made. Making thermoplastic sheaths and holsters was a hobby of theirs, like macramé or quilting. Leon teased them about merit badges.

One of those big retro-looking Russian motorcycles, shiny and red, with matching sidecar, was waiting by the front gate. Rider and passenger wore round black helmets. The passenger was Leon, she saw, the jacket unmistakable.

She’d slept through again. Remembered no dreams. Angle of sun said early afternoon. Leon removed his helmet as Burton came up to the red motorcycle, but stayed put in the sidecar. Took something from a jacket pocket, passed it up to Burton, who glanced at it, then put it in his back pocket.

She stepped back from the curtains, put on her bathrobe, gathered up clothes for after the shower.

But first she needed to tell Burton about Conner. She headed downstairs, in robe and flip-flops, clothes under her arm in a towel. Heard the Russian bike heading out.

Burton was on the porch. She saw that the sheath on the tomahawk was that flesh tone, like orthopedic devices. That was the shade they all preferred, black being considered too dressy. Maybe if somebody saw that orthopedic shade, under the hem of your shirt, they’d just think you’d had an operation. “Seen Conner lately?” she asked him.

“No. Just pinged him, though.”

“What for?”

“See if he wants to help us out.”

“I saw him last night,” she said, “in the parking lot at Jimmy’s. Seriously not good. Like he was that close to doing something to a couple of football players. Right in front of everybody.”

“Need somebody to watch the road, nights. He’d stay straight for that. He’s getting fucked up out of boredom.”

“What was that,” she asked, “on the back of the trike?”

“Probably just a.22.”

“Shouldn’t somebody be trying to help him, he gets that fucked up?”

“Way less fucked up than he has every right to be. And I’m trying. The VA isn’t going to.”

“I was scared.”

“He’d never hurt you.”

“Scared for him. What was Leon here for?”

“This.” He pulled a state lottery ticket, bright and stiff, out of his back pocket, showed it to her.

Leon stared at her out of a blurry foil hologram, to the left of a retinal scan. “Looks like it should have his genome on it,” she said. It had been a while since she’d seen one, their mother having taught them both never to pay what she called the stupidity tax. “You think he’ll win ten million?”

“It’s not that much, but if he does, we’re onto something.”

“You weren’t here last night, after I talked to Milagros Coldiron.”

“Carlos needed some help, tightening the pattern. Who was it?”

“Neither of the ones you talked to. Name’s Netherton. Said he was human resources.”

“And?”

“Wanted to hear what happened. Told him, same as I told you.”

“And?”

“He said they’d be in touch. Burton?”

“Yeah?”

“If it’s a game, why would anybody want to kill you, just for seeing something happen in a game?”

“Games cost, to build. That’s some kind of beta version. They keep all that shit secret.”

“There wasn’t anything that special about it,” she said. “Plenty of kills that ugly, in lots of games.” Though she wasn’t so sure about that.

“We don’t know what it was, about what you saw, that they’d think was special.”

“Okay,” she said, handing him the ticket. “I’m taking a shower.”

She went back into the house, through the kitchen, and out to the shower.

She was taking off her bathrobe when her phone buzzed on her wrist. “Hey,” she said.

“Macon. How you doing?”

“Okay. How’re you?”

“Shaylene says you’re looking for me. Hope it’s not a user satisfaction issue.” He didn’t sound worried.

“More like tech support, but it’ll have to wait till I can see you.”

“I am just now holding a little salon, as it happens, in the snack bar here. We have Hefty’s famous pork nubbins. Pretty much all of them.”

“Confidential.”

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll be over on my bike. Don’t leave.”

“You got it.”

She showered, then dressed in the jeans she’d worn the day before and a loose gray t-shirt. Left the robe and towel and flip-flops on the shelf outside. Headed around the house to her bike.

Didn’t see any of Burton’s posse, but assumed they were there, more settled in. And the drones would be up too. None of that seemed very real to her. Neither did the gaudy ticket with Leon’s hologram and retina on it. Maybe Conner wasn’t the only one batshit, she thought.

She unlocked her bike, got on it, seeing that Leon had somehow managed to not actually deplete her battery, and pedaled away, smelling the roadside pines in the warm afternoon.

She was about a third of the way along Porter, when the Tarantula passed her in the opposite direction, engine whining, too fast for her to get even a glimpse of Conner.

She rode on, through the fried-chicken smell, until that thinned and was gone, and forty-five minutes later was locking her bike outside of Hefty Mart.

Macon had his own table in the snack bar, furthest from where you paid. It was because he could troubleshoot for the local management, handle things the chain’s headquarters in Delhi didn’t have a handle on. When things went wrong with inventory tracking, or with the shoplifter blimps, Macon could fix it on-site. He wasn’t on any payroll, but part of the deal was that he got to use the table in the snack bar as his office, with an open tab on snacks and drinks.

He wouldn’t do anything, for anybody, that had to do with building drugs, not the usual position for someone in his line of work. It could make things tricky for him, if people who built drugs had something that needed fixing, but it could make other things easier. Deputy Tommy Constantine, in Flynne’s opinion the closest thing in town to an attractive single man, had told her the Sheriff’s Department called on Macon if they couldn’t get their shit fixed otherwise

The snack bar smelled of nubbins, the pork ones. The chicken ones didn’t smell as much, maybe because they lacked the traditional red dye. Macon was working his way through a plate of the pork ones as she came up to the table. His back was to the wall, as always, and Edward, to his left, was fixing something that wasn’t there.

Edward had a Viz in either eye, she assumed for the depth perception, and a lavender satin sleep mask over them both, to block out the light. He wore a pair of tight flu-orange gloves, with what looked like black Egyptian writing all over them. She could almost see the thing he was working on, but of course she couldn’t, because it wasn’t there. It might be in the manager’s office upstairs, or for that matter in Delhi, but Edward could see it, and control the pair of plastic hands that held it, wherever that was.

“Hey,” said Macon, looking up from his nubbins.

“Hey,” she said, pulling up a chair. The chairs here all looked like they were molded from the stuff Burton had coated the inside of the trailer with, but less flexy.

Edward frowned, carefully placed the invisible object six inches above the tabletop, and reached up to raise the sleep mask to his forehead. He looked out at her through the silver webbing of the two Vizs, grinned. A grin was a lot, from him.

“Nubbins?” Macon asked.

“No thanks,” she said.

“They’re fresh!”

“All the way from China.”

“Nobody grows pork nubbins juicy as China.” Macon, lighter skinned than Edward, sort of freckled, had very beautiful eyes, irises mottled greenish brown. The left one, now, was behind his Viz. “Phone’s bricked, huh?”

“Don’t you worry about those things?” she asked, meaning the Viz. “Seeing everything.”

“Ours have been pretty thoroughly fiddled with,” he said. “Right out the box, you’d be wise to worry.”

“Mine hasn’t bricked,” she said, knowing he knew perfectly well that it hadn’t. “Thing is, Homes stuck Burton out on the athletic field at Davisville High, to keep him from beating on Luke 4:5.”

“Sorry to hear,” he said. “He didn’t get to beat on them at all?”

“Enough to get taken into protective custody. So they had his phone overnight. What worries me is that they might have looked at mine while they had his.”

“In that case,” he said, “they’d have looked at mine as well. Your brother and I pretty much in a way of business.”

“You tell, if they had?”

“Maybe. Some bored Homes in a big white truck, looking for porn, I could probably tell. To be frank, if they did, I’d know. But some panoptic motherfucker federal AI? Fuck only knows.”

“Would they see my phone was funny?”

“They could,” said Edward, “but something would have to be looking at you, something that really specially wanted to know about certain people’s phones.”

“Actually,” said Macon, “we did you quite the job. Manufacturer in China hasn’t spotted one of ours yet.”

“That we know of,” said Edward.

“True,” said Macon, “but usually we hear if they do.”

“Basically, you don’t know?”

“Basically, no. But I’ll give you permission not to worry about it. Free.”

“You get anything for Conner Penske lately?”

Macon and Edward gave each other a look. Edward lowered the sleep shade over his Vizs and picked up the thing that wasn’t there. Turned it over. Prodded it with an orange and black forefinger. “What sorta anything you thinking of?” Macon asked.

“I was over at Jimmy’s last night. Looking for you.”

“Sorry I missed you.”

“Conner was there, getting into it with a couple of high school dicks. Had something on the back of his trike.”

“Yellow ribbon?”

“Kinda robot snake-spine? Hooked up to a monocle-looking thing.”

“We didn’t fab him that,” Macon said. “Surplus off eBay. Legal. We got him a servo interface and circuitry, is all.”

“What’s on the business end?”

“Nothing we know of,” he said. “Arm’s length.”

“He could wind up in some serious trouble. You know that?”

Macon nodded. “Conner, he’s a compelling motherfucker, you know? Hard to say no to. That trike and shit’s all he got now.”

“That and wakey and drinking. If it was just the trike and some toys, it maybe wouldn’t be so bad.”

Macon looked at her, sadly. “Little manipulator on the end,” he said, “like Edward’s using, but fewer degrees of freedom.”

“Macon, I’ve seen you do guns.”

Macon shook his head. “Not for him, Flynne. No way for him.”

“He could still get one.”

“You could walk through this town, fall down ’most anywhere, you’d land on a fabbed gun. Not like they’re hard to get. I stay out of Conner’s way, then his shit stops working, then the VA can’t fix it for him, so his quality of life falls off, fast. If I don’t, and we keep his shit up and running, he’s grinning up at me asking for whatever he knows he shouldn’t have. It is, honestly, very hard. Understand me?”

“Burton might be hiring him.”

“I like your brother, Flynne. Like you. You sure you don’t want a plate of nubbins?” He grinned.

“I’ll pass. Thanks for the tech support.” She stood up. “Be seeing you, Edward.”

The lavender sleep mask nodded. “Flynne,” he said.

She went out and unlocked her bike.

One of the blimps was hanging over the lot, pretending to just be advertising next season’s Viz. But the banner with the big close-up of an eye behind a Viz made it look like it was watching everybody, which of course she knew it was.