The Peripheral

39

Macon’s rented car smelled of freshly printed electronics. Her phone had smelled like that, back when he’d first passed it over to her, brand-new, in the Hefty snack bar. The smell had gone in an hour or two. “You didn’t think it would be ready until tomorrow,” she said to Macon.

“We got some help. Fabbit did some of it. We loaned them the printer.”

“You got Fabbit to do funny printing?”

“It’s not funny,” said Edward, seated sideways in the back, “just unusual.”

“Fabbit’s all chain,” she said. “Hefty owns them.”

“Cousin of mine’s part-time floor manager,” said Macon. “And, yeah, ordinarily not a chance, but your brother made him an offer, and he saw fit. The only polymer they had that would work for this looks like sugar frosting, though. Usually only use it at Christmas, but it bonds perfectly with the skin-conduction stuff, so you’ve got Snow White’s crown. That was also good because nobody at Fabbit had any idea what it was they were printing.”

“What skin-conduction stuff?”

“Across your forehead. First design we roughed out, we would’ve had to shave a two-inch band clear around the back of your head.”

“Fuck that.”

“Figured you’d feel that way. Got this Japanese stuff instead. Just needs the forehead, use a dab of saline for good measure.”

“You said it was a game controller.”

“Telepresent interface, no hands.”

“You try it?”

“Can’t. Nothing to try it on. Your friends have something they want you to operate, but they didn’t want us trying it first. You lie down for it. Otherwise, you might drool.”

“What’s that mean?”

“If this works, and it should, you’ll be controlling their unit full-body, full range of motion, but your body won’t move as you do it. Interesting, how it does that.”

“Why?”

“Because we still can’t find any patents for most of it, and we imagine if there were, they’d be valuable. Very.”

“Could be military,” said Edward, behind them. They were about midway along Porter now, and already she was losing her sense of where the white tent had been, where the swarm of drones had scoured the road for molecules from Conner’s tires.

To the right, fields she hardly ever really looked at, stands of stunted, storm-broken pine. To the left the ground sloped down, toward what became the course of the creek below their house, beside Burton’s trailer. Soon, where Porter narrowed in the distance, there’d be just enough light to make out the tops of the tallest trees, near their house. “Have they said what it is they need me to do?”

“No,” Macon said. “We’re just the fairy shoemakers. You’re the one gets to go to the ball.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“You haven’t seen the crown we made you,” he said.

She left it at that, and thought about Corbell Pickett and what Janice had told her, and Tommy. It still said CORBELL PICKETT TESLA on the side of the building that had housed his dealership, but it said it in unpainted concrete, where the aluminum and carbon-fiber letters had come off.

Carlos was waiting for them, by the gate. “Your mom’s having dinner with Leon and Reece,” he told her, as she was getting out. “Eaten anything lately?”

“No,” she said, “what is there?”

“They don’t want you to eat,” Carlos said, the “they” already understood to be whoever was paying, not that he knew. “Say you could throw up, first time you do this. Aspirate.” He was, she remembered, a volunteer EMT.

“Okay.”

Macon and Edward were unloading the back of the car. A pair of blue Dyneema duffels the color of surgical gloves, three crisp new cardboard cartons with the Fabbit logo.

“Want help with that? I can get somebody. I need two hands free for this.” He indicated the bullpup slung beneath his arm, in the hollow of his waist, its muzzle spiky with accessories whose functions she could never keep straight.

“Nope,” said Macon. He and Edward both had a crinkly duffel shoulder-strapped now. Edward held two of the cartons, Macon only one, but larger. They didn’t look heavy at all. “It’s the trailer, right?”

“Burton’s down there,” Carlos said, and gestured for Flynne to go ahead.

It reminded her of that night he’d gone up to Davisville. Same light, sun almost gone, moon unrisen.

The lights were on in the trailer. As she got closer, she could see Burton by the closed door, smoking a pipe. Its bowl glowed red, showing her the upper half of his face. She smelled tobacco.

“If you were smoking in there, I’ll fucking kill you.”

He grinned, around the bowl. It was one of those cheap white clay pipes, from Holland, the ones the long stem broke off of the first few days you had it, until it was stumpy, like a cartoon sailor’s pipe. He took it out of his mouth. “I didn’t. And I’m not starting.”

“You just did. Now start quitting.”

He stood on one leg, the other across his thigh, and knocked the pipe against the sole of his boot, loosening a little eye of hot red homegrown. It fell on the trail. He put his foot down and ground it out.

“Give us a minute to get set up,” Macon said. Edward put his cartons down, opened the door, and went in. Macon passed him up his own carton, then Edward’s two, then stepped up himself, his hand guarding his duffel from the doorframe. He pulled the door shut behind him.

“Nobody told me I should be fasting,” she said.

“Came together quicker than we thought,” Burton said.

“You know what the meeting’s about?”

“Want you to meet the human relations guy you talked to, and Ash, the tech liaison.”

“In a game?”

“Somewhere.”

“Corbell Pickett.” She saw him frown, in the dark. “We need to have a talk.”

“Who’s been talking?”

“Janice.”

“Had to pay him. Conner.”

“They know it was him?”

“Nobody does, now.”

“They fucking do. They’re just being paid to pretend they don’t.”

“Close enough.”

“Tommy know?”

“Tommy,” he said, “has to work pretty hard to not know a lot of things.”

“That’s what Janice said.”

“Didn’t make it that way, did I?”

“You part of it, now?”

“Not how I look at it.”

“How do you look at it?”

The door opened. “Ready for Snow White,” Macon announced. He held up something for her to see. She thought it looked like a drone’s fuselage, the single-rotor kind, but bigger. Except someone had bent it into an oval, to fit her head, with the forward bulge of the fuselage over the center of her forehead. It didn’t look like any crown she’d ever seen, but it was made of something that glittered, white as the snowman in a plastic Christmas globe.