The Peripheral

42

Flynne completely altered the peripheral’s body language, Netherton realized, as Ash directed her toward him. Inhabited, its face became not hers but somehow her.

He found himself backing down the corridor, barely shoulder-wide, away from that smallest of the Gobiwagen’s cabins. Unwilling to lose sight of her, out of something that felt at least partially like terror, he couldn’t turn his back.

Ash, earlier, had explained that peripherals, when under AI control, looked human because their faces, programmed to constantly register changing micro-expressions, were never truly still. In the absence of that, she’d said, they became uniquely disturbing objects. Flynne was now providing the peripheral with her own micro-expressions, a very different effect. “It’s fine,” he heard himself say, though whether to himself or to her he didn’t know. This was all much stranger than he’d anticipated, like some unthinkable birth or advent.

He backed into the scent of Ash’s flowers. Ash had had Ossian remove Lev’s grandfather’s displays, and the luggage as well, deeming them unnecessary, not conducive to “flow” in the space, so the flowers were at the end of the desk nearest two compact armchairs she’d raised from hidden wells in the floor. They’d reminded him of the seats in Lowbeer’s car, but slicker, unworn.

“They’re for you,” Ash said, indicating the flowers. “We can’t offer you anything to eat, or drink.”

“I’m fucking starving,” Flynne said, accent her own but the voice not as he recalled it. She looked at Ash. “I’m not? I-”

“Autonomic bleed-over,” Ash said. “That’s your own body’s hunger. Your peripheral doesn’t experience it. It doesn’t eat, has no digestive tract. Can you smell them, the flowers?”

Flynne nodded.

“Colors more normal?”

Flynne hesitated. Took two deep, slow breaths. “They hurt, before. Not now. I’m sweating.”

“You’ve flooded its adrenal system. You won’t find the transition this unsettling again. There was no way we could cushion it for you, as a first-time user, other than have you prone, eyes closed, on an empty stomach.”

Flynne turned, slowly, taking in the room. “I saw you here,” she said to Netherton. “Looked this tacky, but I thought it was bigger. Where’s that atrium?”

“Elsewhere. Take a seat?”

She ignored his suggestion, went to the window instead. He and Ash had argued over whether or not to have the blinds closed. In the end, Ash had ordered Ossian into her workspace in the garage’s corner, leaving the blinds open. With no motion in the garage, the arches had faded to their faintest luminosity. Flynne bent slightly, peering out, but now the nearest arch sensed her movement, pulsed faintly, greenly. “A parking lot?” She must have seen Lev’s father’s cars. “Are we in an RV?”

“A what?” asked Netherton.

“Camper. Recreational vehicle.” She was moving her head, trying to see more. “Your office is in an RV?”

“Yes.” He wasn’t sure how that would strike her.

“Came here from a trailer,” she said.

A short promotional video précis, he recalled. “Pardon me?”

“A caravan,” said Ash. “Please sit down, both of you. We’ll try to answer your questions, Flynne.” She took a seat, leaving Flynne the one nearest the flowers.

Netherton seated himself at the gold-marbled desk, regretting its gangster pomp.

Flynne took a last look out the window, scratching the back of her neck, something he couldn’t imagine the peripheral doing on its own, then went to the remaining chair. She folded herself into it, knees high, wide apart. She leaned forward, raised her hands, studying the nails closely, then shook her head. She looked up at him, lowering her hands. “I used to play in a game,” she said, “for a man who had money. Did it because I needed the money. Man he had us play against was a total shit, but that was just sort of an accident. It wasn’t about making money, for either of them. Not like it was for us. It was a hobby, for them. Rich fucks. They bet on who’d win.” She was staring at him.

All his glibness, all his faithful machinery of convincing language, somehow spun silently against this, finding no traction whatever.

“You say you’re not builders.” She looked to Ash. “Some kind of security, for a game. But if it’s a game, why did someone send those men to kill us? Not just Burton, but all of us. My mother too.” She looked to him again. “How’d you know the winning number in the lottery, Mr. Netherton?”

“Wilf,” he said, thinking it sounded less like a name than an awkward cough.

“We didn’t,” said Ash. “That was why your cousin had to purchase a ticket. Your brother gave us the number of the ticket. We then interfered with the mechanism of selection, making his the winning number. No predictive magic. Superior processing speed, nothing more.”

“You sent that lawyer over from Clanton, with bags full of money? Make him win a lottery too?”

“No,” said Ash, who then looked irritably at Netherton, as if to say that he was supposed to be the one handling this. Which he was.

“This isn’t,” he said, “your world.”

“So what is it?” asked Flynne. “A game?”

“The future,” said Netherton, feeling utterly ridiculous. On impulse, he added the year.

“No way.”

“But it isn’t your future,” he said. “When we made contact, we set your world, your universe, whatever it is-”

“Continuum,” said Ash.

“-on a different course,” he finished. He’d never in his life said anything that sounded more absurd, though it was, as far as he knew, the truth.

“How?”

“We don’t know,” he said.

Flynne rolled her eyes.

“We’re accessing a server,” Ash said. “We know absolutely nothing about it. That sounds ridiculous, or evasive, but what we’re doing is something people do here. Perhaps,” and she looked at Netherton, “not unlike your two rich fucks.”

“Why did you hire my brother?”

“That was Netherton’s idea,” said Ash. “Perhaps he should explain. He’s been curiously silent.”

“I thought it might amuse a friend-” he began.

“Amuse?” Flynne frowned.

“I’d no idea any of this would happen,” he said.

“That’s true, really,” said Ash. “He was in a far messier situation than he imagined. Trying to impress a woman he was involved with, by offering her your brother’s services.”

“But she wasn’t impressed,” Netherton said. “And so she gave him, his services rather, to her sister.” He was in freefall now, all power of persuasion having deserted him.

“You may have witnessed her sister’s murder,” Ash said to Flynne.

The peripheral’s eyes widened. “That was real?”

“‘May’?” asked Netherton.

“She witnessed something,” Ash said to him, “but we’ve no evidence as to what, exactly.”

“Ate her up,” said Flynne. A drop of sweat ran down her forehead, into an eyebrow. She wiped it away with the back of her forearm, something else he couldn’t imagine the peripheral doing.

“If you consider how you’re able to be here now,” Ash said to her, “virtually yet physically, you may begin to understand our inability to know exactly what you saw.”

“You’re confusing her,” Netherton said.

“I’m attempting to acclimatize her, something you’re so far utterly failing to do.”

“Where are we?” Flynne demanded.

“London,” said Netherton.

“The game?” she asked.

“It’s never been a game,” he said. “It was easiest for us to tell your brother that.”

“This thing,” she indicated the cabin, “where is it, exactly?”

“An area called Notting Hill,” said Ash, “in a garage, beneath a house. Beneath several adjacent houses, actually.”

“The London with the towers?”

“Shards,” Netherton said. “They’re called shards.”

She stood, the peripheral unfolding with a slender but suddenly powerful grace from its awkward position in the chair. She pointed. “What’s outside that door?”

“A garage,” said Ash. “Housing a collection of historic vehicles.”

“Door locked?”

“No,” said Ash.

“Anything out there that’ll convince me this is the future?”

“Let me show you this.” Ash stood, the stiff fabric of her suit rumpled. She undid zips, from inner wrist to elbow, on both her sleeves, quickly folding them back. Line drawings fled. “They’re in a panic,” she said. “They don’t know you.” She put her thumb through the central zip’s aluminum ring, at the hollow of her neck, and drew it down, exposing a complexly cantilevered black lace bra, below which swarmed a terrified tangle of extinct species, their black ink milling against her luminous pallor. As if seeing Flynne, they fled again. To her back, Netherton assumed. Ash zipped up her suit, rezipped the sleeves in turn. “Does that help?”

Flynne stared at her. Nodded slightly. “Can I go out now?”

“Of course,” Ash said. “These aren’t contact lenses, by the way.”

Netherton, realizing that he hadn’t moved, possibly hadn’t breathed, since Flynne had stood up, pushed himself up from the desk, palms flat on the gold-veined marble.

“How can I be sure it isn’t a game?” Flynne asked. “At least half the games I’ve ever played were set in some kind of future.”

“Were you paid large sums to play them?” Netherton asked.

“Didn’t do it for free,” Flynne said, stepping to the door, opening it.

He managed to beat Ash there, at the cost of bruising his thigh on the corner of the desk. Flynne was at the top of the gangway, looking up at the arch nearest them, as its cells, sensing her there, luminesced.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Engineered from marine animals. Motion activated.”

“My brother used a squidsuit, in the war. Cuttlefish camo. What’s that?” Pointing, down, to the left of the gangway, to the white anthropomorphic bulk of the muscular-resistance exoskeleton.

“That’s yours.”

“Mine?”

“Your peripheral’s. An exercise device. You wear it.”

She turned toward him, placing her palm flat on his chest, pushing slightly, as if to test that he was there. “Don’t know whether to scream or shit,” she said. And smiled.

Breathe, he reminded himself.