The Peripheral

54

I wouldn’t have imagined this as your sort of place,” Ash said, looking at what Netherton knew to be only the first of several themed environments, this one hyper-lurid dawn in a generic desert. Something vaguely to do with downed airships, it was on the floor above the Kensington High Street showrooms of a designer of bespoke kitchens. She’d driven him here in one of Lev’s father’s antiques, an open two-seater reeking of fossil fuel.

“I was here once with friends,” he said. “Their idea, not mine.”

She was enfolded, or encased, depending, in a Napoleonic greatcoat apparently rendered in soot-stained white marble. When she was still, it looked like sculpted stone. When she moved, it flowed like silk. “I thought you hated this sort of thing.”

“You’re the one telling me Lowbeer wants me to approach Daedra now. She insists I not phone from Lev’s.”

“She also insists on returning you there herself,” she said. “Please be careful. We can’t protect you, here. Particularly not from yourself.”

“You should stay, really,” he said, trusting that she wouldn’t, “have a drink.”

“You probably shouldn’t, but it isn’t my decision.” She walked away, into a cheesily augmented surround rivaling the one in Lev’s father’s blue salon.

“Your pleasure, sir?” inquired a Michikoid he hadn’t heard approaching. Its face and slender limbs were scoured aluminum, under something resembling the remnants of an ancient flight suit.

“Table for one, cloaked, nearest the entrance.” He extended his hand, allowing it to access his credit. “Not to be approached by anything other than serving units.”

“Of course,” it said, and led him toward something aspiring, and failing, to look as though it were constructed from bits of derelict airships, roofed with netted bulges of gasbag, within which faint lights leapt and shuddered.

There was music here, of some genre he didn’t recognize, but a cloaked table would allow the option of silence. Splintered sections of fuselage, wooden propellers, none of it genuine, though he supposed that that might be the point. A thin crowd, this early in the evening, and relatively inactive. He spotted Rainey’s Fitz-David Wu, though almost certainly not the same one. This one wore a retro-proletarian one-piece, one pale cheek artfully daubed with a single smudge of dark grease. It was neutrally eyeing a tall blonde, one emulating, he supposed, some iconic pre-jackpot media asset.

The Michikoid decloaked his table. He took a seat, was cloaked, ordered whiskey. He dialed the silence up, sat watching the peripheral dumb show, waiting for his drink. When a different Michikoid had arrived with his whiskey, he decided that the place did at least offer decent drink. Otherwise, he wasn’t sure why he’d chosen it. Possibly because he’d doubted anyone else would be willing to put up with it. Though perhaps he’d also had in mind that it might provide some perspective on the fact of Flynne, in however lateral a way. Not nearly lateral enough, he decided, looking at the peripherals.

He wasn’t a peripheral person, something his one prior visit here should have definitively proven. He and the others had had a cloaked table then as well. He remembered wondering why anyone would choose to indulge in such behavior, when they could be almost certain of invisible observers. That was what the clientele paid for, someone had said, an audience, and weren’t they themselves, after all, paying to watch? Here, at least, in this first room, it was a purely social exhibitionism, and for that he was grateful.

This would be as stimulating, he decided, as sitting alone in Ash’s tent. Though he was glad to not be in Lev’s basement. And of course there was the whiskey. He signaled a passing Michikoid, who could see him, to bring another.

Whoever the operators of these peripherals were, wherever they were, they were everything he found tedious about his era. And all of them, he supposed, sober, as they were all couched, somewhere, under autonomic cutoff, so unable to drink. People were so fantastically boring.

Flynne, he thought, was the opposite of all of this, whether in her peripheral or not.

Now Lowbeer’s sigil appeared, pulsing, as the Michikoid was delivering his drink, momentarily obscuring its artfully weathered nonface. “Yes?” he asked, not having expected the call.

“Courrèges,” Lowbeer said.

“What about her?”

“You’re definitely proceeding with that?”

“I think so.”

“Be certain,” she said. “It’s someone’s life. You’ll be sending her on her way.”

“Where?”

“To Brazil. The ship departed three days ago.”

“She’s gone to Brazil?”

“The ship has. We’ll send her to catch up with it, retroactively altering the passenger manifest. She’ll be entirely unavailable during the voyage. Practicing a form of directed meditation she requires in order to be accepted by the neoprimitives she hopes to study.”

“That seems rather elaborate,” said Netherton, preferring looser, more readily rejigged deceptions.

“We don’t know who Daedra may know,” said Lowbeer. “Assume your story will be examined in considerable depth. It’s a simple story. She left three days ago, for Brazil. Neoprimitives. Meditation. You don’t know the name of the airship, or her exact destination. Please restrain yourself in the invention of extraneous detail.”

“You’re the one fond of elaboration, I thought,” said Netherton, and allowed himself a very small sip of whiskey.

“We won’t be monitoring digitally. Too evident a footprint. Someone in the club will be reading your lips.”

“So much for cloaking?”

“You might as well be convinced you’re invisible when you close your eyes,” said Lowbeer. “Call her now, before you finish that drink.”

“I will,” said Netherton, looking down at his whiskey.

Her sigil was gone.

He looked up, expecting to find someone watching him, in spite of the cloaking, but the peripherals were busy with one another, or with pretending not to be, and the Michikoid waitstaff all smoothly eyeless. He remembered the one on Daedra’s moby sprouting at least eight eyes, in pairs of different sizes, black and spherical and blank. He drank some whiskey.

He imagined Annie Courrèges boarding some government craft, whisked out to a moby en route to Brazil. Her own plans, whatever they had been, as suddenly and irrevocably altered as anyone’s would be, should someone like Lowbeer decide to alter them. Lowbeer wasn’t simply the Met. No one Lowbeer’s age was simply anything. He looked up at those lights, dimly flitting within the sagging bladders of an imaginary airship, and noticed for the first time that they were vaguely figural. Captive electrical souls. Who designed these terrible things?

He drank off the very last of his whiskey. Time to phone Daedra. But first he’d have another.