The Peripheral

65

Fab was one end of the strip mall, the end nearest town, Sushi Barn the other, three empty stores in between. The one next to Fab had done pretty well when those little paintball robots were hot. One next to that had been nails and hair extensions. She couldn’t remember the one between that and Sushi Barn ever having been anything but vacant.

Burton pulled the rental into the lot, parked in front of the former mini-paintball place, windows pasted over on the inside with sticky gray plastic, starting to peel at the corners. “This is ours now,” he said.

“What is?”

“This.” Pointing straight ahead.

“Rented it?”

“Bought it.”

“Who did?”

“Coldiron.”

“They bought that?”

“Bought the mall,” he said. “Closed on it this morning.”

“What’s that mean, ‘closed’?”

“Ours. Papers are going through right now.”

She didn’t know whether it was harder to imagine having the money to buy this place, or to imagine wanting to. “What for?”

“Macon needs a place to keep his printers, we need a place to work out of. Shaylene’s back room won’t cut it. She’s already sold the business to Coldiron-”

“She has?”

“That meeting she had with you, then what she saw Macon fabbing. Got herself right in. We can’t be running our end out of a trailer down by the creek. So we centralize here. Gets the heat away from Mom, too.”

“Guess it does that, anyway,” she said.

“We’ve got drones over here, more on the way. Carlos is on that. It’ll cut us out of that dumbfuck with lawyers driving over from Clanton, bags of cash. Might as well be builder money, that way. Can’t put it in the bank, can’t pay taxes on it, and we get a haircut every time any’s laundered. If we’re working for Coldiron USA, incorporated right here, that’s a salary. Salary and shares. Corporate headquarters.”

“So what does Coldiron USA do?”

“Property development,” he said, “today. Lawyers have papers for you to sign.”

“What lawyers?”

“Ours.”

“What papers?”

“Incorporation stuff. Buying the mall. Your contract as CCO of Milagros Coldiron USA.”

“I am fucking not. What’s CCO?”

“Chief communications officer. You are. You just haven’t signed yet.”

“Who decided? Not me.”

“London. Ash told me when I was up there with them.”

“So what are you, if I’m CCO?”

“CEO,” he said.

“Know how stupid that sounds?”

“Talk to Ash. You’re CCO, communicate.”

“We aren’t doing that timely a job communicating ourselves, Burton,” she said. “You keep agreeing to shit without asking me first.”

“It’s all moving that fast,” he said.

Conner’s Tarantula swung, growling, into the empty parking lot, to brake beside them, coughing the smell of fried chicken until he killed the engine. She looked down, saw him grinning up at her.

“What did they put him in?” Burton asked her.

“Cross between a ballet dancer and a meat cleaver,” she said, as Conner squinted up at her. “Martial arts demonstrator.”

“Bet he was loving that,” said Burton.

“Too much,” she said, and opened her door. Burton got out on his side, walked around front.

Conner twisted his head, to see her. “Let’s get back where there’s all the fingers,” he said.

She rapped him with a knuckle, hard, on top of his stubbled head. “Don’t go forgetting who took you up there. My brother’s gone native there. Thinks we’ve got a startup going, that he’s CEO of. Don’t get like that.”

“Fingers, legs ’n’ shit, that’s all I want. Brought my catheter. In a ziplock, on the back of the trike.”

“Now that’s exciting,” she said.

Burton was unstrapping him.

“Lady, gents,” said Macon, opening the blank gray glass door from inside, “our North American flagship and headquarters.” He wore a blue business shirt, with a striped tie that was mostly black. Every button buttoned, but the crisp tails weren’t tucked into his holey old jeans.

“Not casual Friday,” Flynne said, seeing Shaylene, behind Burton, in a navy skirt-suit, still managing her big hair thing but looking surprisingly office-ready.

“Hey, Shaylene,” Burton said. He bent over and picked up Conner, like you’d pick up a ten-year-old who couldn’t walk. Conner slid his left arm, his only arm, around Burton’s neck, like he was used to it.

“Conner,” Shaylene said. “How’re you doing?” She seemed different now, Flynne wasn’t sure how.

“Hangin’ in,” said Conner, and used his crooked arm to pull himself up to where he could give Burton a big wet smack on the cheek.

“Could just drop an asshole on the concrete,” Burton said, like he was thinking out loud.

“Let’s get in out of the public eye,” Conner said. Macon stepped back, out of the doorway. Burton carried Conner in, Flynne behind them. Then Shaylene, who closed the door behind her. One big room, lit by shiny new work-LEDs on clean yellow cables. Musty smell. Gyprock walls randomly patched with paint, showing where counters and dividers had been before. Someone had sawn a doorway through, just a raw door-shaped hole, from the back room of Fab. Covered with a blue tarp, on the Fab side. A couple of new electric saws lay beside it on the floor.

Further back, there were three new hospital beds, partially extracted from their factory bubble wrap, white mattresses bare, and three IV stands, plus a lot of white foam cartons, stacked high as Flynne’s head. “What’s all this?” she asked.

“Ash tells me what we’ll need, I order it,” Macon said.

“Looks like you’re setting up a ward,” Flynne said. “Smells, for a hospital.”

“Plumber’s on the way to fix that,” Shaylene said. “Electrical’s good to go, and the mini-paintball guys put in a shitload of outlets. Going to try to get it cleaned up, working around whatever we wind up doing here.”

“Those beds are for us,” Flynne said to Burton. “We’re going back together, aren’t we?”

“Conner first,” Burton said, carrying him to the nearest bed and putting him down on it.

“Just finished printing him a new phone,” said Macon. “Same as yours, Flynne. Ash wants him to acclimate more, work out. They can run training sequences for him through the peripheral’s cloud AI.”

Flynne looked at Macon. “You sound pretty well up on things there,” she said.

“Biggest part of the job,” Macon said. “It mostly makes its own kind of sense, then you hit something that seems impossible, or just completely wrong, and she either explains it or tells you to ignore it.”

She looked back and saw Burton and Shaylene talking. Couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Shaylene’s thing about Burton looked to her to be gone. “She sell Fab, to them?” she asked Macon.

“Did,” he said. “Don’t know what she got for it, but they’ve totally got her attention. Which is good, because I’m too busy to wrangle stuff that’s late, and she’s a natural at that.”

“She get along with Burton?”

“Just fine.”

“Used to be awkward,” Flynne said, “like a whole day or two ago.”

“I know,” Macon said. “But before this, she’d managed to feed herself, and a bunch of other people in this town, with a business that wasn’t Hefty, wasn’t building drugs, and was at least partly unfunny. That way, I’d say she hasn’t actually changed much. Just gotten more focused.”

“I wouldn’t have expected she’d get over that, about Burton.”

“What’s changing here,” he said, “is economics,” and the look on his face reminded her of being in Civics with him, when they’d studied the electoral college. He’d been the only one who really got it. She remembered him sitting up straight, explaining it to them. Same look.

“How’s that?”

“Economy,” he said. “Macro and micro. Around here’s micro. Pickett’s not the biggest money in this county anymore.” He raised his eyebrows. “Macro, though, that’s mega weird. Markets all screwy everywhere, everybody’s edgy, Badger’s buzzing, crazy rumors. All just since Burton came back from Davisville. That’s us, causing all that. Us and them.”

“Them?” She remembered how good he’d been at math, better than anybody, but then they’d graduated and he’d had family needed taking care of, college no option. He was one of the smartest people she knew, good as he was at helping you forget it.

“Ash tells me there’s somebody else, up there, able to reach back here. You know about that?”

She nodded. “Hiring people, to kill us.”

“Uh-huh. Ash says there’s two different anomalous proliferations of subsecond extreme events in the market, right now. Us and them. You understand subsecond financial shit?”

“No.”

“Markets are full of predatory trading algorithms. They’ve evolved to hunt in packs. Ash has people with the tools to turn those packs to Coldiron’s advantage, nobody the wiser. But whoever else is up there, with their own backdoor to now, they’ve got the same tools, or near enough.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“I think it’s like an invisible two-party world war, but economic. So far, anyway.”

“Macon, honey,” called Conner, from his hospital bed, framed by a corona of ragged bubble-pack, “bring a wounded warrior his catheter. It’s out on the back of my trike. Wouldn’t want some dickbag stealing it.”

“Or maybe I’m just crazy,” said Macon, turning to go.

Flynne went to the very back of the room, behind the beds and the IV stands, and stood looking at the barred, unwashed windows, dusty cobwebs in their corners, dead flies and spider eggs dangling. Imagined, behind her, kids paintballing their little robots and tanks in the big sandbox they’d had in here. Seemed forever long ago. A couple of days seemed a long time, now. She imagined the spider eggs hatching, something other than spiders coming out, she had no idea what. “Predatory algorithms,” she said.

“What?” Conner asked.

“Haven’t got a clue,” she said.