The Peripheral

77

You got a bug in your stomach?” Janice finally asked, from the dark at the foot of the bed. “And one in your ear?”

Flynne was sitting up against her pillows, in her underpants and the USMC sweatshirt, moonlight streaming in her window. “One in my stomach’s a tracker,” she said, “from a Belgian satellite security service. Me, Macon, Burton, Conner, we all got one, that I know of.”

“One in your ear?”

“Burton took it.”

“How’d he get it out?”

“Macon flew it out. Into a pill bottle. I thought it was some future-ass thing they showed Macon how to fab, but he says it’s from here, last season’s military.”

“The one you swallowed showed them where you were?”

“Or I wouldn’t be here now. Reece bagged my phone.”

“Macon’s made you a new one. Got it right here. How hard would it be to get that thing out of your stomach?”

“Six months, it just lets go, Macon said.”

“And?”

“You shit it out, Janice.”

“In the toilet?”

“On your friend’s head.”

“Happens daily,” said Janice, from the dark, “kind of people I know. But you’d just trust Belgians, telling you you’d pooped out their tracker bug?”

“Macon would. Where’s Madison?”

“Building a fort. Over at your new world headquarters, next to Fab.”

“Why?”

“Burton told him to. Gave him a Hefty charge card. Said improvise.”

“Out of what?”

“About two hundred pallets of those faux-asphalt roof tiles, mostly. The kind made of shredded bottles, old tires and shit. Leaves ’em in their bags, has Burton’s guys stack ’em like bricks, seven feet high, two bags deep. Stop some serious ammunition, that stuff.”

“Why?”

“Ask Burton. Madison says if it’s about Homes coming after us, won’t be any help at all. And Homes is all over what’s left of Pickett’s place. Got Tommy over helping them.”

“Must be getting sick of driving, there and back.”

“You didn’t get raped or anything, did you?”

“No. Pickett just mentioned maybe dislocating my jaw. Not like his heart was in it, though. I think he mainly just wanted the most money he could get for me.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” said Janice.

“What is?”

“Why I hope the fucker’s dead.”

“If you’d seen how they delivered that bomb, you’d know it wasn’t liable to be sneaking up on anybody, even with a squidsuit on.”

“Here’s hoping anyway,” said Janice.

“How’d they get squidsuits?”

“That Griff.”

“Who?”

“Griff. Ironside people sent him, right away.”

“Coldiron.”

“He was here almost as soon as Burton knew you were off the reservation. Jet helicopter, landed over in the pasture there.” Janice pointed, hand emerging into moonlight. “I never got a look at him. Madison did. Sounded English, Madison said. Probably where they got that micro-drone too.”

“What is he?”

“No idea. Madison says that copter came from D.C. Says it was Homes.”

“Homes?”

“The copter.”

Pickett had people in Homes, Flynne remembered Reece saying. “Guess I’m behind the curve again.” If she wasn’t in the future, she thought, she was getting kidnapped and rescued.

“With Pickett’s place all blown to shit, we get to wake up tomorrow and see who looks like their main source of income’s gone tits up. Here’s the phone Macon made you.” She passed it to Flynne, out of the dark.

“I’d rather have mine back.” Pissed her off, all the hours she’d put in at Fab to pay for that.

“Yours got flown to Nassau.”

“Nassau?”

“Somebody in a lawyer’s office there. They took it out of a Faraday bag, a little after Burton and them broke you out of Pickett’s. Macon bricked it.”

Flynne remembered Pickett saying he’d have her call Netherton, try to get more money for her than the others were offering.

“Macon said Pickett has fancy lawyers, in Nassau,” Janice said, “but not as fancy as yours, and not as many.”

“All of three, that I know of.”

“Lots more now, in town. Housing and feeding them’s a growth industry. Timely one, too.”

“He put my apps and stuff on it?” Flynne raised her new phone, sniffed. Fresh.

“Yeah, plus some major encryption, runs in background. He says to change your passwords on everything. And don’t just use your birthday or your name backwards. And there’s a Hefty Wheelie Boy for you, in that tote there, on your desk.”

“A what?”

“Wheelie Boy.”

“The fuck?”

“Macon got it off eBay. New old stock. Mint in box.”

“Huh?”

“Back in grade school. Like a tablet on a stick? Bottom’s like a little Segway. Remember those things? Motors, two wheels, gyros to keep ’em upright.”

“Looked stupid,” Flynne said, remembering them now.

Janice’s phone chimed. She checked it, the screen lighting her face. “Ella needs me.”

“If it’s anything serious, get me. Otherwise, I’m going to try to sleep.”

“I’m glad they got you back okay. You know that?”

“I love you, Janice,” Flynne said.

When Janice had gone downstairs, she got up, put on her bedside light, brought the tote back to the bed. There was a box inside with a picture of a Hefty Wheelie Boy on the lid. Like a red plastic flyswatter stuck into a softball the same color, two fat black toy tractor tires on either side of that. Swatter part was a mini-tablet with a cam, on a stick. Marketed as toys, baby monitors, long-distance friendship or sad romance platforms, or even a kind of low-rent virtual vacation. You could buy or rent one in Vegas or Paris, say, drive it around a casino or a museum, see what it saw. And while you did, and this was the part that had put her off, it showed your face on the tablet. You wore a headpiece with a camera on a little boom, which captured your reaction as you saw things through the Wheelie, and people who were looking at it saw you seeing that, or them, and you could have conversations with them. She remembered Leon trying to gross her out, telling her how people were getting sexy with them, all of which she’d hoped he’d made up.

Back on the bed, opening the box, she thought this must have been part of where peripherals were going to come from. Wheelie Boy, in its cheap-ass way, had been one.

There was a yellow sheet from a Forever Fab notepad inside. DR’S ORDERS, FULLY CHARGED + HARDASS NCRYPT-M in thick flu-pink marker.

She lifted the thing out and tried to stand it up, but it fell over backward, tablet in the moonlight like a black hand mirror. On the bottom of the red ball, a white button. She pressed it. Gyros spun themselves up with a little squawk, the red plastic rod with the tablet on the end suddenly upright on the bed, black wheels moving independently in the sheets, turning it left, then right.

She poked the black screen with her finger, knocking it back, the gyros righting it.

Then it lit, Netherton’s face on it, too close to the cam, eyes wide, nose too big. “Flynne?” he said, through a cheap little speaker.

“Shit the living fuck,” she said, almost laughing, then had to yank the sheet over her legs because she just had her underpants and the sweatshirt on.