The Peripheral

8

The boss patcher, unless he wore some carnival helmet fashioned from keratotic skin, had no neck, the approximate features of a bullfrog, and two penises.

“Nauseating,” Netherton said, expecting no reply from Rainey.

Perhaps a little over two meters tall, with disproportionately long arms, the boss had arrived atop a transparent penny farthing, the large wheel’s hollow spokes patterned after the bones of an albatross. He wore a ragged tutu of UV-frayed sheet-plastic flotsam, through whose crumbling frills could be glimpsed what Rainey called his double dickage. The upper and smaller of the two, if in fact it was a penis, was erect, perhaps perpetually, and topped with what looked to be a party hat of rough gray horn. The other, seemingly more conventional, though supersized, depended slackly below.

“Okay,” Rainey said, “they’re all here.”

Between the oculi of the twin feeds, Lorenzo was studying Daedra in profile as she faced the five folding steps to the top of the moby’s railing. Head bowed, eyes lowered, she stood as if in prayer or meditation.

“What’s she doing?” asked Rainey.

“Visualization.”

“Of what?”

“Herself, I’d imagine.”

“You cost me a bet,” she said, “getting together with her. Someone thought you might. I said you wouldn’t.”

“It wasn’t for long.”

“Like being a little bit pregnant.”

“Briefly pregnant.”

Daedra raised her chin then, and touched, almost absently, the color-suppressed American flag patch over her right bicep.

“Money shot,” said Rainey.

Daedra took the steps, dove smoothly over the railing.

A third feed irised into place between the other two, this one from below.

“Micro. We sent in a few yesterday,” said Rainey, as Daedra’s parafoil unfurled, red and white, above the island. “The patchers let us know they knew, but nothing’s eaten any yet.”

Netherton swiped his tongue from right to left, across the roof of his mouth, blanking his phone. Saw the unmade bed.

“How does she look to you?” Rainey asked.

“Fine,” he said, getting up.

He walked to the vertically concave corner window. It depolarized. He looked down on the intersection, its wholly predictable absence of movement. Free of crusted salt, drama, atonal windsong. Across Bloomsbury Street, a meter-long mantis in shiny British racing green, with yellow decals, clung to a Queen Anne façade, performing minor maintenance. Some hobbyist was operating it telepresently, he assumed. Something better done by an invisible swarm of assemblers.

“She seriously proposed to do this naked,” Rainey said, “and covered in tattoos.”

“Hardly covered. You’ve seen the miniatures of her previous skins. That’s covered.”

“I’ve managed not to, thank you.”

He double-tapped the roof of his mouth, causing the feeds, left and right, from their respective corners of the square, to show him the boss patcher and his cohort of eleven, looking up, unmoving.

“Look at them,” he said.

“You really hate them, don’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Look at them.”

“We’re not supposed to like their looks, obviously. The cannibalism’s problematic, if those stories are true, but they did clear the water column, and for virtually no capital outlay on anyone’s part. And they now arguably own the world’s single largest chunk of recycled polymer. Which feels like a country, to me, if not yet a nation-state.”

The patchers had shuffled into a rough circle, with their scooters and kick-bikes, around their boss, who’d left his penny farthing on its side at the edge of the square. The others were as small as the boss was large, compactly disgusting cartoons of rough gray flesh. They wore layers of rags, gray with sun and salt. Modification had run rampant, of course. The more obviously female among them were six-breasted, their exposed flesh marked not with tattoos but intricately meaningless patterns expressed in pseudo-ichthyotic scaling. They all had the same bare, toeless, shoe-like feet. Their rags fluttered in the wind, nothing else in the square moving.

On the central feed, Daedra soared down, swinging out wide, up again. The parafoil was altering its width, profile.

“Here she comes,” said Rainey.

Daedra came in low, along the widest of the intersecting avenues, the parafoil morphing rhythmically now, braking, like speeded-up footage of a jellyfish. She scarcely stumbled, as her feet found the polymer, throwing up puffs of salt.

The parafoil released her, instantly shrinking, to land on four unlikely legs, but only for a second or two. Then it lay there, bilobed again, logo uppermost. It would never have fallen logo-down, he knew. Another money shot. The feed from the micro closed.

On the two feeds from the cams above the square, from their opposing angles, Daedra spent momentum, running, keeping impressively upright, into the circle of small figures.

The boss patcher shifted his feet, turning. His eyes, set on the corners of his vast, entirely inhuman head, looked like something a child had scribbled, then erased.

“This is it,” said Rainey.

Daedra raised her right hand in what might either have been a gesture of greeting, or evidence that she came unarmed.

Her left, Netherton saw, was beginning to unzip the jumpsuit. The zipper jammed, a palm’s width beneath her sternum.

“Bitch,” said Rainey, almost cheerfully, as a micro-expression, curdled fury, crossed Daedra’s face.

The boss patcher’s left hand, like a piece of sporting equipment fashioned from salt-stained gray leather, closed around her right wrist. He lifted her, her carefully scuffed shoes parting with the translucent pavement. She kicked him, hard, in his slack stomach, just above the ragged plastic tutu, salt jumping from the point of impact.

He drew her closer, so that she dangled above the horn-tipped pseudo-phallus. Her left hand touched his side then, just below the ribs. Her fingers were curled, but loosely, her thumb against gray flesh.

He shivered, for an instant. Swayed.

She raised both feet, planted them against his stomach, and pushed. As her fist came away, it looked as though she were extracting a length of scarlet measuring tape. A thumbnail. As long, when it fully emerged, as her forearm. His blood very bright, against a world of gray.

He released her. She landed on her back, instantly rolling, the nail shorter by half. He opened his vast maw, in which Netherton saw only darkness, and toppled forward.

Daedra was already on her feet, turning slowly, each of her thumbnails concave and slightly curving, the left slick with the patcher’s blood.

“Hypersonic,” said an unfamiliar voice on Rainey’s feed, ungendered, utterly serene. “Incoming. Deceleration. Shockwave.”

He’d never heard thunder here, before.

Six spotless, white, upright cylinders, perfectly evenly spaced, had appeared above and slightly outside the circle of patchers, all of whom had dropped their bikes and scooters and taken a first step toward Daedra. A vertical line of tiny orange needles danced up and down each one, as the patchers, in some way Netherton was unable to grasp, were shredded, flung. The oculi of Lorenzo’s feeds froze: on one the perfect, impossible, utterly black silhouette of a severed hand, almost filling the frame.

“We are so fucked,” said Rainey, her amazement total, childlike.

Netherton, seeing the Michikoid, on the deck of the moby, sprout multiple spider-eyes and muzzle-slits, in the instant before it vaulted the railing, could only agree.