The Peripheral

93

She was three steps into the back before she realized she was carrying the Wheelie Boy like a teddy bear. Not hugging it, but sort of in her arms. Fuck it.

They turned and looked at her. The red-haired notary from Klein Cruz Vermette, in cammies now and a Clovis-style crotch pouch. Blue surgical gloves. Seemed like she’d just finished putting clean sheets on Burton’s bed. Someone must’ve had to help her, because the pill bug was still all over him. She’d spread one relatively unstained sheet on the floor, between Burton’s bed and Conner’s, which was empty, and had a big ball of blood-stiff sheets on top of that. Clovis was beside Conner’s bed, in fresh clothes, doing something to the white crown on the table there. Griff was at the foot of Burton’s bed, phone to his ear, and as she came in, just his eyes moved.

“Where’s Conner?” she asked.

“Shower,” Clovis said. “Macon took him.”

“How’s Burton?”

“Vitals look good, Walter Reed says. They want him to sleep longer, so it’s still sedating him.”

“I will,” said Griff, to his phone, “thank you.” He lowered it.

“Need to talk,” she said, wishing she hadn’t brought the Wheelie.

“Yes, but not about what you assume we do.”

“The fuck we don’t.”

“Herself.” Holding up his phone. “Wiping party time off the mission statement.”

“You won’t do it?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Huh.” All pissed off, she wondered, and nowhere to go? “Was that shit her idea in the first place?”

“It was,” he said. “I didn’t feel it was appropriate, or advisable. She told me I was unaccustomed to operating from a position of strength.” With that, he gave her a look she couldn’t read. “Could we have a moment, Clovis, please?” The KCV girl, bloody sheet ball folded in the cleaner one, was on her way out. Clovis turned and followed her.

“Now she says she won’t do it?” She watched Clovis’s back vanish around the blue tarp. “Why?”

“Your conversation with the publicist.”

“She listened?”

“Assume she can access anything, any platform, always.”

“So she sits, and listens?”

“She has global intelligence feeds, analytical tools of tremendous functionality. The systems I work with here would surprise you, I imagine, but I have to take her word for what hers are capable of. She doubts anyone fully comprehends them, herself included, as they’ve become largely self-organizing. Having had to evolve from the sort I use today, I suppose. Which means that if you mention anything that concerns her, over or within reach of any platform whatsoever, she learns of it immediately. And at this point, I suppose, anything you speak of concerns her.”

“No party time?”

“Canceled.”

“But you couldn’t convince her yourself, that it sucked?”

“It’s a literally atrocious idea. Using it would constitute, morally and legally, an atrocity. Coldiron’s brand would be attached to something horrific, no matter how effectively we were able to spin the blame. Coldiron is concerned about the townspeople not being priced out of chili dogs, but willing to condone dosing religious protesters, however repellant, with something that turns them into homicidal erotomaniacs?”

“Coldiron knew? Who?”

“No. I knew. And Clovis.”

“She told me. But not what it was. Tommy told me what it does.”

“I had to bring him in. He needed to be prepared, to be ready to tidy up. I’m delighted you’ve put a stop to it.”

She looked at him. “I still don’t see why you couldn’t talk her out of it.”

“Because there’s a way in which I lack agency, in all of this. By virtue of more pressing concerns.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Lowbeer knows the history of her world, and the secret history of ours. The history that produced Lowbeer’s world includes the assassination of the president.”

“Gonzales? You shitting me?”

“She never finished her second term.”

“She gets elected again?”

“Exactly. And in Lowbeer’s view, Gonzales’s assassination was pivotal, a tipping point into the deeper jackpot.”

“Shit-”

“We may be able to change that.”

“Lowbeer knows how to fix history?”

“It isn’t history yet, here. She knows, in large part, what really happened here. But now the two have diverged, will continue to. The divergence can be steered, to some extent, but only very broadly. No guarantee of what we’ll ultimately produce.”

“She’s trying to stop the jackpot?”

“Ameliorate it, at best. We are, very much, already in it, here. She hopes, as do I, that the system in which she operates can be avoided in this continuum. She believes, and I agree, that a necessary step in that is the prevention of the assassination of Felicia Gonzales.”

She stared at him. Was this the loopiest bullshit ever, even after the past week? His pale gray eyes were wide, serious. “Who kills the president?”

“The vice president, not to put too fine a point on it.”

“Ambrose? Wally fucking Ambrose? He kills Gonzales?”

“What Coldiron and your competitor are doing could affect that outcome, but by crashing the global economy, which is a danger in itself. But I can’t know all of what she knows. It isn’t as though she could brief me, and in any case she’s far more experienced than I am. Were she to tell me the use of party time was necessary to prevent the assassination, I’d use it.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s explained her world to me. She’s shared the course of her career, her life. I don’t want it to go that way here.”

“Cute sister,” bellowed Conner, “where’s hot nurse?” His surviving arm, tattooed down its length with “FIRST IN, LAST OUT” in gang-style lettering, was pale around Macon’s neck. Macon himself was bare-chested, in wet shorts, hair matted from carrying Conner under the shower. He’d managed to get Conner mostly back into his Polartec. Now he carried him to his bed, put him down, helped him get his arm into the sole sleeve.

“Going back for my clothes,” Macon said, then looked at Flynne and Griff. “You two okay?”

“Fine,” said Flynne.

“Burton good?” Conner asked, squinting at her unconscious brother.

“Hospital says,” she said.

“Head office canceled the distribution,” Griff said to Macon.

“Okay,” said Macon. “You going to tell me what it would have been?”

“Another time,” Griff said.

Macon raised his eyebrows. “I’ll get my clothes.” He went out.

“Hot nurse said squidsuit fuckers popped a cap in his ass,” Conner said. “Girl’s a baller. Macon says she took down half of them. Fucking Carlos, he only got two.”

“Why aren’t you up in the future,” Flynne asked him, “flying your washing machine?”

“Man’s got to eat.”

Hong stepped sideways through the narrow vertical slit in the barricade, a foam box in one hand. “Shrimp bowl?”

“That’s me,” said Conner.

Hong saw Burton, raised his eyebrows. “He okay?”

“Wasn’t your cooking did it,” Conner said, “it was Jimmy’s. Nearly died of the runs.”

Flynne looked at Griff, who widened his eyes slightly, as if to say their real conversation was over, for a while at least.

Gonzales? Was he shitting her? Was Lowbeer shitting him?