The Peripheral Read online

  TITLES BY WILLIAM GIBSON

  Neuromancer

  Count Zero

  Burning Chrome

  Mona Lisa Overdrive

  Virtual Light

  Idoru

  All Tomorrow’s Parties

  Pattern Recognition

  Spook Country

  Zero History

  Distrust That Particular Flavor

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2014 by William Gibson

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gibson, William, date.

  The peripheral / William Gibson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-17070-4

  I. Title.

  PS3557.I2264P47 2014 2014028558

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Shannie

  CONTENTS

  Titles by William Gibson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. THE HAPTICS

  2. DEATH COOKIE

  3. PUSHING BUGS

  4. SOMETHING SO DEEPLY EARNED

  5. DRAGONFLIES

  6. PATCHERS

  7. SURVEILLANT

  8. DOUBLE DICKAGE

  9. PROTECTIVE CUSTODY

  10. THE MAENADS’ CRUSH

  11. TARANTULA

  12. THYLACINE

  13. EASY ICE

  14. MOURNING JET

  15. ANYTHING NICE

  16. LEGO

  17. COTTONWOOD

  18. THE GOD CLUB

  19. AQUAMARINE DUCT TAPE

  20. POLT

  21. GRIFTER

  22. ARCHAISM

  23. CELTIC KNOT

  24. ANATHEMA

  25. KYDEX

  26. VERY SENIOR

  27. DEAD OLD BOYS

  28. THE HOUSE OF LOVE

  29. ATRIUM

  30. HERMÈS

  31. FUNNY

  32. TIPSTAFF

  33. STUPIDITY TAX

  34. HEADLESS

  35. THE STUFF IN HIS YARD

  36. IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING

  37. COUNTY

  38. STUB GIRL

  39. THE FAIRY SHOEMAKERS

  40. BULLSHIT ARTIST

  41. ZERO

  42. BODY LANGUAGE

  43. ’SPLODING

  44. PERVERSELY DIFFICULT

  45. UP THERE

  46. THE SIGHTS

  47. POWER RELATIONSHIPS

  48. PAVEL

  49. THE SOUNDS HE MADE

  50. WHILE THE GETTING’S GOOD

  51. TANGO HOTEL SOLDIER SHIT

  52. BOOTS ON THE GROUND

  53. SANTA CLAUS’S HEADQUARTERS

  54. IMPOSTOR SYNDROME

  55. COMPLICATED

  56. THE LIGHT IN HER VOICE MAIL

  57. GOOD CHINA

  58. WU

  59. ADVENTURE CAPITALISTS

  60. BROWNING IN

  61. TIMESICK

  62. NOT EXPECTED

  63. THREW UP

  64. STERILE

  65. BACKDOOR TO NOW

  66. DROP BEARS

  67. BLACK BEAUTY

  68. ANTIBODY

  69. HOW IT SOUNDS

  70. ASSET

  71. McMANSION

  72. HALFWAY POSH

  73. RED GREEN BLUE

  74. THAT FIRST GENTLE TOUCH

  75. PRECURSORS

  76. EMULATION APP

  77. WHEELIE BOY

  78. FRONTIERLAND

  79. THE JACKPOT

  80. THE CLOVIS LIMIT

  81. ALAMO

  82. THE NASTINESS

  83. ALL THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD IN A MOMENT OF TIME

  84. SOHO SQUARE

  85. FUTURE PEOPLE

  86. CHATELAINE

  87. THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARTY TIME

  88. PARLIAMENT OF BIRDS

  89. STROBE

  90. METRIC OF CAUTION

  91. ISOPOD

  92. YOU GUYS

  93. MISSION STATEMENT

  94. APOLLINARIS WATER

  95. WHOLE WORLDS FALLING

  96. DISANTHROPOMORPHIZED

  97. CONVOY

  98. BICENTENNIAL

  99. AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES

  100. BACK HERE

  101. ORDINARY SAD-ASS HUMANNESS

  102. TRANSPLANT

  103. SUSHI BARN

  104. THE RED MEDICI

  105. STATIC IN YOUR BONES

  106. BUTTHOLEVILLE

  107. LITTLE BUDDY

  108. COLDIRON MORNING

  109. BLACK SILK FROGS

  110. NOTHING FANCY

  111. ZIL

  112. TO FARRINGDON

  113. BOUNCY CASTLE

  114. CELEBRATION OF LIFE

  115. DISSOCIATIVE STATE

  116. CANNONBALL

  117. ITS GRANITE FACE, BRISTLING WITH IRON

  118. BALCONY MAN

  119. SIR HENRY

  120. VESPASIAN’S CUBE

  121. NOTTING HILL

  122. COLDIRON MIRACLES

  123. COMPOUND

  124. PUTNEY

  Acknowledgments and Thanks

  I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling.

  —H. G. WELLS

  1.

  THE HAPTICS

  They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction and what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they were little, veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother. She and Burton and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there, later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like blunt rifle slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.

  Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of that foam, packed down hard in the dark earth. He had the trailer’s lights turned up, and closer, through a window, she partly saw him stand, turn, and on his spine and side the marks where they took the haptics off, like the skin was dusted with something dead-fish silver. They said they could get that off too, but he didn’t want to kee
p going back.

  “Hey, Burton,” she called.

  “Easy Ice,” he answered, her gamer tag, one hand bumping the door open, the other tugging a new white t-shirt down, over that chest the Corps gave him, covering the silvered patch above his navel, size and shape of a playing card.

  Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Hefty Mart amber. She’d helped him sweep it out, before he moved in. He hadn’t bothered to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick with this Chinese polymer, dried glassy and flexible. You could see stubs of burnt matches down inside that, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a legally sold cigarette, older than she was. She knew where to find a rusty jeweler’s screwdriver, and somewhere else a 2009 quarter.

  Now he just got his stuff out before he hosed the inside, every week or two, like washing out Tupperware. Leon said the polymer was curatorial, how you could peel it all out before you put your American classic up on eBay. Let it take the dirt with it.

  Burton took her hand, squeezed, pulling her up and in.

  “You going to Davisville?” she asked.

  “Leon’s picking me up.”

  “Luke 4:5’s protesting there. Shaylene said.”

  He shrugged, moving a lot of muscle but not by much.

  “That was you, Burton. Last month. On the news. That funeral, in Carolina.”

  He didn’t quite smile.

  “You might’ve killed that boy.”

  He shook his head, just a fraction, eyes narrowed.

  “Scares me, you do that shit.”

  “You still walking point, for that lawyer in Tulsa?”

  “He isn’t playing. Busy lawyering, I guess.”

  “You’re the best he had. Showed him that.”

  “Just a game.” Telling herself, more than him.

  “Might as well been getting himself a Marine.”

  She thought she saw that thing the haptics did, then, that shiver, then gone.

  “Need you to sub for me,” he said, like nothing had happened. “Five-hour shift. Fly a quadcopter.”

  She looked past him to his display. Some Danish supermodel’s legs, retracting into some brand of car nobody she knew would ever drive, or likely even see on the road. “You’re on disability,” she said. “Aren’t supposed to work.”

  He looked at her.

  “Where’s the job?” she asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Outsourced? VA’ll catch you.”

  “Game,” he said. “Beta of some game.”

  “Shooter?”

  “Nothing to shoot. Work a perimeter around three floors of this tower, fifty-fifth to fifty-seventh. See what turns up.”

  “What does?”

  “Paparazzi.” He showed her the length of his index finger. “Little things. You get in their way. Edge ’em back. That’s all you do.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Get you set up before Leon comes.”

  “Supposed to help Shaylene, later.”

  “Give you two fives.” He took his wallet from his jeans, edged out a pair of new bills, the little windows unscratched, holograms bright.

  Folded, they went into the right front pocket of her cutoffs. “Turn the lights down,” she said, “hurts my eyes.”

  He did, swinging his hand through the display, but then the place looked like a seventeen-year-old boy’s bedroom. She reached over, flicked it up a little.

  She sat in his chair. It was Chinese, reconfiguring to her height and weight as he pulled himself up an old metal stool, almost no paint left on it, waving a screen into view.

  MILAGROS COLDIRON SA

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Who we’re working for.”

  “How do they pay you?”

  “Hefty Pal.”

  “You’ll get caught for sure.”

  “Goes to an account of Leon’s,” he said. Leon’s Army service had been about the same time as Burton’s in the Marines, but Leon wasn’t due any disability. Wasn’t, their mother said, like he could claim to have caught the dumbfuck there. Not that Flynne had ever thought Leon was anything but sly, under it all, and lazy. “Need my log-in and the password. Hat trick.” How they both pronounced his tag, HaptRec, to keep it private. He took an envelope from his back pocket, unfolded and opened it. The paper looked thick, creamy.

  “That from Fab?”

  He drew out a long slip of the same paper, printed with what looked to be a full paragraph of characters and symbols. “You scan it, or type it outside that window, we’re out a job.”

  She picked up the envelope, from where it lay on what she guessed had been a fold-down dining table. It was one of Shaylene’s top-shelf stationery items, kept literally on a top shelf. When letter orders came in from big companies, or lawyers, you went up there. She ran her thumb across the logo in the upper left corner. “Medellín?”

  “Security firm.”

  “You said it’s a game.”

  “That’s ten thousand dollars, in your pocket.”

  “How long you been doing this?”

  “Two weeks now. Sundays off.”

  “How much you get?”

  “Twenty-five thousand per.”

  “Make it twenty, then. Short notice and I’m stiffing Shaylene.”

  He gave her another two fives.

  2.

  DEATH COOKIE

  Netherton woke to Rainey’s sigil, pulsing behind his lids at the rate of a resting heartbeat. He opened his eyes. Knowing better than to move his head, he confirmed that he was in bed, alone. Both positive, under current circumstances. Slowly, he lifted his head from the pillow, until he could see that his clothes weren’t where he assumed he would have dropped them. Cleaners, he knew, would have come from their nest beneath the bed, to drag them away, flense them of whatever invisible quanta of sebum, skin-flakes, atmospheric particulates, food residue, other.

  “Soiled,” he pronounced, thickly, having briefly imagined such cleaners for the psyche, and let his head fall back.

  Rainey’s sigil began to strobe, demandingly.

  He sat up cautiously. Standing would be the real test. “Yes?”

  Strobing ceased. “Un petit problème,” Rainey said.

  He closed his eyes, but then there was only her sigil. He opened them.

  “She’s your fucking problem, Wilf.”

  He winced, the amount of pain this caused startling him. “Have you always had this puritanical streak? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You’re a publicist,” she said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”

  His eyes, a size too large for their sockets, felt gritty. “She must be nearing the patch,” he said, reflexively attempting to suggest that he was alert, in control, as opposed to disastrously and quite expectedly hungover.

  “They’re almost above it now,” she said. “With your problem.”

  “What’s she done?”

  “One of her stylists,” she said, “is also, evidently, a tattooist.”

  Again, the sigil dominated his private pain-filled dark. “She didn’t,” he said, opening his eyes. “She did?”

  “She did.”

  “We had an extremely specific verbal on that.”

  “Fix it,” she said. “Now. The world’s watching, Wilf. As much of it as we’ve been able to scrape together, anyway. Will Daedra West make peace with the patchers, they wonder? Should they decide to back our project, they ask? We want yes, and yes.”

  “They ate the last two envoys,” he said. “Hallucinating in synch with a forest of code, convinced their visitors were shamanic spirit beasts. I spent three entire days, last month, having her briefed at the Connaught. Two anthropologists, three neoprimitivist curators. No tattoos. A brand-new, perfectly blank epidermis. Now this.”

  “Talk her out of it, Wilf.”

  He stood, experimentally. Hobbled, naked, into the bathroom. Urinated as loudly as possible. “Out
of what, exactly?”

  “Parafoiling in—”

  “That’s been the plan—”

  “In nothing but her new tattoos.”

  “Seriously? No.”

  “Seriously,” she said.

  “Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?”

  “Posthuman filth, according to you.”