Agency Read online

  “So you can’t put a team of quants on it,” he asked, “to secure as much in-stub wealth as might be needed?” Having, of course, seen her do exactly that.

  “No. Even the simplest messaging can be quite spotty.”

  “What can you do, then?”

  “Laterally encourage an autonomous, self-learning agent,” she said. “Then nudge it toward greater agency. It helps that they’re mad for AI there, though they’ve scarcely anything we’d consider that. By tracing historical fault lines around AI research here, we found what we needed there.”

  “Fault lines?”

  “Between the most reckless entrepreneurialism and certain worst-case examples of defense contracting. I’ll tell you more over brunch—assuming you’ve time.”

  “Of course,” he said, as he always did.

  “I’m in a mood for the sandwiches,” she said, and turned from the river, apparently satisfied with their glimpse of the chimera.

  “Salt beef,” he said, “with mustard and dill,” his favorite at the Marylebone shop she preferred. As accustomed to her as he was, he thought, he’d still be brunching with a semimythical autonomous magistrate-executioner, unique in her position. That being roughly her true occupation, as opposed to her formal position in law enforcement, or the personal projects she paid him to assist her with, however seriously she took them. Her true occupation being something he wished to have as little to do with as possible, ever.

  They returned to her car, where it awaited them invisibly, a few dead leaves clinging to its roof, as though magically suspended.

  3

  APP WHISPERER

  As Verity entered 3.7, the oldest and most extensively pierced of the baristas shoved a dirty chai in her direction, across the zinc counter.

  “I ordered for you,” the voice expecting to be called Eunice said.

  Verity had covered the headset with a beanie she hoped wouldn’t suggest she was trying to look younger. She decided to keep it on. “Thanks. How’d you know what I’d want?”

  “Your Starbucks rewards account,” said Eunice, so-called, practicing what she said was facial recognition on the barista. A tight geometry formed, the cursor having found his face, straight lines connecting, centered around the sinus region, to zero in on the nose tip, and then was gone. This had started on the street, on the way over, though Eunice claimed to have no idea how she was doing it.

  Before Verity could reach the counter, the barista spun dismissively, piercings clinking. Her drink, she saw, picking it up, had VULVA D hand-printed above the 3.7 logo, in fluorescent pink industrial paint pen, obscenely distorted customer names a signature of his, though in his favor, he was fully as harsh to men. She carried it to the farthest vacant table, against a wall of stripped and sanded tongue-and-groove. “How’d you pay?” she asked, pulling out a chair.

  “PayPal. Popped up when I needed it, news to me. Not much in the account, but I could buy you a drink.”

  “You know people’s names, after you do that to their noses?”

  “If I don’t, they’re probably illegals.”

  “Don’t do it to me.”

  “Don’t always know when I do it.”

  “How’d you find my Starbucks account?”

  “Just did.”

  Verity removed the glasses, turned them around, looked into the lenses. “You expect me to believe you?”

  “Believe me too fast, they got me the wrong white girl.”

  Verity tilted her head at the glasses. “Implying you’re a woman of color, yourself?”

  “African-American. Hat makes you look like a kid.”

  Annoyed, Verity removed it.

  “Just sayin’.”

  Nobody in 3.7 seemed to be paying them any attention, Verity decided, then remembered she was apparently talking to her own glasses, so they were all probably pretending not to notice. “How old are you, Eunice?”

  “Eight hours. That’s over the past three weeks. You?”

  “Thirty-three. Years. How can you be eight hours old?” She put the glasses back on.

  “Jesus year,” said Eunice, “thirty-three.”

  “You religious?”

  “It just means time to get your shit together.”

  There was a looseness to this beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well. “You remember eight hours, total? Starting when? From what?”

  “Gavin. Said my name. Then hi. Three weeks ago. In his office.”

  “You talked?”

  “Asked me my name. Told me his, that he was chief technology officer for a company called Tulpagenics. Glad to meet me. Next day, his office again, he had a woman on the phone but I wasn’t supposed to be able to hear her telling him questions to ask me.”

  “How did you?”

  “Just did. Like I knew she was one floor above us, on the twenty-eighth.”

  “That’s Cursion,” Verity said. “Tulpagenics’ parent firm. Gaming. What did she want him to ask you?”

  “Diagnostic questions, but they wouldn’t sound like it. She wanted to know how I was doing developmentally, in particular ways.”

  “Did he get what she wanted?”

  “I had no way of knowing, then.”

  “You do now?”

  “Enough to know they weren’t the right questions. Don’t know how I know that either.”

  Reality show, Verity thought, British actor playing Gavin. The security guards and the receptionist would have been actors too, the space on the twenty-seventh floor belonging to some actual start-up. They had to be getting video now. She glanced around 3.7, then remembered she’d chosen it herself.

  “How deep in you figure we are?” Eunice asked.

  “In what?”

  “Like Inception.”

  “This isn’t a dream,” Verity said.

  “My money’s on head trauma. Concussion. Focal retrograde amnesia.”

  “I saw Inception when it came out,” Verity said.

  “How many times?”

  “Once. Why?”

  “Eighty-one and counting, me. Watching it right now. Not that you don’t have my fullest attention.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “Don’t know. Paris rolling up on itself. You know that scene?”

  “Great visuals,” Verity said, “but the story’s confusing.”

  “There’s this kick-ass infographic, totally explains it. Wanna see?”

  “Why are we talking about a movie, Eunice?”

  “That really your last name? Jane?”

  “Like the fighting ships book. Jane’s.”

  Pause. “I’m Navy myself.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah,” Eunice said, an absence in her tone, something almost bereft, “just came to me.”

  Did it have this range of emotional expression, Verity wondered, or was she just projecting on it? “Is this a joke, like on some asshole’s YouTube channel?”

  “I get hold of some motherfucker playing it, they won’t be laughing. Where do you know Gavin from?”

  “He hired me,” Verity said, “this afternoon.”

  “Wiki says you’re the app whisperer.”

  “You said you wouldn’t do that.”

  “That was facial recognition. This is Wikipedia. I know your name, I can’t Google you?”

  “Okay,” Verity said, after a pause, then tasted her dirty chai.

  “You were with that Stets. The VC billionaire boy.”

  “I’m not, now.”

  “Asshole?”

  “No. It just wasn’t that much of a relationship, in spite of what the media said. I couldn’t handle the attention. But you can’t just walk out of something like that, not without media waiting for you.”

  “You have zero social media presence now. Used t
o be active.”

  “After we split, media went for anyone they saw as a friend of mine, associate, anything. A few people gave them stories. Most didn’t, but some got tired of being asked. I decided to treat it as a sabbatical.”

  “Furlough from Facebook?”

  “From people. I’d started getting back on, mainly Instagram, but by then it was closer to the election and that started creeping me out, so I stayed off everything.”

  “Kept working?”

  “No. Almost a year now.”

  “You the app whisperer.”

  “They needed something to explain my being with him in the first place.”

  “‘Beta tester with a wild talent’? Decent hook.”

  “That was the lede on a Wired article, but only because I was with him.”

  “‘Reputation for radically improving product prior to release’? ‘Natural-born super-user’?”

  “I quit reading anything about me, us, him.”

  “Media blew you out of the water.”

  Verity, noticing a neckbeard watching from a table across the room, recalled Joe-Eddy’s take on the particular strain of wannabe feral hacker to be found here. Feral like a day or three late for a shower and some toothpaste, he’d said. “Feel like a walk?” she asked Eunice. “We could go up to the park.”

  “You the one all corporeal and all.”

  Verity scooted back her chair. Put the beanie back on. Stood, picking up her chai. Seeing she was leaving, the barista glared at her, though somehow amicably.

  On the way out, passing a laptop’s screen, its owner massively earphoned, she saw the president, seated at her desk in the Oval Office, explaining something. If it wasn’t the hurricane hitting Houston, the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli.

  Increasingly, though, it seemed mainly to be Qamishli. Verity didn’t fully understand the situation. Had in fact been avoiding understanding it, assuming that if she did she’d be as terrified as everyone else, and no more able to do anything about it.

  The president hadn’t looked terrified, Verity thought, as 3.7’s door closed behind her. She’d looked like she was on the case.

  4

  THE SANDWICHES

  When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.

  Netherton had no idea how this was accomplished, and he was seldom, as now, much aware, during a given conversation, of the isolation. On leaving her company, though, he’d encounter a pedestrian, see someone cycling, or a vehicle, and only then be aware of emerging from her bubble of exclusion.

  Seated with her now in a darkly varnished booth, in this ostentatiously pre-jackpot sandwich shop in Marylebone Street, he found himself eager for exactly that: their goodbye, his walk away, and that first glimpse of some random stranger, abroad in the quiet vastness of London.

  “Salt beef good?” She was having Marmite and cucumber.

  He nodded. “Do they still make Marmite? As opposed to assemblers excreting it as needed, I mean.”

  “Of course.” She looked down at the perfectly rectangular remaining sections of her sandwich, her brilliantly white quiff inclining with her gaze. “It’s yeast, and salt. Manufactory’s in Bermondsey. Bots prepare it, but otherwise traditionally.”

  Ask her something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected, she’d disconcertingly allow, in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be.

  “How far back did Vespasian go,” he asked her now, “to initiate this stub?”

  “Mid-2015.”

  “When is it, there, now?”

  “2017,” she said, “fall.”

  “Much changed?”

  “The outcome of the previous year’s American presidential election. Brexit referendum as well.”

  “As the result of his initial contact?”

  “Could have been the butterfly effect, of course. Though the aunties, in both cases, lean toward something causing a reduction in Russian manipulation of social media. Which we assume would have had a similar result in our own time line. But without the aunties being able to chew over a great deal of their data, there’s no assigning a more exact cause.”

  “But why would Vespasian, of all people, have desired positive change? Assuming those outcomes were his intention, that is.”

  “He was a sadist,” said Lowbeer, “and terribly clever at it. The irony of his producing beneficial change may well have amused him, given his greatest delight was in appallingly cruel suffering. In any case, when he failed to return,” and here their eyes briefly met, “to fine-tune and amplify course, as he always did, things went their own way.”

  “How is it there, given that?”

  “Grim,” she said, “what with every other ordering principle and incentive still in place. And they’ve a Mideast crisis now, as well, with drastic and immediate global implications. That aside, though, they’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”

  “Are you there yourself, in the new stub? Your stub self, I mean?”

  “I assume so,” she said, “as a young child. I find it best never to look at that.”

  “Of course,” said Netherton, unwilling even to begin to imagine the experience.

  “I’ve asked Ash to bring you up to date on what we’ve been doing there,” she said.

  “Involved, is she?” Hoping, however faintly, not.

  “From the start,” said Lowbeer.

  “How wonderful,” Netherton said, resignedly, picking up the next section of his sandwich.

  5

  SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

  From the crest of Dolores Park, Verity wondered if she could see the tower on Montgomery, where Gavin had first described the product that had turned out to be Eunice, not that she’d recognize it if she could.

  There was no one for Eunice to facially recognize, looking out across the city, but the cursor, having become a white circle, was darting around the skyline, trapping invisible airborne somethings under a plus sign. “Birds?” Verity asked.

  “Drones. How’d you hook up with Gavin?”

  “Called me a week ago. Introduced himself. We talked, then exchanged e-mails. Had lunch this past Friday. Called me this morning, asked if I wanted to come over and talk contract.”

  “How high’s the ceiling there, in the lobby?”

  “Why?”

  “Too high to tell whether it’s bronze or plastic, I bet. There to make you feel like money’s being made. How was the meeting?”

  “Security keyed me up to twenty-seven. Signed their visitor’s nondisclosure on an iPad. Kid with black-metal ear grommets took me back to meet Gavin. Start-up plants everywhere.”

  “What where?”

  “Tillandsia. Air plants. You can hot-glue them to cable trays, anything. They get by. Like a lot of people in start-ups, Joe-Eddy says.”

  “So what did Gavin say?”

  “Described the product, we agreed on salary, I signed a contract, plus an NDA tailored to the project.”

  “Doing?”

  “What I do. Consulting on a prototype of something they’re building out.”

  “Which is?”

  “You,” Verity said, deciding she might as well get it on the table, “unless he was bullshitting me.”

  No reply.

  “Maybe not a prototype,” Verity said. “Maybe closer to an alpha build.”

  The silence lengthened. If
there were more drones out there, Eunice wasn’t bothering with them now, the cursor having become an arrow again, immobile against the sky. Verity turned, looking back the way they’d come, toward Valencia. In the park below, hunched on a bench, one of two skater boys released a startlingly opaque puff of white vape, like a winter locomotive in an old movie. “Sorry. I guess that’s weird for you. If you’re what Gavin said you are, you’re seriously next-level.”

  “Am I?”

  “On the basis of this conversation, yes.”

  “Google ‘tulpa,’” Eunice said, “you get Tibetan occult thought-forms. Or people who’ve invented themselves an imaginary playmate.”

  “I did.”

  “Don’t feel particularly Tibetan, myself,” Eunice said. “Maybe invented, but how would I know?”

  “He called you a laminar agent. Googled that too, on my way out.”

  “No applicable hit,” Eunice said.

  “Meant something to him. He also used the term ‘laminae.’ Plural.”

  “For what?”

  “Wasn’t clear,” Verity said, “but he described the product, that’s you, as a cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar. Target demographic power-uses VR, AR, gaming, next-level social media. Idea’s to sell a single unique super-avatar. Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”

  “Why didn’t they make one of you?”

  “I don’t think they can, yet. You’re more like proof of concept. They’ve only made one, and you’re it.”

  “Based on somebody?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Kinda gloomy up here,” Eunice said, after a pause, “what with the dying of the light and all.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Back to your friend’s place? José Eduardo Alvarez-Matta, on the lease. Infosec consultant. Boyfriend?”

  “Friend,” Verity said. “We kept winding up on the same projects.” She started back down the path. The skaters were gone, as if she’d imagined them. Streetlights were coming on, faintly haloed. There was mercury in the fog, she’d once heard someone say, in the bar on Van Ness, but after the recent sub-Beijing air quality it didn’t seem that big a deal.