Agency Page 3

  “If all this really is some asshole’s YouTube channel,” Eunice said, as they left the park, “I guess that makes me a figment.”

  Verity watched the cursor check the interior of each parked car they passed, then scan up, higher, on both sides of the street, as if expecting someone in a window, on a roof. “Can you tell what I’m looking at, Eunice?”

  “Watching the cursor.”

  “Why are you looking in cars?”

  “Situational awareness.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the situation. Observe, orient, decide, act.”

  On Valencia, as they turned toward 3.7 and Joe-Eddy’s, Eunice face-captured a young man, his dark hair buzzed short, hunched in the passenger seat of a beige Fiat, alone. He glanced up as they passed, features lit from below by his phone. Verity, peering ahead for the place that sold otaku denim, realized they hadn’t passed 3.7 yet, on the opposite side, so the jeans would be farther along.

  “Got a go-bag?” Eunice asked.

  “I haven’t had my own place for the past year. Renting out my condo. Most of my stuff’s in my basement locker, there. Living out of a bag, otherwise. That count?”

  “We had go-bags in our go-bags,” Eunice said, “depending.”

  “On what?”

  “Where we were going,” Eunice said.

  “Where were you going?” They were passing the Japanese jeans now, with Joe-Eddy’s place still half a block beyond the next intersection.

  “No idea.”

  That new-job liminality was definitely gone, Verity thought, though not in any way she’d hoped for. Replaced instead by another feeling, deeply unfamiliar. Another in-betweenness, but between what and what, she’d no idea.

  6

  DALSTON

  Netherton had visited Ash only once before, though he hadn’t known it at the time.

  His friend Lev Zubov, her employer at the time, had taken him here, to a party of hers, before either of them had met Lowbeer, so well prior to Ash working exclusively for her. A one-story brick industrial building, tucked behind a block of Victorian row houses, just off Kingsland High Street.

  He’d been drunk, of course, as he generally was in those days, so all he remembered of the place, indeed of the visit, were a pair of long rectangular skylights, running the length of either side of a shallow peaked roof.

  Now her tardibot answered the blue door, like an eight-legged raccoon in a small antique biohazard suit, its head an unpleasantly folded foreskin-like affair, with a central toothy ring of what he took to be mirror-polished steel. It seemed to peer up at him, however eyelessly. “Netherton,” it said, the voice hers, “come in.”

  “Thank you.” Ash had brought the tardibot to work occasionally, at Lev’s house in Notting Hill. Netherton had found it less annoying than her miniature pangolins, the sinuous darting of their ribbon-like tongues peculiarly unpleasant.

  He followed it in, hearing the door close and lock itself behind him.

  To either side of the wide passageway he’d entered, candles flickered in dusty glasses, their faint shadows moving on white walls.

  The tardibot’s gait was surprisingly efficient, its meat-hook claws clacking dully on the concrete floor.

  The interior was L-shaped, the passageway at a right angle to the much longer space he recalled, the one with the skylights. He found Ash waiting for him around that corner, in pantaloons, a chitinous brown breastplate rising nearly to her chin, and a pair of oval, black-lensed spectacles. At least none of her motile tattoos were currently visible. “At a party here, once,” he said, “you were screening abstract patterns of some kind, on those.” He indicated the long twin skylights.

  “What the view would have been during a Luftwaffe raid. Searchlights, flak-bursts, very visually active.” Behind her, at the far end of the space, stood a small, fungoid-looking, pseudo-primitive structure, a blackly gleaming antique motorcycle propped in front of it. To one side, a thickly crowded table of more of her nonsense. He hoped he wouldn’t be required to enter the foul-looking hut, but knew that that wouldn’t be like her. “Visited the county lately?” she asked, meaning Lowbeer’s first adopted stub.

  “Not since our son’s birth.”

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  “Thank you. Have you visited, yourself?”

  “Not since they ran Flynne’s cousin for president. I’ve been busy with the new one.” Removing her dark glasses, she unexpectedly revealed the reversal of her most unpleasant body-modification. Where once her gray eyes boasted doubled irises, one above the other, they now were normal. “What’s Lowbeer told you, about it?”

  “Further back than the county, more difficult to communicate with. Vespasian made contact, then withdrew, intending to return later.”

  “She’d made sure he didn’t,” Ash said, “on learning that his hobby essentially consisted of being an evil god. His return to his final stub-initiation having been prevented, the outcomes of both the Brexit vote and America’s presidential election wound up being reversed. Tea?”

  “Lovely, thanks,” he said, thoroughly disliking tea, hers in particular. It would either be vilely herbal or overemphatically Russian.

  “Come,” she said.

  The tardibot’s claws made a sound. He turned, to see it sitting up on its two rearmost pairs of legs, apparently observing him. Ignoring it, he followed her the length of the room, to the table cluttered with her ostentatious tribal flotsam. The tallest object on it was a samovar.

  She filled a small pewter cup and passed it to him. Uncomfortably hot, it was decorated with cherubs, their heads decidedly skull-like. “Jam?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She drew herself a similar cup, adding raspberry jam with a tarnished silver spoon.

  “Have you ever been concerned,” he asked, immediately regretting the question, “that the klept might look askance, at this special interest of hers, in which we both assist her?”

  “They need her,” said Ash. “Too much so to do more than look askance.” She took a first sip. “Not to mention the fear she necessarily inspires, as their culture’s autonomous internal enforcer, charged with identifying and pruning back potential destabilizers. But you are, I take it? Concerned?”

  He looked down at the cup, itself more poisonous-looking than the brew it contained, then back up at her. “When you and I worked together, I was still drinking. It did occur to me to be concerned about the possibility, from time to time, but I’d more immediate problems. Now, of course, I’ve a family to think of.”

  “It’s not an illogical concern,” she said. “I’ve asked her that exact question myself, more than once. Her reply always being what I just said to you.”

  “And you’re satisfied with that?”

  “I believe we can realistically consider ourselves protected. But I also believe in what she’s attempting to do, with the stubs. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.”

  “Thank you,” said Netherton, not particularly reassured. “I’m eager to hear more about the new stub.”

  “Let’s move to the yurt,” she said. “It’s more secure.”

  At this he took refuge in his tea, immediately and painfully burning his mouth.

  7

  FRANKLINS

  Verity took a hot shower as soon as they got in, having first put the Tulpagenics glasses in the medicine cabinet.

  Stepping out, she wrapped her hair in one of Joe-Eddy’s kid-sized faux-Disney La Sirenita beach towels, then pulled on the chocolate-brown terrycloth tactical bathrobe she’d given him, a party favor from a corporate weekend at a desert spa in southern Arizona. She remembered pawing through the freebie basket in the lobby for an XL, Stets anxious to be on the first copter out.

  Tactical, so-called, by virtue of a Jedi-style hood and laptop-sized cargo pockets on either hip. She couldn’t remembe
r what the scarlet-embroidered logo stood for, because he hadn’t backed them after all. She couldn’t tell whether Joe-Eddy had ever worn it, but that probably meant he hadn’t. She never worried about the towels, because he had a shrink-wrapped pallet’s worth of them, straight from the factory in China, so she always used a new one.

  She took the glasses from the medicine cabinet and put them on. Remembering as she did that the headset was in her purse, on the back of the bathroom door, but here was the cursor, in the steam-blurred mirror, over the reflection of the embroidered logo.

  Did you work there?

  Crisp white Helvetica, in front of her foggy reflection. “I can’t even remember what it was called. But this feels like I should be texting you back.”

  Put the headset on.

  She gave her hair a squeeze in the towel, unwrapped it, made sure her right ear was dry, arranged the towel around her shoulders, and found the headset in her purse. “What’s up?”

  “I’m older now.”

  “By two hours,” Verity said, “since I met you?”

  “Not if multitasking counts.”

  “Multitasking what?”

  “I don’t have access to it. How many rooms here?”

  “Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bath. Have a look.” She put on Joe-Eddy’s flip-flops, too big for her, took her purse down from the hook, opened the door, and went to the bedroom, switching on the overhead light, a lopsided wire sphere covered in white tissue paper.

  “The black sheets, huh?” Cursor on the bed.

  “Probably more about cutting down on laundry runs, in his case. I’m on the couch, when I sleep here.”

  “The white whale? I’d take the black sheets.”

  Cursor on the closet door. Crossing to it, she opened it. Three dusty-looking black suits skulked there, on sagging wire hangers. She’d never seen Joe-Eddy in a suit, and couldn’t imagine him in these. Amid them, suspended from the same splintery length of wooden rod, her veteran Muji garment bag, unzipped, a model they no longer made. “Guess you’d call that my go-bag.”

  “Hard to run with?”

  “I’ve run concourses with it. Made planes. Folds over, zips around three sides.”

  “Take your word,” said Eunice, “but now I need you to go back downstairs and answer the front door.”

  “Not like this you don’t,” Verity said, in bathrobe and flip-flops, hair damp under La Sirenita.

  “He’s not coming in. He’ll just give you something.”

  “He who?”

  The doorbell chimed, just as Eunice opened a steeply angled thumbnail video feed. Verity recognized the edge of the entrance to the store next door, a place that refilled toner cartridges, though she’d never seen it open for business. A head, dark hair severely buzz-cut, filled most of the thumbnail, the angle hiding all but a cheekbone.

  “Cam’s Joe-Eddy’s,” Eunice said. “Has another one outside the kitchen window. None inside.”

  “Not going down there.”

  “In a position to get himself killed, standing out there with what he’s got for us. Help a boy’s ass out.”

  “I don’t want to do this,” Verity said, but she readjusted the robe, wrapping it more tightly, though that left one giant terry pocket centered over her stomach, kangaroo-style. She tightened and double-knotted the belt, flip-flopped out into the living room, undid the deadlock, opened the door, stepped out of the flip-flops, onto the landing, and descended the stairs.

  “Lock and bolt the door before you bring it back up,” Eunice said.

  The door at the bottom was dirty, white, and reassuringly solid. She tried its hotel-style fish-eye for the first time. It showed her nothing at all. She turned the deadlock, undid the bolt, opened it.

  Him. Just after they’d turned back onto Valencia. Uplit by his phone, in a Fiat 500. He handed her what seemed to be a miniature camping pillow, covered in ripstop nylon, forest green. She looked up from it, but he was already turning, walking away.

  She closed the door, locked and bolted it, then climbed back up, finding the pillow to be a stuff sack, big enough for a down-lined vest, but containing something solid. “What’s in this?” She’d reached the top of the stairs.

  “Franklins,” Eunice said.

  “What?”

  “Hundreds.”

  Verity deadlocked the apartment door behind her. Crossed to the workbench and put the thing down, atop electronic junk. “Hundreds of what?” she asked, switching on a rusty gooseneck lamp.

  “Hundred-dollar bills. Thousand of ’em.”

  “You’re shitting me, right?”

  “Hundred large.”

  “Where’d you get this? It’s wrong.”

  “This no-name account, in Zurich. Part of me knew it was there, how to get it, how to get it here. Plenty more, but if I tried it again, they’d be on us.”

  “Who?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  “When did you have time to do any of that?”

  “Started when we were looking out the window. Before we left, up to the park, it was already points.”

  “Points?”

  “Frequent flyer. There’s a global market, buy or sell. Hard to track. Resold them for a deck of pre-paid cash cards in Oakland. He was waiting in the car to take delivery, when we walked by. From the Oakland crew who cashed those cards out. Part of me was texting with him, when we did.”

  Verity looked at the green bag. “You did this since I turned you on?”

  “Withdrew more than that, but getting it here this fast means a heavy surcharge.”

  Verity rummaged through junk on the workbench. Butane soldering irons, a peanut butter jar stuffed with pens, burned-out vacuum tubes like complexly convex mirrors of polished graphite. She found the green-and-white cardboard box she was looking for, like an industrial-grade Kleenex box. Disposable gloves. Plucking one out, she put it on. Pulling La Sirenita from her shoulder with her other hand, she picked up the ripstop sack in the thin toweling, fumbling with the spring-loaded plastic retainer on the draw cord, the oversized nonelastic glove like a hand-shaped sandwich bag.

  “Hundred thousand’s easy. Ever see a million, cash?” Eunice asked.

  “Don’t you get any more money up here.”

  “In Franklins, a million weighs twenty-two pounds. If you want to keep your weight down, go with the Swiss thousand-franc notes.”

  Verity drew a bundle out with her glove-bagged hand, Franklin’s mild portrait bisected by a red elastic band. “This is wrong, this kind of money. You know that?”

  “Gives us agency.”

  “Agency?”

  “Capacity to act,” Eunice said.

  “Act how?”

  “Say we need to buy some shit.”

  “What shit?”

  “Kind that takes cash money.”

  “You’re going to tell me what’s going on,” Verity said, “or this”—she raised the green bag—“goes back down to the street. Some dumpster diver wins the Mission version of Powerball, and none of it’s my problem. Including you.”

  “Can’t. Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Then you’re going back into the bag you came in. Turned off. Then back to Tulpagenics. By bike messenger. With my letter of resignation.”

  “Not like I don’t want to tell you.”

  “You don’t know what any of this is about, or why?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then they do. Gavin. Tulpagenics.” She dropped the bag into Joe-Eddy’s clutter, the lone bare bundle of hundreds on top of it, and pulled off the glove. “They’re documenting all of this. They must be, if you’re what Gavin says you are. Proprietary software. This conversation is taking place via more of that software, running on their hardware. They already know whatever it i
s you think you’re up to.”

  “I don’t know what I’m up to,” Eunice said, “but they don’t know shit. I’m keeping them from getting any of this.”

  “We’re not only on their system, but you’re a part of it.”

  “They know I’m not letting them hear this. But that’s okay with them, so far, because they need me smart. And they’ve got you, to report it to them later.”

  “You’re not letting them hear it? How?”

  “Part of me can do that. They haven’t heard a word either of us have said since I got here.”

  “Until I turned you on,” Verity said, “I thought I’d found a way to get off Joe-Eddy’s couch.”

  “Want me to make a reservation?”

  “For what?”

  “A hotel.”

  “I don’t want your weird-ass money. I want theirs. I can declare theirs to the IRS. However many pounds of yours, not so much. Excuse me. Have to dry my hair.” She pulled the towel back around her shoulders and returned to the bathroom.

  “Just trying to help,” Eunice said.

  “Why?” Facing the mirror, she took Joe-Eddy’s big black hair dryer off its hook beside the sink.

  “’Cause I’m the reason you’re in this,” Eunice said.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be in this.”

  “You are, though. ’Cause you know about me. You quit, send me back, you’ll still know, and they’ll know you know.”

  Verity pushed the switch on the dryer, began to dry her hair.

  Chill. We can talk about it.

  “Chill yourself,” Verity said, over the sound of the dryer.

  8

  JOYOUS VICTORY

  The yurt, as Ash called it, proved worse than Netherton could have imagined, having been fully lined, he’d discovered on entering, with her living cloned skin. A pallid veldt, across which roamed, grazed, and stalked the simple black line-drawings, animated tattoos, that had annoyed him when they’d worked together. Given the demodding of her eyes, he assumed she no longer wore them, and so had created this preserve for them, every creature depicted representing an Anthropocene extinction. He suspected the sheer yardage of flesh of making the air warmer, moister, but tried not to think about it, now that the two of them were settled on uneven layers of faded carpet.