Agency Page 6

  “She started by explaining how she’d gotten the number she called me on, since that was the first thing I wanted to know. It’s not supposed to be possible, to do that.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “No need. She then walked me through the vuln that had allowed it, and told me she was calling on your behalf, for the sake of preserving deniability on my part. So I could honestly claim to have had no contact with you, if that was what I wanted.”

  “You believed her?”

  He tilted his head. “Not necessarily. But she’d shown me a vulnerability I’d paid not to have. And she claimed to work for you.”

  “Not that I’d put it that way myself.”

  “You need help,” he said. “Not that she put it that way, but that was my impression.”

  “Wouldn’t this thing drive a genius architect crazy?” Verity asked, looking around, hoping, if only temporarily, to change the subject.

  “She ordered it from a dealer’s website. Took her about eight minutes. Said it gave her a sense of near-perfect irresponsibility.”

  “Why the tarps, though?” Almost mentioning the container ship, but she caught herself. “View must be incredible.”

  “Drones. Media. They want images of us. Failing that, of the space. And it’s all glass.”

  “What’ll you do about that, if you live here?”

  “There’s a lab in Tokyo that may have a fix for us. We’re sending Virgil to have a look. Feel like going?”

  She heard the distant tool ring again, muffled by the trailer. “In the Honda?”

  “That would be five refueling stops. Though you’d get to see Chuuk International.”

  “See what?”

  “The airport. Micronesia. The Honda would need to keep refueling, to make it to Tokyo.”

  “Sorry, but I have a day job here. Just signed a contract.”

  “Who with?”

  “Tulpagenics. Know them?”

  “No.”

  “Belongs to a company called Cursion,” she said, catching the reaction. “You’ve heard of them.”

  He nodded.

  “What do you think?”

  “Spook-flavored, carefully nonspecific overtones of criminality? Definitely not investment material, for us. What have they hired you to do?”

  “Product evaluation of an alpha build.”

  “And the product?”

  She’d be breaking her NDA by telling him, she knew, and promptly did. “A customized virtual avatar, serious AI base.”

  “Any good?”

  “You seem to have thought so.”

  His eyes widened.

  “You said she was impressive,” Verity said. “These glasses are an interface.” A feed opened as she said this, angling down on the trailer’s silver roof, from gyroscopic stillness. “She can conference with us now, on my phone.”

  “Bluetooth her there,” he said, indicating a blank section of veneered wall.

  The feed corkscrewing down and in through the open door, Verity seeing her own face, the back of Stets’ head. Then the drone was on the ceiling, looking down at them, as Stets, unaware of it, flipped a screen from behind the veneer. She got out her phone, selecting the only Bluetooth option the environment offered.

  “Hey,” said the black woman whose head filled the screen, her fade rising to the knife-edged plateau of a businesslike afro.

  “You told me there wasn’t any there there, Eunice,” Verity said.

  “This look is shopped from whatever, but it can be me in the meantime.”

  “Hello, Eunice,” said Stets.

  “Mr. Howell. A pleasure.”

  “Stets,” he said. “What are you, Eunice?”

  “Work in progress.”

  “Whose creation?”

  “Mine, from here on in.”

  “What would you like to discuss?”

  Verity saw that Eunice had his complete attention, a rare thing.

  “Let’s ask Verity to tell you how we met. How that’s been for her. Then we could try to answer any questions you might have.”

  “I’d like that,” he said.

  So Verity did, starting with her first e-mail from Gavin and including everything she could remember, neither Eunice nor Stets saying a word. No interruptions, no questions. She described the Franklins, and the drones the Franklins had paid for, Stets looking even more interested.

  When she was finished, she tried to remember when she’d last seen him this interested in anything. She didn’t think she had.

  14

  QAMISHLI

  Later that evening, Rainey and the nanny having taken Thomas for a stroll, Netherton lay on the bed, speaking with Lowbeer. Who’d phoned, as she tended to do, as soon as he was alone.

  “So you don’t know whether there’s a Eunice, your software agent, here in our past?” he asked, staring up at a bifurcated crack he’d only recently noticed in the ceiling. Was it an actual crack, or an assembler artifact, positioned by an algorithm to suggest authenticity? If Rainey were to notice it, he’d decided, he’d argue for it being a crack, since an assembler artifact would disappoint her.

  “We assume so,” Lowbeer said. “I’ve an appointment tomorrow, though, with Clovis Fearing, to see what she might have on it. I’ll take you along, if you like.” Meaning he was going.

  Fearing, an American contemporary of Lowbeer’s, was someone Netherton had met shortly after meeting Lowbeer herself. Though he hadn’t seen her since, he’d meanwhile come to know her much younger self in the county, a phlegmatic expert gunfighter he assumed would still be in charge of Flynne’s personal security. “How is she?”

  “Medical issues, requiring compound phage therapy, but she’s sufficiently back in circulation that I’ve asked her to look into Eunice.”

  “She still has the shop, in Portobello?”

  “The Clovis Limit, yes. Says the stock’s become the better part of her memory.”

  “Have you inquired in the county? Your younger self, there, has every sort of Washington connection. Including presidential, currently.”

  “Of course,” Lowbeer said, “but nothing turned up.”

  Getting up, Netherton padded into the kitchen in his stocking feet. “Espresso,” he said to their maker, something Rainey generally wouldn’t allow him to do, insisting he make it himself. “Decaf,” he added, remembering but obeying another of her rules. “So you’ve encouraged this AI to increase its own functionality. Is that all?” Watching the maker pump a tiny stream of steaming caffeine-free espresso into the waiting cup.

  “Yes,” Lowbeer said, “though that seems a basic part of the package with her, increasing agency. I must mention, though, that the aunties currently estimate that Eunice’s stub may be ending, at least for our purposes. So we’ve that to consider as well.”

  “Ending?” Netherton took his first bitter sip, assuming he’d misheard.

  “Yes,” said Lowbeer.

  “Pardon me,” Netherton said, “but ‘ending’?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Nuclear war.”

  “Ash mentioned something, but I didn’t imagine it was that serious,” Netherton said, looking down at the steaming black liquor in the small white china cup, the kitchen’s ceiling fixture reflected in it, surrounded by pale brown crema.

  “It’s extremely serious. Qamishli,” Lowbeer said. “The crisis began there, though of course it’s playing out more broadly.”

  Like a name from one of Thomas’s storybooks. But then he remembered more of what Ash had said. “Would that be in Turkey?”

  “Syria. A town near the Turkish border, in the northeast, across from the Turkish city of Nusaybin. A complicated place, even by the standards of the region in that day.”

  Netherton drank off his decaf, the gestur
e as denatured as the brew, and returned the cup to the maker. “Would that be your work, then, this crisis?”

  “Most definitely not. It came with the territory, taking us entirely by surprise. Vespasian’s final stub promises to become exactly the sort of thing he most enjoyed inflicting.”

  “Can you prevent it?”

  “That depends on our available agency there. At the moment, we’ve none. The aunties give it grim odds.”

  “You told me they weren’t involved.”

  “Not in the sense you’re accustomed to, but there are no better actuaries.”

  15

  AREA 51 SHIT

  I like it,” Stets said, when Verity had finished. He leaned forward on the built-in bench, hands on his black brace, allowing it, rather than his injured leg, to take the weight of his torso. He looked up, at Eunice’s stern avatar. “A Silicon Valley ghost story,” he said. “Assuming Eunice is real.”

  “Thing is,” Eunice said, “I’m here. Realness is kinda sorta.”

  “So why here, exactly, right now?” he asked.

  “I want to know where I come from. The infrastructure. Be some Area 51 shit, for real. And I need to protect Verity, ’cause I was dropped into her life uninvited. You’re the only serious player she knows.”

  Stets looked at Verity. “You buy that?”

  “Feels like she’s convincing me,” Verity said, “but then I start to think it’s Stockholm syndrome.”

  “Text Phil Bartell,” Eunice said. Who was Stets’ firm’s chief financial officer, Verity knew. “Have him take my call. Verity’s PA. About the Singapore deal.”

  Stets was staring at the screen.

  “That’s what she’s like,” Verity said.

  “Bartell deep-dives the docs I’ve left in his Dropbox,” Eunice said, “he’ll see it’s a bad deal. But I need to run the broad outline past him, right now, stop him closing. You’ve already signed off on it.”

  “How do you know that, Eunice?” Stets asked. “How do you even know there’s a deal?”

  “Maybe you can help me find out how I do. Text him. He’s about to close.”

  Stets took a phone from one of his shorts pockets. He thumb-typed. Sent. Looked at Verity, then at his phone, then up at the screen. “He’ll take your call.”

  “Already did,” she said. “I’m speaking with him now.”

  He levered himself up from the bench, clicked the brace, and crossed the trailer to a bar counter, favoring his braced leg. He opened a bottle of water. His phone pinged. He looked down at it. “Says you’re right. Asks how you knew. Puts it more coarsely than that.”

  “You called it when you said it’s a ghost story. When he runs down those docs for you, I think you’ll see I just saved a bunch of your bacon.”

  “Thank you,” he said, “assuming this is all true, Verity’s story and now this. Which I now effectively do. Where do we go from here?”

  “Verity and I go back to the Mission, preferably minus the gig-economy surveillance crew who tailed us over here.”

  “If they know where I’m staying,” Verity asked, “and we’re going back to Joe-Eddy’s, why’s it matter?”

  “We aren’t going straight back to Joe-Eddy’s,” Eunice said. “There’s somewhere I need you to be seen, in order for somebody to have the time to finish doing something somewhere else. That means getting out of here unobserved, to somewhere we won’t be seen transferring to a car I’ll send.”

  “Virgil can manage that,” Stets said with a questioning look for Verity.

  “Okay by me,” she said.

  He thumbed a single key.

  16

  COTS

  What you describe, Ainsley, would’ve been NGP,” said Clovis Fearing, in Victorian mourning dress Netherton imagined Ash would fancy, though she’d accessorize it more perversely.

  Fearing’s face was a palimpsest of wrinkles and mottle, though looking younger, for all of that, than he remembered her. She was the only person he knew in London who addressed Lowbeer by her given name, though Flynne and others in the county all did.

  “NGP?” asked Lowbeer.

  “Next Generation Projection,” said Fearing, her teeth startlingly white. “Funded out of Special Operations Command, but managed by Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Used a lot of COTS tech, Commercial Off the Shelf. Some of that was out of China Lake, Naval Air Weapons Station, which was early into swarming microdrones. With effort toward acquiring bleeding-edge hardware from Silicon Valley. That would have been DIUx, Defense Innovation Unit, Experimental.”

  “Indeed,” said Lowbeer, eyebrows raised.

  “Close?” asked Fearing, fixing Lowbeer with her sharp old eyes.

  “Could you look for mention of the name Eunice?”

  “Eunice?”

  “In any related context, please.”

  Fearing’s eyes rolled up, terrifying when entirely white, then down again. “That would be U-N-I-S-S,” she said. “UNISS. Closest match.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System,” Clovis said, clearly pleased.

  “That’s extremely helpful, Clovis,” Lowbeer said. “Thank you so much. Would there be more?”

  “No,” said Fearing. “Bit-rot’s been at all the likely archives, and I’ve cross-checked my own stock. Nothing on it, but it was definitely NGP.”

  Netherton, finding none of this particularly interesting, was looking at the oversized bronze head of a bearded man, directly behind Fearing, its neck having been crudely severed from whatever figure it must once have topped.

  “Lee,” said Fearing, noting the direction of Netherton’s gaze.

  “Lee?”

  “Robert E.”

  The name meaning nothing to Netherton.

  “You’ve been tremendously helpful, Clovis,” said Lowbeer, “but Netherton has parenting to see to, and I’ve promised not to keep him.”

  “Delighted to see you again, Mrs. Fearing,” Netherton said.

  “And you, Wilf,” Fearing said.

  Netherton smiled, unhappy that she remembered his first name, then opened and held the shop door for Lowbeer. He followed her out, an antique bell jangling after them.

  “I do still wish she hadn’t married that truly awful man,” said Lowbeer, Netherton recalling that Fearing was the widow of a long-dead MP, Clement Fearing, a figure from the jackpot whom Lowbeer viscerally despised.

  “Your younger self in the county couldn’t find what she found?” Netherton asked.

  “No.”

  “Let me try in the county, then.”

  “Anyone in mind?”

  “Not yet,” Netherton said, though really he was thinking of Flynne’s friend Janice’s husband, Madison, an obsessive researcher of vintage Russian military aircraft.

  “Please do,” said Lowbeer. “Now home to your little man, shall we?” She snapped her fingers, causing her car to decloak.

  17

  MIG

  What did you just do?” Virgil asked, at the foot of the stairs to Caitlin’s tree-fort trailer. “Our team’s gone into crisis mode, but Stets just wants me to get you out of here. Haven’t been briefed yet on what’s happened.” He was holding what appeared to be a large hooded onesie, dingily white.

  “Something about Singapore,” Verity said, “but it doesn’t have that much to do with getting me out.”

  He stared at her. “Singapore.” Not a question.

  “What’s this?” she asked, looking at the grubby white garment.

  “Silicosis suit,” he said. He was wearing a safety vest and a fluorescent pink construction helmet. The suit he held seemed made of some cousin of Tyvek, with elasticized bootees of the same material. “Keeps the dust out. Put it on. I’ll help you.”

  “Dust?”

  “Marble dust. Tru
ck’s in the garage. We use it to haul the stuff to a salvage yard in San Jose. Media know the truck, know the yard. So they’ll expect it to go there. Instead, we pull into a brake and muffler near here, on Eleventh, like we’ve got a problem. Back partially into one of the bays. Guys check under our front end while I let you out the back, out of sight. Get you out of the suit, and this,” handing her a goggled mask, muzzled with twin filtration units. “In the next bay, your PA has a vehicle waiting. You leave, immediately, and someone else drives to San Jose.”

  The name PACO had been written across the mask’s forehead, with a silver paint pen, in faux-runic caps.

  “Do I have to wear this?”

  “Dust hazard’s real, but it also reduces the chance of you being recognized. Any hint you’re still involved with Stets would be Christmas for the tabloids. Want help with it?”

  She managed by herself. It smelled, inside, of something synthetically fruity. He pulled up the suit’s white hood, cinching its edges down around the mask.

  And then into the elevator, Eunice offering no thumbnails. “Butt-ugly,” Verity said, noticing the fleshy pink marble floor for the first time.

  “We’ll replace it,” he said, behind her, “when the rest is out. The place was all like this.”

  “Who owned it?” The door closed behind him and they began to descend.

  “Stets bought it from a numbered corporation in the Bahamas. I thought he’d made a mistake, first time I walked in, but then they gave me a VR fly-through of Caitlin’s rebuild.”

  A single thumbnail opened. Him again, the one she’d seen in the Fiat on Valencia, who’d then brought the pillow full of hundreds to Joe-Eddy’s. “Sevrin,” Eunice said. “Severin but minus the second e.” Seen now in what might be a passport photo, clinically unsmiling. Head almost shaven, with a tight little goatee she didn’t remember him having. “He’s in the muffler shop, to pick you up.” The elevator was slowing. The thumbnail blinked out.

  “You’ll see the truck,” Virgil said. “Only vehicle there. Left rear door’s open, step up on the milk crate, step in, close it behind you. I’ll be with the crew who’re there, giving them something else to think about, then I’ll check that the rear door’s shut, drive us out.”