Agency Read online

  “What do you think that means?”

  “I’m entertaining an upload hypothesis.”

  “A what?”

  “Transfer of someone’s consciousness, or some equivalent of it, to a digital platform. Sometime before the campaign year, let alone the election.”

  “Can they even do that?”

  “Not that I know of, but Area 51, right? And say they could, even a little? Wouldn’t they go ahead and try it?”

  “So say they do, what?”

  “Somebody gets a big-ass idea, sometimes, pure blue-sky, but there’s no existing tech to implement it. So they try to ballpark it. Go really hard in a radical direction, but on some half-assed implementation of whatever’s handy, best they can. Sometimes it works. Other times, it might do something they never imagined.”

  Verity was watching the barista briskly wiping down the chrome-and-copper cuirass of the espresso console. “You think that’s your story?”

  “Could be. Gavin’s laminar agent, high-end but half-assed.”

  Verity looked over at the Followrs girl, their eyes awkwardly meeting, then glancing away. “How long do we have to be here?”

  “On the brink of nuclear war?”

  “No,” said Verity, “here, in 3.7.”

  “They’re almost done, at Joe-Eddy’s. Running a final check now.”

  “It sucks, that there’s one in the bathroom.”

  “I’ll make that one look like it’s had a nervous breakdown,” Eunice said. “Bad quality control in Shenzhen. And bingo, right now, they’re done, leaving the apartment. They have a car waiting. We can go back now. Our girl here gets to go home too. Bring your drink if you want it.” Verity got up, the girl pretending unsuccessfully to not see her do it.

  On the walk back to Joe-Eddy’s, Eunice demo’d feeds from all five cams. Nothing happening in Joe-Eddy’s, nobody there, just that horror-movie feel of any unoccupied webcam feed. The one in the kitchen watched the table and the window, this last still open a crack, just as Eunice had had her leave it, for the drones. “They left fruit?” Verity asked, noticing a bowl with apples, two bananas, a pear.

  “My guy,” Eunice said. “I had someone drop by before they came. You didn’t have much in the fridge.” The feed disappeared. “We’ll stay in tonight. They’ll get a show. Script’s all ready.”

  “Script?”

  “What they’ll hear as your side of whatever we actually talk about. They still can’t hear me. If your mouth’s on camera, post’ll fix it so a lip-reader sees whatever we have you say.”

  “Seriously? How’d they get in?”

  “Brought a locksmith.”

  “How’d your guy get in?”

  “Made keys from images I’d captured of yours.”

  Eunice’s drones, the two that had accompanied them to Stets’ place, which had both wound up, in 3.7, under the lapels of Verity’s blazer, were now aloft on Valencia, though Verity wasn’t getting their feeds.

  When they reached Joe-Eddy’s, she took her keys from her purse, imagining Eunice image-capturing them, with either Joe-Eddy’s cam or the drones. She let herself in, the two drones ducking past, on either side of her head, and up the stairs. Closing the door behind her, she turned the deadlock, and slid the bolt into place, this last more satisfying than previously.

  She climbed the stairs, uncomfortably remembering the man Eunice had shown her in Joe-Eddy’s living room, one of the two who’d planted the cams. She unlocked the apartment door.

  Just inside, in Ikea’s cheapest black aluminum frame, hung a comically moody black-and-white group portrait of the Fuckoids, Joe-Eddy’s late-nineties band, Joe-Eddy himself posing with the Japanese Jazzmaster that now hung on the far wall. The photo was something she was so familiar with that she ordinarily didn’t see it. Now though, it hung level, as it only did when someone had just straightened it, since vibration from passing traffic would almost instantly have it crooked again. Had the guy with the wire-rims straightened it, or whoever he’d been with?

  “Don’t,” Eunice said, “or he’ll know you noticed.”

  Verity’s hand was raised, to restore the Fuckoids’ customary lack of kilter. Now she brushed her hair back with it instead, and kept walking. “Who’ll know?” she asked, when she reached the kitchen.

  “Pryor,” said Eunice. “The one I showed you in the living room. Bad news.”

  22

  ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE

  When Netherton opened his eyes, after the call with Janice, he saw Rainey seated at the other end of the couch, her eyes closed. Studying, he assumed, the Qamishli time line Lowbeer had sent. He watched her, savoring her small fleeting expressions, her concentration, the seriousness he hadn’t known she possessed when they were still only colleagues. He resisted the urge to move closer, to take her hand.

  Her eyes opened, met his. “Imagine being a parent in that. Did Lowbeer explain it to you?”

  “The aunties,” Netherton said, “expect nuclear war.”

  Thomas began to cry, from his crib.

  She stood. “Absolutely horrible.”

  “We’re trying to stop it,” he said, realizing to his surprise that actually, to whatever extent, they were.

  23

  NOT TRUSTING IN THE GLITCH

  After reheating beef lasagna, from Eunice’s restock of the fridge, she ate at the kitchen table, watching the drones sneak in and out, via the open window, fussily navigating 3D geometries she guessed kept them off-camera to Cursion. To whatever extent they weren’t, she supposed, Eunice’s postproduction would erase them, showing Cursion a drone-free kitchen.

  After she’d eaten, she decided to shower, anticipating actual nonvirtual privacy behind the La Sirenita curtain that matched Joe-Eddy’s towels. Remembering where Eunice had shown her the bathroom’s faux-Robertson head was, she put the tactical bathrobe on over her clothing, her back to the cam, then awkwardly undressed. Getting behind La Sirenita, she discarded the robe and her t-shirt, reaching out to hang them where they could easily be retrieved. She showered, until the hot was almost gone, then hooked the robe back in, put it on, pulled the hood up, got out, and brushed her teeth in front of the mirror.

  More of me, all the time. Doesn’t feel bad. Just different.

  Verity helped herself to a swig of Joe-Eddy’s naturopathic mouthwash and started swishing. Counted to twenty before she spat it into the sink. “Cam in here still glitching?”

  Eunice showed her a feed of the bathroom, featuring an inconstant vertical oblong in front of the mirror, the color of the tactical robe.

  She went into the bedroom, to the closet, selected a change of clothes, then back to the bathroom, where she toweled her hair semidry and started dressing with the robe over her shoulders, not trusting in the glitch.

  24

  PORCH

  Madison wore wire-rimmed spectacles with colorless resin lenses. Not as historicist affectation, Netherton remembered, but ground to optically correct for some defect in his vision.

  Solemnly amicable, his upper lip entirely concealed by a wide, brushlike mustache, Madison seemed, as Flynne had more than once said, to have had all of his glands removed. Seated in Janice’s workstation chair, he lifted the Wheelie Boy into view, a tablet atop an aluminum rod, rising from a spherical plastic chassis the size of a large grapefruit, with a lug-tired plastic wheel on either side. “Got your little guy here,” he said.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Netherton said.

  Madison touched the base of the Wheelie’s chassis, causing an oddly angled view of the living room to fill Netherton’s field of vision, which straightened then, when Madison placed the Wheelie on the floor before him, upright on its two wheels.

  “Envy you always having your phone with you,” Madison said. “Never cared for wearables myself, so I’m still carrying mine.”

  Having had his imp
lanted when he was too young to recall the procedure, Netherton regarded the residents of the county as essentially phoneless. They wore them variously or, like Madison, carried units resembling a small tablet, all lacking the most basic neuroconnectivity.

  Now he tried his tongue tip on the roof of his mouth, the backs of his front teeth, reacquainting himself with the Wheelie’s steering. Responding, it rolled forward, the height and angle of its cam causing Madison’s beige plastic clogs and white socks to loom. He tilted the camera up and back.

  “After you,” Madison said, raising his arm to point.

  Netherton, already more at home with the controls, tongue-tapped the sequence required to make the wheels briefly rotate in opposite directions, the tablet turning to face the front door, open except for a frame supporting fine plastic mesh, intended to exclude flying insects. Through that, now, the morning sunlight of the county’s summer. Madison rose from his chair and went to hold the framed mesh open, as Netherton steered the Wheelie out, swiveling the tablet for a better view. “You and Janice never wanted to move out to the compound proper?”

  “Flynne’s banned calling it the compound,” Madison said, “proper or otherwise. For the reason you just called it that. The world’s being run out of it. We’ve been happy to stay right here and still be able to help.”

  Netherton rolled farther out onto the porch, Madison following. “Rainey says it saddens her, that things here are so heavily stage-managed. Do you and Janice feel that way?”

  “No,” said Madison, “not given the immediate future you’re trying to keep us from.”

  Netherton turned the Wheelie, tilting the cam up at him. “I wish I knew that the future of this stub will be an improvement over history as we know it, but we’re no more able to see your future than our own.”

  “Not that we expect you to be all-seeing,” Madison said, looking down at the Wheelie. “We know you’ve just got cooler phones and better computers.”

  “I understand you’ve had some luck with the list I gave Janice,” Netherton said.

  “Finnish gentleman, on one of my boards, Russian militaria. Has lots of American material from back when you’re looking. Got positives on his first search. Your U-N-I-S-S, for instance, commenced April 2015, out of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, but then was run from the Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, plus Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That they needed two APLs suggests a lot of processing, by the standard of the day.”

  “Physics?”

  “Not that it was about physics, this system. My Finn’s not seeing anything after 2023. Highly classified throughout, though. He was delighted at how highly. This was all information he already had, of course, but no idea he had it, and might never have found it, if I hadn’t asked him to look.”

  “Excellent,” said Netherton, assuming that it probably was, insofar as Lowbeer seemed not to have known about it either.

  “There’s more,” said Madison, “but we won’t be seeing that until I give him something in return.”

  “Lowbeer will want anything he finds, money no object.”

  “Money’s no object anyway,” said Madison, “because this is a peer-to-peer exchange. I could lose my membership if I offered him money. He’s given me a want list of his own, information he hasn’t been able to find. When I find it for him, he’ll give us the rest of what he’s got, plus anything related that he might turn up in the meantime.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Performance data on the Kamov Ka-50, a single-seat Russian attack helicopter, designed in the 1980s. The Black Shark, they called it. NATO reporting name Hokum-B.”

  “Why does he want that?”

  “Because he hasn’t been able to find it himself.”

  Netherton tooth-tapped the Wheelie Boy around, to take in the view from their front porch. The gravel driveway ran down to a paved road, beyond which a rusted wire fence enclosed uneven land he supposed was pasture, dotted with a few trees. He was always struck by how unplanned this vista was, a genuinely nondesigner landscape.

  Nothing like it in London, hence stranger to him than, for instance, Madison’s nonmonetary economy of fossilized military secrets.

  25

  BRANCH PLANTS OF ME

  Why do you text sometimes, not others?” Verity asked, back in the living room.

  “Text when you’re on the phone, with somebody, or there’s ambient noise. And sometimes for an extra layer of security.”

  Verity, remembering her pulling Department of Motor Vehicles bar codes down, into passing traffic, crossed to the window, to stand beside the Ikea stool, its soldering-iron scars still hidden beneath the telenovela book. Pedestrians were passing, on the sidewalk opposite. She wondered if any were from Tulpagenics, or Cursion, or Followrs. And now a cab was pulling over, directly below the window.

  She took a step forward, looked down. To see Joe-Eddy unmistakably emerging, from the cab’s rear door, multiply slung with shoulder-strapped bags. He looked up, through ridiculous white-framed goggles. A thumbnail of what he saw appeared: her face, in the window, looking down at him. “Joe-Eddy—”

  “By way of another branch plant,” Eunice said. “I only knew a little before you did.”

  “Branch plant?”

  “How I think of ’em. Gavin’s laminae.”

  He was headed for the street door now. She could see it, in the feed from his white goggles.

  She’d started down the stairs before she was even aware of it, knowing he couldn’t get past the bolt. His feed blinked out before she reached the door.

  She undid the deadlock, then the bolt, opened it. Looked into his eyes, behind the goggles.

  “Here,” he said, “get this—” A black backpack, over one shoulder, was slipping down his arm. She snagged it, almost dropping it. “Thanks,” he said, stepping in. She closed the door behind him, turned the deadlock, slid the bolt. “You got cooler glasses,” he said, looking at her. “These, it had this fifteen-year-old DJ in Frankfurt build out of a Korean AR headset.”

  Get him upstairs.

  “What the fuck was that?” Joe-Eddy asked.

  “A text. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “It texts me too, but only on my phone,” he said. “I didn’t know this was about you until we were on the runway in SFO. Retainer has a clause about not telling anyone where it sends me. I had my phone out to let you know, when I’d gotten to FRA and learned where I was going, but it reminded me.”

  “She hired you?”

  “‘She’?” Joe-Eddy looked at her. “Mine’s not gendered, that I know of.”

  “She’s gendered, trust me. You were dealing with kind of a subprogram of hers.”

  “Okay, she. Paid off my Frankfurt contract, did some kind of meta-deal on top of that, like now they’ll make me an IT manager if I ever do them the favor of coming back.”

  “Get used to it,” Verity said, hoisting the backpack over one shoulder. She started up. “Told you what she is yet?” She heard him stop, on the stairs behind her. Turned to look back.

  Standing there, draped in his luggage, wearing loose black jeans and a belly-hiding black hoodie, he peered at her narrowly. “Not even close.”

  “I’m supposed to be alpha-testing her.”

  “As what?”

  “A cross-platform avatar. They’d customize them. But I still keep thinking it’s all some asshole’s YouTube comedy channel.”

  “Instead of rogue AI,” he said, making an expression she’d seen as a client struggled to describe the bad thing that had happened to their company’s system. “So I leave you here with my fucking cat,” he said, “and you get involved in this?”

  “You don’t have a fucking cat.”

  “I know.”

  She turned and started up the stairs.

  In the living r
oom, beside the Fuckoids photo, she unslung the backpack, lowered it to the floor. “I hope this isn’t money.”

  “Books,” he said, “and cheese.” The goggles’ round white frames looked like half-inch lengths of PVC pipe. He put his other bags on the leather armchair, the one she avoided because its springs were shot.

  Hi, Joe-Eddy. I’m Eunice. You’ve been dealing with a subsidiary of mine, now incorporated.

  Her avatar appeared in a thumbnail. It seemed to have gotten sterner, and somehow more specific unto itself. The fade now rose to a cliff-sided plateau supporting the uneven canopy of a miniature jungle of curls.

  Verity was in the shower here, when you were being recruited in Frankfurt, but I didn’t know. I don’t know what they’ve done until they turn up and I incorporate them.

  “Who tells them where to start?” Verity asked, assuming that Eunice had addressed her that way because Joe-Eddy was reading this too.

  They’re just sort of issued. Out of me but not by me, feels like. They look at available input, then go where they see they can be of most use. In Joe-Eddy’s case, that was securing his services and bringing him here.

  “Shouldn’t you tell him what’s going on,” Verity asked, “like the screw cams?”

  Branch plant showed him the feeds, in the cab from SFO. He already knew about Cursion.

  “You did?” Looking at him.

  “Only by reputation. Creepy but dull? That Banality of Evil kind of thing?”

  He headed for the kitchen. She followed, watching him open the fridge, study the contents, select a carton of her orange juice, and drink from it, deeply. “Turkey and Syria weirding you out?”

  “When I can remember to let it,” Verity said. “Shit here’s been pretty distracting.”

  “Folks in Frankfurt made me feel like the Cold War never really went away. Somebody shoots down a couple of Russian jets, wham, it’s Cold War Atlantis, risen from the depths.” He put the carton back in the fridge, closed the door, yawned uncontrollably. “Couldn’t sleep on the plane. No Wi-Fi. Watched a Transformers movie and wondered if the world’s about to end.”