“Won’t happen. Which is to say zero fucking way.”
“You need somebody they’d have a harder time messing with,” Eunice said. “He’s the best you’ve got. I did a relationship tree, shows that anybody else you know who’s got the kind of juice you need, you met through him. And none of them have anywhere near as much reason to help you.”
“I don’t ‘have’ Stets.” She resisted the urge to throw the phone across the kitchen, reminding herself it was hers, and that she was talking with Eunice over the headset and Tulpagenics’ phone.
“You don’t think he’s an asshole, either.”
Verity’s phone rang, caller unknown, making her reconsider throwing it across the room. “Hello?”
“Verity? Stets.”
“Stets,” she said, blankly.
“I have your new PA on the other line. She thinks we should meet.”
“She does?”
“Says this morning may be your only available slot for a while. Virgil will pick you up. Twenty minutes?”
Virgil Roberts, who looked, people agreed, like Janelle Monáe had a twin brother, and appeared to non-insiders to be Stets’ meta-gofer, but among other things was his resident pitch-critic. “Okay,” she said, “twenty minutes. See you.” Finger-swiping to end it. “Dammit, Eunice—”
“Best I got right now in the might-work-like-a-motherfucker department. Okay?”
“Shit,” said Verity, in what she reluctantly recognized as the relatively affirmative, and twenty minutes later was climbing into the passenger seat of an electric BMW.
“How are you?” Virgil asked, grinning, extending his right hand to give her left an upside-down squeeze.
“Complicated. Where are we going?”
“Fremont,” he said, as Eunice facially recognized him, the street name meaning nothing in particular to Verity. He pulled back into Valencia traffic.
“How are you, Virgil?” she asked.
“Working for the man. Mostly wrangling a lot of reno details, but on what I’d call a heroic scale. You working?”
“Pied-à-terre,” Eunice said, an aerial shot filling the glasses. Sunlit uppermost stories of a tower, its massive verticality penetrating a photoshopped bed of cotton-candy fog. “The fiancée’s regooding them the top two floors. Footprint’s about three tennis courts.” Then it was gone.
“Just got a job,” Verity said, “but I can’t talk about it.”
“As long as it doesn’t involve getting marble out, you’re good. First owner evidently didn’t know that other materials existed, so there’s a lot of it. Caitlin wants every last gram of it optimally recycled, so we have to get as much of it as possible out intact, unbroken.”
Her phone rang. “Sorry,” she said, raising it.
“No problem.” He smiled, turning another corner.
“Don’t hate on me,” Eunice said.
“I do have good reason,” Verity said, her tone cheerful for Virgil’s benefit.
“It’s situational.”
“Steady-state, if things keep on this way,” Verity said, as Virgil turned onto Fourteenth.
“We have to stay inside their feedback loop. Sometimes I have to push you out of a comfort zone.”
The grimly accusatory façade of the Armory loomed now. “Being pushed is outside my comfort zone.”
“Right now,” Eunice said, “we’re being followed. By the dude who’s behind on his child support. Four more waiting for rides, to go wherever he follows us. Last one’s covering 3.7, in case you come back. Work with me.”
Verity took a deep breath, slowly let it out. “Okay.” Beyond the Armory now, they passed antigentrification murals.
“We need a sit-down with Stets, the three of us.”
“How would that look, devicewise?”
“We go with what he’s got. Worst case, you prop your phone up on something, speaker on, and I use an avatar.”
“Topics?”
“Your new job, my views on your employer…”
“What you’ve said to me?” She glanced at Virgil, deciding he looked a little too determinedly like he was just driving.
“Sure,” Eunice said, “and whatever you think about it. It’s not a pitch. We’re giving him a chance to decide whether he wants to be involved with us.”
Past shoals of waist-high cardboard microshanties now, some with shopping carts as structural elements, many roofed with pale-blue dollar-store plastic tarps. “That’s not entirely his call. Or yours.”
“I know. But we’re almost there. End the call.”
“Okay,” said Verity, “bye.” Lowering the phone as they drove beneath the overpass feeding the bridge.
Opening out into SoMa, to descend eventually, blocks and corners later, an off-street ramp of spotlessly new concrete. Stopping before a grid of white-painted steel rod, which rose hydraulically. As he pulled forward, she glanced back, seeing the gate descend behind them.
12
Alfred Mews
Rainey had decorated their flat with furniture collected since joining him in London, all of it the product, relatively speaking, of human hands. None of it, as she put it, liable to shape-shift. She admired Scandinavian design of the mid-twentieth century, but couldn’t afford it, so looked for period knockoffs rather than assembler simulacra.
“So it’s earlier, there? Earlier than the county?” she asked from the kitchenette, as she plated their evening meal.
“The year after the Americans elected their first female president.”
“Gonzalez?”
“No. They elected theirs earlier, in 2016. And the Brexit vote was to remain. May I help you?”
“Have a look in at Thomas, please.”
He crossed to the nursery door, saw Thomas curled in his crib, surrounded by a soothing miniature auroral display. “He’s fine.”
“Are people happier there?” she asked. “Happier than they were here, then?”
“I gather they aren’t, particularly.”
“Pity,” she said. “Ready for tilapia tacos? Place on Tottenham Court Road. Better Mexican in your new stub, no doubt. Why aren’t they happy, there?”
“The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point.” He took a seat at the table. “They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.”
She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.” Picking up a taco. “What had to change, to produce the opposite result in that election?”
“We don’t know yet. Connectivity’s too poor to access the data needed for that.”
“Could you take me there?”
“Not yet. That same lack of connectivity. Infrastructure’s wanting.”
“I liked the county,” she said, “even though it made me sad.”
“It did? Why?”
“They’re living in a conspiracy theory, but a real one. Controlled by secret masters. Your employer, primarily.”
“But isn’t it better there now, than if we hadn’t intervened?” he asked.
“It is, I’m sure, but it makes a joke of their lives.”
“But everyone you know there is in on it.”
“I don’t know whether I’d rather know or not know,” she said, and took a bite of taco.
13
Stets
Virgil parked in a white garage, beside several crisp trade vans, the polished concrete floor only lightly marked by tires. In front of them, massively framed in bronze-toned metal, a single equally bronze-toned elevator door. First owner, she assumed, doubting the architect fiancée was into faux-pharaonic kitsch.