“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 gesture 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.”