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 room, 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.”
“I know the feeling,” Verity said.
“Sleep,” he said, possibly to himself. Like he could do it right there, on his feet, but he headed for the bedroom instead.
26
Denisovan Embassy
Lev Zubov, who’d first introduced Netherton to Lowbeer, curated a list of establishments in London which had been wholly repurposed since originally being named.
Hence the Denisovan Embassy, assembler-excavated beneath most of one entire side of Hanway Street. This was a linear sequence of low-ceilinged rooms, none very large, dressed to somewhat resemble a cave system. Having been built as a themed nightclub, evoking the wholly imaginary erotic appeal of various species of early hominid, it now functioned, original name and décor intact, as a subterranean twenty-four-hour breakfast bar.
To Netherton, it was simply a place that did rather good breakfasts, its club days evident in artificially irregular walls and ceilings of a geologically incorrect sandstone, cartoonishly daubed with phallic and vulvar pictoglyphs. What furniture there was was less convincing still, assembled pseudogeologically from whatever the rest of the place consisted of. All of it, however, now mercifully minus any active assembler-swarms, hence immobile and unchanging.
Seated here, none too comfortably, on a truncated stalagmite, he could at least be glad the place made a decent flat white. The pert young woman who’d brought it hadn’t looked particularly Denisovan, in spite of rumors that former staff could still be found here, some having chosen not to reverse certain risqué modifications required in their previous employment. He seemed the only customer at the moment, something he put down to Lowbeer being expected momentarily.
Now Ash entered, her outfit approximating a Victorian lady’s riding habit, but reimagined as having been cut from nylon aviator jackets and equipped with a demi-bustle that resembled part of a miniature dirigible. She carried a top hat, his least favorite sort of headgear, held just to the side of her multiply zippered black sateen bosom, in what he supposed had once been exactly the correct manner.
“Congratulations,” she said, placing the hat on the faux-sandstone table slab.
“For?”
“She’s chuffed. Pleased as I’ve seen her.”
“She’s here?”
“Outside.” Seating herself on the nearest stalagmite stump, the demi-bustle discreetly adjusting itself. “I was just on the phone with your man in the county. You seem, by consulting him, to have triggered a game change.”