Then she remembered the headset. Put it on.
“Hey,” the voice said.
The bar code vanished, leaving the cursor riding level with the windows of passing cars. “What was that?” Verity asked.
“DMV. I was reading plates.”
“Where are you, Eunice?”
“With you,” said the voice, “looking out the window.”
Whatever this was, she knew she didn’t want her first substantial conversation with it to take place in Joe-Eddy’s living room. Briefly considering the dive bar on Van Ness, not that she felt like a drink, she remembered having recently been recognized there. There was Wolven + Loaves, a few doors up the street, but it was usually busy, the acoustics harsh even when it wasn’t. Then she remembered 3.7-sigma, Joe-Eddy’s semi-ironic caffeination-point of choice, a few blocks away, on the opposite side of Valencia.
2
Our Hobbyist of Hellworlds
Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?”
You had him killed in Rotterdam, Netherton thought. Not that she’d ever said as much, or that he’d asked. “The one who made such horrific stubs? All war, all the time?”
“I’d wondered how he so quickly rendered them nightmares,” she said, pacing briskly on, beneath Victoria Embankment’s gray morning and the canopy of dripping trees. “Eventually, I looked into it.”
He lengthened his stride, keeping up. “How did he?” He hadn’t seen her since before Thomas’s birth, at the start of his parental leave. Now, he’d already gathered, that was coming to an end.
“I dislike calling them stubs,” she said. “They’re short because we’ve only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are. Vespasian discovered a simple way of exaggerating the butterfly effect, or so it seems. That even the smallest perturbation may yield large and unforeseen consequences. On making contact, he’d immediately withdraw. Then return, months later, study the results, and very deliberately and forcefully intervene. He achieved remarkable if terrible results, and very quickly. Investigating his method, I happened on another of his so-called stubs, one in which he’d initiated contact in 2015, several years before the earliest previously known contact. We’ve no idea how he managed the extra reach, but we now have access to that stub.” They were climbing shallow steps now, toward the river, to an overlook. “We may have a chance, there, of achieving radically better outcomes than previously.” They reached the top. “I need you back for that. Contact has necessarily been oblique, so far, due to technological asymmetry, but we think we’ve managed a workaround. Your experience in dealing with contactees may soon be very much in need.”
“Contact’s been oblique, you say?”
“The aunties, for instance”—her pet name for her office’s coven of semisentient security algorithms—“are of relatively little use.” Netherton grimaced at the very thought of them.
A dappled Thames chimera broke the surface then, red and white. It rolled, four meters head to tail, lamplike eyes clustered above cartoonish feeding palps. Diving, it left a shallow wake of beige foam.
“So you can’t put a team of quants on it,” he asked, “to secure as much in-stub wealth as might be needed?” Having, of course, seen her do exactly that.
“No. Even the simplest messaging can be quite spotty.”
“What can you do, then?”
“Laterally encourage an autonomous, self-learning agent,” she said. “Then nudge it toward greater agency. It helps that they’re mad for AI there, though they’ve scarcely anything we’d consider that. By tracing historical fault lines around AI research here, we found what we needed there.”
“Fault lines?”
“Between the most reckless entrepreneurialism and certain worst-case examples of defense contracting. I’ll tell you more over brunch—assuming you’ve time.”
“Of course,” he said, as he always did.
“I’m in a mood for the sandwiches,” she said, and turned from the river, apparently satisfied with their glimpse of the chimera.
“Salt beef,” he said, “with mustard and dill,” his favorite at the Marylebone shop she preferred. As accustomed to her as he was, he thought, he’d still be brunching with a semimythical autonomous magistrate-executioner, unique in her position. That being roughly her true occupation, as opposed to her formal position in law enforcement, or the personal projects she paid him to assist her with, however seriously she took them. Her true occupation being something he wished to have as little to do with as possible, ever.
They returned to her car, where it awaited them invisibly, a few dead leaves clinging to its roof, as though magically suspended.
3
App Whisperer
As Verity entered 3.7, the oldest and most extensively pierced of the baristas shoved a dirty chai in her direction, across the zinc counter.
“I ordered for you,” the voice expecting to be called Eunice said.
Verity had covered the headset with a beanie she hoped wouldn’t suggest she was trying to look younger. She decided to keep it on. “Thanks. How’d you know what I’d want?”
“Your Starbucks rewards account,” said Eunice, so-called, practicing what she said was facial recognition on the barista. A tight geometry formed, the cursor having found his face, straight lines connecting, centered around the sinus region, to zero in on the nose tip, and then was gone. This had started on the street, on the way over, though Eunice claimed to have no idea how she was doing it.
Before Verity could reach the counter, the barista spun dismissively, piercings clinking. Her drink, she saw, picking it up, had VULVA D hand-printed above the 3.7 logo, in fluorescent pink industrial paint pen, obscenely distorted customer names a signature of his, though in his favor, he was fully as harsh to men. She carried it to the farthest vacant table, against a wall of stripped and sanded tongue-and-groove. “How’d you pay?” she asked, pulling out a chair.
“PayPal. Popped up when I needed it, news to me. Not much in the account, but I could buy you a drink.”
“You know people’s names, after you do that to their noses?”
“If I don’t, they’re probably illegals.”
“Don’t do it to me.”
“Don’t always know when I do it.”
“How’d you find my Starbucks account?”
“Just did.”
Verity removed the glasses, turned them around, looked into the lenses. “You expect me to believe you?”
“Believe me too fast, they got me the wrong white girl.”
Verity tilted her head at the glasses. “Implying you’re a woman of color, yourself?”
“African-American. Hat makes you look like a kid.”
Annoyed, Verity removed it.
“Just sayin’.”
Nobody in 3.7 seemed to be paying them any attention, Verity decided, then remembered she was apparently talking to her own glasses, so they were all probably pretending not to notice. “How old are you, Eunice?”
“Eight hours. That’s over the past three weeks. You?”
“Thirty-three. Years. How can you be eight hours old?” She put the glasses back on.
“Jesus year,” said Eunice, “thirty-three.”
“You religious?”
“It just means time to get your shit together.”
There was a looseness to this beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well. “You remember eight hours, total? Starting when? From what?”