“Grid’s in meters,” Ash said. “Here’s a jump from standing, knees bending backward.” It bent its knees backward, shoulders canting slightly forward, and sprang toward them, a full three squares.
“Like a bird,” he observed.
“No. Birds have knees like ours, but we mistake their ankles for their lower legs.”
Could that be true? he wondered.
“Regardless,” she said, “each wheel has its own motor. They’re extended now, under power.” It rolled smoothly toward Netherton, legs immobile, turned, circled back. “It can also jump with wheels under power.”
“How did you learn to do this?”
“Practice, on this period sim. Easier than you’d think.” She raced it toward the horizon, executing a leap that amounted to flying. To land again, still speeding along. “Stop making those tense little sounds,” she said.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were subvocalizing.”
“How will I be controlling it?”
“It’s not a Wheelie. Nor a peri,” she said, doing something that caused the circular feed to fold seamlessly around his head, a full 360 of vision.
He stood alone, as if he were the thing itself, upright on the metrically gridded plane. “Neural cut-out’s in effect,” she said. “Raise your right arm. It will do the same, but your right arm won’t actually move.”
He did. “Like a peri.”
“It can’t emulate the movements of a human body as accurately, given its form. It somewhat approximates them, within available ranges. What you’re going to be doing now, for the most part, is internalizing those ranges. Advance your right foot.”
He did.
“Your left.”
He did, seeing the perspective change slightly.
“That’s with your wheels retracted,” she said. “Now repeat, indefinitely, as we learn to walk. Toward the horizon.”
“Will it all be this tedious?”
“Jumping at speed is quite euphoric, with a little practice, but first you must learn to walk.”
“How far?”
“Until you don’t have to think about it.”
He got on his way then, toward the horizon that seemed to grow no closer, meter by square yellow meter.
29
Legion
Joe-Eddy woke her with a stoneware mug of coffee, the product of one or another single-cup device sharing a crowded shelf in his kitchen cabinet. He was wearing the orange plaid shirt-jacket. At least it fit him.
“McWolven time,” he said, putting the mug down on the café chair, beside the Tulpagenics glasses and the headset. He returned to the kitchen.
She vacated what he called her larva costume and occupied the bathroom, where her bag now hung, unfolded, on the back of the door. When she was finished there, and trusting in Eunice’s glitch this time, dressed, she went back to the living room and put on the glasses and the headset.
“We have a Tulpagenics employee on Wolven’s webcam,” Eunice said, showing Verity a thumbnail of a pink-haired girl. “Reading her as coincidental. She’s a receptionist, wasn’t there when you went in to see Gavin. She’s with her sister and three Facebook friends. They all fit my local face-mapping.”
“The Uber outfit isn’t represented?” Verity asked.
“What Uber outfit?” asked Joe-Eddy, coming back along the hallway in the white Korean AR goggles, flip-flops now replaced with age-inappropriate fluorescent sneakers.
“Followrs,” said Eunice, Verity guessing she was showing him something.
He stood, reading empty air. “Been hoping that whole story was The Onion,” he said.
“I’ve taken care of them,” Eunice said, “for this morning, anyway. Gavin had a dozen headed for the Mission earlier, so I downloaded the app and paid for each of them to be followed by two more, and each of those by two more, till I’d used up all the Followrs in SF and they were pulling people in from Oakland.”
“Nice,” said Joe-Eddy, admiringly.
“Can they tell it was you?” Verity asked.
“Gavin’s going to have his suspicions,” Joe-Eddy said.
“You know him?” Verity asked.
“No, but Eunice, last night, or one of her new parts, left some files for me.”
“I don’t get this ‘new parts’ part,” Verity said.
“Say somebody wrote a self-replicating platform,” he said, “then loaded Eunice, whatever we mean by that, as core entity. The platform spawns subagents as it encounters situations that might benefit from attention. They then provide that attention. Recruiting me in Frankfurt, say, or compiling a dossier on Gavin. Then they report back, show their work, and get subsumed into her Borg.”
“I told her that,” Eunice said.
“He makes it easier to understand,” Verity said.
“There’s a school of scenario-spinning,” Joe-Eddy continued, “that sees the most intense AI change drivers as machine-human hybrids. Radical augmentations of human consciousness, not code trying to behave like it. So here’s Eunice, and that’s how she self-describes, experientially. Scenario fits, wear it till you need a new one.”
“Table for two, coming up in Wolven,” Eunice said. “Verity goes straight to the back, secures it as the tech bros are getting up, while Joe-Eddy orders, brings it to the table. Execute.”
And Joe-Eddy was out the door, heading down the stairs, Verity not far behind him.
The stools along the counter at the front window, she saw as she entered, were occupied by soft grunge girls in pastel plaid flannel. Two had pink hair, the cursor going to the one with LATINX crewel-worked in fancy capitals across her shoulders, who Verity assumed was the Tulpagenics employee.
She headed for the rear, where a pair of Filson-clad, meticulously bearded young men were indeed pushing back their chairs as she arrived to claim their table. Seated, she watched Joe-Eddy paying for and collecting their breakfast.
Said he knew what you wanted.
He brought over two McWolvens and two black coffees, on a larger gray tray. As he arrived, phones began to ding and chirp around them, notification tones, bringing an instant cessation of conversation, everyone but Verity looking at their own small screen.
“What’s that?” Verity asked, as Joe-Eddy put down the tray. She hadn’t had any notifications turned on since she’d split with Stets.
“Presidential tweet,” said Joe-Eddy, looking at his own phone. “But it just says negotiations are ongoing. ‘We got this,’ basically.”
Democrats called her tweets “Churchillian,” someone had said, while Republicans called them “Orwellian.”
Looks like we have Gavin incoming.
“We do?”
He has people watching. Doubt it’s anything to do with the Tulpagenics kids over there. But they want me to see him coming, otherwise he wouldn’t be walking the last two blocks. They’d have dropped him at the door. Eat up and get moving, Joe-Eddy.
“What?” Joe-Eddy asked. “I’m chopped liver?”
Table for two. ETA in five.
Joe-Eddy started finishing his McWolven.
“Why’s he coming here?” Verity asked.
I shut Cursion out, when you and I met, so he had the cams installed. Now he only gets your half of any conversation we have, when we’re in the apartment, and I’m doctoring that anyway, which I doubt he knows. He’ll use the excuse of having the convo he promised you to try to get more of a sense of what I’m up to.
Thumbnails opening, on Gavin walking past 3.7, headed their way. One of them framed his face, unsmiling in close-up, the drone evidently flying directly in front of him, unnoticed. First time she’d seen him not smiling. Maybe this was just resting-Gavin-face. “When you first had them shut out,” Verity asked Eunice, “why didn’t they just come and get their hardware back?”