Along a hallway, walls the dingy beige of the foyer below. He opened one of a pair of brown-painted steel doors, into bright light and a low tumult of small sounds. “Don’t worry about your ears,” he said, touching an orange plastic muff. “I just wear these because I get tired of it.”
Stepping past him into a factory loft, shadow-free fluorescent light and this quiet cacophony of rustling, clicking, buzzing. Machines, busy rows of them. The walls were white-painted concrete block. To her left, steel-framed windows with old-fashioned privacy glass, horizontally ridged. A smell like scorched polyester. She recognized some of the machinery from tours Stets had been given: deposition printers, injection molders…
“Kathy Fang.” A woman, offering her hand.
Verity took it. “Verity Jane.”
“Expecting you.” Handshake firm.
“How?”
“We received a text.” Chinese-American, late thirties in a gray sweatshirt and mom jeans that probably weren’t ironic.
“She texted you?”
“Never uses the same number twice. But she’d told us recently that we’d hear, if she had to go away.”
“What did it say?”
“That she was going away. That you were on your way, from the city.”
“Why am I here?”
“She bought something from us. We’ve been modifying it to her specifications. It’s for you.”
Remembering her phone, Verity looked back at the man who’d introduced himself as Dixon. “He has my phone,” she said to the woman, “and everything Tulpagenics issued me. I want my phone.”
“Sorry. Needs to stay pouched,” the woman said.
“Eunice tell you that?”
“In the same text, but we’d insist anyway.”
“The drones were made here?”
“They seriously slowed us down, on a run of mandibles.”
“Mandibles?”
“Between those drones and finishing your boy, we put a kink in the costuming pipeline for a semi-big second sequel.”
“Boy?”
“We’d gotten hold of plans ourselves, had fabbed most of it. Then Eunice contacted us, offering plans for the rest, plus her own modifications, in exchange for exclusive option to buy. The plans for the modifications alone would have been worth it to us. We did the job. This morning she phoned, told us she was picking up the option, and to expect you. Payment’s been delivered. Here you are.”
“Is she dead?”
“I don’t know. She said we could trust you, as well as anyone she sends to help you. If I knew more, I’d tell you. We build things here. Meet specs. Keep our mouths shut. Film and television production are secretive industries.” She gestured down an aisle bisecting the rows of repetitively restless machinery, the length of the long room, to another pair of brown doors. “Come and see him,” she said, starting down the aisle, without looking to see whether Verity followed.
36
Gone
Gone,” Ash said, when Netherton answered her pulsing sigil.
Rainey had just placed an egg salad sandwich and a glass of milk on the kitchen table, beside the controller.
“That would be Eunice?” he asked.
“Neither Johns Hopkins nor the University of Washington are hosting her now,” Ash said. “Johns Hopkins continues to provide a better gateway than we had previously, and I’ve retained what little access we had to Cursion’s back chatter. She hasn’t been mentioned.”
“Where does that leave us, then?”
“Verity Jane.”
“Why did you choose her?” he asked.
“I didn’t want our nascent agent emulating any personalities at Cursion. Verity’s not sociopathic.”
“This Jane?” he asked.
“Verity. Jane’s her surname.”
Netherton picked up half of his sandwich. “Tell me more, while I eat.”
“We obliquely put Eunice in touch with fabricators. She ordered four small military-grade aerial drones. We then managed to contact them ourselves, discovering that they were already building, for themselves, a passable knockoff of a bipedal combat drone. Verity Jane may already be with them, in Oakland. Wherever she is, she finds herself in a very different situation than the one she woke to Monday. Via the drone represented by the sim you practiced with, you’ll soon be having a conversation with her. A woman with no idea of stubs, and no particular reason to believe anything you say.”
His mouth full, Netherton nodded dubiously, momentarily forgetting that she couldn’t see him.
37
Top-Heavy
Slightly smaller than Joe-Eddy’s bedroom, the room beyond the second set of brown doors, less brightly lit, was empty, aside from a metal folding chair and something that reminded Verity of an Italian heater her mother had had, an electric oil-filled radiator, squat yet dynamic-looking. This one, though, was strapped to a hand trolley, tilted back against the wall. Her mother’s had been teal, chrome trim. This one, various shades of gray. “What’s that?” she asked.
“Your guy,” Kathy Fang said, behind her, in the doorway.
Verity turned. “‘Guy’?”
“A drone,” Kathy Fang said. Dixon was behind her, his earmuffs on.
“It flies?”
“Has legs,” Dixon said. “Wheels too. Can’t fly.”
Verity turned back, seeing that it did have legs, short ones, two of them, currently positioned between the trolley’s two plump tires. “Why’s it strapped in like that?”
“Keeps it from falling over while the gyros are off,” Kathy Fang said. “It’s still charging.” She indicated a flat rectangular unit on the floor, like the charger for an electric bicycle but larger, a red LED glowing at one end. “That goes green, it’s ready.”
“For what?”
“For whoever it is you’re supposed to meet.”
Verity looked at the chair.
“Once you’ve met them, there’s a more comfortable space for you upstairs. Wave when they’re here and Dixon will take you up. We have mandibles need overseeing.” She stepped back, closing the door.
There were two unopened bottles of water on the floor beside the chair. She sat down, bent to pick one up, unscrewed the top, and drank.
With the bottle in her hand, she looked at the thing. The LED on the charger was still red. “Eunice?”
Which felt stupid, and made her sad when there was no answer.
38
The Handshake
Netherton remembered Flynne using a county-fabbed controller, printed in a plastic resembling icing sugar, to first interface with the peripheral they’d found for her in London.
Seated on the couch now, with the controller from the Denisovan Embassy activated, eyes closed, its cams showed him their flat, in that anachronistic squashed-circle format familiar from the sim. The upper segment was currently presenting the windows directly behind him, with their view of the mews.
“Waiting for the handshake,” Ash said, likely in the yurt, in Dalston, attended by her tattoos and the tardibot.
“What handshake?”
“Your controller must perform one with Johns Hopkins APL.”
“Why, if Eunice is no longer there?”
“It’s our best present gateway to adequate connectivity. University of Washington’s slower.”
A short tone sounded.
“What was that?”
“The handshake,” she said. “We’re in.”
The display filled with another room, smaller, bare. A woman in a tweed jacket leaned tensely forward on a chair, staring at him narrowly.