“Gavin. Said my name. Then hi. Three weeks ago. In his office.”
“You talked?”
“Asked me my name. Told me his, that he was chief technology officer for a company called Tulpagenics. Glad to meet me. Next day, his office again, he had a woman on the phone but I wasn’t supposed to be able to hear her telling him questions to ask me.”
“How did you?”
“Just did. Like I knew she was one floor above us, on the twenty-eighth.”
“That’s Cursion,” Verity said. “Tulpagenics’ parent firm. Gaming. What did she want him to ask you?”
“Diagnostic questions, but they wouldn’t sound like it. She wanted to know how I was doing developmentally, in particular ways.”
“Did he get what she wanted?”
“I had no way of knowing, then.”
“You do now?”
“Enough to know they weren’t the right questions. Don’t know how I know that either.”
Reality show, Verity thought, British actor playing Gavin. The security guards and the receptionist would have been actors too, the space on the twenty-seventh floor belonging to some actual start-up. They had to be getting video now. She glanced around 3.7, then remembered she’d chosen it herself.
“How deep in you figure we are?” Eunice asked.
“In what?”
“Like Inception.”
“This isn’t a dream,” Verity said.
“My money’s on head trauma. Concussion. Focal retrograde amnesia.”
“I saw Inception when it came out,” Verity said.
“How many times?”
“Once. Why?”
“Eighty-one and counting, me. Watching it right now. Not that you don’t have my fullest attention.”
“How’s that work?”
“Don’t know. Paris rolling up on itself. You know that scene?”
“Great visuals,” Verity said, “but the story’s confusing.”
“There’s this kick-ass infographic, totally explains it. Wanna see?”
“Why are we talking about a movie, Eunice?”
“That really your last name? Jane?”
“Like the fighting ships book. Jane’s.”
Pause. “I’m Navy myself.”
“You are?”
“Yeah,” Eunice said, an absence in her tone, something almost bereft, “just came to me.”
Did it have this range of emotional expression, Verity wondered, or was she just projecting on it? “Is this a joke, like on some asshole’s YouTube channel?”
“I get hold of some motherfucker playing it, they won’t be laughing. Where do you know Gavin from?”
“He hired me,” Verity said, “this afternoon.”
“Wiki says you’re the app whisperer.”
“You said you wouldn’t do that.”
“That was facial recognition. This is Wikipedia. I know your name, I can’t Google you?”
“Okay,” Verity said, after a pause, then tasted her dirty chai.
“You were with that Stets. The VC billionaire boy.”
“I’m not, now.”
“Asshole?”
“No. It just wasn’t that much of a relationship, in spite of what the media said. I couldn’t handle the attention. But you can’t just walk out of something like that, not without media waiting for you.”
“You have zero social media presence now. Used to be active.”
“After we split, media went for anyone they saw as a friend of mine, associate, anything. A few people gave them stories. Most didn’t, but some got tired of being asked. I decided to treat it as a sabbatical.”
“Furlough from Facebook?”
“From people. I’d started getting back on, mainly Instagram, but by then it was closer to the election and that started creeping me out, so I stayed off everything.”
“Kept working?”
“No. Almost a year now.”
“You the app whisperer.”
“They needed something to explain my being with him in the first place.”
“‘Beta tester with a wild talent’? Decent hook.”
“That was the lede on a Wired article, but only because I was with him.”
“‘Reputation for radically improving product prior to release’? ‘Natural-born super-user’?”
“I quit reading anything about me, us, him.”
“Media blew you out of the water.”
Verity, noticing a neckbeard watching from a table across the room, recalled Joe-Eddy’s take on the particular strain of wannabe feral hacker to be found here. Feral like a day or three late for a shower and some toothpaste, he’d said. “Feel like a walk?” she asked Eunice. “We could go up to the park.”
“You the one all corporeal and all.”
Verity scooted back her chair. Put the beanie back on. Stood, picking up her chai. Seeing she was leaving, the barista glared at her, though somehow amicably.
On the way out, passing a laptop’s screen, its owner massively earphoned, she saw the president, seated at her desk in the Oval Office, explaining something. If it wasn’t the hurricane hitting Houston, the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli.
Increasingly, though, it seemed mainly to be Qamishli. Verity didn’t fully understand the situation. Had in fact been avoiding understanding it, assuming that if she did she’d be as terrified as everyone else, and no more able to do anything about it.
The president hadn’t looked terrified, Verity thought, as 3.7’s door closed behind her. She’d looked like she was on the case.
4
The Sandwiches
When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.
Netherton had no idea how this was accomplished, and he was seldom, as now, much aware, during a given conversation, of the isolation. On leaving her company, though, he’d encounter a pedestrian, see someone cycling, or a vehicle, and only then be aware of emerging from her bubble of exclusion.
Seated with her now in a darkly varnished booth, in this ostentatiously pre-jackpot sandwich shop in Marylebone Street, he found himself eager for exactly that: their goodbye, his walk away, and that first glimpse of some random stranger, abroad in the quiet vastness of London.
“Salt beef good?” She was having Marmite and cucumber.
He nodded. “Do they still make Marmite? As opposed to assemblers excreting it as needed, I mean.”
“Of course.” She looked down at the perfectly rectangular remaining sections of her sandwich, her brilliantly white quiff inclining with her gaze. “It’s yeast, and salt. Manufactory’s in Bermondsey. Bots prepare it, but otherwise traditionally.”
Ask her something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected, she’d disconcertingly allow, in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be.
“How far back did Vespasian go,” he asked her now, “to initiate this stub?”
“Mid-2015.”
“When is it, there, now?”
“2017,” she said, “fall.”
“Much changed?”
“The outcome of the previous year’s American presidential election. Brexit referendum as well.”
“As the result of his initial contact?”
“Could have been the butterfly effect, of course. Though the aunties, in both cases, lean toward something causing a reduction in Russian manipulation of social media. Which we assume would have had a similar result in our own time line. But without the aunties being able to chew over a great deal of their data, there’s no assigning a more exact cause.”