“But why would Vespasian, of all people, have desired positive change? Assuming those outcomes were his intention, that is.”
“He was a sadist,” said Lowbeer, “and terribly clever at it. The irony of his producing beneficial change may well have amused him, given his greatest delight was in appallingly cruel suffering. In any case, when he failed to return,” and here their eyes briefly met, “to fine-tune and amplify course, as he always did, things went their own way.”
“How is it there, given that?”
“Grim,” she said, “what with every other ordering principle and incentive still in place. And they’ve a Mideast crisis now, as well, with drastic and immediate global implications. That aside, though, they’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”
“Are you there yourself, in the new stub? Your stub self, I mean?”
“I assume so,” she said, “as a young child. I find it best never to look at that.”
“Of course,” said Netherton, unwilling even to begin to imagine the experience.
“I’ve asked Ash to bring you up to date on what we’ve been doing there,” she said.
“Involved, is she?” Hoping, however faintly, not.
“From the start,” said Lowbeer.
“How wonderful,” Netherton said, resignedly, picking up the next section of his sandwich.
5
Situational Awareness
From the crest of Dolores Park, Verity wondered if she could see the tower on Montgomery, where Gavin had first described the product that had turned out to be Eunice, not that she’d recognize it if she could.
There was no one for Eunice to facially recognize, looking out across the city, but the cursor, having become a white circle, was darting around the skyline, trapping invisible airborne somethings under a plus sign. “Birds?” Verity asked.
“Drones. How’d you hook up with Gavin?”
“Called me a week ago. Introduced himself. We talked, then exchanged e-mails. Had lunch this past Friday. Called me this morning, asked if I wanted to come over and talk contract.”
“How high’s the ceiling there, in the lobby?”
“Why?”
“Too high to tell whether it’s bronze or plastic, I bet. There to make you feel like money’s being made. How was the meeting?”
“Security keyed me up to twenty-seven. Signed their visitor’s nondisclosure on an iPad. Kid with black-metal ear grommets took me back to meet Gavin. Start-up plants everywhere.”
“What where?”
“Tillandsia. Air plants. You can hot-glue them to cable trays, anything. They get by. Like a lot of people in start-ups, Joe-Eddy says.”
“So what did Gavin say?”
“Described the product, we agreed on salary, I signed a contract, plus an NDA tailored to the project.”
“Doing?”
“What I do. Consulting on a prototype of something they’re building out.”
“Which is?”
“You,” Verity said, deciding she might as well get it on the table, “unless he was bullshitting me.”
No reply.
“Maybe not a prototype,” Verity said. “Maybe closer to an alpha build.”
The silence lengthened. If there were more drones out there, Eunice wasn’t bothering with them now, the cursor having become an arrow again, immobile against the sky. Verity turned, looking back the way they’d come, toward Valencia. In the park below, hunched on a bench, one of two skater boys released a startlingly opaque puff of white vape, like a winter locomotive in an old movie. “Sorry. I guess that’s weird for you. If you’re what Gavin said you are, you’re seriously next-level.”
“Am I?”
“On the basis of this conversation, yes.”
“Google ‘tulpa,’” Eunice said, “you get Tibetan occult thought-forms. Or people who’ve invented themselves an imaginary playmate.”
“I did.”
“Don’t feel particularly Tibetan, myself,” Eunice said. “Maybe invented, but how would I know?”
“He called you a laminar agent. Googled that too, on my way out.”
“No applicable hit,” Eunice said.
“Meant something to him. He also used the term ‘laminae.’ Plural.”
“For what?”
“Wasn’t clear,” Verity said, “but he described the product, that’s you, as a cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar. Target demographic power-uses VR, AR, gaming, next-level social media. Idea’s to sell a single unique super-avatar. Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”
“Why didn’t they make one of you?”
“I don’t think they can, yet. You’re more like proof of concept. They’ve only made one, and you’re it.”
“Based on somebody?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Kinda gloomy up here,” Eunice said, after a pause, “what with the dying of the light and all.”
“Sorry.”
“Back to your friend’s place? José Eduardo Alvarez-Matta, on the lease. Infosec consultant. Boyfriend?”
“Friend,” Verity said. “We kept winding up on the same projects.” She started back down the path. The skaters were gone, as if she’d imagined them. Streetlights were coming on, faintly haloed. There was mercury in the fog, she’d once heard someone say, in the bar on Van Ness, but after the recent sub-Beijing air quality it didn’t seem that big a deal.
“If all this really is some asshole’s YouTube channel,” Eunice said, as they left the park, “I guess that makes me a figment.”
Verity watched the cursor check the interior of each parked car they passed, then scan up, higher, on both sides of the street, as if expecting someone in a window, on a roof. “Can you tell what I’m looking at, Eunice?”
“Watching the cursor.”
“Why are you looking in cars?”
“Situational awareness.”
“Of what?”
“Of the situation. Observe, orient, decide, act.”
On Valencia, as they turned toward 3.7 and Joe-Eddy’s, Eunice face-captured a young man, his dark hair buzzed short, hunched in the passenger seat of a beige Fiat, alone. He glanced up as they passed, features lit from below by his phone. Verity, peering ahead for the place that sold otaku denim, realized they hadn’t passed 3.7 yet, on the opposite side, so the jeans would be farther along.
“Got a go-bag?” Eunice asked.
“I haven’t had my own place for the past year. Renting out my condo. Most of my stuff’s in my basement locker, there. Living out of a bag, otherwise. That count?”
“We had go-bags in our go-bags,” Eunice said, “depending.”
“On what?”
“Where we were going,” Eunice said.
“Where were you going?” They were passing the Japanese jeans now, with Joe-Eddy’s place still half a block beyond the next intersection.
“No idea.”
That new-job liminality was definitely gone, Verity thought, though not in any way she’d hoped for. Replaced instead by another feeling, deeply unfamiliar. Another in-betweenness, but between what and what, she’d no idea.
6
Dalston
Netherton had visited Ash only once before, though he hadn’t known it at the time.
His friend Lev Zubov, her employer at the time, had taken him here, to a party of hers, before either of them had met Lowbeer, so well prior to Ash working exclusively for her. A one-story brick industrial building, tucked behind a block of Victorian row houses, just off Kingsland High Street.