“She called for one of the spa’s cars, to take her back to Floral Street. Place looks like a cross between a capsule hotel and a morgue. Had her take me through it on their site. Guests are all female. Bodies, semibiologic or not, which are legally someone else’s property, are an inherently creepy proposition.”
“Yes,” said Netherton, opening the refrigerator, “though in this case you wouldn’t know Flynne nearly as well, without that peri. If a different one were being rented for her, each visit, you wouldn’t have the same bond.”
“True, and neither would I have anything like the same sense of London, if she hadn’t wanted to see it all. I wouldn’t have visited the cosplay zones, for instance, because you don’t.”
“They’re for children,” he said, “and tourists. We can take Thomas, when he’s older.”
“Cheapside’s great,” she said. “The smell of it.”
“That’s mainly feces. Human as well as equine.”
“The crowds.”
“Bots, most of them.”
“It gives you a better sense of what it was like than any augmented reality,” she said. “Carnaby Street is AR, for instance, and spectral in comparison. And visitors aren’t required to dress for it, which makes it visually inconsistent.”
Not seeing anything in the refrigerator that appealed, he closed it. “I should check on the stub,” he said, glancing at the controller, uncomfortable with not being able to tell her what Lev, or for that matter Lowbeer, had told him. He looked down at a third of the nanny, squirming to escape Rainey’s tickling. It seemed to look back at him, out of shoe-button eyes.
“Go ahead,” said Rainey. “Seems like a good idea.”
He went to the couch, sat down beside the controller, picked it up, and put it on.
63
Users
What would happen if I used this to call my mother?” Verity asked Virgil, indicating a hotel phone.
“Is she on cell?” Virgil asked, still on the couch with his feet up.
“Landline. She only turns her cell on if she’s out with it and needs to make a call.”
“Assuming Cursion’s tapped it, they’d record the conversation, probably be able to get the room number. According to your IT lady in the future—”
“Ash,” Verity said.
“She says Cursion aren’t, in themselves, a big deal. That they’re ex-government, so unconnected to state power. Which doesn’t make her happy, though, because she says that makes them liable to fuck us up without even meaning to. No street smarts. Way she thinks reminds me of what I do for Stets.”
“Except for what you do for Stets, not many people would’ve heard of him.”
“I didn’t hear you say that,” he said, and smiled. “But thanks. To the man’s credit, though, I know he tends to agree. But back to Cursion. Ash says Gavin’s their front in the industry, an actual businessperson with a background in technology. If you called your mother, those are the kind of people you might alert to our whereabouts. Hers too, though they probably already have that.”
“Stets still doesn’t have anyone exclusively on security?”
“Few of us do keep an eye on things,” he said.
“I know. You always did.”
“Caitlin doesn’t have security staff either. Her father has people in Paris, when she and Stets visit him, but they all have gray hair. The ones we notice, anyway.” He put one of his feet down and dug in a pants pocket. “Speaking of phones, I took delivery of this one while you were sleeping.” He leaned over to hand her a phone. “Not in your name.” He passed her a black charger, its cable wound around it, and a pair of black earbuds. “Not okay to phone your mother on, or anyone else Cursion might know you know, but you’ve got the web, and it’s programmed to dial fresh burners of ours.”
“Where’s mine?”
“With whoever built this controller for Stets, apparently, but I don’t know how it got there.”
She remembered dropping it into the barista’s Faraday pouch, at Fabricant Fang, along with the Tulpagenics phone and the gray-framed glasses. She’d seen him give the pouch to Dixon.
The drone coughed. “Wilf here.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Back in our flat. Went out to meet a friend. Upset about where he’s living, after a divorce.”
“What’s wrong with where he’s living?”
“Too near relatives of his,” Wilf said.
She tried to imagine his future London with completely boring problems, realizing she expected all future problems to be inherently interesting.
“Hello, Virgil,” Wilf said.
“Hey,” Virgil said. “Conner said he had to go and do something in the Rose Garden. Why’s he in the White House?”
“He and the president, Leon Fisher,” Ash said, “are both from the same small town. This is Leon’s first year in office, so it’s helpful for him to have someone there from home.”
“But that didn’t happen, in your past?” Virgil had both his feet on the floor now, and was sitting up.
“That’s correct,” said Wilf.
“Conner says it isn’t time travel, because of that,” Virgil said. “That time travel, physically, is impossible.”
“We can establish digital contact with our own past,” Wilf said, “provided sufficient infrastructure exists there to allow it. Doing so initiates a new continuum, one in which that message was received. In ours, right now, it wasn’t.”
“So you could get in touch with us here, yesterday?” Virgil asked. “Our yesterday?”
“No,” said Wilf, “but if we could, that would be the start of a new stub, because that didn’t happen in your past.”
“Why can’t you?” Verity asked.
“Initiation results in a one-to-one temporal ratio. If I initiate a stub, leave it, then return, the same amount of time has passed in the stub.”
“Conner told Virgil that the election last year went the other way, there,” Verity said. “Did it?”
“Yes,” said Wilf.
“So you’re in another stub?” she asked.
“No,” said Wilf, “because that was in our past, and all stubs branch from ours.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Virgil asked.
“Because,” said Wilf, “we’ve the means of initiating stubs and you don’t.”
“So what if you reached back to your own last Tuesday?” Virgil asked.
“That’s impossible,” Wilf said.
“Why?” Verity asked.
“We need to reach quite a distance back, in order to make contact. Though not too far, else the resulting new stub lack sufficient infrastructure to receive our data. There’s a window, that way. I’m told yours is the earliest stub known to have been viably initiated.”
“So what you do,” Virgil said, his eyes narrowed, “is colonize alternate pasts.”
“I don’t think colonization’s the best metaphor,” Wilf said, something about the ease with which he said it suggesting to Verity that this wasn’t the first time. “There’s no possibility of resource extraction. No transferable financial gain.”
“How about something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk?” Virgil asked, Verity recognizing this as what he really did for Stets.
“I don’t know it,” Wilf said.
“Like Uber, but for information labor,” Virgil said.
“We have AI for that,” Wilf said. “We could manipulate your markets, make money there, and pay you with it, but our AI is free, essentially, so it wouldn’t be worth it.”
“Art,” said Virgil. “Music. Literature.”
“Yes,” said Netherton. “But still, in practice, there’s no real economic basis.”