“Here we are, then,” said Lowbeer, stopping unexpectedly, a thick wooden door, previously unnoticed, partially opening to Netherton’s immediate left. Fearing, dimly backlit by candlelight, squinted ferociously at him over something thrust forward in both hands, her arms outstretched from the shoulders. A pistol, Netherton saw, of the county’s era, and exactly the sort he knew her younger self to favor.
“Good evening, Clovis,” said Lowbeer, removing her top hat.
“Don’t dawdle,” Fearing said, taking a step back and partially lowering the pistol.
Lowbeer promptly stepped in, opening the door further. Netherton followed, remembering to remove his derby.
Fearing, her gun now in one hand, a brass candelabra in the other, its half-consumed white tapers flickering, nodded toward a dark narrow gap behind her. “Go ahead,” she said, “it’s straight back.”
73
Singularity
Virgil brought them lunch: hamburgers from a ranking Dogpatch bistro that didn’t do takeout but had been susceptible to his PA moves, which Verity knew to be potent. Simultaneously arranging, with the same skill set and whatever amount of cash, for the van, its freshly applied vegan wholesaler signage fitting right in, to park behind this hipster supermarket.
She kept thinking the day was overcast, as she ate her burger, then remembering that that was the window tint. The sun was now solidly out.
The drone was stationed at the passenger door, its back to the van’s interior, the thin black camera-tentacle protruding out and up, through a narrow gap at the top of the right front window, to scope for aerial drones. Conner might have it on automatic now, she guessed, as he’d said nothing since Virgil had gone to pick up lunch, and neither had Ash.
“Am I interrupting lunch?” asked Rainey, from the drone.
“You aren’t,” Verity said. “Where’s Wilf?”
“Cheapside,” said Rainey.
“That’s a neighborhood?”
“A street. But also the most popular cosplay zone. Victorian. Visitors have to dress for it. Most of the apparent population are bots.”
“Bots?”
“Like a peripheral, but inorganic, nonsentient, usually remotely directed. There are a few permanent actual residents, though, and that’s why Wilf’s there. Gone with Lowbeer to visit a friend of hers, the only person I know who’s as old as she is.”
“How old?” Verity asked.
“Well,” Rainey said, “Lowbeer herself is alive in your stub, in 2017. A child, there.”
Verity stared at the drone, over her brown cardboard box of forgotten fries.
“She and her friend are both a hundred and twenty-something,” Rainey said. “Their biological clocks keep getting reset, so we’re not just talking cosmetic treatments. Lowbeer has that cosmetic work done as well, but Clovis refuses. Says she’s old as dirt and might as well look it.”
“Dirt?”
“An expression of her day, she says.”
“How long do people live, there?” Verity asked.
“A hundred and sixty’s about the limit, for full functionality, that I know of, but it keeps increasing.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven,” Rainey said.
“Will you live that long?”
“Not unless someone who can afford it wants me to. And people who can afford it for themselves generally don’t want other people to have it.”
“They don’t?”
“Used to be that the one who died with the most toys won. Now it’s who can afford to live longest while holding on to the toys.”
“Lowbeer and her friend are that rich?” Verity asked. Realizing she was still holding the box of fries, she put them down.
“Neither of them are. Lowbeer became very important to some very wealthy people during the jackpot, so they started having her reset. She’s still important, more so actually, so she’s still being reset. Clovis gets it because she was married to a member of Parliament, when that was still a thing, and he helped enable some powerful people to come into a different sort of power. Evidently someone still remembers that.”
“What’s this jackpot, then?” Verity asked, still looking at the back of the drone’s shoulders.
“Fuck,” said Rainey, in an entirely different tone, “that was exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do.”
Verity looked to Virgil, who seemed himself to have been squinting at the drone. Now he looked at Verity. “Been getting pieces of it from Conner,” he said. “Their time line, according to him, is one grim motherfucker.”
“But you’ve changed things, so that we won’t necessarily get that,” Verity said, to Rainey.
“If you have a nuclear war now,” Rainey said, “our idea of apocalypse would be the least of your worries. Unless you get a nuclear winter to reverse the warming, and we had people seriously floating the idea of trying that. You didn’t get Brexit, though, and you got a different American president, but as far as we know you’ll have the rest coming your way, if you don’t blow yourselves up.”
“What they call the jackpot,” Virgil said, “all of that coming down together, Conner says. And none of it’s anything you haven’t heard of.”
74
Old Klept
Fearing had placed her pistol, and the candelabra, on the square, glass-topped, thoroughly non-period-correct table at which the three of them now sat.
Netherton had seen her younger self shoot someone dead, with a gun like this, in the county. Possibly, he supposed, this very gun. Not that he’d been physically present, of course, hence in no danger, but he knew what these things could do. And was himself, now, physically present. She’d placed it, he noted, so that its muzzle pointed at none of them.
“I gather,” said Lowbeer, whose top hat was also on the table, “that your greeting us with a handgun is indicative of some concern.”
“Making sure it was you. Anybody can look like anybody. Not that I don’t enjoy imagining overreacting, if it happened not to be you.”
“Does this one have the switch for full automatic?” Netherton asked, having learned this one distinction about firearms in the county.
“Double taps or nothing,” said Fearing, dismissively. “Sequential doubles, if you got the customers for them.”
“So this sanguinary mood of yours, Clovis, is the result of your having made those inquiries for me?”
“Sure is,” Fearing said.
None of which encouraged Netherton, as the inquiries he’d hoped Fearing had been making would have been about whatever project had created Eunice, and thus safely in the past.
He looked up at the wall of crates behind her, many of them apparently of wood. This room, or rather space, was at the far end of the passage she’d directed them down, and built of similar containers. He’d never given any thought to what private interiors might be like, in Cheapside. To judge by this one, rigorous period accuracy wasn’t an issue. While some of the crates were wooden, others were of tin, aluminum, and various kinds of plastic. The ceiling was lost to darkness, though light from the uneven pulsing of the candelabra suggested there might be a central plaster rosette overhead.
“It isn’t Lev’s great-uncle,” Fearing said.